by Elif Shafak
‘What’s going on? Did a cat come here and get your tongues?’
She had barely finished the sentence when she spotted the girl in the corner. The runaway. The bringer of shame. Dropping her load, the woman stood across from the girl, almost transfixed. Then she took a step forward and made a gesture with her lips as if spitting on the floor.
Hediye paled.
In the evening, when all the sisters were at home, nobody dared to speak to Hediye, lest they upset their stepmother. Nobody offered her tea or food. The sisters didn’t eat much either. Several hours into this discomfort, Berzo appeared at the door. As soon as he walked in, they sensed that he already knew. He had heard the news and yet he had taken his time, listening to what the other men said. He had been in no haste to reach home.
Hediye sprang to her feet, running to kiss his hand, but her father held back.
‘I have no sons,’ he said loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘God gave me none. I’ve never understood why He did that. Until today.’
The girls held their breaths, listening. Hediye’s shoulders slouched.
‘Now I know the reason,’ Berzo said. ‘If I had a son, I’d ask him to kill you and clean our family’s good name. And your brother would go to gaol because of you. He would spend his life rotting amidst four walls.’
Hediye didn’t weep, wail or ask for forgiveness. She kept her eyes glued to a spider on the windowsill and remained motionless, wordless.
Into the ensuing silence Berzo said, ‘I never thought I’d say this but I’m glad I don’t have a son.’
In the evening, as the sisters got ready to sleep on bedmats on the floor, they could hear their father and his wife arguing in the other room, though they could not make out the words. The girls, with their hair unbraided and dressed in thick flannel nightgowns, looked at Hediye, still perched on the divan. Quietly, Pembe stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Jamila whispered.
‘She must be hungry.’
‘Are you mad? Papa and Stepma are not yet asleep. They’ll find it out.’
With a shrug, Pembe tiptoed across the room into the kitchen and came back with some bread, cheese and water. Under her sisters’ eyes she carried them to Hediye, who accepted only the water.
The next morning Berzo had his breakfast later than usual. As he sipped his black tea and chewed his flat bread, the girls waited. ‘I’m going to the tea house,’ he said, without meeting anyone’s eye.
Upon hearing this, Pembe felt a rush of panic. Their father had not entered the tea house since the day Hediye had run away. What had changed now to make him go there?
‘What will I do with her under my roof?’ their stepmother grumbled.
‘You know what to do,’ he said, and said no more.
Soon after, their stepmother, a grim look on her broad face, told them they would all have to leave. A lot of work to do, carpets to weave.
As her sisters put on their boots and coats, Pembe lingered behind, seized by a harrowing sense of dread. Something was happening and yet she could not pin it down. Shortly before they left the house, she saw her stepmother carry in the large, round, brass tray used for all their meals. The woman spread the dining cloth on the floor, set up the wooden base and balanced the tray on top. For a second Pembe thought she was serving Hediye some food. But an odd meal it would be. There were no plates. No water. No bread.
Hediye, in the meantime, did not budge. A statue of salt.
The last thing Pembe saw was a cauldron being brought in. Dying to know what was inside, she took a chance. ‘I’m not feeling well. My throat is sore. Perhaps I should stay at home.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Your father’s orders. Nobody stays in the house.’
They went to a neighbour’s and wove carpets all day. They knew the pattern by heart. Robin-egg blue, Persian-rose, periwinkle, cinnamon-brown. Pembe loved making colours. Red from henna, yellow from turmeric, brown from crushed walnut shells. As she soaked yarn in a bowl of honeydew, she confided in her twin.
‘What do you mean she served her an empty cauldron?’ asked Jamila, her eyes wide open.
‘I swear she did,’ whispered Pembe. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t empty. But it was peculiar. If there had been food inside, I would have seen steam, right? Or smelled something. Nothing!’
‘Go back to work,’ said Jamila, because she didn’t know what else to say.
In the afternoon they swapped places. This time Pembe let Jamila prepare the dye while she wove. It was tiring. The muscles behind her eyes hurt, and her fingertips were sore. Parts of her body that she never thought about began to ache.
