hard to tell. Too early to tell.
'Good morning, Petite-Ma!' Asya exclaimed as she shuffled her lavender feet toward the table, having finally washed her face and brushed her teeth. She leaned over the old woman and gave her a sloppy kiss on both cheeks.
Ever since she was a little girl, of all the women in her family, Petite-Ma retained a most special place in Asya's heart. She loved her dearly. Unlike some others in the family, Petite-Ma had always been capable of loving without suffocating. Shewould never nag or nitpick or sting. Her protectiveness was not possessive. From time to time she secretly put grains of wheat sanctified with prayers into Asya's pockets to save her from the evil eye. Other than crusading against the evil eye, laughing was the thing she did best and mostthat is, until the day her illness escalated. Back in the past, she and Asya used to laugh together a lot: Petite-Ma, a lengthy stream of mellifluous chuckles; Asya, a sudden spurt of rich, resonant tones. Nowadays, though deeply worried about her great-grandmother's well-being, Asya was also respectful of the autonomous realm of amnesia that she drifted into, being constantly denied autonomy herself. And the more the old woman digressed from them, the closer she felt to her.
'Good morning my pretty great-granddaughter,' Petite-Ma replied, impressing everyone with the clarity of her memory.
Sitting there with a remote control in her hand, Auntie Feride chirped without looking at her. 'At last, the grumpy princess is awake.' She sounded jovial despite the tinge of harangue in her voice. Just this morning she had dyed her hair, turning it to a light blond, almost ashen. By now Asya knew too well that a radical change in hairstyle was a sign of a radical change in mood. She inspected Auntie Feride for traces of insanity. Other than that she seemed to be absorbed in the TV, watching with delight a terribly untalented pop singer spinning around in a dance too ridiculous to be real, Asya couldn't find any.
'You have to get ready, you know, our guest is arriving today,' Auntie Banu said as she entered the living room with the tray of borek fresh out of the oven, visibly pleased to have her daily carbohydrates. 'We need to get the house ready before she arrives.'
Trying to push Sultan the Fifth away from the dripping little faucet with her feet, Asya poured herself tea from the steaming samovar and asked dully: 'Why are you all so excited about this American girl?' She took a sip of the tea, only to make a face and search for sugar. One, two… she filled up the tiny glass with four cubes of sugar.
'What do you mean `why are you all excited'? She is a guest! She is coming all the way from the other side of the globe.' Auntie Feride stretched her arm forward in the Nazi salute to indicate where and how far the other side of the globe was. The thought of the globe brought an agitated timbre to her voice, as the map of global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns flashed in her mind's eye. The last time Auntie Feride had seen this map on paper, she was in high school. This nobody knew, but she had learned the map by heart down to its tiniest detail, and today it remained engraved in her memory as vividly as the day she had first scrutinized it.
'Most importantly, she is a visitor sent to us by your uncle,' broke in Grandma Gulsum, who still tenaciously retained her reputation of having been Ivan the Terrible in another life.
'My uncle? Which uncle? The one I have never seen to this day?' Asya tasted her tea. It was still bitter. She threw in another cube of sugar. 'Hello, wake up everyone! The man you are talking about has not visited us even once ever since he stepped on American soil. The only thing we have received from him to prove he is still alive are patchy postcards of Arizona landscapes,' Asya said, with a venomous look. 'Cactus under the sun, cactus at twilight, cactus with purple flowers, cactus with red birds…. The guy doesn't even care enough to change his postcard style.'
'He also sends his wife's pictures,' Auntie Feride added to be fair.
'I couldn't care less about those pictures. Plump blond wife smiling in front of their adobe house, where by the way we have never been invited; plump blond wife smiling in the Grand Canyon; plump blond wife smiling, wearing a huge Mexican sombrero; plump blond wife smiling with a dead coyote on the porch; plump blond wife smiling, cooking pancakes in the kitchen…. Aren't you sick of him sending us every month the poses of this complete stranger? Why is she smiling at us, anyway? We have not even met the woman, for Allah's sake!' Asya gulped her tea, ignoring the fact that it was still scalding hot.
