by Elif Shafak
At eight thirty Pembe finished sweeping the floor, rinsing the brushes and washing the plastic bottles in which she mixed the hair dyes. Her hands were so used to scrubbing, wiping and polishing that she didn’t think they would obey her if she ordered them not to toil. When there was nothing left to do, she grabbed her coat and handbag, and gave the salon one last glance.
‘Bye-bye hairdryers,’ she murmured. ‘Bye rollers, scissors, bleaches . . .’
She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry. Biting the inside of her mouth, she opened the door and stepped on to the street. A middle-aged couple kissed as they tottered by, looking quite tipsy. She tried not to stare but couldn’t help it. Eight years had passed since she had come to this country and yet she was still not used to seeing people kiss in public. The woman noticed her, and pulled away from her lover, chuckling briefly, as if amused by Pembe’s bashfulness.
Hurrying, Pembe locked the door and dropped the key through Rita’s letterbox. She realized she had forgotten to write her a note but maybe it was better that way. There was no need to explain anything, and, even if she had tried, she didn’t think she would succeed. Now she had to find Elias and tell him that from now on it would be more difficult for her to meet him.
The Encounter
London, 14 November 1978
That Tuesday at school, during the lunch-break, Iskender seemed psyched up, as always. Teasing, sneering, having fun. He ate his shepherd’s pie listening to the idle chit-chat around him. The boys were talking about the next day’s game. Chelsea against Moscow Dynamo.
Suddenly Arshad turned to Iskender. ‘Hey, you gonna give me that puddin’?’
Iskender shook his head. ‘Nn . . . not on yo . . . uuur . . . nn . . . neee . . . nelly! Fo . . . forr . . . gett . . . itt.’
The conversation hit a lull as everyone stopped and stared at him. They had never heard him stammer before. Or seen him blush. The moment came and went, and they resumed their banter, but Iskender’s discomfort stayed.
In the classroom he kept his eyes glued to the collar of the student in front of him, unmoving. He remained like that until a crumpled paper landed on his desk. He took it, opened it. It was from Katie.
Maggie, Christine, Hilary. If boy, Tom.
Then came another ball of paper inquiring if he was all right. Iskender scribbled a short message to appease her curiosity and flung it back. Yet as soon as the lesson was over he grabbed his rucksack and walked out, even though he knew he would be in deep trouble for leaving without permission. After rambling around aimlessly for a while, feeling small and conspicuous in his uniform during school hours, he headed to the bus stop.
When the bus arrived, he went down the aisle without paying much attention to his surroundings. The thick, slightly fetid air entered him like a splinter of sadness. People were standing in clusters, although there were plenty of empty seats in the middle. Instantly he understood why. Sitting there all alone, talking to himself, was a tramp, a loony. His face unwashed, unshaven, his eyes raw red, he had taken his boots off and was massaging the soles of his filthy, callused feet as if they were the most precious things in the world. A stench like warm rubbish suffused the air.
On a whim, Iskender lurched towards the man and sat next to him. The tramp gawked at his companion with amusement, as if wondering what was wrong with him. Iskender noticed other people were staring at him too. He didn’t mind. Now that he had started to stammer, he felt a bit mad himself.
When the bus made a lumbering turn, Iskender caught a glimpse of himself in the opposite window, his face pale and hollow. Though he had just turned sixteen he looked older. He remembered a comic book he had read in which a detective regularly ran into his future self. Perhaps that was what he was seeing now – a yet-to-come Iskender.
His thoughts went back to his stammering. He wondered if he had caught some kind of virus. His mother would know what to do; she would prepare herbal teas to soothe his throat and untangle his tongue. If she couldn’t, she would write to Aunt Jamila. Didn’t she always boast that her twin knew the secret language of herbs? Iskender sat back, feeling confident that he would be cured. His love for his mother kindled in his heart. Uncle Tariq was full of nothing but crap. How he wished he could find a time-machine and travel through the years back to his babyhood. Before Yunus. Before Esma. When it was only him and his mother wrapped in untainted love.
This, more or less, was his mood when the bus arrived at London Fields.
‘Looks like somebody’s in a hurry,’ the loony announced in a chirpy tone to everyone in the bus, as if they were his friends.
Iskender felt the need to say something, and since he couldn’t, he nodded in the man’s direction.
‘Tootle-oo! Don’t keep Mummy waitin’.’
Upon hearing this Iskender felt a shiver down his spine. As he marched off into the bright day, the man’s laughter still echoed in his brain. It was three thirty when he reached the house on Lavender Grove and rang the bell.
*
Elias was sitting alone in the living room, partly obscured by the half-closed curtains, when he heard footsteps outside the door.
‘I want to know where you live,’ he had said the week before, aware he was crossing some invisible line.
‘Why?’
‘My dear, you know where I live, my house, my plants, my work, but you are a mystery to me. When you’re at home, away from me, I want to be able to imagine what you’re doing. I need a picture in my mind, that’s all.’
‘A picture?’ she asked, suddenly sounding forlorn.
‘Yes, well, not like a photo. I mean, look, if I could just come and see – a few minutes would be enough. Nothing else. I will come like a cat, leave like a cat. No one will know. Just once. Is that possible?’
