by Elif Shafak
Soon after, Hakan, who had never really seen the value of a good education, announced he was dropping out of university and had no intention of going back to that useless cowshed. Overnight, to the chagrin of his parents, he ended his student days, his mind sealed before it had been opened. They could see in his eyes how much he abhorred his life and those whom he held responsible for its misery.
Many days a month Hakan would come home solely to fill his stomach, change his clothes and catch some sleep. As directionless as a balloon in the wind, he tried his hand at several jobs without success – until he found a cause through a set of friends he called Brothers. Mates who had big opinions about America, Israel, Russia, the Middle East, and saw conspiracy theories and secret societies everywhere. They greeted each other by knocking their temples together and splashing out high-sounding words – such as ‘honour’, ‘allegiance’ and ‘righteousness’. In their company, Hakan proved to be a quick learner. The cynicism and pessimism of his new circle suited him. With the help of the Brothers he landed a position at an ultra-nationalist newspaper. Shamelessly careless when it came to grammar and spelling, he nonetheless had a knack for words, a talent for incendiary rhetoric. Under a pseudonym he began to write columns that became increasingly shrill and thuggish in their messages. Every week he revealed the traitors of the nation – the rotten apples that, if not taken care of, could putrefy the entire basket: Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Alevis … there wasn’t a single ethnic group that a Turk could trust, other than another Turk. Nationalism, like a bespoke suit, fitted his mood. Nationalism assured him that he had been born into a superior nation, a worthier race, and was destined to do great things, not for himself but for his people. Clad with this identity, he felt strong, principled, invincible. Observing her brother’s transformation, Peri would come to understand that nothing swells the ego quite like a cause motivated by the delusion of pure selflessness.
‘You think you have only one son in jail? In this house I’m just as much a prisoner,’ Hakan shouted at his father after another breakfast quarrel. ‘Umut is lucky, he doesn’t have to listen to you haranguing us every day.’
‘You call your brother lucky, you miserable wretch?’ Mensur shouted back, his voice shaking worse than his hands.
Peri listened, her head down, her shoulders stiff. There was something about a family row that resembled an impending avalanche: one wrong word and it threatened to turn into something so huge it brought down everyone.
‘Let him be. He’s just a young man,’ Selma muttered to her husband.
‘An irresponsible young man who lives off his father’s money,’ said Mensur.
‘Oh, you don’t want me to eat your food, right? Fine, from now on I won’t.’ Hakan flung the empty breadbasket against the wall, where it bounced like a rubber ball, the crumbs scattering around. ‘Anyway, who wants the bread of an alcoholic?’
Never before had the word actually been spoken. Unthinkable. Unretractable. Irreparable, to call the head of the house an alcoholic, and yet it was done. Hakan, unable to shoulder the silence that ensued, stormed out.
Selma began to cry. In between sobs, her voice rose and fell in a litany of laments. ‘We’ve been cursed. The whole family! Yes … it’s a curse.’
In her elder son’s misfortune she saw a punishment and a warning from Allah, she said. As they had paid no heed to the divine message, she was certain there would be more damnation to come.
‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard,’ Mensur said. ‘Why would God want to destroy the Nalbantoğlus? I’m sure He’s got better things to do.’
‘Allah works on us in all sorts of ways. He wishes to teach us … teach you … a lesson.’
‘And what lesson is that?’
‘See the error of your ways,’ Selma said. ‘Until you get it, none of us will have peace.’
Mensur sat tight in his chair. ‘If you really believe what happened to Umut is God’s doing, and that God needs prisons and torturers to carry out His teachings, there’s something wrong with you, woman, or else, dammit, there’s something wrong with your God.’
‘Tövbe, tövbe …’* Selma murmured.
