10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  ‘That’s okay, dear,’ said Baba. ‘Go and study.’

  As Leila walked out of the room, her footsteps muffled by the carpet where a lonely deer stood abandoned, she heard Uncle whisper behind her back, ‘Oh, bless her! She’s jealous of the baby, poor darling.’

  The next morning Baba visited a glass-maker and ordered an evil-eye bead, bluer than the skies and larger than a prayer rug. On the fortieth day following Tarkan’s birth, he sacrificed three goats and distributed their meat to the poor. And, for a while, he was a happy, proud man.

  Months later, two grains of rice appeared in Tarkan’s mouth. Now that he had his first teeth, it was time to determine the boy’s future profession. All the neighbouring women were invited. And they came, dressed neither as conservatively as they would on a Qur’an reading day, nor as boldly as they would if it were leg-waxing day. Today their clothes were somewhere in between, signifying motherhood, domestic life.

  A large, white umbrella was held open above Tarkan’s head, on which they poured a potful of cooked wheat berries. The baby looked a little startled as he watched the wheat raining down on him, but to everyone’s relief he did not cry. He had passed the first test. He would be a strong man.

  Now he was made to sit on the carpet, surrounded by a range of objects: a wad of money, a stethoscope, a tie, a mirror, a rosary, a book, a pair of scissors. If he chose the money, he’d become a banker; if the stethoscope, a doctor; if the tie, a government official; if the mirror, a hairdresser; if the rosary, an imam; if the book, a teacher; and if he motioned towards the scissors instead, he was sure to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a tailor.

  Forming a semicircle, inching closer, the women waited, barely breathing. Auntie’s face was pure concentration, her eyes slightly glazed and fixed on a single target, like a person about to swat a fly. Leila suppressed an urge to laugh. She glanced at her brother, who was sucking his thumb, unaware that he was at a critical crossroads – about to choose the course of his destiny.

  ‘Come this way, darling,’ said Auntie, gesturing towards the book. Wouldn’t it be nice if her son became a teacher – or, even better, a headmaster? She would visit him every week, sauntering through the school gates with pride: welcome, at last, in a place she had longed to be part of as a child, but from which she had been excluded.

  ‘No, this way,’ said Mother, pointing at the rosary. As far as she was concerned, nothing was as prestigious as having an imam in the family – a good deed that would bring them all closer to God.

  ‘Are you out of your minds?’ piped up an elderly neighbour. ‘Everyone needs a doctor.’ With her chin she pointed towards the stethoscope while her eyes followed the baby and her voice trickled with honey. ‘Come over here, dear child.’

  ‘Well, I’d say lawyers earn more money than anyone,’ said the woman sitting next to her. ‘Clearly you’ve forgotten that. I don’t see a copy of the constitution here.’

  Meanwhile, Tarkan’s puzzled eyes scanned the objects around him. Not interested in any of them, he turned his back to the guests. That was when he caught sight of Leila, who was standing silently behind him. Instantly, the baby’s expression softened. He reached out towards his sister, pulled off Leila’s bracelet – of brown leather braiding with a blue satin cord woven through it – and held it in the air.

  ‘Hah! He doesn’t want to be a teacher … or an imam,’ said Leila with a chuckle. ‘He wants to be me!’

  And the girl’s joy was so pure and spontaneous that the grown-ups, despite their disappointment, felt obliged to join her laughter.

  A frail child with poor muscle tone and control, Tarkan often got sick. The slightest physical effort seemed to exhaust him. He was small for his age; his body did not seem to be growing in proportion. As time went by, anyone could see that he was different, though no one talked about it openly. It was only when he was two and a half years old that Baba agreed to take him to a hospital. Leila insisted on accompanying them.

  It was raining in earnest when they reached the doctor’s office. Baba placed Tarkan on a bed that had been covered with a sheet. The baby’s eyes moved from him to Leila and back, his lower lip sagging, poised to cry, and for the thousandth time Leila felt a surge of love so strong and helpless that it almost hurt. Softly, she put her hand on the warm round of his belly and smiled.