Biting at the inside of her mouth, she had murmured, ‘But only five minutes. Then you go.’
That afternoon, when the children were at school, Elias walked into the house on Lavender Grove. As soon as he passed the threshold, he regretted the entire idea. He could see Pembe had not wanted to do this. The only reason she had yielded to the plan was to please him. She was so tense that the slightest sound sent a surge of panic through her. He felt terrible, not only for being there, but also for being in her life, and causing so much distress. He had wanted his love to create wonders, but perhaps it was only producing troubles. In order not to make her any more ill at ease than she already was, Elias kept his coat on, ready to leave at the slightest signal from her.
And yet the house itself was the insight into his beloved’s existence that he so desperately craved. For this dim, tiny place, where Pembe spent so much time all by herself, was the reason why she so resembled the lonely ballerina in a wind-up music box. He saw the lace doilies on the coffee tables, shelves and armchairs; the embroidery she had crocheted, the dried peppers and aubergines she had lined up on a string by the window to make dolma, and her scarlet slippers with pompons. He took in the details, the colours. The entire place was suffused with competing scents: home-made pastries, newly washed clothes, a hint of cinnamon and rosewater. Everything was new to Elias, and yet so much like the life his family had left behind in Lebanon that it brought tears to his eyes.
When he was a boy Elias had spent a summer in Beirut with his grandparents, sauntering by the gently rolling sea, the sand warm and generous. Once, after a storm, he had come across a number of deep-sea creatures that had been washed ashore. It had shocked him to see these peculiar organisms so helplessly out of place. Over the years, as he worked in numerous Western cities and observed the lives of the first generation of immigrants, he would recall this scene. They, too, were cut off from their natural environment. In their new setting, they breathed uneasily, vulnerably, waiting for the ocean to take them back or the beach to swallow their discomfort, help them belong. Elias understood this emotion, for he had always thought of himself as a man who lived on t
he shores of other cultures. Yet in one fundamental way he differed from them. He could survive anywhere, having no attachment to any particular piece of land.
Making his way towards the door, he thanked Pembe for letting him in, and apologized for the anguish he had caused. She seemed both relieved and saddened by his departure. ‘Stay,’ she said in the quietest of voices. ‘Drink tea. Then go.’
‘Are you sure?’
There was a bronze samovar on the table with steam coming out of it in puffs. Her hands shook so badly as she poured a glass that she spilled some of the scalding tea on her crimson blouse.
‘Oh, no,’ Elias exclaimed. ‘Did you burn yourself?’
Trying to keep her blouse away from her skin, she shook her head. ‘It’s okay. You drink here. I go change.’
He complied, waiting. He had barely finished his tea when someone rang the bell, a short ring, followed by another one, long and persistent. Elias felt the sinews on his neck stiffen, and his fingers tighten around the glass.
Dashing out of her bedroom, her white blouse wrongly buttoned, Pembe looked at him, horrified. Her children weren’t due back for another two and a half hours. Her neighbours were working, and didn’t pop in just like that. Elias signalled to her that he would hide, though he had no idea how or where. They exchanged tense whispers. Then he crawled under the dining table, as though in a frightful dream, unable to believe this was really happening.
A second later a key was thrust into the lock. All the colour went from Pembe’s face. Now she knew who it was at the door. Only one person had his own key.
The Cloak of Calmness
London, 1 December 1978
Elias was giving his air plant its monthly shower when he first heard about the murder. Air plants were peculiar beings, the enigma of the plant world. Absorbing moisture through the pores in their leaves, they survived without having any roots to transport nutrients such as water to them. Instead of being rooted in the soil, like all other flora, they latched on to all sorts of objects and grew almost in the air, the nomad-plants that they were. Elias kept his Tillandsia in a large conch shell on the kitchen worktop. When the house became too dry in the summer, he submerged the plant in water every ten days – the bath. But now that it was winter he made do with a bit of spraying every four weeks – the shower.
So immersed was Elias in his work that he did not hear the first knock. His doorbell had not been working properly since the last power-cut, and he had not found time to repair it. In a matter of seconds came another knock, louder. Curious as to who it could be at this early hour, he put the air plant in its place and dried his hands on a towel.
Pembe had come to his flat on four occasions, always timid and hurried, like a bird perching on a tree branch before finding the strength to fly off. Quiet and observant, she had sat on the leather sofa, the cat curling up on her lap. She had watched him work in the open kitchen, listening to him chattering on. Her smile was genuine, as was the discomfort in her eyes.
From the beginning she had struck him as a mass of contradictions. He could see how diffident she was, almost fragile, and yet underneath there was a resilient layer – a thread of courage, tenacious to the point of audacity, weaving in and out. It was all entangled. In her gaze he encountered the starry light he had witnessed in his mother’s eyes as a child and had never seen in anyone else’s again. Yet a permanent melancholy shadowed her, and it was, in part, this inexplicable sorrow that had pulled him towards her.
