Orhan's Inheritance (28 page)

“She is a good woman,” he says simply. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand how this all relates to my grandfather.”

She withdraws her hand from his. “There is still so much to tell,” she says. “And I am doing a bad job of telling it.”

“No, you are doing great,” says Orhan, hoping she does not retreat back into her silence.

She nods at this, saying, “I suppose I could begin the way all ancient Armenian tales begin:
Gar oo chegar . . .
There was and there was not. You see, like all of life, a story is and is not.”

And this is how she begins her tale, with her and Dede playing as children underneath the mulberry tree, its dark berries raining down upon their unsuspecting heads.

AT FIRST, SEDA’S
words spew out of her mouth in fits and spurts, reminding Orhan of a clogged faucet that suddenly starts working. But before long, the sentences come pouring out in a steady never-ending flow until she is interrupted by an uncontrollable fit of coughing.

“I’ll get you some more water,” he says, grabbing the empty pitcher. Seda concedes by nodding her head midcough.

Pitcher in hand, Orhan finds his way to the nearest water fountain. When he’s filled the container, he does not walk directly toward Seda’s room, but meanders in the hallways, trying to process everything she’s told him. Lost in thought, he almost passes an open doorway from which Mrs. Vartanian’s head is poking out.

She startles him and Orhan blushes just a little, thinking how the bent old woman sometimes scares him.

“Psst . . . psst . . .” she hisses, her hand beckoning him.

He takes a few measured steps toward her.

“Please, effendi, Mr. Gendarme, sir,” she addresses him in Turkish, her voice reverential, devoid of its usual spite. Her breath is sour and smells of medicine.

“I am no gendarme,” he tells her. “My name is Orhan.”

Her eyes are pinned to his face but have a far away look about them.

Mrs.Vartanian nods. “I am marching to Aleppo,” she says, turning her slippered feet toward the corridor that leads to the garden.

“What are
you
still doing here?” Betty’s voice comes from behind him.

Orhan turns to find her walking toward him.

“I don’t know who you think you are, letting little old ladies fall. What you talking to Mrs. Vartanian about anyway?”

“She thinks she’s on some sort of death march.”

“I know what she thinks, Mr. Orren. Haven’t you wreaked enough havoc?” She takes one more look at him and smiles. “I’m assuming you’re on your way out. It’s way too late for you to be up in here.”

“Yes,” Orhan lies. “But I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Well, all right,” she says, her eyes studying his face. “You get anything out of Ms. Seda?” she asks.

Orhan nods.

“Really? Well, I’ll be damned! What she say?”

“Many things.”

“Anything that niece of hers would wanna hear?”

“Yes, I think so,” says Orhan.

Betty nods with approval. “I have to clock out,” she says. “You see yourself out now, you hear?” She turns down the empty hallway.

When Orhan returns to Seda’s room, she is sitting up in her bed.

“Feeling better?” he asks, placing the pitcher on the bedside table.

“
Evet,
yes,” she says, but her eyes have retreated further into their sockets.

“That is good,” says Orhan. He pauses, preparing himself to ask her about Dede’s will.

“There is still much to tell,” she says, grasping the bed rail to prop herself up.

“Where I come from, everything is more or less covered up or left unsaid,” Orhan says, thinking of Auntie Fatma’s doilies. “Have you told any of this to your niece?”

“What do you know about my niece?”

“Nothing. Only that she is very interested in the past.”

“She is already drowning in the past. They all are,” says Seda. “She has too much past in her veins and you have none. I’m just evening things out.”

“So you’re not going to tell her any of this?”

“What I do and don’t tell her is my business.”

“No one would judge you for what happened.”

“You don’t understand,” says Seda. “It isn’t just what happened with Aram. It’s Kemal I don’t want to explain.”

“He turned all our lives upside down for you and you don’t want to have to
explain
him? You are right, I do not understand. The situation back home is not good. My father has hired a lawyer to contest Dede’s will. A very good lawyer.”

“I don’t know anything about a lawyer,” she interrupts him. “He was a clever man, your grandfather. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted you here for a reason.”

Orhan wishes he knew what that reason was.

