by Elif Shafak
Towards the end of one picnic, as the sun was beginning to set and the seagulls were shrieking, time seemed to come to a halt, a sharp smell of anise hanging in the air. Baba added some water to his drink, watching the translucent liquid turn to a milky grey, as blurred as his thoughts. After a while, he rose awkwardly to his feet, his eyes solemn, his chin raised, and made a toast to the cemetery.
‘You fellows are so damn lucky,’ he said. ‘No rent to pay, no petrol to buy, no mouths to feed. No wife nagging you. No boss reading you the riot act. You don’t know how blessed you are.’
The graves listened, a low wind swirling the dead leaves to and fro.
‘From dust we came,’ Baba declared, ‘and to dust we must return.’
On the way home, he insisted that the boys sit in the front with them. No matter how careful they were, stifling every gasp, watching their every word, something always happened, something dire enough to send their father into a lather. The potholes in the road, a missing traffic sign, a stray dog running in front of the van, the news on the radio. This new man, Khrushchev, didn’t seem to know what he was doing; his brain addled by vodka, a vulgar drink that could not hold a candle to raki; Nasser expected too much of the Arabs, who spoke the same language but never listened to one another; and why didn’t the Shah of Iran divorce this second wife of his, who obviously couldn’t give him an heir?
‘What a mess! What a shitty world!’
Baba (the Drunk One) cursed the municipality, the mayor, the politicians. For a few happy minutes his irritation was aimed at the world outside, sparing his family. Usually, someone in the van would do or say something to annoy him. One of the children would wriggle, hiccup, burp, fart or guffaw.
On this day Aisha begged him to drive more slowly.
‘What in hell is wrong with you?’ he inquired in a tone so composed it hardly matched the severity of the question. ‘Can’t I have a moment’s peace? Hmm? Do you want me to explode? Is that what you want?’
Nobody answered. The boys stared at their scrubby knees, or at a fly that had flown in through the open window and now couldn’t get out.
Baba raised his voice. ‘I work my fingers to the bone. Every fucking day. Like a mule! Just so that you lot can eat. Am I the jackass of this family?’
Someone said * – a lame attempt at appeasement, considering what came next.
‘You’re vampires, all of you, sucking my blood.’ He took his hands off the steering wheel to show his wrists, thin and sallow. ‘Do I have more blood to feed you? Have you left me any?’
‘Please hold on to the wheel,’ his wife whispered.
‘Shut your damn mouth! I’m not going to learn how to drive from you.’
Adem could not help but feel sorry for Baba, who clearly was the victim, the sufferer. Guilt would gnaw at his every fibre. They had done it again. They had upset him, although he had warned them over and over. How Adem wanted to make it up to him, to kiss his hand and promise never to suck his blood again.
‘Do I tell you how to cook lentils? Of course I don’t. Because that’s not my job. And driving isn’t your job, woman! What do you know about cars?’
Another time he slammed on the brakes so hard that the van spun round as if on ice. They careered across the road straight into a flowerbed, escaping a ditch by only yards. Adem opened his eyes to a stillness he had never known before – the perfect silence that descends after an accident. He noticed, for the first time, the susurrus of the wind, the quills of light in the air. His brother Tariq was holding his elbow, his face twisted with pain, his lips curled around a moan that never came. Slowly, Baba opened his door and walked out, his upper lip bleeding. He circled the van and opened his wife’s door.
‘Get out!’
‘Oh, please,’ Aisha said, her face ashen.
‘I said get out!’
Grabbing her by the arm, Baba dragged her towards the bonnet of the van, which had popped up when they came to a stop. He said, ‘Since you know so much about cars, fix this.’
Not a single muscle moved on her face. Baba shoved her head down into the engine and stopped only when her forehead hit it with a thud.
‘What? Can you not fix it?’
She mumbled, words so strangled neither Adem nor his brothers could make out their meaning. But they all heard Baba announce, ‘Then zip your mouth and don’t tell me how to drive.’
