10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  By the time D/Ali reached secondary school it was clear to all his teachers and classmates that he was destined to become an artist. Yet his passion for art had never been encouraged in the family. Even when his favourite teacher came to talk to them, his parents failed to understand. D/Ali would never forget the shame he felt that afternoon: Mrs Krieger, a heavily built woman, perched on a chair, a small tea glass balanced daintily in her hand, trying to explain to his parents that their son was really talented and could win a place at an art and design school if only he could be tutored and mentored. D/Ali watched his father: he was listening with a smile that did not reach his eyes, pitying this German woman with salmon-pink skin and cropped blonde hair, telling him what to do with his own son.

  When D/Ali was eighteen, his sisters attended a party at a friend’s house. Something went terribly wrong that night. One of the twins did not come back home, even though she had permission to stay only until eight o’clock. The next morning, she was found by the highway, unconscious. Rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, she was treated for hypoglycaemic coma due to excessive alcohol consumption. They pumped her stomach until she felt like her soul had been emptied out. D/Ali’s mother hid the incident from her husband, who was working a late shift that night.

  Rumours travel fast in a village, and every immigrant community, no matter its size, is a village at heart. Soon the scandal had reached their father’s ears. Like a storm unleashing its fury over the length and breadth of a valley, he punished his entire family. This was it, the last straw. His children would return to Turkey. All of them. The parents would stay in Germany until retirement, but the younger ones would, from now on, live with their relatives in Istanbul. Europe was no place to raise a daughter, much less two daughters. D/Ali was to attend a university in Istanbul and keep a sharp eye on his siblings. If anything untoward were to happen, he would be held responsible.

  And so he arrived there, at the age of nineteen, with his broken Turkish and his irreparably German ways. He was used to feeling like an outsider in Germany, but until he started living in Istanbul he had never thought he would feel the same way in Turkey, if not even more so. It wasn’t only his accent and the way he involuntarily sprinkled a ja or an ach so! at the end of his sentences that made him stand out. It was the expression on his face, as if he were perpetually dissatisfied or disenchanted with what he saw, what he heard, what he couldn’t bring himself to be part of.

  Anger. Those first months in the city, he was often seized by a sudden excess of anger, not so much at Germany or Turkey as at the order of things, at the capitalist regime that tore families apart, at the bourgeois class that fed on workers’ sweat and pain, at a lopsided system that did not allow him to belong anywhere. He had read extensively about Marxism when he was in secondary school, and had always admired Rosa Luxemburg, brave and brilliant woman that she was, murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps and dumped in a canal – a canal that flowed placidly through Kreuzberg, a place D/Ali had visited several times and once, secretly, dropped a flower into. A rose for Rosa. Yet it was only when he started at Istanbul University that he would fall in with a diehard leftist group. His new comrades wanted to demolish the status quo, and build everything anew, as did D/Ali.

  So when D/Ali showed up at Leila’s door in July 1968, running away from the police breaking up the demonstration against the Sixth Fleet, he brought with him the smell of tear gas along with his radical ideas, complicated past and soulful smile.

  ‘How did you end up here?’ men always asked.

  And each time Leila told them a different story, depending on whatever she thought they might like to hear – a tale customized to client requirements. It was a talent she had learned from Bitter Ma.

  But she wouldn’t do that with D/Ali, and he never asked the question anyhow. Instead he wanted to know other things about her – what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give every city a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul? If ‘freedom’ were a type of food, he wondered, how did she think she would experience it on the tongue? And how about ‘fatherland’? D/Ali seemed to perceive the world through flavours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells.

  Savouring the cadence of his voice, she could listen to him for hours and never get bored. In his presence she felt a sense of lightness that she had not experienced in a long while. A trickle of hope, such as she had imagined herself incapable of feeling any more, swept through her veins and made her heart beat faster. It reminded her of the way she had felt when, as a little girl, she used to sit on the roof of their house in Van and watch the landscape like there was no tomorrow.

  What puzzled Leila the most about D/Ali was how, from the very beginning, he treated her as his equal, as if the brothel were just another classroom in the university he attended and she a student he kept running into along the dimly lit corridors. It was this, more than anything, that put Leila off guard – this unexpected sense of equality. An illusion, surely, but one that she treasured. As she walked in this unfamiliar territory, discovering him, she was also rediscovering herself. Anyone could see how her eyes lit up when she saw him, but few knew that the excitement was accompanied by a surge of guilt.

  ‘You shouldn’t come here any more,’ Leila said one day. ‘It’s not good for you. This place is full of misery, don’t you see? It contaminates people’s souls. And don’t think you’re above it, because it’ll suck you in; it’s a swamp. We’re not normal, none of us is. Nothing here is natural. I don’t want you to spend time with me any more. And why do you come here so often when you don’t even –’

  She didn’t complete the sentence, worried that he might think she was upset on account of his still not having slept with her, for the truth was she liked and respected that about him. She had been holding on to it, like a precious gift he had given her. Strangely, though, it was only in the absence of sex that she allowed herself to think of him in that way, to the point that, every now and then, she caught herself wondering what it would be like to touch his neck, kiss that tiny scar to the side of his chin.

