Kantika: A Novel

Constantinople, 1907

I

THIS, THE BEAUTIFUL TIME, the time of wingspans, leaps and open doors, of the heedless, headlong flow from here to there. This, the time before thought, the world arriving not as lists or harkening back or future tense, but as breath-filled music—kantar, sing. Rebecca sings to the rhythm of the oars as the boat delivers her to school, and in school with the nuns—tournez vos yeux vers Jésus—and climbing ropes at Maccabi gymnastics, hand over hand and wrap your feet, girls, but what draws her up is less the instructor barking commands or the strength of her limbs than the unspooling thread of her own voice. In wordless tunes, nonsense sounds and ballads, in Ladino, French and bits of Turkish, Hebrew, Greek, she sings, as on the street the lemon man sings lemons, the Bulgarian sings pudding, the vegetable man sings eggplant, squash and artichokes—fresh, cheap, ladies, how I wait for you with my aubergine! She sings at school in chorus and for daily hymns, and at night her mother sings the children to sleep: "Durme durme, kerido ijiko…"—sleep sleep, darling boy, though two of them are girls. If the dull-eyed nightingale rarely makes a chirp, still her father stops by its cage most mornings to try to coax it into song, and he sings at synagogue—you’ve given me a throat that has not gone dry for calling out to you—and one strange morning after services, he leads Rebecca to the ark (she has just turned eight, still more baby than girl in his eyes), and she sings to the men below and the women above, her voice as unwavering as the cushioned freedoms and unspeakable good fortune of her childhood (still, her grandmother sews a bonjuk bead to the underside of every collar to ward off the evil eye).

Their house has three stories and is made of stone, which does not burn. Down the slope is Balat, where the poor Jews live, but her family lives at the top of the hill in Fener, their neighbors Greek diplomats, Armenian doctors, Jewish bankers and traders like her father, and it is with the daughters of these families and a few equally prosperous Muslim girls that Rebecca and her sister Corinne go to Catholic school. From their bedroom window, they can see the brick tower of the Greek School for Boys, and below it, the minarets of mosques, and beyond that, the Golden Horn with its blinking lighthouse and Hasköy and Galata on the other side. Downstairs, a stream of people come and go, the door more invitation than barrier, men arriving in the evening to join Rebecca’s father in prayer, and it is only after the guests kiss the mezuzah and file out into the dark that he locks the door and shuts the iron gate. On Sunday afternoons, her mother’s friends and relatives arrive to play cards, gossip and assemble baskets for the poor, and so-and-so might be a second cousin or a cousin’s cousin, or it’s Rebecca’s best friend, Rahelika, running up the stairs, or the dressmaker come for a fitting, or Oktay the music master instructing her father on the ney flute. During the week, her father is at the textile factory or out wandering the city, but on Fridays he returns to them, the house spotless, the children, too. Her mother covers her face, says the prayer and lights the candles, and as the wicks sputter and take hold, the sun goes down and the gleaming house falls quiet.

Saturday wakes to sound and light. Later in life, Rebecca will encounter Jews for whom the Sabbath is a solemn, davening affair—no apricots in syrup or pomegranates with their bloody pearls, just gefilte fish trembling in slime. Here, too, the meals are prepared ahead of time, and Gateel, the Armenian maid, arrives to start the fire, serve and wash the dishes, but the children are encouraged to dance and make merry on Shabbat, and in the afternoon, the family visits with relatives or takes a riverboat to the park, where the babies nap in a hammock tied to a tree, sometimes several babies to one tree, suspended like pendulous, damp fruit. For supper there’s cold fish with lemon and egg, and lokum for dessert, and toasted melon seeds to snack on, and the ball comes out for catch, the tambourine for song. Later, at home, they will light the braided candle, then snuff it with wine and laugh out loud to show the evil spirits that though Shabbat is over, joy remains and has no place for them. Hahaha, hahaha!

Kyen no rizika, no rozika. Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom.

IF REBECCA’S FATHER IS NOT, even then, a loud or overtly cheerful man, still he laughs often, a reedy, high, almost wheezing sound, and while he is not tall in stature, he seems tall because of how other men tip their hats to him or clap him on the shoulder, whether at kal—synagogue—or in the marketplace or coffeehouse, and he is on friendly terms with important people: the pharmacist and dentist at the sultan’s palace, the owner of the tobacco factory, who gives Rebecca candy cigarettes. He counts among his associates philosophers, scholars, bankers, even the chief rabbi, who comes to the house to discuss ideas or offer advice. Her father’s friends call him Alberto, but his real name, Abraham, means father of many, and her mother’s name, Sultana, means queen, and their family name, Cohen, means high priest, which isn’t something to brag about but something to know, just as Rebecca knows that her own name comes from her mother’s mother and means to bind or to tie, and that the name of their street, Çorbaci Çeşmesi, means soup-maker’s fountain, and one day, Rebecca and Corinne come home from school to find two bowls of steaming soup perched on the edge of the fountain and their mother telling them to thank the fountain and standing guard against the cats.

