The Bakery (the story of a building, in nine parts)

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AZIZ WAS, BEFORE ALL ELSE, THE BAKER'S SON. The world into which he was born was the tiny, yellow-plastered, dirt-floored, smoke-filled bakery that had first been tucked into an Istanbul street corner by his great grandfather.

His grandfather had added the upstairs floor, a small cluster of rooms each no greater than an arm's span across. The ceilings were so low as to be riddled with dents and depressions where heads had risen too suddenly and confronted the boundaries of the baker's finances. Furniture was piled up along the bare walls; a rickety chair, a table with only three even legs - also built by the grandfather - that creaked with protest when bearing any load, and a narrow cot on which the grandfather had slept. There had been up to three on the cot's thin, exhausted straw mattress at a time - the grandfather, the grandmother, and the latest of Aziz's uncles and aunts. Packed sawdust covered the floor, put there by the grandfather to soak up the sweat of the night; it made do as bedding for the other older, less- fortunate children. It was on that floor, many years ago, that the father of Aziz was born.

The father grew up in the rooms his father had built, and the grandfather taught the father the baker's trade, which he assumed at age sixteen when the grandfather died. The grandmother died soon after - she was found on the cot, arms crossed, eyes skyward as though searching for her husband in the smudges and smears his fingers had left in the ceiling he plastered. The father of Aziz took her to the pauper's field after the day's bread was safely in the oven. Soon the aunts and uncles either married, moved, or died as well. The baker father of Aziz was left alone in the house where his family had lived and died for generations - alone with his memories, and with the smell of rising bread.

The bakery was on the lower floor, level with the bustle and dust of the street outside. The father built the two red brick ovens that came to dominate the ground story. Trails of smoke crept up their chimneys from dawn to dusk, dispersing into the thick haze of the street, signaling activity in the great ovens that provided heat, light, and livelihood to the tiny bakery. For the forty years that the father lived and baked the ovens sat dormant only one day: the day of his wedding. The next day the cot was again crowded and the ovens brought forth the smell and light of life once more. Not long after, Aziz was born. The father named the son for his great grandfather, the man who first built the bakery.