"Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West.
If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East." He chuckled. "It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity."
But high above the clouds, Asya didn't hear him. She lit another joint and put it between her chapped lips. She drew a deep puff of indifference, ignoring afterward the feeling of his fingers on her skin, his tongue on her tongue.
"There had to be a way to reach Johnny Cash before he passed away. I mean the guy had to come to Istanbul, he died without knowing he had die-hard fans here…."
The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist broke into a soft smile. He kissed the little mole on her left cheek, caressed her neck gently, until his hands started moving down to her abundant breasts, cupping them each in his hands. The kiss was brash, unhurried, but also woven with a shade of force, if not ferocity. With shimmering eyes he asked, "When are we meeting again?"
"Whenever we both run into each other in Cafe Kundera, I guess." Asya shrugged, pulling herself away from him. When she withdrew, he came closer.
"But when are we meeting here in my house?"
"You mean when are we meeting here in my cathouse?" Asya spit out, no longer fighting back the urge to backbite. "Because as we both know too well, this is not your home! Home is where your wife of so many years is, whereas this place is your secret cathouse where you can imbibe and get laid without your wife knowing a thing. This is where you screw your chicks. The younger, the shallower, the tipsier, the better!"
The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist sighed and grabbed his glass of raki. He drank half in one gulp. His face was marred with a desolation so intense that for a second Asya feared he would either yell at her or start to sob, she could not imagine that much hurt remaining calm. Instead, he muttered in a hoary voice, "You can be so cruel sometimes."
There was an eerie silence in the room, muffled by the screams of the children playing soccer on the street outside. From the pitch of the screams it sounded like one of the boys had just been shown a red card and all the players on his team were now busy arguing with the referee, whoever that was.
"You have such a dark side, Asya," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's voice came from a distance. "Because it doesn't show on your sweet face, it is hard to tell at first glance. But it is there. You have a bottomless potential for demolition."
"Well, I do not demolish anyone, do I?" Asya felt the need to defend herself. "All I want is to be free and to be myself and all that shit…. If only I could be left on my own.."
"If only you could be left on your own so that you could destroy yourself faster and earlier…. Is that what you want? You are attracted to self-destruction like a moth is attracted to light."
Asya snorted a tense chuckle.
"When you drink you drink to extremes, when you criticize you bulldoze, when you get down you sink and hit the bottom. I honestly don't know how to approach you. You are so full of rage, baby…."
"Perhaps it's because I was born a bastard," remarked Asya, taking another puff. "I don't even know who my father is. I never ask, they never tell. Sometimes when my mother looks at me I think she sees him in my face but never says a word. We all pretend there is no such thing as_father. Instead there is only Father, with a capital F. When you have Allah up there in the sky to look after you, who needs a father? Aren't we all His children? Not that my mother buys that crap. I tell you she is more cynical than any woman I've ever known. And that is precisely where the problem is. My mom and I, we are so alike and yet so distant."
She blew a plume of smoke in the direction of the mahogany desk where the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist kept some of his best works, those he was afraid his wife might destroy after one of their frequent fights. He also kept there the first rough sketches of the Amphibian Politician and Rhinoceros Politicus, two new series in which he depicted the members of the Turkish parliament as different animal species. He planned to release this series soon, especially now that the court had agreed to postpone indefinitely his three-year prison sentence for drawing the prime minister as a wolf in sheep's clothing. The main prerequisite of the deferment was that he did not repeat the wrong, which he was determined to do. What was the use of fighting for freedom of expression, he thought, if one didn't fight for freedom of humor first?
At the corner of the desk, beneath the ochre light of a gooseneck art deco table lamp, sat a huge hand-carved wood sculpture of Don Quixote bent over a book, lost in his ruminations. Asya liked this sculpture very much.
"My family is a bunch of clean freaks. Brushing away the dirt and dust of the memories! They always talk about the past, but it is a cleansed version of the past. That's the Kazancis' technique of coping with problems; if something's nagging you, well, close your eyes, count to ten, wish it never happened, and the next thing you know, it has never happened, hurray! Every day we swallow yet another capsule of mendacity…."
What was it that Don Quixote read, Asya wondered in her pixilated mind. What was written on that open page there? Had the sculptor cared to scribble down a few words? Curiously she bolted from the sofa and got closer to the sculpture. Alas, there were no words on the wooden page. She took a long drag before she went back to her seat and started complaining again.
"It annoys me to see all those home-sweet-homes. Sad facsimiles of happy families. You know at times I envy my Petite-Ma, she is almost a hundred years old now, how I wish I had her disease. Sweet Alzheimer's. Memory withers away."
"That's not good, sweetie."
"It might not be good for the people around you, but it's good for you," Asya insisted.
"Well, usually the two are related."
But Asya ignored that. "You know, today Petite-Ma opened her piano after so many years; I heard her play these dissonant sounds. It's depressing. This woman used to play Rachmaninoff, and now she can't even play a silly children's song." She paused for a second, considering what she had just said. Sometimes she talked first, thought later.
"But my point is, she doesn't know that, we do!" Asya exclaimed with a forged zest. "Alzheimer's is not as terrible as it sounds. The past is nothing but a shackle we need to get rid of. Such an excruciating burden. If only I could have no past you know, if only I could be a nobody, start from point zero and just remain there forever. As light as a feather. No family, no memories and all that shit…."
"Everybody needs a past," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist took a pull from his glass, his expression hovering somewhere between rue and ire.
"Don't count me in because I sure don't!" Asya now grabbed the Zippo on the coffee table and thumbed it to life, only to instantly snap the lighter closed with a sharp click. She liked the sound and repeated the routine several times, without knowing that she drove the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist slightly mad. Click! Click! Click!
"I'd better go." She handed him the Zippo and looked for her clothes. "My dear family has assigned me an important duty. I have to go to the airport with Mom and welcome my American pen pal."
"You have an American pen pal?"
"Sort of. This girl who materialized out of nowhere. So one day I wake up and there is this letter in the mailbox, guess from where? San Francisco! Some girl named Amy. She says she is my uncle Mustafa's stepdaughter. We didn't even know the man had a stepdaughter! So now it dawns on us that this marriage is his wife's second marriage, you know? He never told us that! My grandma almost had a heart attack finding out that her precious son's wife of twenty years was in fact not a virgin when they got married, no sir, no virgin, but a divorcee!"