10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

She needed to find a job. There were none – except a few she wasn’t qualified for. The slum she used to observe from a distance soon became her address. Meanwhile, the country was changing. All her friends, echoing the words of Mohamed Siad Barre – Mighty Mouth – went on about liberating Somalis living under the yoke of others. A Greater Somalia. They said they were ready to fight for it – and to die for it. It seemed to Jameelah that everyone, including herself, was trying to avoid the present moment; she, by longing to go back to her childhood; her friends, by aspiring to a future as uncertain as the shifting sands of a maritime desert.

  Then things started to get ugly, and the streets were not safe any more. The smell of burning tyres, gunpowder. Opponents of the regime were arrested with Soviet-made weapons. Prisons – relics of the former British and Italian rule – were filling up fast. Schools, government buildings and military barracks were turned into temporary jails. Still there was not enough room to lock up all those arrested. Even parts of the presidential palace would have to be used as a jail.

  Around this time, an acquaintance told her about some feringhees who were looking for healthy, hard-working African women to take to Istanbul. For menial jobs – housekeeping, babysitting, cooking and the like. The acquaintance explained that Turkish families liked to have Somalian help at home. Jameelah saw an opportunity. Her life, like a door, had closed, and she was eager for another to open elsewhere. He who has not travelled in the world has no eyes, she thought.

  Along with more than forty people, mostly women, she made the journey to Istanbul. Upon arrival they were lined up and separated into groups. Jameelah noticed that younger girls like herself were kept to one side. The rest were soon taken away. She would not see any of them again. By the time she understood it was a sham – a pretext to bring people in as cheap labour and for sexual exploitation – it was too late for her to escape.

  The Africans in Istanbul came from all sides of the old continent – Tanganyika, Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Upper Volta, Ethiopia – escaping civil war, religious violence, political insurgency. The number of asylum seekers had increased daily over the years. Among them were students, professionals, artists, journalists, scholars … But the only Africans mentioned in the newspapers were those who, like her, had been trafficked.

  A house in Tarlabasi. Threadbare sofas, frayed bedsheets turned into curtains, the air filled with the smell of burnt potatoes and fried onions, and of something tart, like unripe walnuts. At night, several of the women would be summoned – they never knew which of them it would be. Every couple of weeks the police would pound on their door, round them up and take them to the Venereal Diseases Hospital for a check-up.

  Those women who resisted their captors were locked up in a cellar underneath the house, so dark and small they could only fit if they crouched down. Worse than the hunger, and the pain in their legs, was the conflicted anxiety of worrying about their jailers, that something might happen to these men, the only people who knew their whereabouts – and the consequent fear that they might find themselves abandoned there forever.

  ‘It’s like breaking horses,’ said one of the women. ‘That’s what they are doing to us. Once our spirits are broken, they know we won’t go anywhere.’

  But Jameelah had never stopped planning her escape. This was what she was deliberating the day she met Leila at the hospital. She was thinking, maybe she was only a half-broken horse, too frightened to bolt, too lame to dare, but still able to remember the sweet taste of, and therefore to yearn for, freedom.

  Eight Minutes

  Eight minutes had gone by, and the next memory that Leila pulled from her archive was the smell of sulphuric acid.

  March 1966. On the street of brothels, upstairs in her room, Leila was reclining on her bed, flipping through a glossy magazine that had on its cover a picture of Sophia Loren. She wasn’t really reading, distracted as she was by her own thoughts – until she heard Bitter Ma call her name.

  Leila dropped the magazine. Slowly, she rose to her feet and stretched her limbs. She crossed the corridor as if in a daze, descending the stairs, her cheeks slightly flushed. A middle-aged client was standing next to Bitter Ma, his back half turned to her, inspecting the painting of yellow daffodils and citrus fruits. She recognized the cigar he was holding before she recognized his face. It was the man all the prostitutes tried to avoid. Cruel, mean and foul-mouthed, he had been so violent a couple of times that he had been banished from the premises. But today Bitter Ma seemed to have pardoned him – again. Leila’s face closed.

