10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  ‘There’s no need for you to be here,’ the director said without looking anyone in the eye. ‘Your friend … the doctor has examined the body and written an official report. You may ask for a copy, if you wish. It’ll be ready in about a week. But now you must leave – please. You are making everyone uncomfortable.’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath. We are not going anywhere,’ said Nostalgia Nalan and, unlike the others, who had stood up when they saw the director, she remained seated as though to prove her point. Her eyes were a warm brown and almond-shaped – but that’s not what people usually noticed when they looked at her. They saw her long polished nails, broad shoulders, leather trousers, silicone-implanted breasts. They saw a brazen transsexual staring back at them. Just as the director did now.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said the woman, sounding annoyed.

  Gingerly, Nalan opened her handbag and took out a cigarette from a silver case, but, despite desperately needing one, she did not light it. ‘What I’m saying is, we won’t leave until we see our Leila. We’ll camp out here if we have to.’

  The director arched her brows. ‘I think you may have misheard me, so let me be clear: there’s no need for you to wait – and there’s nothing you can do for your friend. You are not family.’

  ‘We were closer to her than family,’ Sabotage Sinan said, a tremble in his voice.

  Nalan swallowed. There was a lump in her throat that wouldn’t go away. Since she heard the news of Leila’s murder she had not shed a single tear. Something blocked the pain – an anger hardening the edges of her every gesture and every word.

  ‘Look, that has nothing to do with my institution,’ the director said. ‘The point is, your friend has been transferred to a cemetery. She has probably been buried already.’

  ‘Wha … What did you just say?’ Nalan rose to her feet slowly, as if waking from a dream. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Legally, we have no obligation to –’

  ‘Legally? What about humanly? We could have gone with her if we’d known. And where did you self-loathing idiots take her, exactly?’

  The director winced, her eyes widening for a second. ‘First of all, you cannot talk to me like that. Secondly, I’m not authorized to reveal –’

  ‘Then go and bring someone who is fucking authorized.’

  ‘I will not be spoken to in this manner,’ the director said, her jaw visibly quivering. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask security to remove you from the premises.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to smack you in the face,’ Nalan said, but the others held her hands and pulled her back.

  ‘We need to be calm,’ whispered Jameelah to Nalan – though it was not clear whether she heard the warning.

  The director turned sharply on her kitten heels. She was about to walk off when she stopped and gave them a sidelong scowl. ‘There are cemeteries reserved for such people. I’m surprised that you didn’t already know that.’

  ‘Bitch,’ Nalan murmured under her breath. Her voice, raspy and thick, nevertheless carried – and of course she had wanted the director to hear what she thought of her.

  A few minutes later, Leila’s friends were escorted by security guards out of the hospital grounds. A crowd had gathered on the pavement, watching the incident with riveted eyes and amused smiles, proving once again that Istanbul was, and would always remain, a city of impromptu spectacles and ready-made, eager spectators. Meanwhile, no one paid any attention to the old man following the group a few feet behind.

  After the unruly five had been left by the security guards at a corner far away from the hospital, Kameel Effendi approached them. ‘Forgive me for intruding. May I have a word with you?’

  One by one, Leila’s friends turned their heads and stared at the old man.

  ‘What do you want, amca?’ said Zaynab122.

  Her tone was suspicious, though not altogether unkind. Behind her tortoiseshell-framed glasses her eyes were red and swollen.

  ‘I work at the hospital,’ said the orderly, leaning in close. ‘I saw you waiting there … my condolences for your loss.’

  Not expecting to hear any words of sympathy from a stranger, Leila’s friends stood motionless for a moment.

  ‘Tell us, have you seen the body?’ asked Zaynab122. Her voice dropped as she added, ‘Do you think she … suffered a lot?’

  ‘I saw her, yes. I believe it was a quick death.’ Kameel Effendi nodded, trying to convince himself as much as the others. ‘I’m the one who arranged for her to be taken to the cemetery. The one in Kilyos – I’m not sure whether you’ve heard of it, not many people have. They call it the Cemetery of the Companionless. Not a nice name, if you ask me. There are no headstones there, just wooden planks with numbers. But I can tell you where she’s buried. You have a right to know.’

  So saying, the old man produced a piece of paper and a pen. The backs of his hands were covered with bulging veins and age spots. Hurriedly, he scribbled a number in his sloppy writing.

  ‘Here, keep this. Go and visit your friend’s grave. Plant nice flowers. Pray for her soul. I heard she was from Van. So was my late wife. She died in the earthquake, back in 1976. For days we dug through the rubble, but we couldn’t find her. After two full months, bulldozers flattened the whole area. People used to say to me, Don’t be so sad, Kameel Effendi. What difference does it make in the end? She’s buried, aren’t we all going to join her six feet under someday? Maybe they meant well, but God knows how I hated them for saying such things. Funerals are for the living, that’s for sure. It’s important to organize a decent burial. Otherwise you can never heal inside, don’t you think? Anyway, don’t mind me, I’m just blabbering. I guess … I wanted to tell you, I know what it feels like not to be able to say goodbye to a loved one.’

