by Elif Shafak
When I reach Shrewsbury Prison, I wait outside the building, surprised that no one else is around. No Uncle Tariq. No Aunt Meral. No neighbours, friends, relatives. Where are they? Iskender’s old chums haven’t shown up either. Has everyone forgotten about him?
An hour passes. There is a creeping chill in the air, muting all sound, and I feel a bit thirsty. Had I had gone into the building, the officers would, in all likelihood, have offered me some water, if not a cup of tea. I would have asked them what to expect, and perhaps learned a few new things about Iskender. But then he would emerge, and we would have to hug or shake hands in front of everyone. I’d rather wait here, outside.
Finally, the double gates open. Under this light, wearing a pair of jeans and a corduroy jacket, he looks so different from the last time I saw him. He has taken care of himself, seems fit and wiry. His gait has changed. He doesn’t push his shoulders back and crane his head the way he used to do. After taking a few steps forward, he stops and gazes at the cold, overcast sky, just as I imagined he would.
Then he notices me. My face, a blank. He moves slowly, giving me time to go back to the car park, start the engine and leave should I want. When he approaches, I take a step forward, my hands thrust into my pockets.
‘Hello, Esma,’ he says.
Suddenly I am upset with Nadir, and Yunus, and all the spirits in the world for convincing me to come here. But I try to push the dark thoughts away. ‘Hello to you, brother.’ I pronounce the last word with some emphasis.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you.’
‘Oh, I didn’t think I’d come myself.’
‘Well, I’m glad you did,’ he says.
In the car I feel the need to say something to fill the empty space between us. ‘I thought Uncle Tariq would be here.’
‘He was planning to be. I told him not to come.’
I tighten my grip on the wheel. ‘Really? That’s interesting.’
Iskender leans back, doesn’t comment. ‘How are the girls? And Nadir?’
I tell him the girls are acting in a school musical this term. Layla will be a Singing Fish, but we don’t know yet which kind. It will be a haddock probably, though she’d much prefer to be a dolphin. My younger has been given the part of the Fisherman’s Wife, a nasty, greedy character, but quite a central one. So there is a bit of competition going on in the house at the moment. Singing Fish versus Fisherman’s Wife.
I tell him all this without mentioning Jamila’s name, though he knows, of course. ‘They are both excited,’ I conclude.
‘Great kids,’ he says, smiling.
The silence that follows is disconcerting. I put on the ABBA cassette I have brought with me, but somehow dread pressing the play button.
‘Do you want a cigarette?’
Iskender shakes his head. ‘I quit a while ago.’
‘You did?’ I study him out of the corner of my eye. ‘So, if you don’t mind my asking, what will you do now?’
‘I’d like to see my son as soon as possible.’
I don’t mention that Katie phoned me a few days before. She has settled in Brighton. Married to a clairvoyant. A man who reads palms and claims to see the future, though I doubt whether he has prophesied the release from prison of her rather notorious ex-boyfriend. They have three children together. As we chatted on the phone, I couldn’t help but suspect she still cared for my brother, and perhaps even loved him a bit.
As if he has read my mind, Iskender asks softly, ‘How is Katie doing?’
‘Happily married.’
If that hurts, he doesn’t let it show. ‘That’s fantastic. I’m happy for her.’
Does he really mean it?
‘It was kind of you to come to pick me up,’ he says. ‘I won’t be staying long, though. I’ll find a place. And a job. There are Good Samaritans who help people like me. Then . . .’ He pauses. ‘I’d like to go to visit Mum.’
There is anticipation after his words, hovering in the air like steam wafting off Mum’s boreks. I change gear, accelerate and say, thickly, ‘She died.’
He turns a blank stare on me. ‘But . . . but Yunus told me –’
‘I know what he told you. It was the truth.’ I wipe my eye. ‘Six months ago, she passed away.’
‘Alone?’
‘Alone.’
I don’t tell him how it happened. I’ll do that later.
‘I was . . . I was going to ki . . . ss her hand,’ he says, and I detect a slight stutter in his speech. ‘I was hoping she would agree to see me.’
‘I’m sure she would have,’ I say, because it is true. ‘I have her letters with me. You’ll read some of them, you’ll see she always asked about you.’
Iskender drops his head, studying his wrists as if there are still handcuffs around them. He turns to the window and sighs, his breath fogging the glass. He rolls down the window and pops his head out, breathing hard. Then he takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and lets it go into the wind.
‘One more thing,’ I say, when he rolls up the window again. ‘Nadir . . . My husband, he doesn’t know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only Yunus and I. And now you, of course. No one else in the family knew Mum was alive and no one else ever should.’
It was our oath, Yunus’s and mine. When we understood that everyone had confused Aunt Jamila with my mother, we swore on the Qur’an that we would never reveal the truth to anyone. Not to our father. Not to Uncle Tariq. Not to Aunt Meral. Not to Elias. Not even to our spouses if and when we got married. Only the two of us would bear the secret.
‘Then why did you tell me?’
