by Elif Shafak
*
They took a walk, which came as a relief to Katie, who had consumed three Cokes. Strolling without purpose, they passed by greengrocers, chemists and betting shops, the last of the sun trailing them. Though it was a blustery day and the sky was a bleak mantle, there were many people out and about, doing their business.
In Victoria Park they stood by the pond, watching the pigeons. The grass felt good beneath their weight, fresh and promising. He put his arm around her, pulling her close, kissed her. She liked the smell of him, the taste of his lips, and she liked that he didn’t try to fumble under her clothes to cup her breasts, the way other boys did, in hopes of going further. She noticed the zeal in his voice, the dare in his eyes, the hunger in his soul.
They held hands, and sat on a bench and watched the pedestrians, whispering into each other’s ears a frivolous remark about every single person who went past. Bonkers. Old trout. Mugger. A few people smiled at them, happy to see another young couple in love. Others averted their gaze.
‘How about the bloke over there?’ said Katie. ‘Doesn’t he look a bit dodgy?’
Iskender’s eyes followed hers until he saw a lean, dark-haired man approaching them. Immediately, his back stiffened, his arms around her loosened.
‘What? Do you know him?’
Wordlessly, Iskender turned his back to the road and pulled up his collar better to hide his face. The man, whom everybody called the Orator, strode by a few seconds later without so much as a glance at the couple on the bench.
‘What’s going on? Is he someone you don’t want to see?’ Katie asked.
‘He’s quite all right. But I’d rather he didn’t see me with you.’
Katie was intrigued by the way Iskender closed up like a steel trap whenever he was asked a question he didn’t want to answer, including queries about his family and childhood. There were sides to him that she couldn’t grasp. He was a cool bloke, she thought, but prone to outbursts of fury. When they met the next time – and she knew there would be a next time – he would treat her better. Of this, she was certain.
Miracles
London, 24 December 1977
In a spacious, well-lit kitchen full of cooks and assistants, Elias, the owner and head chef of Cleo’s, slouched over a massive range cooker upon which various pans sizzled away. Slowly, he stirred a thick, creamy mushroom sauce. It was almost ready, but not yet perfect. He always included a pinch of nutmeg before taking the pan off the heat. That was his little secret. And today everything had to be just right. It was, after all, Christmas Eve.
An Orthodox Christian by birth, an agnostic by choice, he loved the spirit of Christmas: the singing, the family get-togethers, the sharing, the giving, but especially the belief in miracles. That was the part he could relate to the best. As a boy his favourite saint had been Saint Andrew of Crete – not because the saint was far more pious and virtuous than the others, but because, unlike many of them, he himself was a walking miracle. Saint Andrew had been mute from birth, and remained so until the day when, only seven, he suddenly started to speak of truths too immense for his age. Young Elias had loved this story, taking an impish pleasure in imagining the shock on the faces of the people around the child when he uttered his first words. He rejoiced in the fact that the saint had gone down in history as a good orator as well as a hymnographer. If a mute boy could do that, life might perhaps not be as dismal as it sometimes seemed.
After putting the nutmeg into the pan, Elias gave the sauce one more stir and turned off the burner. His sous-chef appeared beside him and carefully emptied the sauce into a porcelain container, where it would cool before being poured on to fifty-five servings of beef fillet steak.
Elias checked his watch before starting to work on the next dish: spiced pear cake with maple pecan sauce. He never used metal utensils while preparing any of his recipes. That was another one of his secrets. Everything had to be wood. Metal was cold, polished and too perfect. It didn’t connect, it only controlled. Whereas wood was clumsy and rough but sincere.
It was only seven hours until Christmas. And, as far as counting went, 1978 was only days away. Elias didn’t have great expectations for the coming year. Well, only one. That it would not be as dreadful as the one coming to an end.
