10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  She had often thought five was a special number. The Torah contained five books. Jesus had suffered five fatal wounds. Islam had five pillars of faith. King David had killed Goliath with five pebbles. In Buddhism there were five paths, while Shiva revealed five faces, looking out in five different directions. Chinese philosophy revolved around five elements: water, fire, wood, metal, earth. There were five universally accepted tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Human perception depended on five basic senses: hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste; even though scientists claimed there were more, each with a baffling name, it was the original five that everyone knew.

  On what was to be her last birthday, her friends had settled on a rich menu: lamb stew with aubergine puree, börek with spinach and feta cheese, kidney beans with spicy pastrami, stuffed green peppers and a little jar of fresh caviar. The cake was a surprise, supposedly, but Leila had overheard them discussing it; the walls in the flat were thinner than the slices of pastrami, and, after decades of heavy smoking and even heavier drinking, Nalan rasped when she whispered, her voice husky like sandpaper scraping on metal.

  Strawberry cream with fluffy, fairy-tale-pink icing. That’s what they had planned. Leila was not a fan of pink. She liked fuchsia better – a colour with personality. Even the name melted on the tongue, mouth-wateringly sweet and punchy. Pink was fuchsia without grit; pale and lifeless as a bedsheet worn thin from too much washing. Maybe she should ask for a fuchsia cake.

  ‘So how many candles are we putting on it?’ Hollywood Humeyra asked.

  ‘Thirty-one, darling,’ Leila said.

  ‘Sure, thirty-one my arse.’ Nostalgia Nalan chuckled.

  If friendship meant rituals, they had them by the truckload. In addition to birthdays, they celebrated Victory Day, Atatürk Commemoration, Youth and Sports Day, National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, Republic Day, Cabotage Day, St Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve … at every opportunity, they would dine together, feasting on delicacies they could barely afford. Nostalgia Nalan prepared her favourite drink, Pata Pata Boom Boom – a cocktail she had learned to mix while flirting with the barman in Karavan. Pomegranate juice, lime juice, vodka, crushed mint, cardamom seeds and a generous splash of whisky. Those of them who consumed alcohol got nicely sloshed, their cheeks turning a vivid red. The strict teetotallers drank Fanta orange instead. They spent the rest of the night watching black-and-white movies. Squeezing on to the sofa, they watched one film after another, utterly engrossed and silent, except for the occasional sigh and gasp. Those old Hollywood stars and those old Turkish stars were masters at captivating an audience. Leila and her friends knew their lines by heart.

  She had never told her friends this, not in so many words, but they were her safety net. Every time she stumbled or keeled over, they were there for her, supporting her or softening the impact of the fall. On nights when she was mistreated by a client, she would still find the strength to hold herself up, knowing that her friends, with their very presence, would come with ointment for her scrapes and bruises; and on days when she wallowed in self-pity, her chest cracking open, they would gently pull her up and breathe life into her lungs.

  Now, as her brain came to a standstill, and all memories dissolved into a wall of fog, thick as sorrow, the very last thing she saw in her mind was the bright pink birthday cake. They had spent that evening chatting and laughing, as if nothing could ever pull them apart and life were merely a spectacle, exciting and unsettling, but without any real danger involved, like being invited to someone else’s dream. On TV, Rita Hayworth had tossed her hair and wiggled her hips, her gown falling to the floor in a silken rustle. Tilting her head towards the camera, she had given that famous smile of hers, the smile many around the world had mistaken for lust. But not them. Dear old Rita could not fool them. They never failed to recognize a sad woman when they saw one.

  Part Two

  * * *

  THE BODY

  The Morgue

  The morgue was located at the rear of the hospital, in the north-eastern corner of the basement. The corridor leading to it was painted a pale Prozac green and was noticeably colder than the rest of the building, as though exposed to draughts day and night. Inside, the acrid smell of chemicals hovered in the air. Around here there was little colour – chalk white, steel grey, ice blue and the dark, rusty red of congealed blood.

  Wiping his palms on the sides of his coat, the medical examiner – a gaunt man with a slight stoop, a high domed forehead and obsidian-black eyes – glanced at the latest arrival. Another homicide victim. An expression of insouciance crossed his face. Over the years he had seen far too many of them – young and old, rich and poor, those accidentally hit by a stray bullet and those gunned down in cold blood. Every day new bodies arrived. He knew precisely when in the year casualties would soar and when they would tail off. There were more killings in the summer than in the winter; May to August was peak season for aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder in Istanbul. Come October, along with the temperature, crime dropped dramatically.

  He had his own theory as to why, and was convinced it all had to do with people’s dietary patterns. In autumn, shoals of bonito headed south from the Black Sea towards the Aegean, swimming so close to the surface one might think they were exhausted from the forced migration and the constant threat of trawlers, and just wanted to be caught once and for all. In restaurants, hotels, workplace cafeterias and homes, serotonin levels rose and stress levels plummeted as people consumed this delicious fatty fish. The outcome was fewer violations of law. But the lovely bonito could only do so much; soon crime rates would surge again. In a land where justice often came late, if it came at all, many citizens sought their own revenge, reciprocating hurt with bigger hurt. Two eyes for an eye, a jaw for a tooth. Not that all crime was planned – most was committed on the spur of the moment, in fact. A glance perceived as dirty could be grounds for manslaughter. A word misunderstood could be an excuse for bloodshed. Istanbul made killing easy, and dying even easier.