Every few years, they go to Studio Parnasse on Grande Rue de Péra, where an Armenian man with enormous hands covers himself with a dark cloth and takes their photograph. One year, their nanny, Victoria, who is also their second cousin, is with them and stands behind the children for the portrait. They’re in a faux garden with a painted backdrop of a Doric column, silk flowers at their feet. It’s supposed to be a choice—garden, palace, salon or imperial caïque—but their father always picks the garden, just as he always positions himself behind the photographer, hands up, a conductor mandating a pause.

Does he have something to prove? Es de buena famiya. Or something to preserve? He found his second marriage late in life and takes pleasure in his children’s youthful beauty, even as he feels time panting down his neck. Or something to hide? He is rarely in the photographs himself. The children’s feet ache from all the standing, but even as early as four or five years old, Rebecca notices how being photographed makes her feel more real, more seen. Alberto will frame the picture of the children with their cousin Victoria for his wife Sultana’s birthday, though she is not in it, home resting in bed, which means pregnant again and at risk of another miscarriage or stillbirth. So take your pills shipped from France. So hang a sprig of ruda—rue, the queen of herbs—over your bedroom door and collect dew in a teacup on the windowsill (he puts no stock in this nonsense, but his wife does). Pray.

BEHIND THEIR HOUSE is a small, sloped garden with Alberto’s roses and Sultana’s herbs, and in spring, crocuses, tulips and grape hyacinths, and on the street side in winter, the cold stone fountain, and always, down the hill, Rebecca’s father’s first wife, Djentil Nahon. When a fire comes—in Balat, usually, or across the water—the watchman cries out, Yangin var! Yangin var!, and everyone climbs the brick steps to the highest point on the hill to watch the smoke below, flames rising, not their house, not quite their neighborhood, but don’t feel too blessed, don’t say you’re lucky—this will curdle your luck. Just wait until the smoke clears and offer to help by giving money, food and clothes. The fire brigades spray some water, but mostly they dismantle the houses, bashing in doors, walls and windows so that the fire gobbling up one dwelling can’t leap to the next, and soon there are no houses where the fire tore through, just ashy air that stings the eyes and mattresses lumbering through the streets, headless beasts on the bent backs of men.

Is this when Rebecca feels her first flicker of unease, standing snug between her mother and little brother, Isidoro, an adult’s hand resting heavy on her hair? Is this when the skin of her eyelids first registers the possibility of sudden loss—how, for the people below, a house is a matchbox, its residents slender, red-tipped matches; strike them and they flare? The smoke smells musky sweet, the scene a shadow play lit from inside, and then the structure is on tiptoes, red ribs flaring, a fire scouring her wrists, chest, groin.

AT PURIM, THEY GIVE biscochos to the neighbors, and on Tu B’Shevat they pass out candied almonds to wish the trees a happy birthday. At Shavuot, they rent a boat and go for a picnic at the Sweet Waters of Europe, and at Orthodox Easter, the Papadopouloses next door bring them colored eggs. And if Rebecca is told not to cross in front of the church that week or go near the Easter parade with its rabbi effigy, so she is told not to do a great many things. Stay away from gypsies. Don’t pick your father’s flowers. Don’t compliment a pretty baby, and if you forget, undo the words with more words, unsaying them, a common practice in Ladino, where evil spirits are called buena djente—good people—and a blind man is a vistozo, one who can see.

In school, you must always speak French, and if you’re caught using another language, even during recess, you must put a coin in the pot for the needy. Christ is everywhere at Lycée Notre Dame de Sion—in the hallway alcove, in the classrooms, in the art studio, where they see images of Baby Jesus through the ages, naked or swaddled, dimpled or skinny, white to the point of glowing. Sometimes a porcelain baby doll in a white dress is set out on the table for them to draw. Most girls can’t get beyond a few crude shapes, but Rebecca falls happily inside the task, following the curve of arm, the broad forehead, managing the splayed fingers by focusing on the shapes between.