'Journeys are not safe. The roads are full of perils. Airplanes are hijacked, cars crash in accidents even trains tumble. Eight people died in a car accident yesterday on the Aegean Coast,' Auntie Feride noted. Unable to make eye contact with anyone, her eyeballs drew nervous circles around the table until they landed on a black olive resting on her plate.
Every time Auntie Feride conveyed ghastly news from the third page of the Turkish tabloids there followed a prickly silence. This time it was no different. In the ensuing silence Grandma Gulsum grimaced, disturbed to hear her only son being disparaged like this; Auntie Banu tugged on the ends oilier head scarf; Auntie Cevriye tried to remember what kind of an animal 'coyote' was, but since twenty-four years in the profession of teaching had made her terrific with answers and equally bad with questions, she didn't dare ask anyone; Petite-Ma stopped nibbling the slice of sucuk on her plate; and Auntie Feride tried to think of some other accidents she'd read about, but instead of more macabre news, she recalled the bright blue sombrero that Mustafa's American wife was wearing in one of the pictures-if only she could find anything close to that in Istanbul, she sure would like to wear it day and night. In the meantime, no one noticed that Auntie Zeliha's face looked woeful all of a sudden.
'We need to face the truth!' Asya announced with certitude. 'All these years you have all doted on Uncle Mustafa as the one and only precious son of this family, and the instant he flew from the nest, he forgot about you. Isn't it obvious that the man doesn't give a hoot about his family? Why should he mean anything for us, then?'
'The boy is busy,' Grandma Gulsum interjected. In truth, she favored her son, of which she had only one, over the daughters, of which she had too many. 'It is not easy to be abroad. America is a long way away.'
'Yeah, of course it's a long way, especially when you consider the fact that you need to swim the Atlantic Ocean and walk the entire European continent,' Asya said, biting into a slice of white cheese to soothe her tea- burned tongue. To her surprise the cheese was really good, soft and salty, the way she liked it. Finding it a bit difficult to gripe and enjoy the food at the same time, she shut up for a second and chewed nervously.
Taking advantage of the momentary lull, Auntie Banu launched into a moral story, as she always did in times of distress. She told them the story of a man who decided to travel the entire globe round and round, in an endeavor to escape his mortality. North and south, east and west, he wandered every which way he could. Once, in one of his numerous trips, he unexpectedly ran into Azrail, the angel of death, in Cairo. Azrail's piercing gaze raked the man with a mysterious expression. He neither said a word nor followed him. The man right away abandoned Cairo, traveling nonstop thereafter until he arrived in a small, sleepy town in China. Thirsty and tired he rushed into the first tavern on his way. There, next to the table to which he was ushered, sat Azrail patiently waiting for him, this time with a relieved expression on his face. 'I was so surprised to run into you in Cairo,' he rasped to the man, 'for your destiny said it wass here in China that we two would meet.'
Asya knew this story by heart, just like she knew the many other stories repeatedly narrated under this roof. What she didn't understand, and didn't think she ever could, was the thrill her aunts derived from narrating a story of which the punch line was already known. The air in the living room grew snug, all too sheltered, enveloped by the recurrence of the routine, as if life were one long, uninterrupted rehearsal and everyone memorized their speech. During the ensuing minutes, as the women around her jumped from tittle-tattle to tittle-tattle, each story triggering the next, Asya perked up, looking quite unlike the girl she had been earlier this morning. Sometimes she herself was baffled by her own inconsistencies. How could she so begrudge the ones she loved most? It was as if her mood were a yo-yo, bobbing up and down, now incensed, now contented. In this respect too she resembled her mother.
A simit vendor's monotonous voice infiltrated from the open window, piercing the ongoing chatter. Auntie Banu rushed to the window and popped her red head outside. 'Simitist! Simitist! Come this way!' she yelled. 'How much are they?'
Not that she didn't know how much a simit cost, she sure did. The question was less a query than a rite, performed dutifully. That is why as soon as the question came out of her mouth, she proceeded to the next line, without waiting for the man to answer. 'All right, give us eight simits.'
Every Sunday at breakfast they bought eight simits, one for each person in the family, and then one extra, for the missing sibling now far away.
'Oh, they smell superb.' Auntie Banu beamed when she returned to the table wearing the simits on each arm like a circus acrobat ready to juggle with hoops. She left one in front of everyone, scattering the sesame seeds all
