"It is so easy for Tolstoy to sputter that nonsense," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife shrugged. "The guy had a wife who took care of every little detail, raised the dozens of kids they had, and worked like a dog so that his majesty the great Tolstoy could concentrate and write novels!"
"What do you want?" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist asked.
"Recognition! That's what I want. I want the whole world to admit that if given the opportunity, Tolstoy's wife could be a better writer than him."
"Why? Just because she was a woman?"
"Because she was a very talented woman oppressed by a very talented man," his wife snapped.
"Oh," said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Perturbed, he called the waiter and to everyone's chagrin, he ordered a beer. Yet when it was served he must have felt some sort of guilt, for all of a sudden he switched the topic, embarking on a speech on the benefits of alcohol.
"This country owes its freedom to this little bottle which I can so freely hold in my hand." The cartoonist raised his voice over an ambulance siren squealing outside. "Neither social reforms, nor political regulations. Not even the War of Independence. It is this very bottle that differentiates Turkey from all other Muslim countries. This beer here"-he raised the bottle as if to toast-"is the symbol of freedom and civil society."
"Oh, come on. Since when is being a rotten drunkard a symbol of freedom?" the scenarist reprimanded sharply. The others did not join in. Debating was a waste of energy. Instead, they chose a frame on the wall and focused on a road picture.
"Since the day alcohol was forbidden and denigrated in all the Muslim Middle East. Since forever." The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist grunted. "Think about Ottoman history. All those taverns, all those metes to accompany each glass…. It looks like the guys were having a good time. We as a nation relish alcohol, why don't we accept that? This is a society that likes to imbibe eleven months a year and then panic, repent, and fast in Ramadan, only to go back to drinking when the holy month is over. If there never was sharia in this country, if the fundamentalists never succeeded as they did elsewhere, I tell you, we owe it to this twisted tradition. It is thanks to alcohol that there is something resembling democracy in Turkey."
"Well, why don't we drink, then?" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife gave a tired smile. "And what better reason do we have to drink than Mr. Tiptoe? What was his name-Cecche?"
"Cecchetti," Asya corrected her, still lamenting the day she had been intoxicated enough to give the group a speech on ballet history, and in passing mentioned the name Cecchetti. They loved him. Ever since that day, now and again someone at the table would propose a toast to him, the dancer who introduced the pointe walk on the toes.
"So if it weren't for him ballet dancers wouldn't be able to walk on their toes, huh?" Someone would chuckle each time.
"What was he thinking?" Someone else would add, and then everybody would have a laugh.
Every day they met at the Cafe Kundera. The Exceptionally Untalented Poet, the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies and whomever his girlfriend might be at that moment, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife, the Closeted-Gay Columnist, and Asya Kazanci. There was tension buried far below the surface, waiting for talk of the day to pump it out. In the meantime, things flowed swimmingly. Some days they brought other people along, friends or colleagues or consummate strangers; some days they came alone. The group was a self-regulating organism wherein individual differences were displayed but could never take over, as if the organism had a life outside and beyond the personalities composing it.
Among them Asya Kazanci found inner peace. Cafe Kundera was her sanctuary. In the Kazanci domicile she always had to correct her ways, striving for a perfection that was beyond her comprehension, whereas here in Cafe Kundera no one forced you to change since human beings were thought to be essentially imperfect and uncorrectable.
It is true, they were not the ideal friends her aunts would have chosen for her. Some in the group were old enough to be Asya's mother or father. Being the youngest, she enjoyed watching their childishness. It was rather comforting to see that nothing really improved in life over the years; if you were a sullen teenager, you ended up being a sullen adult. The pattern was with us to stay. True, it sounded a bit glum, but at least, Asya consoled herself, it proved that one didn't have to become something else, something more, like her aunts kept nagging her about day and night. Since nothing was going to change in time and this sullenness was here forever, she could continue to be her same sullen self:
"Today is my birthday," announced Asya, surprising herself since she hadn't had any intention of declaring that.
"Oh yeah?" someone asked.
"What a coincidence! It is also my youngest daughter's birthday today," exclaimed the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.
"Oh yeah?" Now it was Asya's turn.
"So you were born on the same day as my daughter! Gemini." The poet shook his fluffy head with glee, theatrically.
"Pisces," Asya corrected.
And that was that. Nobody tried to hug her or suffocate her with kisses, just like nobody thought about ordering a cake. Instead the poet recited an awful poem for her, the cartoonist drank three bottles of beer in her honor, and the cartoonist's wife drew her caricature on a napkin-a surly young woman with electrified hair, huge tits, and a sharp nose under a pair of piercingly astute eyes. The others bought her another coffee and at the end did not let her pay her share of the bill. It was as simple as that. Not that they hadn't taken Asya's birthday seriously. To the contrary, they had taken it so seriously that soon they were excogitating aloud the notion of time and mortality, only to travel from there to the questions of when they were going to die and whether there really was an afterlife. "There is an afterlife and it's going to be worse than here," was the general opinion in the group. "So enjoy whatever time you have left."
Some mulled it over, others stopped midword and fled into this or that road picture on the wall. They took their time, as if no one was waiting for them outside, as if there was no outside, their grimaces gradually evolving into beatific smiles of indifference. Having no energy, no passion, no need for further conversation, they sunk deeper into the murky waters of apathy, wondering why on earth this place was named Cafe Kundera.
At nine o'clock that night, after finishing a square meal and with the lights turned off, amid singing and clapping, Asya Kazanci blew out the candles on the triple-layer caramelized apple cake (extremely sugary) with whipped lemon cream frosting (extremely sour). She was able to blow out only a third of them. The rest of the candles were doused by her aunts, grandmother, and Petite-Ma, all of them blowing from all sides.
"How was your ballet class today?" Auntie Feride asked as she turned the lights back on.
"It was good." Asya smiled. "My back hurts a little because of all the stretching the teacher compels us to do, but, still, I can't complain. I learned many new moves…."
"Oh yeah?" came a suspicious voice. It was Auntie Zeliha. "Like what?"
"Well… " Asya replied as she took her first bite of the cake. "Let's see. I learned the petit jete, which is a little jump, and the pirouette and the glissade."
"You know, this is like killing two birds with one stone," Auntie Feride remarked. "We pay for her ballet class, but she ends up learning both ballet and French. We save a whole lot of money!"