After losing her husband, Auntie Cevriye sold her house and joined the other daughters who had come to accept living under the same roof. In her first months there, all she did was shed tears. She started the day sifting through her late husband's photographs, talking to them, sobbing over each one, only to end the day tired from so much sorrow. Her eyes swollen like two puffy bags of red distress, her nose peeling from too much wiping-this had been her state until one morning she had come home from the cemetery to find all the old photos gone.
'What did you do with his pictures?' Auntie Cevriye exclaimed, knowing too well whom to accuse. 'Give them back to me!'
'No,' Grandma Gulsum answered, stern and dry. 'The pictures are available. You will not spend your days crying over them. For the heart to heal, the eyes need not see them for a while.'
Nothing healed. If anything, she got used to envisioning him without looking at his pictures. From time to time she found herself redesigning his face, furnishing him with a grizzled mustache or some more tufts of hair here and there. The disappearance of the photographs coincided with Auntie Cevriye's evolution into a staunch teacher of Turkish national history.
In the room across from her sleeps Auntie Feride. She is a clever and creative woman, a collage woman. If only she could hold the pieces together. It is unusual to be so sensitive, it is fabulous to be so sensitive, it is frightening to be so sensitive. Since anything can happen at any time, she can never be sure of the ground beneath her feet. There is no sense of safety or continuity. Everything comes in bits and pieces that beg to be united and yet defy any notion of wholeness. Now and again Auntie Feride dreams of having a lover. She wants a love that will absorb her in her entirety, even to the point of embracing her multiple anxieties, eccentricities, and abnormalities. A beloved who will adore everything about her. Auntie Feride doesn't want a love that is good to her good side but shuns her dark side. She needs someone who can stand with her through thick and thin, sanity and insanity. Perhaps that is why lunatics have a harder time dating, she thinks-not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find someone who is willing to date so many people in one person.
But those are only daydreams. In real dreams Auntie Feride doesn't see lovers but abstract collages. At nighttime she creates patchworks with stunning colors and manifold geometrical shapes. The wind blows hard, the oceanic currents slide along, and the world becomes an orb of endless possibilities. Everything constructed can be deconstructed at the same time. The doctors have told Auntie Feride to take it easy, to use her pills regularly. But they know little about this dialectic. Make and destroy make and destroy make and destroy. Auntie Feride's mind is an excellent collage artist.
Next to Auntie Feride's room there is the bathroom and next to that, Auntie Zeliha's. She is awake. She is sitting straight up in her bed, eyeing her room as if it belonged to someone else, as if she were memorizing the details to feel closer to the stranger who belongs there.
She looks at her clothes, the dozens of skirts, all of them short, all of them flamboyant, her own way of protesting the moral codes she was born into. On the walls there are pictures and posters of tattoos. Auntie Zeliha is a woman in her late thirties but her room in many ways resembles that of a teenager. Perhaps she will never grow up and lose the anger within, the anger she has unintentionally passed on to her daughter. To her way of thinking, anyone who can't rise up and rebel, anyone devoid of the ability to dissent, cannot really be said to be alive. In resistance lies the key to life. The rest of the people fall into two camps: the vegetables, who are fine with everything, and the tea glasses, who, though not fine with numerous things, lack the strength to confront. It is the latter that are the worse of the two. Auntie Zeliha crafted a rule about them, back when she used to make rules.
The Iron Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: If you are as fragile as a tea glass, either find a way to never encounter burning water and hope to marry an ideal husband or get yourself laid and broken as soon as possible. Alternatively, stop being a tea-glass woman!
She had opted for the third choice. Auntie Zeliha abhorred fragility. To this day, she was the only one among all the Kazanci females capable of getting infuriated at tea glasses when they cracked under pressure.
