Orhan's Inheritance Read online

  ORHAN’S

  INHERITANCE

  a novel

  Aline Ohanesian

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2015

  For Vram,

  who made it possible

  and for Alec and Vaughn,

  who made it necessary

  The past is not dead; it’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  Language is the house of being.

  In its home man dwells.

  —MARTIN HEIDEGGER

  Contents

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  An Axe in the Forest

  CHAPTER 2

  Pilgrimage to Ararat

  CHAPTER 3

  Home

  CHAPTER 4

  White Days

  CHAPTER 5

  The Staff of Moses

  PART II

  CHAPTER 6

  Normal

  CHAPTER 7

  Red River

  CHAPTER 8

  The Crier

  CHAPTER 9

  Under the Mulberry Tree

  CHAPTER 10

  Bedros and the Dress

  CHAPTER 11

  Infidels

  CHAPTER 12

  Kismet

  CHAPTER 13

  The Whips of Satan

  PART III

  CHAPTER 14

  Selling Minds

  CHAPTER 15

  Ani

  CHAPTER 16

  Memory’s Garden

  CHAPTER 17

  The Fountain

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 18

  The Pretty Ones

  CHAPTER 19

  The Road to Kangal

  CHAPTER 20

  Empty Prayers

  CHAPTER 21

  God’s Will, Inşallah

  CHAPTER 22

  Eagle Eye

  CHAPTER 23

  Ctesiphon

  CHAPTER 24

  Place of Sin

  CHAPTER 25

  Rebirth

  CHAPTER 26

  Altar of Contrition

  CHAPTER 27

  Spilled Porridge

  CHAPTER 28

  Ghosts

  CHAPTER 29

  Resurrection

  CHAPTER 30

  The Handmaid

  CHAPTER 31

  Finding Faith

  PART V

  CHAPTER 32

  Exile

  CHAPTER 33

  Decrepit Seed

  CHAPTER 34

  The Photographer

  CHAPTER 35

  Semantics

  CHAPTER 36

  Witness

  CHAPTER 37

  Fatma Forgiven

  CHAPTER 38

  Transformation

  Acknowledgments

  A Note from the Author

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  PART I

  1990

  CHAPTER 1

  An Axe in the Forest

  THEY FOUND HIM inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Türkoğlu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. Orhan was told the old men of the village stood in front of the soaking corpse, fingering their worry beads, while their sons waited, holding dice from abandoned backgammon games. Modesty forbade any female spectators, but within hours the news spread from one kitchen and vendor’s stall to the next. Orhan’s grandfather, his dede, had immersed his body, naked except for his britches, into a vat of fabric dye outside their family home.

  Orhan sinks into the backseat of the private car, a luxury he talked himself into when the dread of a seven-hour bus ride back to the village started to overwhelm his grief. He wanted to mourn in private, away from the chickens, the elderly, the traveling merchants, or worse yet, the odd acquaintance that could normally be found on a bus ride to Anatolia, the interior of Turkey. He told himself he could afford a little luxury now, but the car showed up an hour late, sporting a broken air conditioner and a driver reeking of cheap cologne and sweat. Orhan lights a cigarette and shuts his eyes against the sting of the man’s body odor.

  “Going to visit your family?” the driver asks.

  “Yes,” answers Orhan.

  “That’s nice. So many young people leave their villages and never come back,” he says.

