by Elif Shafak
‘Auntie?’
The hand stopped. ‘Hmmmm.’
‘What are you looking at?’
‘The soldiers. I heard they were coming back.’ She pointed to a photograph in the paper, and for a moment they both stood peering at the caption beneath it, trying to make sense of the black dots and swirls lined up like an infantry battalion.
‘Oh, so your brother will be home soon.’
Auntie had a brother who was among the five thousand Turkish troops dispatched to Korea. They were helping the Americans, supporting the good Koreans in their fight against the bad Koreans. Given that the Turkish soldiers spoke neither English nor Korean, and the American soldiers were probably equally ignorant of anything but their own language, how on earth, the child wondered, did they communicate, all these men with their rifles and pistols, and if they could not communicate how did they manage to understand each other? But this was not the right moment to raise the question. Instead, she beamed a broad smile. ‘You must be excited!’
Auntie’s face closed. ‘Why should I? Who knows when I will see him again – if ever? It’s been so long. My parents, brothers and sisters … I haven’t seen any of them. They have no money for travel and I cannot go to them. I miss my family.’
Leila didn’t know how to respond. She had always assumed that they were Auntie’s family. Being the accommodating child that she was, she found it wiser to change the subject: ‘Are you preparing food for the guests?’
Even as she spoke, Leila studied the shredded lettuce piled up on the chopping board. Among the ribbons of green she noticed something that made her gasp: pink earthworms, some cut into pieces, others still wriggling.
‘Eww, what is that?’
‘It’s for the babies. They love it.’
‘Babies?’ Leila felt her stomach sink.
Clearly Mother had been right all along: Auntie was sick in the head. The child’s eyes slid down to the floor. She saw that Auntie wasn’t wearing any shoes; that the soles of her feet were cracked and hard around the edges, as though she had trudged miles to get here. Leila lingered on that thought: maybe Auntie was a sleepwalker, disappearing into the rustling darkness each night before rushing back home at dawn, her breath clouding in the chill air. Maybe she slunk past the garden gate, climbed up the drainpipe, jumped over the balcony rail and sneaked into her bedroom, her eyes remaining closed all the while. What if one day she couldn’t remember the way back?
If Auntie was in the habit of roaming the streets in her sleep, Baba would know about it. Sadly, Leila couldn’t ask him. It would be one of the many subjects that were off-limits. It troubled the child that while she and her mother slept in the same room, her father stayed with her aunt in another room upstairs. When she enquired about why that was, Mother had said that Auntie was scared to be alone because she fought demons in her sleep.
‘Are you going to eat it?’ Leila asked. ‘It’ll make you feel poorly.’
‘Me, no! It’s for the babies, I told you.’ The look Binnaz gave the child was as unexpected as a ladybird landing on her finger, and just as gentle. ‘Haven’t you seen them? Up on the roof. I thought you were there all the time.’
Leila raised her eyebrows in surprise. She had never suspected that her aunt might be visiting her secret place. Even so, she wasn’t worried. There was something ghost-like about Auntie: she didn’t take possession of things, but merely floated through them. In any case, the child was sure there were no babies up there on the roof.
‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m crazy. Everyone thinks I’m crazy.’
There was such hurt in the woman’s voice, such sadness pooling in her beautiful eyes, that, for a moment, Leila was taken aback. Ashamed of her thoughts, she tried to make it up to her. ‘That’s not true. I always believe you!’
‘You sure? It’s a serious thing to believe in someone. You can’t just say it like that. If you really mean it, you have to support them no matter what. Even when other people say awful things about that person. Are you capable of doing that?’
The child nodded, happy to accept the challenge.
Pleased, Auntie smiled. ‘Then I’ll let you into a secret, a big one. Do you promise not to tell anyone?’
‘I promise,’ Leila said instantly.
‘Suzan is not your mother.’
Leila’s eyes grew.
‘Do you want to know who your real mother is?’
Silence.
‘I am the one who gave birth to you. It was a cold day, but a man was selling sweet apricots on the street. Weird, eh? If they find out that I’ve told you, they’ll send me back to the village – or maybe they’ll lock me up in a mental hospital, and we’ll never see each other again. Do you understand?’
The child nodded, her face inert.
‘Good. Then keep your lips sealed.’
Auntie went back to work, humming to herself. The bubbling of the cauldron, the chit-chat of the women in the living room, the clinking of the teaspoons against the glasses … even the ram in the garden seemed eager to join the chorus, bleating a tune of his own.
‘I’ve an idea,’ said Auntie Binnaz all of a sudden. ‘Next time we have guests over, let’s put worms in their wax. Imagine all these women running from the house half-naked, worms clinging to their legs!’
She was laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. She lurched backwards, stumbled on a basket and knocked it over, sending the potatoes inside rolling left and right.
Leila broke into a smile, despite herself. She tried to relax. It all had to be a joke. What else could it be? No one in the family took Auntie seriously – so why should she? Auntie’s remarks were no more substantial than the drops of dew on the cool grass or the sighs of a butterfly.
