At the end of the day he always asks: "Will you stay?"
Her response to that never changes: "Not today."
Before she leaves the house she adds: "There is food in the fridge, don't forget to heat the soup, finish the pilaki in two days or it'll go bad. Don't forget to water the violets, I changed their place next to the window."
He nods and mutters softly, as if talking to himself: "Don't worry. I know how to take care of myself. And thanks for the apricots…."
After that Auntie Banu returns to the Kazanci domicile. That is how it has been, day after day, year after year.
The woman in the mirror looks old tonight. Auntie Banu always thought aging swiftly was the price she had to pay for her profession. The overwhelming majority of human beings age year by year, but not the clairvoyants: They age story by story. If only she had wanted to, Auntie Banu could have asked for compensation. Just as she has not asked her djinn for any material gains, she has not asked for physical beauty either. Maybe she will some day. So far Allah has given her the strength to carry on without asking for more. But today Auntie Banu is going to request something extra.
Allah, give me knowledge, for I cannot resist the urge to know, but also give me the strength to bear that knowledge. Amin.
From a drawer she produces a jade rosary and strokes the beads. "All right then, I'm ready, let's start. May Allah help me!"
Dangling from the bookshelf where the gas lamp stands, Mrs. Sweet grimaces, unhappy with the role of observer she has all of a sudden found herself in, unhappy with the things she is about to witness shortly in this room. Meanwhile, Mr. Bitter smiles bitterly, the only way he knows how to smile. He is content. Finally, Auntie Banu is convinced. It wasn't Mr. Bitter's djinnish command that convinced her but her own mortal curiosity. She couldn't resist the urge to learn. That antediluvian urge for more knowledge…. Who could resist it, after all?
Now, Auntie Banu and Mr. Bitter will together travel back in time. From 2005 to 1915. It looks like a long trip, but it is only a matter of steps in terms of gulyabani years.
In front of the mirror, between the djinn and the master stands a silver bowl of consecrated water from Mecca. Inside the silver bowl there is silvered water and inside the water there is a story, similarly silvered.
224
TWELVE
Pomegranate Seeds
Hovhannes Stamboulian stroked the hand-carved walnut desk he had been sitting at since early afternoon and felt the smooth, glossy surface glide under his fingers. The Jewish antique dealer who sold it to him had said such pieces were quite rare because they had been so hard to manufacture. Carved from walnut trees on the Aegean Islands, then adorned with tiny drawers and secret compartments like a fine piece of embroidery. Despite the delicacy of its adornment, the desk was so durable it could last several lifetimes.
"This desk will outlive you and even your children!" The dealer had guffawed, as if his merchandise outliving his customers was a standing joke with him. "Isn't it sublime that a piece of wood lives longer than us?"
Though he knew the remark was meant to demonstrate the quality of the merchandise, Hovhannes Stamboulian had felt a pang of sadness.
Even so, he had bought the desk. Along with it, he had also purchased a brooch from the same store-a graceful brooch in the shape of a pomegranate, delicately smothered with gold threads all over, slightly cracked in the middle, with seeds of red rubies glowing from within. It was a deftly crafted piece by an Armenian artisan in Sivas, he had been told. Hovhannes Stamboulian bought the piece as a present for his wife. He was planning to give it to her tonight, after dinner, or perhaps better, before, as soon as he was done with this chapter.
Of all the chapters he had written, this was the most demanding. Had he known it was going to be this grueling, he might have abandoned the entire project. But he was up to his neck in the book, and the only way out was to keep at it. Hovhannes Stamboulian, a renowned poet and columnist, was secretly writing a book entirely outside his main field. He could be rejected, ridiculed, or reviled at the end. At a time when the entire Ottoman Empire was sated with grandiose undertakings, revolutionary movements, and nationalist divisions, at a time when the Armenian community was pregnant with innovative ideologies and ardent debates, he in the privacy of his house was writing a children's book.
Writing a children's book in Armenian was something never done before, almost inconceivable. Why was there not a single piece of literature in this field? Was it because the Armenian minority had become a society unable to consider its children as children? Was childhood a futility, if not a luxury, denied to a minority in need of growing up as quickly as it could? Or was it because the literati in Istanbul had been cut off from the oral traditions faithfully ferried by Armenian grandmothers to their grandchildren?
The book was titled The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country. It was about a pigeon lost up there in the blue skies while flying with his family and friends over a blissful country. The pigeon would stop at numerous villages, towns, and cities, searching for his loved ones, and at each stop he would listen to a new story.
In this manner, Hovhannes Stamboulian gathered in the book old Armenian folktales, most of which had been transmitted from generation to generation, others long forgotten. Throughout the book he remained loyal to the authenticity of each tale, hardly changing a word. But now he planned to end the book with a story of his own. When done, the book would be published in Istanbul and then distributed in the major cities, like Adana, Harput, Van, Trabzon, and Sivas, where Armenians lived in large numbers. Even though the Muslims had started using the printing press about two centuries ago, the Armenian minority had been printing its own books and texts long before then.
Hovhannes Stamboulian wanted Armenian parents to read these stories to their children before they went to bed each night. It was ironic that this book had taken so much of his time over the past eighteen months that he himself hadn't been able to spend much time with his own children. Every afternoon he would come into this room, sit at his desk, and write for however long it took him. Each night when he emerged from the room his children would already be in their beds, asleep. The urge to write had cast a spell over everything and everyone in his life. But fortunately he was about to finish. This was the last chapter he was writing this evening, the most demanding of all. When he was finished he would go downstairs, bundle up the whole text with a ribbon, hide the golden brooch inside the knot, and hand the package to his wife. The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country was dedicated to her.
"Read it, please," he was planning to say. "If it is not good enough, I want you to burn it. All of it. I promise I won't even ask you why. But if you think it is good, I mean, good enough to be published and distributed, then please take it to Garabed Effendi at Dawn Publishers."
Hovhannes Stamboulian respected his wife's opinion like no one else's. She had sophisticated taste in literature and fine art. Thanks to her hospitality, this chalky konak along the Bosphorus had for years been a center for intellectuals and artists, visited by countless men of letters, some eminent writers, some aspiring to be. They would come to eat, drink, read, contemplate, and fervently discuss one another's works, and even more fervently, their own.