by Elif Shafak
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First American edition
Published in 2013 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2012.
All rights reserved.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permissions.
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Purchase only authorized editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shafak, Elif, 1971-
Honor / Elif Shafak.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-101-60614-8
1. Kurds—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H328H66 2013
813’.6—dc23
2012039761
When I was seven years old, we lived in a green house. One of our neighbours, a talented tailor, would often beat his wife. In the evenings we listened to the shouts, the cries, the swearing. In the mornings we went on with our lives as usual. The entire neighbourhood pretended not to have heard, not to have seen.
This novel is dedicated to those who hear, those who see.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Esma
Names Like Sugar Cubes
Colours
Askander . . . Askander . . .
A Prince in the Tree
The Wish Fountain
Memories
Picnics in the Sun
A Scrap of Truth
Big Oath
Esma
A Box of Baklava
A Love Like a Comet
No Wisdom without Foolishness
Racism and Rice Pudding
Beauty and the Beast
A Fluffy Cardigan
Miracles
The Moustache
Silent Surprise
Disgrace
The Missing Piece
The Brave Fight
The Amber Concubine
Esma
Heart of Glass
A Boy Made of Wax
Haroun the Smuggler
Esma
The Slap
A Big, Brown Trout
Head of the Family
The Debt
The Man from Beyond
The Decision
Mother
The Stick and the Bundle
The Rope
Sandstones
Esma
Ink on Silk
The Encounter
The Cloak of Calmness
The Watch
Mirror Image
Lemon Tree
Esma
The Cleaning
Esma
Dream within a Dream
Esma
Acknowledgements
As long as he can remember he has had a sense of himself as prince of the house, and of his mother as his dubious promoter and anxious protector.
J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
Esma
London, 12 September 1992
My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten, but I could never find the time or the will or the courage to write about it. That is, until recently. I don’t think I’ll ever become a real writer and that’s quite all right now. I’ve reached an age at which I’m more at peace with my limitations and failures. But I had to tell the story, even if only to one person. I had to send it into some corner of the universe where it could float freely, away from us. I owed it to Mum, this freedom. And I had to finish it this year. Before he was released from prison.
In a few hours I’ll take the sesame halva off the hob, let it cool by the sink and kiss my husband, pretending not to notice the worried look in his eyes. Then I’ll leave the house with my twin daughters – seven years old, four minutes apart – and drive them to a birthday party. They’ll quarrel on the way, and, for once, I’ll not scold them. They’ll wonder if there will be a clown at the party, or, better still, a magician.
‘Like Harry Houdini,’ I’ll say.
‘Harry who?’
‘Who-deeny, she said, you silly!’
‘Who’s that, Mummy?’
That will hurt. A pain like a bee sting. Not much on the surface, but a growing burning within. I’ll realize, as I have done on so many occasions before, that they don’t know anything about their family history because I have told them so little. One day, when they’re ready. When I’m ready.
After I have dropped off the girls, I’ll chat for a while with the other mothers who have shown up. I’ll remind the party host that one of my daughters is allergic to nuts, but, since it is difficult to tell the twins apart, it is better to keep an eye on both of them and make sure neither gets any food with nuts, including the birthday cake. That is a bit unfair to my other daughter, but between siblings that does happen sometimes, the unfairness, I mean.
I’ll then get back into my car, a red Austin Montego that my husband and I take turns driving. The journey from London to Shrewsbury is three and a half hours. I may have to make a pit stop just before Birmingham. I will keep the radio on – that will help to chase the ghosts away, the music.
There have been many times when I thought of killing him. I have made elaborate plans that involved guns, poison or, better yet, a flick-knife – a poetic justice, of sorts. I have also thought of forgiving him, fully and truly. In the end, I haven’t achieved either.
*
When I arrive in Shrewsbury, I’ll leave the car in front of the railway station and take the five-minute walk to the grimy prison building. I’ll pace the street or lean against the wall across from the main entrance, waiting for him to come out. I don’t know how long this will take. And I don’t know how he’ll react when he sees me. I haven’t visited him for more than a year. I used to go regularly, but as the day of his release drew closer I just stopped.
At some point the massive door will open from inside and he’ll walk out. He’ll gaze up at the overcast sky, unused to seeing this vast expanse above his head after fourteen years of incarceration. I imagine him blinking at the daylight, like a creature of the dark. In the meantime, I’ll stay put, counting up to ten or one hundred or three thousand. We won’t embrace. We won’t shake hands. A mutual nod and the thinnest of greetings in small, strangulated voices. Once we get to the station, he’ll hop into the car. I’ll be surprised to see how athletic he is. He’s still a young man, after all.
