Bozuk Read online

  “No but I will, but I won’t be stealing anything. How are you going to explain all this weird stuff you’re collecting when you go through customs?”

  “We’ll quote Pamuk,.” Hannah the Reader looks up from my dog-eared copy of The Museum of Innocence, “…to better understand the lives of others and our own.”

  We are quiet, even Naomi and Hannah, even though they don’t yet know all that we know. We all carry memories as heavy as stones on our wings, the past weighing on all of us, as it does on this ancient city.

  CANADA

  I must have a scarlet letter on my forehead – “ C” for Canada, or a red maple leaf. Wherever I go in Istanbul, people follow me in the street, asking if I am Canadian. How else would they know? I see clothes very much like the ones I wear in the markets here. I run into blond tourists speaking Dutch and German. I don’t see many black people. How strange with Africa so close.

  “One hundred and eighty-nine.”

  “What?” I haven’t told Güzel about the game.

  “I have counted one hundred and eighty-nine persons of colour.”

  “We are all persons of colour, Madeleine,” he replies, quite rightly.

  “No, I mean Black People.”

  “Why would you do such a thing? It sounds like the American red and orange alerts, what we call ‘the rainbow of fear.’”

  “Who is we?”

  “Us.”

  “Comment?” I can’t think of an English word that fits better.

  “My people.”

  “Ah, well, the son one of my clients, who is a Black Person, noticed that he was singular in Istanbul. Everyone thought he was Barack Obama.”

  “Sweet,” my enigmatic companion offers.

  “I’m counting and will report back to him. The funny thing is I met Christina, a Canadian non-profit worker, while listening to music at the Polka Café in Moda this afternoon. She’s counting too.”

  “What will your friend think of you and your white sister standing on street corners counting Black People?”

  “I am not standing on street corners. I am moving about, minding my business.”

  “You think Turks are racist?”

  “No, I am just trying to figure out why a country so close to Africa has no Africans, apart from tourists.”

  “Why would they come where there are no jobs? Besides, it was the son of an American slave who brought jazz to Istanbul. They called him the Sultan of Jazz.”

  “One person isn’t exactly a diaspora.”

  “Don’t forget the eunuchs.”

  “Ah, so the word is out. Every man who fails the comb and brown paper bag tests at the Istanbul airport gets his balls chopped off?” And, just in case he doesn’t understand the American roots reference, I explain. “Blacks couldn’t get into certain clubs and juke joints if their hair didn’t pass through ordinary combs and their skin was darker than brown paper bags.”

  “We are not responsible for the paranoid imaginings of tourists.”

  There is no getting around Güzel. He has already thought of everything.

  Tonight I have invited him to a violin and piano concert at the Moda Opera House, a modified-baroque post-Ataturk building blending the Turkish fascination with European decoration and the clean lines of the secular regime. The hall, its boxes hung with red velvet draperies and gold details, brings to mind the sequined evening gowns hanging in cheap dress shops in the markets. I wonder if these garments are worn by Turkish ladies or the Russian prostitutes that obsess Berk, the Sweet Papa Lowdown slide guitarist, who says whole towns along the Black Sea in this sexually repressed country have been bankrupted by the introduction of expensive Ukrainian hookers. People trafficking through Istanbul is no secret. I can’t imagine what will happen when the dam busts and the Middle East pours into Turkey.

  Tonight the program is European, a sonata by Grieg and a Beethoven concerto. We were almost late. A shoeshine man on the street dropped his brush while apparently running for a dolmuş. When I picked it up and ran after him, he offered to shine my shoes. Realizing that he wanted to thank me, I didn’t want to insult him by refusing or offering a tip and yet, when I thanked him and started to walk away, he came after me asking for ten lira.

  “What should I do?” I asked Güzel.

  “It’s a scam,” he answered. “Do what you like.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  What a strange country. Every experience is a parable. What odd people, so civil and yet so obtuse. I gave the shoeshine man five lira.

  Berk, the slide guitarist, waves to me in the lobby. I notice he is wearing earplugs. When I mime the question, why, he shrugs. I notice he still has them on when he sits down three rows in front of us. How odd, I think, a musician wearing earplugs at a concert.

