The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online

righteous Kazancı family! Let this child live! You don’t know it yet, but this child will be a leader. This baby will be a monarch!’ ”
    “He cannot!” the teacher Cevriye broke in, missing no opportunity to show her expertise. “There aren’t monarchs anymore, we are a modern nation.”
    “ ‘Oooo you sinner, this child will rule over others!’ ” Zeliha continued, pretending not to have heard the lesson. “ ‘Not only this country, not only the entire Middle East and the Balkans, but the whole world will know her name. This child of yours will lead the masses, and bring peace and justice to humankind!’ ”
    Zeliha paused and let out a breath.
    “Anyhow, good news everybody! The baby is still with me! Before long, we’ll put another plate at this table.”
    “A bastard!” Gülsüm exclaimed. “You want to bring into this family a child out of wedlock. A bastard!”
    The word’s effect spread out, like a pebble thrown into still water.
    “Shame on you! You’ve always brought disgrace on this family.” Gülsüm’s face contorted in anger. “Look at your nose piercing. . . . All that makeup and the revoltingly short skirts, and oh, those high heels! This is what happens when you dress up . . . like a whore! You should thank Allah night and day; you should be grateful that there are no men around in this family. They’d have killed you.”
    It wasn’t quite true. Not the part about the killing perhaps, but the part about there being no men in the family. There were. Somewhere. But it was also true that there were far fewer men than women in the Kazancı family. Like an evil spell put on the whole lineage, generations after generations of Kazancı men had died young and unexpectedly. Petite-Ma’s husband, Rıza Selim Kazancı, for instance, had all of a sudden dropped dead at sixty, unable to breathe. Then in the next generation, Levent Kazancı had died of a heart attack before he had reached his fifty-first birthday, following the patterns of his father and his father’s father. It looked as if the life span of the men in the family got shorter and shorter with each generation.
    There was a great-uncle who had run away with a Russian prostitute, only to be robbed by her of all his money and frozen to death in St. Petersburg; another kinsman had gone to his last resting place after being hit by a car while trying to cross the autobahn heavily intoxicated; various nephews had died as early as their twenties, one of them drowning while swimming drunk under the full moon, another one hit in the chest by a bullet fired by a hooligan enjoying himself after his soccer team had won the cup, yet another nephew having fallen into a six-foot-deep ditch dug out by the municipality to renovate the street gutters. Then there was a second cousin, Ziya, who had shot himself, for no apparent reason.
    Generation after generation, as if complying with an unwritten rule, the men in the Kazancı family tree had died young. The greatest age any had reached in the current generation was forty-one. Determined not to repeat the pattern, another great-uncle had taken utmost care to lead a healthy life, strictly refraining from overeating, sex with prostitutes, contacts with hooligans, alcohol and other sorts of intoxicants, and had ended up crushed by a concrete chunk falling from a construction site he happened to pass by. Then there was Celal, a distant cousin, who was the love of Cevriye’s life and the husband she lost in a brawl. For reasons still unclear, Celal had been sentenced to two years on charges of bribery. During this time Celal’s presence in the family had been confined to the infrequent letters he had been sending from jail, so vague and distant that when the news of his death had arrived, for everyone other than his wife, it had felt like losing a third arm, one that you never had. He departed this life in a fight, not by a blow or a punch, but by stepping on a high-voltage electricity cable while