Secretly, Pembe included a motif in her carpet that wasn’t part of the intended pattern. If anyone noticed it, and she was sure someone would, they would get upset. But she couldn’t help it. It was a tiny mark, an h, as a reminder of her sister’s name. When the carpet was finished, it would be sold to a local merchant, who would then sell it to a bigger merchant. From there the carpet would be carried to a smart shop in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. A tourist couple in the city for a few days would notice it in the window. They would buy it, even though it would cost them dear. The carpet would then be transported to Paris, Amsterdam or New York, wherever the couple lived, the letter h for ever concealed, but for ever alive all the same.
At dusk the family returned home – the seven sisters and their stepmother. As they neared the garden walls, a wave of nervousness surged through Pembe’s body. She broke into a run. She had a bad feeling, less dread than fury, a mounting rage against no one but herself for not having acted earlier. About what, she didn’t know.
It was she who found Hediye, her body limp like a rag doll, her neck broken, hanging from a brass hook in the ceiling, which had been used many times in the past for the hammocks in which babies were rocked to sleep.
She had hanged herself with the rope served to her in the cauldron.
*
The cowboy named Bad tried to smile, as a noose was pulled tightly around his neck. ‘You’re joking, Blondie,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘You wouldn’t . . . you wouldn’t play a joke on me like that.’
Blondie squinted, and with a tilt of his head answered, ‘It’s no joke. It’s a rope, Tuco.’
Clamping her lips tightly, Pembe realized she could not watch these scenes. She half stood up. ‘I go now.’
‘What? But why, my love?’ Elias asked. ‘Why are you leaving early today?’
‘Yes, no . . . I go now.’
‘Is it because of the film? You didn’t like it?
‘No . . . yes . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Shall I come with you?’
‘You stay, please.’
With that Pembe rose to her feet, leaving him without any explanation. As she walked hastily towards the exit and passed by the rows at the back, the person sitting there rubbed his temples to hide his face with his hands.
When the film was over and the lights went back on, Elias stood up with everyone else. He didn’t know what to make of Pembe’s sudden departure. He trudged to the foyer, his heart aching. Someone tapped him on his shoulder.
‘Excuse me, do you have a light?’
A young lad, a teenager. Too young to be smoking. But it was none of his business to tell him that, and even if he did, he knew the boy wouldn’t listen.
‘Sorry, I don’t smoke,’ Elias said.
‘Really?’
There was something in the teenager’s stare and such awkwardness in his remark that Elias flinched. But before he could say another word, the boy gave a slight nod, and said, his tone hard and level, ‘Well, have a good one.’
‘Thanks. You too.’
Leaving the boy there, still watching him, Elias walked out through the double doors, his coat brushing the grey threads that Pembe had left there only an hour ago.
Sandstones<
br />
Abu Dhabi, November 1978
Only a week after the fight in front of the club, Roxana left Adem for another man – an Australian businessman with interests in the Gulf.
After losing her, a blanket of numbness fell over Adem, like night covering a valley of ghosts. Distracted and distant, he was here and nowhere, his mind drifting, his self-confidence dwindling. He did not know what the truth was any longer, and whether he had ever grasped it. His life had been a maze of mirrors, in each mirror he had seen a different reflection of himself, but which one of them was the real Adem, he couldn’t tell. Despite everything, he did not return home. Nor could he stay in the flat he had shared with Roxana, which was, in fact, let in her name. Going to Tariq’s house was not an option, unless Adem was willing to listen to him preach. So he sought refuge with his friend Bilal, who, though not sympathetic to his woes, was at least not dismissive of them.
Days passed with an excruciating slowness. There was a pain in his stomach, as if he had swallowed an iron weight that pressed down on the core of his body. Having little appetite, he skipped meals. He smoked three, often four packs of cigarettes a day. Asthma, his childhood illness, came back. As it became increasingly clear to everyone around him that he couldn’t go on like this, Bilal tried to persuade him to return to his family.