Then and there, Leila resolved to forget what she had heard. Surely that would be the right thing to do. But a seed of doubt niggled at her mind. Part of her wanted to unveil a truth that the rest of her was not ready for, perhaps would never be. She couldn’t help sensing that something remained unresolved between them, like a muddled message on a poorly transmitted radio wave, strings of words that, though conveyed, could not be formed into anything coherent.
About half an hour later, holding a spoon dolloped with wax, Leila sat in her usual spot on the roof, her legs dangling over the edge like a pair of drop earrings. Even though it hadn’t rained in weeks, the bricks felt slippery and she moved around with caution, knowing that if she fell down she could break a bone, and even if she didn’t, Mother might just as easily do it for her.
When she had finished eating her treat, with the concentration of a circus performer on a tightrope, Leila inched her way towards the roof’s far end, where she rarely ventured. She stopped halfway and was about to turn back when she picked up a sound – soft and muffled, like a moth against a lantern glass. Then the sound intensified. A thousand moths. Curious, she walked in that direction. And there, behind a pile of boxes, inside a large wire cage, were pigeons. Many, many pigeons. On both sides of the cage were bowls of fresh water and food. The newspapers spread underneath were marked with a few droppings but otherwise they seemed clean enough. Someone was taking good care of them.
Laughing, the child clapped her hands. A wave of tenderness welled up within her, caressing her throat like the carbonated bubbles of her favourite drink, gazoz. She felt protective towards her aunt, despite – or because of – her frailties. But this sentiment was soon overwhelmed by a sense of confusion. If Auntie Binnaz had been right about the pigeons, what else had she been right about? What if she really was her mother – they had the same blunt, upturned noses, and they both sneezed as soon as they woke, as if suffering from a mild allergy to the first light of the day. They also shared the strange habit of whistling as they spread butter and jam on toast, and spitting out the seeds when they ate grapes, or the skins when they ate tomatoes. She tried to consider what more they had in common, but the thought she kept returning to was this: all these years she had been scared
of make-believe Gypsies who kidnapped small children and turned them into hollow-eyed beggars, but maybe the people she should be fearing were in her own home. Maybe it was they who had snatched her from her mother’s arms.
For the first time she was able to stand back and regard herself and her family from a mental distance; and what she found out made her uncomfortable. She had always assumed they were a normal family, like any other in the world. Now she wasn’t so sure. What if there was something different about them – something inherently wrong? Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.
Leila began to panic. She loved Mother, and didn’t want to think badly of her. She loved Baba too, though she was also scared of him sometimes. Hugging herself for comfort, sucking in lungfuls of air, she brooded on her predicament. She didn’t know what to believe in any more, which direction to take; it was as if she were lost in a forest, the paths ahead jumping about and multiplying before her eyes. Who in the family was more reliable – her father, her mother or her aunt? Leila looked around as though in search of an answer. Everything was the same. And nothing would be from now on.
As the tastes of lemon and sugar melted on her tongue, so too her feelings dissolved into confusion. Years later, she would come to think of this moment as the first time she realized that things were not always what they seemed. Just as the sour could hide beneath the sweet, or vice versa, within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity.
To this day she had been careful not to show her love for her mother when Auntie was around. From now on she would have to keep her love for her aunt a secret from Mother as well. Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden – that such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards. This was the only form of affection she had learned from grown-ups, and the teaching would come with dire consequences.
Three Minutes
Three minutes had passed since Leila’s heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee – strong, intense, dark. A taste forever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul. It was rather strange that this should follow on the heels of her recollections of childhood. But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.
Hence Leila remembered: September 1967. A dead-end street down by the harbour, just a stone’s throw from the port of Karaköy, near the Golden Horn, extending between rows of licensed brothels. There was an Armenian school nearby, a Greek church, a Sephardic synagogue, a Sufi lodge, a Russian Orthodox chapel – remnants of a past no longer remembered. The district, once a thriving commercial waterfront and home to prosperous Levantine and Jewish communities, and then the hub of Ottoman banking and shipping industries, nowadays witnessed transactions of a very different kind. Muted messages were conveyed through the wind, money changing hands as fast as it was acquired.
The area around the port was always so crowded that pedestrians had to move sideways like crabs. Young women in miniskirts walked arm in arm; drivers catcalled out of car windows; apprentices from coffeehouses scurried back and forth, carrying tea trays loaded with small glasses; tourists bent under the weight of their backpacks gazed around as if newly awake; shoe-shine boys rattled their brushes against their brass boxes, decorated with photos of actresses – modest ones on the front, nudes on the back. Vendors peeled salted cucumbers, squeezed fresh pickle juice, roasted chickpeas and yelled over one another while motorists blasted their horns for no reason at all. Smells of tobacco, sweat, perfume, fried food and an occasional reefer – albeit illegal – mingled with the briny sea air.
The side streets and alleyways were rivers of paper. Socialist, communist and anarchist posters plastered the walls, inviting the proletariat and peasantry to join the upcoming revolution. Here and there, the posters had been slashed and defaced with far-right slogans and sprayed with their symbol: a howling wolf inside a crescent. Street cleaners with tattered brooms and weary looks picked up the litter, their energy sapped by the knowledge that new flyers would rain down as soon as they turned their backs.
