It’s the first time I’m experiencing a polar vortex. It wasn’t this cold back home, neither in Vancouver nor Istanbul. Toronto is different. Face freezing, I pull up to a cafe inside a plant shop to see a friend I met at a Palestinian event. She isn’t here yet.
Looking at the menu, I see that I can get an almond cookie for 50 cents with the purchase of a coffee. Deciding to treat myself, I grab a cookie. I turn on my Kindle to start reading Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World. I sip my cappuccino. The first pages of the novel is a glossary that translates the foreign words in the novel. I glance through the Arabic words.
“Booza: Ice cream.”
I bite the almond cookie.
I used to live in a neighbourhood called ‘Bitter Almond’ (Acıbadem in Turkish) in Istanbul until the age of seven. My dad would come home late in the evening, the smell of the chilly weather on his coat. In his hands, a box of ice cream from a shop called Efendiler. The box had 10 different flavours, and my favourite was chocolate chips. The owner, Mustafa, apparently travels all around Turkey to pick the highest quality fruits to make ice cream with. Raspberries, clementines, apricots, and lemons. The best ice cream I ever had and ever will. It’s a staple in this neighbourhood. Everyone loves it. Once a week, we sit on the small balcony of our pink apartment with tea spoons at hand and try all the seasonal flavours as a family.
They say that the ‘Bitter Almond’ neighbourhood had lots of almond trees back in the Ottoman era, hence the name. When I was a kid, I thought that the neighbourhood was named after the famous Turkish ‘bitter almond cookie’.
I loved these cookies. Crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside. A bittersweet taste, similar to an amaretto.
Now, sitting here in the cafe, the gluten free almond cookie I took a bite of tasted almost the same. How long has it been since I last had one?
After the age of seven, my parents decided to move out of Bitter Almond. We moved into a magical home in the forest where I got to play with twigs and mud all day. Made potions out of crushed rose petals and rain drops. Shared secrets with the worms. Rolled dried flowers in a huge magnolia leaf to make cigars. Saw a praying mantis for the first time. My mom shouted her lungs out to call my name after sunset to get me home. My dad taught me how to blow into a trumpet flower to make music. This was where I got wet to the bone under the sprinklers in summer. Where I first fell in love. I was only 13 at the time so it didn’t make much sense. My dad still brought us a box of ice cream from Efendiler after work occasionally. What a treat it was. We still ate it with teaspoons. Sitting at the garden as a family, mosquitos buzzing by.
It must have been fate because we moved back to the Bitter Almond when my parents had to sell the magic house. I was 17. This time it was a different reality. I was now going to a boarding school so I got to visit home on some weekends. The dorm I was staying at was an hour away from home. We were looked after really well there. If one of us was sick, the principal brewed us all herbal tea. Served us in our beds and checked our foreheads one by one to see if we had fever.
Each time I got to visit home from school, I saw my parents getting more and more stressed. Things were brewing, I knew. There was already a lot of hostility towards our community. But no one saw it coming this fast. Or this hard.
One summer night, we hear military planes flying over our heads, shots being fired, they say it’s a coup. The mayor of Bitter Almond is shot and killed on the lower street. The “coup” is over the same night, and the people I love are suddenly labeled enemies of the state, aka. terrorists. Nothing changes other than our lives. I don’t send my dad to work next day in fear of his life. I don’t see the dorm principal again. I can’t thank her for the tea.
Dad wants us to relax the next day. He says things will settle down. They can’t accuse hundreds of thousands of people with terrorism in one night. The people who’ve known us for years will not believe any of that. He goes out to get us ice cream, that always cheers us up.
He’s back in 20 minutes and I open the door. I know something’s wrong because he’s holding some store bought ice cream bars.
“They vandalized Efendiler.” he says. “They are calling him a terrorist.”
I’ve never seen my dad shaking like that.
I can hear the ticking of the clock. It’s much louder than usual. “What will happen next?” I ask, nibbling on the ice cream stick.
We plan the next steps. I am 17.
It’s been almost eight years since I had an almond cookie that tastes like this.
I text my spouse: “Found almond cookie. Tastes just like the ones back home. It used to be my favourite when I was a kid you know.”
I receive a reply stating that he did not know that.
We are now 26. Still learning new things about each other. It makes a lot of sense now, why we fell in love back then. He says he’ll Google a recipe and bake me bitter almond cookies. “Pick up some eggs from Shoppers on your way back.”
My friend is here, so I put my phone away to greet her.
“You should try out the almond cookie, it’s really nice.”
Written by Ayse 