Free The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak Page B

name!”
    “You don’t need another name,” Auntie Varsenig consoled her uncle. “No doubt she is doing this deliberately. . . .”
    “We have to rescue Armanoush,” interrupted Grandma Shushan, the matriarch of the family. She left the table and scuffled toward her armchair. Though a wonderful cook, she had never had a big appetite and lately, her daughters feared, had somehow developed a way to stay alive by eating no more than a teacupful a day. She was a short, bony woman who possessed an exceptional strength to handle situations even more dire than this, and whose delicate face radiated an aura of competence. Her refusal to admit defeat no matter what, her unflagging conviction that life was always a struggle but if you were an Armenian it was three times as grueling, and her ability to win over everyone she came across had over the years bewildered many in her family.
    “Nothing is as important as the well-being of the child,” Grandma Shushan muttered as she caressed the silver pendant of Saint Anthony that she always wore. The patron saint of lost articles had helped her numerous times in the past to cope with the losses in her life.
    With that Grandma Shushan took up her knitting needles and sat down. The first skeins of a cerulean baby’s blanket dangled from the needles with the initials A. K. woven on the border. There was silence for a moment as everyone in the room watched her hands move gracefully with the needles. Grandma Shushan’s knitting affected the family like group therapy. The sure and even cadence of each stitch soothed everyone watching, making them feel that as long as Grandma Shushan kept knitting, there was nothing to fear and in the end, everything would be all right.
    “You are right. Poor little Armanoush,” said Uncle Dikran, who as a rule took Shushan’s side in every family dispute, knowing better than to disagree with the omnipotent materfamilias. Uncle Dikran dropped his voice as he asked, “What’s going to become of that innocent lamb?”
    Before anyone could respond, there was a jingling at the doorstep and the door was opened with a key. Barsam walked in, his face pale, his eyes staring worriedly behind wire-rimmed glasses.
    “Hah! Look who’s here!” said Uncle Dikran. “Mr. Barsam, your daughter is going to be raised by a Turk and here you are doing nothing about it. . . . Amot! ”
    “What can I do?” lamented Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, turning to his uncle. He moved his eyes to a huge reproduction of Martiros Saryan’s Still Life with Masks on the wall, as if the answer he needed was hidden somewhere in the painting. But he must have failed to encounter any solace there because when he spoke again his voice sounded as inconsolable as before. “I have no right to interfere. Rose is her mother.”
    “ Aman! What a mother!” Dikran Stamboulian laughed. For a man of his size he had an oddly shrill laugh—a detail he was usually conscious of and able to control, except when he was under stress.
    “What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboulian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa! What kind of a joke is that? . . . Ah, marnim khalasim! ”
    Dikran Stamboulian paused and looked closely at his nephew to see the effect of his words. Barsam stood stone still.
    “Go, Barsam!” Uncle Dikran exclaimed louder this time. “Fly to Tucson tonight and stop this comedy before it’s too late. Talk with your wife. Haydeh! ”
    “Ex-wife!” Auntie Zarouhi corrected him, as she served herself a piece of burma. “Ah, I shouldn’t be eating this. It has so much sugar in it. So