To balance out Allah’s wrath, Selma went days, sometimes weeks, without eating much; content with bread, yoghurt, dates and water. Votive offerings; visceral negotiations with the Almighty. At nights she slept little, spending her time doing the only two things that quieted her mind: praying and cleaning. From her bed, she could spot a layer of fine dust on every piece of furniture; she listened to the termites eating away at the wooden cabinets – why couldn’t the others hear them? Crushed aspirin, white vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda. She scrubbed, rinsed, brushed, waxed and wiped. In the mornings the family woke up to the smell of detergents.
Selma washed her hands so frequently, and with such intensity, that they smelled of antiseptic all the time. The skin was cracked, bleeding in places, which increased her fear of contamination and led her to wash them again even harder. To hide the state of her hands, she began to wear black gloves with her hijab and a long, dark, loose coat that reached almost to her heels. One evening, as Selma and Peri were returning from the bazaar, Peri looked back and, for a fleeting second, she could not see her mother – so thoroughly had she blended in with the night.
Mensur, mortified at his wife’s appearance, wished not to be seen with her any more. He shopped alone; so did she. Her outfit epitomized everything that he had always despised, loathed and confronted in the Middle East. The benightedness of the religious. The presumption that their ways were the best – only because they had been born into this culture and swallowed unquestioningly whatever they had been taught. How could they be so certain of the superiority of their truths when they knew so little, if anything at all, about other cultures, other philosophies, other ways of thinking?
For Selma, Mensur’s manners embodied all that set her on edge: the condescension in his eyes, the finality in his voice, the righteousness in the tilt of his chin. The arrogance of the secular modernists. The pompous and pretentious ease with which they placed themselves outside and above society, looking down on centuries-old traditions. How could they call themselves enlightened when they knew so little, if anything at all, about their own culture, their own faith?
Rigid with the dread of having to converse, husband and wife slipped past each other, untouching. What they lacked in love, they made up for in resentment.
Meanwhile, Peri found solace in literature. Short stories, novels, poems, plays … she devoured whatever she could lay her hands on at the limited library at school. When there was nothing else to be found, she read encyclopaedias. Devouring everything from Aardvark to Zombie, she came to know about things that, though of no current use in her life, might someday come in handy, she hoped. But even if they were never to have a function, she would still keep reading, propelled by her hunger for learning.
Books were liberating, full of life. She preferred being in Storyland to being in her motherland. Refusing to leave her room on weekends, munching on apples and sunflower seeds, she finished one borrowed novel after another. She discovered that intelligence, like a muscle, needed to be exercised with increasing levels of stress, if it were to grow to its full potential. Unsatisfied with the rote learning at school, she developed verbal and visual methods of her own to store information – names of plants in Latin; lines of poems in English; the dates of wars, peace treaties and more wars, of which there were far too many in Ottoman history. She was determined to excel in every subject, from literature to maths, from physics to chemistry. She imagined different subjects as tropical birds kept in separate cages side by side. What would happen if she cut holes in the wire mesh and the birds could fly into the next cage and then the next? She longed to see maths keeping company with literature, physics with philosophy. Who had decided they could not mingle, anyway?
Peri understood that her obsession with studying kept her apart from her peers and earned her their envy and animosity. It
suited her just fine. Like all Nalbantoğlus, she had a natural proclivity for loneliness. She didn’t mind that the other children called her teacher’s pet; she didn’t mind that she wasn’t invited to popular girls’ birthday parties or asked out to films by popular boys. That life was about enlightenment or ideals or love – that made sense to her. But fun – that was never her thing.
Like every outcast she would soon discover that she was not alone. In every class there were a few who, for a variety of reasons, remained out of sync with everyone else. They would recognize each other immediately. It took one untouchable to know another: a Kurdish boy ridiculed for his accent; a girl with facial hair; another girl in a lower class who could not control her bladder when she got nervous in exams; a boy whose mother was rumoured to be a wanton woman … With them she became good friends. But her true companions were always books. Imagination was her home, her homeland, her refuge, her exile.
