10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  Immediately, the midwife, with movements deft and swift, thrust her hands into the bowl and pulled the baby out. A loud, terrified wail filled the room. All four women smiled with relief.

  ‘Good girl,’ said the midwife. ‘What took you so long? Cry, my dear. Never be ashamed of your tears. Cry and everyone knows you’re alive.’

  The old woman wrapped the baby in a shawl and sniffed her again. That beguiling, other-worldly scent had evaporated, leaving only the slightest trace behind. In time that, too, would disappear – although she had known quite a few people who, even in old age, still carried with them a whiff of Paradise. But she felt no need to share this information. Lifting herself on to the balls of her feet, she laid the infant on the bed, beside her mother.

  Binnaz broke into a smile, a flutter in her heart. She touched her daughter’s toes through the silky fabric – perfect and beautiful, and frighteningly fragile. She tenderly held the baby’s locks of hair between her hands as if she were carrying holy water in her palms. For a moment she felt happy, complete. ‘No dimples,’ she said, and giggled to herself.

  ‘Shall we call your husband?’ asked one of the neighbours.

  This, too, was a sentence laden with unspoken words. By now Suzan must have told Haroun that the baby had arrived, so why hadn’t he come running? Clearly, he had lingered to talk to his first wife and soothe her worries. That had been his priority.

  A shadow passed over Binnaz’s face. ‘Yes, call him.’

  There was no need. In a few seconds, Haroun walked in slouching, round-shouldered, moving out of the shadow into the sunlight. He had a shock of greying hair that gave him the look of a distracted thinker; an imperious nose with tight nostrils; a broad, smooth-shaven face and downturned dark brown eyes, shining with pride. Smiling, he approached the bed. He looked at the baby, at the second wife, at the midwife, at the first wife, and finally upwards to the heavens.

  ‘Allah, I thank you, my Lord. You’ve accepted my prayers.’

  ‘A girl,’ said Binnaz softly, in case he was not yet aware.

  ‘I know. The next one will be a boy. We’ll name him Tarkan.’ He ran his index finger across the baby’s forehead, as smooth and warm to the touch as a favourite amulet rubbed too many times. ‘She’s healthy, that’s what matters. I was praying this whole time. I said to the Almighty, if You let this baby live, I won’t drink any more. Not a single drop! Allah has heard my plea, He is merciful. This baby is not mine, nor is she yours.’

  Binnaz stared at him, a flicker of confusion in her eyes. Suddenly, she was seized by a feeling of foreboding, like a wild animal that senses – albeit too late – that it is about to walk into a trap. She glanced at Suzan, who was standing by the entrance, lips pursed so tight they were almost white; silent and motionless save for the impatient tapping of her foot. Something about her demeanour suggested that she was excited, overjoyed even.

  ‘This baby belongs to God,’ Haroun was now saying.

  ‘All babies do,’ murmured the midwife.

  Oblivious, Haroun held his younger wife’s hand and looked straight into her eyes. ‘We’ll give this baby to Suzan.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Binnaz rasped, her voice sounding to her ears wooden and distant, the voice of a stranger.

  ‘Let Suzan raise her. She’ll do an excellent job. You and I will make more children.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You don’t want to have more kids?’

  ‘I’m not going to let that woman take my daughter.’

  Haroun drew in a breath, then released it slowly. ‘Don’t be selfish. Allah won’t approve. He gave you a baby, didn’t He? Be grateful. You were barely scraping by when you came to this house.’

  Binnaz shook her head, and kept doing so; whether it was because she was unable to stop herself or because it was the one small thing she could control, it was hard to tell. Haroun leaned over and held her by the shoulders, pulling her close to him. Only then did she become still, the light in her eyes dimmed.

  ‘You’re not being rational. We’re all in the same house. You’ll see your daughter every day. It’s not like she’ll be going away, for God’s sake.’

  If he had meant his words to be consoling, that was lost on her. Trembling to hold back the pain ripping through her chest, she covered her face with the flat of her palms. ‘And who will my daughter call “Mummy”?’

