Orhan's Inheritance (14 page)

“Even so, you need to get that signature and hurry back.”

“I have a feeling that getting the signature won’t be a problem,” he says. “But getting her to reveal her connection to Dede is another matter.”

“Who cares what her connection is?”

“I care. Don’t you want to know who she is?”

“She’s probably some tart from his past,” says Fatma.

“Doubtful,” says Orhan.

“Some things are better left alone.”

“I want to know why he did it.”

“This is no time for fairy tales and interviews. You’ve got bigger problems waiting for you here.”

“What are you talking about?” Orhan feels a lump forming in his throat.

“Your father is talking nonsense again. Says he’s going to contest the will. He even mentioned the name of that lawyer, Hakan Celik.”

“That piranha? Tell him no. I need more time. I just got here.”

“This is not just about the house. You know that.”

Mustafa would forcibly take the approval Dede would never give him. “I’ve poured my entire life into this company,” he says. “All my time and attention, for years.”

“By law, he is the first heir,” continues Fatma. “The one who should inherit the business.”

“He hasn’t worked a day in his life,” shouts Orhan.

“Nor will he. I imagine that will be your job.”

“Did you show him Dede’s letter? Did he read it?”

“Not yet, but I don’t think it would change much. He’s hurt. Has a right to be. Your
dede
wasn’t very kind to him growing up.”

“Oh, please,” says Orhan. “At least Dede didn’t beat him like he beat me.”

He drags at his cigarette and tries to think strategically. His body aches of hunger and sleep deprivation. There will be no stopping his father once he has Celik working for him. If he wrestles the company away from Orhan, he’ll sell everything Dede built and pocket it. No one knew this better than Dede. It’s why he circumvented Mustafa and left everything, or almost everything, to Orhan. He has to show everyone that he has the situation under control. He has to get the old woman to give the house back immediately.

“Shit,” he says. “You have to talk to him. Tell him I can fix everything. Everything will go back to the way it was before.”

“You tell him,” Auntie Fatma says.

“He hates me. You know that.”

“He’s angry and bitter, but he’s not a bad man. And he’s still your father.”

“My father who wants to sue me,” says Orhan. “Why are you always protecting him? Why can’t you protect me for once?”

The question is a loaded one. Orhan was seven when the beatings began.

Auntie Fatma is silent for once.

“I just need more time,” he continues. “Promise me you’ll talk to him.”

“I’ll talk to him,” she says finally, “but you know what happened when they started selling minds in the market?”

“What are you talking about?” asks Orhan.

“There were no sales. Everyone liked his own mind.”

CHAPTER 15

Ani

THE ARARAT HOME
is pressed under the thick gray fog of sleep, the day still tucked beneath tired lids, when Ani slips inside Seda’s room, trailing the faint scent of gardenias along with her. Even with her eyes shut, Seda can sense her niece standing above her bed. Seda feels the blanket lifting but does not stir. Then Ani does something she hasn’t done in a very long time: she climbs into Seda’s bed, the way she used to when she was little, and wraps her arm around Seda’s body, cradling it with her own.

“Meza,” she whispers. Short for
mezmama,
or grandmother, it is what Seda called her own grandmother a hundred years ago in Karod.

Seda keeps her eyes shut and inhales the familiar spirit trapped in Ani’s breath. When her niece was little, Seda used to place her face beneath Ani’s sleeping head and inhale the oxygen leaving her nostrils. The little gust of expelled breath filled her with joy. It is the only thing she’s ever taken from her niece. Ani has lost so much already. Bedros’s children were conceived and born in loss. Ani (short for Anush) and Aram, both named for his dead siblings. What right did Seda have to take anything from them? Even their names were not their own.

Once, when she was in her twenties, Ani fell in love with a Ukrainian boy named Roger. “His parents survived the Holocaust. He understands us,” she told Bedros.

“He understands nothing,” Bedros had shouted. “He shares his horror with the world, and the world gasps and apologizes. And what about us?” Bedros was right. The Armenians bore their loss alone. They tucked it away, like something precious, in every syllable of language taught in Saturday schools, and in the smell of dishes, and in the lament of songs. In the breath of children.

“Marry him and you finish what the Turks started,” Bedros told her.

