by Elif Shafak
A pen in my hand, I scrawl different letters on different days. A few of them seem so-so, but there is so much missing, and most of them are pretty lame. I rip them to pieces, start again, getting nowhere. Every day I scribble something, just as I promised Zeeshan. I meditate a bit too. Officer McLaughlin comes and goes; there is no love lost between us, but we’re not at each other’s throats. Not any more.
Then I compose something that somehow seems less dreadful than the others. And this time I decide to keep it. Zeeshan instructed me to copy my letter on to a blank page each day, until I’ve memorized it, and that is what I do next.
Dear Mother,
I’m not going to send this letter. I’ll bring it myself, inshallah, and give it to you, because it’s easier to write the contents than to say them. This year I had my eyes opened. I had this daft cellmate. Daft in a good way. You would have liked him. His name was Zeeshan. Good bloke, helped me a lot. I understand this better now that he’s gone. Too bad, we always appreciate what we have after we lose it.
If I could be sixteen years old again, I’d never do the things that I did to cause so much pain. To you, my sister, my brother, my poor aunt. I cannot change the past. Not a single moment of it. Zeeshan says I can improve myself now. Even of that I’m not sure. But if you’d accept me into your life again, if you could find it in your heart to forgive me, what a blessing it’d be to once more be your son.
Iskender Toprak
Esma
London, 12 September 1992
Saturday morning. I am preparing breakfast in our newly fitted kitchen. It has cost us an arm and a leg, more than we could afford. But my husband has insisted on getting the latest of everything. It is his present to me on our eighth anniversary. Espresso-coloured units, maple floorboards, a posh American refrigerator, a whole-fruit juicer, no need to chop, so practical. Sleek, serene and practical. That is what it said in the brochure.
I scrape the eggs with a spatula, watching the well-cooked bits at the bottom come to the top, like fragments from the past surfacing into the present. It is not easy to make scrambled eggs when your mind isn’t on the job. You have to have the right timing to achieve a good result, and my timing, I suppose, is never right. I might have a problem with the notion of time in general. I can neither let go of yesterday, nor focus on tomorrow. Of the girl with big ideas and coruscating words not much is left today. When I think of the bright-eyed me, which I do often, I cannot help feeling betrayed, though by no one other than myself.
My daughters are sitting at the table, chirping on about the presenters of Blue Peter, their favourite programme. As usual, they hold opposing views. I listen to them but my brain is a kite. It flutters every which way in the wind.
‘Mum, can you please tell your other daughter to shut up?’ bellows Layla.
‘Uh-hmm, yes,’ I say, taking the pan off the heat. The eggs are not exactly ready yet, but I don’t want them to overcook. Not again.
‘Mum!!!’ Jamila exclaims.
‘Sorry, dear, what did you say?’ I ask, but it is too late. When I turn back I find one of them beaming, triumphant, the other upset.
It is my husband who runs to my rescue. ‘Leave your mum alone. She’s got a lot on her mind today.’
‘Why?’ asks Layla.
‘We’ve talked about this,’ says Nadir amiably. ‘Your uncle is coming to meet us. Your mother hasn’t seen him for a long time.’
‘Oh,’ says Layla, though there is no trace of surprise on her face.
I notice Jamila watching her father intently, a glint of defiance flickering in her eyes, dark and almond, so different from the eyes of the woman for whom she was named. Suddenly she says, ‘Are you two lying to us?’
My hand, dishing up the eggs, stops in mid-air. I listen to the ensuing silence, unable to break it.
Nadir is calm, composed, as always. ‘That’s not a nice word to use when talking to your parents, darling. Or to anyone else.’
‘Sooorry,’ Jamila says in a singsong voice.
‘All right, now tell me what did you mean by that?’
Relishing the attention, Jamila purses her lips playfully. ‘Well . . . I don’t think Uncle Iskender works in Alaska. I think . . .’ She scans the table as if hoping to find a clue in there. ‘He’s a Russian spy.’
‘In your dreams!’ Layla butts in.