  The truth is it’s been three years since his last visit. Had Dede had the good sense to move out of that godforsaken place, there would be no reason to go back. The car veers off the highway, making its way along a recently paved road toward the city of Sivas, on whose outskirts Karod village is located. The driver slows down and opens a window, letting the terroir-laden scent of soil waft into the car’s cavity. Unlike Istanbul, whose majesty is reflected in the Bosporus, Central Anatolia is the quintessential other Turkey, in which allusions of majesty or progress are much harder to come by. Here shepherds follow the bleating of long-haired goats, and squat village women carry bundles of kindling on their backs. Time and progress are two long-lost relatives who send an occasional letter. The ancient roads of Sivas Province, once a part of the famed Silk Road, have seen the stomping of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman feet. Dry-rotted timber, blocks of concrete, and sheets of corrugated tin stand feebly upon ancient Byzantine stone structures whose architectural complexity suggests a more glorious past. Layer upon layer of earth and civilization washed downstream by the muddy waters of the Kizil Irmak, the Red River, produces a kind of sedimentary aesthetic. Orhan thinks of the unbearable heat of Anatolian summers acting as an adhesive for all these different layers.

  “You have siblings?” the driver asks.

  “No,” answers Orhan.

  “Just your parents then?” he asks, glancing at Orhan through the rearview mirror.

  “Father, grandfather, and an aunt,” he says, looking out at the barren landscape. How is it that even without a single structure weighing down on it, the land is heavy, the atmosphere so pressed it makes it hard to breathe? It was these very fields, burdened with a history he could not name that first inspired him to pick up Dede’s Leica. Somewhere around age fifteen, Orhan discovered that if he blurred the image in the lens enough, Karod would no longer threaten to crush him. Through the lens, the slopes and valleys of his childhood started to resemble abstract paintings, broad strokes of yellow and green, hidden patches of lavender, set against an ever-changing sky of blue and orange. It was only later that he realized he was imposing meaning upon the world, by the way he chose to capture it. Those first photographs were like butterflies suspended in glass panes.

  “I grew up near Sivas,” the driver continues. “What’s your family name? Maybe I know it.”

  There is no escaping this constant need for placing one another in Turkey. It’s one of the few things Orhan loved about living in Germany: the anonymity. “Türkoğlu,” he says finally.

  The driver’s expression, framed in the rearview mirror, changes. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says. “Kemal Bey was an extraordinary man. Is it true he fought at Ctesiphon?”

  Orhan nods, taking another drag from his cigarette.

  “They don’t make them like that anymore. That generation was full of real men. They fought against all of Europe and Russia, established a republic, and founded entire industries. It’s something, huh?”

  “Yes,” agrees Orhan. “It’s something.”

  “The paper says he immersed himself in dye for medicinal purposes,” the driver says.

  It’s not the first time Orhan has heard this preposterous theory. It’s a story crafted, no doubt, by his cunning little aunt. Though Dede had been a well-respected World War
I hero-turned-businessman, he was also an eccentric man, living in a place where eccentricities needed to be explained away or covered up.

  In villages like Karod, every person, object, and stone has to have some sort of covering, a layer of protection made from cloth, brick, or dust. Men and women cover their heads with skullcaps and head scarves. These standards of modesty also apply to their animals, their speech, their ideas. Why should Dede’s death be an exception?

  The car veers left onto a loosely graveled road that leads into the village. Orhan searches for the wooden post that used to announce the village’s name in unassuming hand-painted white letters, but it’s nowhere to be found. A young boy in a bright orange shirt and green shorts walks behind a herd of cows. He sweeps a long stick at their backs, ushering them into one of many narrow corridors sandwiched between mud-caked houses.

  “Is this it?” asks the driver.

  “Yes,” says Orhan. “Just follow this road until you see the house with the large columns.”

