by Elif Shafak
As it was carried from the doorstep to its chosen corner, the tree shed plastic needles, like the child in the fairy tale leaving breadcrumbs to find its way back home. Regardless, Peri and Mensur decorated it in earnest – silver, gold, blue tinsel. When they had no more trinkets left, they made some of their own: painted walnuts, sprayed pinecones, bottle caps and cork animals. Everything about their tree was cheap and mismatched; yet they adored it.
When Selma returned from running errands, her face fell. ‘Why the need for this thing?’
‘A new year is coming,’ said Mensur, in the unlikely event that his wife was unaware.
‘It’s a Christian custom,’ Selma said.
‘Are we not entitled to a drop of pleasure?’ Mensur rolled his eyes. ‘You think He wouldn’t love me were I to have a bit of fun?’
‘Why should Allah love you when you do nothing to endear yourself to Him?’ Selma said.
Aware that her father had purchased this controversial conifer to make her happy, Peri felt responsible for the tension in the air. She had to find a way to make things right. That night she waited until everyone had gone to sleep and put her plan into action, staying up till the small hours.
The next morning, when the Nalbantoğlus walked into their living room, they found a curiously dressed evergreen. Selma’s beloved prayer beads, porcelain cats and silk headscarves, these last shredded into ribbons, adorned its branches. On top of the tree was a tiny brass mosque, and next to it a Book of Hadiths, carefully balanced.
‘You see, it’s not Christian any more,’ said Peri, beaming.
The world seemed to come to a standstill as she waited for her mother’s reaction. Selma’s jaw dropped in horrified incredulity, seemingly on the verge of saying something. But, before she could speak, Mensur, standing behind them, began to giggle, his shoulders convulsing. At the sound of her husband’s amusement, Selma’s expression darkened. She walked out.
Still to this day Peri did not know what her mother would have said and what she had really made of her Islamic Christmas Tree.
The day before New Year’s Eve, Peri was again at the bookshop. Other than an elderly woman, there more for warmth than for literature, there were no customers. The owners were away, visiting a friend, and the rest of the staff had taken the day off.
Peri dusted the shelves, brewed coffee, swept the floors, rearranged the bean bags, checked the stock; at ease in a place she’d grown to love. Her tasks done, she took down a book by A. Z. Azur and curled up in an armchair, packing cushions around her. She had dug out his entire backlist in the shop: nine publications with seductive titles and geometric dust covers. The sales figures showed they sold well. It was one of his early works she was reading now: The Guide to Remaining Perplexed.
The old woman shuffled over to the chair opposite and sat down, her eyelids drooping, head bowed. Soon she was asleep. Peri fetched a blanket from under the till and gently laid it over her. Time stretched and slowed down, a gluey mystery like the pine resin from the conifers of Anatolia. A sense that the universe was full of possibilities coursed through her mind, like an intoxicating drug. Surrounded by books, all of which she wanted to read, and accompanied by Azur’s writing – half provoking, half soothing – she felt more peaceful than she had in years. True, she was still angry at him, but she could not remain angry at his books. And she had not stopped thinking about his seminar. She had not been able to.
Barely had she finished a chapter when the shop door opened with the tinkling of a brass bell. A chilly gust of air swept in along with none other than Professor Azur in a long, dark coat and a saffron scarf, bound to draw the envy of any Buddhist monk. A velvet fedora, barely taming his rebellious locks, completed his natty appearance.
‘May we come in?’ he said, addressing no one in particular.
As she stood up and darted towards the door, catching her toe on a crack in the floorboard, Peri saw what he meant by ‘we’. Next to him, thick-coated, sharp-snouted, with a sable, mahogany and white coat, was a long-haired collie.
Azur’s eyebrows arched. ‘Hi, Peri. What a surprise. What are you doing here?’
‘I work in the bookshop, part time.’
‘Splendid! So what shall I do with Spinoza?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘My dog,’ he said. ‘It’s too cold outside.’