Hence she read and studied, and finished at the top of her class, term after term. Whenever her self-confidence needed a boost, she ran to her father. And Mensur always gave the same counsel: ‘Education, my soul. Education will save us. You’re the pride of our joyless family, but I want you to be educated in the West. Plenty of good schools in Europe but you must go to Oxford! You’ll fill your head with knowledge and then you’ll come back. Only young people like you can change the fate of this tired old country.’
Back in his youth Mensur had met a student from Oxford, a backpacker, a pale-skinned hippie with whom he had felt an instant rapport. The man was planning to travel through Turkey all alone on his bike. He had boasted that he kept all his money inside his sock to thwart pickpockets and hotel thieves. Worried that something might happen to this naive foreigner, Mensur had insisted on accompanying him. The two of them had traversed the Anatolian peninsula, after which the fair-haired Brit had crossed into Iran. What happened to him Mensur did not know. But he had never forgotten his own bafflement at seeing his country through the eyes of a Westerner. It was the first time he had realized that what was ordinary to him was not necessarily so to outsiders. It was the first time he had realized there was an ‘outside world’. Now he wanted his daughter to be educated there. It was his most fervent wish. Peri – and hundreds of youngsters like Peri – would become an educated, idealistic, forward-thinking graduate who would rescue this country from its backwardness.
Peri understood and accepted that some daughters were born with a mission: to fulfil their fathers’ dreams. In doing so, they would also be redeeming their fatherland.
The Tango with Azrael
Istanbul, 1990s
The summer Peri turned eleven years old, her mother, fulfilling a long-awaited dream, went on pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Her elder brother still in prison, her other brother squatting in God knows whose house, she and her father were left in charge at home. They prepared their own food (kofte and chips for lunch, kofte and spaghetti for supper), washed the dishes (simply rinsed) and watched any TV programme they fancied. It was like being on holiday, except better.
On the day of the local bazaar, Peri woke up, feeling queasy. She held her stomach with a sneaking feeling that all that kofte and spaghetti had finally got to her. She would have to remind her father to change the menu. But a surprise awaited her in the bathroom: stains on her underwear. Too dark and yet she knew it was blood. Her mother had warned her this would happen and, when it did, she would have to be all the more careful with boys. Don’t let them touch you. It was too soon! At school, she had eavesdropped on older girls complaining about it: ‘My aunt is back!’ they would say airily. ‘Could you check my back?’ they would ask each other, hurrying their steps. In her classroom, there was one girl who claimed she had had her period, though everyone knew it was a lie. That left Peri as the first among her peers. She had grown too fast this past year, no matter how much she’d tried to hide it. She had been told enough times that she was pretty to understand this was what people thought of her. Her own perception of herself was acutely different. How she wished she had hair black as night, instead of a mousy light brown; instead of her newly beginning curves, a confident flatness. She would have loved to have been born as the third son of the Nalbantoğlus. Wouldn’t life be easier had she been a boy?
She found a clean old bedsheet, cut it into strips. If she used it sparingly, wisely, she would not have to say anything to her mother. She could wash, dry and reuse them, the way she knew many women did in this country. That way, she could conceal the truth until she was about fourteen, the age she regarded as fitting for her first period. God had made a mistake in His divine calculation. She was determined to correct it.
Two weeks later Selma returned, sunburned and thinner. She plopped down on the sofa and began to relate her journey to Mecca, her words galloping along as her porcelain horses would have done, had they a breath of life in them.
‘Last year, a stampede inside a pedestrian tunnel in the holy city killed more than a thousand pilgrims. Now the Saudis are cautious,’ she explained. ‘But they can’t prevent diseases. I got so sick I thought I was going to die. Right then and there!’
‘Oh, I’m glad you didn’t,’ Mensur said. ‘Good to have you back.’
‘Thank Allah, I’m home,’ Selma said with a sigh. ‘If I hadn’t made it, I’d have been buried in Medina, close to the Prophet, peace be upon him.’
‘The cemeteries in Istanbul have a better view,’ Mensur quipped. ‘We’ve fresh sea air. Buried in Medina, you’d have been mulch for a date palm. In Istanbul, you can fertilize mastic, linden, maple … Jasmine would be great. You’d be bathed in perfume all year round.’
