The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online Page A

trying to find a better spot to watch two other prisoners exchange blows. After losing the love of her life, Cevriye sold their house and joined the Kazancı domicile as a humorless history teacher with a Spartan sense of discipline and self-control. Just as she waged battle against plagiarism at school, she took it upon herself to crusade against impulsiveness, disruption, and spontaneity at home.
    Then there was Sabahattin, the tenderhearted, good-natured, but equally self-effacing husband of Banu. Though he was not a blood relative and looked exceptionally hale and hearty, though the two were still married on paper, except for a brief period following their honeymoon, Banu had spent more time in her family’s konak than at home with her husband. So noticeable was their physical distance that when Banu had announced being heavy with twin boys everyone had joked about the technical impossibility of the pregnancy. Yet the ominous fate awaiting every Kazancı man had struck the twins at an early age. Upon losing her toddler boys to childhood illnesses, Banu permanently moved into her family house, only to sporadically visit her husband in the years that followed. Every now and then she went to see if he was doing okay, more like a concerned stranger than a loving spouse.
    Then, of course, there was Mustafa, the only son in the current generation, a precious gem bequeathed by Allah amid four daughters. The result of Levent Kazancı’s fixation on having a boy to bear his surname had been that the four Kazancı sisters had each grown up feeling like unwelcome visitors. The first three children were all girls. Banu, Cevriye, and Feride had each felt like an introduction before the real thing, an accidental prelude in their parents’ sex life, so determinedly were they oriented toward a male child. As for the fifth child, Zeliha, she knew she had been conceived with the hope that fortune could be generous twice in a row. After finally having a boy, her parents had wanted to see if they were lucky enough to make another one.
    Mustafa was precious from the day he was born. A series of measures had been taken to protect him from the grim fate awaiting all the men in the family tree. As a baby he was bundled in evil-eye beads and amulets; as a toddler he was kept under constant surveillance, and until age eight his hair was kept long like a girl’s so as to deceive Azrail, the angel of death. Whenever someone needed to address the child, “girl” they would say, “girl, come here!” Though a good student, most of Mustafa’s high school life was ruined by his inability to socialize. A king in his house, the boy seemed to refuse to be one among many in the classroom. So unpopular had he become over time that when Gülsüm wanted to throw a party for Mustafa and his friends to celebrate their graduation, there was no one to invite.
    So arrogantly antisocial outside his house, so indisputably cherished as the king at home, and with the passing of each birthday so ominously close to the doom suffered by all the Kazancı men, after a while it seemed like a good idea to send Mustafa abroad. Within a month, Petite-Ma’s jewels were sold for the money required and the eighteen-year-old son of the Kazancı family left Istanbul for Arizona, where he became an undergraduate student in agricultural and biosystems engineering and would hopefully survive to see his old age.
    Hence, when on that first Friday of July, Gülsüm chided Zeliha, asking her to be grateful for the lack of men in the family, there was some truth somewhere in that statement. In response Zeliha said nothing. Instead she went to the kitchen to find and feed the only male in the house—a silver tabby cat with an insatiable hunger, an unusual fondness for water, and plentiful social-stress symptoms, which could at best be interpreted as independent, and at worst, as neurotic. His name was Pasha the Third.
    In the Kazancı konak generations of cats had succeeded each