‘It’s true. He drops bombs on icebergs.’
‘He does not!’
‘Yes, he does!’
I put a few slices of tomato and a leaf of basil on each plate and carry the dishes to the table, wondering if things would have been easier had my older brother been a spy working for the Russians, testing bombs at the North Pole.
Later, when the girls have gone to get ready for a birthday party, Nadir wraps his arms around me, tilting his head sideways. I look at him squarely, taking him in. The way he squeezes his eyes into a tender squint, the smile lines on his cheeks, the fine wrinkles on his forehead. His hair, thick and bushy, is growing upwards, defying gravity, refusing to cover his ears. There are a few grey streaks at the temples, hinting at his age. He is sixteen years older than me. Exactly the same age difference that was between Elias and my mother. A coincidence, of course, I always remind myself.
I love him and yet it didn’t start out as love. We both knew at the beginning I wasn’t devoted to him in the way he was to me. Deep in my heart I concocted a mixture of feelings for him: respect, fondness, admiration and, especially, gratitude for pulling me out of the sludge in which I was wallowing. You sometimes hear people say that being with their partners has turned them into ‘a better person’. You hear it, and you don’t quite believe it, unless it happens to you.
After the last day of November 1978, our family thawed like a snowman under a scorching sun. Suddenly all that was left of our previous life was a grey pile of slush. What had once seemed solid and steadfast quickly became elusive, undependable. Yunus and I lived with Uncle Tariq and Aunt Meral for a while, and, though they were neither unkind nor ungenerous to us, I hated every second of it. I never forgave them for spreading dirt about my mother in the weeks before the murder, and even as I stayed under their roof, ate their food and wore the clothes they bought for me, they were at the top of the list of people I loathed. At first Father sent us cards, gifts and money from Abu Dhabi, though this became more sporadic over the years, until eventually all contact dried up. My uncle and aunt kept his suicide from us as long as they could. Covering, marring, distorting the truth. And I should know, because here I am doing the same thing to my children now. It’s a family tradition, shrouding the truth in veils, burying it deep within the stagnation of everyday life, so that after a while it cannot be reached, even in your imagination.
My memory of those years is a shifting ground, a quicksand of hurt and despair. Having tumbled into it, I found only anger could pull me out, and so it has been for some time. Early days of Mrs Thatcher, huge changes under way. England fast moving away from all that it had been, a behemoth waking from a sluggish winter dream. My exam marks were high, always. The Department of Education showed a special interest in our case, and both Yunus and I were transferred to a boarding school in Sussex. That helped a bit, the distance. But I held on to my rage without realizing that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was drowning in my resentments. After boarding school I went to Queen Mary College, where I read English. Then I met Nadir.
He is a man of science, a scholar who believes in universal certainties and objective truths. Born in Gaza, raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, he left his motherland for England at the age of nineteen thanks to a relative who generously supported his education. Shortly after the Beatles released Yellow Submarine, Nixon was inaugurated as president and Arafat became the chairman of the PLO, Nadir arrived in Manchester, taciturn and timid but faithful. He then pursued a career that was as far from politics as possible: molecular biology. While the
world spun faster in a whirl of conflict, he retreated into his laboratory, neat, methodical and controllable, to study the morphology of cells.
His kith and kin are still in Gaza. I have met them several times. A large family. Warm, proud, curious, garrulous. I observed my husband amidst his relatives, cynically searching for signs of change in his character, a swing that would bring out the core beneath the veneer of decorum. But Nadir is the same gentle soul everywhere and with everyone. He never acts on a whim or an impulse. He likes to process, to cogitate, a favourite word of his. He is never in a hurry. His motto in life: Still waters run deep. No wonder he and Yunus get along so well.
‘You all right?’ he asks me.
I nod. To be alone. That is all I want right now. To take my coat and walk out the door, leaving everything as it is, untouched, the leftovers on the plates, the crumbs on the tablecloth, the stains on the mugs, the pieces of my past.