  The sound of crunching gravel comes to a halt as the car stops. Orhan extinguishes his cigarette and steps out. He can hear the singular sound of hired wailers, their practiced percussion luring him out of the car: two, maybe three female voices filled with a kind of sorrow and vulnerability that comes only with practice. The two-story family home is a dilapidated old ruin by any standards, but here in the forgotten back pocket of Central Anatolia, it is considered a sturdy and grand affair. A thin film of mustard-colored stucco advances and retreats over hand-cut stones of putty and gray, reminding Orhan of a half-peeled piece of dried-out fruit. The Victorian-looking house, complete with parlor and basement, is the birthplace of Tarik Inc., which began as a small collection of workshops and which, over the past six decades, grew into an automated firm, exporting textiles as far away as Italy and Germany. Here, inside these ruinous walls, according to family legend, Orhan’s great-grandfather had woven a kilim for the sultan himself. That was before the empire became a republic, before democracy and westernization revolutionized what it meant to be a Turk. In the courtyard to the left of the house, the massive copper cauldrons stand guarding the wilting structure. Through the decades they’ve gone from holding fabric dye to sheltering children playing hide-and-seek, to storing the discarded ashes of hookah pipes and cigarettes. These vessels have contained the many bits and pieces of Dede’s life. Perhaps it is only fitting that they also housed his last breath.

  Orhan weaves a familiar path around the cauldrons. All empty, except one holding a murky sledge like dye that looks more black than blue, the color of a good-bye.

  Above the wooden frame of the front door, a stone arch inscribed with indecipherable script and the date 1905 welcomes guests into the time warp inside. No one really knows what these letters above the door announce or in what language they’re written. Orhan hunches his six-foot frame in order to step inside the home and into a sea of curious townspeople and villagers come to pay their respects and graze on food and gossip. The head wailer, a rich woman by the looks of her gold teeth, orchestrates a powerful atmosphere of lamentation with a chant from the Koran.

  “He drowned himself,” someone whispers.

  “If he drowned himself, why is his head not blue?” another asks.

  “Consider how neatly he folded his clothes,” someone else says, as if that alone could prove something.

  “Apparently, medicinal dye is all the rage in Istanbul.”

  “He was always a forward-thinking man.”

  Orhan recognizes only a handful of people in the room. Anyone with any sense or prospects left Karod a long time ago, peeling it off like an ill-fitting coat. A few old men and women, the aging parents of his childhood friends, people he politely calls auntie and uncle, pat his face and shake his hand. Village girls, none older than twenty, roam around the room offering tea and cookies on plastic trays, their black head scarves framing eyelids lowered in modesty. They wear traditional baggy şalvar pants beneath their brightly colored cotton dresses. Orhan thinks he recognizes one or two of them. Suddenly conscious of his Italian suit and loafers, he grabs a cup of tea and makes his way to the living room, where every flat surface—tables, bookshelves, mantels, even the television—is covered with handcrafted doilies. Their intricate geometric and floral designs in various shades of beige provide every exposed horizontal surface with a measure of modesty.

  A young girl, flanked on both sides by older women, one of whom he remembers as the village marriage broker, silently offers Orhan a tray of baklava.

  “Maşallah,” says the marriage broker, scanning her eyes along the length of his body. “We heard you came by private car.” She nods in solemn approval. The girl standing to her left keeps her eyes glued to the plastic tray of sweets, and the broker gives him a conspiratorial smile. Orhan lifts his hand in protest, sure that the gesture is universal enough to decline both the baklava and the girl.

  Six years ago, when Orhan first returned from Germany, these same “aunties” shunned him like a leper. The word communist was thrown at his back and sometimes to his face. Now they parade their single daughters in front of him, fantasizing about becoming the mother-in-law of the prodigal grandson and successful businessman. It was the combination of their scorn and his father’s that made him settle in Istanbul, where no one knew a thing about his past. To his city friends, Orhan’s stay in Germany was not a forced and shameful exile but an acceptable part of a rich man’s education.

  The girl still stands before him, awkwardly holding the tray of baklava in her calloused hands. They look so much older than the rest of her. These girls are a completely different species from the gazelles that make up the social elite of Istanbul, a modern crowd of which Orhan’s ex-girlfriend, Hülya, is a member. Perhaps, with his inheritance only moments away, Orhan could pursue Hülya, with her excellent lineage and perfect tan, in the manner she was accustomed to and win her back. Though by the standards of Turkish inheritance law, the majority of Dede’s wealth will no doubt go to his useless father, Orhan is sure to receive something. Hülya could move into his apartment, its ancient walls covered in what her posh friends perceived as high art. He would have to buy a large china cabinet for all her cherished relics of the West, a collector’s plate with Lady Diana’s face lodged at its center, her collection of Duran Duran albums displayed prominently on the shelf. All the symptoms of Western capitalism without the pesky virtues like freedom of expression and minority rights.

