by Elif Shafak
Fifth, there were the nerds. Serious, studious, intelligent, inquisitive, worthy of respect but impossible to befriend. In mathematics, physics, philosophy, they sprang up like wild mushrooms, preferring their quiet, shady corners to open sunlight. They studied their subjects with a passion that verged on neurosis. You could spot them even amidst a crowd, walking briskly from the library to their tutorials, eager to discuss issues with dons in the cloisters, but otherwise perfectly content in their solitude; in truth, they were more comfortable in the company of their books than next to their peers in the college bar or the Junior Common Room.
As she kept listening to Shirin, Peri felt an excitement laced with anxiety. She was both ready and afraid to discover this new world into which she needed the strength to walk. ‘How do you know all this?’
Shirin laughed. ‘Because I’ve dated guys – and girls – of each group.’
‘You dated … girls?’
‘Sure. I can love a woman, I can love a man. I don’t give a damn about labels.’
‘Oh,’ Peri said uneasily. ‘Well … uhm, what about the sixth category?’
‘Aha!’ Shirin said, her dark eyes lit with flecks of amber. ‘Those are the ones who arrive here as one thing and then become something else altogether. They thrive. Ugly ducklings transformed into swans; pumpkins into coaches; Cinderellas into heroines. For some students Oxford works like a magic wand, it touches you and ta-da! You change from frog to prince.’
Peri shook her head. ‘How so?’
‘Well, it happens in several ways, but usually it’s thanks to someone … a tutor, probably. Someone who challenges you and makes you see yourself for who you are.’
Something in Shirin’s tone intrigued Peri. ‘Is that your experience?’
‘Yep, you got it! I’m a type six,’ Shirin said. ‘You wouldn’t have recognized me a year ago. I was a ball of anger.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Professor Azur happened!’ said Shirin. ‘He opened my eyes. He taught me to look within. I’m a calmer person today.’
If this was her calmer self, Peri didn’t want to know what the other Shirin might have been like. She asked, ‘Who’s Professor Azur?’
‘You don’t know?’ Shirin smacked her lips as if she had something sweet on her tongue. ‘Azur is a walking legend around here!’
‘What does he teach?’
A smile flashed across Shirin’s face. ‘God.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ said Shirin. ‘He’s a bit like God himself. He’s published nine books, and he’s always on a panel or conference. Quite a celebrity, I must tell you. Last year Time magazine named him among the one hundred most influential people in the world.’
Outside a wind was picking up, slamming a window open and shut somewhere in the building.
‘It was fucking hard to be his student!’ Shirin continued. ‘Hell, he made us read so much! It was insane! All kinds of weird stuff: poetry, philosophy, history. I mean I like these things, don’t get me wrong, why would I be in the humanities if I didn’t like them, huh? But he’d find these texts that no one knew a jot about and ask us to debate them. Still, it was fun. By the time I finished I was not the same person.’
Once Shirin started talking, Peri noticed, she kept going on and on, like a car with bad brakes, unable to slow down, much less stop, unless by an outside force. Now she was saying, ‘You should consider taking his seminar as an option. Well … if Azur allows you to, that is. Hard to convince him. Easier to make a camel jump a ditch.’
Peri smiled. ‘We have the same proverb in Turkey. Why is it so hard to get on to his seminar?’
‘You need to be eligible. That means you need to discuss it with your academic adviser, et cetera. If he approves, you go to Azur. That’s a bit tricky. The man is hard to please. He asks you the weirdest questions.’
‘About?’
‘God … good and evil … science and faith … existence and mortality …’ Shirin frowned, searching for more words. ‘Everything. It’s like an academic audition. I’ve never understood what he’s looking for. In the end, he chooses only a handful.’
‘It seems like you’ve made the cut twice,’ said Peri, feeling something like envy creeping into her throat, for no reason at all.
‘That’s right,’ Shirin said. The pride in her voice was impossible to miss.
A brief silence ensued.
