10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World
Page 30
It was the blue betta fish. The very one that had been released into the creek in Van on the day she was born.
‘Nice to see you, finally,’ said the fish. ‘What took you so long?’
Leila did not know what to say. Could she speak under the water?
Smiling at her confusion, the blue betta fish said, ‘Follow me.’
Now finding her voice, Leila said, with a shyness she could not conceal, ‘I don’t know how to swim. I never learned.’
‘Don’t worry about that. You know everything you need to know. Come with me.’
She swam – slowly and clumsily at first, and then smoothly and assuredly, gradually increasing the tempo. But she was not trying to get anywhere. There was no reason to rush any more and nothing to run away from. A shoal of bream swirled in and around her hair. Bonitos and mackerels tickled her toes. Dolphins escorted her, flipping and splashing above the waves.
Leila surveyed the panorama, a universe in Technicolor, each direction in the water a new pool of light, seemingly flowing into the other. She saw the rusting skeletons of sunken passenger boats. She saw lost treasures, surveillance vessels, imperial cannons, abandoned cars, ancient shipwrecks, concubines who had been thrust out of palace windows inside sacks and then dropped into the blue, their jewels now tangled with the weeds, their eyes still searching for a meaning in a world that had brought them so cruel an end. She found poets and writers and rebels from the Ottoman and Byzantine times, each cast into the deep for their treacherous words or contentious beliefs. The ghastly and the graceful – everything was present around her, in rich abundance.
Everything but pain. There was no pain down here.
Her mind had fully shut down, her body was already decomposing and her soul was chasing a betta fish. She was relieved to have left the Cemetery of the Companionless. She was happy to be part of this vibrant realm, this comforting harmony that she had never thought possible, and this vast blue, bright as the birth of a new flame.
Free at last.
Epilogue
The flat on Hairy Kafka Street was decorated with balloons, streamers and banners. Today would have been Leila’s birthday.
‘Where is Sabotage?’ asked Nalan.
They had fresh justification for calling him that, now that he had finally, and fully, sabotaged his life. After being shot while pushing the dead body of a prostitute off the Bosphorus Bridge, accompanied by dubious friends, he had been all over the newspapers. Within the same week he had lost his job, his marriage, his house. He had learned only belatedly that his wife had been having a long-term affair, and that is why she had always been happy to see him leave in the evenings. That had given him some leverage during the divorce settlement. As for his wife’s family, they no longer talked to him, though thankfully his children did, and he was allowed to see them every weekend, which was all that mattered. He now had a small stall near the Grand Bazaar, selling knock-off merchandise. He was making half the money he used to earn, but he did not complain.
‘Stuck in traffic,’ said Humeyra.
Nalan waved a newly manicured hand. Between her fingers she held an unlit cigarette and D/Ali’s Zippo. ‘I thought he didn’t have a car any more. What’s his excuse this time?’
‘That he doesn’t have a car. He has to take the bus.’
‘He’ll be here soon, give him some time,’ said Jameelah soothingly.
Nodding, Nalan stepped out on to the balcony, pulled up a chair and sat down. Looking down the street, she saw Zaynab122 leaving the grocer’s with a plastic bag in her hand, walking with some difficulty.
Nalan clutched her side, seized with a sudden cough, a smoker’s hack. Her chest hurt. She was getting old. She had no pensions or savings, nothing to sustain her. It had been the wisest thing for the five of them to start living together in Leila’s flat and share the costs. They were more vulnerable on their own; together, they were stronger.
Far in the distance, beyond the roofs and domes, was the sea, shimmering like glass, and deep in the water, somewhere and everywhere, was Leila – a thousand little Leilas stuck to fish fins and seaweed, laughing from inside clam shells.
Istanbul was a liquid city. Nothing was permanent here. Nothing felt settled. It all must have begun thousands of years ago when the ice sheets melted, the sea levels rose, the floodwaters surged, and all known ways of life were destroyed. The pessimists were the first to flee the area, probably; the optimists would have chosen to wait and see how things would turn out. Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
When the floods arrived, they burst in from all sides, drowning everything in their path – animals, plants, humans. In this way the Black Sea was formed, and the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus, and the Sea of Marmara. As the waters flowed all around, together they created a patch of dry land, on which someday a mighty metropolis was built.
It still had not solidified, this motherland of theirs. When she closed her eyes, Nalan could hear the water roiling under their feet. Shifting, whirling, searching.
Still in flux.
Note to the Reader
Many things in this book are true and everything is fiction.
The Cemetery of the Companionless in Kilyos is a real place. It is growing fast. Lately, an increasing number of refugees who drowned in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross to Europe have been buried here. Like all the other graves, theirs have only numbers, rarely names.
The residents of the cemetery mentioned in this book were inspired by newspaper clippings and factual stories about people buried there – including the Zen Buddhist grandmother who was travelling from Nepal to New York.
