"That's enough," Auntie Banu exclaimed, flinching. She untied her head scarf and covered the silver bowl with it. "I don't want to see this anymore. I learned what I had wanted to learn…."
"But you have not seen it all," Mr. Bitter objected with a rasping voice. "I haven't told you about the lice yet."
"The li-. . li-ce?" Auntie Banu stuttered. Whatever spirit had moved her to put an end to this session seemed to have passed now. She picked up her head scarf and peeped into the bowl again.
"Oh yeah, the lice, my master, is an important detail," Mr. Bitter said. "Remember the part when little Shushan let go of her elder brother's hand and all of a sudden got lost in the crowd? She got the lice from a family whom she had approached in the hope of getting some food. The family had little to consume themselves, and they pushed her away. A few days later little Shushan was aflame with a roaring fever: typhus!"
Auntie Banu let out a loud, prolonged sigh.
"I was there. I saw it all. Shushan dropped to her knees. Nobody in that convoy of people was in any condition to help her. They left her there on the ground, her forehead covered with sweat and her hair full of lice!"
"Enough!" Auntie Banu rose to her feet.
"But aren't you going to listen to the best part? Don't you want to learn what happened to little Shushan?" Mr. Bitter asked, sounding offended. "You wanted to learn about your guest's family, didn't you? Well, that little Shushan in my story is your guest's grandmother."
"Yes," Auntie Banu replied. "I had figured that out. Continue!"
"All right!" Mr. Bitter enthused, savoring his triumph. "After she was left half-dead on the road and after the convoy had disappeared on the horizon, little Shushan was discovered by two women from a nearby Turkish village. They were a mother and a daughter. They took the sick girl back home with them and bathed her with chunks of daphne soap and washed off the lice in her hair with potions concocted from the herbs in the valley. They fed and cured her. Three weeks later when a high-ranking officer stopped by the village with his men and interrogated the villagers to learn if they had chanced upon any Armenian orphans in the area, this Turkish mother hid Shushan inside her daughter's dowry chest to save her from harm. A month later the little girl was on her feet again, except she didn't talk much and cried in her sleep at nights."
"I thought you said she was brought to Istanbul…."
"Eventually she was. During the following six months this mother and daughter looked after her as if she were one of their own family, and would probably have kept doing so. But then a horde of bandits arrived, searching and plundering the houses. They stopped and ransacked every Turkish and Kurdish village in the region. It didn't take them long to find out that there was a little Armenian girl there. Despite the wails of the mother and daughter, they took Shushan away from them. They had heard about the orders to deliver all Armenian orphans below the age of twelve to the orphanages around the country. So before long Shushan was in an orphanage in Aleppo, and when there was no room there, in a school in Istanbul under the care of several hocahanim, some benevolent and caring, others cold and strict. Like all of the children there she was dressed in a white robe and a buttonless, black coat. There were both boys and girls. The boys were circumcised and all the children were renamed. So was Shushan. Everyone called her Shermin now. She was also given a surname: 626."
"Enough is enough," Auntie Banu put her head scarf back over the silver bowl and gave her djinni a long, piercing stare.
"Yes, master, as you wish," Mr. Bitter muttered. "However, you skipped the most important part of the story. Should you wish to listen to that part too, just let me know because we gulyabani know everything. We were there. I told you the past of Shushan, once a little girl, now the grandmother of Armanoush. I told you things that your guest doesn't know. Will you tell her? Don't you think she has a right to know?"
Auntie Banu stood silent. Would she ever narrate for Armanoush the story she had learned tonight? Even if she wanted to, how could she tell her she had seen the story of her family in a silver bowl of water shown by a gulyabani, the worst kind of djinn? Would Armanoush believe her? Besides, even if she did believe her, wasn't it better that the girl never learned about all of these sorrowful details?
Auntie Banu turned toward Mrs. Sweet for solace. But instead of an answer all she got from her benevolent djinni was a bashful smile and a sudden shimmer of the corona around her head, flickering in shades of plum, pink, and purple. Together with the djinni's corona, a thorny question flared up: Was it really better for human beings to discover more of their past? And then more and more…? Or was it simply better to know as little of the past as possible and even to forget what small amount was remembered?
It is past dawn now. A short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. The only time of the day when it is early enough to harbor hopes of realizing one's dreams but far too late to actually dream, the land of Morpheus now flung far away.
Allah's eye is omnipotent and omniscient; it is an eye that never closes, or even blinks. But still no one can tell for sure if the earth is equally omniobservable. If this is a stage wherein spectacle after spectacle is displayed for the Celestial Gaze, there might be times in between when the curtains are down and a gauzy head scarf covers the surface of a silver bowl.
Istanbul is a hodgepodge of ten million lives. It is an open book of ten million scrambled stories. Istanbul is waking up from its perturbed sleep, ready for the chaos of the rush hour. From now on there are too many prayers to answer, too many profanities to note, and too many sinners, as well as too many innocents, to keep an eye on.
Already it is morning in Istanbul.
THIRTEEN
Dried Figs
Through the range of the months of the year, every month knows the particular season it belongs to and behaves accordingly, every month but one: March.
March is most unbalanced in Istanbul, both psychologically and physically. March might decide she belongs to the spring season, warm and fragrant, only to change her mind the very next day, turning into winter, sending chilly winds and sleet all around. Today, March nineteenth, was an unusually sunny Saturday, far above the average temperature for this time of the year. Asya and Armanoush took their sweaters off as they walked the wide, windswept road from Ortakoy toward Taksim Square. Asya was wearing a long batik dress, hand painted in tones of beige and caramel brown. Every step she took, tiers of necklaces and bracelets jingled. Armanoush, in turn, was loyal to her style: a pair of blue jeans and on top of it a loose UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA sweatshirt, pasty pink as a ballet slipper. They were on their way to visit the tattoo parlor.
"I'm so glad you will finally meet Aram." Asya beamed as she shifted her canvas bag from one shoulder to the other. "He is such a nice person.
"I heard you mention his name before, but I have no idea who he is."
"Oh, he is… " Asya paused, searching for the right word in English. Boyfriend sounded too light for the situation, husband was technically wrong, husband-to-be didn't look plausible. Fiance seemed to suit better, but the truth is they had never been formally engaged. "He is Auntie Zeliha's significant other."
Across the road, under an elegantly carved Ottoman archway, they caught a glimpse of two Gypsy boys, one of them plucking cans from garbage bins and then piling them on a dilapidated cart. The other boy sat on the edge of the cart sorting the cans, doing his best imitation of working hard while basking in the sun. That could be such an idyllic life, Asya thought to herself: She would give anything to switch places with that boy on the cart. First, she would go and buy the most lackadaisical horse she could find. Then every day she would ride her horse cart up and down along the steep streets of Istanbul, collecting things. She would wholeheartedly gather the most unattractive artifacts of human life, embracing the debris rotting underneath its polished surface. Asya had a feeling that a garbage collector in Istanbul probably led a far less stressful life than she and her friends at Cafe Kundera did.