  ‘What difference does that make? Suzan can be Mummy. You’ll be Auntie. We’ll tell her the truth when she gets older, no need to confuse her little head now. When we have more kids, they’ll all be brothers and sisters anyhow. They’ll be running riot in the house, you’ll see. You won’t be able to tell who belongs to whom. We’ll all be one big family.’

  ‘Who is going to nurse the baby?’ asked the midwife. ‘The mummy or the auntie?’

  Haroun glanced at the old woman, every muscle in his body strung taut. In his eyes, reverence and loathing formed a wild dance. He thrust his hand into his pocket and took out a jumble of items: a dented pack of cigarettes with a lighter tucked inside, crumpled banknotes, a piece of chalk he used for marking alterations on garments, a tablet for his upset stomach. The money, he handed to the midwife. ‘For you – a token of our gratitude,’ he said.

  Tight-lipped, the old woman accepted her payment. In her experience, getting through life as unscathed as possible depended to a large extent on two fundamental principles: knowing the right time to arrive and knowing the right time to leave.

  As the neighbours began to pack their things, and removed the blood-soaked sheets and towels, silence filled the room like water, seeping into every corner.

  ‘We are off now,’ said the midwife with quiet resolve. The two neighbours stood demurely on either side of her. ‘We’ll bury the placenta under a rosebush. And this –’ She pointed a bony finger towards the umbilical cord that had been tossed on to a chair. ‘If you’d like, we can throw it up on the school roof. Your daughter will be a teacher. Or we could take it to the hospital. She will be a nurse, who knows, even a doctor.’

  Haroun considered the options. ‘Try the school.’

  After the women had left, Binnaz turned her head away from her husband, facing the apple on the bedside table. It was rotting; a soft, tranquil decay, achingly slow. Its browning colour reminded her of the socks of the imam who had married them, and how after the ceremony she had sat alone on this very bed, a shimmering veil covering her face, while in the next room her husband and the guests tucked into a banquet. Her mother had taught her absolutely nothing about what to expect on her wedding night, but an older aunt more sympathetic to her concerns had handed her a pill to pop under her tongue. Take this and you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over before you know it. During the commotion of the day, Binnaz had lost the pill, which she suspected was just a pastille anyway. She had never seen a man naked, not even in pictures, and, though she had often bathed her younger brothers, she suspected it was a different type of body, the body of a grown man. The longer she had waited for her husband to come into the room, the higher her anxiety had soared. No sooner had she heard his footsteps than she had blacked out, collapsing to the floor. When she had opened her eyes, it was to the sight of neighbourhood women frantically rubbing her wrists, moistening her forehead, massaging her feet. There was a sharp smell in the air – of cologne and vinegar – and undertones of something else, something unfamiliar and unbidden, which she would later realize had come from a tube of lubricant.

  Afterwards, when the two of them were alone, Haroun had given her a necklace made of a red ribbon and three gold coins – one for each of the virtues she would bring to this house: youth, docility, fertility. Seeing how nervous she was, he had spoken softly to her, his voice dissolving in the dark. He had been affectionate, but also acutely aware that people were waiting outside the door. He had hurriedly undressed her, perhaps fearing she might faint again. Binnaz had kept her eyes closed the whole time, sweat breaking out on her forehead. She had begun to count –
One, two, three … fifteen, sixteen, seventeen – and carried on doing so even when he had told her to ‘Stop that nonsense!’

  Binnaz was illiterate and could not count beyond nineteen. Every time she had arrived at the last number, that unbreakable frontier, she had taken a breath and started all over again. After what felt like infinite nineteens, he had left the bed and marched out of the room, leaving the door open. Suzan had then rushed in and turned on the lights, paying no attention to her nakedness or to the smell of sweat and sex hanging in the air. The first wife had whisked off the bedsheet, inspected it and, clearly satisfied, disappeared without a word. Binnaz had spent the rest of the evening by herself, a fine layer of gloom settling on her shoulders like a dusting of snow. As she remembered it all now, an odd sound escaped her lips that could have been a laugh had it not been hiding so much hurt.