Together they pushed the van out of the flowerbed, the two boys and Baba. Tariq watched without a word, clutching his fractured arm. Their mother, too, waited on the verge, weeping. It was always the same. Every picnic would start with great hopes and end with someone crying or broken.
At night Adem would remind himself that it was his other baba who fumed and raged, just as it was his other baba who punched the steering wheel/the walls/the tables/the doors/the china cupboard, and, when that didn’t help, beat them with his belt, and once kicked his wife in the groin, sending her flying down the stairs. It helped to remember that it wasn’t the same man. Not that this lessened the pain or the fear, but it made it easier the next morning to go back to loving Baba (the Sober One).
A Scrap of Truth
London, December 1977
There was an artists’ lounge backstage. Not that anybody called it that – only Roxana. She alone liked to think of the cold, cramped dressing room that smelled of cigarettes, talcum powder, perfume and sweat as an area for artists to rest before they went on stage. That didn’t mean she thought of herself as an artiste, for she did not. When need be, she would use other words to describe her profession – performer, danseuse, entertainer, exotic dancer.
It was almost midnight now. In less than fifteen minutes it would be her turn to take the stage. As she scrutinized her costume, she sprinkled silver glitter on her chest. For the first act she was dressed as a samba dancer. A tiara with flamboyant purple feathers, a bikini top ornamented with rhinestones and sequins, silvery, metallic trousers and, underneath those, the skimpiest G-string – to be revealed at the end of the show. With practised ease, she opened the make-up set and arranged the cosmetic pads and brushes of varying sizes. It was an old, worn-out kit that had been used many times by many women. The sponge applicators had turned an unhealthy mushroom tone, the mascara brushes were caked with a thick, crusty substance, and some of the colours on the palette were gone, their pans staring at her like empty eye sockets. There was no more turquoise, for instance, nor platinum nor champagne – Roxana’s favourite shades – so she went for amethyst. Again.
When she was finished with her face, she put on a frosted peach lipstick. Lastly, she pushed up her breasts and arranged them so that they looked bigger, plumper, inside the frilly bra. They never called them ‘breasts’ in England. What funny names they had instead – boobs, tits, wobblers, milky moos.
She had once danced in private for an elderly gentleman – a conservative MP who moonlighted as a fur merchant, so it was rumoured – and heard him say, ‘Shake your jiggly wigglies for me, love.’ It had taken her a few seconds to figure out exactly which parts of her body he was talking about.
Her English had improved remarkably over the years, although her accent was still strong, unyielding. At times, she stressed her r’s deliberately, stretched out her u’s, replaced w’s with v’s. Since she couldn’t get rid of her accent, she made it even thicker, bolder, the way everyone in England expected a Russian to speak – for that’s what Roxana told each new person she met, that she was from Russia.
In truth, she was from Bulgaria. But in England, even in London, where one heard so many languages and dialects on the street, people didn’t know much about her motherland. The Balkans were a jigsaw puzzle with myriad pieces, each of which was equally unfamiliar, eccentric. If Roxana said she was from Bulgaria, they would nod tactfully and ask no more. But whenever she remarked she was born and bred in Russia, they would respond with a barrage of questions. It was i
ntriguing, and somehow romantic, to be from the land of snow, vodka, caviar – and, oddly, KGB spies.
‘Girls who aim highest end up falling down the furthest,’ people always warned. But, even if that were true, even if she would stumble eventually, and even if her dream was destined to be shorter than a butterfly’s breath, it would count for something to have made the attempt, wouldn’t it? Roxana was her own creation. She had found herself a name (Roksana, Roxane or Roxie, as men interchangeably said), a nationality, a past, a future and a story to tell. The truth, her truth, was not hidden under layers upon layers, like a Victorian lady’s petticoat. It consisted of the total of all the fabrications that made her what she was – a girl from a sleepy town in Bulgaria pretending to be Russian and dancing to Brazilian sambas in a striptease club in the heart of London.