Twice a week, while the Christian students receive catechism, the Jewish girls attend a separate religious history class (because there are so few Muslims at the school, they get to leave early). It is led by Monsieur Eskenazi, who teaches them about Jews being chased and Jews being run out of town and Jews being brave, while an old nun dozes in the corner so they’re not left alone with a man. Who is Hashem? Monsieur intones. A hand shoots up—prissy Roza Valpreda’s: He whose name cannot be said. Rebecca has never seen an image of El Dyo, and when her father speaks of Him, it is in mind-bendingly abstract ways, as the One Who Can Be Understood for What He Is Not, or the One Who Has No Human Form, or the One Who Is Said Through the Unsaid. He lectures his children like this, growing increasingly driven, until Rebecca’s mother stops him, and so they lightly argue: But I need to teach them, Sultana!—But you talk too much, darling—Well, you talk too little—Not true, I talk plenty, just not of things impossible for a child to understand.

Be sage in the classroom, hands clasped, face to front, and curtsy when you see Notre Mère Marie-Godeleine, who takes a special interest in the Jewish girls because the school was founded by a Jewish-German convert whose dark oil portrait hangs in the front hall. Learn to sew and embroider—first with thick red wool, then with cotton, and finally with silk for your trousseau—and dress à la Franca, in outfits modeled on the latest fashions from Pareee. Be generous to the poor. Rebecca and Corinne go with their mother to bring packages to a Jewish orphanage in a neighborhood where the cratered streets have no name and women squat in doorways, cooking on outdoor grills. The girls are not allowed to leave the carriage, but they may wave from their perch to the orphan boys who hop up to get the bundles from the back. Their parents call this benadamlik—to be a good person—and at school the nuns write it in perfect cursive on the chalkboard as le devoir avant tout.

Whatever its name, Rebecca’s childhood is steeped in it, and this both speaks to and goes against her nature, which is to open her hands, touch, offer, create—but also to grab, stow, hoard. And while she is too young to know that her father is a distracted, half-hearted businessman fast burning through the family fortune, and that the tides are turning against the Greeks and especially the Armenians but also the Jews, and that her people are only long-term guests here in an economy of tolerance, she is nonetheless the one, out of all her friends, most likely to spot the glint of a coin lodged between the cobblestones, hungry for the silvery taste of fished-out luck.

II

HALFWAY DOWN THE HILL live two important people—Rahelika and Djentil Nahon. Rebecca has always had a best friend and it has always been Rahelika, who goes to school with her and to gymnastics and to the summer house in Büyükdere, because their mothers are close friends, and Lika’s father is a poorly paid teacher at an Alliance Israélite school, and they have no summer house. The two girls look alike, both dark-haired and petite. Strangers sometimes mistake them for twins, though Rebecca’s eyes are lighter, and they tote around twin dolls, birthday gifts from Rebecca’s father—Chérie and Bella, with blond ringlets and beatific smiles. Rebecca stands out at school at drawing, painting and singing, while Lika, on a scholarship to Sion, is gifted in math and science and would like to be a nurse, which the nuns say is possible if you pray and study hard enough. Beccalika, Mère Mélanie (so young, pretty and mirth-filled that she seems more like an older sister than a nun) calls the girls, or Likabecca, and by the time Rebecca is nine, her own home overrun with babies, she is allowed to walk alone to Lika’s house, clutching Chérie, down the hill past the glassblower with his burned face, past the furrier, fishmonger, sesame oil maker, until she arrives at Lika’s door.

There, she is fussed over, cooked for, doted on by Lika’s mother and allowed to sink with Lika into hours of imaginary play, or they’ll leaf through the illustrated French magazines Lika’s father uses with his students—Journal des Voyages and Je Sais Tout—finding one day, among the shirtless whalers and feathered Indian chiefs, an illustrated folio on the Oriental Jew, and there, a lady with a black strap winding from beneath her chin to the top of her head and another strap circling her dress, hoisting up her enormous bosom. Her expression is dazed, her eyes beady; she might be a trussed bird. TYPICAL TURKISH JEWESS reads the caption. Between laughing fits, the girls stuff themselves with tea towels, bind each other in sashes and pretend to pose for photographs. Sometimes on Sunday nights, Rebecca sleeps at Lika’s, bringing her school uniform with its white lace collar and black frock, and in winter, the black peacoat and wide-brimmed hat, and in spring, the straw hat made in France.

