A Sack of Pastries
By Rosaleen Bertolino


Cemil watched the lady hand Yeter something wrapped in waxy white paper.

“For your child,” she said softly. “A pastry.”

“Such kindness, lady,” replied Yeter. Cemil could tell she was displeased. Her thighs, across which he lay, tensed as she spoke. She did not sit on the sidewalk all day for pastry; it was money she wanted.

Cemil gazed at the hem of the lady’s black skirt and her shining black shoes. Her body loomed. From Cemil’s perspective, flat on his back, everything was mountainous. Seven days a week he lay on Yeter’s lap; when her legs tired, he lay on a blanket on the sidewalk.

The world hurried past. Children skipped and ran. Cemil admired the shoes that had little red lights that flashed at the heels when they jumped. Sometimes, their eyes met his. The littlest were curious, the older ones disgusted—a few of these sneered. Adults did not look at them. They churned past, their legs flashing, clutching plastic shopping bags or with a cell phone pressed to one ear. When they tossed money into Yeter’s rusty dolmas tin, they did it quickly and without comment.

This lady was an exception. She lingered as Yeter tucked the pastry into the folds of her ragged clothes.

“How old is the child?” she asked. The skin of her hands was smooth and plump, unlike Yeter’s rough, bony hands.

“Five years, lady,” said Yeter.

Cemil thought Yeter might be lying. He did not know how old he was—how could she? They had not met until after his legs had disappeared.

“Leave the talking to me,” Yeter had told him the first day out. “If you get me in trouble, your tongue will disappear as well.” She was talking about the men in charge of them, not the people on the street.

“Dear child,” said the lady. She leaned down. The light touch of her hand on his cheek felt foreign and disturbing, as if an insect had landed on his face. He wanted to brush it away but he knew it was necessary to lie still. Her eyes were brown, with clear whites. White jewels sparkled on her earlobes. She smelled like warm bread. Her interest in him was terrifying. “There are people who will pretend to be your friend,” Umut had warned him. “Don’t believe it. They will take your happiness away.”

“I want to tell you about the shelter,” the lady said to Yeter.

Yeter began to rock and mutter. It was what she did when she wanted to get rid of an annoyed shopkeeper or a policeman. If people thought you were crazy, they left in a hurry.

“The shelter will feed and clothe you,” the lady continued, raising her voice. “There will be medicine for your child.” She held out a card to Yeter. When Yeter did not take it, the lady placed the card into the rusty tin.

“I can take you there now,” said the lady.

Yeter screamed. Her agitation was real, not an act.

“Please think it over,” the lady said, and was gone.

Yeter spit onto the sidewalk when she was sure the lady was out of sight. “Snake!” she cursed. “All the money we lost while she stood there with her phony smile.”

Cemil was relieved that the lady was gone, too. Her soft voice and intense interest combined with Yeter’s agitation had left him spinning, like a discarded bag the wind tumbled along the street.

Yeter picked up the card and stared at it. Neither of them could read. “Umut will want to know about this,” she said, tucking it into her skirt next to the pastry for safekeeping.

Cemil could smell the pastry: buttery and sweet. It would not do to eat it until they got home. Yeter and Cemil never ate or drank in public. That was the number one rule. People gave only to those who had nothing. The worse off you looked, the more money you made. People would scowl if they caught them licking honey off their fingers. He drooled a little in anticipation nonetheless.

One other time in his life he had tasted a pastry, in a medical clinic. Sticky and sweet it had been, shaped like a paw, each toe studded with a slivered almond for the claw. He had been astonished that there could be anything so clever and delicious in the world and he had eaten it slowly, toe by crispy toe, and finally the softer middle part. But the best and the worst memories of his life tangled together: the morning after the pastry, the bottom part of his legs had vanished, all the way to his knees.

Once he had been able to run as well as anyone at the orphanage. Then he had fallen out of a mulberry tree and landed on a rake. He had been driven a long time in the back of a van, such a long way that when the van finally stopped, the people who took his hand no longer spoke his language.