‘I can’t do that,’ Adem said. ‘If I go back now, I’ll leave again tomorrow.’
‘But why are you running away from your own?’
‘Why?’ was a question Adem wasn’t used to asking himself, or others for that matter. He knew how to deal with ‘How?’(how to place biscuits in a box, how to operate a machine) and ‘What?’(what to do at the roulette table, what to bet on), but ‘Why?’ was too abstract, and hardly fathomable.
Near by, a police siren went off and they were both distracted momentarily. When Adem started to speak again, his voice was solemn, his shoulders low. ‘Look, I’ve been thinking this through. The Chinese will never let me off the hook. And my debt is not getting any smaller. I need to get out of here; this city is killing me.’
‘Where are you gonna go?’ asked a baffled Bilal.
‘Actually, I was thinking of Abu Dhabi.’ That was where Roxana had gone, but he wasn’t going to tell this to his friend. Instead he said, ‘I heard they’re building a new city out there. Offices, apartment blocks, shopping malls . . . They’re going to need workers. Thousands of them. Not only for a year or two, but for a long time.’
‘Isn’t it all desert down there? How do they build skyscrapers on soft sand?’
‘Oh, the sand might not hold up, but the banknotes will.’
They mulled over every detail. How much money Adem would earn a month, how long it would take him to buy a Mercedes-Benz, honey-coloured and so well polished that you could watch the reflection of the clouds passing above on its bonnet, and how good it would feel when he came back to England a successful man laden down with gifts for his children. Between them they crafted a dream so vivid that a few days later Bilal was bewailing his own lot. ‘Ah, if I didn’t have a family and a bloody job in London, I’d come with you.’
‘You can join me after. I’ll write to you, give you my address.’
‘The Arabs will treat you differently. It’s not like you’re second class there, you’ll be their guest!’ Bilal said.
A guest basking in the sun. Even the thought of it warmed Adem’s heart. It had been eight years since he had come to London to work and yet he was still an outsider, an interloper. All the other immigrants he knew of had fared much better, and were happier, but not him. Even if there was a brighter future here, especially for the new generation, he was not part of it.
Surely, the Arabs would not be like the Brits and Abu Dhabi would not be London. No rain coming down in buckets, no pork sausages wrapped in glazed bacon as if to double the sin, no pint-sized kitchens in mouldy houses, no tomatoes without taste, no youngsters dyeing their hair purple and terrorizing the streets with their drunken madness. The Brits were always polite: they spat in your face so courteously that you expected them to hand you a handkerchief afterwards. You could not come to blows with an English gentleman, for he would hit you with faint praise. It took years to figure out when the English were complimenting you and when they were telling you that you had screwed up. With the Arabs, things would be more direct, more transparent. You would know that when someone said ‘Welcome’ they really meant it. Perhaps he would manage to bring the children over after a while. That would be nice.
Still, even as he fantasized about his life in sun-drenched Abu Dhabi, Adem knew the bit about the children joining him was a pipe dream. Esma was a Londoner through and through, and loved this country, this civilization. As for his younger son, what a special boy he was. Such an old head on such young shoulders, Pembe always said. Yunus was the wisest of all the Topraks, though he was weak in the face of love – a malady that ran in the family. And Iskender . . . it embarrassed Adem to recall their quarrel, but, more than that, to have to admit that he’d failed to live up to his son’s expectations.
When you first became a father, you assumed your child was an extension of yourself. He gave you pride, and a sense of achievement and rootedness, until you came to realize, little by little, that a child was a being of his own making. He would keep to his own destiny, no matter how much you wished, prompted or forced him to follow in your footsteps. The moment Adem grasped this truth he couldn’t help but feel cheated, beaten. This was not how he had behaved when he was a teenager. He had listened to his baba, always respectful, always obedient. If only he had known he had wings, and was of a different species, he, too, could have flown. But now it was too late. The freedom he had failed to secure from his father, his own child was now demanding from him.