Should he want to have a cigarette, I won’t object, even though I hate the smell and don’t let my husband smoke in the car or in the house. We’ll drive across the English countryside, passing through quiet meadows and open fields. He’ll inquire about my daughters. I’ll tell h
im they’re fine, growing fast. He’ll smile, though he hasn’t the slightest idea about parenthood. I won’t ask him anything in return.
I will have brought a cassette along to play. The greatest hits of ABBA – all the songs that my mother used to hum while cooking or cleaning or sewing. ‘Take a Chance on Me’, ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘The Name of the Game’ . . . for she’ll be watching us, I’m sure. Mothers don’t go to heaven when they die. They get special permission from God to stay around a bit longer and watch over their children, no matter what has passed between them in their brief mortal lives.
Back in London, once we reach Barnsbury Square, I’ll search for a parking space, grumbling to myself. It will start to rain – tiny crystal drops. Finally, we’ll find a spot into which I’ll squeeze the car after a dozen manoeuvres. I can deceive myself that I’m a good driver, until it comes to parking. I wonder if he’ll scoff at me for being a typical woman driver. He would have done so once.
We’ll walk together towards the house, the street quiet and bright behind and ahead of us. For a fleeting moment we’ll compare our surroundings with our old home in Hackney, the house on Lavender Grove, marvelling at how different things seem now, and how time has moved forward, even when we couldn’t.
Once inside, we’ll take off our shoes and put on slippers – classic charcoal for him, a pair of my husband’s, and for me burgundy slip-ons with pompoms. His face will crumple when he sees them. To put his mind at ease, I’ll tell him they are a present from my daughters. He’ll relax, now realizing that they are not hers. The resemblance is merely coincidental.
From the doorway he’ll watch me make tea, which I’ll serve without milk and with lots of sugar, that is, if gaol hasn’t changed his habits. Then I’ll take out the sesame halva. We’ll sit together by the window, with porcelain cups and plates in our hands, like genteel strangers, watching it rain on the violas in my back garden. He’ll compliment me on my cooking, saying how much he has missed sesame halva, though he’ll politely decline another serving. I’ll tell him I follow Mum’s recipe to the letter, but it never turns out as good as hers. That will shut him up. We’ll lock gazes, the silence heavy in the air. Then he’ll excuse himself, saying that he feels tired and would like to rest, if that is all right. I’ll show him to his room and close the door, slowly.
I’ll leave him there. In a room in my house. Neither far away nor too close. I’ll keep him confined within those four walls, between the hate and the love, none of which I can help but feel, for ever trapped in a box in my heart.
He is my brother.
He, a murderer.
Names Like Sugar Cubes
A Village near the River Euphrates, 1945
When Pembe was born, Naze was so sad she forgot about all she had suffered for the previous twenty-six hours, the blood oozing between her legs, and tried to get up and walk away. At least, that’s what everyone said – everyone present in the delivery room on that blustery day.
As much as she might have wanted to leave, however, Naze could not go anywhere. To the surprise of the women in the room and her husband, Berzo, waiting in the courtyard, she was forced back into bed by a new wave of contractions. Three minutes later the head of a second baby appeared. Lots of hair, reddish skin, all wet and wrinkled. Another girl, only smaller.
This time Naze did not attempt to run away. She gave a wisp of a sigh, buried her head in the pillow and turned towards the open window, as if straining to hear fate’s whisper in the wind, as mild as milk. If she listened attentively, she thought, she might hear an answer from the skies. After all, there must be a reason, a justification unbeknownst to her but surely obvious to Allah, as to why He had given them two more daughters when they already had six, and still not a single son.
Thus Naze pursed her lips like a folded hem, determined not to say a word until Allah had explained, fully and convincingly, the motive behind His actions. Even in sleep her mouth was clamped tight. During the next forty days and forty nights she did not speak a word. Not when she was cooking chickpeas with sheep’s-tail fat, nor when she was giving her six other daughters baths in a large round tin bucket, nor even when she was making cheese with wild garlic and herbs, nor when her husband asked her what she would like to name the babies. She remained as silent as the graveyard by the hills where all her ancestors were buried and where she, too, would some day be laid to rest.
It was a rugged, remote Kurdish village with no roads, no electricity, no doctor, no school. Barely any news from the outside world permeated its sheath of seclusion. The aftermath of the Second World War, the atomic bomb . . . The villagers hadn’t heard of any of this. And yet they were convinced that strange things happened in the universe, that is, beyond the shores of the Euphrates. The world being what it was, there was no point in wishing to discover it. Everything there had been, and everything there ever would be, was already present here and now. Human beings were ordained to be sedentary, like trees and boulders. Unless you happened to be one of these three: a wandering mystic who had lost his past, a fool who had lost his head or a majnun who had lost his beloved.
