“He would have put his eyes out to avoid looking at me as a child. Avoided me like the plague until you came along. Now he’s put it in writing. Skipped me like I never existed. Made it official.”
“Every father loves his son,” says Orhan, “even if he doesn’t know the best way to show it.” He should know.
“A perfect stranger,” his father says in disbelief.
Orhan reminds himself that this is not his fault. And though it isn’t, he feels guilty just the same.
“You know that attorney is no friend of ours. What will you do next, shine his shoes?”
“Dede trusted him,” Orhan says.
“Your dede was an old fool.” His father’s voice grows louder, making Orhan wonder how soon the family’s plight will spread from the balconies and stalls of Karod to the streets of Istanbul, where Tarik Inc. is located. “Everything we have has just slipped through our fingers. And what do you do?”
“Not everything,” says Orhan. And not our fingers, he thinks. Just yours.
“You have been charmed, you know. Bewitched by the West, its shiny coins and godless women,” Mustafa says, rubbing his index finger against his thumb.
“I live in Istanbul. How is that the West?” Orhan says, thinking he hasn’t had anything shiny or naked in such a long time.
“Be quiet!” Mustafa says, propping himself up with the help of his cane. Despite himself, Orhan reflexively recoils from the menacing rod.
“You are not to contact that woman,” his father says.
“Don’t you want to know who she is? Why he’s done this?”
“No, I don’t want to know. And I forbid you to go stirring up shit that no one cares about.”
“I have to go and see her to get the house back,” says Orhan.
“Always, I am living among heathens,” Mustafa says, raising his voice again. “I ask nothing of you. Only to be a good Turk, a good Muslim. And what do you do? You shame me. You turn communist. You spread leftist propaganda and get kicked out of the country.”
“I was a photographer, not a communist.” Orhan is shouting now. When will his father understand this? Every conversation turns to this perceived betrayal.
“You’ve given me nothing to be proud of,” Mustafa says. “I hang my head in shame while you go around without remorse.”
“I have nothing to be remorseful about. I’ve been pardoned, remember?” he says, thinking that it must be easier to dwell on a son’s perceived betrayal than a father’s disapproval. Orhan stands to his full height and begins pacing, towering half a meter above his father. He knows all about a father’s disapproval. If it were up to his Mustafa, the country would be run by mullahs, every woman in a head scarf, bureaucrats so busy praying five times a day, they can’t see straight.
“You godless louse,” Mustafa says. “You think you are so much better with your art and your pictures.”
“I haven’t taken a picture in years,” Orhan says.
“Yes, yes, Mr. Big Businessman,” Mustafa says, making wide circles with his arms. “You think you would have that job if it weren’t for your dede? Hmm, Mr. Exile?”
“Well, he didn’t give it to you, did he?” Orhan says. “He gave the company to me.” Even as the words leave him, Orhan wishes he could take them back.
Mustafa’s face turns as gray as his mustache. “You are nothing but a traitor,” he says finally. “To your faith, to your country, and most of all, to this family. I want you out of this house by morning. And take his fucking letter with you,” he says, throwing Dede’s letter at Orhan and limping toward his room.
Orhan watches his father walk out of the room with the help of his cane. Unable to face the funeral guests that litter the house, he steps out into the family courtyard, where Auntie Fatma is waiting for him on one of two plastic chairs. Free of her dark head scarf, she carries her grief, raw and exposed to the dry wind, in the creases of her face.
“I’ve brought tea,” she says. “Sit. Let him fester.”
Orhan accepts, though he isn’t thirsty, and settles into the other chair.
“I see you’ve found God,” he says, lighting a cigarette and pointing to the discarded head scarf draped on a low table between them.
“Nonsense,” she replies. “Those idiots in Ankara have outlawed it, so naturally I decided to take a new fancy to it.” A new law banning head scarves in universities had just passed. It was the Kemalist state’s way of curbing fundamentalist Islam and embracing modernism. But the rule was meant for young university students, not village women in their nineties.
“Always the rebel,” Orhan says.
She reaches over and takes the letter in Orhan’s hand. She rips it open. “Here, read it to me,” she says.
Orhan hesitates for only a moment, before his curiosity and the need to hear Dede one last time overcome him.
Dede’s narrow slanted script dominates the page. There are no drawings here. Only words.