  He was wearing a khaki vest with several pockets. It was this detail that caught Leila’s attention before anything else. Only a photojournalist would need such a thing, she thought – or someone with a lot to hide. Something in his manner made Leila think of a jellyfish; not out in the open sea, but in a bell jar, its translucent tentacles hanging in the confined space. It was as if there were nothing holding him up straight; his entire body was a flaccid mass, composed of a different kind of solidity, one that could, at any moment, liquefy.

  Placing her palms on the desk and leaning forward with her enormous bulk, Bitter Ma gave the man a wink. ‘Here she is, my pasha: Tequila Leila! She’s one of my finest.’

  ‘Is that her name? Why do you call her that?’ He eyed Leila from head to toe.

  ‘Because she’s impatient, that one. She wants life to run fast. But she’s resilient too; she can guzzle the sour and the bitter, like downing tequila shots. I gave her that name.’

  The man laughed unhappily. ‘Then she is perfect for me.’

  Upstairs in the room where just a few minutes before she had been looking at Sophia Loren’s perfect figure and white lace dress, Leila took off her clothes. The floral skirt, the bikini top – a pink frilly thing that she hated. She peeled off her stockings but kept her velvet slippers on, as though to feel more secure.

  ‘Do you think the bitch is watching us?’ the man said under his breath.

  Leila glanced at him in surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘The madam downstairs. She could be spying on us.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Look, right there!’ He pointed at a crack in the wall. ‘See her eyeball? See how it moves? The devil!’

  ‘There’s nothing there.’

  He squinted at her, his gaze clouded with an unmistakable hatred and spite. ‘You work for her, why should I trust you? The devil’s servant.’

  Leila suddenly felt scared. She took a step back, a sick feeling growing in her stomach at the realization that she was alone in a room with a man who was mentally unstable.

  ‘Spies are watching us.’

  ‘Trust me, there is no one else here,’ Leila said soothingly.

  ‘Shut up! Stupid bitch, you don’t know a thing,’ he bawled, and then dropped his voice. ‘They are recording our conversation. They have placed cameras everywhere.’

  He was patting his pockets now, his words an incomprehensible murmur. He produced a little bottle. When he pulled out the cork, it made a sound like a suppressed groan.

  Leila panicked. In her confusion, she moved towards him, trying to understand what the bottle contained, then changed her mind and backed away, heading towards the door. Were it not for those dainty slippers that she adored so much, she could have escaped faster. She tripped, lost her balance, and the liquid he had tossed at her only a second ago hit her in the back.

  Sulphuric acid. He was planning to pour the rest on her face, but she managed to dash into the corridor, despite the acid burning into her flesh. The pain was unlike anything else. Out of breath and shaking, she leaned against the wall like an old, discarded broom. Her head spinning, she nevertheless dragged herself towards the stairs, and gripped the banister tight to keep herself from collapsing. When she was able to make a sound – a raw, feral sound – her voice broke, raining down on all the rooms inside the brothel.

  A hole remained in the floorboard where the acid had spilled. After she was released from hospital, the scar on
her back still tender and discoloured – the wound never fully healing – Leila often sat next to that spot. She would run a finger around it, feeling its amorphous shape, its rough edge, as though they shared a secret, she and the floorboard. If she looked at that dark hole long and hard enough, it would start to swirl, like eddies on the surface of cardamom coffee. Just as she had seen the deer on the carpet move when she was a child, now she watched an acid hole swirl.

  ‘It could have been your face, you know. Count your lucky stars,’ Bitter Ma said.

  The clients echoed the sentiment. They told her how fortunate she was that the disfigurement had not prevented her from working. If anything she was more popular than before, in greater demand. She was a prostitute with a story, and men seemed to like that.

  After the attack, the number of police officers on the street of brothels increased – for about two weeks. Throughout the spring of 1966, violence was escalating in every corner of the city, political factions clashed, blood was washed with blood, students were gunned down on university campuses, the posters on the streets had turned angrier, their tone more urgent, and soon the extra officers were deployed elsewhere.