  The medical examiner had inspected the body, drained the fluids and cut open the chest, making an incision from each collarbone to the breastbone. He had spent a long time examining the injuries and had noted the tattoo above the woman’s right ankle and identified the patch of discoloured skin on her back – scarring clearly caused by a chemical burn from a caustic substance, most likely an acid. He guessed it was a couple of decades old. He wondered how it had happened. Had she been attacked from behind, or was it a freak accident – and if that were the case, why would she have had this type of acid in her possession?

  A complete internal analysis not being required, he finally sat down to write a cursory report. For any further details, he consulted the police account attached to the file.

  Name/Surname: Leyla Akarsu

  Middle Names: Afife Kamile

  Address: Hairy Kafka Street, 70/8. Pera, Istanbul.

  The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian woman, measuring five feet seven and weighing 135 pounds. Age appears to be inconsistent with that stated on her ID of 32. It is likely she is somewhere between 40 and 45. An examination has been performed to determine the cause and manner of death.

  Clothing: a gold-sequinned dress (torn), high-heeled shoes, lace underwear. A clutch bag containing an ID card, a lipstick, a notebook, a fountain pen and house keys. No money, no jewellery (might have been stolen).

  The time of death is estimated to be between 3.30 a.m. and 5.30 a.m. No sign of sexual intercourse detected. The victim was beaten with a heavy (blunt) instrument and strangled to death after being knocked unconscious.

  He paused his typing. The marks on the woman’s neck troubled him. Next to the imprints of the murderer’s fingers, there was a reddish stripe that seemed to have been made post-mortem. He wondered if she had worn a necklace that had been yanked off. Not that it mattered any more. Like all the unclaimed dead, she, too, would be consigned to the Cemetery of the Companionless.

&
nbsp; No Islamic burial rituals would be performed for this woman. Nor of any other religion, for that matter. Her body would not be washed by the next of kin; her hair would not be braided into three separate braids; her hands would not be placed gently over her heart in a gesture of eternal peace; her eyelids would not be closed to make sure that from now on her gaze was turned inward. In the graveyard, there would be no pall-bearers or mourners, no imam leading the prayers and not one professional weeper hired to cry and wail louder than everyone else. She would be buried the way all the undesirables were – silently and swiftly.

  Afterwards, she would probably have no visitors. Perhaps an old neighbour or a niece – one distant enough not to mind the shame brought upon the family – would show up a few times, but eventually the visits would cease. In just a few months’ time, with no marker or stone, the woman’s grave would fully blend in with its surroundings. In less than a decade, no one would be able to locate her whereabouts. She would become yet another number in the Cemetery of the Companionless, yet another pitiable soul whose life echoed the opening of every Anatolian tale: Once there was, once there wasn’t …

  The medical examiner hunched over his desk, his brow furrowed in concentration. He had no desire to learn who this woman was or what kind of a life she may have led. Even when he was new to the job, the stories of the victims were of little concern to him. What really interested him was death itself. Not as a theological concept or a philosophical question but as a subject of scientific enquiry. It never ceased to amaze him how little progress humanity had made with regards to funerary rites. A species that had dreamed up digital wristwatches, discovered DNA and developed MRI machines stalled miserably when it came to taking care of their dead. Things were hardly more advanced today than they had been a thousand years ago. True, those rolling in money and imagination seemed to have a few more choices than the rest; they could blast their ashes into outer space, if they so wished. Or freeze themselves – in the hope that a hundred years from now they would be revived. But for the majority of people the options were pretty limited: to be buried or cremated. That was about it. If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.

  He had worked with cadavers for so long, preferring their silent company to the endless chatter of the living. Yet the more bodies he inspected, the more intrigued he was by the process of death. When exactly did a living being turn into a corpse? As a young graduate fresh out of medical school, he had had a clear answer, but he wasn’t so sure these days. It seemed to him now that, just as a stone dropped into a pond sent ripples out in concentric circles, the cessation of life generated a series of changes, both material and immaterial, and death should only be acknowledged when the final changes had been completed. In the medical journals he had been following fastidiously he had come across ground-breaking research that had excited him. Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?

  Successive research had also shown that more than a thousand genes continued to function in cadavers days after the person had been pronounced dead. All these findings fascinated him. Perhaps a person’s thoughts survived longer than his heart, his dreams longer than his pancreas, his wishes longer than his gall-bladder … If that were true, shouldn’t human beings be considered semi-alive as long as the memories that shaped them were still rippling, still part of this world? Though he might not know the answers, not yet, he valued the quest for them. He would never tell this to anyone, because they wouldn’t understand, but he took great pleasure in working in the morgue.

