lattes and nibbled the vanilla biscuits that came with them, although by this time his frustration was becoming visible. In any case, nothing was done in harmony, and yet in that dissonance there lay an unusual cadence. This is what Asya liked most about the cafe: its comatose indolence and farcical disharmony. This place was out of time and space. Istanbul was in a constant hurry and yet at Cafe Kundera only lethargy prevailed. People outside the cafe stuck to one another to disguise their loneliness, pretending to be far more intimate than they really were, whereas in here it was the opposite, everyone pretending to be far more detached than they really were. This spot was the negation of the whole city. Asya took a drag on her cigarette, fully appreciating the inaction until the cartoonist looked at his watch and turned toward her. 'It's seven forty, dear. Your class is over.'
'Oh, do you have to go? Your family is so outmoded,' the scenarist's girlfriend blurted out. 'Why are they making you take ballet classes when obviously you aren't into it?'
That was the problem with all these butterfly-life-spanned girlfriends the scenarist brought with him. Driven by an impulse to become friends with everyone in the group, they asked too many personal questions and made too many personal comments, miserably failing to acknowledge that it was precisely the opposite, the lack of any serious and sincere interest in each other's privacy, that drew the group members to one another.
'How can you cope with all those aunts?' the scenarist's girlfriend continued, failing to read Asya's face. 'Gosh, so many women playing the role of mother all under the same roof…. I couldn't stand it a minute.'
Now that was too much. There were unwritten rules in a group as eclectic as this and they were not to be violated. Asya sniffed. She did not like women, which would have been easier to deal with had she not been one of them. Whenever she met a new woman she did one of two things: either waited to see when she would hate her or hated her right away.
'I don't have a family in the normal sense of the word.' Asya gave her a condescending gaze, hoping this would stop whatever the other was planning to say next. Yet in the endeavor she caught sight of a shiny silver frame on the wall right above the latter's right shoulder. It was the picture of a road to the Red Lagoon in Bolivia. How nice it would be to be on that road right now! She finished her coffee, stubbed out her cigarette, and began to roll another one as she mumbled, 'We are a pack of female animals forced to live together. I don't call that a family.'
'But that's exactly what a family is about, my dear,' objected the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. At times like this he remembered that he was the eldest of the group, not only in terms of age years but also in terms of mistakes years. Married and divorced three times, he had watched as one by one all of his ex-wives left Istanbul to get as far away from him as possible. From each marriage he had children whom he visited only once in a long while, but always proudly claimed ownership of. 'Remember'-he wagged a paternal finger toward Asya-'all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'
'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