‘Oh, that’s fine, you can bring him in,’ Peri said, and then, remembering the owners’ aversion to dogs in the shop, had second thoughts. ‘Perhaps it … Spinoza … can wait for you by the entrance?’
But Professor Azur was already well inside, his dog in tow, both of them holding their heads up, their eyes straight ahead, like two Egyptian hieroglyphs.
‘I haven’t been here in a while,’ said Azur, scanning the room. ‘This place has changed. It looks bigger – and brighter.’
‘We rearranged a few things and got rid of the clunky furniture,’ Peri said. She watched as Spinoza sniffed around, then settled himself on the softest bean bag, his fur fanning out over the floor.
If Professor Azur noticed her discomfort, he didn’t show it. His voice undulating in its distinctive way, he had already moved on to another subject. ‘Love the Forbidden Tree in the window, by the way. Great idea.’
Peri felt a glow of pride. She wanted to tell him it was her creation, but she did not want him to think she was bragging. Instead, she said the first thing that came to mind. ‘Were you looking for a particular book?’
‘Not now,’ Azur said. ‘My publicist asked me to pop in and sign a few copies. I promised her I would.’ His eyes fell on the armchair in which Peri had been sitting. ‘That looks familiar. Are you reading it?’
Peri shuffled her feet. ‘Yes, just started.’
He waited for her to fill the silence. She waited too, as if they had yet to discover the language in which they could really communicate. In the end she said, gesturing towards the table, ‘Why don’t you have a seat please? I’ll find your books.’
There were so many. Seven titles were in stock; the other two had been reordered. With ten to fifteen copies of each, there were enough books to build a small tower. Professor Azur pulled up a chair, threw off his coat, produced a fountain pen and diligently began to sign. She brought him coffee and busied herself in a corner from where she could watch him.
Halfway through the stack, Azur stopped and fixed her with a quizzical look over his spectacles. ‘Why aren’t you celebrating the New Year with your family?’
‘I wasn’t able to travel,’ Peri said, gesturing casually with her hand, as if Istanbul were waiting outside the door. ‘But it’s okay, Christmas is no big deal for us.’
A long, penetrating look. ‘Are you telling me you’re not sad that you couldn’t spend the holidays with your family?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ She had known him for months, but she was still under the impression that his misunderstanding of her was deliberate. ‘It’s just this season is more important for Christian students.’ She paused. Had she said anything wrong? She was always careful with her words, as if she were treading on ice, stopping to check, every now and then, that the surface beneath her feet had not cracked – yet.
He studied her, a strange gleam in his eyes that seemed to look right through her. ‘Your parents are Muslims, practising?’
‘My mother and one brother are,’ Peri said. ‘But not my father and my other brother.’
‘Ah, what a split,’ said Azur, with the triumph of someone who had found the missing jigsaw piece that had been in front of his eyes the whole time. ‘Let me guess. You are close to your father and your elder brother.’
She swallowed hard. ‘Uhm, yes, that’s true.’
Nodding, he went back to the books.
‘What about you?’ Peri asked tentatively. ‘I mean, are you celebrating with your family?’
He appeared not to hear, just kept on signing his name, and she dared not repeat herself. For a few minutes, or so it felt, the only sounds in the books
tore were the collie snoozing, the elderly customer snoring, the ticking of a longcase clock and the scratch of his fountain pen. She saw him set his jaw, his eyes lose focus momentarily. Everything about him seemed transitory, evanescent, in motion. No past, no future, only this present moment, already fleeting and gone.
He took a sip of coffee. ‘Spinoza is my family now.’
Now. The way he pronounced the word made Peri feel as if she had prised open a lid she had no right to touch and glimpsed the sadness inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
The pen stopped moving. ‘Let’s make a deal, you and I,’ Azur said. ‘You’ve already said sorry to me so many times that from now on, even if you do something horrible, I don’t want to hear your apologies. Promise?’
