by Elif Shafak
Peri listened, her face changing from curiosity to delight.
‘Afterwards we went to Portugal. I liked it there, but not Baba. Still smoking, complaining. Two years in Lisbon, just when I’ve learned enough Portuguese, bam! Pack up, kids, we’re going to England, the Queen’s waiting! I was fourteen for God’s sake. When you’re fourteen, you should be dealing with your own drama, not your family’s. Anyway, the year we arrived Baba died. Doctor said his lungs had turned to coal. Don’t you think it’s kind of bizarre for a physician to use a metaphor – does he think he’s a poet or what?’ Shirin drummed her fingers on the table and examined her manicure. ‘England was Baba’s dream, not mine, and here I am as British as a treacle tart but as out of place as a stuffed date cake!’
‘Where do you see as home?’ said Peri.
‘Home?’ Shirin sucked her teeth in disapproval. ‘I’ll tell you a universal rule: home is where one’s granny is.’
Peri smiled. ‘That’s nice. Where is yours?’
‘Six feet under. She died five years ago. She adored me, her first grandchild. Neighbours said till her last breath she hoped we’d come back. That’s home for me! Buried with Mamani in Tehran. So, technically speaking, I am home-less.’
‘I’m … uhh … sorry,’ said Peri, sensing in her own hesitation an inability to keep up with extroverts, of whom Shirin was clearly one.
‘You know what they call the cemetery over there? Zahra’s Paradise. Pretty cool, eh? All graveyards should be named “paradise”. No need to trouble the Almighty with the Day of Judgement and boiling cauldrons and hair-thin bridges and whatnot. You die, you go to paradise, end of story!’
Peri stood still, charmed and puzzled in equal degree. It seemed to her that her new friend, though of the same age, had lived twice as much as she and seen more of the world than her entire family had in total. Peri had never heard anyone speak like this about the afterlife. Not even her father, who frequently expressed his distaste for all matters of faith.
In a little while Mensur and Selma returned. By now, the couple had finally found something to agree upon: Shirin. For different reasons, yet with equal intensity, the girl had rubbed each of them up the wrong way. Separately, they were both planning to tell their daughter to stay away from the British-Iranian girl. Surely, she would be a bad influence.
About an hour later, having walked in dizzying circles, they finished their tour in front of the Oxford Union. Before parting, Shirin gave Peri a hug as if they were long lost friends. Her perfume was heady and musky, and so overpowering that for a second Peri felt disorientated, her head swimming.
Shirin said that the English, though polite and well mannered, could be too reserved and too cautious for a lonely foreigner in a new country, and Peri would be better off hanging around with other international students or those from a mixed cultural background – like herself.
‘So, I guess I’ll see you around?’ Peri said.
She meant it. For, even as she was slightly intimidated by Shirin’s personality, she could not help but be drawn to her endless chatter, self-assurance and audaciousness. One always yearned for what one lacked.
‘See me around?’ echoed Shirin, as she kissed Selma and Mensur on both cheeks, even though they held themselves rigidly. ‘You bet you will! Forgot to tell you, we’re in the same quad.’
‘Really?’ asked Peri.
‘Yup.’ Shirin beamed from ear to ear. ‘Actually, you’re just opposite me. And if you dare to make noise, I’ll raise hell … just kidding. Turkey and Iran, neighbours, just like on the map. We’ll be great friends. Or great enemies. Maybe we’ll start a war. World War Three! Because you know that’s what’s going to happen, right? There’ll be another fucking war because the Middle East is totally screwed up – oops, excuse my bloody language.’
Then, turning to Peri’s startled parents, and mispronouncing their surname, Shirin announced, ‘Mr and Mrs Nawbawmtlooo, don’t you worry about your daughter. She’s in good hands. From now on, my job will be to keep an eye on her.’