Since the day they had held hands at the cinema, watching The Kid together for the first time, he had craved to make love to her. He had longed to be intimate with her, away from all eyes, emptied of the rush and the guilt and the fear that she carried with her everywhere. But every time she had visited his flat, a strange sense of restraint had descended over him, a self-control he didn’t know he was capable of exhibiting.
What he really wanted was to solve the riddle that she presented. But, more than that, Elias realized, he wished to make her happy. It sounded altruistic, almost noble, but he was aware that, in its essence, it was a selfish aspiration. He yearned for his love to work like a magic wand, transforming what it touched. If he loved her purely and profoundly enough, he could turn a Cinderella into a princess – beautiful, blissful and incandescent. And it was this desire to re-create her in a lighter, freer mould that both intrigued and thrilled him.
In some ways she was, and acted, like a young maiden. She would hold hands, and allow him to steal kisses, put her head on his chest and rejoice in the warmth of his body against hers, but she never dared go further than that. He had intuited quickly that any attempt to move beyond that line would make her utterly uncomfortable, and induce a huge amount of guilt. She was already feeling mortified: a married woman with three children getting involved in clandestine meetings with an older man. Several times she had confessed to him she would like to get a divorce and so might her husband, but she did not want to upset her children, especially the youngest one, who was still too small. Her physical inaccessibility, far from putting him off, had drawn him even closer. And so, much to his own surprise, he had accepted her as she was.
All too suddenly, sex resembled a dessert kept to the end of a long meal. Delightful and exquisite, no doubt, but not the main course, and not at all impossible to skip when it came to it. They were only at the starters now. Elias didn’t know how long they could go on like this, and he was in no rush to find out. There was something oddly sexy about refraining from sex. He laughed at himself for making such a discovery at his age, precisely when he thought he was too old to discover anything new.
‘God is testing us,’ she said to him once. ‘You think we pass?’
‘I’m not interested in God’s tests. I want to face my own challenges.’
She didn’t like to hear him speak like that. She wanted them both to be hopeful and faithful – traits he had lost long ago, if he had ever possessed them. Ever since he was a young man he had managed without pleading for anything from a higher force, consistently sinful, if sin it was. Still, Elias decided not to talk about his reasons for agnosticism. He didn’t want to break Pembe’s heart – or her God’s.
Nonetheless, deep in his soul, Elias was certain that some day, perhaps not so distant, their fingertips would meet, as if on their own accord and that would be the beginning of a new phase in their lives. They could then look into each other’s eyes, earnest and alive, comfortable in their nakedness. There would be no more qualms. No more shame. Love would be enough, and everything else would follow. She would come to him, free and light. He would help her to raise her children, be present whenever they needed him. He would love and be loved, and the hole in his soul would finally be mended.
Now as he strode down the corridor to answer the door, Elias couldn’t help but wonder if it could be Pembe visiting him. It wasn’t her habit to appear out of the blue, but she could have decided to surprise him. When he unlatched the door, however, he was disappointed to see a stranger there. A teenage girl. Flared jeans, wide-sleeved russet shirt, a creamy silk scarf around her neck. Hair parted in the middle with loose curls on both sides, a broad forehead and a protruding chin.
‘I am looking for Elias,’ the girl said.
‘Yes, how can I help you?’ he answered, his smile cautious.
‘So it was you?’ The question was so unexpected, and sounded so menacing, that he was unable to conceal how it troubled him. She said, ‘My mother . . .’
‘Excuse me?’
The girl raised her head, without quite meeting his gaze, aware that he was scrutinizing her. ‘My mother is dead.’
She turned aside, ready to leave. He grabbed her elbow, a bit too harshly, his panic kicking in.
‘What are you talking about? Who are you?’ he asked, his voice darting unsteadily, and in the same breath he said, ‘Who is your mother?’
Only now did he notice that she’d b
een crying.
‘Don’t you know who I’m talking about?’ she said reproachfully.
He was beginning to. ‘I . . . I don’t understand. But when . . . how?’
‘My brother stabbed her. Because of your affair.’
His eyes grew wide, and all the blood drained from his face. It took another silent beat of his heart before it could receive what his mind had already processed. He let go of her arm, in his need to lean against the wall.
‘You’ve brought us nothing but shame,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’
Elias began to sense how much she had loved her mother and yet also envied, begrudged and possessed her, all at once. But he had no words with which to console her or himself. He opened and shut his mouth, like a goldfish in a bowl.
‘We don’t want to see you around. Don’t come to her funeral and don’t try to involve yourself any further. Just leave us alone. Got it?’
The question was too painful to be left unanswered and he nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he said. Then again, ‘Yes.’
He watched her scurry down the steps, without looking back. A part of him still refused to believe her. The girl must have invented this awful lie in the hope of saving her parents’ marriage. Children did such things all the time. There was nothing to be alarmed about. Everything would be clear in a matter of hours.
Finding an excuse not to go to work, Elias stayed in his flat that afternoon, waiting for Pembe to come round and comfort him. He drank quite a bit, slept poorly and woke up with a taste in his mouth like rust. First thing in the morning he fetched the newspapers. It was there. On the front page. Boy Murdered Mother for Honour. He blinked at the words, seeing and recognizing each one of them but refusing to grasp their meaning as a whole.