Orhan's Inheritance (4 page)

“How is Hülya?” Auntie Fatma asks.

“Don’t know. We broke up,” he says, thinking about the curse of the Türkoğlu men, always being left by their women. His grandmother passed when his father was only a toddler and Orhan’s own mother died in childbirth. Auntie Fatma, never having been a Türkoğlu wife or mother, is the only female constant in the family.

“Her loss,” Fatma says. “You’re a handsome devil, like your grandfather, may Allah’s blessings be upon him. I’m supposed to say that now,” she says, laughing, “every time I mention your
dede
. As if Allah would take commands from me.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about, Auntie?”

“Why should I? Besides, why do you suppose I know?”

“Because you knew Dede best. And because you’re old,” he adds, winking at her. “As old as this house, maybe older.”

“Why, you son of a goat. For your information, the house is at least a decade or two older than I am. Don’t let the date on that stone arch fool you. And I’m as strong as an ox,” she says crossing her arms. “Besides, you’re no schoolboy yourself. What are you now, thirty-five?”

“I’m only twenty-nine and you know it,” he says.

“Got any pictures to show me?”

“No. I don’t even own a camera. Since when do you want to see my photos, anyway? You’re just trying to change the subject,” he says.

“Clever little boy.”

“Man,” Orhan corrects her.

“Boy, man—what’s the difference? And I have always liked your pictures. Look, I even kept this here for you.” Auntie Fatma lifts her head scarf that is draped on the table to reveal the Leica, familiar yet titillating, its silver and black fascia hinting at all kinds of possibilities. Underneath it is a portfolio of his photography.

Orhan hasn’t seen either object for years. Like the stone arch above the main door of the house, his camera and portfolio are remnants from a forgotten life.

“Take them,” she says. “It’s not good to keep a grudge, especially against one so dear.”

Orhan reaches for the camera, running his hand across the silver knobs and leather creases. His breath slows down, quelling his anxiety. There’s no harm in touching the thing. It’s only a camera, an inanimate object.

“What am I supposed to do about all this?” he asks, trying to concentrate on the problem at hand.

“You’ll do what you’ve always done,” she says. “Follow your Dede’s wishes. Just promise me you’ll get the house back.”

“Just like that. Like I’m picking up some
simit
on the way home from work.”

“Yes, like that,” Auntie Fatma says. She sighs, letting her shoulders drop. Never one for serious conversation, his aunt has a special talent for trivializing all of life’s little unhappinesses. But this time, for once, she seems worried.

“You don’t have to worry,” says Orhan. “I’m not going to let some stranger turn you out of your home,” says Orhan.

“
Benim paşam
. My prince,” she says, patting his knee. “You’ve got her information. Go and find her. Only be careful.”

“Careful?”

“Yes, careful,” she says. “You know what the trees said when the axe came to the forest?”

“No, what?” asks Orhan.

“The handle is one of us,” she says, smiling her devious smile.

Orhan knits his brows together in confusion.

“I don’t get it. Am I the tree or the axe?” he asks.

“Who knows?” she says.

CHAPTER 2

Pilgrimage to Ararat

WHEN THE BOEING
747 finally pulls its wheels up during take off, Orhan literally feels lighter. The more space between himself and his father, and that damned house and Karod, the better. He shuts his eyes and tries to push the terrifying thought of Mustafa moving to Istanbul and taking ownership of Tarik Inc. out of his mind. He tries instead to imagine California, where Seda Melkonian lives. Sunny beaches and German-dubbed reruns of
Knight Rider
come to mind. He thinks of the tall American in that show, David somebody, singing “Looking for Freedom” on top of the Berlin Wall minutes before it was torn down.