It is hard to believe that was over twenty-five years ago. They never heard much about her love life after that. If she had one, she kept it to herself. Fifty and still single, she teaches Armenian-language classes, when she’s not devoting herself to her people’s painful past. Seda should have said something back then, in the days of Roger.

Seda finally opens her eyes, places a hand on Ani’s arm and squeezes.

“Hi,” Ani whispers, smiling.

Seda takes in her niece’s frizzy black bob, kohl-rimmed eyes and dark clothing. “Why do you always dress like you’re in mourning?” says Seda.

“Tell me a story?” Ani says, ignoring her.

Seda clicks her tongue. “No more stories,” she says.

“Oh come on. Why not?”

“Not in the mood,” says Seda.

Ani starts stroking Seda’s hair. “Remember when I was little, I used to sneak into your bed at night and warm my cold feet between your thighs?” she asks. “You used to tell me the craziest stories. Like the one about Aghavni Hanim who played with her breasts so much as a girl that they had grown a meter long each.”

Seda smiles. “They grew so long that she had to toss each breast over a shoulder so they wouldn’t knock into her knees,” she says.

Ani giggles at the memory. “What was the point of that story?” she asks. “It’s ridiculous.”

“It was supposed to prevent masturbation,” she says, struggling to sit up in bed.

“Oh my God,” says Ani, laughing. “Are you serious?”

Seda shrugs.

“Why not tell a vagina story then?” she asks.

Seda gives Ani a stern look. “We don’t talk about things like that. It’s shameful.”

“What else don’t we talk about?” Ani asks, the humor in her voice gone.

Seda looks away, not knowing what to say. She has left so much unsaid.

“What’s going on?” asks Ani. “Betty tells me you had a visitor yesterday.”

Seda searches for an entry point to the story of her life, a life compartmentalized and safely tucked away, a life that should not have been uncovered in this way.
Damn Kemal
.

“Betty says a lot of things,” she says.

“Is he from the
Armenian Herald
? They’re doing a story about the survivors again. If you’re going to talk to anyone, it better be me.”

“Who’s talking?”

“Not you,” says Ani.

“That’s right. Not me,” says Seda, pulling the blanket back.

“But you’re coming to the exhibit, right?”

“It’s down the hall. I couldn’t avoid it if I tried,” says Seda. This exhibit is just another venue for what Ani and her generation like to call
baykar,
the struggle. Her niece had a bullhorn pressed to her lips as early as age three. Seda still has the VHS tape somewhere of Ani’s first fifteen seconds of fame, courtesy of a KTLA news reporter who was covering that year’s protest in front of the Turkish consulate.

“Why would you want to avoid it?” Ani asks.

“
Aman,
I’m tired of the past. I was there, remember? Once was enough.”

“No, I don’t remember. Because that’s the one story you won’t tell me.”

“Your father told that story enough for the both of us,” she says.

“But I want to hear your version,” says Ani. “Maybe if you told me about what happened to you and Dad, I would stop harping about the past.”

“You wouldn’t stop. Besides, I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember,” says Ani, her face full of skepticism.

“Old age,” says Seda. “Now get out of my bed so I can start my day.”

“Got a busy schedule, have you?” Ani teases.

“Very funny.”

“I’ll be down the hall, if you change your mind,” she says from the doorway.

“If I had a mind left, I’d think about changing it,” says Seda.

Alone again in her room, Seda manages to put her slippers on and lower herself onto the wheelchair. She moves her chair to the window. There was a time, not long ago, when she could have walked up to the glass. You can tell a lot about a person from his walk.

The Orhan fellow has a good walk. He is tall and lean like Kemal, but he walks differently in the world. His footsteps are more sure and his shoulders more hunched. Perhaps he gets that from his father. She wouldn’t know. She left when the boy was only a small child, a halfling perpetually clinging to the hem of her skirt.

On that last morning with Mustafa, Seda woke him with her usual tenderness. His name was chosen because it meant one who has ancestral blood, an accurate description and one that would counter another word they feared would one day describe him:
bastard.
The boy reached for Seda, his plump fingers deftly searching for morning milk. She pulled away from him and produced a small tin cup filled with goat’s milk.

“Anne,” the child begged. “Mamma.”

