Rose can date and even marry whomever she wants, but her daughter is Armenian and she should be raised as an Armenian.'
Then she leaned forward and with a smile said to her eldest daughter: 'Give me that half on your plate, will you? Diabetes or no diabetes, how could one decline Burma?'
Asya Kazanci didn't know what it was that made some people so fond of birthdays, but she personally detested them. She always had.
Perhaps her disapproval had something to do with the fact that ever since she was a little girl, each year on her birthday she was made to eat exactly the same cake-a triple-layer caramelized apple cake (extremely sugary) with whipped lemon cream frosting (extremely sour). How her aunts could expect to please her with this cake, she had no idea, since all they heard from her on the matter was a litany of protests. Perhaps they simply forgot. Perhaps each time they erased all recollections of last year's birthday. That was possible. The Kazancis were a family inclined to never forget other people's stories but to blank when it came to their own.
Thus on each birthday Asya Kazanci had eaten the same cake and at the same time had discovered a new fact about herself. At the age of three, for instance, she had found that she could get almost anything she wanted, provided she went into tantrums. Three years later on her sixth birthday, however, she realized she'd better stop the tantrums since with each episode, although her demands were met, her childhood was prolonged. When she reached the age of eight, she learned something that until then she had had only a sense of but did not know for sure: that she was a bastard. Looking back, she thought she shouldn't be given the credit for this particular information since if it weren't for Grandma Gulsum, it would have taken her much longer to discover it.
It so happened that the two were alone in the living room on that day. Grandma Gulsum was immersed in watering her plants, and Asya in watching her as she colored in a clown in a children's coloring book.
'Why do you talk to your plants?' Asya wanted to know.
'Plants bloom if you talk to them.'
'Really?' Asya beamed.
'Really. If you tell them soil is their mother and water is their father, they buoy up and blossom.'
Asking no more, Asya went back to her coloring. She made the clown's costume orange and his teeth green. Just when she was about to color his shoes a bright crimson, she stopped, and began to mimic her grandmother. 'Sweetie, sweetie! Soil is your mom, water is your daddy.'
Grandma Gulsum pretended not to have noticed. Emboldened by her indifference, Asya increased the dose of her chant.
It was the African violet's turn to be watered, Grandma Giilsum's favorite. She cooed to the flower, 'How are you, sweetie?' Asya cooed mockingly, 'How are you, sweetie?'
Grandma Gulsum frowned and pursed her lips. 'How beautifully purple you are!' she said.
'How beautifully purple you are!'
It was then that Grandma Gulsum's mouth tightened and she murmured, 'Bastard.' She uttered the word so calmly, Asya did not immediately understand that her grandmother was addressing her, not the flower.
Asya didn't learn the meaning of the word until one year later, sometime close to her ninth birthday, when she was called a bastard by a kid at school. Then, at age ten, she discovered that unlike all the other girls in her classroom, she had no male role model in her household. It would take her another three years to comprehend that this could have a lasting effect on her personality. On her fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth birthdays, she uncovered respectively three other truths about her life: that other families weren't like hers and some families could be normal; that in her ancestry there were too many women and too many secrets about men who disappeared too early and too peculiarly; and that no matter how hard she strived, she was never going to be a beautiful woman.
By the time Asya Kazanci reached seventeen she had further comprehended that she no more belonged to Istanbul than did the ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION Or BUILDING UNDER RESTORATION Signs temporarily put up by the municipality, or the fog that fell over the city on gloomy nights, only to be dispersed at the crack of dawn, leading nowhere, accumulating into nothing.
The very next year, exactly two days before her eighteenth birthday, Asya plundered the pillbox in the house and swallowed all the capsules she found there. She opened her eyes in a bed surrounded by all her aunts and Petite-Ma and Grandmother Gulsum, having been forced to drink muddy, smelly herbal teas as if it wasn't bad enough that they had made her vomit up everything she had had in her stomach. She began her eighteenth year discerning a further fact to be added to her previous discoveries: that in this weird world, suicide was a privilege as rare as rubies, and with a family like hers, she sure wouldn't be one of the privileged.
It's hard to know if there was a connection between this deduction and what ensued next, but her obsession with music started more or less in those days. It wasn't an abstract, encompassing love for music in general, not even a fondness for selected musical genres, but rather a fixation on one and only one singer: Johnny Cash.
She knew everything about him: the myriad details of his trajectory from Arkansas to Memphis, his drinking buddies and marriages and ups and downs, his pictures, gestures, and, of course, his lyrics. Making the lyrics of 'Thirteen' her lifelong motto at the age of eighteen, Asya had decided she too was born in the soul of misery and was going to bring trouble wherever she went.
Today, on her nineteenth birthday, she felt more mature, having made yet another mental note of another reality of her life: that she had now reached the age at which her mother had given birth to her. Having made this discovery, she didn't quite know what to do with it. All she knew was that from now on she could not possibly be treated like a kid.
So she grumbled, 'I warn you! I do not want a birthday cake this year!'
Shoulders squared, arms akimbo, she forgot for a second that whenever she stood like this, her big breasts came to the fore.,If she had noticed it, she surely would have gone back to her hunchback position, since she abhorred her ample bosom, which she detected as yet another genetic burden from her mother.
Sometimes she likened herself to the cryptic Qur'anic creature Dabbet-ul Arz, the ogre destined to emerge on the Day of judgment, with each one of its organs taken from a different animal found in nature. Just like that hybrid creature, she carried a body composed of disconnected parts inherited from the women in her family. She was tall, much taller than most women in Istanbul, just like her mother, Zeliha, whom she also called 'Auntie'; she had the bony, thin-veined fingers of Auntie Cevriye, the annoyingly pointed chin of Auntie Feride, and the elephantine ears of Auntie Banu. She had a most blatantly aquiline nose, of which there were only two others in world history Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror's and Auntie Zeliha's. Sultan Mehmed had conquered Constantinople whether you liked it or not, a fact significant enough to overlook the shape of his nose. As for Auntie Zeliha, so imposing was her personality and so captivating her body that no one would see her nose-or any other part of her, for that matter-as a source of imperfection. But having no imperial achievements on her curriculum vitae and possessing a natural incapability for charming people, Asya thought, what on earth could she do about her nose?
Among what she inherited from her relatives, there were some pleasant qualities too. For one thing, her hair! She had frizzy, sable, wild hair theoretically, like every other woman in the family, but in practice, only like Auntie Zeliha. The disciplined high school teacher in Auntie Cevriye, for instance, kept her hair in a tight chignon while Auntie Banu was disqualified from any comparison, since she wore a head scarf almost all the time. Auntie Feride frantically changed her hair color and style depending on her mood. Grandma Gulsum was a cotton-head, as her hair had gone snowy and she refused to dye it, claiming it wouldn't be appropriate for an old woman. Yet Petite-Ma was a devoted redhead. Her everworsening Alzheimer's might have caused Petite-Ma to forget a plethora of things, including her children's names, but to this day she had never forgotten to dye her hair with henna.
Finally in her list of positive genetic features, Asya Kazanci included her almond-shaped fawn eyes (from Auntie Banu), a high forehead (from Auntie Cevriye), and a temperament that rendered her prone to explode too quickly but that also, in an odd way, kept her alive (from Auntie Feride). Nevertheless, she hated to see that with the passing of each year she more and more resembled them. Except for one thing: their proclivity for irrationality.
