Anticipating this question, Armanoush talked about her daily routine in Arizona. Though she felt awful about the deception, she tried to assuage her discomfort by thinking it was for the best. How could she tell her, "I am not in Arizona. I am in the city where you were born!"?
After she hung up, she waited a few minutes. Pensively, she took a deep breath, mustered her courage, and made her second call. She decided to stay calm and not to sound frustrated-a promise she found hard to keep upon hearing her mother's edgy voice.
"Amy, honey, why didn't you call before? How are you? How is the weather in San Francisco? Are they treating you well?"
"Yes, Mom. I'm OK. The weather is" Armanoush regretted not having checked the weather in San Francisco on the Internet "fine, a bit windy, as always-"
"Yeah," Rose interjected, "I have called you over and over but your cell phone was dead. Oh, I've been so worried!"
"Mom, please listen," Armanoush said, surprised at the note of determination in her own voice. "I feel uncomfortable when you keep calling me at my grandma's house. Let's make a deal, OK? Let me call you and do not call me. Please."
"Are they making you say this?" Rose asked suspiciously.
"No Ma, of course not. For God's sake. I'm the one who's asking you this."
Though reluctant, Rose accepted the terms. She complained about not having any time for herself, her days being divided between home and work. But then she cheered up as she told how there was a sale at Home Depot and she and Mustafa had agreed to get new kitchen cabinets.
"Tell me your opinion," Rose enthused. "What do you think about cherry wood? Do you think it would look good in our kitchen?"
"Yeah, I guess so…"
"I think so too. But how about the dark oak? It's a bit more expensive but it has class written all over it. Which one do you think would be better?"
"I dunno, Mom, the dark oak sounds good too."
"Yeah, but you see, you're not helping me much." Rose sighed.
When she hung up Armanoush looked around her and felt a deep estrangement. The Turkish rugs, the old-fashioned bedside lamps, the unfamiliar furniture, books and newspapers that spoke another language…. Suddenly she felt a panic that she hadn't felt since she was a small child.
When Armanoush was six years old, she and her mother had once run out of gas in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. They'd had to wait almost an hour before another vehicle passed by them. Rose stuck her thumb out and a truck stopped to pick them up. Inside there were two rough-looking, brawny` men, scary, sullen fellows. They didn't say a word and drove them to the next gas station. Once they were dropped off and the truck disappeared, Rose hugged Armanoush with a quivering lip, weeping in panic. "Oh God, what if they had been bad people? They could have kidnapped, raped, and killed us, and nobody would have found our bodies. How could I have taken this risk?"
Though not quite that dramatic, Armanoush had a similar feeling right now. Here she was in Istanbul staying at the house of strangers without anyone in her family knowing about it. How could she have acted so impulsively?
What if they were bad people?
i68
NINE
Orange Peels
The next day Asya Kazanci and Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian left the konak early in the morning to search for the house where Grandma Shushan had been born. They found the neighborhood easily-a charming, posh borough in the European side of the city. But the house wasn't there anymore. A modern, five-story apartment building had been erected in its place. The entire first floor was a classy-looking fish restaurant. Before going in, Asya checked her reflection in the glass, adjusting her hair while discontentedly eyeing her breasts.
As it was still too early for dinner, there was no one inside except for a handful of waiters sweeping the traces of the previous night off the floor and a rosy-cheeked, stout cook in the kitchen preparing the metes and the main courses for the evening under a cloud of mouth-watering smells. Asya talked to each of them, asking questions about the building's past. But the waiters had arrived in the city only recently, migrating from a Kurdish village in the southeast, and the cook, though he had lived longer in Istanbul, did not have any memory of the street's history.
"Of the long-standing Istanbulite families, only a few have remained on their soil of birth," the cook explained with an air of authority, as he started gutting and cleaning a huge mackerel.
"This city was so cosmopolitan once," the cook continued, breaking the mackerel's backbone first above its tail, then below its head. "We had Jewish neighbors, lots of them. We also had Greek neighbors, and Armenian neighbors…. As a boy I used to buy fish from Greek fishermen. My mother's tailor was Armenian. My father's boss was Jewish. You know, we were all intermingled."
"Ask him why things have changed," Armanoush turned to Asya.
"Because Istanbul is not a city," the cook remarked, his face lighting up with the importance of the statement he was about to make. "It looks like a city but it is not. It is a city-boat. We live in a vessel!"
With that he held the fish by its head and started moving the backbone right and left. For a second Armanoush imagined the mackerel to be made of porcelain, fearing it would shatter to pieces in the cook's hands. But in a few seconds the man had managed to take the whole bone out. Pleased with himself, he continued. "We are all passengers here, we come and go in clusters, Jews go, Russians come, my brother's neighborhood is full of Moldovans…. Tomorrow they will go, others will arrive. That's how it is…."
They thanked the cook and shot a last glance at the mackerel waiting to be stuffed, its mouth still open.
Asya disappointed, Armanoush distressed, they walked out of the restaurant into an exquisite Bosphorus landscape sparkling under the late winter sun. They put their hands over their eyes to block the sun. Both took a deep breath and knew instantly that spring was in the air.
Having no better plans, they strolled through the neighborhood, buying something from almost every street vendor they came upon: boiled sweet corn, stuffed mussels, semolina halvah, and finally, a large package of sunflower seeds. With each new treat, they launched on a new topic, talking about many things, except the three customary untouchables between young women who were still strangers to one another: sex, men, and fathers.
"I like your family," Armanoush said. "They are so full of life."
"Yeah, sure, tell me about it," Asya countered, and jingled her many bracelets. She was wearing a long, sage green hippie skirt with a maroon flower print, a patchwork bag, and lots of jewelryglass bead necklaces, bracelets, and silver rings on almost every finger. Next to her Armanoush felt a bit underdressed in her jeans and tweed jacket.
"There's a downside," Asya said. "It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around. I'm grateful that I was sent to a first-rate school and probably given the best education possible in this country. But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life. You know what I mean?"
Armanoush feared she did.
"As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time. I started learning English at six, which was okay if only they could have stopped there, you know? The next year I had a private teacher to teach me French. When I was nine, I was made to study the violin the whole year, although it was obvious that I had absolutely no interest and no talent in it. After that a skating rink was opened near our house and my aunts decided I should become a skater. They dreamed of me in sparkly dresses pirouetting gracefully to the tune of our national anthem. I'd be the Turkish Katarina Witt! Soon there I was spiraling on ice, falling on my rear again and again while trying to pirouette! The sound of skates scraping on ice still sends shivers down my spine."