  ‘Come on,’ Haroun said. ‘It’s not –’

  ‘This was her idea, wasn’t it?’ Binnaz interrupted him – something she had never done before. ‘Did she just come up with this plan? Or have you two been plotting for months? Behind my back.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’ He sounded startled, though perhaps less by her words than by her tone. With his left hand, he stroked the hair on the back of his right hand, his eyes glazed and distracted. ‘You are young. Suzan is getting old. She will never have a child of her own. Give her a gift.’

  ‘And what about me? Who’s going to give me a gift?’

  ‘Allah, of course. He already has, can’t you see? Don’t be ungrateful.’

  ‘Grateful, for this?’ She made a little fluttering motion, a gesture so indistinct it could have referred to anything – this situation or perhaps this town, which now felt to her like just another backwater, on any old map.

  ‘You’re tired,’ he said.

  Binnaz started to cry. These were not tears of rage or resentment. They were tears of resignation, of the kind of defeat that is tantamount to a loss of greater faith. The air in her lungs felt heavy like lead. She had been a child when she had arrived in this house, and now that she had a child of her own, she was not allowed to raise her and grow up with her. She curled her arms around her knees and did not speak again for a long time. Thus the subject was closed, then and there – though, in truth, it would always remain open, this wound in the midst of their lives that would never heal.

  Outside the window, pushing his cart up the street, a vendor cleared his throat and sang praise of his apricots – juicy and ripe. Inside the house, Binnaz thought, How strange, it not being the season for sweet apricots but the season of icy winds. She shivered as though the cold, of which the vendor seemed oblivious, had slipped through the walls and found her instead. She closed her eyes, but the darkness didn’t help. She saw snowballs piled up in threatening pyramids. Now they were raining down on her, wet and hard with pebbles inside. One of the snowballs hit her on the nose, followed by others, flying thick and fast. Another landed on her bottom lip, splitting it. She opened her eyes, gasping. Was it real or was it just a dream? Tentatively she touched her nose. It was bleeding. There was also a dribble of blood on her chin. How strange, she thought once again. Could no one else see that she was in dreadful pain? And if they couldn’t, did that mean that it was all in her head, all make-believe?

  This wasn’t her first encounter with mental illness, but it would remain her most vivid. Even years later, every time Binnaz wondered when and how her sanity had sneaked away, like a thief climbing out of the window in the dark, this was the moment she would always hark back to, the moment that she believed had debilitated her forever.

  That same afternoon Haroun held the baby up in the air, turned towards Mecca and recited the ezan, the call to prayer, into her right ear.

  ‘You, my daughter, you who, Allah willing, will be the first of many children under this roof, you with eyes dark as the night, I’ll name you Leyla. But you won’t be just any Leyla. I’ll also give you my mother’s names. Your nine was an honourable woman; she was very pious, as I am certain you’ll be one day. I’ll name you Afife – “Chaste, Untainted”. And I’ll name you Kamile – “Perfection”. You’ll be modest, respectable, pure as water …’

  Haroun paused with the nagging thought that not all water was pure. He added, more loudly than he intended, just to make sure there was no celestial mix-up, no misunderstanding on the part of God, ‘Spring water – clean, undefiled … All the mothers in Van will chide their daughters, “Why can’t you be like Leyla?” And husbands will say to their wives, “Why couldn’t you give birth to a girl like Leyla!”’

  Meanwhile, the baby kept trying to jam her fist into her mouth, her lips twisting into a grimace each time she failed.

  ‘You’ll make me so proud,’ Haroun carried on. ‘True to your religion, true to your nation, true to your father.’

  Frustrated with herself, and finally realizing that her clenched hand was simply too big, the baby broke into a wail, as though determined to make up for her early silence. Quickly, she was handed over to Binnaz, who, without a second of hesitation, began to nurse her, a sizzling pain drawing rings around her nipples like a marauding bird circling the skies.

  Later on, when the baby had fallen asleep, Suzan, who had been waiting to one side, approached the bed, careful not to make a noise. Avoiding eye contact, she took the infant from her mother.