The Silence
Oxford, 2000
After her parents left for the train station, with a sickening sense of loneliness Peri returned to her staircase in the front quad of her college. Thrilling though it was to be free of their quarrels and bickering for once, at least they were familiar to her, and in their absence she was left with an unsettling feeling, as if a carpet had been pulled out from underneath her feet and she was forced to walk on rough terrain. Now that the pride and the excitement of the day had dissipated, she was overcome by a profound disquiet. She realized she was not as ready for the next big stage in her life as she had liked to imagine. Holding herself tense against the wind, so unlike the salty breeze of a late afternoon in Istanbul, she took a breath and slowly let it out. Her nose searched for habitual smells – deep-fried mussels, roasted chestnuts, sesame bagels, grilled sheep intestines blended with the aromas of Judas trees in spring, daphne plants in winter. Like a demented sorceress who had forgotten the formulas of her potions, Istanbul mixed unlikely aromas in the same cauldron: rancid and sweet; stomach-churning and mouth-watering. Here in Oxford, however, the resinous odour hanging in the air seemed unwavering, reliable.
She climbed the dark wooden staircase to her room, where she opened her suitcases, took out her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe, organized her drawers, arranged family photos on the desk. She placed her God-diary beside her bed.
She had brought along a few of her favourite books, some in Turkish, others in English – Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl, Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Oǧuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.
‘Why do you always read Western writers?’ the only boyfriend she had ever had once asked.
She was in school back then, in her final year, and he, three years older, was already at university, studying sociology. The hidden accusation in the question had caught her by surprise. In truth, Peri read both local and world literature. Her tendency was to lose herself in any book that captured her imagination and awakened her curiosity, regardless of the nationality of its author. Yet, compared with her boyfriend, whose shelves displayed Turkish titles – and a few Russian and South American novels, which he said were uncorrupted since they were not written through the distorted lens of cultural imperialism – her reading list was too European.
‘When I look at you, I see a typical Oriental intellectual in the making,’ he had said. ‘In love with Europe, at odds with her roots.’
Why roots were rated so highly compared with branches or leaves, Peri had never understood. Trees had multiple shoots and filaments extending in every direction, under and above the ancient soils of the earth. If even roots refused to stay put, why expect the impossible from human beings?
Even so, besotted with him, Peri had felt a stir of guilt. Although she was a more avid reader than he, it seemed as if she had wasted her time roaming the side streets and back lanes in the City of Books, tempted by its flairs and flavours. She had tried, for a while, not to spend any money on Western titles, but her new resolution had quickly collapsed. A good book was a good book and that was all that mattered. Besides, for the life of her, she could not comprehend the reactionary attitude to reading. In many parts of the world you were what you said and what you did and, also, what you read; in Turkey, as in all countries haunted by questions of identity, you were, primarily, what you rejected. It seemed that the more people went on about an author, the less likely it was that they had read their books.
Eventually, their relationship, undermined less by their diverging taste in literature than their differing attitudes to intimacy, had come to an end. There was a type of boyfriend in the Middle East who became irritated if you rejected his sexual advances; yet, at the same time, the moment you began to respond passionately to his desires, you
lost your value in his eyes. Doomed if you said ‘no’, doomed if you said ‘yes’. Either way, it was a no-win situation.
Once she finished arranging her room, Peri opened the leaded window looking out on to the pristine lawns of the college garden. A sense of emptiness hovered in the air, blurring the outlines of every perceptible shape in the distance. Staring at the shadows of the trees nearby, she shuddered as if a spirit or a jinni, pitying her loneliness, had brushed up against her ever so softly. Could it be the baby in the mist? She did not think so. She had not seen him in a long while. An English ghost, probably. Oxford seemed like a place where ghosts, uninhibited and not necessarily frightening, could move around at will.
The first thing that struck Peri about Oxford was the silence. That was, and would remain for months to come, the one peculiarity she found hard to get used to – the absence of noise. Istanbul was unashamedly boisterous, day and night; even when one pulled down the shutters, drew the curtains, put in earplugs and pulled the blanket up to one’s chin, the din, barely weakened, would penetrate through the walls, seeping into one’s sleep. The last cries of street-hawkers, the rumbling of late-night lorries, the sirens of ambulances, the boats on the Bosphorus, the prayers and the profanities, both of which multiplied after midnight, would hang in the wind, refusing to disperse. Istanbul, just like nature, abhorred a vacuum.