Selma shrank away from her husband’s words as if they were hot cinders spat sizzling from a fire. Worried that they might lock horns again, Peri butted in, ‘What’s in your suitcase, Mum? Did you bring us anything?’
‘I brought you the whole of Mecca!’ came the answer.
Peri and Mensur perked up, their faces beaming – two expectant kids. One by one packages were unwrapped: dates, honey, miswak, colognes, prayer mats, musk, rosaries, scarves and Zamzam in tiny bottles.
‘How do you know this is sacred water – did anyone authenticate it?’ Mensur inquired, shaking a bottle. ‘They might as well have sold you tap water.’
At which Selma grabbed the bottle, opened it and drained it in one swallow. ‘This is pure Zamzam but your mind is filthy!’
‘Fine.’ Mensur shrugged.
Pointing at a box, Peri asked, ‘What’s that, Mum?’
That turned out to be a mosque-shaped bronze wall-clock – 20 × 18 inches – with a swinging pendulum and minarets on both sides. Selma explained it could be programmed to show prayer times in a thousand cities worldwide. Then she hung it up on a nail in the living room, in the Qibla direction, across from the portrait of Atatürk.
‘I’m not having a mosque under my roof,’ said Mensur.
‘Oh, really? But I have to live with an infidel under mine,’ riposted Selma.
‘Well, right now half of my sins are yours. If you hadn’t bought that thing, I’d have never blasphemed. Take it down!’
‘I won’t,’ Selma shouted. ‘I chose it, paid for it, carried it all the way from the holy land. I got sick there, almost died. I’m a haji, show me some respect!’
It was the first time Peri heard her mother yell at her father. Coming from a woman whose main rebellion for years had been either stoical silence or barbed words at low decibels, it sounded like an explosion. The wall-clock stayed where it was, albeit muted – a concession that made neither party happy.
During the rest of the day, Mensur was locked in a deep sulk. The same evening there was a power cut that went on for hours. Mensur took his place at the raqi table earlier than usual, between Atatürk and the prayer clock, his pale face cast in shadows by a lit candle; he said he was feeling unwell. Bringing his hand to his heart, as if to salute an invisible being, he tilted his head to one side and collapsed.
It was a heart
attack.
For as long as she lived Peri would never forget how the night grew darker by the minute. As she observed with horror, her father slumped over like a lifeless mannequin, his forehead hitting the table; he was picked up by neighbours, who had come when they heard Selma’s cries, and carried to the sofa. Then, as he was placed on a stretcher, tucked into an ambulance, rushed into the A & E department and pushed into an operating theatre with machines beeping on all sides, the only thing she could think of, over and over, was whether it was a punishment from God. The question was so intimidating that it could not be expressed aloud; it had to be swallowed down. She would have liked to ask her mother, weeping by her side, but was terrified of the answer Selma might provide. Was this the way of Allah? First, He allowed you to utter profanities and joke without inhibition. Next, He made you pay the price? It was almost as if He waited for you to sin so that He could smack you with His wrath. Was the way of God one of camouflage, a trick to disguise calculated revenge?
Another persistent thought gnawed away at her. Deep down in her mind, Peri was convinced that her father’s heart attack was, through some circuitous chain of causation in the universe, instigated by her period. Why had she bled so early and while her mother was away? It was wrong of her to try to become the woman of the house. Wrong also because, as she now reckoned, the faster she grew, the sooner her father might die.
In the waiting room at the hospital, Peri and Selma sat on the worn-out sofa. A shaft of moonlight pierced through the windows, only to be engulfed by the intrusive glare of the fluorescent lamps. The TV was on, though silent. On the screen, a woman in a red sequined dress turned the wheel of fortune and was disappointed to see it land on ‘bankrupt’. The caretaker on duty, a hefty man with a bushy moustache and the only person watching the programme, laughed gleefully.
‘I’ll go and pray,’ Selma said.
‘May I come with you?’