‘It was Yunus’s idea, not mine. He thought it was time for you to know. He hoped that the two of you would meet, reconcile. He wanted you to prepare yourself, I guess.’
We pass by a sleepy village without coming across a single soul. The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the world feels complete and content. At a red light, he turns aside and meets my eye. ‘You live with too many secrets, sister.’
‘Speaking of which,’ I say, opening the glove box, ‘can you take that out?’
Slowly, he fetches the object at which I am pointing. A book. On Alaska.
‘You’ve an hour and a half to learn everything there is to know about Alaska. That’s where I told my daughters you’ve been all this time, working.’
Smiling dolefully, Iskender begins to peruse the book. Snowy mountains, grizzly bears, salmon dancing in cold fresh waters. Suddenly, it doesn’t look like a bad place to be, not bad at all. Alaska.
Dream within a Dream
A Place near the River Euphrates, May 1991
Opening the chest, she took out the prayer rug and stood listening to the sounds of the valley. That was another thing about living there. As long as the wind blew northwards, it would carry the calls to prayer from the mosque in the village far below; but when the wind changed direction she was no longer able to figure out what time it was. The clock she had brought with her from London had stopped working and was waiting in a corner, like an ancient, withered face too tired to talk. But she needed to know the hour to pray, for she had so much to tell God.
Perhaps it was her age that was making her more observant, though she was far from being old, only in her mid forties. Or perhaps it was simply because there were too many ghosts in her life now, too many to grieve for. Every day she asked God to help her twin find peace in heaven, as that surely was where Jamila would have gone. Somewhere in that prayer she included Hediye, the mother-sister whom she remembered not as the mass of swollen, purple flesh hanging from the ceiling but as the jovial young girl she once had been. She also prayed for her husband, contemplating all that they had, and had not, given to each other. Then she prayed for her long-deceased parents. If she still had any energy left, she mentioned the three village centenarians who had recently
breathed their last, one after the other.
Once she had paid her respects to the dead, she moved on to the living. She started with her granddaughters in rainy London, whom she knew from pictures only. She asked for guidance for my headstrong daughter and that caring husband of hers. This was followed by an elaborate prayer for Yunus (and sometimes for his band), that he might excel and soar high without being seduced by the trinkets of fame. Next she took a minute to pray for Elias, that he might be well, healthy and content, and find a person to love, if he hadn’t already. Then came the longest prayer of all, for Iskender. Her sultan, her lion, the apple of her eye.
There were times when she wondered if she had done the right thing by coming back. But the serenity that wrapped around her like a shawl every morning at dawn was confirmation enough. Living such a solitary life could be only a short step to insanity. She tried to keep herself balanced by expressing thanks to God for everything He had both given and denied her. It was harder to go mad when you were thankful.
The early days in England now seemed as distant to her as a dream within a dream. The first time she took a big red bus, the children still little by her side and Yunus yet to be born. She would never forget the excitement of seeing the Queen’s palace through the steamed-up windows and the Queen’s soldiers, sober and serious on high horses. A sense of loneliness had washed over her upon arriving in Hackney, with its rain-soaked streets, adjoining brick houses and thimble-sized gardens. The house her husband had found was shabby and in need of paint, but she didn’t mind, being used to making a home in small spaces. What she couldn’t adjust to, however, was the weather. The rain. The gloom. The clouds always a tint of some obscure colour. Growing up by the Euphrates had inured her to harsh winters and harsher summers, but she didn’t adapt easily to waking up to a permanently overcast sky. Yet she loved going to the market on Ridley Road, watching the people rummaging for bargains, the street buzzing with purposeful activity, like a beehive. It was nothing like the bazaars in Istanbul, though it was throbbing with life, and that she cherished. One could come across so many different people with skins of all shades of brown, white and black, from places that were, to her, only names on a blurry map.
It wasn’t things such as the traffic coming at her from the left or the drivers sitting on the opposite side of the car that startled her so much as the way Londoners carried themselves. The starchiness of old ladies, the brazenness of the youth, the freedom of housewives, the kind of confidence she never had and never thought she would obtain. She would watch the women in their T-shirts with their nipples showing, their hair iridescent in the sun, and marvel at how they wore their femininity like a gown. Couples kissing on the streets, smoking, drinking, debating. Never had she seen people so keen to lead their lives out in public. The villagers of her childhood had not been the most loquacious types, and she herself had always retained a reticent nature. To her, England was a nation of words, and she tried hard to crack the hidden meanings, the in-jokes, the irony.
But it was the birds that amazed her the most in big cities – confined to gaps and holes, mostly invisible, except when they were crowding and jostling against one another for a handful of grain or when they dropped dead on the pavements. The birds of the Euphrates were not like that. Perhaps there weren’t very many species, surely not as many as in the London Zoo, but they were free – and welcomed.
In London she would be dismayed to see windowsills with prickly needles cemented on to them, like a porcupine’s bristles, to prevent the birds from perching and soiling the place. It reminded her of the garden walls with embedded shards of glass that she had observed in Istanbul. It was to keep the thieves away, she was told. Even the thought of it had made her cringe. Whoever lived in those houses did not only want to stop trespassers but also wished them to cut their bare hands or feet. Windowsills with needles, garden walls with glass – she didn’t like either of them. Or what the city life did to people, bit by bit.