Auntie Zeliha reaches out for the pack of Marlboro Lights on the bedstand and lights a cigarette. Aging has not changed her smoking habits at all. She knows her daughter is a smoker too. It all sounds like a tawdry passage from a brochure by the Ministry of Health: Children of parents addicted to smoking are three times as likely to become smokers themselves. Auntie Zeliha is worried about Asya's wellbeing and yet she is wise enough to sense that if she intervenes too much, showing signs of mistrust, it will only generate a backlash. It's difficult to pretend not to look concerned, just like it's difficult to be called 'auntie' by your own child. It kills her. Nonetheless, she still believes this might be better for them both. It has somehow freed the child and the mother; the two had to be detached nominally so that they could be attached physically and spiritually. Allah is her only witness; the only problem is, she doesn't believe He exists.
She inhales a thoughtful drag, holds it for a moment, and exhales an angry puff. Provided that Allah exists and knows so much, why didn't He do anything with that knowledge of His? Why does He let things happen the way they do? No, Auntie Zeliha is resolute, there is no way she'll give in to religion. She lived as an agnostic, and she will die as one. Sincere and pure in her blasphemy. If Allah really exists somewhere, He should appreciate this heartfelt denunciation of hers, germane to only a select few, rather than being sweet-talked by the self-absorbed pleas of the religious fanatics, who are everywhere.
In the room at the other end of the second floor is Auntie Banu. She too is awake at this hour. The third person awake in the Kazanci domicile. There is something unusual about her this morning. Her face is pale and her large, fawn eyes flicker with worry. Across from her is a mirror. She looks at herself and sees a woman aged before her time. For the first time in years she misses her husband-the husband she walked out on, but never fully abandoned.
He is a good man who deserves a better wife. Never has he treated her badly or said a mean word, but after losing her two sons, Auntie Banu couldn't stand living with him anymore. Every now and then, she goes to her old house, like a stranger who knows every detail of a place from deja vu. She always buys dried apricots on the way, his favorite. Once there she does some cleaning, sews on a few buttons, cooks a few dishes, always his favorites, and tidies up the place. Not that there is too much to tidy up because he is a man who keeps the house in order. While Auntie Banu works, he watches her from close by.
At the end of the day he always asks: 'Will you stay?'
Her response to that never changes: 'Not today.'
Before she leaves the house she adds: 'There is food in the fridge, don't forget to heat the soup, finish the pilaki in two days or it'll go bad. Don't forget to water the violets, I changed their place next to the window.'
He nods and mutters softly, as if talking to himself: 'Don't worry. I know how to take care of myself. And thanks for the apricots….'
After that Auntie Banu returns to the Kazanci domicile. That is how it has been, day after day, year after year.
The woman in the mirror looks old tonight. Auntie Banu always thought aging swiftly was the price she had to pay for her profession. The overwhelming majority of human beings age year by year, but not the clairvoyants: They age story by story. If only she had wanted to, Auntie Banu could have asked for compensation. Just as she has not asked her djinn for any material gains, she has not asked for physical beauty either. Maybe she will some day. So far Allah has given her the strength to carry on without asking for more. But today Auntie Banu is going to request something extra.
Allah, give me knowledge, for I cannot resist the urge to know, but also give me the strength to bear that knowledge. Amin.
From a drawer she produces a jade rosary and strokes the beads. 'All right then, I'm ready, let's start. May Allah help me!'
Dangling from the bookshelf where the gas lamp stands, Mrs. Sweet grimaces, unhappy with the role of observer she has all of a sudden found herself in, unhappy with the things she is about to witness shortly in this room. Meanwhile, Mr. Bitter smiles bitterly, the only way he knows how to smile. He is content. Finally, Auntie Banu is convinced. It wasn't Mr. Bitter's djinnish command that convinced her but her own mortal curiosity. She couldn't resist the urge to learn. That antediluvian urge for more knowledge…. Who could resist it, after all?
Now, Auntie Banu and Mr. Bitter will together travel back in time. From 2005 to 1915. It looks like a long trip, but it is only a matter of steps in terms of gulyabani years.
In front of the mirror, between the djinn and the master stands a silver bowl of consecrated water from Mecca. Inside the silver bowl there is silvered water and inside the water there is a story, similarly silvered.