Adem was done with London. Though mindful of the difficulty of leaving his children, he wished to go, though not for too long, of course; free as a feather, floating once again on a current stronger than he was. Abu Dhabi would be new. Abu Dhabi would raise his spirits. Once there he would find Roxana – everything in its own time. She would come back to him and he would accept her. The only problem was that he didn’t have the resources for the trip. The old dilemma confronted him once again: in order to make money you had to have money first.
Upon the advice of Bilal, he went to see a man everyone called Mamut Baba. With a wispy goatee, dark slanting eyes that gleamed above high cheekbones, and a mouth set in a grim line, he was one of those people who radiated worldly power without being physically imposing. Born and raised in Bukhara, he had run away from the Soviets and spent many years in different parts of Europe, finally arriving in London. He spoke several languages and helped Uzbeks, Iranians, Turks, Arabs, Chinese, Mexicans and Portuguese . . . As long as he liked you, he helped you. Young people who couldn’t find jobs, fathers whose daughters had eloped, families with bad blood between them, shopkeepers who couldn’t pay their rent – they all went to Mamut Baba.
The room was full of men of every age, sitting on the carpeted floor, conversing in low tones. In the middle of the circle, with his back to the wall and an elegant fawn cape on his shoulders, sat Mamut Baba. His nine-year-old son – a wiry boy with dark eyebrows – was perched next to him, his gaze glued to a new handheld electronic game from America, his thumbs twiddling nonstop. From time to time a flush of excitement crossed the boy’s face as he won or lost a game, and he would almost cry out, his lips closing around a ghost of a shout.
‘Look at him,’ Mamut Baba said blithely. ‘At this age he is better with technology than I am. When a machine breaks in the house his mother asks him to repair it, not me.’
The men in the room listened, nodding and smiling when necessary.
‘But that’s the way it should be. Every generation must keep up with the technology of the day. We should not fall behind the times.’
‘But . . .’ Adem heard himself murmur and immediately fell qui
et. The word had escaped him without thinking, almost like a sigh.
He noticed a gaunt, bearded man frown at him, annoyed that he had cut in while the master was speaking. Wriggling under the young man’s stare, Adem lowered his face, not knowing that he had just set eyes on a friend of his son, the Orator, a prominent member of this circle.
In the meantime, Mamut Baba was glancing left and right, trying to see who had spoken up. ‘What was that? I couldn’t quite hear.’
Now feeling obliged to come forward, Adem cleared his throat. ‘Uh-hmm, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt like that.’
‘That’s all right, my good man. Go ahead,’ said Mamut Baba affably. ‘Do tell us what you were thinking.’
‘Well, I used to work at the United Biscuits Factory. The biscuits follow each other along the conveyor belt without an end,’ Adem said, looking, despite himself, at the Orator, searching for a sign of encouragement where there was none. ‘You do the same thing again and again, thousands of times. It numbs your brain. I was thinking these games our kids play, could all that repetition be good for them?’
Mamut Baba studied Adem with a new expression – a mixture of patience and tolerance. Then he embarked on a long speech about science and technology, which Adem found too abstract to follow. An hour later, as he was about to leave with everyone else, Mamut Baba asked him, and a few others, including the Orator, to stay for dinner.
The five of them sat on the carpet, circling a round, low table, and waited for their food to be served. It was then that Adem was able to bring up the subject.
‘I need a loan to go to Abu Dhabi,’ he said. ‘When I’ve made enough money there, I’ll return and pay you back.’
‘How about your family?’ Mamut Baba asked, as he tore a piece of bread.
‘My son Iskender will take care of the house. He’s a big boy.’
At the mention of the name the Orator eyed Adem with interest. So this is the absent father the lad was talking about. Just then the door opened, and a woman came into the room carrying a large tray crowded with plates. She was fully covered in a cinnamon-coloured burqa that exposed only her hands, and two dark eyes behind the slits in her veil. She served a creamy garbanzo soup in glass bowls, set the rice and lamb in the middle, distributed the flat breads, filled the water glasses, and disappeared.