Dervishes, eccentrics and lovers aside, for the rest of the people nothing was astonishing, and everything was as it should be. Whatever took place in one corner was heard, at once, by everyone else. Secrets were a luxury only the rich could afford, and in this village, named Mala Çar Bayan, ‘House of Four Winds’, no one was rich.
The village elders were three small-statured, forlorn-looking men who spent most of their time in the sole tea house contemplating the mysteries of Divine Wisdom and the stupidities of politicians while they sipped tea out of glasses as thin as eggshells, as fragile as life. When they heard about Naze’s oath of silence, they decided to pay her a visit.
‘We came to warn you that you’re about to commit sacrilege,’ said the first man, who was so old the slightest breeze could have knocked him down.
‘How can you expect Allah the Almighty to reveal His ways to you when He is known to have spoken only to prophets?’ remarked the second man, who had but a few teeth left in his mouth. ‘Surely there was no woman among them.’
The third man waved his hands, as stiff and gnarled as tree roots. ‘Allah wants to hear you talk. If it had been any other way, He would have made you into a fish.’
Naze listened, now and then dabbing her eyes with the ends of her headscarf. For a moment, she imagined herself as a fish – a big, brown trout in the river, its fins glittering in the sun, its spots surrounded by pale haloes. Little did she know that her children and grandchildren would, at different times in their lives, feel attached to various kinds of fish, and an affinity with the kingdom under the water would run in the family for generations to come.
‘Speak!’ said the first old man. ‘It’s against nature for your kind to be quiet. What goes against nature goes against Allah’s will.’
But still Naze said nothing.
When the honourable guests had left, she approached the cradle where the twins were sleeping. The shimmer from the lighted hearth painted the room a golden yellow, giving the babies’ skins a soft glow, almost angelic. Her heart mellowed. She turned to her six daughters, who had lined up beside her, from the tallest to the shortest, and said, in a voice both hoarse and hollow: ‘I know what I’ll name them.’
‘Tell us, Mama!’ the girls exclaimed, delighted to hear her speak again.
Naze cleared her throat and said, with a note of defeat, ‘This one will be Bext and the other, Bese.’
‘Bext and Bese,’ the girls echoed in unison.
‘Yes, my children.’
Upon saying this, she smacked her lips, as if the names had left a distinct taste on her tongue, salty and sour. Bext and Bese in Kurdish, Kader and Yeter in Turkish, Destiny and Enough in every language possible. This would be her way of declaring to Allah that even though, like a good Muslim, she was resigned to her fate, she h
ad had her fill of daughters and the next time she was pregnant, which she knew would be the last time because she was forty-one years old and past her prime now, He had to give her a son and nothing but a son.
That same evening, when their father came home, the girls rushed to give him the good news: ‘Papa! Papa! Mama is talking.’
Pleased as he was to hear his wife speaking again, Berzo’s face clouded over when he learned about the names she had chosen for the newborns. Shaking his head, he remained silent for few awkward minutes.
‘Destiny and Enough,’ he muttered finally, as though to himself. ‘But you haven’t named the babies, really. You’ve sent a petition to the skies.’
Naze stared down at her feet, studying the toe poking out of a hole in her woollen sock.
‘Names hinting at resentful feelings might offend the Creator,’ Berzo continued. ‘Why draw His wrath upon us? Better stick to ordinary names and stay on the safe side.’
Thus saying, he announced that he had alternatives in mind: Pembe and Jamila – Pink and Beautiful. Names like sugar cubes that melted in your tea, sweet and yielding, with no sharp edges.
Though Berzo’s decision was final, Naze’s choices were not easily discarded. They would linger in everyone’s memory, tied to the family tree like two flimsy kites caught in some branches. Thus the twins came to be known by both sets of names: Pembe Kader and Jamila Yeter – Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty. Who could tell that one of these names would some day be printed in newspapers all around the world?
Colours
A Village near the River Euphrates, 1953
Since she was a little girl, Pembe had adored dogs. She loved the way they could see into people’s souls, even in deep sleep through closed eyes. Most grown-ups thought dogs did not understand much, but she believed that was not true. They understood everything. They were just forgiving.
There was one sheepdog in particular that she treasured. Droopy ears, long muzzle, a shaggy coat of black, white and tan. He was a good-natured creature that liked to chase butterflies and play catch with twigs, and ate almost everything. They called him Kitmir, but also Quto or Dodo. His name changed all the time.