“Kemal gave me a drawing once. We were separated during the deportations, but providence reunited us after the war. It happened at Fatma’s in Malatya,” Seda says, pressing her head into a pillow. “It was God’s hand working a miracle. I was so shocked to see him I thought he was a ghost.” She lets out another short laugh. “We had a few precious weeks, and then he had to go.”

“Kemal’s plan was to establish himself in Istanbul, then send for me,” Seda continues. “He had been gone six months. Half a year. Seventeen moons dipping into my little window. Fatma was big by then, no longer able to hide her condition.”

“Her condition?” asks Orhan.

“She was pregnant.”

Orhan lets the information wash over him. He struggles to imagine Auntie Fatma as a young pregnant woman. As far as he knows, she was never married. Inside her stout body rests all the comfort and nurturing that three generations of Türkoğlu men could ever want. She is unlike any other woman Orhan has ever known. A woman who stands apart from all the rest not just because of her sharp mind and even sharper tongue but precisely because she is immune to the limitations of motherhood and matrimony.

“Was this at the inn?” he asks.

Seda nods, coughing into her fist. “She lived in fear of her bey returning to find her as big as a house. What would happen to us then?”

“Her bey?” he asks.

“Yes, Nabi Bey, the lieutenant governor of Malatya was an important man in her life back then. In his absence, things had gotten so much worse around the khan. The soldiers and lodgers were not as careful with her, the food supply not as consistent. Even the stable boy had taken to disappearing into the mountains for days at a time.

“I received no letters from Kemal,” Seda continues. “Not a single word arrived from Istanbul. I began to think he had forgotten me. And Fatma agreed.

“‘Why so glum?’ she would ask me. ‘You didn’t really think that boy was going to whisk you away, did you? Men are like dogs. They will lick a bone until someone hides it. They may dig a little here and there, but if they find another bone somewhere, they forget about the first.’”

“That sounds like something she would say,” says Orhan.

“I was beside myself with sadness,” Seda says, smoothing the crumpled skin of her brow with a hand. “A new kind of sadness that only occurs after you’ve managed to find some hope. A fresh wound after a prolonged recovery.

“That is when she convinced me.”

“Convinced you to do what?” Orhan asks.

“To write and tell him I was pregnant.”

“To tell my grandfather
you
were pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“And were you pregnant?”

“No. It was risky and deceptive, but what choice did I have? I knew nothing about men and she knew so much. Her plan was that I would claim her child as my own and raise it with Kemal.”

Orhan’s chest constricts and his ribs tighten around a pocket of breath that travels up and gets trapped in his throat.

“‘You owe me this much,’ she said. And she was right. She had saved my life at great risk. At first, I could not fathom lying to Kemal, let alone raising a child of some . . .”

“Who? Raising the child of who?”

“Only Fatma can answer that.”

Orhan feels his pockets for his cigarettes before remembering he can’t smoke in the nursing home. There are no words he can manage, no words to speed this experience along so he can find out what happened to Auntie Fatma’s child.

“As you probably know, Fatma can be very convincing,” Seda continues. “She reminded me that I had taken an innocent child’s life and could now save the life of another.”

“You told him you were pregnant with his child,” Orhan says in disbelief.

“Yes,” she says. “I was so desperate to be out of that khan. To be given a new chance at life. So I wrote the letter. I don’t know if he ever received it or had it read to him. I never got a chance to find out, because three weeks after sending it my uncle Nazareth showed up at the khan. He was ragged and disguised, but I knew him right away. Nothing can explain the joy I felt when I saw him. He had come for me. After combing every village on the deportation route from Sivas to Syria, he found me.

“He thought he knew where Bedros was and this only made my heart grow even more glad. Our plan was to go to Syria, where Uncle Nazareth believed Bedros was living in an orphanage, and then on to Lebanon, where my uncle had a contact.

“It was clear that Kemal had abandoned me. Fatma could barely sustain herself after the baby was born. And here was my uncle, alive and well, with a plan. I left all of it. Fatma, Kemal, Sivas, the deportations, my life, all of it.”

“You kept the name Seda,” Orhan says.