Djentil Nahon, Rebecca’s father’s first wife, lives upstairs from Lika, and Lika calls her tiya, for aunt, though they’re not related, so Rebecca does too. Several times a week, Tiya Djentil calls out the window or bangs on her floor, which is Lika’s ceiling, and the girls know this means she has a task for them. When they come out to the street, she lowers money in a basket on a rope and sends them off to peddlers or shops, errands that Lika’s mother says they must fulfill cheerfully because to be childless is a sorrow and Tiya worries about leaving her ancient mother on her own. Sometimes the girls make quick work of it and deliver the items into the basket. Other times Tiya Djentil says come up for a visit, mi suvrinas, I’ve made you a cake. So dutifully at first and then with increasing desire, they climb the steep stairs to the dark apartment, and as her old mother snores on the couch, Tiya Djentil offers them almond cakes and linden tea or black coffee with sugar, which they gulp down fast so she can read their fortunes in the muddy grounds. After the food is served and Tiya Djentil says kome kon gana—eat with desire—she settles her tiny, oddly girlish body into a massive wooden chair and tells them stories of the kind that Rebecca’s father loathes and her mother tolerates and Rebecca hungers for.

"SO ONE DAY LAST WEEK, I banged and called—I’d made you cake—but you didn’t come. First I thought, all right, so they’re not coming, they’re at school or helping their mothers, but soon it was late afternoon and I’d stopped calling but started to worry. Something terrible has happened! A kidnapping, accident or fire, even a rape—you shouldn’t know what it is—but then I realized there were evil spirits, shedim, right here in my house, inhabiting my wooden spoon, because when I clipped my good mother’s nails, I forgot to burn the parings. So I said, Mama, wake up, quick! There’s trouble in our spoon! Notice I didn’t say shedim aloud to her—if you name them in their presence, they’ll come forward. My poor mother woke up and started whimpering—ahhh, ahhh, ahhh!—like somebody was poking her with a hot knife. They were there that day, the shedim! The spoon came after me, and my mother, too! But not you girls. I must have kept you away without realizing it. I knew in my bones before the spoon told me. I’m blessed with that kind of knowing. Maybe you have it, too."

Rebecca glances at Lika, whose lips are white with powdered sugar, and Lika, trying not to laugh, snorts instead, sugar puffing from her mouth. Something also rises in Rebecca, but it’s not laughter. Might she also have that special kind of knowing? Does she want it? The objects on the table—the plate of cookies, tarnished bombonyera full of stale candies, jars of beads and cloves—take on a sudden weight, as if each has not a face, exactly, but a soul, a personality and will. Her dreams regularly contain things that are more than things—a wardrobe that walks but has no feet, a boat that laughs but has no mouth, people who are not quite people, though they appear to be. For as long as she can remember, she’s seen faces everywhere, not just in the clouds, which is common, but in knots of wood and bowed iron window grilles and the flowers in her father’s garden with their gaping mouths and silky heads. A few years ago at Pesach, she glimpsed the Prophet Elijah, just the cuff of his sleeve and his hand on the stem of a wineglass, but to see him at all is something that happens only to dogs and to people with a special gift.

So then what happened? she asks Tiya Djentil.

The spoon in my hand got so hot that my skin, right here, started shedding, peeling off— She holds up a finger with a shiny, raw tip.

Oh, Tiya! You burned it! says Lika. You need to wrap it. Do you have any bandages? I can get some from my mother.

Djentil waves her off. No need. I took care of it.

How? asks Rebecca.

Tiya shrugs. Just sugar and paper.

On your burned finger? You’ll get an infection! Lika sounds almost angry.

"Of course not! I put the sugar and paper under my pillow. Then the next day, you drink it with the dew. Like so, they leave. ‘Vos do dulsuria, ke me desh sultura.’ I give you sweetness that you may release me. This is a reliable cure, but promise me you won’t write it down. All true wisdom goes from mouth to ear. Until you tell, keep it shut away—she raps twice on her forehead—here."

In this manner, she goes on. Some of what she says is familiar to the girls, who have plenty of relatives who still believe in spirits and the evil eye, though at school the nuns will snip off their amulets if they spot them (but what of the wine as blood and the wafer as flesh; is this not equally far-fetched?). The girls’ fathers are opposed to the old ways, but their mothers still reflexively neutralize a compliment with sin ojo or ojo malo ke no tengan!—without the eye; may the evil eye not get you. One day Djentil tells them that because sleep is one sixtieth part death, you can meet dead souls in dreams. The next, Rebecca’s father tells them he just read that cosmic rays have been discovered by a scientist who climbed the Eiffel Tower. Why not? Either, both. One thing seems as plausible as the next.