  ‘I see you have a problem here. I’m sorry about your son’s condition – it happens,’ the doctor said after he had examined Tarkan. ‘These kids can’t learn a thing, there’s not much point in trying. They don’t live long anyhow.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Baba kept a tight rein on his voice.

  ‘This baby is a mongoloid. You never heard of it?’

  Baba stared off into space, silent and motionless, as if it were he who had asked a question and was now waiting for a reply.

  The doctor removed his glasses and held them up to the light. He must have found them sufficiently clean, for he returned them to his nose. ‘Your son is not normal. Surely you are aware of this by now. I mean, it’s obvious. I don’t even understand why you are so surprised. And where is your wife, may I ask?’

  Baba cleared his throat. He was not going to tell this patronizing man that he did not approve of his young wife leaving the house unless strictly necessary. ‘She’s at home.’

  ‘Well, she should have come with you. It’s important that she is clear about the situation. You need to talk to her. In the West, there are institutions for these kids. They stay there their whole lives and don’t bother anyone. But we don’t have that kind of support here. Your wife will have to take care of him. It won’t be easy. Tell her she should not get too attached. They usually die before they reach puberty.’

  Leila, who had been listening to every word, her heart accelerating, scowled up at the man. ‘Shut up, you stupid, bad man! Why are you saying horrible things?’

  ‘Leyla … behave,’ said Baba – though perhaps not as sternly as he would have at any other time.

  The doctor turned to the girl with a bewildered look, as if he had forgotten she was in the room. ‘Don’t worry, child, your brother doesn’t understand anything.’

  ‘He does!’ Leila yelled, her voice like shattered glass. ‘He understands everything.’

  Taken aback by her outburst, the doctor raised a hand to pat her on the head, but he must have thought better of it because he swiftly brought it down again.

  Baba took Tarkan’s condition personally, certain that he had done something terrible to draw God’s ire. He was being punished for his sins, past and present. Allah was sending him a message, loud and clear, and if he still refused to receive it, worse things were to follow. All this time he had lived in vain, preoccupied with what he wanted of the Almighty, never thinking about what the Almighty wanted of him. Had he not sworn to stop drinking alcohol the day Leila was born, but then gone back on his word? His whole life was full of broken promises and incomplete tasks. Now that he managed to quieten the voice of his nafs, his ego, he was ready to redeem himself. After consulting with his sheikh, and upon his advice, he decided to stop making alla franga garments for women. No more skimpy dresses, no more short skirts. He would use his skills to better purpose. Whatever life he had left, he would dedicate it to spreading the fear of God because he bore witness to the blows that rained on humans when they stopped fearing Him.

  His two wives could take care of his two children. Baba was done with marriage, and done with sex, which, he now realized, just like money, had a way of complicating things. He moved to a dimly lit bedroom at the back of the house, ordering all the furniture inside to be removed – except for a single mattress, a blanket, an oil lamp, a wooden chest, and a handful of books carefully chosen by his sheikh. His clothes and rosaries and ablution towels he kept inside the chest. All items of comfort, even a pillow, were to be relinquished. Like many a belated believer, Baba was keen to make up for what he regarded as his lost years. Yearning to bring everyone around him to God – his God
– he wanted to have disciples, if not in the dozens, then at least a few. Or else, a single devoted follower. And who would fit this role better than his daughter, who was fast becoming a defiant youngster, her attitude increasingly rude and irreverent?

  If Tarkan had not been born with severe Down’s syndrome, as his condition came to be called years later, Baba might have distributed his expectations and frustrations more evenly between his children, but, as things stood, they were all placed on Leila. And, as the years went by, those expectations and frustrations multiplied.