Those twelve months had been the toughest in his five decades of life. Elias had started the year with his career on the rise, an attractive wife, a spacious house in Islington and more business than he could handle at the restaurant. At the end of seven months, he was single and living in a tiny flat with barely any furniture. Aside from a few friends, he hardly socialized any more – reeling from the toll of a divorce for which he hadn’t been prepared. Emotionally, he likened his state to a model train whose batteries had run out while climbing up a hill. Throughout the last phase of his marriage he had kept trying, pushing and faltering with an energy he no longer possessed, until he had swerved off the rails. The divorce had been ugly, neither of them acting like their usual selves. He had often found himself debating financial issues more than emotional ones, until finally he let go – of her, the alimony, the memories.
He had loved his wife, and in some ways he still did. With her lean figure, narrow shoulders, pale complexion, crisply British accent and scintillating ideas, Annabel was the reason he had moved to this country. Since she was more English than the Queen and umbilically attached to her family in Gloucestershire, and since his job was more flexible than hers – she was the founder of a pioneering women’s legal centre – it had seemed natural that, after a brief honeymoon on Ibiza, they should settle in London.
While Elias had not objected to this plan at any stage, the move had not proved easy. London in the early seventies was far from a culinary paradise. There were only a handful of first-class restaurants; and new approaches to food, let alone cross-cultural cuisine, were regarded with undisguised suspicion. Indian cuisine was relatively popular, but its flavours were unlike the ones Elias wanted to introduce. Overall, he found English cuisine heavy and insular, and the customers resistant to fresh tastes – all of which he intended to address.
In the end, their marriage finished exactly the way it had started: with a sense of urgency and a need to challenge. Once the divorce papers were signed, all that was left for Elias from seven and a half years of married life was an aged, lazy Persian cat called Magnolia, albums with photos he no longer wanted to see and the bitterness in his memory and, at times, his dreams.
At midsummer, he received a phone call from his mother informing him that his father had suffered a second heart attack and, this time, not survived. Elias had been unaware of the first.
‘He talked about you every day,’ she said. ‘Your pa respected you and what you’ve done over there. He was too proud to say it to your face.’
The line was so poor Elias could not be sure he was hearing her correctly. ‘I’m coming home, Ma.’
‘Not now, dear,’ she said. ‘You’ll come to see me and Cleo when you’re better and when I’m better. Right now, we’re of no help to each other. Stay where you are and do what you need to do. Your pa would have preferred that.’
But even without her words, Elias knew he had already decided not to abandon London. He would work and work, devouring his past as hungrily, as tenaciously, as a caterpillar eats away every leaf in eyesight, and then he would wait for someone to pull him out of this cocoon, miraculously transformed. The only thing that remained unscathed throughout 1977 had been his business. The restaurant was thriving – he was planning to open a second one in Richmond – as if to compensate for all the chaos elsewhere.
By now Elias had got used to the pain. It had started as a tightening in his stomach and moved up into his ribcage, nestling in his chest, making it hard to laugh, sometimes even to breathe. His friends kept ringing, pressing him to start seeing people again. They left messages on his answering machine, arranged blind dates for him with women who
either worshipped or despised themselves. The truth was, more and more so lately, Elias found himself looking for excuses to be alone. Loneliness, that dull feeling he had dreaded almost all his life, had now become palpable and physical, almost like a liquid. It rushed into his pores, drenching every blood vessel and tissue in his body, water penetrating a dry sponge. Strangely, he didn’t find it that bad.
Pink Destiny – that’s what she said her name was. Elias couldn’t help noticing how vastly different she and Annabel were. If his ex-wife had met Pembe, she would smile knowingly, finding her simple and unsophisticated. Wasn’t this what all men wished for deep in their hearts, she would say? An uncomplicated woman – someone who wouldn’t question, nag, confront or criticize them. Even so, Annabel would add, it was a false fantasy, for there was no such thing as an uncomplicated woman. There were only those who were openly complicated and those who hid it.
