Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

  Mona said, ‘I think I’d better leave.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Peri said.

  Not that she was bothered by the alcohol or the suggestive behaviour in the way Mona seemed to be. Peri’s discomfort was of a different nature. When confronted with others’ exuberance and unable to keep up, she always shrank, a hedgehog rolling herself into a ball – self-protection from joy.

  When Peri and Mona left the pub, unnoticed, it was full moon. Passing under the Bridge of Sighs, they wound their way through the dimly lit side streets.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Mona. ‘Why did Shirin invite me?’

  Peri had been wondering the same thing herself. ‘Well, she likes to make new friends.’

  Mona shook her head. ‘No, there’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. We’ve known each other for some time but I’ve always had the feeling she doesn’t like me because of … my headscarf, probably.’

  Remembering how Shirin had stared at her mother, Peri fell quiet.

  ‘If that’s the case, fine, I don’t care. But why does she try to befriend me?’ Mona said, her face fierce with pride. ‘Do you think I’m being paranoid?’

  ‘No,’ Peri said. ‘I mean, yes, a bit. I’m sure you can be friends.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ Mona said. ‘Shirin always tells me I should take Professor Azur’s seminar.’

  ‘Really?’ Peri tensed as if her body had sensed a danger her mind was yet to grasp. ‘She does the same thing to me. Go to Azur, she says.’

  ‘So I’m not the only one …’ Mona said distractedly. She pointed towards Turl Street. ‘Anyway, I’m this way.’

  ‘Okay, well, have a good night.’

  ‘You, too, sister,’ said Mona. ‘We must meet more often.’

  With that she gripped Peri’s hand firmly in both her own, shook it vigorously and disappeared into the night.

  Alone again with her thoughts, Peri turned on to Broad Street. Ahead in the dark she noticed a figure illuminated by the sodium-yellow street lights: a bag lady pushing a rusty pram, piled with clothes, cardboard, plastic bags – a perennial traveller from here to nowhere. Peri scrutinized her. Her clothes were soiled and clung damply to her body; her hair was matted with dirt and what looked like dried blood. Little by little, Peri could pick out more details: calluses on her palms, a bruise that discoloured her right cheekbone, puffiness around the eyes. In Istanbul one spotted down-and-out faces all the time. Some huddled in corners to hide from strangers’ eyes; most begged for attention, food and money. In Oxford there were vagrants too, just not as many as in Istanbul, but somehow, seeing a homeless person was disconcerting, because of the stark contrast with the exquisite serenity of the town.

  Feeling oddly drawn to the woman, who moved with short, deliberate steps, Peri began to follow her. A foetid smell entered her nostrils when the wind momentarily changed direction. A mixture of urine, sweat and excrement.

  The bag lady was talking to herself, her voice strained. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, dammit?’ she asked. Her face hardened as she waited for an answer. She chuckled with glee but her rage was quick to rise. ‘No, you fucker!’

  Peri felt a heaviness of heart so sharp it verged on melancholy. What separated her – an Oxford student with a promising future – from this woman who had nothing to her name? Was there an edge over which polite society feared to fall – like the brink of the flat world that had once filled ancient sailors with dread? If so, where was the boundary between sanity and madness? She recalled what the hodja had said when she and her mother had visited him. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she was prone to darkness.

  The woman stopped and turned around, her gaze cutting through Peri. ‘Were you looking for me, darling?’ she cackled, revealing a set of nicotine-stained teeth. ‘Or were you looking for God?’

  Peri paled. She shook her head, unable to answer. Stepping forward, she opened her fist to offer the coins she had prepared. The woman’s hand extended from her coat-sleeve and grabbed them as deftly as a lizard’s tongue taking an insect off a leaf.

  Peri instantly swung round, setting off towards her college, almost running, scared without knowing why, hoping that each step would take her further from the bag lady and the creeping suspicion that the two of them belonged in the same place.

  That night Peri stayed up late, reading. Had she kept an eye on the lawn outside, she might have seen Shirin, having misplaced her late key, slip off her wedge heels, get a leg up from an equally inebriated friend over the twelve-foot-high stone garden wall – split and stain her tight white jeans in the process – drop into a flower bed, scramble to her feet and knock on a random window of a ground-floor room, all the while giggling and singing a lilting Persian melody.

  The Dictionary

  Oxford, 2000

  Oxford had no shortage of pubs and eating places suitable for a student budget, yet Peri seldom crossed the threshold of any of them. And, while there were more than a hundred clubs and societies she could have joined, she shied away from every single one, including the Feminist Squad. She had to stay on course, she reminded herself; anything else would take her mind off her studies. This included boys. Falling in love was messy; falling out of love was even messier. All the emotions and the back and forth; the lunches, suppers and walks; then the quarrels over petty issues and the reconciliations. In short, placing another human being, if not at the centre of your life then somewhere close to it, was a lot of effort. She had no time for that. Likewise, friendships could be just as demanding, labour-intensive. Every now and then she would come across a student with whom she would instantly hit it off, but then avoid deepening the bond. There was something rigid and robotic, almost dogmatic, in the way Peri disciplined herself around one single motto during those early weeks in college: study, study, study.