  For a long while after the attack, Leila avoided, as much as she could, the other women, most of whom were older than her and irritated her with their spiky words and sardonic humour. She fought back when she needed to; otherwise, she mostly kept to herself. Depression was common among the women on this street, tearing into their souls as fire tears into wood. No one used the word though. Miserable, was what they said. Not about themselves, but about everyone and everything else. The food is miserable. The payment is miserable. My feet hurt, these shoes are miserable.

  There was only one woman that Leila liked to spend time with. An Arab woman of indeterminate age, she was so short that she had to buy her clothes from children’s departments. Her name was Zaynab122, which, depending on her mood, she spelled as Zainab, Zeinab, Zayneb, Zeynep … She claimed she could write her name in 122 different ways. That number was also a reference to her height, which was exactly 122 centimetres. Dwarf, Pygmy or Thumbling – she had been called such names and worse. So fed up was she with people staring at her, and secretly or openly wondering how tall she was, that, in an act of defiance, she had added the measurement to her name. Her arms were out of proportion to her torso, her fingers were fat and stubby, and her neck was almost non-existent. A broad forehead, a cleft palate and wide-set, intelligent slate-grey eyes were the most prominent features in her face. Her Turkish was fluent, though spoken with a guttural accent that betrayed her roots.

  Mopping the floors, scrubbing the toilets, vacuuming the rooms, Zaynab122 worked hard even as she assisted the prostitutes with their every need. None of this was easy, for she suffered not only from shortened limbs, but also from curvature of the spine, which made it hard for her to stand on her feet for long hours.

  Zaynab122 was a fortune-teller in her spare time – but only for people she favoured. Twice a day without fail, she brewed coffee for Leila. After she had finished her drink, Zaynab122 would peer into the dark residue at the bottom of the cup. She preferred to talk about neither the past nor the future, only the present. Her predictions she kept to under a week or a few months at most. But one particular afternoon, Zaynab122 broke her own rule.

  ‘Today your cup is full of surprises. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  They were sitting on the bed, side by side. Outside, somewhere down the road, a playful melody rose, reminding Leila of the ice-cream trucks she had heard as a child.

  ‘Look! An eagle perched high on a mountaintop,’ said Zaynab122, revolving the cup. ‘There’s a halo around its head. A good omen. But there’s a raven down there.’

  ‘And that’s a bad omen?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s a sign of conflict.’ Zaynab122 turned the cup one more time. ‘Oh, my God, you need to see this!’

  Curiously, Leila leaned forward and squinted into the cup. All she found in there was a jumble of brown stains.

  ‘You’ll meet someone. Tall, slender, handsome …’ Zaynab122 spoke faster now, her words like sparks from a fire. ‘Path of flowers, that means a great romance. He’s holding a ring. Oh dear … you’re going to get married.’

  Leila straightened her back, studied her palm. Her eyes narrowed as though she were peering at a scorching sun in the distance or a future just as impossible to reach. When she spoke again, her voice was flat. ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘I swear I am not.’

  Leila hesitated. Had it been anyone else saying such things she would have walked out of the room right away. But this was a woman who never said anything mean about others, although she was ridiculed by them all the time.

  Zaynab122 tilted her head to the side like she did when she was searching for the right words in Turkish. ‘Sorry if I sounded too excited, I couldn’t help it. I mean … it’s been years since I’ve come across a reading this hopeful. What I say is what I see.’

  Leila shrugged. ‘It’s just coffee. Stupid coffee.’

  Zaynab122 took off her glasses, wiped them with her handkerchief and put them on again. ‘You don’t believe me, that’s fine.’

  Leila grew still, her eyes focused somewhere outside the room. ‘It’s a serious thing to believe in someone,’ she said. And for a moment she was a girl in Van again, standing in the kitchen, watching the woman who had given birth to her chop lettuce and earthworms. ‘You can’t just say it like that. It’s a big commitment, to believe.’