*
Behind the stage, past the magenta curtains that had not been washed in ages, if ever, Roxana now stood ready, in full make-up. She peeked out and saw that the club was full. Another busy night. There were the regulars, a few new customers: the bachelors, the soon-to-be married, the recently divorced and the long-time husbands. Black, brown, and white. Young and old, but mostly middle aged.
Then she spotted him at the bar, drinking his soda slowly. The dark-haired Turkish man with the expression of infinite despair, who wore his apprehension like a moth-eaten jacket. She had first seen him in the gamblers’ den, where she had been invited by one of the Chinese owners. That’s where she had learned his name, Adem. She had watched him win a large sum at roulette and knew that any other man would have immediately gone out and blown every penny of that money. But he had come back the next day, played even bigger and lost all of it. One part of her despised him for his stupidity. Yet another part of her applauded his recklessness.
Since then he had turned up at every one of her shows, and each time invited her for a drink afterwards. He had been solicitous, asking her about her past, expecting to hear the gloomiest confessions. The only scrap of truth she let slip was about her father’s drinking habit.
‘Really,’ Adem said. ‘So your old man was just like mine, uh? Baba died of a swollen liver.’
That was when she winced, as if she had tripped over an unseen obstacle. She didn’t want to learn this man’s sad story. She didn’t want to learn anyone’s sad story. All she wanted was to make up her own stories, taking comfort in the knowledge that they were not, and never would be, real.
She would give him the cold shoulder, tell him to stay away from her. This might hurt his feelings, but it would be better for him – and his family. Perhaps then he would be faithful to his wife, although she doubted it. Men like him, once they started frequenting this place and fantasizing about the romantic escapades that life had denied them, did not go back to their homes until they experienced something memorably disastrous.
Big Oath
London, October 1977
Yunus was the only one of the Toprak children who had been born in England. His English was fluent, his Turkish halting, his Kurdish nil. He had auburn hair that curled at the ends, a few freckles across his cheeks and ears that stuck out, giving him a boyish charm. His head was slightly out of proportion to his body and a bit big for his age, from too much thinking, according to his mother. His eyes changed from moss-green to myrtle depending on the colour of the outfit he was wearing or his mood. He was named after the prophet Jonah, the fleeing prophet: the man who, upon learning that he was bound to inform the people about truths they weren’t ready to hear, headed for the hills, hoping to dodge the mission God had for him; the man who ended up being swallowed by a whale and having to endure three dark days and three dark nights, alone and full of remorse.
Seven-year-old Yunus loved to listen to this story, his face alight with curiosity as he pictured the fish’s stomach – dark, deep and damp. There was another reason why this ordeal interested him: just like the prophet himself, Yunus had a tendency to cut and run. When he didn’t like it at school, he ran away, and when he didn’t like it at home, he fled his family. At the slightest onset of boredom, he was on his feet, ready to take flight again. Despite Pembe’s unrelenting efforts, he spent so much time outside, mastering the side streets and back alleys of Hackney, that he could give directions to cab drivers.
Pembe said she never understood how her children could be so different from one another, and Yunus was different. He was the introverted one. The philosopher. The dreamer. The hermit who lived in an imaginary cave of his own, finding riches in ordinary things, company in solitude, beauty everywhere. While Iskender and Esma begrudged other people their good fortune and quarrelled, each in their own way, with their circumstances, Yunus loathed no one and belonged to himself alone. Though everyone in the family felt they were an outsider, albeit for different reasons, Yunus seemed the most comfortable in his skin. When he retreated into his inner self such was his completeness that he didn’t need any distraction. He could have lived in the belly of a fish and have been all right.
Pembe believed he had turned out this way because he hadn’t had enough of either her womb or of her milk. Yunus was the only one of her children who had been born prematurely and who, upon refusing her breasts, had had to be fed formula. ‘See the outcome? It’s made him distant, unreachable,’ she complained.
While Iskender craved to control the world, and Esma to change it once and for all, Yunus wanted to comprehend it. That was all.
