by Elif Shafak
I loved the neighbourhood. Afro hair salons, the Jamaican café, the Jewish baker’s, the Algerian boy behind his fruit stall who pronounced my name in a funny way and always had a little present for me, the penniless musicians who lived around the corner and rehearsed every day with their windows open and introduced me, without knowing it, to Chopin; the artist who drew portraits in Ridley Road Market for ten bob, and once made mine for only a smile. All creeds and colours.
Before this house, there was a flat in Istanbul – the place where Iskender and I had spent the early years of our childhood but that now belonged to another time, another country. This was where our family had lived prior to our move to England in May 1970, shortly before Yunus was born. Like many expatriates, Mum, too, had a selective memory. Of the past she had left behind, she would reminisce mostly, if not solely, about the good things: the warm sunshine, the pyramids of spices in the market, the smell of seaweed in the wind. The native land remained immaculate, a Shangri-La, a potential shelter to return to, if not actually in life, at least in dreams.
My recollections, however, were of a mixed nature. Perhaps, of the past they share together, children never remember the same bits as their parents. Once in a while my mind ran back to the basement in that old house: the furniture upholstered in azure; the round, white, crocheted lace doilies on the coffee tables and kitchen shelves; the colony of mould on the walls; the high windows that opened on to the street . . . The flat etched in my memory was a dimly lit place where a crackly radio was on all day long and a faint odour of decay lingered in the air. It was always dusk in there, morning or afternoon made little difference.
I was little when the place was home to me. I would sit cross-legged on the carpet in the living room and look up with my mouth half open at the windows near the ceiling. Through them I could see a frantic traffic of legs flowing left and right. People going to work, returning from shopping or out for a promenade.
Watching the feet of the passers-by and trying to guess what their lives were like was a favourite game of ours – a game with three players: me, Iskender and Mum. So, for instance, we would see a pair of shiny stilettos walking at a brisk, hurried pace, ankle straps neatly tied, heels clattering against the pavement. ‘I think she’s going to meet her fiancé,’ Mum would say and then come up with an intriguing story of love and heartache. Iskender, too, was good at this game. He would spot a pair of worn-out, dirty moccasins and fabricate a story about how they belonged to a man who had been without a job for quite some time and was now so desperate he was going to rob the bank around the corner, where he would get shot by the security guard.
Though the basement did not get enough sunshine, it did receive plenty of rain. Drizzles were no threat, but whenever it rained more than two inches in the city the drains in the house overflowed, engulfing the back room in a messy, murky lake. Wooden ashtrays, spatulas, picture frames and bamboo baskets were good swimmers. Baking trays, chopping boards, teapots, and the pestle and mortar were hopeless. While the glass vase on the table would plummet fast, the plastic flowers in it would float. Then there was the backscratcher . . . I wished it, too, would sink, but it never did.
My parents had talked about moving out of the apartment, but, even if they had had the means and found a sunnier basement in this impoverished neighbourhood, there was no guarantee that it would endure Istanbul’s infamous downpours any better. Perhaps over the years they had also developed an attachment to their flat. Dark and damp it may have been, but it was, nevertheless, home.
Istanbul . . . Deep in the slow, whirling memories the city’s name stood out from the hundreds I had stored away throughout my life. I placed the word on my tongue, sucking on it slowly, eagerly, as if it were a boiled sweet. If London were a confection, it would be a butterscotch toffee – rich, intense and traditional. Istanbul, however, would be a chewy black-cherry liquorice – a mixture of conflicting tastes, capable of turning the sour into sweet and the sweet into sour.
*
My mother first started to work shortly after my father had gambled away two months’ worth of wages. Suddenly, money was needed like never before. While Iskender was at school, Mum started to go to the houses of the rich, where she would take care of their toddlers, cook their food, clean their rooms, scour their saucepans, iron their clothes and occasionally offer a shoulder to cry on. I would be left in the care of a neighbour, an old woman with a sharp tongue and poor hearing, but otherwise nice.