Orhan’s own freedom is in the hands of a total stranger. The thought lands him right back where he’s been since Dede’s funeral: wallowing in a pool of dread. Maybe the old man really had lost his mind. Maybe Orhan was too busy with the company to notice. Reports of Dede’s growing eccentricities did sometimes reach him, but indulging the old man’s whims was a time-honored tradition in the Türkoğlu house. Auntie Fatma and his father didn’t agree on much, but neither of them balked when Dede started making strange requests. As a boy, Orhan watched as his father washed all the coin money before placing it in a wooden box Dede had labeled
TEMIZ
, clean. His grandfather was always going on and on about the evil stench of money. One afternoon, Orhan found Auntie Fatma ironing the paper money. She placed the bills flat onto the board, then covered them with a linen pillowcase. The iron hissed as hot steam rose up from the bills, through the white linen and into the hallway. When he asked her what she was doing, she said, “I’m purging the money of all its evil.” Not questioning it, Orhan helped her hang each bill to dry on the clothing line.

Last month, the old man wrote a letter to the supervisor at the factory demanding that all the red fabric dye in the plant be the exact shade of a red mulberry he’d included in an envelope. The discreet manager had placed the letter with smudged fruit on Orhan’s desk and ignored its directives.

Orhan knew Dede’s requests were growing stranger and stranger, but he could never have predicted this. A battle begins in the pit of his stomach between the forces of anxiety and grief. Just when grief takes hold of his insides, a wave of anxiety sweeps in and coats everything with its venom.

Orhan orders a whiskey on the rocks and stares into the amber liquid, trying to make sense of what Dede has done. Is this Seda woman a relative? Even so, what would possess Dede to leave the house to her? Even if the family home is the least valuable of Dede’s assets, it encompasses four generations of Türkoğlu life.

Dede started Tarik Inc. inside those walls sometime after the First World War. The company specialized in handwoven rugs and grew significantly in the mid-seventies. By the time Orhan came along, the business had moved to the city. To Orhan, the house was always a place of confinement and conflict, a place where Mustafa’s menacing rod and booming voice faced off against Auntie Fatma’s iron will. As a boy, he’d escaped to the outdoors. But as a teenager, Dede’s Leica had saved his sanity. The truth is, when he first picked up the camera, he wasn’t trying to change the world or make it better; he was trying to escape it. The Leica gave him a legitimate reason to capture the world, without having to join it.

ALL THAT WAS
before he was exiled to Germany, before he stopped taking photographs. But Orhan doesn’t want to think about that. What matters is not what the world does to you but how you respond.

Upon his return to Turkey, six years ago, Orhan had imagined himself a prodigal son, returning to claim his rightful place in his country, his home, his family business, maybe even his father’s heart—that most impenetrable of caves. He flew straight into Istanbul, took a cab to his grandfather’s factory, and never looked back. He worked tirelessly and without looking up. He collected patterns from all the most remote corners of the country and mined ottoman archives for designs that would have otherwise been extinct. Recently, Orhan designed his own line of kilims. He merged ancient patterns with the clean lines and a monochromatic color palette more suitable for younger buyers. He stopped thinking about photography altogether. The business, Dede’s failing health, and his father’s incompetence left little room for anything of his old life. He chased stability like a blind dog on a scent.

And now he was sniffing his way to Los Angeles.

Orhan downs the rest of his whiskey in one big gulp and eyes his travel bag. His Leica lies on its side, on top of Dede’s sketchbook and his old portfolio. Black on black on black, a triumvirate of dark casings that contain his past. Auntie Fatma insisted that he take the camera and his portfolio with him. He hasn’t cracked the portfolio open and doesn’t plan to. Looking at the images would be like rummaging through the things of an old lover and he’s got no need for that kind of pain.

Before leaving Karod, Orhan found an old roll of unused black-and-white film. He chose a 50 mm lens and stood staring at the house of his childhood. The once mighty mulberry tree prevailed over the aging structure, its black barren branches hanging like so many veins in God’s arm. The dark downward lines crisscrossed against the bright sunlit mustard of the house’s stucco. He took the photo, thinking of all the drawings of the mulberry tree and cauldrons in Dede’s final sketchbook. He pressed the shutter release and the camera snapped and moaned, but it brought no new knowledge about the tree, the house, or the man who loved them.

CHAPTER 3

Home

SEDA FINGERS THE
letter tucked inside her sleeve, where its crumpled surface has molded into the shape of her left wrist. Pulling it out, she smoothes its creases against her knee. Her eyes roam around the page, like they’ve done again and again in the past few weeks, resting on the spots where the black ink stops and begins again, then to the white spaces in between. Thinking, sometimes, there is more in between words than within them.