  My jaw drops when the musicians appear on stage with their page turner. The pianist, a beauty, whose voluptuous face could fit the cherubs painted on the ceiling as easily as portraits of odalisques, is the very image of Iman. I rub my eyes, grope in my purse for my glasses. Surely not. Or, I rationalize, perhaps she is one of the Mediterranean stereotypes, a face as ubiquitous as olives.

  “What’s wrong?” The voice in the dark is concerned.

  This time I whisper, “I keep seeing her.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I hear that Iman is safe in Qatar.”

  “Safe,” I repeat to myself as I sit back in my seat and enjoy the exquisite dialogue between the violin and piano in Beethoven’s second movement. The pianist has beautiful dynamics and a tone as rich as her velvet dress.

  “How do you know,” I ask later, over a cup of foamy ayran at the Polka Café.

  “It’s still a secret. You haven’t been hearing anything because she’s still in danger.”

  “Evil has no political boundaries. Does this mean you won’t be writing about her?”

  “It wouldn’t be wise.”

  “What about the petition to President Erdog˘an?”

  “That has been delivered, but you won’t hear any more about it. Not for the time being.”

  Voltaire said redemption was possible if we just cultivated our gardens. I am not so sure. In Turkey, I understand that gardening is practical, its bounty found in the markets filled with spices, tomatoes, cucumbers, figs, olives, and artichokes. In Victoria where I live, the cultivation of plants is competitive. Who can grow the biggest dahlias, the most exotic roses? Who can name every variety of lilies? English settlers brought their snobbery with their oak trees. Even the gardens, passed down now, have a hierarchy, a detail that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Songhees People. “What is the point of growing grass,” asked an aboriginal friend, who was admiring the spirit tree in my rubble heap when I apologized for the state of my yard, “if you can’t eat it?”

  What is so Canadian about me? Do I have green thumbs? Do I have a built-in personal ozonator? Do I smell like snow? Will having a colder climate spare us when climate change dries up equatorial gardens?

  In Auschwitz, where I understand the Germans had exquisite gardens maintained by the prisoners, Canada was the shed where inmates checked their belongings. I’ve seen photos of that Canada, the piles of shoes and family silver, and the workers who were allowed to grow their hair after being shaved and de-loused.

  As I walk past the hotels and street cafés in Beyoğlu and Sultanahmet, I wonder where the Hungarian Jew, Joseph Brandt, braced himself with a cup of Turkish coffee for the negotiation that could have saved the lives of a million Hungarian Jews? Did that coffee churn in his stomach and back up, burning his anxious throat as he groped for the words he would need to barter so many human souls for trucks for the Third Reich? Did he look over to the Asian side, hoping relief for his people would come from the Holy Land? When his desperate diplomacy failed, did he consider throwing himself into the Bosphorus, where long ago the Byzantines chucked their household valuables to avoid giving them up to the Ottomans?

&nbs
p; “Canada” was the death camp equivalent to the treasure-filled channel that is the Golden Horn, a place where personal belongings were forfeited with no chance of getting them back. I always thought the inmates of Auschwitz called that shop of horrors after my country because the building wasn’t heated. Mr. Gudewill told me of a Canada capo, one of the Jewish trusties with lighter jobs, who risked her life to secure a heater for a handful of new mothers and babies who had somehow survived pregnancy in the death camp. One of those mothers is still alive. She emigrated to Canada and ran a Judaica shop he had visited in Toronto.

  “Good one,” I said, and he looked startled.

  The equation of my country with Arctic conditions is not exclusive to Americans. There were many delusional misconceptions among the starving population at the concentration camps. Newcomers wanted to believe the ashes falling from the crematorium chimneys were snow.