  ‘I come because I like seeing you, it’s as simple as that,’ D/Ali said in a subdued tone. ‘And I don’t know who’s normal in a system so crooked.’

  D/Ali said that, as a rule, people who overused the word ‘natural’ did not know much about the ways of Mother Nature. If you told them how snails, worms and black sea bass were hermaphrodites, or male seahorses could give birth, or male clownfish turned female halfway through their lives, or male cuttlefish were transvestites, they would be surprised. Anyone who studied nature closely would think twice before using the word ‘natural’.

  ‘Fine, but you pay so much money. Bitter Ma charges you by the hour.’

  ‘Oh, she does,’ D/Ali said unhappily. ‘But let’s imagine for a moment that we were dating, and I could take you out or you could take me out. What would we do? We’d go to a movie, and then to a fancy restaurant and a ballroom …’

  ‘A fancy restaurant! A ballroom!’ Leila echoed with a smile.

  ‘My point is, we’d be spending money.’

  ‘That’s different. Your parents would be horrified if they knew you were wasting their hard-won cash in a place like this.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t get money from my parents.’

  ‘Really? But I thought … Then how do you afford this?’

  ‘I work.’ He winked.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here and there and everywhere.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For the revolution!’

  She looked away, unsettled. And, once again in her life, she was torn between her gut and her heart. Her gut warned her that there was more to him than the considerate, gentle young man she saw and she had to be very
careful. But her heart pushed her forward – just like it had done when, as a newborn baby, she had lain motionless under a blanket of salt.

  So she stopped objecting to his visits. Some weeks he would come every day, other times only over the weekends. She sensed, with a lurching heart, that on many a night he was out with his comrades, their long, dark shadows cast before them on empty streets, but what they might be doing with their time she chose not to ask.

  ‘Yours is back!’ Bitter Ma would yell from downstairs every time he showed up, and if Leila had a customer with her, D/Ali would have to wait on a chair by the entrance. Those were the moments when Leila felt so ashamed she could die: when she invited him afterwards into a room that smelled of another man. But if D/Ali was disturbed by any of this he never commented on it. A hushed concentration permeated his movements, and his eyes watched her intently, oblivious to everything else, as though she was, and had always been, the centre of the world. His kindness was spontaneous, uncalculated. Every time he said goodbye and left, after exactly an hour, a void spread into every corner of the room, swallowing her whole.

  D/Ali never forgot to bring her a little present – a notebook for her to write in, a velvet ribbon for her hair, a ring in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail, and, at times, chocolate bonbons with surprise fillings – caramel, cherry paste, hazelnut praline … They would sit on the bed, open the box, taking their time to decide which bonbon to eat first, and, for a full hour, talk and talk. Once, he touched the scar on her back, left from the acid attack. Tenderly he traced the wound, which, like a prophet parting the sea, broke her skin apart.

  ‘I want to paint you,’ he said. ‘May I?’

  ‘A painting of me?’ Leila blushed a little and lowered her gaze. When she looked at him again she found him smiling at her, just as she had known he would.

  The next time he appeared carrying an easel and a wooden box full of bristle brushes, oil paints, palette knives, sketchpads and linseed oil. She posed for him, sitting on the bed in her short crimson crêpe skirt and matching beaded bikini top, her hair pulled up into a soft bun, her face slightly turned from the door as if willing it to stay shut forever. He would keep the canvas in the wardrobe until his next visit. When he had finished, after about a week, she was surprised to see that where her acid scar lay he had painted a tiny white butterfly.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Zaynab122. ‘He’s an artist, and artists are selfish. As soon as he gets what he wants, he’ll vanish.’

  Yet, to everyone’s surprise, D/Ali kept coming back. The whores made fun of him, saying he was clearly incapable of getting an erection and incapable of fucking, and when they ran out of jokes they complained about the smells of turpentine. Knowing they were jealous, Leila paid them no heed. But when Bitter Ma, too, started to grumble, mentioning repeatedly that she did not want any lefties around, Leila began to worry that she would not be able to see him any more.

  On one of those days, D/Ali approached Bitter Ma with an unexpected offer.

  ‘That still life on the wall … I mean, no offence, but those daffodils and lemons seem a bit shoddy. Have you ever considered having a portrait up there?’

  ‘Actually, I had one,’ said Bitter Ma, though she refrained from telling him it was of Sultan Abdülaziz. ‘But I had to give it away.’

  ‘Ach so, that’s a shame. Maybe you need a new portrait then. Why don’t I paint you – for free?’

  Bitter Ma laughed hoarsely, the rolls of fat around her waist quivering in amusement. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m not a beauty. Go find someone else.’ She paused, suddenly serious. ‘You’re not kidding?’

  That same week, Bitter Ma began to pose for D/Ali, holding her knitting up against her chest both to show her skill and to hide her double chin.