‘I still see him for advice at least once a week,’ Shirin babbled, unable to keep quiet for more than a minute. ‘Actually, I’m a bit potty about him. He’s ridiculously handsome. No, not just handsome. He’s hot!’
Peri sat tight on her chair, not knowing how to respond. On the surface, they both came from Muslim countries, similar cultures. Yet how different from her was this girl, who seemed in every respect perfectly at ease with herself and her sexuality.
‘Wow, it sounds like you have a crush on your professor,’ Peri said. She couldn’t help adding, ‘Isn’t that wrong?’
Shirin tossed back her head and gave out a hoot of laughter. ‘Oh, it’s very, very wrong. Detain me at Her Majesty’s pleasure!’
Embarrassed by her naivety, Peri shrugged. ‘Well … the seminar sounds cool. But I need to focus on other things.’
‘You mean you’re too busy being a mortal,’ Shirin said, fixing her sharp stare on her new friend. ‘God will have to wait.’
Though it was meant to be a joke, Shirin’s remark was so unexpected and forceful, it perturbed Peri. She glanced away towards the window and the slate-grey sky from which the last light was fading. The wind, the rain, the banging of a window shutter, the winter chill in the air, even though it was only the beginning of autumn – she would remember it all for many years to come. It was a defining moment in her life, though she would not understand this until it was gone.
The Pastime
Istanbul, 2016
The hors d’œuvres vanished amidst effusive compliments to the chef. Smoked aubergine purée, Circassian chicken with garlic and walnuts, artichoke with broad beans, stuffed courgette flowers, grilled octopus in lemon butter sauce. When she saw the latter, a shadow passed across Peri’s face. She had long stopped regarding octopus as food and pushed it away with her fork, gently.
Having thrashed out the intrigues of the football world, the guests turned their conversation to the next favourite topic of Istanbul dinners: politics. And the inevitable question asked each time more than three Turks came together was asked inevitably: ‘Where are we heading?’
Peri thought there was something hypocritical about the capitalist class in this part of the world. On the outside they were professedly conservative and for the status quo; inside they seethed with fury and frustration. With little crossover between their public and private personas, the elite – especially the business elite – spent a lifetime looking over their shoulder. Publicly they kept their thoughts to themselves, she could see, refraining from talking politics – unless they had to, in which case they made a few innocuous comments, no more. They sauntered through society with an air of indifference, like customers strolling past shops without apparent interest. When they came across something that bothered them, which happened often, they closed their eyes, plugged their ears, sealed their mouths. Within the walls of their homes, however, the mask of insouciance fell away; and they went through a metamorphosis. Their apathy turned into brazenness, their mumbling into shouts, their discretion into rashness. At private parties, the Istanbul bourgeoisie could hardly rant enough about politics, as if to compensate for their silence outside.
At Oxford, Peri had studied how the bourgeoisie in the West, with its liberal, individualistic values and opposition to feudalism, had played a progressive role in the course of history. Over here the capitalist class was an afterthought, an epilogue to a chronicle yet to be told. In the eyes of Marx, the bourgeoisie had created a world after their own image. Had the Communist Manifesto been written in and about Turkey, that thesis might have been som
ewhat different. Notoriously evasive, the local bourgeoisie had yielded to the culture that surrounded them. Like a pendulum that knew no rest, they oscillated between a self-approving elitism and a self-effacing statism. The State – with a capital S – was the beginning and the end of everything. Like a thundercloud in the sky, the authority of the State loomed over every house in the country, whether a grand villa or a humble shack.
Peri glanced at the faces around the table. The rich, the wannabe-rich and the ultra-rich were all equally insecure. Much of their peace of mind depended on the whim of the State. Even the most powerful worried about losing control, even the most affluent dreaded hardship. You were expected to believe in the State for the same reason you were expected to believe in God: fear. The bourgeoisie, despite its glamour and glitz, resembled a child afraid of its father – the eternal patriarch, the Baba. Amidst uncertainty, unlike their counterparts in Europe, the local bourgeoisie had neither audacity nor autonomy, neither tradition nor memory – squeezed between what they were expected to be and what they wished to be. Not so unlike me, Peri thought to herself.