In the evenings Mum would tell us, as if they were bedtime stories, about life in the villas where every child had his or her own room, and modern husbands invited their wives to have a drink with them. She had once seen a couple put jazzy music on a machine and dance – which had struck her as something of a shame, for they stepped on the carpet with their dusty shoes, confirming her belief that there was something queer about the wealthy. Otherwise why would anyone throw green olives into their drinks, ruin lush carpets and nibble yellow cheese cubes jabbed with toothpicks?
After working for several families, Mum found a full-time job. They were famous people, her employers. The woman was an actress and had just given birth to a girl. As for her husband, we never came to learn what exactly he did, but he was always busy and travelled frequently, that much we knew. My mother’s job was to take care of the house and the baby, as well as the actress, who didn’t seem to be coping well with the changes in her life. Colicky and moody, the baby constantly cried. But the new mother wept just as easily and sometimes even more. She was beautiful – almond eyes, jet-black hair, a shapely nose, slender hands with the thinnest veins. If her fans had seen her like this, they might have been disappointed, but Mum felt a rush of fondness for her in her shabby, despondent state.
By then the old lady who looked after me had fallen sick and Mum started taking me with her. While I played on my own, she would toil, and secretly sprinkle cardamom seeds around the actress’s bed to protect her from the djinn. Then we would take a bus and a dolmush,* and go home, just as the sky hung low and dim above the city. A full month went by. Mum expected to get her wages any day, but there was no mention of it and she was too shy to ask.
One afternoon, while Mum was cooking and I was playing under the kitchen table, the woman’s husband appeared. There was a faint, sour odour emanating from him – aftershave and whisky. His eyes were bloodshot but oddly amused. Unaware of my presence, he staggered towards Mum and grabbed her sides.
‘Hush,’ the man said, putting his finger to his lips. ‘They’re all sleeping.’
They’re all sleeping. They won’t see us. They’re all sleeping. So we can sleep too. I’ll buy you nice things. Shoes, bags, clothes, a pair of golden earrings . . . You’re a good woman, a saint. Please have pity on me. My wife will never know. Neither will your husband. They’re all sleeping. I’m not a bad man. But I am a man, like any other, and I have needs. My wife isn’t a woman any more. She’s changed since the baby, always weeping, whining. The entire city is sleeping.
My mother pushed the man against the wall; in his drunken state he offered little resistance. His hands dangled at his sides, his body slackened as if it were empty, like a soft toy. Yanking me with one hand, grabbing her handbag with the other, Mum stomped down the corridor, but then realized we didn’t have enough money to go home.
‘Sir . . .’ she said. ‘You haven’t given me my wages.’
He was standing by the door, slightly teetering. ‘You want money?’ he asked, sounding surprised.
‘It’s my monthly –’
He cut in. ‘You treat me like this and on top of that you want my money? What a bitch you are!’
We marched out of the house. We took the bus, got off at our usual stop and decided to walk the rest of the way home. But Mum wasn’t paying attention to where we were going. Step by step, we drifted away from main avenues into serpentine streets that seemed to lead nowhere. It was getting dark. We found ourselves by the s
easide in an area where we had never before set foot. There were huge, black rocks along the shore, the waves crashing against them. We sat there, catching our breath, observing the splendour of the city and its indifference to us.
Noticing tiny seashells on the beach, I stood up to collect them. I was still lingering by the sea when I saw two men approach my mother. They were eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out, leaving a trail behind them like in the Hansel and Gretel story.
‘Good evening, sister, you seem so sad,’ said the first one. ‘What’s a woman like you doing here at this hour?’
‘Yeah, you look like you need help,’ said the other.
Mum didn’t answer. She fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief, still sniffing. A few hairpins, house keys, bills to pay, a handful of hazelnuts she had taken with her but forgotten to give me, a photo of her children, and a mirror in which she saw her melancholy, but no handkerchief.
‘Do you have anywhere to go tonight? Why don’t you join us?’
‘We’ll take care of you,’ the other said sassily.