He was taken to the clinic. He ate a pastry, and woke to see bandaged stumps where his legs had been. He was put into another van and driven to the house, where Umut gave him an injection, his first dose of happiness. Day by day the old language faded, replaced by the new one. Bit by bit, he became used to his new life. But still he missed his legs.

Tears ran from his eyes. Coins clattered into Yeter’s dolmas tin.

“Good job,” she whispered. She did not know that he was grieving for his legs. She believed that his stumps were an advantage. “Twice, three times the money for cripples,” she’d said.

“Cemil is the best we have,” Umut had said once. “A natural.”

Now, whenever Cemil felt envious of those whose legs did not end at the knees, he turned Umut’s praise over in his mind, a sweet that he could taste again and again.

He practiced ways to keep his mind busy so that he would not become restless as he lay on Yeter’s lap. He told himself stories about a boy whose legs were miraculously restored to him. They had been hidden inside a locked trunk. Several times as he dozed in the heat of the day the story had gone the other way, becoming a nightmare in which his hands vanished as well.

He began to wonder about the pastry tucked in Yeter’s skirts. Was it a trick? If he ate it, might his arms cease to function? Perhaps the lady had been a demon in disguise. The pastry’s rich scent tortured him. He moaned and rolled off Yeter’s lap to get away from it.

Yeter pinched him hard. “Stay still,” she hissed. He lay on his back on the blanket. The sky, pale blue, was crisscrossed with electrical wires. He imagined the wires to be a net, protecting him from the dangerous emptiness into which he could otherwise tumble. A bird landed on the pointed top of the gold minaret that jutted up from behind the building across the street. After the evening call to prayer, Umut would come.

Yeter’s mood improved as the day passed. It was a Friday, the most generous day of the week. Those headed to the mosque threw coins into Yeter’s tin. As the day became hotter and then colder again, Yeter emptied the tin many times into the bag tucked between her legs. By the time Umut arrived to pick them up, they had done quite well.

“That spot is dangerous,” said Yeter to Umut as he drove them home. They were crowded with the others—Getel, Altan, Cronk and the two Irmaks—on the floor in the back of the van.

“What happened?”

“This.” Yeter handed him the card.

The van wove slightly as Umut glanced at it. “I see,” he said. He flicked the card out the window. “I will be sure to pass the information along.”

“I want a new spot,” said Yeter. “What if she comes back?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Umut.

Near the high pink walls of the Palace hotel, they became caught in a traffic jam. Everyone was heading home from work, including them.

“Yeter smells like a bakery,” Cronk said. His blind eyes rolled back and forth as he leaned forward to sniff her chest.

Yeter shrank back.

Cemil could smell it, too. Cronk thrust a hand out and Yeter slapped him away.

By the time Umut pulled up to the house, Cemil longed for his happiness even more than he wanted the sweet. Every cell in his body ached for it.

Yeter tied the piece of rubber tubing around her forearm first; then it was his turn. At the beginning, Cemil had been frightened of the needle. No longer. “Our remedy for the ills of life,” Yeter called it. The misery left Cemil’s body, washed away by pure pleasure. He and Yeter lay quietly, side by side on the rugs, simply breathing. In the next room, someone turned on the radio and they heard an advertisement for yogurt.

That reminded Yeter. She pulled the pastry out from its hiding place. It was slightly squashed. “Want some?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you joking?”

“I ate a pastry once,” said Cemil, “and my legs went away.”

“Suit yourself.” Yeter wolfed it down while Cemil watched, swallowing the saliva that flooded his mouth. Her tongue circled the edges of her lips, licking up the last little crumbs. He waited anxiously to see what would happen to her.

Yeter looked like a crone because she had no teeth although she claimed to be in her twenties. She could eat only soft foods, rice and hummus, nothing chewy. “Oh that was good. I could live on those,” she sighed.

“Do your legs still work?”

Yeter grinned and kicked them in the air. Cemil was relieved, and regretful that he’d turned down a taste.

“You told the lady I was five years old,” he said.

She shrugged. “What does it matter?”

“I think I’m older,” he said.