  Accustomed to success all her school life, she was painfully aware of her newly gained academic weaknesses. She had no trouble following the lectures. Participating in the tutorials – the debates and writing assignments – proved more difficult. Putting her thoughts on paper in a language other than her mother tongue was challenging. Determined not to fail, she pushed hard, unsatisfied with herself.

  She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity – just as every foreigner did, one way or another:

  Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger.

  Cleft stick: (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation.

  Rantipole: (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.

  In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote: In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy.

  When it was her turn to read her essay aloud to her tutor, he stopped her halfway through, looking both perplexed and amused. ‘Was that even English?’

  Peri was mortified. The sentence that had sounded smart and sophisticated and stylish to her ears was no more than gibberish to a native speaker. How could the foreigner and the local hear the same words so differently? Refusing to be discouraged, obsessed with nuances, she kept on collecting dazzling words. They reminded her of the spiral shells and pink corals, smoothed by countless tides, she had picked up as a child when her family went to the seaside. Except, unlike those pretty but motionless keepsakes, words were breathing, alive.

  A sense of direction not being her strong suit, Peri occasionally got lost when she was exploring Oxford. On one of these outings she discovered a bookstore called Two Kinds of Intelligence. Its uneven floorboards creaked in fancied sympathy as she walked across the front room; booksh
elves rose to the ceiling on every wall; there was a fireplace in the corner, above which were old prints of Oxford; a flight of wooden stairs led to two small rooms, each packed with hand-picked volumes reflecting the owners’ peculiar tastes in philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult. With framed photographs on the walls, pastel bean bags on the floor for customers to sit on and a coffee machine that served free coffee all day long, it instantly became a favourite spot.

  The owners (she was Scottish; he, Pakistani) were impressed with her when they realized she knew the origin of the store’s name. It was the title of a poem by Rumi. Peri even remembered a few verses: There are two kinds of intelligence, one acquired, as a child in school memorizes … from books and what the teacher says … the other … intelligence … fluid … a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

  ‘Well done,’ said the woman. ‘Come and read here whenever you like.’

  ‘To further nourish your intelligence. Both kinds!’ said the man.

  This Peri did. Soon it became a habit. She would grab her coffee, put a coin in the tip box and plant herself on a bean bag, reading until her back hurt and her legs felt stiff. She also visited the Bodleian a lot. She would find a remote carrel, pile up more books than she could possibly read, surreptitiously open a package of pretzel sticks and bury her head in waves of words.

  She bought postcards with pictures of Oxford. The sunlit medieval streets, the honeyed limestone buildings, the shaded college gardens … A few of these she sent to her parents, but the rest were reserved for her brother Umut. She wrote to him all the time, though his answers were irregular, curt. Still, she never gave up. She kept her postcards light, even mirthful. No need to mention her fears, her migraines, her nightmares and the loneliness, which by now, she knew, was both a curse and a companion. Instead, she talked about the oddly engaging ways of the British, their pragmatism, their unspoken confidence in their institutions, their quirky humour.

  Umut wrote back with messages on lined paper, scraps torn from biscuit boxes, calendars or grocery bags. But once he sent a postcard. An indigo sea, a red fisherman’s boat, the calming breeze of the Mediterranean, and a sand soft as promises … as though, he, too, were trying his hand at the art of feigning happiness.

  During ‘Formal Hall’ – in a great hall dating back centuries – surrounded by portraits of former presidents of the college, Peri would sit at the ancient oak benches, the tables adorned with the college silver, served by white-jacketed scouts and feel translated into another dimension. She was a figure in a painting, surreal and romantic at once. There were parts of the college that had not changed for centuries, and she loved the touch and the smell of history, continuity. On many days she would visit the old library just to breathe in the heady aroma of the stacked bookshelves. She would go down into a basement where she would wind a handle to move the shelves in order to reach the books she needed. Amidst thousands of titles, each of which was a refuge, she felt complete. Strangely, there was one recurrent thought that would surface in her mind when inside that vastness of knowledge: God.

  It puzzled her that this was so, since, among all the attributes she might claim for herself, none would come close to ‘religious’ or even ‘spiritual’. This she would never dare tell her mother, but there were moments when she doubted if she believed in anything at all. Culturally, she was a Muslim, of course. She loved the Ramadan and the Eids, each of which filled her heart with warmth and her mind with visceral recollections of smells and tastes. Islam, for her, was reminiscent of a childhood memory – so very familiar and personal but also somehow vague, far removed in space and time. Like a cube of sugar dissolved in her coffee, there and not there.

  It had always struck her as odd that so many Turks memorized Arabic prayers without having the slightest idea what they were saying. Whether English or Turkish, Peri loved words. She held them in her palms like eggs about to hatch, their tiny hearts beating against her skin, full of life. She inquired into their meanings – hidden and manifest; she studied their etymologies. But for countless believers, the words in the prayers were holy sounds one was expected less to penetrate than to imitate – an echo without a beginning or an end, in which the act of thinking was subsumed by the act of mimicking. In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering.