The street of brothels is real too. And so are the historical events mentioned in the story, including the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and the massacre in Istanbul on International Workers’ Day in 1977. The Intercontinental Hotel from which snipers opened fire on the crowds has now become the Marmara Hotel.
Until the year 1990, Article 438 of the Turkish Penal Code was used to reduce the sentence given to rapists by one-third if they could prove that their victim was a prostitute. Legislators defended the article with the argument that ‘a prostitute’s mental or physical health could not be negatively affected by rape’. In 1990, in the face of an increasing number of attacks against sex workers, passionate protests were held in different parts of the country. Owing to this strong reaction from civil society, Article 438 was repealed. But there have been few, if any, legal amendments in the country since then towards gender equality, or specifically towards improving the conditions of sex workers.
And finally, although the five friends are products of my imagination, they have been inspired by actual people – natives and latecomers and foreigners – I have met in Istanbul. While Leila and her friends are entirely fictional characters, the friendships described in this novel, at least in my eyes, are as real as this beguiling old city.
Glossary
agha: honorific title in the Ottoman Empire
amca: traditional address for an old man
ayran: yoghurt drink
börek: filled pastry
cezve: coffee pot
darbuka: goblet drum
dhikr: form of devotion where the name of God or His attributes are repeated; associated with Sufi brotherhoods
ezan: call to prayer
feringhee: foreigner
gazino: Turkish music hall
geçmiş olsun: get well soon
grape-leaf sarma: stuffed grape leaves
habibi: my love
haram: forbidden by Islamic law
hayati: my life
hodja: Muslim headmaster
kader: destiny
konak: mansion
nafs: ego
nazar: evil eye
nine: grandmother
salep: hot milk
with cinnamon and wild orchid
Sheitan: Satan
simit: type of bagel with sesame seeds
takke: skullcap
tariqa: Sufi order or school
tövbe: repent
ya ruhi: my soul
yenge: aunt-in-law (or sister-in-law)
Zamhareer: part of hell that is extremely cold
Zaqqum Tree: tree that grows in hell
Zeybek: a form of folk dance in Western Turkey
Cemetery of the Companionless, Turkey
Photo credit © Tufan Hamarat
Acknowledgements
There are some special people who helped me during the writing of this novel. I am deeply grateful to them.
My heartfelt thanks to my wonderful editor, Venetia Butterfield. It is a true blessing for a novelist to work with an editor who understands her like no one else does, and guides and encourages her with faith, love and determination. Thank you, dear Venetia. I owe a big thank you to my agent, Jonny Geller, who listens, analyses and sees. Every conversation we have opens a new window in my mind.
Many thanks to those people who patiently read earlier versions of this book and provided me with advice. Stephen Barber, what an amazing friend, a generous soul, you are! Thank you, Jason Goodwin, Rowan Routh and dear Lorna Owen for being with me all the way through. Thank you so much, Caroline Pretty: you’ve been most thoughtful and helpful. Thank you, Nick Barley, who read the first chapters and told me to keep going without a doubt, without looking back. Huge thanks to Patrick Sielemann and Peter Haag, who have stood by me from the very beginning. How can I forget your valuable support?
I want to express my gratitude to Joanna Prior, Isabel Wall, Sapphire Rees, Anna Ridley and Ellie Smith at Penguin UK, and Daisy Meyrick, Lucy Talbot and Ciara Finan at Curtis Brown. Thanks also to Sara Mercurio, who sends me the loveliest emails from LA, and Anton Mueller for words of wisdom from New York. And to the editors and friends at Doğan Kitap – a beautiful and brave team swimming against the current, guided by nothing other than a love of books. My gratitude, too, to beloved Zelda and Emir Zahir, and dear Eyup, and to my mother, Shafak, the woman whose name I adopted as my surname long, long ago.
My grandmother passed away shortly before I started writing this novel. I didn’t go to her funeral, as I didn’t feel comfortable travelling to my motherland at a time when writers, journalists, intellectuals, academics, friends and colleagues were being arrested on the most baseless charges. My mother told me not to worry about not visiting Grandma’s grave. But I did worry and I felt guilty. I was very close to Grandma. She was the one who raised me.
The night I finished the novel there was a waxing moon in the sky. I thought about Tequila Leila and I thought about Grandma, and though the former is a fictional character and the latter as real as my own blood, somehow it felt to me that they had met and become good friends, sister-outsiders. After all, boundaries of the mind mean nothing for women who continue to sing songs of freedom under the moonlight …
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2019
Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97945-7
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
One Minute
1 Meaning, respectively, ‘Bold and Strong’, ‘War Helmet’, ‘Torrential Rain’ and ‘The Way to Reach God’.
Three Minutes
1 Hiç: pronounced ‘Heech’.
Back to the City
1 ‘Istanbul’ derives from eis ten polin in Medieval Greek, meaning ‘to the city’.