“Younger is better,” said Yeter. “If you are five, you are tragic. If you are eleven, you are a monster.” She scratched at her head. Her black hair was thin.

“I’m eleven?”

“That was an example, silly. You won’t be eleven for a while yet, judging from your teeth.”

Cemil’s hand went to his mouth, where a tooth was loose. Every time one fell out, he worried that another would not grow in to replace it, but so far, new teeth had come, three of them.

Sometimes Yeter told Cemil about the dramatic losses of her own teeth, how several had been knocked out by a lover and the others gone brown and so painful that it was a relief when the dental school pried them out. Sometimes she spoke of the aunt and uncle who had beaten her until she ran away. Sometimes she wept and he curled up against her. Today she said dreamily, “I should like to live in a bakery. I would eat pastries all day long.”

“I would like my legs back,” Cemil confided, since they were speaking of the impossible.

“You are a little pastry,” Yeter said to him.

Cemil blushed with fright and pleasure.

The next morning, feeling sad, Yeter injected herself with an extra syringe of happiness. Then it was Cemil’s turn. As his blood hummed deliciously, Yeter began to shake. By the time Umut arrived, her eyes had rolled back in her head.

Umut and tall Irmak splashed her with cold water and walked her limp body back and forth. Then they laid her on the floor.

“Do you think it was the pastry?” Cemil asked Umut.

“What are you saying?”

“She ate a pastry last night.”

“The little pig.” Umut laughed mirthlessly.

Cemil felt prickles running up and down his body.

Umut made him go out for the day with Getel.

She rolled him along in a tiny cart with wobbly wheels to a place he had never been to before. They sat at the entrance to a public garden. Skinny cats crept through the bushes hunting bugs and mice.

“It’s strange here,” said Cemil, frightened of the cats.

“It’s good here,” said Getel, inclining her head.

Just down the street were fancy shops with large plate glass windows. Women in beautiful clothes strolled by. Cemil saw gold shoes and green, silver and white, some with heels as tall and skinny as the handle of a coffee spoon. A man with eyes of the same blue as Yeter’s marched toward them. Cemil’s heart twisted as he passed.

“Is Yeter alive?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Getel. “May God bless her.”

Tears rolled down Cemil’s cheeks. “I wish she’d never eaten that pastry.”

“That won’t kill you,” Getel snorted. “No one ever died from a pastry except maybe choking on it.”

“How did she get sick then?”

Getel squeezed him by the arm. “She injected too much. Now shut up.”

Cemil had not known it was possible to have too much happiness. He puzzled over the idea that the things that gave you the most pleasure—a pastry, a syringe of happiness—could also hurt you. He wished that he was with Yeter.

Getel’s technique was noisier than Yeter’s. She held out her grimy hands and pleaded. “A mite, dear lady. Whatever you can spare, fine gentlemen.” Cemil did not think that got her more money than Yeter although she certainly got more attention. People frowned as they tossed coins, as if hoping to shut her up. Some stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter in order to avoid her and the upside-down cap that served as her begging bowl.

“I recognize this child.”

Cemil’s heart stopped. It was the lady from yesterday. Today her gleaming shoes were brown and she wore blue trousers. He wanted to cry out a warning to Getel. But the rules were that he was not to speak in front of strangers, and the rules, as Umut had explained, were for his own safety. “Those people will never, never let you have your happiness again,” Umut had said, his narrow, bristly face pressed up to Cemil’s. “Do you like your happiness? Do you understand?”

Getel stretched out a hand. “Can you spare us a little, lady? Just a mite?”

The lady squatted, her knees twin peaks. Her silky jacket grazed the dirty sidewalk. Cemil watched in fascination as she smiled, showing a full mouth of teeth, white and strong. The jewels sparkled on her ears like stars.

“How old is the child?”

“Three, lady,” said Getel, wiping at her eyes with the edge of her scarf.

The lady’s smile disappeared. “Three?”

“And two more children at home,” Getel sighed. Cemil prayed silently for Getel not to be stupid and for the lady to go away.

“I can help you,” the lady said. “Are you willing to let me help you?”