  Recently, I read that the conventional wisdom was that Canada was abundant, a new Eden, the Promised Land. The inmate workers in Canada had certain privileges. They might find a piece of bread or chocolate in the pocket of an abandoned coat while they were sorting clothes. Paradise. Never mind that we are squandering that blessing, our water and our wilderness, in the spirit of competition, the bad seeds that were planted by the first settlers. Still, it is paradise, which I was told means an enclosed garden in Farsi, compared to what? Isn’t everything about perception? No wonder our Aboriginal people admire the shape-changing Raven. Does Raven have limitless points of view? I know he brings the light. Is that the real matrix of tolerance? Am I going to learn how to be like a raven in this polyglot society? Did I come here for flying lessons as my stranger has intuited?

  CHOCOLATE SUNDAY

  One hot evening in my eleventh summer, I caught Coon stealing transparent apples from our tree. While lying on the lawn cart on the deck counting stars way past midnight, I heard a loud crack. Years later, I heard the same sound when an orthopedic surgeon snapped the adhesions I’d developed in my shoulder from diminishing lubricants and all the body work I’ve done. That time, the noise was a branch breaking.

  Because his eyes shone in the leaves, I thought at first that the intruder was a raccoon. I wasn’t scared of him. Faster than cotton candy dissolves in your mouth, I was off the deck and halfway up the apple tree.

  I have a thing for raccoons. Once, I brought a whole family of orphans in the house and fed them with an eyedropper. When they no longer drank from a baby bottle with a rubber nipple, I set them free in the bushes – all but Bandit who had learned to pee in the toilet. He was my friend until he too, of course, ran away.

  Coon was no four-legged highwayman, just a dirty boy looking for food. I called my wild boy “Coon” because as far as I knew he didn’t have a name. Besides, he was just like a raccoon: cute, sometimes vicious, and a wicked scavenger. The only difference was that raccoons travel with their tribe. My Coon was all by himself, with no one to help him or hold him down.

  I didn’t know any of that the first time I spotted him up in the branches filling his face and his pockets with the green cooking apples Stella made into apple pie, apple cobbler, apple sauce and apple butter back in the good old days when my dad was alive and she was a real mother.

  At first I thought Coon was just some neighborhood brat spying on us or taking a dare. Most of the kids had heard Stella was crazy and there were rumours she had a shotgun and would blow the arse end off anyone making a getaway through the loose boards in our fence. That was bull tweedy. There were guns in our house but my mother wouldn’t have known the goodbye end from the trigger. They were my father’s war souvenirs.

  I heard some of the neighbourhood boys had tomboy tests, and if the girls wanted to get into the boys’ forts they had to pass dares, like swinging over the ravine on a rope and stealing stuff from our yard. Half of our yard burglars wet themselves because they were afraid my mother was going to haul herself off her Easyboy and blow their heads off when she heard them rummaging through the piles of household junk, my father’s memorabilia from the Italian and Korean campaigns, and tools rusting in the back forty.

  Coon didn’t budge out of that tree. He just sat there. I climbed up.

  “That’s stealing, you know.” I pushed my face close. “This is my tree.”

  Coon admitted nothing, but up close his breath smelled of apples. As soon as you look at transparent cooking apples, they start to bruise. Coon shrugged and went back to stuffing them in his pie hole as fast as they would fit. I gave up, picked one for myself and ate it too. So that was it; just the two of us sitting on separate branches in the moonlight eating and watching the car lights flicker and fade as, just like horses that know their way back to the barn, they drove themselves and the drunks behind the wheels home to bed. It was very quiet. All we could hear was chewing and swallowing and cat fights down the lane. Inside the house, Stella’s late-night movie cast its grey pall over the living room, leaking through cracks in the curtains while she drank gin out of one of her goddamned china teacups.

  “Cat got your tongue?” I asked. Then, when that didn’t get a response, “You’re lucky our dog is asleep.” Frend was getting pretty old by then. He slept twenty-three hours a day and only woke up for his chip steak sandwiches and trips to his toilet, the yard next door, where I had to go with a poop shovel and pick his love droppings off the lawn every day after school so Mr. and Mrs. Fussypants wouldn’t call the pound to come after him. Coon just ignored me. He picked himself a few more apples, packed them in his pockets, then slid down the tree and over the back fence. He was gone.

