THE CAULDRONS SURROUNDING the house have been cleaned and restored, their smooth copper surfaces gleaming in the sun. The house itself has been renovated to its former splendor, its mustard-colored stucco bright against white wood-trimmed windows. Everything is brighter in the spring air. Orhan stands some thirty feet away, across the street, taking long drags from his cigarette. He doesn’t dare go inside, where his father and Fatma have been engaged in daily battle.
Mustafa’s legal fortitude did not melt upon hearing the news of his questionable parentage. The sting of illegitimacy only served to confirm to him that the whole world was out to betray him. Orhan checks his watch: 5:42 a.m. A speaker mounted on the highest minaret of the mosque crackles. The voice of the muezzin cuts against the gray sky, calling believers like his father to their morning prayers. At the sound of footsteps and the clicking of his father’s cane, Orhan turns his back and steps into a nearby alleyway. Only a coward hides from his own aging father. But he isn’t entirely cowardly, he reminds himself. The legal battle for his ancestral home ensues, and in that, he has been downright heroic.
Orhan waits for Mustafa to disappear entirely before extinguishing his cigarette and walking toward the house, where Fatma stands by the open door.
“Good morning, Buyukanne,” he says kissing her cheek.
“I get many more kisses since you’ve started calling me grandmother,” she says.
“Where’s your burka?” he says, stepping inside.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says, smiling.
“How long do we have?”
“An hour.”
“The exterior of the house looks good,” he says.
“Like a butterfly landing on a donkey’s dick,” she says, making him laugh with one of her favorite Turkish phrases.
Inside, the house looks emptied and gutted. The home, once cluttered and covered almost entirely with doilies and kilims, is now a blank space. The bare floor looks naked without its ancient carpets. His dede’s green lounge chair sits like a modern art installation in the middle of the room.
“What happened here?” he asks.
“Home improvement.”
“It looks like an empty museum,” he says.
Fatma shrugs. Two metal folding chairs lean against a blank wall where the television and shelves used to be.
“Where’s the television?” Orhan can’t imagine his father sitting in the room without it.
“Out for repairs,” she says winking at him.
Orhan gives her a doubting look.
“What are you trying to do here?” Orhan asks. “Smoke him out?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought more about what you said about basing my whole life, our lives, on a lie. It was wrong. Necessary back then but wrong. I can correct it now.”
“By stripping the house of furniture?”
“By starting fresh. Every word from my mouth, every object in this house, will be based on the truth. No more decrepit seeds.”
Orhan nods. “That may take longer than we thought,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, grabbing a folding chair and placing it near Dede’s chair. “Besides, a good general doesn’t leave a front until it’s conquered.”
“We are fighting over a dilapidated house,” he says, knowing full well that there is so much more at stake here—things he cannot define to anyone but her. Reclaiming the house is the first step toward reclaiming his family’s and his country’s past.
“I wasn’t talking about the house,” she says, folding her crumpled hands in her lap like a schoolgirl. “I was talking about your father’s heart.”
She looks so vulnerable and frail. Orhan wants to reach over and embrace her shrinking body, and he almost does, but she stands up, breaking the moment in half.
“Besides,” she says, her voice cheerful now. “The house isn’t dilapidated anymore. Did you see the stucco outside? And the cauldrons? Good as new.”
“We can paint, and scrub, and remove things, but the past is always here,” he says.
“Everything is built on something else,” Fatma says.
“Yes, but we’ve built an entire fortune on her loss, an entire country on their bones,” says Orhan.
“An unlucky Bedouin will get fucked by a polar bear in the desert,” she responds. “What can be done about it?”
“Acknowledge it, I suppose,” says Orhan. “Isn’t that what Dede was trying to do with his will?”
He turns away from her and Dede’s chair and walks out of the house. He doesn’t stop until he is engulfed in the abundant foliage of the mulberry tree. Lush leaves, so large they can be worn as masks, hang low and wrap around him like a bright green cloak. Adorned with the deep reds and purples of the fleshy fruit, they sway in the wind, brushing Orhan’s head and shoulders. He hears the sound of Fatma’s footsteps amid the whispered chatter of the wind and leaves.