‘It’s going to be a long day, is all.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ he says. ‘I’ll pick up the monsters from the party. You ought to spend time with him alone.’
I listen to my husband’s accent. The guttural sounds, Arabic tinges.
‘But that’s exactly what I fear, having time with Iskender.’
Nadir cups my cheeks in his hands, planting a kiss on my lips. ‘Darling, it’s going to be o-kay.’
For a fleeting moment I wish he wasn’t so considerate, so caring. Nadir is the kind of man who, in the face of aggression, physical or verbal, will avoid confrontation at all costs. If anyone does him wrong, as a co-worker at the university once did, he will accept the situation and even hold himself responsible. It suddenly dawns on me that, knowingly or not, I have married the exact opposite of my elder brother.
‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go. My uncle might show up. Or some of his old cronies.’
Nadir arches an eyebrow. He can see it coming back, my bitterness. He seems to be choosing his words carefully. ‘You should go to see him. If he hasn’t changed a bit, if he’s the same man as before, you don’t need him in your life. But you ought to go and be sure.’ Then he pronounces four words that will ring in my ears all day long: ‘He is your brother.’
‘What am I gonna tell the girls when he’s here? Hello, darlings, this is your uncle whom you’ve never met. Why? Well, because he was in prison. Why? Umm, because, you see, he killed your –’
‘You don’t need to explain anything to them. Not yet.’
My eyes water, and when I speak my voice comes out strained. ‘You and Yunus always want things to be simple and easy. But the world is so complicated. Everything is complicated.’
Nadir’s mouth puckers as he dotingly mimics my tone. ‘Forget the world. Make the most of what we yet may spend,/ Before we too into dust descend.’
I laugh, despite myself. ‘Is that Khayyam again?’
‘Omar Khayyam it is.’
This man of tender words and uplifting poems. This man who is honest, dependable and righteous sometimes to the point of a naivety that drives me crazy. This man who believes that honour has got to do with people’s hearts rather than their bedrooms. I try to imagine what he sees in me, how it is that he still loves me. Unable to come up with an answer, I murmur, ‘I’d better go and get ready.’
‘All right, darling.’
Once I thought I was cut out for important things, worthy struggles, life-sized ideals. I would become a writer as well as a human-rights activist. I would travel to different parts of the world to campaign for the oppressed and the abused. J. B. Ono – the renowned author of novels in which no one was ever fooled by love. Once I wished to be the centre of the world, but then I came to accept that I was only one of the many characters in a story, and not even a major character at that.
I wrote for a while, once I finished my A-levels, hard though it is to remember now. At university my results were good, my essays inventive, and there were people who believed in me, but something had changed irreversibly. I had lost faith in myself. Like a plant that looks vibrant in the shop but mysteriously droops after it is brought home, my wish to become a novelist wilted as soon as I was out of my familiar environment.
After that I didn’t write. Other than letters, lots and lots of letters. I wrote to Shrewsbury regularly, and to Yunus, whenever we were apart. I also corresponded with Elias (with whom I got in touch) and with Roxana (who got in touch with me), and they each helped me, in their own way, to find the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And I wrote to my mother, twice a week for the next twelve years.
Then, last summer, after my mother passed away, I started to write down the story of her life. I worked day and night, as if frightened that if I stopped, even for a moment, I would lose the urge, or the urge would lose me, and everything would crumble. The things I described were so personal that some parts hurt, while others latched on to something inside me. Still, shortly after the manuscript was completed I was seized by a sense of estrangement. It wasn’t mine, this story.
The past is a trunk in the loft, crammed with scraps, some valuable, but many entirely useless. Although I’d prefer to keep it closed, the slightest breeze throws it open, and, before I know it, all the contents have flown everywhere. I put them back. One by one. The memories, the bad and the good. Yet the trunk always snaps open again when I least expect it.