I am the grandson of Kemal
Türkoğlu . . .
he’s written. Kemal’s name, warm and sweet, swims through her blood and down into her belly before it somersaults into her throat and threatens to escape. She presses her lips together, refusing to let him out.

It is a strange thing, receiving a letter from a dead man’s grandson. A letter from a place so far away and long ago that opening it was itself an act of heroism. Even in death, Kemal would not let go of her. He has reached through time and space to grab hold of her once again.

She feels the sheet of paper releasing an ancient djinn, a demon that threatens to uncover the past she’s painstakingly buried. She stares at the letter’s folds and creases, the frayed edge where it’s been torn out of a legal pad, reading the awkward English translation of Turkish thoughts.

From her room, she can see the other residents shuffling to and fro, searching for God knows what. Morning medications, breakfast, companionship, a reason to live. The first time she saw the words
Ararat Home for the Aging,
they were printed on a white folder sitting on the kitchen counter. Beneath a large photo of Mount Ararat was captioned: “Named after the holy mountain in Armenia where Noah’s ark is believed to have landed, the home is a refuge for an aging Diaspora.” It was the word
refuge
that bothered Seda the most, so similar to
refugee,
a word she was all too familiar with. She thought about flinging the brochure into the yard, burying it deep in that cactus soil that her niece liked so much. Ani was her only living relative, the daughter of her long-deceased younger brother. Seda knew Ani loved her. Still, a month later she found herself living in the Ararat Home. It is a museum for the living, breathing relics of an unburied past, built by a community for whom everything, from the church picnic to the baker’s son passing the bar exam, is a testament to survival.

“You coming?” Old Kalustian pokes his bald head into her doorway. The old goat thinks he’s got pull with the ladies just because he uses a fancy cane instead of a walker.

Seda clicks her tongue and waves him and his silver-headed cane away. Can’t hold his stool but still thinks he can command his pecker.

“Come on. The kids from St. Nishan are reenacting the great battle of Sardarabad,” he says, eyes shining.

Seda lifts both her eyebrows and clicks her tongue, before turning her wheelchair around in refusal.

“Suit yourself,” he says.

There’s no dignity in this place, thinks Seda. No privacy either. Some fool is always poking his or her head into your doorway. And as if the residents and nurses aren’t bad enough, lately all kinds of people keep showing up, waving their tape recorders in her face, asking her questions about the past. Everyone is an amateur historian. They use words like
witness
and
genocide,
trying to bridge the gap between her past and their own present with words.

She wants nothing to do with it. But the other residents have fallen under a confessional spell. They’re like ancient tea bags steeping in the murky waters of the past, repeating their stories over and over again to anyone who will listen. Who can blame them? Driven from their homes not by soldiers this time, but by their own loved ones, to this place so cleverly labeled “home,” a second exile. In some ways, Seda thinks it’s worse than the first: to the lexicon of horrific memories is added the immense shame of surviving, of living when so many others did not. Yet they all bask in their rediscovered relevance. But all the words in every human language on earth would not be enough to describe what happened.

When the past wells up inside her, Seda knows not to let it out. “I can’t remember,” she tells those who ask. When the river of words comes billowing out, it poisons everything. It taints the present with the blood and tears of the past. She wouldn’t mind the forgetting that comes with age, but whatever is eating at her brain is only wiping out the freshest of memories. It leaves the undigested past alone, lets it fester, decomposing in her mind. Despite her best efforts, the scents and visions of her girlhood come bubbling up to the surface. Yesterday, she thought she smelled pistachios and almost threw up her lunch.

Seda rolls her chair to the window and opens the blinds. She places a palm above her brow to block the sun. She can see three rows of plastic chairs facing the great fountain. A splattering of costumed boys and girls in varying heights are scattered between the fountain and the audience. One fat boy wears an Armenian priest’s robe complete with pointy black hat. She spots Kalustian limping toward the back row and leans forward to hear a few phrases.