  That was it, no more wild boy. I spent the rest of that summer looking for him. First off, I drew a sketch with WANTED FOR STEALING APPLES written over the top and put it in the Jung’s grocery store. Nobody knew about Coon. The only inquiries I got were phone calls from kids wanting to know about the reward. Everyone in town seemed to know about the boxes of gratis complaint candy I got for writing letters about weight scams and low nut counts that I had stashed in the attic.

  That gave me an idea. Back when we were still a family, my father read fairy tales while I sat on the floor next to the big velour chair in the living room and my mother washed the dinner dishes. In those days nobody but him got to sit in the Easyboy, ever. Then it became Stella’s. After his final curtain, his widow nuzzled up to his chair like it was Daddy himself. Sometimes I caught her sniffing the headrest for traces of his hair oil or riding the arm like a deranged cowgirl.

  I liked his hair oil and tobacco smells too. His fingers smelled of cigarettes and popcorn. I picked up the scent when he turned the pages in my storybooks. Then I closed my eyes and pretended we were in the dark, watching a movie. I didn’t get to go to the movies very much. Most of them had kissing and killing in them and he said kissing and killing weren’t for kids, even though he made a partial exception for fathers and daughters after story time. My daddy read stories like he was reading a script, every voice different. I liked Hansel and Gretel and the cunning trail of crumbs they left in the woods so they could find their way back to the woodcutter’s house. Woods were my happiness. Coon lived in the bushes. The forest was so big he would be impossible to find. He had to find me again, apples or no apples.

  My dad told me that the grandmother I never got to meet, because she’d already gone to the big sugar bowl in the sky, weighed over three hundred pounds. She lost one of her hands and both feet to diabetes and the doctor told her, “No more sweets!” That included her famous pies and cakes. Since she’d owned a bakery, going without was a real hardship. How could a person be around so much sweet stuff and not put it in her mouth? I couldn’t. Most people couldn’t. I know that. My gran kept right on eating in secret, but everyone knew. One day my dad staged an intervention and took her to a rest home. She hated that. The rest home inmates got bland food with no salt and no sugar and she was, understandably, driven mad by her cravings.

  It turned out there was a male nurse at the rest home who was sweet on Gran
. Either that or he felt sorry for her. That’s what I thought until Stella told me in one of her drunken confidences that my gran was buying jellyroll. In extended care, deprived of chocolate, Gran was overtaken by febrile lust. (I could picture this behaviour. After Daddy died, the widow rubbed herself up against everything that stood in her way. I caught her with her hand in her panties lots of times, especially as she got older and less careful with herself.) It could be that my grandmother had mistaken kindness for perverse desire. Who in their right mind would want to make love with an old lady with both feet and one hand cut off? I had no idea. How was I to know when and why old people had sexual longings?

  Gran hid her candy stash from the nurses and from my father, who said he had a nose like a bloodhound just in case I took it into my head to hide anything from him.

  That was about the time my dad got Frend. One Sunday he took Stella and his puppy to visit my grandmother. It was a nice day. They ate their tasteless rest home lunch in the pee and Dettol-smelling dining room (now I know they all smell like pee and Dettol), and then took a walk in the garden. Just like the Queen, Gran took her purse everywhere with her, and she always wore gloves. They pushed her wheelchair past the roses and day lilies until Gran suggested a little nap under a big oak tree. Daddy and my soon-to-be female parent found her a place in the shade, put her handkerchief over her face, and told Frend to stay with her while they went off in the bushes for a little private time.

  It wasn’t long before my grandmother started hollering and Daddy and Stella ran back with their clothes all covered with prickles and leaves to find Gran cursing at the dog, who was running with her gloved fingers, still attached to her purse, in his mouth. My father ran after him and got the hand back, but it was all chewed up.

  Later on, Frend threw up the chocolate. My father said dogs were allergic. Frend could sniff candy bars from a mile off. He ran at me from blocks away, and went straight for my pocket. My mother told me I got made in the bushes on Chocolate Sunday. They called me the chocolate miracle, because, since they got together relatively late in life, they didn’t expect to be blessed with a child.