  When D/Ali had finished the painting, the woman on the canvas looked like a happier, younger and thinner version of the original model. Now all the prostitutes wanted to pose for him, and this time it was Leila who was jealous.

  The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.

  Ten Minutes

  As time ticked away, Leila’s mind happily recollected the taste of her favourite street food: deep-fried mussels – flour, egg yolks, bicarbonate of soda, pepper, salt, and mussels fresh from the Black Sea.

  October 1973. The Bosphorus Bridge, the world’s fourth longest, finally completed after three years of work, was opened to traffic following a spectacular public ceremony. At one end of the bridge, a large sign was erected: Welcome to the Asian Continent. At the other end, another sign read, Welcome to the European Continent.

  Early in the morning, on both sides of the bridge, crowds had gathered for the occasion. In the afternoon the President gave an emotional speech; army heroes, some of whom were so old that they had fought in the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the War of Independence, stood to attention in dignified silence; foreign dignitaries sat on a high platform alongside political grandees and provincial governors; red-and-white flags fluttered in the wind for as far as the eye could see; a band played the national anthem and everyone sang at the tops of their voices; thousands of balloons were released into the air; and Zeybek dancers swirled in circles, their arms held spread at shoulder height, like eagles aloft.

  Later on, when the bridge was opened to pedestrians, people were able to walk from one continent to the other. Surprisingly, though, so many citizens chose this picturesque location for their suicides that in the end the authorities decided to ban pedestrian access altogether. That all came later, however. Now it was a time of optimism.

  The day before had been the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. That had been a massive event in itself. And today Istanbulites were celebrating this feat of engineering, over five thousand feet long – the offspring of Turkish workers and developers and British engineers from the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company. The Bosphorus Strait, slender and narrow, had always been called ‘the neckline of Istanbul’, and here was a bridge decorating it like an incandescent necklace. High above the city the necklace glowed, dangling over the waters where the Black Sea blended with the Sea of Marmara on one side and the Aegean ran to meet the Mediterranean on the other.

  The whole week there had been such an intense, shared sense of jubilation in the air that even the beggars in the city smiled as if their stomachs were full. Now that Asian Turkey was permanently connected to European Turkey, a bright future awaited the entire country. The bridge heralded the beginning of a new era. Turkey was now technically in Europe – whether people over there agreed or not.

  At night, fireworks exploded overhead, illuminating the dark autumn sky. On the street of brothels, the girls stood in groups along the pavement, watching and smoking. Bitter Ma, who considered herself a true patriot, was teary-eyed.

  ‘What an amazing bridge – it’s massive,’ said Zaynab122, looking up at the fireworks.

  ‘Birds are so lucky,’ said Leila. ‘Imagine, they can perch on it whenever they like. Seagulls, pigeons, magpies … And fish can swim underneath. Dolphins, bonitos. What a privilege. Wouldn’t you like to end your life like that?’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t,’ said Zaynab122.

  ‘Well, I would,’ said Leila doggedly.

  ‘How can you be so romantic, honey?’ Nostalgia Nalan, clearly amused, gave an exaggerated sigh. She came to visit Leila from time to time, but her presence made Bitter Ma nervous. The law was clear about it: transvestites could not be employed in brothels – and since they could not get a job anywhere else either, they had to work on the streets. ‘Do you have any idea how much that giant construction has cost? And who’s paying for it – we, the people!’

  Leila smiled. ‘You sound like D/Ali sometimes.’

  ‘Speaking of whom …’ Nalan gestured to her left with her head.

  Turning aside now, Leila saw D/Ali approaching, his jacket crumpled, his boots clopping heavily, a larg
e canvas bag on his shoulder and in his hand a paper cone full of fried mussels.

  ‘For you,’ he said, as he handed her the mussels. He knew how much she loved them.

  D/Ali did not speak again until they were upstairs and the door was firmly closed. He planted himself down on the bed, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Leila asked.

  ‘Sorry. I’m in a bit of a state. They almost got me this time.’

  ‘Who? The police?’

  ‘No, the Grey Wolves. The fascists. There’s this group that’s in charge of the area.’

  ‘Fascists are in charge of this area?’

  His eyes bored into her. ‘Every neighbourhood in Istanbul has two competing groups: one from them and one from us. Unfortunately, around here they’ve managed to outnumber us. But we fight back.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘I rounded a corner and there they were in a huddle, shouting and laughing. I think they were celebrating the bridge. Then they saw me –’

  ‘They know you?’

  ‘Well, we all kind of recognize each other by now, and even if we don’t, we can easily make a guess about someone based on the way they look.’

  Clothes were political. And so was facial hair – particularly the moustache. The nationalists wore theirs pointing downwards, in the shape of a crescent moon. The Islamists kept theirs clipped, small and neat. The Stalinists preferred walrus-like moustaches that looked as if they had never seen a razor. D/Ali himself was always clean-shaven. Leila didn’t know if this gave off a political message, and, if so, of what kind exactly. She found herself studying his lips – straight and rose-coloured. She never looked at men’s lips, deliberately avoiding that, and catching herself doing this now troubled her.