Despite Annabel’s needling at the back of his mind, Elias had been thinking about Pembe. At first he had hoped she would visit him, and they would talk about the things they liked, perhaps even cook for each other. A friendly exchange. Nothing else. He had taken extra care with his appearance, but as the weeks passed that hope had been replaced by the awareness that she would not come. Why should she? In all probability he had been living in his head for so long that his grip on what was real or possible had slipped.
Working soothed him, as it had always done. Tonight, in addition to the Christmas traffic in the restaurant, they would be catering two prestigious events. The entire staff had been running full steam ahead, and he was glad that no one had had the chance to ask him why he had included a last-minute item on the menu: rice pudding with orange blossom.
Half an hour later, while the steaks were still being marinated in a zesty sauce, one of the new assistants approached. ‘Chef, you have a visitor.’
Elias raised his eyebrows, surfacing from his thoughts. ‘Hmm?’
‘Someone is asking for you.’
‘Later,’ Elias said. ‘I can’t even take a leak now.’
As Elias watched the assistant shrug and turn back, a doubt crept in. ‘Wait a sec. It’s not a woman with auburn hair?’
‘What exactly is auburn hair, Chef . . . is it . . .?’
‘Never mind,’ Elias muttered, deciding to go to check for himself.
Years after that Christmas Eve, Elias would remember that moment – how he had marched out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel, and halted as soon as he saw her, standing in the foyer, smoothing down her skirt beneath her knees as if she suddenly found it too short, a burgundy handbag tucked under her arm, a shadow of guilt on her face, still not believing she had gone there.
They sat at a table in the empty restaurant, which felt odd, while the team kept running around, which felt even odder. Every few minutes one of the assistants came to ask something, and each time Elias answered with a mixture of anxiety and calm.
‘You go to kitchen,’ Pembe said after a while.
‘No, no, don’t worry. I have plenty of time,’ Elias lied.
Resolutely, she shook her head. ‘You go but can I come too?’
‘You sure?’ he asked. ‘It’s a henhouse in there. With a hungry fox on the loose. Only two hours before dinner, they’re all acting a little mad.’
She smiled, impervious. The hairdresser’s had been closed today, and since her family didn’t celebrate Christmas, she said, she had time on her hands. Besides, she liked henhouses. Still hesitating, Elias led her into the kitchen, where everyone was too busy to gawk at her. He gave her a uniform, and then, upon her request, gave her peppers to dice, parsley to chop, ginger to peel, and so on. Without a word, without a break, she worked.
Later, when the time came for Pembe to leave, Elias walked her to the door. They stood under a painting in which a chalky-white, naked woman stared at them with indifferent eyes – a reproduction of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque. For different reasons, they both felt uneasy, averting their gazes from the painting, from each other.
‘I owe you one,’ he said, and when he realized she didn’t understand, he added, ‘Thank you.’
‘I thank you,’ she said. ‘You helped other day.’
So fearful was he of saying or doing something wrong, of eschewing cultural norms, that he extended his hand for a firm shake. Ignoring the gesture, she approached and kissed him gently on the cheek.
***
Shrewsbury Prison, 1991
This afternoon I went to see Officer Andrew McLaughlin to get my sister’s postcard back, as he knew I would.
He makes me wait for thirty minutes, and it isn’t because he has other business to attend to but because he wants me to remember who’s the boss. Also waiting to see him is a new arrival, a fish out of water. Nervously shaking his leg, clutching some papers, he’s here to file a complaint. One look at this bloke and you can see he’s wet behind the ears – untested, untried, unhurt.
‘Don’t be daft,’ I want to tell him. ‘Save your breath.’
It’s never a brilliant idea to snitch in prison, especially not in the first weeks, when everybody is watching you like vultures, and you don’t yet know who is who. There are some big toes you don’t dare step on, and, if you do, you’d better brace yourself.