As she sat on her bed, Peri felt a knot in her chest. Her parents’ anxiety seemed to have caught up with her, though for reasons of her own. She felt like an impostor. She feared she might never succeed here, among students who were surely far better educated and more articulate than she. The English she had learned at school, and refined through long nights of reading on her own, might not be enough to keep up with some of the advanced courses in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree. Though she took pains to hide it as best as she could, Peri’s fear of failure was profound. Her throat constricted. She was surprised at how fast her eyes welled up. The tears, when they came, felt warm and familiar and somehow not sad at all.
A knock jolted her back to the moment. Without waiting for an answer, the door was pushed open and Shirin walked in.
‘Hello, neighbour!’
Peri sniffed involuntarily and smiled as she tried to compose herself.
‘Told you to leave your door open.’ Shirin stood in the middle of the room, arms akimbo. ‘Is it a boy?’
‘What?’
‘You’re crying. Did you break up with your boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Good, you should never shed tears over a man. What then? You broke up with a girlfriend?’
‘What? No!’
‘O-kay, easy,’ Shirin said, throwing up her hands in mock apology. ‘I can see you’re as straight as dried spaghetti. I’m more the fresh pasta type.’
Peri’s eyes widened.
‘If those tears are not for a sweetheart, you must be homesick,’ Shirin said with a tilt of her head. ‘Lucky you!’
‘Lucky me?’
‘Yup, if you are homesick, it means you have a home somewhere.’
Shirin planted herself down on the armchair by the desk and produced out of her pocket a bottle of nail varnish – a red so bright that several creatures might have been slaughtered in the making of it. ‘Do you mind?’
Once again without waiting for a reply, she took off her slippers and began to paint her toenails. A pungent chemical smell infused the air.
‘So now that your parents have left, can I ask you a few things?’ Shirin said. ‘You religious?’
‘Me? Not really …’ said Peri painstakingly, as though revealing something it had taken her a while to understand. ‘But I care about God.’
‘Hmm. I need more than that. Like, for instance, do you eat pork?’
‘No!’
‘What about wine, do you drink?’
‘Yeah, sometimes, with my father.’
‘Aha, I thought so. You are a half and half.’
Peri frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
But Shirin was not listening any more. She seemed to be looking for something else in her pockets. Unable to find it, she screwed up her nose, stood and headed to her room across the staircase, wobbling on the bottom of her heels so as not to smudge her freshly painted toenails.
Curious and slightly irritated, Peri followed Shirin into her room, its door wide open. She stopped dead, struck by the mess she saw. Makeup kits, face creams, lace gloves, perfume bottles, half-eaten apples, sweet wrappers, empty crisp bags, crumpled Coke cans, books and pages torn from magazines were scattered around. Some of these pages had been stuck up on the walls, next to a poster of Coldplay and a black-and-white picture of a dark-haired sultry-looking woman that read Forough Farrokhzad. From the other end of the room a huge poster of Nietzsche, with his copious moustache, glared at her. Next to it was what looked like an enlarged, colourful photocopy of a Persian miniature, its frame glittering gold. Underneath it stood Shirin, fumbling inside her backpack.
‘What did you mean by that?’ Peri repeated.
‘Half Muslim, half modern. Can’t stand the sight of pork, but content with wine – or vodka or tequila … you get the drift. Loosey-goosey when it comes to Ramadan, fasts here and there, yet eats on days in between. Won’t abandon religion, for you never know if there’s life after death, better to play it safe. Doesn’t want to let go of freedoms either. A bit of this, a bit of that. The great fusion of the times: Muslimus modernus.’
‘Hey, I feel offended,’ said Peri.
