Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

  Tired and famished, they spotted a pub on Alfred Street, a place with low ceilings, creaking wooden floorboards and clamorous customers. Timidly, they settled at a snug table by the window. Everyone was drinking beer in glasses fit for the hands of giants. When the waitress, a girl with a piercing in her bottom lip, arrived, Mensur ordered fish and chips for each and a bottle of white wine.

  ‘Imagine, this place goes back centuries …’ said Mensur. He stared at the oak panelling as if it contained a code he might decipher if he tried hard and long enough.

  Selma nodded – notwithstanding, she had noticed other things when she looked around: students guzzling beer in a corner, a woman in a skimpy dress that might as well have been a camisole, a tattooed man fondling his girlfriend, whose cleavage was deeper than the rift between Selma and her husband … How would she be able to leave Peri all alone amidst these people? Westerners might be advanced in science and education and technology, but what about their morals? It irked her that she had to keep her thoughts to herself, lest she annoyed her husband and daughter. Her mouth was turned down, a sign of the caustic remarks that she held back. It was unfair to have to be the principled one, the boring parent all the time.

  Unaware of his wife’s concerns, but not entirely naive about her views, Mensur said, ‘We are proud of you, Pericim.’

  It was the second time Peri was hearing this from her father and she enjoyed it as much as the first time. With their modest resources, he had invested well beyond their means in her education. She was determined not to fail him.

  ‘We must toast,’ Mensur declared as their wine arrived. ‘To our brilliant daughter!’

  Selma’s face closed. ‘You know Allah prevents me from joining you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mensur said. ‘I’ll be the sinner. When I die, send me a pass from heaven.’

  ‘If only it were that simple,’ said Selma. ‘You’ll have to work your way up in Allah’s eyes.’

  Mensur chewed the inside of his mouth for a moment. Listening to his wife preach her smartly arranged words had the same effect on him as seeing a row of neatly standing dominoes. He couldn’t suppress the urge to tip one over. ‘You speak as if you know first-hand what Allah thinks. Did you enter His mind? How do you know what He sees?’

  ‘Because He tells us in the Quran, if you only cared to read,’ Selma said.

  ‘Oh, please, can’t you two manage not to quarrel for a day?’ Peri pleaded. To change the subject and ease the tension, she added, ‘So I’ll be back in Istanbul soon for the wedding.’

  Hakan was about to get married. Even though Umut – who had retreated to a town by the Mediterranean after being released from prison – was still unmarried, Hakan had refused to wait his turn, defying the family order. At first, everyone had suspected that behind his impatience there might be an embarrassing explanation, a bump too obvious for the bride to hide, but it had then become clear that the only reason for the rush was the groom-to-be’s personality.

  They finished the rest of their lunch, mostly in silence.

  As they waited for the bill, Selma took her daughter’s hand and said, ‘Stay away from those who are no good.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Mother.’

  ‘Education is important, but there’s something far more important for a girl, you understand? If you lose that, no diploma will redeem you. Boys have nothing to lose. Girls need to be extra careful.’

  ‘Right …’ Peri said, as she averted her gaze.

  Virginity, that shibboleth that could only be alluded to and not spelled out. It loomed large in many a conversation between mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces. A subject to be tiptoed around, like a moody sleeper in the middle of the room no one dared to disturb.

  ‘I trust my daughter,’ chimed in Mensur, who had ended up drinking most of the wine on his own and now sounded just a bit tipsy.

  ‘I do too,’ Selma said. ‘It’s the others I don’t.’

  ‘That’s a stupid thing to say,’ Mensur said. ‘If you trust her, why care so much about other people?’

  Selma’s lips puckered into a grimace. ‘A man who drinks himself to death every day can’t call anyone but himself stupid.’

  Listening to her parents cross swords again, their battles never won, the tally never settled, all Peri could do was stare out of the window into the heart of the town that was to become, at least for the next three years, her university, her sanctuary, her home. Apprehension churned in her stomach. Dark thoughts circled in her mind. She recalled the expensive saffron – not the fake spice but the real deal – sold inside delicate glass tubes in Istanbul’s bazaars. Such was her optimism – limited, confined, perishable.