  13 April 1963. Age sixteen, Leila had fallen into the habit of following the world news closely – both because she was interested in what happened elsewhere and also because it helped her not to think too much about her own limited life. This afternoon, peering over the newspaper spread on the kitchen table, she read out the news for Auntie. Far away in America a brave black man had been arrested for protesting against the ill-treatment of his people. His crime: holding a march without a permit. There was a photo of him with a caption underneath that read, ‘Martin Luther King sent to jail!’ He wore a neat suit and a dark tie, his face tilted towards the camera. It was his hands that grabbed Leila’s attention. He held them gracefully in the air, his palms curved towards each other as though he were carrying an invisible crystal ball that, though it would not show him how the future would look, he had nevertheless promised himself never to drop.

  Slowly, Leila turned the page to the domestic news. Hundreds of peasants in Anatolia had held a march against poverty and unemployment. Many had been arrested. The newspaper said the government in Ankara was determined to crush the mutiny and not to make the same mistake as the Shah in Iran, just next door. Shah Pahlavi had been distributing land to landless peasants in the hope of earning their loyalty and the plan did not seem to be working. Discontent was brewing in the land of pomegranates and Caspian tigers.

  ‘Tut-tut, the world is running as fast as an Afghan hound,’ Auntie said after Leila had finished reading the news. ‘There’s so much misery and violence everywhere.’

  Auntie glanced out of the window, intimidated by the world far and beyond. It was one of the endless troubles of her life that, even after all this time, and even after she had had two children, her fear of being kicked out of this house had not abated in the slightest. She still did not feel secure. Tarkan, who was nine years old now but had the communication skills of a three-year-old, was sitting on the carpet by her feet, playing with a ball of wool. It was the best toy for him, without any sharp edges or unsafe bits. He had been feeling unwell the whole month, complaining of chest pains, weakened by a flu that never seemed to leave him. Although he had gained a lot of weight recently, his skin had the pale glow of the emaciated. Watching her brother with an anxious smile, Leila wondered if he understood that he would never be like other children. She hoped not. For his own good. It must be painful to be different and to know it deep within.

  None of them was aware back then that this would be the last time Leila, or anyone in the family, would be reading the papers aloud. If the world was changing, so was Baba. After his sheikh had passed away, he had been looking for a new spiritual master. Early in the spring, he started to attend dhikr ceremonies of a tariqa based on the outskirts of Van. The preacher there, a decade younger than him, was a stern man with eyes the colour of dry grass. Although the tariqa had historical roots in the time-honoured Sufi philosophies and mystical teachings of love, peace and self-effacement, it had nowadays become an axis of rigidity, zealotry and hubris. Jihad, once regarded as the lifelong struggle against one’s own nafs, now meant only the war against infidels – and infidels were everywhere. ‘How could the state and religion be separated when they are one and the same in Islam?’ the preacher wanted to know. Maybe this artificial duality worked for Westerners, with their heavy drinking and loose morals, but not for the people here in the East, who liked to have God’s guidance in everything they did. Secularism was another name for the reign of Sheitan. The tariqa members would fight against it with every fibre of their being, and one day put an end to this man-made regime by bringing back God-made sharia.

  To this end, every member had to open the way for God’s work, starting with their personal life, the preacher advised. They were obliged to make sure that their families – their wives and children – lived according to the holy teachings.

  And this is how Baba waged a holy war in the house. First, he instituted a new set of rules. Leila was no longer allowed to go to the house of the Lady Pharmacist to watch TV. From now on she was to refrain from reading any publications, and to especially avoid alla franga ones, including the popular Hayat magazine, which featured a different actress on its cover each month. Singing contests, beauty pageants and sports competitions were immoral. Figure skaters with their skimpy skirts were all sinners. Swimmers and gymnasts in their skintight outfits were provoking lustful thoughts in pious menfolk.

  ‘All those girls flipping in the air, naked!’

  ‘But you used to enjoy sports,’ Leila reminded him.

  ‘I had gone astray,’ Baba said. ‘My eyes are open now. Allah did not want me to get lost in the wilderness.’

  Leila did not know what wilderness her father was talking about. They lived in a city. Not a big one, but a city nonetheless.

