A Recipe for Daphne Nektaria Anastasiadou (the rosie project .TXT) 📖

“Forget about it.” She pressed the corners of her eyes with the napkin.

“That’s a lovely dress.”

Daphne laughed through her tears. “This old thing? It’s my aunt’s. She got mad at me because I was so caught up in studying that I forgot you were coming.”

So she hadn’t spent an hour primping, as Gavriela had said, and she hadn’t dressed for him, as Mr. Spyros had conjectured. But they were still together. That was what really mattered.

“You look beautiful in it,” he said.

Daphne lifted her heavy lids and pressed her mouth into a sad and unbecoming attempt at a smile. “My aunt and I are going to Antigone Island on Sunday. Would you and your mother like to come?”

Kosmas glanced toward the water. The motor launch was nearly still. The Bosporus, undisturbed by ship wakes, lapped gently against the sea wall. “Of course,” he said. “I mean, sure. I think we can make it.”

11

Ablutions

Emotionally exhausted, fanis returned home from Murat Aydın’s house on Friday evening and fell asleep on the couch. He didn’t awake until the sunset call to prayer ascended the hill from Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. A few seconds later, the muezzin of Karabaş Mustafa Ağa Mosque began his call to prayer, and then the loudspeaker of Tomtom Kaptan picked up the chant and finished it, leaving the distant hum from some other mosque, farther away, to carry on the relay. Fanis rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling until the last traces of the call to prayer had faded and he could hear nothing but street noise and seagulls squawking.

The phone rang. He was so disoriented that he picked up and said hello.

A sinister voice asked, “Who’s there?”

Fanis hung up and took the phone off the hook: that was the only way to deal with such callers, unless you wanted to risk involving the police. He turned off the hallway light, sat down in the outward-facing armchair of the oriel, lifted a corner of the heavy velvet curtain, and peered out.

Across the street was a stately, gray–mauve apartment building with new window boxes that had already become coffins for unwatered geraniums. Through the side pane of the first floor glowed a red lamp. The gallery windows of the ground floor were circled by holiday garlands. It was still lit at half past nine in the evening. Suddenly Fanis felt short of breath—not because he suspected that the telephone voice inhabited that house, which was too gentrified and expensive to harbor common criminals but because of a certain fortuity: the lit windows coincided exactly with those of the street’s few Muslim apartments on the fateful night of the riots, just as he had seen them when he peered out of his darkened living room. As naïve as the other Rums, he had considered it wise to let the storm pass in darkness. The others, however, had been better informed: they’d been told to leave their lights on so that the pogromists would know that the houses were Muslim.

Fanis poured himself a shot of sour-cherry liqueur and returned to his perch. The next apartment building had a modern, two-tone design of light and dark paint like the braids of candy ribbons. Half a century ago, the ground-floor shop had been occupied by a quiltmaker. On the night of the riots, a watchman had passed through Faik Paşa Street before the mob. He had written tamam on the building’s door in chalk. Tamam: okay. The mob had passed the quiltmaker’s shop as if it hadn’t even existed.

Fanis heard a loud cry from somewhere nearby. In European or American cities, the noise might have passed without much more than a few raised heads. People might not have interrupted their viewing of the evening news, their phone calls to place dinner takeout orders, or their internet surfing. But in Çukurcuma, curtains were drawn from the side panes of almost every oriel. Fanis dropped his. He thought: everyone had seen; everything had been seen.

Another shout—gâvur—resounded not from the street, but from his memory. Tamam was the word for some. Gâvur, infidel, was the word for others. Fanis fumbled for the lights. He wondered whether that caller kept bothering him because he was old and alone, or because they considered him a gâvur. Fanis had cantored in Rum Orthodox churches for decades. While doing his military service, he had prayed in the mosques of Erzurum, where there were no open churches. He wondered if God existed at all and if there would be a hereafter waiting for him when he no longer had the strength to struggle with this life, but, God or no God, he would always be gâvur.

He was about to close the curtain when he noticed that the rental sign had been removed from the gray–mauve building’s garret window. There was both light and movement inside. Through the fluttering curtains Fanis spied the silhouette of a solid woman with curly dark hair. Could it be?

A few minutes later, the wind blew the curtains high once again, and Fanis imagined that he saw Selin. “Dr. Aydemir was right,” he said out loud. “I’m a deluded old man who sees whatever he wants, wherever he wants.”

He went to the bedroom and groped through the nightstand drawer. Somewhere there had to be a few remaining sleeping pills, even if they were expired. He knew he shouldn’t take them after drinking, but he had to shut out his hallucinations at any cost. He found a half-pill that had loosened from its bubble pack and nestled into a corner of the drawer. He swallowed it with the water that he always kept by the bed, double-checked that the windows and doors were properly locked, then turned on the balcony light and all the lamps in the living room, kitchen, and his late mother’s bedroom. He didn’t even remember lying down before a drug-induced coma overtook him.

Fanis awoke groggy on Saturday morning. He sat up, rubbed his disheveled head, and