  Into her God-diary Peri wrote: Believers favour answers over questions, clarity over uncertainty. Atheists, more or less the same. Funny, when it comes to God, Whom we know next to nothing about, very few of us actually say, ‘I don’t know.’

  The Angel

  Oxford, 2000

  Ever since she arrived at Oxford, Peri had regularly spoken on the phone with her father, deliberately calling at hours when she knew he was more likely to pick up the phone. Today, however, when she called Istanbul, it was her mother who answered.

  ‘Pericim …’ Selma said lovingly, but quickly changed her tone. ‘You are coming to your brother’s wedding?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. I told you I would.’

  ‘She’s an angel, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The bride, of course, silly.’

  Anxious because of the preparations, Selma praised her future daughter-in-law’s virtues with an exaggeration that was not lost on Peri.

  ‘That’s great, we could do with an angel in the family,’ said Peri. She could taste the insinuations wrapped inside her mother’s compliments, like sweets hiding something rancid inside shiny packaging. The bride was the daughter Selma had never had – pious, easy-going, obedient.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Selma.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Selma sighed. ‘You must be here for the henna night.’

  Unlike the wedding, which was regarded as the groom’s responsibility, the henna night fell under the bride’s family’s duties.

  ‘Mum, we talked about this. I can only attend the wedding.’

  ‘That won’t do. People will gossip. You must come earlier.’

  Peri rolled her eyes. The speed at which her mother could ruin her mood still astonished her – as if Selma, and only Selma, knew exactly where in her daughter’s heart to squeeze to speed up the flow of her blood.

  ‘I can’t afford to miss more lectures,’ Peri said firmly.

  Their conversation turned sour, each side blaming the other for being selfish. After she hung up, Peri felt a seething resentment at all that had been said and left unsaid, at all that was broken between them and could not be mended.

  That same night, Peri slept fitfully. She woke up with a pounding headache, on the verge of a migraine. She checked the drawers but could not find any painkillers. Massaging her temples, she pressed the bottom of a metal can against her throbbing right eye, which always helped. She crawled back into bed and curled into herself. She didn’t expect to fall asleep but before she knew it she was dreaming.

  A garden with gnarled trees. Alone, wearing a dress that fluttered in the breeze, Peri sauntered. Beside a stream, she saw a massive oak. There, dangling from one of the branches, was a baby in a basket, a dark stain covering half of its face. Peri noticed in horror that the tree was on fire, flames licking its trunk from the ground up. She grabbed a bucket and began to draw water from the stream. Soon there was water everywhere, churning and eddying around her feet. When she looked up again, the baby was no longer on the tree; it had been carried away by what had now become a rowdy river. Peri screamed as it dawned on her that she had done something terribly, irretrievably wrong.

  There was a tapping somewhere, soft yet persistent. Peri tried to open her eyes, unsure whether this, too, was part of her dream.

  ‘It’s me, Shirin, you scared the shit out of me,’ came a voice from the other side of the door. ‘You all right?’

  Peri sat up, blinking in confusion. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. Her throat felt parched and dry, like dead leaves. She was horrified that she had screamed loudly enough to be heard from the ro
om opposite.

  ‘I’m not leaving unless I see you with my own eyes.’

  Slowly, Peri got out of bed and opened the door. Shirin had on peach-coloured silk pyjamas with a matching eye mask, which she had pulled up to her forehead. Her eyes, free of makeup, and circled with a thick layer of cream, looked darker and smaller.

  ‘Shit, you sounded like a woman in a horror film,’ Shirin said. ‘One of those dumb heroines who runs upstairs when she sees a psycho instead of opening the front door and getting the hell out of there.’

  ‘Sorry if I woke you up.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Shirin said, as she folded her arms across her striking bosom. ‘You always have nightmares?’

  ‘Sometimes …’ Peri admitted. She stared down at the fitted carpet, spotting a stain she hadn’t noticed before. ‘Just silly dreams.’

  ‘Recurring?’

  ‘Sort of, yes.’

  Shirin pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and said, in a voice that brooked no opposition, ‘I’ve seen enough madness in my family, and God knows I’m a bit cuckoo myself. I can recognize it when I see it.’

  ‘You mean I’m crazy?’

  ‘Not certifiably nuts, but the scream I heard was quite something. If you have a psychological problem, you’ve got to deal with it.’

  ‘I don’t have a psychological problem!’

  ‘Argh!!!’ Shirin unleashed an excruciating sound, like a wild animal being pierced by an arrow. ‘I get so upset when people are offended by the word “psychological”! I bet you wouldn’t have been offended if I said you were haemorrhoidical.’

  ‘Haemorrhoidal,’ Peri corrected.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Shirin, glancing at the Post-its on the walls. ‘You’re the dictionary girl.’

  ‘Look, it’s very kind of you to come to check on me, but I’m fine.’ Through the leaded window the moon cast a distorted rectangle of light on to her face. ‘I’ll be going home for my brother’s wedding. I can’t afford to miss lectures but family obligations come first. I feel a bit stressed out.’