“No, my lion, Anne’s milk is all gone,” she told him, holding the tin cup to his lips. “This is Zazu’s milk.” Zazu was the boy’s favorite goat. Seda had milked her early that morning and added a drop of honey to the cup. “It’s warm and sweet,” she reassured him.

She watched as the boy eyed the cup with suspicion before placing his lips on the vessel’s edge and extended his sparrow’s tongue toward the warm milk. She took a deep breath then, knowing the boy would eat and grow, even after she had gone. He and Fatma didn’t need her anymore.

THE SOUND OF
SHOES
squeaking announces Betty’s presence at her door. “Still crabby?” she asks.

“Always,” says Seda. “I thought I told you to stay out of it.”

“I did,” says Betty.

“Then why is Ani asking about my visitor?”

“There’s a log out front. You know that. She asked me if I’d seen him, is all. You all right?” Betty asks.

“When are you going to stop asking me that?” asks Seda.

“When you’re dead,” Betty says, smiling.

“More incentive to stop breathing,” says Seda.

“Hush now. You got handsome young men whispering sweet nothings in your ear. If that’s not a reason to live, I don’t know what is. What does he want from you anyway?”

“Answers, I guess,” says Seda.

“You got plenty of those,” Betty says, laughing. “You gonna give him some answers Miss Seda?”

“Not if I can help it,” Seda says.

“Well, either way, do me a favor. Think long and hard before signing any papers.”

CHAPTER 16

Memory’s Garden

ON THE DRIVE
to the Ararat Home, the sun seems artificial, big and bright but without the kind of heat one would expect. Like everything else here, it surprises Orhan with its banality. This isn’t what he expected from Hollywood, or
the land of the heathen,
as his father calls it. Only the palm trees zipping past his window smack of blasphemy. They don’t bow their heads humbly to the sky the way most trees do. They protrude straight up, as if the landscape itself were giving Allah the finger.

Orhan puts the cigarette to his lips and fills his lungs up completely. Seda’s reluctance to speak haunted Orhan throughout the night. It’s clear she wants to be rid of him as quickly as possible. Getting her to reveal her connection to Dede will be tricky.

Sitting on the leather seat next to him is his satchel with the Leica, his old portfolio, and Dede’s sketchbook inside it. The images of Turkey may loosen the old woman’s tongue, and the camera would help him blend in with all the other visiting loved ones.

The Ararat Home entrance hall is just as it was the day before, except the receptionist doesn’t look up to greet him. She pushes a clipboard for him to sign before letting him pass. Orhan walks down the hall, taking in the craft projects that litter the walls. Construction paper, glitter, and glue all competing to create the illusion of still-active lives. Resident stragglers roam around aimlessly. Mrs. Vartanian appears in the hallway. She’s wearing the same dull brown house dress as yesterday, but the doll is swaddled in a pretty pink blanket. Though she can’t cover much distance with her slippered feet, she shows off her impressive spitting range by launching some at Orhan’s shoes. She says some words in Armenian before turning her back to him. He stands there feeling like a little boy who knows he’s in trouble but isn’t sure why. An old man balancing on a silver-tipped cane stands witness to his humiliation. He glares at Orhan as if pondering some accusation.

The orderly from the day before walks by, pushing a tray of breakfast foods down the hall. Orhan speeds up so he can walk with her.

“Hallo,” he says.

“You’re back,” she says, not stopping for him.

“Yes,” says Orhan, hurrying to fall in step with her. “Is Mrs. Melkonian always so quiet?” he asks.

“Quiet? Ms. Seda? No sir, but she’s definitely been more cranky since she got that letter.” She cocks one eyebrow at him.

Orhan’s letter was as polite as could be, under the circumstances. “You have any advice for me?” he asks, ignoring her accusatory glance.

“Not really. She’ll talk to you when she’s ready, I guess. She does like being in the garden, though. She plants flowers when she feels like it. But stay away from the fountain. She hates that thing. Can’t stand running water.”

“No running water,” he says. “I will remember that.”

“You going over there now?”

“Yes, that is why I am here.”

“Well, you may wanna wait. She’s in there with Ms. Ani right now.” The orderly stops her tray and looks triumphantly at him.