  A knock at the door jolted him from his thoughts.

  ‘Come in.’

  The orderly, Kameel Effendi, walked in, limping slightly. He was a good-natured, gentle soul, and after all these years a permanent fixture in the hospital. Although initially hired to do basic menial work, he performed whatever task was needed on any given day, including stitching up the odd patient when the emergency room was short of a surgeon.

  ‘Selamün aleyküm, doctor.’

  ‘Aleyküm selam, Kameel Effendi.’

  ‘Is this the prostitute the nurses were whispering about?’

  ‘Yes, it is. They brought her in just before noon.’

  ‘Poor thing, may Allah forgive whatever sin she might have committed.’

  The medical examiner smiled a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘Might? That’s a funny thing to say, considering who she was. Her entire life was full of sin.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that’s so … but who knows who deserves heaven more – this unlucky woman or the zealot who thinks he is the only chosen of God.’

  ‘Well, well, well, Kameel Effendi! I didn’t know you had a soft spot for whores. You’d better watch out, though. I don’t mind, but there are plenty of people out there who’d be ready to give you a good hiding if they heard you talk like that.’

  The old man stood still, silent. He looked at the corpse with forlorn eyes, as though he had known her once. She seemed to be at peace. Most of the dead bodies he had come across over the years had been this way, and he often wondered whether they were relieved to be done with the struggles and misunderstandings of the world.

  ‘Any family, doctor?’

  ‘Nope. Her parents are in Van. They have been informed, but they refuse to claim her. Typical.’

  ‘Any siblings?’

  The medical examiner consulted his notes. ‘She doesn’t seem to have any … oh, I see, one brother, dead.’

  ‘There’s no one else?’

  ‘Apparently there’s an aunt who’s unwell … so she won’t do. And, hmm, there is an another aunt and an uncle –’

  ‘Maybe one of them would help?’

  ‘Not a chance. They both said they don’t want to have anything to do with her.’

  Stroking his moustache, Kameel Effendi shifted on his feet.

  ‘Okay, I’m almost done here,’ said the medical examiner. ‘You can take her to the cemetery, the usual one.’

  ‘Doctor, I was thinking about that … There’s a group of people in the courtyard. They’ve been waiting for hours. They seem devastated.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Her friends.’

  ‘Friends,’ the medical examiner repeated, as if the word were new to him. He had little interest in them. The friends of a streetwalker could only be other streetwalkers, people he would probably see here one day, lying on the same steel table.

  Kameel Effendi coughed faintly. ‘I wish we could give the body to them.’

  At this the other man frowned, a hard gleam in his eyes. ‘You know perfectly well we are not authorized to do that. We can release bodies only to their immediate family.’

  ‘I know, but –’ Kameel Effendi paused. ‘If there’s no family, why not let the friends sort out the funeral?’

  ‘Our state does not permit that, and for good reason. We’d never be able to trace who is who. There are all kinds of lunatics out there: organ thieves, psychopaths … it would be pandemonium.’ He checked the old man’s face, not trusting he understood the meaning of the last word.

  ‘Yes, but in cases like this, what’s the harm?’

  ‘Look, we didn’t make the rules. We just follow them. Don’t try to bring new customs to an old village. It’s hard enough to run this place as it is.’

  The old man raised his chin in acknowledgement. ‘All right, I understand. I’ll give the cemetery a cal
l. Just to make sure they’ve got space.’

  ‘Yes, good idea, check with them.’ The medical examiner pulled out a pile of documents from a folder, grabbed a pen and tapped it against his cheek. He stamped and signed each page. ‘Tell them you’ll send the body this afternoon.’

  It was a formality, though. They both knew that while other graveyards in the city might be fully booked years in advance, there was always space available in the Cemetery of the Companionless – the loneliest graveyard in Istanbul.

  The Five

  Outside in the courtyard, five figures sat squeezed side by side on a wooden bench. Their shadows stretched across the paving stones in contrasting shapes and sizes. Having arrived just past noon, one after the other, they had been waiting here for hours. Now the sun was slowly descending and the light streamed slantwise through the chestnut trees. Every few minutes, one of them stood up and trudged wearily towards the building to speak to a manager or a doctor or a nurse – whomever they could get hold of. It was of no use. No matter how much they insisted, they had not been able to get permission to see their friend’s body – let alone bury it.

  Still they refused to leave. Their expressions carved by grief, as stiff as seasoned wood, they continued to wait. The other people in the courtyard, visitors and staff, shot questioning glances in their direction, whispering among themselves. A teenager sitting next to her mother watched their every move with a curiosity that was half contemptuous. An elderly headscarved woman scowled at them with the disdain she reserved for all oddballs and outsiders. Leila’s friends were out of place here, but then again they didn’t seem to belong anywhere.

  Just as the evening prayer rose from a nearby mosque, a woman with a short, neat hairstyle and a peculiarly upright gait marched briskly out of the building towards them. She was wearing a khaki pencil skirt that fell below the knee, a matching pinstripe jacket and a large brooch in the shape of an orchid. She was the director of patient care services.