  Orhan gulps down the remainder of his tea, sets the tiny cup on the girl’s baklava tray, and moves to the sitting room, where it is less crowded. The room has only three occupants, his aunt, father, and a man in a modern suit whom he recognizes as Dede’s lawyer. They sit in an uncomfortable silence that goes undisturbed by his arrival at the door. Auntie Fatma sits at the back wall, in her usual garb—a long-sleeved peasant dress of dark rayon challis fabric over baggy şalvar trousers—doing her best to remain invisible. Orhan is surprised by the black cotton head scarf that covers her head and frames her prunelike face. Though it is customary for village women of a certain age to cover their heads, his aunt has never been one to follow convention.

  She balances a large aluminum tray on her knees, as she guts the insides of a dozen tiny squash. Her hands work at a frenzied pace, but Orhan suspects she will be listening carefully to every word spoken. He bends down and gives her a quick peck on the cheek. Seeing him, her face cracks into a smile, revealing a mouth full of gold teeth. Orhan takes the seat closest to her in silence. Light bounces from Auntie Fatma’s tray to her golden mouth and back again. The smell of garlic and red pepper paste lingers in the air. She scoops handfuls of ground beef and rice into the hollows of each vegetable, her legs spread apart to steady the tray. The yellow and green squash glow like tiny gems in a jewelry box. Orhan’s hand instinctively reaches toward the middle of his chest where his camera used to hang, before remembering he hasn’t got one. It’s a reflex that almost never happens in Istanbul, where he now lives. His body stil
l remembers that long-lost object like the severed limb of an amputee.

  His Leica is probably still somewhere in the house. Orhan hasn’t seen it since his arrest a half-dozen years ago, and he doesn’t want to. She is a skilled lover. If he got close to her again, pressed a firm finger on her shutter release button, she would open her aperture just enough to let the light penetrate and then shut it again. She would release that familiar and intoxicating sound, somewhere between a clap and a moan, and wait for him to wind her up again. The act would be blissful no doubt, but it would end badly. It always did. The last time he took a photograph in Karod, the country was coping with the military coup of 1980. Orhan was only nineteen when he took that final photograph. It was the sharp contrast of colors and textures that interested him. So focused on the abstractions that he failed to see the world around them. The Leica did that. It stole all his perspective.

  Yes, much better to stay away from it.

  Orhan tries hard not to look at his father who sits in the opposite corner, in Dede’s favorite chair. He balances a cane on his knees, fingering a set of worry beads hanging from his left hand. It is the middle of August and Mustafa Türkoğlu is, as always, dressed to rural standards, beige skullcap, oxford shirt, sweater vest, and a dark gray wool sports jacket paired with baggy şalvar pants. Orhan can’t remember a time when his father wasn’t dressed this way. The sweltering heat of the Anatolian sun seeps through the window, threatening to suck the oxygen from Orhan’s lungs, but his father sits unfazed. Nothing, not even the death of his father, much less a little heat, can produce the slightest change in the man.

  Mustafa does not acknowledge Orhan’s presence. His eyes, hard little marbles of contempt, stare straight ahead. It is probably the position he’s assumed all day, throughout the long funeral service and the endless cries of hired wailers, the procession of handshakes and sorrowful faces. As the funeral guests leave, he regresses to his belligerent old self. All those years in exile it was his Dede, who had sustained him, who’d written long letters and accepted phone calls. How ironic to be left with this one, this angry little man whose perpetually sunburned skin had hardened like his heart.