  The Map

  Oxford, 2000

  ‘Hello!’ a voice called out from behind them, seconds after they had reached the front lodge of her college, where a second-year student appointed to show them around was waiting.

  Turning back they saw a tall, young woman with the bearing of the Sultana she might have been in another time, another land. She wore a skirt as pink as the rosewater meringue Peri had treasured as a child. Her black hair fell in loose curls down her back, which she held perfectly straight. She had painted her lips a glossy carmine and rouged her cheeks. But it was her eyes, dark and set wide apart, outlined with a purple pencil and shaded with the brightest turquoise, that were the most striking. Her makeup was like the flag of an unstable country, declaring not only its independence but also its unpredictability.

  ‘Welcome to Oxford,’ she said with a grin, as she extended a manicured hand. ‘My name is Shirin.’ She pronounced it with as many vowels as she could possibly pack in: Shee-reen.

  Although with her large, arched nose and her noticeable chin she was not, in any conventional sense, pretty, she had such a powerful aura that she could be perceived as beautiful. So taken was Peri by her appearance that she smiled broadly as she stepped forward towards the girl.

  ‘Hi, I’m Peri – and these are my parents.’ She thought to herself, We’ll pretend to be a normal family for a day.

  ‘Wonderful to meet you all. I hear you’re Turkish. I was born in Tehran, but I’ve never been back,’ Shirin said with a casual wave of her hand, as if Iran were just around the corner, waiting. ‘I guess that’s why they asked me to show you round. They like to lump us all together. Are you ready for a tour?’

  Peri and Mensur nodded enthusiastically. Selma looked disapprovingly at the girl’s short skirt, high heels, heavy makeup. To her eyes, Shirin didn’t look like a student. And she surely didn’t look Iranian.

  ‘What kind of a student is she?’ Selma murmured in Turkish.

  Peri, seized by an irrational concern that the British-Iranian girl might actually understand Turkish, hissed back, ‘Mother, please.’

  ‘Let’s go!’ Shirin exclaimed. ‘Normally, we’d start with our own college and then see the rest of the town. But I never do anything in the right order. It’s against my nature. So follow me, folks!’

  Thus saying, Shirin launched into a long discourse on the history of Oxford. As she chattered, she guided them deeper into the crooked lanes of the old city. Lively and good-humoured, she talked so fast that her words gushed out in a wild torrent, which the Nalbantoğlus found hard to catch – especially Selma, who saw no resemblance between the old-fashioned grammar-based English she had learned years ago in school – and forgotten with the speed of lightning afterwards – and the gibberish that she heard right now. To help her out, Peri assumed the role of translator – if rather loosely. She softened, rephrased and, where need be, censured anything that might irritate her mother.

  Meanwhile, Shirin explained that all the colleges in Oxford were autonomous, self-governing foundations that controlled their own affairs – a fact Mensur found confusing. ‘But there has to be President, authority above everything,’ he objected in his broken English, and glanced around, as though he feared the town might descend into anarchy.

  ‘I have to disagree,’ Shirin said.
‘In my experience, authority is like garlic: the more you use it, the heavier the smell.’

  Mensur, who had spent most of his adult life longing for a central authority, strong and solid and secular enough to stop the rise of religious fundamentalism, looked up in alarm. Authority for him was a binder – the mortar that held the pieces of a society together in perfect order. Without that, the bricks would fall down, the structure would come apart.

  ‘Surely not all authority bad,’ Mensur insisted. ‘What about women’s rights, what do you say when a strong leader defends women?’

  ‘Well, I’d say, thank you very much, I can defend my own rights just fine. We don’t need a higher authority to do that for us!’

  As she said these words, Shirin glanced at Selma, taking in her headscarf and long, shapeless coat. Peri, ever sensitive to other people’s negativity, realized that her mother’s dislike of Shirin was mutual. The British-Iranian girl seemed to harbour a disdain for women who covered their heads – a disdain she felt no need to hide.

