'But don't you want to know what happened to her?' PetiteMa inched closer and sat on her husband's lap, caressing his chin softly, as if to cajole him into facing the question.
'I have no interest in learning that slut's fate.' Riza Selim Kazanci stiffened, without caring to lower his voice so that Levent wouldn't hear him smear his mother.
'Did she run away with someone else?' Petite-Ma insisted, knowing she was surpassing her limits but confident that she could not fully know what her limits were until she had surpassed them.
'Why are you poking your nose into things that are none of your business?' Riza Selim Kazanci snapped in reply. 'Are you interested in repeating the act or what?'
With that Petite-Ma learned what her limits were.
Except for the moments when the topic of the first wife came up, their life flowed tranquilly in the years that followed.. Comfortable and contented. Unusual indeed given that the families around them were anything but. Their contentment was a source of envyy for relatives and friends and neighbors. They would meddle in whenever they could. The most suitable topic to pick on was the couple's childlessness. Many tried to persuade Riza Selim Kazanci to marry another woman before it was too late. Since under the new civil law men could no longer have more than one wife, he would have to divorce this wife of his who, by now everybody suspected, was either barren or bolshie. Riza Selim Kazanci turned a deaf ear to such counsels.
On the day he died, a totally unexpected death common to generations of Kazanci men, Petite-Ma came to believe in the evil eye for the first time in her life. She was convinced that it was the gaze of the jealous people around them that had pierced through the walls of this otherwise blissful konak and killed her husband.
Today she barely remembered any of that. As her creased, bony fingers caressed the old piano, Petite-Ma's days with Riza Selim Kazanci flickered from a distance like a dim, ancient lighthouse misguiding her through the stormy waters of Alzheimer's.
On a divan in a renovated apartment facing the Galata Tower, a neighborhood where the streets never slept and the cobblestones knew many secrets, under the rays of the sunset reflecting from the glass windows of decrepit buildings and amid the squeals of the seagulls, Asya Kazanci sat nude and still, like a statuette absorbing the talent of the artist who had carved her out of a block of marble. As her mind drifted into fantasyland, so did the thick smoke she had just inhaled coil inside her body, burning her lungs, elating her spirits until she finally exhaled it slowly, reluctantly.
'What are you pondering, sweetheart?'
'I am working on Article Eight of my Personal Manifesto of Nihilism,' Asya replied as she opened her foggy eyes.
Article Eight: If between society and the Self there lies a cavernous ravine and upon it only a wobbly bridge, you might as well burn that bridge and stay on the side of the Self, safe and sound, unless it is the ravine that you are after.
Asya took another drag, and held the smoke in.
'Here, let me feed you,' said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, taking the joint from her hands. He leaned toward her, his hairy chest pressing against her; she opened her mouth like a blind baby bird ready to be fed. He blew the stream of smoke directly into her mouth; she inhaled it eagerly as if thirstily drinking water.
Article Nine: If the ravine inside enthralls you more than the world outside, you might as well fall in it, fall into yourself.
They repeated the act, he directing the smoke into her mouth, she taking it in again and again, until the last puff of smoke that had disappeared down her throat was released.
'I bet you are feeling better now,' cooed the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, his face reflecting his desire for more sex. 'There is no cure better than a good screw and a good joint.'
Asya bit the inside of her mouth to fight back the urge to raise objections. Instead, she tilted her head toward the open window and stretched her arms as though she were about to embrace the whole city, with all its chaos and splendor.
He in the meantime was busy perfecting his statement: 'Let's see. There is nothing so overrated as a bad fuck and nothing so underrated as a good-'
'Shit.' Asya lent a hand.
Nodding heartily, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist stood up with only his silken boxers on and his slight beer belly exposed. He lolloped toward the CD player to put on a song, which happened to be one of her all-time Johnny Cash favorites: 'Hurt.' Swinging with the opening rhythm of the song, he walked back, his eyes all glittery: I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel…
Asya scrunched up her face like she had just been pinched by an invisible needle. 'It's such a pity….'
'What is a pity, sweetheart?'
She stared at him with widely opened troubled eyes that seemed to belong to someone three times her age. 'It sucks,' she groaned. 'These managers and organizers, whatever they are called, they organize European tours or Asian tours or even hurrah-perestroikaSoviet Union tours… but if you are a music fan in Istanbul you do not fit into any geographical definition. We fall through the cracks. You know, thee only reason why we don't have as many concerts as we'd like to is the geostrategic position of Istanbul.'
'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