There is a board on the wall across from me with posters and fliers about organ donation, methadone-replacement therapy, a group for the friends and families of prisoners, Hepatitis B and C, and the Samaritans’ Prisoners Support Programme. To a free man all of this might suggest the sorrows of life inside. But that’s not how I look at it. After more than ten years’ bird, it is the external world that I dread.
I was eight and Esma was almost seven when we came to England and saw from the top of a red bus the Queen’s Chiming Clock – that’s what we called Big Ben. We learned the language fast, unlike our parents, particularly Mum. It wasn’t the grammar that she didn’t get. It’s just that she didn’t trust English in general. Not that she was more comfortable with Turkish. Or even her native Kurdish. Words caused trouble, she believed. They made people misunderstand one another. Nor did she trust those who depended on jargon, such as journalists, lawyers or writers. Mum liked songs, lullabies, recipes and prayer, where the words – if they mattered at all – were only secondary.
At home, with us children, my mother spoke a Turkish that was peppered with Kurdish words. We answered her in English and spoke only English amongst ourselves. I always suspected she understood more than she revealed.
Perhaps all immigrants shrink from a new language to some extent. Take the brick-thick Oxford English Dictionary and show a new arrival a couple of pages, ask about a few entries. Especially idioms and metaphors – they’re the worst. Imagine trying to crack the meaning of ‘kicking the bucket’. You learned the verb ‘to kick’ and you know what a damn bucket is, but, no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t sink in. Rhetoric is a bit like red tape. It makes you feel small, vulnerable.
My sister was different. Esma loved language. Duck to water. If someone used an expression she wasn’t familiar with, she’d do anything to make it hers, like a collector who’s found a rare coin. She adored words – their sounds, their hidden meanings. Mum was worried that her eyesight – and her options for marriage – would be ruined because of too much reading. As for me, I had no time for books. I had better luck with the slang: to me that had power, currency. That is, until the day I started to stammer.
I’ve changed here. Not overnight, but inch by inch. While I’m not exactly a ‘trusted inmate’, Martin gave me the privilege to use the library after hours. I read, research and reflect – the three big r’s that can make life in prison a step closer to hell or heaven, depending on how you see it.
You’d imagine that everyone would hate a bloke like me. Only, strangely, it isn’t the case. I receive letters, cards and gifts from places that are only dots on the map. There are bo
ys who think I’m a hero. They don’t have a clue about my life, but still. There are women who want to marry me, and cure me with their love. Sick in the head, that is.
Then there are the God Botherers, who want to ‘work’ on me. They come from all religions and no particular religion at all; I seem to have a quite broad appeal. Once in a while I even get some of that New Age bollocks. They send me leaflets, booklets, tapes. ‘Let us help your injured soul by shedding the Light upon your darkest hours.’ Pompous words! They pretend their message is for all humanity but are ready to burn at the stake anyone who doesn’t go along with them. Still, they feel affection for the likes of me. They just can’t get enough of us. So strong is their desire to correct sinners and score points in God’s eyes. We’re their tickets to heaven. We, the scumbags of the earth – the wicked, the fallen.
A journalist came to see me once: thin as a stick, but well dressed, short skirts, long sexy legs and all that. She visited me a few times, seemed to be on my side. ‘Please rest assured, Alex, I only want to understand the story, and increase awareness in society by writing about it.’
How noble is that! Then she goes and pens the shittiest article. I was mucked around with as a child. It was all Mum’s fault: as the elder son, I had been spoiled by her. ‘This is a typical case of Middle Eastern patriarchal tradition,’ blah, blah, blah. I was so irritated I never spoke to a journalist again. They’re not really interested in the truth. All they want to do is to fit you into the story that’s already in their minds.
There were also reports written, even a thesis at some university in London. And once there was this politician who used me as an example to smear all Muslim immigrants. ‘This man is a prototype of the kind of immigrant who is clearly incompatible with the basic tenets of European civilization,’ he said. To all these people, I’m invisible. So is my mother. We’re just a means of furthering their own ends.