She could feel the pounding of her heart in her ribcage, though quite why she didn’t know; it felt like a vaguely illicit pact. Even so, she did not hesitate. ‘I promise.’
‘Good!’ Having signed the pile of books, he rose to his feet. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
‘I’ll put stickers on the books,’ she said. ‘Signed copies.’
‘Thank you.’ He smiled towards Peri.
They strode towards the door, the long-haired professor and the long-haired collie, their bodies in a harmony perfected by years of friendship. As he reached for the doorknob, Azur paused, turned and glanced at her. ‘Tell you what, we’re having an informal dinner, some old friends, a few colleagues, assistants, one of them just about your age, could be nice, could be boring. But you should not be alone on New Year’s Eve. England has a peculiar way of making foreigners feel exhilaratingly free and depressingly alone. Would you like to join us?’
Before she could think of an answer, he had taken out his notepad, torn out a page, and written out the address and the time.
‘Here, think about it, no pressure. If you feel like coming, drop in. Don’t bring anything. No flowers, no wine, no Turkish Delight, just yourself.’
He opened the door and stepped outside. It had begun to snow. The flakes twirled aimlessly in the wind, directionless, as if they had spiralled up from the ground instead of falling from the sky. Oxford resembled a town in a snow globe.
‘Fabulous,’ said Azur, to his dog, to himself or to Peri.
‘Beautiful,’ she said quietly, from the doorway.
Then she did something quite unexpected. Even though it was late and cold, and he was leaving and she was shivering in her jumper with her arms folded, she began to talk about his book, unable to stop herself, her breath coming out in clouds of condensation: ‘You say our life is only one of many possible lives we could have led. And deep inside I think we all know this. Even in happy marriages and successful careers there’s an element of doubt. We can’t help wondering what our lives could have been like had we chosen another path … or paths, always plural! And you tell us that our idea of God is only one of many. So what is the point of being dogmatic about God – whether we are theists or atheists?’
‘That’s right,’ Azur said, his gaze sweeping across her face, surprised and pleased to hear such an outburst from her.
‘But you have to know there are many in this world, like my mother,’ Peri continued, ‘whose sense of security comes from their faith. They’re convinced that there is only one interpretation of God: their own. These people already have enough to deal with, and you want to take away their only protection: their certainty. My mother … I mean sometimes I look at her and I see so much sorrow, I can sense she would’ve gone crazy without her faith to hold on to.’
Silence opened up between them as delicately as a silk fan.
‘I understand. But absolutism of all kinds is a weakness,’ Azur said. ‘Absolute atheism or absolute theism. To my mind, Peri, they are equally problematic. My task is to inject the faithless with a dose of faith and the believers with a dose of scepticism.’
‘But why?’
Azur’s eyes cut into her. ‘Because I am not a purist. It inhibits intellectual progress.’ A snowflake came to rest on his hat, another in his hair. ‘You see, some scholars are inclined to divide and categorize; others, to blend and unite. The splitters and the lumpers. Whereas I want all my senses awake – like your prodigious octopus. Let’s not depend on one centralized brain. Let’s bring poetry into philosophy and philosophy straight into our daily lives. The problem today is that the world values answers over questions. But questions should matter so much more! I guess I want to bring the devil into God and God into the devil.’
‘I – we … how do we do that?’
‘Wherever we see a duality, we’ll smash it into tiny little pieces. We’ll make plurality out of singularity and complexity out of simplicity.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means we’ll mess things up, we’ll blur the lines. We’ll bring irreconcilable ideas and unlikely people together. Imagine, an Islamophobe develops a crush on a Muslim woman … or an anti-Semite becomes best friends with a Jew … on and on, until we grasp categories for what they really are: figments of our imagination. The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other. The absolutists, they venerate purity, we hybridity. They wish to reduce everyone down to a single identity. We strive for the opposite: to multiply everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere. Look at history. Observe life. It evolves from simplicity to complexity. Not vice versa, that would be devolution.’
‘But is that not too much?’ said Peri. ‘People need simplification.’