  ‘Come, Mother.’ Peri gently pulled Selma by the arm – the one with the burn scar, a souvenir from a carpet-washing day years before. The two of them fell behind.

  On the steps up to the entrance of the Ashmolean Museum, mother and daughter spotted a couple kissing passionately. Peri blushed as if she herself had been caught in the boy’s arms. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Selma scowl. This was the same woman who had taught her absolutely nothing about sex. She still remembered when, as a child one day in the hamam, she had asked about the thing she saw dangling in between a boy’s legs. Selma’s response had been to storm off towards the boy’s mother and launch a tirade that did not quite carry over the noise of the running water from the marble fountains, but, judging by her gestures, must have been harsh. Peri had felt mortified, and guilty too, for being curious about something she clearly had no right to be curious about.

  Over time curiosity had yet again got the better of her. She once asked her mother if she had ever considered having an abortion, given the long interval in years between Selma’s first pregnancies and her very last. Her parents might have considered that their family was already complete and chosen not to have her.

  ‘Well, it was embarrassing. I was forty-four when you came along,’ Selma had said.

  ‘Why didn’t you terminate it?’ Peri had pushed.

  ‘It was illegal back then. Although there would have been ways. But of course it would have been a sin, surely. I said to myself, sin in the eyes of Allah is worse than shame in the eyes of neighbours, so I carried on.’

  Peri had never told her mother how she loathed this reply. She had expected her to say something gentler. I never thought of ending the pregnancy; I already loved you so much or I had arranged to see a woman who would help, but the night before I saw you in my dream, a little girl with green eyes … But, as things stood, Peri concluded she was a sandwich baby born between Sin and Shame: two layers of doom.

  Together they visited the college where Peri would be in residence. Her accommodation was in a front quad, a magnificent Grade I-listed building that, to the Nalbantoğlus’ eyes, looked less like a dormitory than a museum. As impressed as Peri was with the high ceilings, oak panelling and the timelessness of tradition, she was also silently disappointed by the size and simplicity of her room. A sink, a wardrobe, a bureau, a bed, a desk, an armchair and a cupboard. That was it – a surprising contrast with the spectacular exterior – but then there was the exhilarating freedom of living alone for the first time.

  As they went down the narrow staircase, moving aside for other students to pass, Shirin turned and winked at Peri. ‘If you want to make friends fast, leave your door open. That way, people will pop in and say “Hello”. A closed door means, “Back off, I don’t want to be disturbed.” ’

  ‘Really?’ Peri whispered, not wanting her parents to catch any of this. ‘But how can I study with interruptions?’

  Shirin chuckled as if the mention of studying were the funniest thing she had heard that day.

  During the rest of the afternoon, Shirin showed the Nalbantoğlus the circular Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Museum of the History of Science with its early scientific instruments. Their next stop was the Bodleian Library. Shirin explained that ‘the Bod’, as students and dons called it, had over a hundred miles of underground shelves. At one time you had to take an oath not to steal the books. In some college libraries there were still chained books, as in medieval times.

  Mensur pointed at an inscription on the coat of arms on the wall. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Dominus illuminatio mea, “The Lord is my Light”,’ said Shirin, pointing her eyes to the skies, either inadvertently or mockingly, it was hard to tell.

  Recognizing the gesture more than the words, Selma elbowed her husband in the ribs. ‘See, if a Turkish university had a similar sign on its wall about Allah, you’d be riled. You’d regard it as a retreat for fanatics! A terror camp for suicide bombers! But here you have no problem with religious inscriptions!’

  ‘That’s because in Europe religion has a different nature,’ said Mensur dismissively.

  ‘How so?’ said Selma. ‘Religion is religion.’

  ‘Not true. Some are more … religious,’ said Mensur, sounding, even to his own ears, like a surly child. ‘Look, in Europe religion doesn’t try to dominate everything and everyone. Science is free!’