  ‘That must have been very hard for you,’ said Hollywood Humeyra. Normally extremely talkative, she seemed to have run out of words.

  ‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’

  One by one the orderly shook their hands and wished them well. Leila’s friends watched him limp away until he rounded the corner of the hospital building and disappeared through the large gate. Only then did Nostalgia Nalan, this big-boned and broad-shouldered six-foot-two-inch-tall woman, sit down on the edge of the pavement, pull her legs up to her chest and weep like a child abandoned in a foreign land.

  No one spoke.

  After a while, Humeyra placed her hand on the small of Nalan’s back. ‘Come on, my dear. Let’s get out of here. We need to sort through Leila’s things. We must feed Mr Chaplin. Leila would be terribly upset if we didn’t take care of her cat. The poor animal must be starving.’

  Biting her lower lip, Nalan quickly wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She stood up, towering over the others, though her legs felt weak, rubbery. There was a dull, pounding ache in her temples. She gestured to her friends to go ahead without her.

  ‘You sure?’ Zaynab122 looked up with concern.

  Nalan nodded. ‘Sure, honey. I’ll catch up with you later.’

  They listened to her – as they always did.

  Left alone, Nalan lit the cigarette she had been craving since early afternoon but had stopped herself from having because of Humeyra’s asthma. She took a deep drag and held it in her lungs before exhaling a spiral of smoke. You are not family, the director had said. What did she know? Goddamn nothing. She knew not a single thing about Leila or any of them.

  Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home.

  As for the water family, this was f
ormed much later in life, and was, to a large extent, of your own making. While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot. It was therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined. But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years. They would never know that there were times when water ran thicker than blood.

  Nalan turned around and looked at the hospital one last time. The morgue could not be seen from this far, but she shivered as if she could feel the chill of it in her bones. It wasn’t that death scared her. Nor did she believe in an afterlife where the wrongs of this world would be miraculously righted. The only professed atheist among Leila’s friends, Nalan saw the flesh – and not some abstract concept of the soul – as eternal. Molecules mixed with soil, providing nutrition for plants, those plants were then devoured by animals, and animals by humans, and so, contrary to the assumptions of the majority, the human body was immortal, on a never-ending journey through the cycles of nature. What more could one possibly want from the hereafter?

  But Nalan had always assumed that she would die first. In every group of old and tested friends there was one person who knew instinctively that they would leave before the others. And Nalan had been certain that that person was her. All those oestrogen supplements and testosterone-blocking treatments and post-op painkillers, not to mention long years of heavy smoking, unhealthy eating and excessive drinking … It had to be her. Not Leila, who was full of life and compassion. It was a source of endless surprise – and slight annoyance – to Nalan that Istanbul had not hardened Leila into cynicism and bitterness the way she knew it had hardened her.

  A chilly wind was blowing from the north-east, working its way inland, stirring the sewage fumes. She held herself tense against the cold. The ache in her temples had shifted, spreading across her chest and drilling into her ribcage, as if a hand were squeezing her heart. Far ahead the rush-hour traffic was clogging the arteries of the city, a city which now resembled an ailing giant animal, its breathing painfully slow and ragged. In contrast, Nalan’s breathing was fast and furious, her features shaped by a burning indignation. What deepened Nalan’s sense of helplessness was not only Leila’s sudden death, or the brutal and horrific way it had happened, but the absolute lack of justice in everything. Life was unfair, and now she realized death was even more so.

  Ever since childhood Nalan’s blood had boiled to witness someone – anyone – being treated cruelly or unfairly. She wasn’t naive enough to expect fairness from a world so crooked, as D/Ali used to say, but she believed that everyone had a right to a certain share of dignity. And inside your dignity, as if it were a patch of soil that belonged to no one else, you would sow a seed of hope. A tiny germ that one day, somehow, might sprout and blossom. As far as Nostalgia Nalan was concerned, that small seed was all there was worth fighting for.

  She took out the piece of paper the old man had given them and read his scrawled note: Kilyos. Kimsesizler Mezarliği, 705–. The final number, a scrawly 2 upon closer inspection, crammed on to the bottom of the page, was barely legible. The handwriting was not the neatest. With the fountain pen she carried in her clutch bag, Nalan went over the whole thing. Then she carefully folded the piece of paper and put it back in her pocket.

  It was not fair that they had dumped Leila in the Cemetery of the Companionless when she wasn’t companionless at all. Leila had friends. Lifelong, loyal, loving friends. She might not have had much else, but this she surely had.

  ‘The old man was right,’ Nalan thought. ‘Leila deserves a decent burial.’

  She flicked the cigarette stub on to the pavement and crushed the burning end under her boot. A slow fog was creeping up from the harbour, obscuring the shisha cafes and bars at the edge of the waterfront. Somewhere in this city of millions Leila’s murderer was having supper or watching TV, empty of conscience, human only in name.

