Some Istanbulites have, as usual, awakened earlier than others. The imams all around the city, for instance; the young and the old, the mellow-voiced and the not-so-mellow-voiced, the imams of the copious mosques are the first ones to wake up, ready to call the believers to morning prayer. Then there are the simit vendors. They too are awake, headed to their respective bakeries to pick up the crispy sesame bagels they will be selling all day long. Accordingly, the bakers are awake too. Most of them get only a few hours of sleep before they start work, while others never sleep at night. Every day without exception, the bakers heat their ovens in the middle of the night, so that before dawn, the bakeries in the city are thick with the delicious smell of bread.
The cleaning ladies are also awake. These women, of all ages, get up early to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off, where they will scrub, clean, and polish all day long. It is a different world here. The wealthy women always wear makeup and never show their age. Unlike the husbands of the cleaning ladies, the husbands in suburbia are always busy, surprisingly polite, and somewhat effeminate. Time is not a scarce commodity in suburbia. People use it as lavishly and freely as hot water.
It is dawn now. The city is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity at this moment, an amorphous shape half-liquid, half-solid.
To the Celestial Gaze up in the sky, the Kazanci domicile must seem like a glittering sphere of sullied sparklers amid the shadows of the night. Most of its rooms are dark and quiet now, but a few are lit.
One of the Kazanci residents awake at this hour is Armanoush. She woke up early and instantly went online, eager to tell the members of the Cafe Constantinopolis about the shocking incident of the day before. She told them about the bohemian circles in Istanbul and then about the quarrel, summarizing every character and detail she took in at Cafe Kundera. Now sheds giving them a full description of the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, adding how he had found a new function for the wine at the table.
That cartoonist sounds fun, writes Anti-Khavurma. So you are saying he might go to prison for drawing the prime minister as a wolf? Humor is serious biz in Turkey!
Yeah, the guy seems cool, Lady Peacock/Siramark agrees. Tell us more about him.
But apparently someone has an entirely dissimilar interpretation of the incident.
Come on, guys, there is nothing cool or that interesting either in him or in any other character at that dingy cafe. Don't you see, they are all faces and names from the bohemian, avant-gardist, arty-farty side of Istanbul. Typical third world country elite who hate themselves more than anything else in the world.
Armanoush winced at this sharp message from Baron Baghdassarian and looked around.
Asya is asleep on the other side of the room with Sultan the Fifth curled up on her chest, a pair of headphones on her head, and an open book in her hand: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, by Emmanuel Levinas. There is also a CD case next to Asya's bed Johnny Cash dressed from head to toe in black, erect against a gray, gloomy sky with a dog on one side of him and a cat on the other, staring dourly at something far beyond the frame. Asya has slept with the Walkman set on constant replay. She is her mother's daughter in this respect as well, perfectly capable of battling all sorts of voices but unable to cope with silence.
Armanoush cannot make out the lyrics from where she is, but she can hear the rhythm spinning round. She enjoys hearing Cash's baritone voice pour into the room from the headphones, just as she enjoys listening to the various sounds circulating inside and outside: the morning prayers echoing from the distant mosques; the clatter of the milkman as he leaves milk bottles in front of the grocery store across the street; the surprisingly cadenced breathing of Sultan the Fifth and Asya, a whistlelike fusion of snores and purrs, though it is not always easy to tell who does which; and the sound of Armanoush's fingertips as they move on the keyboard searching for the best response to give to Baron Baghdassarian. It is almost morning, and although Armanoush hasn't had enough sleep, she feels elated, with the sense of triumph that comes after defeating sleep.
Downstairs is Grandma Gulsum's room. She could indeed have been Ivan the Terrible in another life but the harshness of her persona is not without reason. Like many who end up bitter in life, Grandma too has her story. Growing up in a little town on the Aegean Coast where life was idyllic yet deprived; getting married into the Kazancis, a family much wealthier, much more urbane than hers, but certainly more ill-fated; the uneasiness of being a young, rural bride to the only son of a debonair, disaster-prone lineage; the burden of being assigned to give birth to sons, the more the merrier, for you never knew how long they would survive, yet giving birth to one girl after another; enduring the anguish of seeing her husband drift further away from her with each birth.
Levent Kazanci was a troubled man who didn't hesitate to use his belt to discipline his wife and children; a boy, if only Allah had bestowed a boy, everything would have been all right. Three girls in a row, and then the dream, the fourth baby, finally a boy. Hoping their fate had changed, they tried again, a fifth baby, but it was a girl again. Still, Mustafa was enough, he was all they needed to continue the family line. There was Mustafa, pampered, mollycoddled, spoiled, always favored over the girls, his every whim catered to… then the melody ceased and darkness and despair set into the dream: Mustafa left for the United States never to return.
Grandma Gulsum was a woman who had never been reciprocally loved; one of those women who aged not gradually but in a hurry, leaping from virginity to wrinkles, never given the chance to dwell in the middle. She had fully dedicated herself to her only son and valued him often at the expense of her daughters, trying to find solace in him for everything that life had taken from her. Yet, once in Arizona, the boy's existence had been reduced to postcards and letters. He had never returned to Istanbul to visit his family. Grandma Gulsum buried a deep pain of being rejected. In time, she became more and more hard-hearted. Today she bore the look of someone who had willingly accomplished austerity and meant to keep it that way.
At the right corner of the first floor, Petite-Ma is deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, mouth agape, snoring peacefully. Next to her bed there is a cherry cabinet and on it rests the Holy Qur'an, a book on Muslim saints, and a gorgeous lamp radiating soft sage green light. Beside the book lies an ochre rosary with an amber stone dangling from its end, and a half-full glass containing her false teeth.
Time for her has long lost its linear command; there are no regulatory signs, no warning lights, and no directions along the highway of history anymore. She is free to move in any direction, or change lanes. Or, she can stop right in the middle of the road, refusing to move, refusing the obligation to proceed, since there is no such thing as "progress" in her life, but only a perpetual recurrence of isolated moments.
Certain childhood recollections are coming back to her these days, as vivid as if they were happening here and now. There she is as an eight-year-old blue-eyed, blond girl in Thessaloniki with her mom, as both silently weep after her dad's death in the Balkan Wars; then she sees herself in Istanbul, it is late October, the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic. Flags. She sees lots of flags, red and white, crescent and star, fluttering in the wind like newly washed clothes. Behind the flags looms Riza Selim's face, his thick beard and full, somber eyes. Then she sees herself as a young woman sitting at her Bentley piano, playing jovial tunes to wellgroomed guests.
In the small room right above Petite-Ma's sleeps Auntie Cevriye. She is having the nightmare she has had countless times over the last years. She is a student in a classroom again, wearing an ugly, ash gray uniform. The headmaster calls her to the front of the room to take an oral quiz. She breaks into sweat as she wobbles there unsteadily, her feet heavy. None of the questions asked make any sense. Auntie Cevriye discovers she hasn't really graduated from high school. There has been a mistake somewhere in the records and now she has to pass this one course in order to graduate and become a teacher. Every time, she wakes up at exactly the same scene. The headmaster pulls out the class grade sheet and a fountain pen with crimson ink, and then writes a huge red zero right where the name Cevriye is inscribed.