  ‘Science bloomed in al-Andalus,’ said Selma. ‘Üzümbaz Efendi explained it to us, Allah bless his soul. Who do you think invented algebra? Or the windmill? Or the toothbrush? Coffee? Vaccination? Shampoo? Muslims! When Europeans were barely washing themselves, we had gorgeous hamams scented with rosewater. We are the ones who taught hygiene to Westerners, now they are selling it back to us.’

  ‘Who cares who invented what a thousand years ago?’ said Mensur. ‘Ask yourself, woman, who has made the most of science!’

  ‘Dad, Mum, enough,’ muttered Peri, mortified that a stranger was witnessing her parents’ confrontation.

  Shirin, whether because she had picked up the tension and wanted to fan the flames a little, or out of sheer coincidence, went on to explain that many of the oldest colleges in Oxford had evolved from Christian monastic foundations. Peri translated none of this into Turkish for her mother.

  As they climbed the stairs in the Bodleian Library, Peri stopped to read the names of the patrons inscribed on a brass board. Since time immemorial, without interruption, the wealthy and the mighty had supported this magnificent collection. It saddened her to think that had this library been built in Istanbul, say around the same period, it would have been razed to the ground, probably more than once, and rebuilt on each occasion with a different architectural style and a new name depending on the dominant ideology of the times – until one day, it would have been converted to military barracks and then, most probably, to a shopping centre. She heaved a sigh.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Shirin, standing right beside her.

  ‘Yeah, I just wish we had such lovely libraries in Turkey,’ said Peri.

  ‘Keep wishing, sister. Europe has been printing books since the Middle Ages. I don’t know when exactly the Middle East started doing it, but I know, for a fact, we are all doomed – I mean, Iran, Turkey, Egypt. Okay, I get it, rich cultures, lovely music, good food. But books are knowledge, knowledge is power, right? How can the gap ever be closed?’

  ‘Two hundred and eighty-seven years,’ Peri said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Peri said. ‘Gutenberg’s press dates from around 1440. A few Arabic books were published in Italy in the 1500s. But it was with Müteferrika in the Ottoman Empire that Muslims started printing – under heavy censorship, of course. Anyway, that adds up to a difference of about two hundred and eighty-seven years.’

  ‘You’re a weird one,’ said Shirin. ‘You’ll definitely survive at Oxford.’

  ‘You think so?’ Peri smiled.

  Feeli
ng thirsty, they stopped for coffee in the Covered Market nearby. While Peri and Shirin looked for a table, Mensur and Selma went in search of lavatories, walking apart from each other.

  ‘Speaking of gaps, there seems to be quite a large one between your parents,’ said Shirin suddenly. ‘Your father’s kind of leftist, right? And your mum –’

  ‘I wouldn’t call him a leftist, but yes, he’s a secularist … Kemalist, if you know anything about Turkey. And Mum is –’ Just like Shirin, she, too, left the sentence hanging in the air. Slowly, Peri picked an invisible piece of lint off her sleeve and rolled it between her fingers. She had never met anyone so blunt and intrusive, but she wasn’t half as offended as she felt she ought to be. Still, she changed the subject. ‘So you were born in Tehran?’

  ‘Yes, the oldest of four girls. Poor Baba! He desperately wanted a boy, but Sheitan sneaked into his bed. Baba smoked like a chimney, ate like a bird. It’s killing me – that’s what he used to say. He meant the regime, not us. Finally, he found a way out. Madarjan didn’t want to leave but, out of love, she agreed. We were spirited to Switzerland. Have you ever been there?’

  ‘No, this is the first time I’ve left Istanbul,’ said Peri.

  ‘Well, Switzerland’s nice, far too nice, bathing-in-melted-caramel-nice, if you know what I mean. Four years of my life in sleepy Sion. Believe it or not, I once overheard a girl complain to her father that the supermarket didn’t stock her favourite variety of berries! I mean, hello, the world is boiling, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and you’re talking about berries? Though I was a child, even I could feel something exciting was in the air. I love it when walls come down. Okay, life was good in Switzerland, but a bit too slow for my taste. Ever since then I’ve been rushing to make up for lost time.’