by Elif Shafak
It was a lie, a rather shameless one. The woman in question was leaving, but for a different reason altogether. On her latest visit to the hospital she had tested positive for both gonorrhoea and syphilis. Banned from working, she was obliged to stay away from the premises until completely free of infection. Bitter Ma did not mention this detail as she took the man’s money and put it in the drawer. She had not forgotten how rude he had been to her. No one was to talk to her like that, especially not in front of her employees. For unlike Istanbul, a city of wilful amnesia, Bitter Ma had an excellent memory; she remembered every wrong that had ever been done to her, and when the right moment arrived, she took her revenge.
Inside the brothel the colours were dull: soulless brown, stale yellow and the insipid green of leftover soup. No sooner had the evening ezan reverberated over the city’s leaden domes and swayback roofs than Bitter Ma would turn on the lights – a string of naked bulbs in shades of indigo, magenta, lilac and ruby – and the whole place would be bathed in the strangest glow, as if kissed by a demented pixie.
Next to the entrance was a large handwritten sign framed in metal that was the first thing anyone would see upon walking in. It read:
CITIZEN!
If you wish to protect yourself from syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, you must do the following:
1. Before you go to a room with a woman, ask to see her health card. Check if she’s healthy!
2. Use a sheath. Make sure you use a new one each time. You will not be overcharged for sheaths; ask the landlady and she will give you a fair price.
3. If you have any suspicion that you might have contracted a disease, do not hang around here, go straight to a doctor.
4. Sexually transmitted diseases can be prevented, if you are determined to protect yourself and to protect YOUR NATION!
Working hours were from ten a.m. to eleven p.m. Twice a day Leila had a coffee break: half an hour in the afternoon and fifteen minutes at night. Bitter Ma did not approve of downtime in the evening, but Leila, insisting she got terrible migraines if she did not have her daily dose of cardamom coffee, stood her ground.
Every morning, as soon as the doors were opened, the women took their seats on the wooden chairs and low stools behind the glass panels at the entrance. Those who had recently joined the brothel could be told apart from the old-timers simply by the way they carried themselves. The newcomers sat with their hands in their laps, their gaze unfocused and distant like sleepwalkers who had just woken up in a strange place. Those who had been around for longer moved nonchalantly and freely across the room – cleaning under their fingernails, scratching itchy spots, fanning themselves, examining their complexions in the mirror, braiding each other’s hair. Unafraid of making eye contact, they watched indifferently the men strolling along – in groups, pairs and alone.
A few of the women had suggested doing needlework or taking up knitting during these long hours of waiting, but Bitter Ma would hear none of it.
‘Knitting – what a dopey idea! Do you want to remind these men of their boring wives? Or, worse, their mothers? Certainly not! We offer them what they have never seen at home, not more of the same.’
This being one of the fourteen brothels lined up along the same cul-de-sac, the clients had plenty of options. They would pace up and down, stop and leer, smoke and ponder, weighing up their choices. If they still needed time to think, they would stop by a street vendor and drink a shot of pickled-cucumber juice or eat a fried-dough pastry, known as kerhane tatlisi, ‘bordello churro’. Experience had taught Leila that if a man did not make up his mind in the first three minutes, he would never do so. After three minutes her attention would shift to someone else.
Most of the prostitutes refrained from calling out to the punters, finding it sufficient to blow the occasional kiss or offer a wink, show some cleavage or uncross their legs. Bitter Ma did not approve of her girls appearing too eager. She said it cheapened the merchandise. Nor were they to act cold, as though they were unsure of their own quality. There had to be ‘a fine sophisticated balance’ – not that Bitter Ma herself was a well-balanced person, but she expected from her employees what she herself desperately lacked.
Leila’s room was on the second floor, the first on the right. ‘The best location in the house,’ everyone said. Not because it offered any luxuries or a view of the Bosphorus but because, if anything were to go wrong, she could easily be heard from downstairs. The rooms at the other end of the corridor were the worst. Even if you screamed your head off, no one would come running.