*
Early in the autumn of 1977, Yunus was the first to notice that something was not right with his mother. She looked withdrawn, lost in thought. A few times she had forgotten to give him pocket money. And she also fed him less, not shoving as much food into his mouth, which is how Yunus knew something was definitely wrong. Pembe would never forget to feed him; even if it were the morning of the Apocalypse, she would make sure he went to heaven with his belly full.
Not that Yunus minded on his own account; it was always other people he was concerned about. Anyway he had found a way to make pocket money. And it was more than Pembe ever gave him.
There was a house on Moulins Road, several streets north-west of his school. A large detached Victorian building, solitary, abandoned and haunted by ghosts, according to the locals. It had a steep roof, a wrap-around porch and pointed arch windows. Yunus had discovered it on one of his many explorations in the neighbourhood. A group of young people were squatting there. Punks, anarchists, nihilists, pacifists, social dropouts and deviants of various views and many of no single affiliation . . . They were a colourful bunch, mostly in shades of red and black. Nobody in the Toprak family knew how Yunus had first made their acquaintance but the squatters liked him, the wise little boy that he was. They sent him on errands when they were knackered or simply unwilling to move. Bread, cheese, milk, ham, chocolate bars, tins of tobacco, Rizlas . . . Yunus had learned where to get the best deals for each item.
At times they also asked him to retrieve packages from a dour-faced Asian man who lived in a badly lit building, ten minutes’ ride away by bike – a task that Yunus secretly dreaded, even though the man tipped him and didn’t ask any questions. There was a disturbing stench in his place – of decay and sickness. The squatters’ house, too, stank – sometimes even worse. And yet beneath the heavy odour that enwrapped everyone and everything, there were other aromas: of flowers, spices and leaves – lives in transition.
Inside the house there was a wooden staircase winding up three floors, so steep and rotten that it wobbled every time anyone went up or came down it. The internal walls of the ground and first floors had been knocked through, creating open spaces that were used as large bedrooms – even the bathtubs had been turned into beds. The second floor was called the agora. The squatters regularly met there, like the ancient Greeks in a city-state, to discuss, vote on and seal the decisions of the commune.
Most of the furniture in the house was reserved for the agora: lamps scavenged from second-hand
shops, armchairs and dining chairs – no two of which matched – sofas with cigarette burns all over them. There was an ornate crimson oriental carpet. No one knew where it had come from. A little threadbare here and there but still in good shape, it was probably the most precious item in the entire squat. Piled all around were towers of books, magazines and fanzines, and a medley of coffee mugs, wine glasses, biscuits long gone stale, harmonicas and a broken cassette player that no one tried to repair . . . Everything belonged to all and not much belonged to anyone.
The number of residents changed from week to week. This Yunus discovered on his second visit, when he met new faces and learned that some of those he had met earlier had moved out.
‘It is like a floating house,’ a man explained, and gave a stoned grin. ‘This is our ship and we’re sailing to the Big Unknown. Along the way some passengers disembark, others hop on board.’
The man’s hair was dyed canary yellow and spiked into shapes that resembled flames. It looked as if his head were on fire.
‘Yeah, an ark,’ said a young Irish woman with almond eyes, coal-black hair and a radiant smile. She turned to face the boy and introduced herself. ‘Hi, I’m –’
But Yunus never heard her name. Not then, not later. He was busy staring at her lip ring, her pierced eyebrows, and the tattoos that covered her arms, shoulders and upper chest. Noticing his astonishment, she asked him to come closer and showed him every visible tattoo on her body, like an art collector showing off his collection to a party guest.
She had an archer on her left arm because it was her sign – Sagittarius. And because she didn’t want the archer to feel alone and miserable, she had put an angel with a golden harp next to him. Starting from the nape of her neck, expanding towards both shoulders, was a large lotus flower, white and teal, the roots going all the way down her back. On her right arm was a pink rose in bloom, and underneath it a word: Tobiko.