“A mite is all we ask,” said Getel. “A few spare coins.”

“I offer a warm bed and nourishing food.”

“That’s most kind of you, lady.” Getel’s voice rose in alarm. Finally, it seemed, she understood what was up. “I’m afraid we cannot accept. I must get home to nurse my sick husband.”

“Yesterday the child was with a different woman,” said the lady sternly. “Yesterday I was told the child was five.”

“Dearest lady, the child is motherless,” Getel stammered.

“I could have you arrested,” the lady said.

As if on cue, two large young policemen appeared down the street.

Getel stood. “Take him,” she said. Lifting her skirts, she ran, leaving behind the wagon, the hat with its few coins, and Cemil.

A pair of sturdy arms lifted him up. Cemil closed his eyes and hid himself inside his mind. Yeter would not have deserted him like that, he thought.

Two young men peeled away Cemil’s clothes, shaved his head, and washed him, wrinkling their noses and teasing one another as they worked. Cemil kept his eyes shut. When they addressed him, he said nothing. “What is your name?” they asked. “Would you like a sweet?” He could keep himself safe by hiding. He wanted Yeter and if he could not have Yeter then Umut. Most of all, his wanted his happiness. He ached for it.

They wrapped him in a sheet that smelled of the bleach the storekeepers washed the sidewalks with mornings and brought him to a small room. Cemil began shaking. His arms would vanish now. Or they would kill him altogether.

The doctor, an irritable man with thick eyeglasses, poked at his ears and eyes, pried open his mouth and muttered, placed a cold metal disc against his chest. He squeezed Cemil’s stumps and clicked his tongue. Next he pressed at Cemil’s arms, putting his face so close that his large nose brushed the skin. “Track marks!” he shouted.

“How did this happen?” he asked Cemil accusingly. “Who did this to you?”

Cemil shook his head and would not answer. Umut was right, he thought. They will take my happiness away.

The metal prostheses and the crutches felt strange. They were real, not a dream. If he had been dreaming, it would have been better: his lower legs, his feet, his toes would have grown back. He would have been able to run. Instead, his gait was as laborious and clumsy as an old man’s. Nevertheless, the worst days, when he had wanted to die because he could not have his happiness, were over.

“It’s poison,” the doctor told him. “It will kill you.”

Cemil could tell the doctor had never tried happiness. If he had, he would not speak that way. It only hurt you if you injected too much. Cemil still longed for it, the way he still longed for real legs.

Every day the man who made him walk came. Cemil did what he was told, struggling past the rows of beds to the window and back again. When the man left, Cemil retreated to the corner, behind his bed, and closed his eyes. The shelter reminded him of the orphanage: children that no one wanted, including him. Several were blind and one, like the boy in his nightmares, had no arms. Cemil did not speak to them.

Mid-morning a puddle of sunlight came, buttering his face, warm and yellow against his closed eyes. He drifted back to the street, saw shoes clipping past and felt again as though he might tumble off the earth and into the sky. Perhaps what Yeter had dreamed of had come true: she had found a bakery to live in. He told himself new stories. How he would grow taller and walk faster and visit every bakery in the city until one day he found Yeter.

“Would you like a sweet?”

A hand brought a baklava up to his nose. Cemil smelled the honey and the nuts and turned his head away.

“Isn’t it funny that he doesn’t like sweets?”

“You’d think he was a little old man the way he naps.”

The lady stood in front of him. Cemil’s insides clenched anxiously, as frightened as though he was being inspected by God almighty.

“How do like your new legs?”

Cemil shrugged.

“You don’t use them much, I hear.” Her hand reached out and held his chin, her fingers cool and smooth. She took her hand away and Cemil could breathe again. She folded her arms and tapped a foot. “I’m going to take you on a walk. Where would you like to go?”

He had never been asked this question before. Not once in his entire life.

“Come now. A meatball shop perhaps? The park?”

He was still afraid of the lady but beginning to understand the possibilities. His thoughts rushed to the future. “A bakery?”

“So you can talk! You don’t like sweets but you want to go to a bakery?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Very well. My name is Tansu. And yours?”