  Nalan wiped her eyes, but the tears kept returning. Her mascara was running down her cheeks. Two women passed by, each pushing a buggy. They gave her a surprised, pitying look and turned their heads away. Almost instantly Nalan’s face took on a pinched expression. She was used to being shunned and despised simply because of how she looked and who she was. That was fine, but she couldn’t bear for anyone to pity her or her friends.

  As she set off at a brisk pace, Nalan had already made up her mind. She would fight back, the way she had always done. Against social conventions, judgements, prejudices … against silent hatred, which filled the lives of these people like an odourless gas, she would fight. No one had the right to cast aside Leila’s body as though she didn’t matter and never had. She, Nostalgia Nalan, would make sure her old friend was treated properly and with dignity.

  This was not over. Not yet. Tonight she would talk to the others and together they would find a way to give Leila a funeral – and not just any funeral, but the finest funeral this manic old city had ever seen.

  This Manic Old City

  Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong.

  Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive.

  There was, for instance, an ancient Istanbul designed to be crossed on foot or by boat – the city of itinerant dervishes, fortune-tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters and porters with wicker baskets on their backs … There was modern Istanbul – an urban sprawl overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back and forth, construction trucks laden with building materials for more shopping centres, skyscrapers, industrial sites … Imperial Istanbul versus plebeian Istanbul; global Istanbul versus parochial Istanbul; cosmopolitan Istanbul versus philistine Istanbul; heretical Istanbul versus pious Istanbul; macho Istanbul versus a feminine Istanbul that adopted Aphrodite – goddess of desire and also of strife – as its symbol and protector … Then there was the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing to faraway ports. For them this city would always be a metropolis made of memories, myths and messianic longings, forever elusive like a lover’s face receding in the mist.

  All these Istanbuls lived and breathed inside one another, like matryoshka dolls that had come to life. But even if a wicked wizard managed to separate them and put them side by side, nowhere in this vast line-up would he find a part of the city more desired, demonized and denounced than one particular neighbourhood: Pera. A hub of commotion and chaos, for centuries this area was associated with liberalism, debauchery and Westernization – the three forces that led young Turkish men astray. Its name, from the Greek, meant ‘on the further side’, or simply ‘across’ or ‘beyond’. Across the Golden Horn. Beyond established norms. This, as it once was known, was Peran en Sykais – ‘On the Opposite Shore’. And it was where, until the day before, Tequila Leila had made her home.

  After D/Ali’s death, Leila had refused to move out of the flat. Every corner was full of his laughter, his voice. The rent was high but she just about managed it. Late at night, back from work, she would wash herself under the rusted shower head that never delivered enough hot water, scrubbing her skin hard. Then, red and raw as a newborn, she would sit in a chair by the window and watch the morning break over the city. D/Ali’s memory would envelop her, soft and comforting like a blanket. Many afternoons she would wake up, cramped and sore, having fallen asleep in this way, with Mr Chaplin curled up by her feet.

  Hairy Kafka Street ran down between dilapidated buildings and small, dingy shops specializing in lighting fixtures. In the evenings, when all the lamps were turned on, the area acquired a sepia glow, as though it belonged to another century. Once, this place had been called Fur-Lined Kaftan Street – although a group
of historians insisted it had been Fair-Haired Concubine Street. Either way, when the municipality, as part of an ambitious gentrification project, decided to renew the street signs in the area, the officer in charge, finding the name too clunky, shortened it to Kaftan Street. And so it was known until one morning, after a night of gale-force winds, a letter fell off and it became Kafta Street. But that, too, didn’t stick for long. A literature student, with the help of a permanent marker, changed Kafta to Kafka. Fans of the author hailed the new moniker; others had no idea what it meant but embraced it nonetheless, liking its sound.

  A month later, an ultra-nationalist newspaper published a story about secret foreign influence in Istanbul, claiming that this clear homage to a Jewish writer was part of a sinister plan to eradicate local Muslim culture. A petition was circulated to return the street’s name to its original, despite the unresolved debate as to what that might have been. A banner was hung between two balconies and it read: Love It or Leave It: One Great Nation. Washed by the rain and bleached by the sun, the banner flapped in Istanbul’s lodos – south-western wind – until one afternoon it snapped its strings and flew off, an angry kite in the sky.

  By then the reactionaries had moved on to other battles. The campaign was forgotten as swiftly as it had materialized. In time, as with all else in this schizophrenic city, the old and the new, the factual and the fictitious, the real and the surreal amalgamated, and the place has come to be known as Hairy Kafka Street.

  In the midst of this street, wedged between an old hammam and a new mosque, stood an apartment building that had once been modern and majestic and was now anything but. An amateur burglar had smashed the window of the main doorway and, scared by the noise, had run off without stealing anything. As none of the residents agreed to fork out the money to replace the glass, ever since then it had been held together with brown tape, the sort used by removal companies.