‘Nonsense, my dear. Our brains are wired for twists and turns!’
Then there was nothing else to say. He raised his hand in farewell and she nodded. So they went into the darkness extending before them, man and dog. Peri’s stomach felt weak, her breathing uneven; she was both elated and terrified at the same time, on the verge of something unknown. She watched them until they turned the corner. This, for her, was no ordinary moment. One always knew the moment one fell in love.
The Psychic
Istanbul, 2016
Aromas of coffee, cognac and cigars blending uneasily with the expensive perfumes in the air hit Peri as soon as she came back into the room. She was still thinking about the message she had left on Shirin’s answering machine when she noticed the psychic a few feet away. With a complacent smile spreading across his features, the man sat on a chaise-longue, surrounded by kneeling and fawning women, like a sultan in a grotesque Orientalist fantasy. The American hedge-fund manager was also there, waiting patiently for his coffee cup to be read.
Peri walked towards the men’s circle, oblivious to the rules of social conduct. She sat herself down in the middle of the group, beside her husband, under clouds of blue-grey smoke from multiple cigars.
Adnan placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. Once, twice. A code between them signifying, ‘Are you bored?’ She took his hand, squeezed back, only once. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Mark my words, the Middle Eastern map will be redrawn,’ the architect was saying to those around him. ‘It’s clear the Western powers have a major plan.’
‘That’s for sure. They’ll never allow us Muslims to prosper,’ concurred the Islamist newspaper tycoon. ‘The Crusades have never ended!’
‘Yes, but Turkey is not the same Turkey,’ said the nationalist architect. ‘We are no meek lamb. Not the sick man of Europe any more. Europe’s now scared of us – and will do anything to stir up unrest.’
The tycoon agreed. ‘They certainly know how to foment chaos. An invisible hand pushes a button and it all flares up again, bloodshed and violence. We must be on the alert.’
The rest of the men were listening intently – some nodding, others quiet.
Through the cigar smoke Peri looked at them. ‘To me what you’re saying sounds like sheer paranoia,’ she said softly. ‘Europeans … Westerners … Russians … Arabs … If you were to get to know them, n
ot as a category, but individually, then you would see how we are all, more or less, flesh and mind, the same.’ She paused. ‘We can only recognize ourselves in the faces of … the Other.’
The architect and the tycoon gaped at her in astonishment. Adnan gave her a wink. ‘Well said, darling.’
Smiling at her husband, Peri excused herself and stood up. She crossed to the opposite side of the room and approached the women’s circle.
Seeing her, the PR woman leaned over and whispered something into the psychic’s ear. The man listened, his eyebrows raised. He looked up and stared at Peri. He smiled. She didn’t. His smile grew wider. Like all those accustomed to being flattered and fawned upon, he was most intrigued by the one person who tried to avoid him.
‘Why doesn’t your guest join us?’ the psychic asked the hostess, who was sitting across from him with Pom-Pom nestled on her lap.
Adamant, the businesswoman jumped to her feet. One hand under Pom-Pom’s belly, she cupped the other around Peri’s elbow, gently but firmly steering her towards the guest of honour.
‘Did you meet our friend Peri?’ she said to the psychic. ‘She was late, just like you. She had an accident on the way here.’
‘Sounds like you had a tough day,’ the man said, eyeing Peri’s bandaged hand and damaged dress.
‘Nothing important …’ Peri said.
‘You deserve a gift. Would you like me to read your future?’ He rose to his feet and added with a smile. ‘For free.’
The girlfriend of the journalist and the PR woman sitting on either side of him, waiting for their turns, were not pleased.
Peri shook her head. ‘You have enough to do.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m here for everyone.’ A slow smile crept over his face, as if he had intended to say something else but decided to keep it to himself.
‘I think I’ll skip it this time.’
He chuckled, though his eyes had acquired a steely gleam. ‘I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and I’ve yet to meet a woman who doesn’t want to know her future.’