  ‘I’ll bring her back when she cries,’ Suzan said, and swallowed. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her.’

  Binnaz said nothing in return, her face as pale and worn as an old porcelain plate. Nothing emanated from her, except the sound of her breathing, faint but unmistakable. Her womb, her mind, this house … even the ancient lake where many a heartbroken lover was rumoured to have drowned, everything felt hollowed out and dried up. Everything but her sore, swollen breasts, leaking rivulets of milk.

  Now alone in the room with her husband, Binnaz waited for him to speak. It was not an apology she wanted to hear as much as an admission of the injustice she faced and the enormous hurt it would do to her. But he, too, said nothing. And so it was that the baby girl, born to a family of one husband and two wives on 6 January 1947, in the city of Van – ‘the Pearl of the East’ – was named Leyla Afife Kamile. Such self-assured names, grandiose and unambiguous. Big mistakes, as it would turn out. For while it was true that she carried the night in her eyes, befitting the name Leyla, it would soon become clear that her middle names were far from apt.

  She wasn’t flawless, even to begin with; her many shortcomings ran through her life like underground streams. In truth, she was a walking embodiment of imperfection – once she figured out how to walk, that is. And as for staying chaste, time would show how, for reasons not of her own doing, that would not exactly be her thing either.

  She was to be Leyla Afife Kamile, full of virtue, high in merit. But years later, after she had turned up in Istanbul, alone and broke; after she had seen the sea for the first time, amazed at how that vast expanse of blue stretched to the horizon; after she had noticed that the curls in her hair turned to frizz in the humid air; after she had awoken one morning in a strange bed next to a man she had never seen before and her chest felt so heavy she thought she could never draw breath again; after she had been sold to a brothel where she was forced to have sex with ten to fifteen men each day in a room with a green plastic bucket on the floor, collecting the water that dripped from the ceiling every time it rained … long after all that, she would be known to her five dear friends, one eternal love and many clients as Tequila Leila.

  When men asked – and they often did – why she insisted on spelling ‘Leyla’ as ‘Leila’, and whether by doing so she was trying to make herself seem Western or exotic, she would laugh and say that one day she went to the bazaar and traded the ‘y’ of ‘yesterday’ for the ‘i’ of ‘infinity’, and that was that.

  In the end, none of this would make any difference to the newspapers that covered her murder. Most did not care to mention her by name, findin
g her initials sufficient. The same photo accompanied almost all the articles – one of Leila’s unrecognizable old snaps, back from her secondary-school years. The editors could have chosen a more recent image, of course, even a headshot from the police archives, had they not worried that the sight of Leila’s heavy make-up and conspicuous cleavage might offend the nation’s sensitivities.

  Her death was also covered on national TV on the evening of 29 November 1990. It followed a lengthy report on the United Nations Security Council Resolution to authorize military intervention in Iraq; the after-effects of the tearful resignation of the Iron Lady in Britain; the continuing tension between Greece and Turkey following the violence in Western Thrace and the looting of stores owned by ethnic Turks and the mutual expulsion of the Turkish Consul in Komotini and the Greek Consul in Istanbul; the merging of West Germany and East Germany’s national football teams after the unification of the two countries; the repeal of the constitutional requirement for a married woman to get her husband’s permission to work outside the home; and the smoking ban on Turkish Airlines flights, despite passionate protests from smokers nationwide.

  Towards the end of the programme, a bright yellow band scrolled along the bottom of the screen: Prostitute Found Slain in City Waste Bin: Fourth in a Month. Panic Spreads Among Istanbul’s Sex Workers.

  Two Minutes

  Two minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila’s mind recalled two contrasting tastes: lemon and sugar.

  June 1953. She saw herself as a six-year-old, a thicket of chestnut-brown curls surrounding her frail, wan face. No matter how remarkable her appetite, especially for pistachio baklava, sesame brittle and all things savoury, she was as thin as a reed. An only child. A lonely child. Restless and bouncy, and always a little bit distracted, she reeled through the days like a chess piece that had rolled on to the floor, consigned to building complex games for one.