“I am called Cemil.”

The bakery was only a block away, Tansu told him. Not far. But he had only been on the streets of the city before in a wagon or someone’s arms. The difference between lying on the sidewalk in Yeter’s lap and trying to walk with his crutches was the difference between lying under a mulberry tree and trying to climb it.

He was sure he would fall. Tansu gripped his elbow. “Take it slowly,” she said.

Faces bobbed toward him. They passed a beggar, an old man with the cloudy white eyes of the blind, and for a moment, Cemil’s heart flew into his throat, thinking it was Cronk. He might speak to him, send Umut a message to come, to take him back. But the man was someone else. “Let’s move on,” Tansu said.

Someone jostled him. A plastic bag entangled with one of his crutches.

“I want to go back,” he said.

“Too late. We’re here.” She pointed to a large window painted with gold letters.

Inside was more glass, and behind it row after row of pastries, hundreds of them, arranged like treasures. The people inside wore white just like they did at the clinic.

A fat man took him through a curtained doorway and sat him on a stool next to another man, who was squeezing white paste out of a plastic bag, making a pretty spiral on top of a shiny brown bun. When the spiral was done, he placed a candied cherry in the center.

A machine with an enormous paddle stirred batter.

Flour hung in the air like dust.

The oven door opened and the scent of sesame seeds and butter fluttered out. There were bowls of eggs. There were brown stars cooling on tall racks. In a corner a teenage boy rolled green jellies in powdered sugar.

The man decorating the buns winked at Cemil. He was handsome with sparkling black eyes and arms covered with crispy black hair. When he smiled, Cemil saw that he was missing a few teeth.

“Do you know Yeter?” Cemil asked him.

The man paused. “No,” he said. “Would you like to put on the cherries?”

Cemil just wanted to watch.

White goo was spooned into a pan and came out of the oven a smooth beige cake. Balls of soft yellowish dough fried up bronze and crisp. Cream was poured into a bowl, beaten with a whisk, and transformed into clouds.

Magic.

“Would you like to come again?” Tansu asked, coming back into the kitchen.

“I would like to stay, lady,” said Cemil. He understood now why Yeter wanted to live here.

“Wash your hands,” said the baker.

Cemil put five cherries on five buns, dead center.

“You have a fine hand,” said the baker.

“I don’t know how old I am,” said Cemil. “Yeter said that I was five but she didn’t know.”

“You look about six to me,” said the baker. “But you might be small for your age. Will you come again?”

“Yes, please.”

They gave Cemil a paper bag and told him to fill it. His heart pounded as he picked golden nests drenched in honey, jellies, cream cakes, three of the cherry-topped buns that he had helped to decorate, and the star-shaped cookies freckled with sesame seeds.

“Aren’t you going to eat any?” said Tansu. She bit into a baklava; the handsome baker was devouring a bun.

“Go on, taste something,” they said.

“I’m saving them,” said Cemil.

“You are a very strange child,” said Tansu. “If we come back tomorrow, they can give you more, you know.”

The idea of more made him dizzy. Reaching for one of the freckled stars he felt as if he were once again falling, as he had from the mulberry tree.

Tansu smiled encouragingly, as Yeter had that first time they injected him with happiness. The cookie shattered in his mouth—grainy, buttery, and sweet. Heavenly. He ate it all.

“Good?” she asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Yes.”

Heading back to the shelter was easier than leaving it had been. He felt anchored by the bag of pastries, which swung against his thighs each time he lifted the crutches, and by Tansu, who had promised that he would not fall. Stopping to rest, he closed his eyes against the rushing crowd and, putting his hand inside the bag, felt for a cherry-topped bun.

Rosaleen Bertolino's short stories have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Hawaii Pacific Review, Stringtown, Marginalia, Dark Sky, and Tertulia. Work is forthcoming in West Marin Review and Tiferet. She has twice been a finalist for Glimmer Train's very short fiction award, and has received an individual artist's grant from the Marin Arts Council for her fiction. She is currently at work on her second novel.

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