A few minutes’ walk away from the harbour, just off a steep avenue, was the street of brothels. An iron gate in need of a fresh coat of paint separated the place from the world outside. In front of it stood a few police officers on eight-hour shifts. Some of them visibly hated their job; they despised this street of ill repute and anyone who crossed its threshold: women and men alike. An unspoken reprimand in their brusque manners, they kept their unflinching gaze fixed on the men huddled by the gate, raring to get in but reluctant to queue. Whereas some officers took it as they would any other job, simply doing what they were asked to do, day in, day out, others secretly envied the punters, wishing they could trade places, if only for a few hours.
The brothel where Leila worked was among the oldest in the area. A single fluorescent tube flickered at the entrance with the force of a thousand tiny matches catching light and burning one after another. The air was thickened by the scent of cheap perfume, the taps encrusted with deposits of limescale and the ceiling coated with the sticky brown stains of nicotine and tar from years of tobacco smoke. An intricate lacework of cracks spread across the entire length of the foundation walls, as wispy as the veins of a bloodshot eye. Under the eaves, right outside Leila’s window, dangled an empty wasps’ nest – round, papery, mysterious. A hidden universe. Now and then she felt an urge to touch the nest, to break it open and reveal its perfect architecture, but each time she told herself that she had no right to disturb what nature had intended to remain intact, complete.
This was her second address on the same street. The first house had been so unbearable that before a year was up she had done something no one else had dared to do before or ever since: she had packed her few belongings, put on her one good coat and walked out to seek refuge in the brothel next door. The news had divided the community into two camps: some said she should immediately be returned to the previous place; otherwise, every mother’s daughter would start doing the same thing, violating the unwritten code of work ethics, and the whole business would tumble into anarchy; others said that, according to the dictates of conscience, anyone who had been so desperate as to seek sanctuary should be provided with it. In the end, the madam of the second brothel, impressed by Leila’s audacity as much as by the prospect of the fresh money she could bring in, had taken a shine to her and accepted her as one of her own. But not before paying a large sum to her colleague, extending her sincerest apologies and promising she would never let this happen again.
The new madam was a woman of ample proportions, resolute gait, and rouged cheeks that sagged like flaps of staked leather. She had a tendency to address every man who walked in, whether a regular or not, as ‘my pasha’. Every few weeks she visited a hairdressing salon named Split Ends where she had her hair dyed a different shade of blonde. Her wide-set, protuberant eyes gave her an expression of permanent surprise, although this she rarely was. A web of broken capillaries fanned out across the tip of her mighty nose, like streams threading their way down a mountainside. No one knew her real name. Both the prostitutes and the punters called her ‘Sweet Ma’ to her face and ‘Bitter Ma’ behind her back. She was all right as far as madams went, but she had a tendency to do everything to excess: she smoked too much, swore too much, shouted too much and was simply too much of a presence in their lives – a veritable maximum dose.
‘We were founded way back in the nineteenth century,’ Bitter Ma loved to boast, a proud lilt to her voice. ‘And by none other than the great Sultan Abdülaziz.’
She used to keep a framed portrait of the Sultan behind
her desk – until one day a client with ultra-nationalist leanings had reprimanded her about it in front of everyone. The man had told her in no uncertain terms not to tout such nonsense about ‘our magnanimous ancestors and our glorious past’.
‘Why would a sultan – the conqueror of three continents and five seas – allow a house of filth to open in Istanbul?’ he had demanded to know.
Bitter Ma had stammered, nervously twisting her handkerchief. ‘Well, I think it’s because –’
‘Who cares about what you think? Are you a historian or what are you?’
Bitter Ma had raised her freshly plucked eyebrows.
‘Or maybe you are a professor!’ The man had chuckled.
Bitter Ma’s shoulders had drooped.
‘An ignorant woman has no right to distort history,’ the man had said, no longer laughing. ‘You better get it straight. There were no licensed brothels in the Ottoman Empire. If a few ladies wished to ply their trade on the sly, they must have been Christians or Jews – or heathen Gypsies. Because I’m telling you, no proper Muslim woman would ever have agreed to such immorality. They’d rather have died of hunger than agreed to sell themselves. Until now, that is. Modern times, immodest times.’
After the lecture, Bitter Ma had quietly taken down the portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz and replaced it with a still life of yellow daffodils and citrus fruits. But since the second painting happened to be smaller than the first, the outline of the Sultan’s frame remained visible on the wall, thin and pale like a map drawn in the sand.
As for the client, the next time he showed up, the madam, all smiles and bows, welcomed him with cordial sweetness, offering him a hot chick he was exceptionally lucky not to be missing out on:
‘She’s leaving us, my pasha. Going back to her village tomorrow morning. She managed to pay back her debts, this one. What can I do? Says she will be spending the rest of her days repenting. “Good for you,” I said in the end. “You can pray for the rest of us too.”’
