seeds in salted water to wash away its sad saga.
Under the watchful gaze of the djinn, Auntie Banu caressed the brooch, feeling the glamor of the rubies glowing inside. Until she met Armanoush it had never occurred to her to investigate the story of the pomegranate brooch. Now that she knew the story, however, she couldn't figure out what to do next. Tempted as she was to give the brooch to Armanoush, for she believed it belonged to her more than to anyone else, she hesitated because she wasn't quite sure how to explain why she was giving it to her.
Could she tell Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian that this brooch had once belonged to her grandma Shushan without telling her the rest of the story? How much of her knowledge could she share with those whose stories she learned through magic?
Forty minutes later on the other side of the city, Asya entered through the squeaky, wooden door of Cafe Kundera.
'Yo, Asya!' the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist called out cheerfully. 'Over here! I'm here!'
He hugged her and then, as she drew back from his arms, he exclaimed, 'I've got news for you, one piece is good, one is bad, and one is yet to be classified. Which one would you like to hear first?'
'Give me the bad one,' Asya said.
'I am going to prison. My drawings of the prime minister as a penguin weren't well received, I guess. I am sentenced to eight months in prison.'
Asya stared at him with astonishment that soon widened into alarm.
'Shush, dear,' the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist mumbled in a meek voice, putting his finger on her lips. 'Don't you want to hear the good news?' Then he beamed with pride. 'I decided I need to be true to my heart and get a divorce.'
As the shadow of bewilderment that marred her face faded out, it finally occurred to Asya to ask, 'And the yet-to-be classified news?'
'Today is my fourth day without a drink. Not even a drop! You know why?'
'I guess because you went to Alcoholics Anonymous again,' Asya replied.
'No!' the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist drawled, looking hurt. 'Because today was the fourth day since I last saw you and I wanted to be sober the next time we met. You are my one and only incentive in this life to become a better person.'
Now he blushed. 'Love!' he declared. 'I am in love with you, Asya.'
Asya's hazel eyes slid toward a frame on the wall, the photo of a rutted road from Camel Trophy 1997 in Mongolia. It would be nice to run into that picture now, she thought, to be traversing the Gobi Desert in a 4x4 Jeep, heavy, dirty boots on her feet, sunglasses on her face, sweating out her troubles as she went, until she'd become as light as a nobody, as light as a dry leaf in a gust, and thus waft into a Buddhist monastery in Mongolia.
'Don't you worry, little bird,' the pomegranate tree smiled and shook the snow on her branches. 'The story that I'm going to tell you is a happy one. '
Hovhannes Stamboulian pursed his lips, as his mind worked feverishly, and the whirl of writing swallowed him up. With each new line added to this last story of his children's book, generations of lessons swirled back to him, some disheartening, others raising his spirits, but all similarly reverberating from another time, a time without beginning or end. Children's stories were the oldest stories in the world, where the ghosts of generations long gone spoke through the words. The urge to finish this book was so instinctive and undeniably riveting as to be irrepressible. The world had been a gloomy place since he had started writing it and now he had to finish without ado, as if its becoming a less heartrending place depended on this.
'All right, then,' the Little Lost Pigeon chirped. 'Tell me the story of the Little Lost Pigeon. But I warn you, if I hear anything sad, I will take wing and fly away.'
After Hovhannes Stamboulian had been taken away by the soldiers, his family did not have the heart to enter his writing room for days. They had been in and out of every room but that one, and kept the door closed as if he were still inside working day and night. But the despondency permeating the house had become too intense and too palpable to pretend that life could return to normal. Soon Armanoush decided they would all be better off in Sivas, where they would stay with her parents for a while. It was only after this decision that they entered Hovhannes Stamboulian's room and found his manuscript, The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country, waiting to be completed. There among the pages they also found the pomegranate brooch.
Shushan Stamboulian saw the pomegranate brooch for the first time there on the walnut desk that belonged to her father. All of the other details of that ominous day faded away, but not that brooch. Perhaps it was the twinkle emanating from the rubies that had mesmerized her, or else seeing the world around her fall apart in a day made this the only thing she could remember. Whatever the reason, Shushan never forgot that pomegranate brooch. Not when she dropped half dead on the road to Aleppo and was left behind; not when the Turkish mother and daughter found her and took her into their house to heal her; not when she was taken by bandits to the orphanage; not when she ceased to be Shushan Stamboulian and became Shermin 626; not when years later Riza Selim Kazanci would fortuitously chance upon her in the orphanage and, finding out she was the niece of his late master, Levon, decide to take her as his wife; not when she would the next day become Shermin Kazanci; and not when she would learn she was pregnant and would become a mother, as if she wasn't still a child herself.
The Circassian midwife revealed the sex of the baby months before his birth, by observing the shape of her belly and the types of food she craved. Creme brulee from posh patisseries, apfelstrudel from the bakery opened by White Russians who escaped from Russia, homemade baklava, bonbons, and sweets of all sorts…. Not even once during her pregnancy had Sherrnin Kazanci craved anything sour or salty, the way she would have had she been expecting a girl.
Indeed it was a boy, a boy born into harrowing times.
'May Allah bless my son with longer life than any man in this family has ever had,' Riza Selim Kazanci said when the midwife handed him the baby. He then put his lips to the baby's right ear and announced to him the name he'd carry hereafter: 'You will be named Levon.'
Honoring the master from whom he had learned the art of cauldron making was not the only incentive behind this nominal choice. By naming their son Levon, he was also hoping it would be a favor to his wife for having converted to Islam.
Thus he chose the name Levon and like a good Muslim repeated it thrice: 'Levon! Levon! Levon!'
Shermin Kazanci, in the meantime, remained as silent as a displaced stone.
It wouldn't take long for the triple echo to boomerang back to them in the form of a negative question. 'Levon? What kind of a Muslim name is that? No Muslim boy can be named that!' the midwife balked aloud.
'Ours will,' Selim Kazanci rasped in return, a defense he would repeat each time. 'I made up my mind. Levon it shall be!'
But when the time came to take the baby to the Population Registrar, he softened.
'What is the boy's name?' the lanky, edgy-looking clerk asked without lifting his head from over a mammoth, clothbound notebook with a maroon spine.
'Levon Kazancl'
The officer lifted his reading glasses to the bridge of his nose and took a long look at Riza Selim Kazanci for the first time. 'Kazanci is indeed a fine surname, but what kind of a Muslim name is Levon?'
'It is not a Muslim name; it was a good man's name nevertheless,' Riza Selim Kazanci replied tensely.
'Sir,' the officer raised his voice a notch, sounding selfimportant and knowing it. 'I know what an influential family the Kazancis are. A name like Levon will not serve you well. If we write down this name, this boy of yours might have problems in the future. Everyone will assume that he is Christian, although he is a hundred percent Muslim…. Or am I mistaken? Is he not Muslim?'
'He sure is,' Riza Selim immediately corrected. 'Elhamdulillah. ' For a fleeting moment it occurred to him to confide in the clerk that the boy's mother was an Armenian orphan converted to Islam and this would be a gesture to her, but something inside told him to keep this information to himself.
'Well, then, with all due respect to the good man you want to name this child after, let's make a slight change. Make it something akin to Levon, if you so wish, but choose a Muslim name this time. How about Levent?' The clerk then added kindly, too kindly for the harshness of the statement he was about to make: 'Otherwise, I am afraid I will have to refuse to register him.'
And so it was Levent Kazanci; the boy born upon the ashes of a past still smoldering; the boy no one knew his father had once wanted to name Levon; the boy who would one day be abandoned by his mother and grow up
