“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 Türko?lu 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.”