‘Of course you do. A Muslimus modernus always does.’ With that Shirin pulled out from her backpack a pellucid bottle – topcoat for her nails – and exclaimed, ‘Found it!’
Peri glared at Shirin. ‘If I am who you say I am, what about you?’
‘Oh, sister, I’m just a wanderer,’ said Shirin. ‘I don’t belong anywhere.’
As she applied the topcoat to her toenails, Shirin went on to inveigh against bigots and hypocrites and conformists and what she called ignoramuses. Like a river her ideas gushed, words of liquid, seething, splashing, searching. She said people who believed or disbelieved with a sincere passion were equally worthy of respect in her eyes. What she couldn’t tolerate were those who didn’t think. The copycats, she called them.
In the hush that followed, Peri was pulled in two opposite directions. A part of her disliked Shirin’s argumentative swagger. She could sense the girl’s anger, but at what exactly – her motherland, her father, her religion, the mullahs in Iran – she could not be certain. Another part enjoyed listening to Shirin, catching in her soliloquy echoes of her own father’s voice. Either way, this was not the kind of conversation she had expected to find herself engaged in on her first evening away from home. She wanted to chat about the classes, the dons, where to go for coffee, where to get the best sandwiches, the particulars of everyday life in Oxford.
It began to rain; a soft, steady patter filled the room. The sound must have had a soothing effect on Shirin, for when she spoke again, her voice, though still suffused with emotion, was calmer. ‘Sorry to bombard you with my personal crap. It’s up to you what you choose to believe in, none of my business. Don’t know why I got carried away like that.’
‘It’s okay,’ Peri said. ‘I’m just glad my mother isn’t here.’
Shirin laughed – an airy giggle, almost childish.
‘Tell me about the other students,’ said Peri. ‘Are they all very smart?’
‘You think everyone in Oxford is fucking Einstein?’ Shirin snorted on the last word. ‘Look, students are like milkshakes, they come in flavours. There are about six kinds of students around here, I’d say.’
First, there were the social-environmental-justice types. Talkative, serious, peppery, immersed in campaigns like saving rainforests in Borneo or persecuted Buddhist monks in Nepal, Shirin explained. They were easy to identify, with their baggy sweaters, beaded necklaces, bad haircuts, turned-up jeans, purposeful expressions, and ballpoint pens and pads – alw
ays equipped to collect signatures. They organized night-time vigils, and during the day put up flyers everywhere, and got themselves into one heated debate after another. They loved making you feel guilty for not being part of something larger and more meaningful than your petty life.
Second, there were the Eurotrash. They came from wealthy European families who somehow all seemed to know one another; over the holidays they went skiing at the same resorts and came back flaunting their tans and parading their snaps. Practising a sophisticated form of endogamy, they dated only among themselves. At lengthy breakfasts they consumed loaves of bread with wads of butter and still managed to stay slim. They liked to complain that the croissants were stale and the cappuccinos were fake, and they never stopped talking about the weather.
Third, the public school crowd. Selective socializers. They established cliques at warp speed, choosing their friends mostly on the basis of the schools they had been to. With abundant energy and confidence, they launched into a series of extra-curricular activities. They rowed, canoed, fenced, acted; played cricket, golf, tennis, rugby, water polo and did t’ai chi or karate in their spare time. All that action must have left them thirsty, for they gathered in ‘drinking societies’ where they made the most of dressing in black tie and drowning in alcohol, revelling in the exclusion of those who lacked the social background to become members of their clubs. One had to be nominated to join, and any prospective candidate could be blackballed.
Then there were the international students: Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Indonesians, Africans … Most of them fell into two subgroups. Those who, like magnets drawn to each other, cast about for the familiar. They dined, studied, smoked and hung around in clusters where they could speak their mother tongue. And then there were those who did the exact opposite, aiming to distance themselves as far as possible from their compatriots. The latter had the most volatile accents, which changed dramatically in their attempts to sound more British or, at times, American.