‘I don’t need your help,’ Mum retorted, her voice tinted with irritation. Then she turned towards the shore, and yelled, ‘Esma, come here, quickly!’
The men were surprised to see me, but they didn’t back off. Instead they followed us silently. It was a game. Mum would resist. They would insist. Mum would resist. They would insist. Mum would surrender.
‘Get away! Don’t you see I’m a married woman?’
One of the men glanced nervously at her, but the other scoffed and rolled his eyes as if to say, So what?
Dark and misty, there were fewer and fewer pedestrians around, and the traffic was sparse. We hurried, careful to avoid the corners, where the moonlight etched grey outlines on the trees. We saw one or two women, strolling next to their husbands or brothers, enjoying the protection, the privilege. Ten minutes had gone by, or maybe more, when we came across an old man with a boy.
‘Selamun aleykum. Are you all right?’
Not waiting for Mum to respond, I blurted out, ‘We’re lost.’
Tipping his head in a gentle nod, the old man smiled at me. ‘And where is your home, my dear?’
Mum whispered a district, but out of courtesy she added that he shouldn’t worry about us.
‘Well, you’re in luck. My grandson and I are going that way too.’
‘No, we aren’t,’ objected the boy, who was slightly older than me.
The old man squeezed his grandson’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes the shortest way is to follow a friend’s route.’ Then he turned to the two men behind us and scowled so hard that they averted their eyes, suddenly embarrassed.
Thus we started our walk home – Mum, me, the old man and the boy. I inhaled the salty scent the wind brought from the sea, eternally grateful to the strangers who had so unexpectedly turned into companions of the road. When we reached our street, Mum asked the man the name of his grandson.
‘Yunus,’ he said with pride. ‘He’ll be circumcised next month, inshallah.’
‘If God gives me another son,’ Mum said, ‘I shall remember you and name him Yunus, so that he can be as kind to strangers as you have been to me.’
*
Back in the basement flat, sitting under the windows now filled with a slate-coloured emptiness, my father was waiting, chain-smoking. The moment he heard our keys in the lock, he leaped to his feet. ‘Where have you been?’
‘We had to walk,’ Mum said, and frowned at me. ‘Esma, take your coat off and go back to your room.’
She pushed me towards the corridor, and closed the door so harshly it bounced open again and stood slightly ajar. ‘I didn’t have the money for the dolmush.’
‘What do you mean you didn’t have the money? How much did they give you?’
‘Nothing. I’m not going to work for them again.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ my father asked, raising his voice a notch, but no more. ‘I have debts, you know that.’
‘They didn’t pay me . . .’
For almost a full minute I didn’t hear a sound. Then, as if surfacing from dark waters to grab a breath, my father inhaled loudly. ‘You come home at this hour and you think I’m going to believe your lies. Where’s the money, you whore?’
There was a backscratcher on the sofa. A mustard-yellow, cold tool made of a ram’s horn. In the twinkling of an eye, he grabbed it and flung it at Mum, who was so distracted by his words that she failed to dodge it in time. The implement hit her on the side of her face with a thud, cutting her neck.
No, my father Adem Toprak did not beat his wife or his children. And yet on that night, and on other nights in the ensuing years, he would easily lose his temper and turn the air blue with words that were full of pus and bile; he would smash objects against the walls, all the while hating the entire world for pushing him to the edge, where he feared the shadow of his abusive father was waiting to tell him he might not, in the end, be that different from him.
A Box of Baklava
A Village near the River Euphrates, 1961
Born and bred in Istanbul, Adem only left the city for the first time when he was eighteen years old. Taking with him a suitcase full of clean underwear, lavender cologne and a box of baklava, he got on a bus and arrived twenty-four hours later, drained and disorientated, at a south-western town he knew not much about. From there he travelled in the back of a lorry to a village that bordered the northern tip of Syria. This was where his brother Khalil had been doing his military service for the past five months.
