'I don't do that anymore,' said Auntie Banu, contritely. 'It didn't prove such a good method after all.'
'You see, my aunt is a positivistic psychic. She scientifically measures the margin of error in each divination,' Asya said to Armanoush in English but then switched back to a serious tone in Turkish. 'Well then, read our coffee cups.'
'Now that's another thing,' Auntie Banu agreed, incapable of saying no to coffee cups. 'Those I can read anytime.'
Coffees were made, Armanoush's with no sugar and Asya's with plenty, although the latter did not want to have her cup read. It was caffeine that she was after, not her fate. When Armanoush finished her coffee, the saucer was placed on top of the coffee cup, held tight, and moved around in three horizontal circles; the coffee cup was then turned upside down over the saucer, letting the coffee grinds slowly descend to form patterns. When the bottom of the cup had cooled off, it was flipped over and Auntie Banu started to read the patterns left in the coffee cup, moving her gaze clockwise.
'I can see a very worried woman here.'
'It must be my mother.' Armanoush sighed.
'She is deeply worried. She thinks about you all the time, loves you very much, but her soul is stressed. Then- there is a city with red bridges. There is water, sea, wind, and… mist. There I see a family, many heads-look at this, lots of people, lots of love and caring, lots of food too….'
Armanoush nodded, a little embarrassed at being found out like this.
'Then..' Auntie Banu said, skipping the bad news settled at the bottom of the cup flowers soon to be scattered on a grave, far far away. She rotated the coffee cup between her plump fingers. Her next words came out louder than she intended, startling them all. 'Oh, there is a young man who cares deeply for you. But why is he behind a veil?… Something like a veil.'
Armanoush's heart skipped a beat.
'Can that be a computer screen?' Asya asked mischievously as Sultan the Fifth hopped onto her lap.
'I don't see computers in my coffee grounds,' Auntie Banu objected. She didn't like to incorporate technology in her psychic universe.
Auntie Banu solemnly paused, turned the cup an inch, and then paused again. Her face looked troubled now. 'I see a girl your age. She has curly hair, black, pure black… an ample bosom….'
'Thanks, auntie, I got the message.' Asya chuckled. 'But you don't have to place your relatives in every cup you read, that's called nepotism.'
Auntie Banu blinked, completely deadpan.
'There is a rope here, a thick, strong rope with a noose at one end, like a lasso. You two girls are going to be attached to each other with a strong bond…. I see a spiritual bond….'
To the girls' disappointment Auntie Banu said nothing further. She stopped reading, put the coffee cup on the saucer, and filled it with cold water so that the patterns jumbled and vanished before anyone else, good or bad, had a chance to peek inside. That was the one good thing about coffee-cup reading: Unlike the fate written by Allah, that written by coffee could always be washed away.
On the way to Cafe Kundera, they took the ferry so that Armanoush could see the city in all its vastness and splendor. Like the ferry itself, its passengers too had an air of lassitude, which was quickly swept away by the sudden wind when the huge vessel veered into the azure sea. The hum of the crowd inside amplified for a full minute, and then it dwindled to a monotonous drone to accompany other sounds: the clatter of the outboard motor, the splash of the waves, the shrieks of the seagulls. Armanoush noticed with delight that the lazy seagulls on the shore were coming with them. Almost everyone on the ferry was feeding them with morsels of simit-sesame-seed ring breads being a treat these carnivorous birds found irresistible.
A classically dressed, portly woman and her teenage son sat on the bench across from them, side by side but worlds apart. From her face Armanoush could tell the woman was no big fan of public transportation, despising the masses, and if possible would have thrown all of the poorly dressed passengers into the sea. Hidden behind thick- rimmed glasses, the son looked half embarrassed by his mother's standoffish ways. They are like Flannery O'Connor characters, Armanoush thought to herself
'Tell me more about this Baron,' Asya said out of the blue. 'What does he look like? How old is he?'
Armanoush blushed. Within the vivid light of the winter sun glowing from among thick clouds, her face was that of an enamored young woman. 'I don't know. I've never met him in person. We're cyber friends, you see. I admire his intellect and passion, I guess.
'Don't you want to meet him someday?'
'Yes and no,' Armanoush confessed after purchasing a simit from the small but crowded buffet inside. She ripped a piece off and with the morsel in her hand leaned against the rail surrounding the deck, waiting for a seagull to approach.
'You don't have to wait for them to appear.' Asya smiled. 'Just toss a piece up in the air and a seagull will catch it instantly.'
Armanoush did as told. A seagull materialized from the empty sky and bolted the treat down.
'I am dying to learn more about him, and yet deep down, I don't want to meet him ever. When you date someone the magic perishes. I couldn't bear for that to happen with him. He's too important to me. Dating and sex are just another story, so knotty….'
Now they were entering that murky zone guarded by the three untouchables. A good sign indeed, indicating that they were drawing closer to each other.
'Magic!' Asya said. 'Who needs magic? The tales of Layla and Majnun, Yusuf and Zulaykha, the Moth and the Candle, or the Nightingale and the Rose…. Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.'
Armanoush looked at her friend, amazed. 'I thought you liked philosophy.. ' she stammered without quite knowing why she'd said it.
'I admire philosophy,' Asya conceded. 'But that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with the philosophers.'
'So should I assume you are not a big fan 'of Amor platonicus?!'
Now that was a piece of information Asya preferred to keep to herself, not because the question itself was unanswerable, but because she was afraid of the implications of her answer. Armanoush being so polite and proper, Asya did not want to intimidate her. How on earth could she now tell Armanoush that, though only nineteen, she had known many men's hands and did not feel a speck of guilt for it? Besides, how could she ever reveal the truth without giving the wrong impression to an outsider about 'the chastity of Turkish girls'?
This kind of 'national responsibility' was utterly foreign to Asya Kazanci. Never before had she felt part of a collectivity and she had no intention of being so now or in the future. Yet here she was accomplishing a pretty good impersonation of someone else, someone who had gotten patriotic overnight. How could she now step outside her national identity and be her pure, sinning self? Could she tell Armanoush that deep in her heart she believed only when you had sex with a man, could you really be sure that he was the right person for you; that only in bed did people's most imperceptible, innate complexes surface; and that no matter what people assumed all the time, sex was in fact far more sensual than physical. How could she reveal she had had numerous relations in the past, way too many, as if to take revenge on men, but the revenge of what, she still couldn't tell. She had had many boyfriends, sometimes simultaneously, polygamous affairs that had always ended in heartbreak, accumulating a heap of secrets she had neatly kept away from the frontiers of the Kazanci domicile. Could she divulge these? Would Armanoush understand without being judgmental; could she really, truly see into Asya's soul from the echelons of that sterile tower of hers?
Could Asya confess to her that once she had tried to commit suicide, a nasty experience from which she had derived two basic lessons: that swallowing your lunatic aunt's pills was. not the right way to go about doing this and that if you wanted to kill yourself you'd better have a rationale ready in hand in case you survived, since 'WHY?' would be the one question you would hear from all sides. Could she further confess that to this day she hadn't been able to fathom the answer to that question, other than recalling being too young too foolish too furious too intense for the universe in which she lived? Would any of this make sense to Armanoush?
Could she then disclose that recently she had made some progress toward stability and tranquillity, since she