  Zaynab122 stared at her – a long, curious look. ‘Well, on that we agree. So why not take my words seriously? One day, you’ll leave this place in a wedding gown. Let this dream give you strength.’

  ‘I don’t need dreams.’

  ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard from your lips,’ said Zaynab122. ‘We all need dreams, habibi. One day you are going to surprise everyone. They’ll say, “Look at Leila, she moved mountains! First she walks out of one brothel to another; she has enough courage to leave an awful madam. Then she quits the street altogether. What a woman!” They will talk about you even long after you’ve gone. You’ll give them hope.’

  Leila drew in a breath to protest but said nothing.

  ‘And when that day comes, I want you to take me with you. Let’s go together. Besides, you’ll need someone to hold your veil. It’ll be a long one.’

  In spite of herself, Leila could not resist the trace of a smile that played at the corners of her mouth. ‘When I was in school … back in Van … I saw a picture of a princess bride. My God, she was beautiful. Her gown was the prettiest thing and her veil was two hundred and fifty feet long, imagine!’

  Zaynab122 walked towards the sink. She rose on tiptoes and let the water run. This she had learned from her master. If the coffee grounds revealed exceptionally good news, they had to be washed off right away. Otherwise, Destiny could step in and mess things up, as was its wont. Gently, she dried the cup and put it on the windowsill.

  Leila carried on: ‘She looked like an angel, standing there in front of her palace. Sabotage cut out the picture and gave it to me to keep.’

  ‘Who is Sabotage?’ asked Zaynab122.

  ‘Oh.’ Leila’s face darkened. ‘A friend. He was a dear friend.’

  ‘Well, about that bride …’ Zaynab122 said. ‘Her veil was two hundred and fifty feet, did you say? That’s nothing, habibi. Because I’m telling you, Princess you might not be, but if what I’ve seen in your cup is true, your gown will be even prettier.’

  Zaynab122, the diviner, the optimist, the believer; for whom the word ‘faith’ was synonymous with the word ‘love’ and for whom God, therefore, could only be Beloved.

  Zaynab122, one of the five.

  Zaynab’s Story

  Zaynab was born a thousand miles away from Istanbul, in an isolated mountain village in northern Lebanon. For generations the Sunni families in the area had only intermarried, and dwarfism was so common in the village that they
often attracted curious visitors from the outside world – journalists, scientists and the like. Zaynab’s brothers and sisters were average-sized and when the time came they would marry, one after another. Among her siblings she alone had inherited her parents’ condition, both of them little people.

  Zaynab’s life changed the day a photographer from Istanbul knocked on their door, asking permission to take her picture. The young man was travelling through the region, documenting unknown lives in the Middle East. He was desperately looking for someone like her. ‘Nothing beats female dwarfs,’ he said with a coy smile. ‘But Arab female dwarfs are a double mystery for Westerners. And I want this exhibition to be shown across Europe.’

  Zaynab did not expect her father to agree to this, but he did – on the condition that the family’s name and whereabouts were not mentioned. Day after day, she posed for the photographer. He was a talented artist, despite having no understanding of the human heart. He failed to notice the blush that spread on his model’s cheeks every time he entered the room. After shooting over a hundred photos, he left satisfied, claiming that her face would be the centrepiece of his exhibition.

  That same year Zaynab, due to her deteriorating health, travelled to Beirut with an older sister, and stayed in the capital for a while. It was here, in the shadow of Mount Sannine, in between successive hospital visits, that a master fortune-teller, taking a liking to her, taught her the ancient art of tasseography – divination based on reading tea leaves, wine dregs, coffee grounds. Zaynab sensed that for the first time in her life her unusual physique could work to her advantage. People seemed fascinated by the idea of having a dwarf predict their futures – as if by virtue of her size she had a special acquaintance with the uncanny. On the streets she might be taunted and pitied, but in the privacy of her reading room she was admired and revered. This she liked. She got better at her craft.