The pregnancy was more of an accident than something planned. When I found out, I was shocked, terrified and euphoric, all at once. And upon learning that it was twin girls, I cried for a good hour, feeling, once again, that my life, whatever I chose to do with it, was merely a link in a chain of stories. During those nine months my body was remoulded, as if made of clay. So, I hoped, would be my soul. Now my daughters are seven years old. Layla, with hair like the black satin of the night, and Jamila, named after her late great-aunt, though she doesn’t know why.
Upstairs in my bedroom I hear the phone ring and my husband pick it up. I have a hunch it is Yunus – the boy named after the most reluctant prophet. Lately my younger brother and my husband have been ringing each other daily. A manly camaraderie. I know they are conspiring about me, and my wretched moods. They see me as a time bomb, constantly ticking, ready to explode, and they, always collected and rational, are trying to figure out how to defuse me. I picture myself as a suspicious package on the road, and Yunus and Nadir as bomb-disposal experts, dressed in flameproof suits and helmets, approaching me circumspectly.
‘Darling, Yunus wants to talk to you.’
I pick up the phone, wait for my husband to hang up on his end, and say, as blithely as I can manage, ‘Hi, my dear.’
‘Esma, love. How are you feeling today?’
Why is everyone asking me how I feel? ‘Jolly good,’ I blurt out. ‘How about yourself? How’s the weather over there?’
He ignores my banality and goes to the heart of the matter. ‘Good. When are you going to pick him up?’
In the background I can hear the band rehearsing. The piano, the guitars, the ney. My brother has a concert in Amsterdam tonight. A glitzy cultural event. Prince Claus is expected to attend.
‘I’m leaving in an hour.’
‘Look, umm . . . I know this isn’t easy. I feel terrible letting you down. I wish I could be there.’
‘That’s okay. You’ve got things to do.’
I catch a tinge of tartness in my voice. If Yunus, too, has detected it, he doesn’t let on. ‘You know what I was thinking about this morning: that day when I went to visit him. He was happy to hear she was alive. He was . . . so touched. It’s such a pity he couldn’t have seen her and asked her forgiveness.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Ah, her forgiveness . . .’
‘It could have happened,’ he insists. ‘It would have been nice if he could have kissed her hand, and asked her blessing.’
‘Oh, please, give me a break.’
There is a heavy silence and I’m beginning to suspect that the line has gone dead when I hear Yunus say, ‘I think he’s suffered enough.’
I close my eyes, feeling my blood boil inside my veins. ‘How can you say that? There is no way he has suffered enough. He’s a selfish man who killed our aunt and he’ll die a selfish man.’
‘He was a boy.’
‘He was not a boy! It had nothing to do with his age. Now you were a boy. You didn’t do what he did. It was his personality.’
‘But he was the eldest,’ Yunus says. ‘You were always going on about being treated differently because you were a girl, and I found it tough to be the youngest child. But did you ever consider that maybe it was harder on Iskender?’
‘Yeah, being a sultan can’t have been easy.’
He sighs. ‘Listen, sister, I gotta go. I’d be there if I could. We’ll talk when I get back. We’ll figure this out. Together. Like we have always done. Okay?’
Not quite trusting my voice, I bob my head, as if Yunus can see me. After I hang up I go to the bathroom to wash my face and put on some make-up. I begrudge Yunus for being able to forgive and forget, and I begrudge Iskender for what he has taken from us: a normal childhood. That comforting sense of security, love and continuity you get from your family before you grow up and plunge into the big world with its real miseries. I was fifteen years old when Iskender lost his head. After that, ordinary life as I knew it was shattered and a steady ache made its home in my heart. For my mother it was even worse.
In murdering one, Iskender has killed many.
*
I drive to Shrewsbury, past well-kept lawns and rolling green pastures. Time slows down. My mind drifts back to Yunus. He is becoming pretty famous, my little brother. Nadir tells me his students know his music and love it. I am proud of him. And, at those moments when I’m honest with myself, I am also envious. I wonder if it is another one of God’s games that I, the so-called creative one, have ended up with a middling, domestic life, while Yunus, the calm and composed one, is following his dreams around the world. I suppose it never ends, this sibling rivalry. You compete for your parents’ love, even when they are no longer there.