His face tanned from the winter sun, Khalil had lost some weight, but the greatest change was in his demeanour. His eyes had acquired a thoughtful gleam and he seemed unusually reticent, as if wearing a uniform had altered his character. Even as he gladly accepted the underwear and cologne, he seemed more pensive than merry. Adem examined him with curiosity, for he, too, would become a soldier in about a year. Military service being compulsory, he had decided to do it as soon as he left secondary school. University wasn’t for him, and he couldn’t afford it anyway. Upon coming back from the army, he would find a job, get married and have six children – three boys, three girls. This, in a nutshell, was the future he had envisaged for himself.
When visiting hours were over, Adem left his brother in his garrison and rode a donkey back to the nearby village. Frozen earth, the colour of porridge, stretched out as far as the eye could see. Nature was resilient here, unyielding. Only as he was observing the landscape did it occur to him that he had forgotten to give Khalil the box of baklava.
Kismet, he thought to himself. Maybe it was for someone else.
Upon arriving in the village Adem found the muhtar – the headman. It was a lucky coincidence that his father had done business with him in the past. Though the two men hadn’t seen each other in many years, they had kept in touch through common friends. And so, prior to his trip, Adem had sent a postcard to his father’s acquaintance to notify him of his arrival. Worryingly, he had not had a reply.
‘Postcard? What card?’ yelled the headman when Adem knocked on his door. ‘I didn’t receive anything.’
He was a swarthy man, so tall that he had to stoop before walking in and out of doorways. A thick moustache curled upwards atop his lip, and his sideboards were slicked down with a substance that looked like oil.
‘I . . . I’m sorry . . . then I’d better go,’ said Adem.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I . . . look, I –’
‘No visitor has ever been unwelcome under this roof,’ roared the headman.
Slowly, it dawned on Adem that the Kurdish man was not angry with him. Nor was he shouting. His voice was naturally loud and husky, and his Turkish so unpractised that it made him sound enraged even when he wasn’t.
‘Well, thank you. It’s only for a night, really
.’
‘A night? You cannot leave so soon! There is a wedding in two days. You must join us. Otherwise the groom’s family will be offended.’
How can they can be offended when they don’t even know me, Adem wanted to ask. But the customs were different in this part of the country, and far more pronounced. Besides, he didn’t have any reason to hurry back to Istanbul. It wasn’t as if anyone there was desperate for him to return.
Weddings, joyful as they were, had long been a source of sadness for Adem, for they always reminded him of his mother, Aisha. Her name was not mentioned in their house any more; her photos had been destroyed as if she had never been. The lace she had tatted, the handkerchiefs she had embroidered, the necklaces that had once adorned her long neck, and the blouses, stockings and hairpins she had worn – all had been burned on a bonfire lit by Baba (the Drunk One).
So it was that Adem accepted the headman’s offer and remained in the village, gorging himself on fresh butter, cream and honey. The next afternoon, the headman dozed off after lunch, his wife and daughters immersed themselves in polishing the copper utensils in the house, and his sons became caught up in a backgammon tournament. Adem had seen his brother in the morning. The second visit had been shorter, though no less sentimental. Again he had forgotten the baklava. Now, having no interest in backgammon and for want of anything better to do, he decided to go out for a walk.
He strolled through the village, observing the rickety houses, the cracks in the walls, the children with dirt under their fingernails, the ruts left by carts and caravans that had crossed this land, never to return. It was bare and bleak but oddly beguiling. He came across a pack of stray dogs basking in the dirt, and one of them, a large canine with a tawny coat and bloodshot eyes, showed its teeth. The other dogs followed suit, snarling and growling, their ears pinned back. Adem turned around and began to run, even though he knew it would prompt the pack to chase him. Panting, he scrambled down mud tracks without a sense of direction, until he arrived at a sod house with chickens and hens in the front garden. There was someone sitting on the garden wall – half-girl, half-woman – who, upon closer inspection, was sniggering at his panic. Adem dashed towards her, and entered the garden without permission, taking refuge in her self-confidence.