  ‘I’m doing you a favour. One day you’ll appreciate it,’ Baba would say as the two of them sat at the kitchen table with a pile of religious pamphlets between them.

  Every few days, Mother, in the soft, plaintive voice she reserved for praying, reminded Leila that she should have already started covering her hair. The time had come and passed. They had to go to the bazaar together and choose the best fabrics, just as they had once agreed – except Leila no longer felt bound by this understanding. Not only did she refuse to wear a headscarf, but she treated her body as if it were a mannequin she could shape and dress and paint to her heart’s content. She bleached her hair and eyebrows with lemon juice and chamomile tea, and when all the lemons and chamomile in the kitchen mysteriously disappeared, she turned to Mother’s henna. If she couldn’t be blonde, why not be a redhead? Quietly, Mother disposed of all the henna in the house.

  On the way to school one day Leila saw a Kurdish woman with a traditional tattoo on her chin, and, inspired by her, the next week she had a black rose imprinted just above her right ankle. The ink for the tattoo was based on a centuries-old formula known to local tribes: wood-fire soot, gall-bladder liquid from a mountain goat, deer tallow and a few drops of breastmilk. With each push of the needle, she flinched a little but endured the pain, feeling strangely alive with hundreds of splinters under her skin.

  Leila decorated her notebooks with pictures of famous singers, even though Baba had told her that music was haram and Western music even more so. Because he said this, leaving no room for compromise, Leila had of late been listening to Western music exclusively. It wasn’t always easy to follow the European or American singles charts in a place so remote and secluded, but she seized on whatever she could. She was especially fond of Elvis Presley, who, with his dark handsomeness, looked more Turkish than American, endearingly familiar.

  Her body had been changing fast. Hair under her arms, a dark patch between her legs; new skin, new smells, new emotions. Her breasts had turned into strangers, a pair of snobs, holding the tips of their noses in the air. Every day she checked her face in the mirror with a curiosity that made her uneasy, as though half expecting to see someone else staring back. She applied make-up at every opportunity, kept her hair unbound instead of in neat braids, wore tight skirts whenever she could, and had recently, secretly, taken up smoking, stealing from Mother’s tobacco pouches. She had no friends in the classroom. The other students found her either strange or scary, she couldn’t tell which. In voices loud enough for her to hear, they gossiped about her, calling her a bad apple. That was all fine by Leila: she avoided them anyway, particularly the popular girls with their judgemental glares and sharp remarks. Her
grades were low. Baba did not seem to mind. Soon she would get married and start her own family. He didn’t expect her to be an exemplary student; he expected her to be a good girl, a modest girl.

  Still to this day, her only friend at school was the son of the Lady Pharmacist. Their friendship had stood the test of time, like an olive tree that grows stronger as the years pass. By nature timid and taciturn, Sinan was a whizz with numbers and always got the highest grade in maths. He had no other friends either, unable to keep up with the assertive energy of most of his peers. Next to dominant personalities – the class teacher, the headmaster and, above all, his mother – he usually kept quiet and withdrew into himself. Not with Leila though. When they were together he wouldn’t stop talking, his voice full of excitement. At every break and lunchtime at school, they sought each other out. Sitting in a corner by themselves – while other girls gathered in groups or jumped rope and other boys played football or marbles – they would chat endlessly, ignoring the reproving stares directed at them in a town where the sexes kept to their designated spaces.

  Sinan had read everything he could find on the First and Second World Wars – the names of the battles, the dates of the bombing raids, the heroes of the resistance movement … He knew an awful lot of information about Zeppelins and the German Count that these airships had been named after. Leila loved to listen to him as he told her about them, speaking with such passion that she almost saw one drifting overhead, its massive, cylindrical shadow brushing over the minarets and domes as it floated towards the great lake.

  ‘One day you too will invent something,’ Leila said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, and it’ll be better than the German Count’s invention because that killed people. Whereas yours will help others. I am sure you’ll do something truly remarkable.’

  She was the only one who thought him capable of doing extraordinary things.