The mingling smells of candles and spices, like a dense bank of fog, lay above them. The air in the room felt heavier and warmer, in spite of a cool wind blowing through from the terrace, where a few men had stepped out to smoke. That there was tension among some of the guests was not lost on Peri. Politics transformed friends into foes. The opposite was also true: politics united people who otherwise had little in common, making comrades out of adversaries.
In the next quarter of an hour, as the starters were consumed, postures changed, faces hardened, smiles grew serious. With exclamation marks punctuating their assertions, they conversed about the future of Turkey. Since the future of Turkey was tied up with the future of the globe, they also talked about America, Europe, India, Pakistan, China, Israel, Iran. Clearly they mistrusted all, though some more than others. Sinister lobbies and their puppets machinated against Turkey, imperialists manipulated their lackeys, hidden hands that controlled everything from afar. They discussed international relations with the kind of watchfulness they reserved for glue sniffers and dope addicts on the streets, expecting at any moment to be assaulted and mugged.
Peri listened quietly, though deep inside she was seized by a tangle of emotions. She longed to be home, alone under a blanket, reading a novel. A part of her was embarrassed for not knowing how to enjoy the evening, the delicious food, the fine wine; and for not being enough fun, as her daughter often reminded her. The other part, however, wanted to get drunk, go back to the bathroom and smash the fish tank. She still remembered vividly her father’s story – shoals of pitch-black fish nibbling the verses of a poem and the eyes of a poet.
This is how she felt tonight – Istanbul was gnawing at her soul.
The Runner
Oxford, 2000
Being a student at Oxford had two immediate effects on Nazperi Nalbantoğlu. The first was cinematographic. With its ancient quadrangles and tranquil gardens, soaring spires and crenellated battlements, formal dining halls and dignified chapels, Oxford evoked a sense of openness and beauty and purpose, as though every detail were part of a well-designed panorama – a filmic story, in which she, the fresher, starred. A feeling of exhilaration. An expectation that something important was going to happen with her at its centre.
Many mornings, Peri would wake up elated, bursting with energy and ambition, as if there were nothing she could not accomplish as long as she tried hard enough. After graduating, she planned to stay in academia or to find a job at a top international institution. She would make a lot of money and buy her parents a big house by the sea – they would each occupy one floor and never have to quarrel. Determined to make her father proud, she could already see her degree certificate framed, polished and hanging on the wall of their living room, next to the portrait of Atatürk. In the evenings, when Mensur raised a toast to the national hero, he would also salute his daughter’s achievements.
The second effect Oxford had on Peri was the opposite of the first. It was claustrophobic. A particular way of shutting inwards, almost evasion; the place was too much to take in and could be deciphered only piecemeal. On such mornings Peri became withdrawn, trapped inside her head, intimidated by the difficulty of her tutorials or the ways of the dons and the formality they claimed was essential to academic study.
She soon learned it wasn’t cool to own sweatshirts and teddy bears with the name of the university emblazoned all over them; they were only for tourists, though she couldn’t resist getting a mug. When she went home for her brother’s wedding, she planned to take it with her and give it to her mother as a present. Selma would probably display it on her shelf, next to her porcelain horses and books of Islamic prayers.
One morning, the moon still high in the sky, Peri watched from her window a female student – wearing earphones, her cheeks flushed – running through the quad. She herself had tried it a few times back in Istanbul, despite the obstacles the city peppered along her trail. Here it was a privilege, of sorts, not to have to worry about broken pavements, potholes in the roads, sexual harassment, cars that did not slow down – even at pedestrian crossings. The same day, she bought herself a pair of trainers.