“Yes, it was the only thing I kept from that life. I could not go back to being Lucine. Lucine died with Aram. And I never allowed myself to look back. Never. Not even when I was reunited with my brother Bedros.”

“So you did find him?” asks Orhan.

“Yes, in an orphanage in Beirut. My niece, Ani, is his daughter. But the Bedros I found was very different from the Bedros I’d known as a young girl. Instead of the boy, I found a man consumed by hate and revenge. My brother called himself a freedom fighter, but others would call him a fanatic. How could I tell him I had loved a Turk? How could I tell any of them? It was impossible. There was only one story. A story of hate. So I stayed quiet. Always quiet, even more so when I got your letter.”

Orhan takes a deep breath. His head is reeling with the past. He tries to picture Dede walking into that khan after all those years of pining away for this woman, only so she could walk away from him like it was nothing.

“So my father . . .” he says.

“Mustafa is Fatma’s child,” says Seda.

The blood drains from Orhan’s face and heads down to the bottom of his feet.

“All these years . . .” he begins, thinking about all the big and little ways Auntie Fatma spent her life loving all of them, the Türkoğlu men. And suddenly he is saddened beyond measure.

“And the father?” he says.

“Perhaps Nabi Bey. Perhaps another. I’m sorry,” says Seda. “This must be very hard for you. You thought she was your aunt.”

“I thought he was my grandfather,” he manages before staggering to his feet. “I have to go,” he says, and leaves the room.

CHAPTER 33

Decrepit Seed

ORHAN MAKES HIS
way back to the sea of mauve and green that is the reception area. Sitting down, he sinks so deep into one of the couches that he swears he can suddenly feel the weight of a century’s worth of deception and longing bearing down on his shoulders. Like the crumbling Byzantine structures all over Sivas, he is being pressed, layer upon layer, by the past.

If what the old woman says is true, then he and his father are not even related to Kemal. They have no right to his fortune. He thinks about the lawyer Celik, whose name literally translates to “steel,” an element that describes the man’s iron will. His ancestors were probably sheepherders, Orhan thinks, to make himself feel better. When Atatürk declared Turkey a republic, he forced everyone to pick a last name. Strong names like Celik, meaning “steel,” and Demir, meaning “iron,” were common.

Orhan’s own last name translates to “son of a Turk.” He hopes that Dede’s lawyer, Yilmaz, lives up to the meaning of his surname: one who never gives up. Because if his father succeeds in taking over the company, there is no telling what will become of Dede’s life’s work or the family fortune. Mustafa doesn’t know the first thing about textiles or exporting, or money, for that matter. He may build a mosque or donate it all to some extreme nationalist faction full of illiterate angry men. For years, when Dede was alive and Orhan was running the business, Mustafa kissed the hand that he could not wring. Now all that could change.

The blood pumps through his body, boiling with anger. The images of Seda’s story dance around in his head. A young and vibrant auntie Fatma. His
dede,
an insecure boy, in love with his employer’s daughter. He feels the tears slide down his face.

Feeling suffocated, he gets back on his feet and makes his way to a pay phone tucked inside a hallway near the restrooms. Breathing deeply, he stares into the dark narrow cavity where the money should go. Though he’s used a phone his whole life, he is stupefied. With enough money, he could speak to and hear anyone. Words travel from one person in the world to another—truth and lies and inconsequential syllables, laughter and tears too. All of human expression exchanged here for a small price. Yet no person or machine is equipped to interpret these words, give them a finite meaning. No one and nothing to explain it all.

It takes nine rings for Auntie Fatma to answer the telephone. When she does, she sounds breathless from the exertion.

“Ha? What news?” she pants.

The anger swells up in his throat, so he can’t bring himself to speak.

“Hello? Are you there? Speak up, boy.”

“Auntie,” Orhan says finally. The word, a lie, sits heavily on the telephone line. It is a stone brick in a dividing wall that stretches from Sivas to California, from World War I to now. His entire world is made of one brick, one lie, one word placed carefully on top of another.

“Grandmother,” Orhan says, whispering it in her ear.

Fatma is frozen and speechless on the other end of the telephone line.

“Would you have ever told me?” he asks.

“No,” she says finally.