The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [43]
“Then do you feel that I am going to cheat you? Or maybe cheat your son?”
“Cheat … no, no I don’t think that….”
She smoothed her soft chiffon skirts around her pretty legs and said, “Good, Kazahn Pasha. Then we have no problems between us, no secrets left unspoken. I hope it will always be that way.” Lifting her head proudly, she stared at Michael, limping across the room toward them, his slanting blue eyes as fierce as Tariq’s. “Like father, like son,” she said, smiling mischievously, and Tariq knew that he had met his match. Refika would be the perfect wife for his son.
Michael’s withered leg had not mattered to Refika. All she saw was a tall, bearlike, handsome young man, glaring at her as suspiciously as his father. But she had no fears. She knew what she wanted and, with all the skills learned from her French mother, she knew how to charm a man. By the end of the evening Michael was loath to let her go. He was used to the overt sexual charms of the series of women who over the years had occupied his apartment in the old town or else to the demure, well-brought-up girls who were too shy even to speak more than two words to him. Refika was a mixture of both. She was demure yet not shy, bold but not brazen, teasing yet not “knowing.” Suddenly he was a man in love, and after a whirlwind courtship they were married on a rare rainy day in September.
Their son, Ahmet, was born “nine months later to the day,” as Tariq would always explain with a proud roar of laughter just in case any Turk doubted the masculinity of the Tartar Kazahns. And three little girls soon followed.
Ahmet was a small, quiet boy, completely unlike his bold, brash father and grandfather. He looked like Han-Su, with her smooth black hair and dark almond eyes, though he had his mother’s fair skin. Recognizing his intelligence, Refika and Han-Su insisted that he have the best education in spite of Tariq’s protests at what he thought was his grandson’s lack of proper masculine occupations such as riding, shooting, drinking, and women. He asked himself many times how such a child could have been born of two such strong, passionate people. Yet he was the proudest grandfather of all at Ahmet’s graduation from the Harvard class of ’54.
After two years at business school, Ahmet returned to Istanbul and the family business. Tariq watched him like a hawk, firing questions at him when he suggested changes or “improvements.” But despite his misgivings, Ahmet’s cool, calm confidence impressed him. “That boy’s balls are in his brains,” he told Han-Su, half mocking, half proud, as he gave Ahmet permission to build his first big oil tanker.
Tariq was seventy-three years old when Han-Su died in 1960, so peacefully in her sleep that he wasn’t aware at first that she had gone. “She had no illness, no pain,” he cried, bewildered, as his children and many grandchildren gathered around him, and he was not ashamed of the tears in his eyes, for true love has no pride.
With Han-Su gone, Refika and Michael became the official heads of the family. Michael was running the freighter line as successfully as his father had done, with his own headstrong flair and his wife’s common sense. Meanwhile, Tariq filled in his days with long hours at the office, his only companion Ahmet, who was devoted to his work. Together, the old man and the young one plotted the rise of the Kazahn Shipping Line into a new empire of supertankers, fighting the Greeks for the lucrative oil business. Tariq would chuckle with delight as his grandson outwitted their rivals time and time again, displaying a coolness and nerve that Tariq said proved him a true Tartar Kazahn.
Ahmet was thirty-two when he met and married a pretty Swedish blonde and took her back to live with him and his grandfather at “the big yali on the Bosphorus. Their daughter Leyla was born in 1966. She was a beautiful child with almond-shaped eyes in the true blazing Kazahn blue and heavy, silken dark hair; and of all his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Tariq loved her the best.
Despite his