After a few trial-and-errors she found her ideal route. She would cross the High Street near Magdalen Bridge, run along Merton Field, through Christ Church Meadow, and back round Addison’s Walk, depending on her stamina. Sometimes the cobbles seemed to roll out beneath her feet and she had the feeling that at the end of one of those quaint little streets she would find a portal to another century. Getting into a rhythm was the hardest part, but once she did she could keep on going for almost an hour. After she had run for a good long while, her hair clinging damply to her neck, her heart galloping to the point of pain, she would feel as though she had entered another space, a threshold between the living and the dead. She was aware that she thought about death far too much for a person so young.
Many went running at Oxford – academics, students, staff. One could easily tell those who enjoyed it for the exercise and those who saw it as a burden, doing it only because they had promised someone – their doctor, their partner – a fitter version of themselves. Peri envied the runners who were clearly better than she was, but mostly she was content with her performance – weekends and weekdays without fail. When she had to work in the mornings, she ran after dusk. If evenings were full, she forced herself out of bed at sunrise. A few times, too sporadically to turn into a habit, she went on late runs to clear her head, the night so silent she could hear nothing but her rasping lungs as she ran full-pelt through the centre of town. Such iron self-discipline, she assured herself, would do her good, not only physically but also emotionally.
Occasionally, when she fell into sync with another runner, she wondered what he or she might be thinking about. Maybe nothing. For Peri, this was the only time she could quiet her anxieties and dispel her fears. Speeding across the meadows, inhaling the moist air, which, at any moment, might turn to rain, she felt a lightness of being that she had never before experienced, as though she – Peri, Nazperi, Rosa – had not saved her worries all these years the way others collected golden wrappers and foreign stamps; she felt like a blithe spirit, as though she had no past and no memory of the past.
The Fisherman
Oxford, 2000
Freshers’ Week, they called it. Before the Michaelmas term began in earnest that October, a cornucopia of social events and fun had been jam-packed into a few days to help fresh-faced undergraduates get to know the university, the town and its surroundings, make new friends – and possible enemies – and shed their nervousness as fast as a gingko tree drops its leaves at the first frost. Barbecues, meetings with tutors, cooking and eating competitions, afternoon teas, dances, karaoke and a fancy-dress party … Clad in her fresher T-shirt, Peri wandered casually around and conversed with students and staff members. The more she talked to people, the more she was convinced that everyone kn
ew what they were doing, everyone but her.
Peri had learned that the university – intent on changing its image as the preserve of a privileged few and creating a diversity of intake and environment – had recently announced a bursary scheme to encourage candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply. She now scanned the faces around her, observing a range of ethnicities and nationalities – but their economic circumstances were harder to discern.
She noticed that underneath the frantic buzz, there was a subtle traffic of glances. One boy in particular seemed interested in her. Tall, firm-jawed with close-cropped blond hair, powerful shoulders and a triumphal posture – from swimming or rowing, she guessed – he smiled at Peri as a gourmet might smile at an exotic dish.
‘Stay away from him,’ a voice spoke into Peri’s ear.
Instantly, Peri turned around. She saw a headscarved girl, her eyebrows bow-shaped and her eyes rimmed with the darkest kohl. She wore a nose stud in the shape of a miniature silver crescent.
‘University Boat Club, extremely popular,’ said the girl. ‘He’s fresher-fishing.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘That guy, he does the same thing every year, apparently. Then he goes around boasting about how many fish he caught in one week. Someone told me he’s trying to break his record from last year.’
‘You mean, the fish are … girls?’
‘Yes, the irony is, some girls have no problem with being treated like stupid glittering fish, all dolled up.’ A teasing note crept into her voice. ‘It’s hard to break our chains when some of us love being shackled.’
Peri’s eyes widened as she tried to picture what a fish in chains might look like.
‘Ask people around here, who needs feminism?’ the girl went on. ‘They’ll say, “Oh, women in Pakistan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, but not Britain, we are so over it! Surely not Oxford, huh?” But the reality is different. Did you know that women students do unusually badly here? There’s a massive gender gap in exam results. A freshwoman in Oxford needs feminism just as much as a peasant mother in rural Egypt! If you are with me, sign our petition.’ She offered a pen and a paper that read ‘Oxford Feminist Squad’ at the top.