More and more, Rebecca looks forward to her visits with Tiya Djentil. Everywhere she lives, works and studies contains a steady march toward order, from her home, which is a well-oiled machine despite its brood of children; to her school with its graph paper and polished floors; to her gymnastics club, where they parade military style, flexing their slight arms, because to be a Jew is to be strong is to be proud. At Tiya Djentil’s, she finds another world. Despite its cramped size, the apartment reminds her of the forbidden quarters of the city she longs to explore: the Spice Bazaar, where she’s only been once, on a school trip where they had to hold on to a length of communal rope, or the gypsy shows in the streets where a bear on a chain bangs a drum and slow-dances with his Romani master. Once, watching the bear from afar, she started panting with delight and would, if not restrained by her mother, have run straight into the arms of the dignified, sad, shuffling creature and buried her nose in the musk-oil blanket of its fur. Even then (she couldn’t have been more than four), she knew it as a tale to tell and magnify, repeating it for months, though in her mind, it always took place yesterday: Yesterday I danced with the big bear! Tell the truth, Rebecca, her mother scolded from early on. Embroider your embroidery, that’s all.

When her parents tell stories, the tales hold clear morals and almost never contain the word I. Not so with Djentil Nahon: Did I tell you about losing my presyoza mother in a fire? Did I tell you about the wild dog who snatched my baby in the night?

Afterward, when the girls emerge into the daylight, they take stock, and sometimes it’s Rebecca who comforts Lika, who gets upset by Djentil’s wanderings in a way that Rebecca rarely does, or sometimes it’s Lika who dismantles the stories to find the chinks in them: She said it happened in July but it was snowing in the story; her mother isn’t dead, she’s on the couch! Now and then they sneak into their own mothers’ gardens to pick herbs to put in potions or hang in the doorway, and if terrible things happen in their games (fire, illness, fanged creatures, maimed children, dead siblings), there’s always a brew or spell to turn things around, and if they run out of stories or crave sweets, they can always run another errand for Tiya Djentil.

The fact that Rebecca’s father used to be married to Djentil Nahon is simply how it is. It will take Rebecca a long time to think it noteworthy that her father even had a wife before her mother. That he is much older than her mother is also just how it is, and while she understands abstractly that her parents had lives before her, this doesn’t much interest her, and they rarely speak of it. When finally, after spending the better part of an afternoon with Djentil Nahon, she asks her mother why her father’s first marriage ended, she is told that Djentil Nahon could not have children.

A dog snatched her baby, Rebecca almost says, but something stops her. Why didn’t they find an orphan?

It’s not that simple and not your business. Just be kind to her.

"I am kind. Yesterday we got her bread."

Her mother puts down her sewing and peers at her. Lika’s mother told me Sinyora Nahon has you up for tea. She says she’s harmless. It’s good of you to help her.

I don’t mind.

Does she know who you are, that Papa is your father?

In their neighborhood, doesn’t everyone know everyone? I think so. I don’t know.

Best not to mention it. Her mother is stitching again, something small and delicate, the needle dipping, rising, dipping in her right hand as her left rotates the hoop. It might unsettle her to think of it.

Why? Was Papa unkind to her?

Her mother hesitates. Not unkind, she just … she has troubles. Your papa helps her still. She has no little girl of her own. She sighs. "I’ve been—ojo malo—so lucky, even if my work never ends." She ties off a knot and cuts the tail with her teeth.

How does he help her?

Enough, Rebecca.

Does he give her money?

Do you ask this many questions in school? I pity your nuns.

Her mother has filled the corner of her mouth with pins now, the pearled ends sticking out as she releases the hoop and fastens the patch she’s been working on to a bigger swathe, all of it white and gauzy, smelling clean. Rebecca sees that it will be a dress for her little sister, Elsa, with a smocked, embroidered center, and in the middle, a duck holding an umbrella in the rain, and beside the duck, a rabbit in galoshes. The rain is done in slanted gray running stitch, the boots in pink cross-stitch. The eyes—pink for the rabbit, black for the duck—are snug French knots. It is the most beautiful thing, and not for her.

Hold this for me, please, says her mother through a mouth still stabbed with pins, but as Rebecca fights the urge to push the fabric away, Elsa starts crying from the nursery, which wakes Marko, who starts crying, too, and then the nanny is there—a new, stout one from Bulgaria—Elsa on her hip, Marko at her side, and her mother returns the pins to their plump rose cushion and rises with a backward glance—have you done your homework yet?—before descending on the little ones with open