*
After the murder, Pembe stayed in the squat for several months. Yunus and Esma took turns visiting her, always watchful, always on guard not to breathe a word to their uncle and aunt. By then Iskender had been arrested and put in gaol, but Pembe was still confused as to whether to come forward or not. Initially, she had feared the squatters would find out why she was in hiding, but the fact that they barely read the newspapers, let alone listened to local gossip, worked in her favour. Not that they didn’t sense trouble, but they imagined that it related to the Home Office. Being against all sorts of authority, they were happy to shield her, even after they discovered the real reason for her stay. Yunus asked them to help his mother change her appearance and they jumped at the opportunity. They cut Pembe’s hair and dyed it a soft ginger colour, like an Irish lassie’s. With a pair of big, round glasses and wearing jeans, she was unrecognizable.
Nonetheless, try as she might, Pembe would not have made it through the darkness of those days had it not been for the help of her twin. One midnight in the squat, as she was sitting by the window, staring into an emptiness only she could see, she noticed a form in the garden, listless but wakeful at the same time. It was her sister. Jamila neither approached nor shared a word, but the sight of her was enough to send a bolt of tremendous joy through Pembe. The moment was swiftly curtailed: the apparition dissolved in the air like a drop of milk in water. But the experience somehow assured Pembe that her twin was not in pain and the place she had migrated to was not unbearable. After that day, the same ghost would from time to time appear, commuting between Pembe and Iskender in prison.
Shortly before Yunus and Esma began boarding school in Sussex, Pembe decided to leave. She had realized, with a deeper surge of understanding, that she had completed her time in England and had to go back. To the Euphrates, to the place where she was born, for, unlike Elias, she was no air plant and needed to embrace her roots. Yunus and Esma supported the plan, provided that they could pay visits in the summer.
They still had the Amber Concubine, which Jamila had brought with her in the hollowed-out heel of her shoe and which she asked her sister to keep safe for her. None of them had the foggiest idea about its worth or how to sell it. In the end it was Mrs Powell who came to their rescue, with the Captain, much to the disquiet of Yunus. The diamond was sold, while Mrs Powell helped to arrange Pembe’s trip. She also made sure that some money was put aside in a bank for Yunus and Esma. With the rest of the money the punks threw parties so wild that they would be the talk of Hackney for months to come. The only detail that escaped Pembe, when the deal was done in Hatton Garden, was that the diamond could be given or taken as a gift, but never put up for sale. She hadn’t been informed about the curse, but, even if she had been, she would still have gone ahead with the plan. Pembe, the woman with endless superstitions, was tired of her fears.
When Pembe went to her sister’s hut in the valley, she wasn’t overly dismayed by the wreck she found. The passage of time, the four winds, the bandits and general neglect had partly ruined the peaceful hideaway that Jamila had created.
The peasants were thrilled to have the Virgin Midwife back, though they would never understand why she refused to attend births. But they helped her to clean and to fix her hut. The region had become a dangerous place, however. There were Kurdish insurgents fighting against the government and soldiers patrolling day and night. In the middle of all this Pembe remained, replacing her twin. There were times when she dodged danger, but she never mentioned this in her letters. She wrote only about good things.
She had promised her children the move would be temporary, that she would stay a while and then return, a new woman, but once she walked into her sister’s house and started putting things in order, Pembe knew she wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry.
Esma
They say you begin to understand your mum when you become a mother yourself, but for me it was Pembe’s letters that helped me to get to know her better.
She wrote to me regularly, openly, telling me more about herself than she ever had to my face. Getting a blue airmail envelope from her became indispensable to me, a cherished weekly routine. I would make myself tea, sit at the kitchen table and read, once, then many times, knowing that she was well and thriving.
My dear daughter, the light of my life, in this world and the next,
I think about you all the time. Please don’t stop visiting your brother. Forgive, Esma. Try. I know how hard it is, but you must. Make sure he understands he’s not alone. We are never alone. I pray to Allah that He sends him a companion, someone who has compassion for his fellow human beings and knows how ignorant they are but still loves them anyway. I pray every day that He finds this person and sends him to prison to accompany Iskender.
Don’t frown, my love. Don’t say that I am being biased towards him even now. Can you choose one finger over the other? That’s how it is for a mother. You cannot favour among your children. Iskender, Yunus and you are equally and so dear to me.
These days it is harder than before to send out post. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for some time. I had a most peaceful dream yesterday. I was here and there in Queen’s London at the same time. It was raining, except it was a strange rain of colours so vivid it was like watching fireworks without any fire. I woke up and thought, but it is true. I am there with you. Always.
Your loving mother, Pembe
It was the last letter I received from her: the one I have read so many times that the paper is slightly tattered around the edges, and carries fingerprints all over it, mine on top of hers, like storylines that intersect and diverge.