In front of her door, Leila had placed a half-moon mat for the men to wipe their shoes on. The room was sparsely furnished: a double bed, covered with a floral-print bedspread and a matching ruffled valance, took up most of the space. Next to it was a cabinet with a locked drawer where she kept her letters and various objects that, though not at all precious, were of sentimental value to her. The curtains, tattered and faded from the sun, were the colour of sliced watermelon – and those black dots that resembled seeds were, in fact, cigarette burns. In one corner was a cracked sink; a gas cooker on which a brass cezve rested precariously; and, next to it, a pair of slippers – blue velvet with satin rosettes and beaded toes. They were the prettiest thing she owned. Pushed against the wall stood a walnut wardrobe that did not shut properly. Inside, underneath clothes on hangers, were a pile of magazines, a biscuit box full of condoms, and a musty-smelling blanket that had long gone unused. A mirror hung on the opposite wall, with postcards tucked into its frame: Brigitte Bardot smoking a slim cigar, Raquel Welch posing in an animal-hide bikini, the Beatles and their blonde girlfriends sitting on a carpet with an Indian yogi, and pictures of places – a capital city’s river sparkling in the morning sun, a baroque square lightly dusted with snow, a boulevard bejewelled by the night-time lights – that Leila had never visited but yearned to explore one day: Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo …
It was a privileged room in many ways, one that revealed Leila’s status. Most of the other girls had much less in the way of comfort. Bitter Ma was fond of Leila – partly because she was honest and hard-working; partly because she bore an uncanny resemblance to the sister Bitter Ma had left, decades ago, in the Balkans.
Leila was seventeen years old when she had been brought to this street – sold to the first brothel by a man and a woman, a couple of hustlers well known to the police. That was about three years ago, though it felt like another life already. She never talked about those days, just as she never talked about why she had run away from home or how she had arrived in Istanbul without a place to stay and with only five lira and twenty kurush. She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them.
The first months on this street had been so dark, the days like a rope mooring her to despair, that several times she had considered suicide. A fast, quiet death – it could be done. Back then, every detail had unsettled her; every sound had been a thunderclap to her ears. Even after she arrived in Bitter Ma’s house, which was a slightly safer place, she did not think she could carry on. The stench from the toilets, the mouse droppings in the kitchen, the cockroaches in the basement, the sores in the mouth of a client, the warts on the hands of one of the other prostitutes, the food stains on the madam’s blouse, the flies buzzing hither and thither – everything made her itch uncontrollably. At night, when she laid her head on the pillow, she picked up a faint, coppery smell in the air that she had come to identify as decaying flesh, and she feared that it was gathering under her fingernails, seeping into her bloodstream. She was sure she had caught some horrible disease. Invisible parasites were crawling under and over her skin. In the local hammam that the prostitutes visited once a week, she washed and scrubbed herself until her body burned red; and upon her return, she boiled her pillowcases and bedsheets. It was no use. The parasites kept coming back.
‘It could be sicologik,’ said
Bitter Ma. ‘I’ve seen it before. Look, I run a clean place here. If you don’t like it, go back. But I’m telling you, it’s all in your head. Tell me, was your mother also a hygiene freak?’
That made Leila stop cold. No more itching. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of Auntie Binnaz or that big, lonely house in Van.
The only window in Leila’s room overlooked the back premises: a small courtyard with a single birch tree, behind which stood a dilapidated building that remained unoccupied except for a furniture workshop on the ground floor. Inside, around forty men slogged away for thirteen hours a day, inhaling dust and varnish and chemicals they had no name for. Half of them were illegal immigrants. None of them had insurance. And most were no older than twenty-five. It wasn’t a job one could do for long. The fumes from the resins destroyed their lungs.
The workers were supervised by a bearded foreman who seldom spoke and never smiled. On Fridays, as soon as he went to the mosque, a takke on his head, a rosary in his hand, the other men opened the windows and craned their necks, trying to spy on the whores. They couldn’t see much since the curtains in the brothel were kept closed most of the time. But they did not give up, keen to catch a glimpse of curvy hip or bare thigh. Bragging to one another about tantalizing peeks, they chuckled; the dust that covered them from head to toe gave them wrinkles, greyed their hair, and made them look not so much like old men as like spectres stuck between two worlds. On the other side of the courtyard the women generally remained indifferent, but every now and then one of them, either out of curiosity or pity, it was hard to tell, would suddenly appear by the window and, leaning on the ledge, her breasts hanging heavy over her forearms, smoke quietly until the cigarette in her hand burned low.
A few of the labourers had a good voice, and they liked to sing, taking turns in leading. In a world they could neither fully understand nor prevail in, music was the only joy that was free of charge. Hence they sang copiously, passionately. In Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Georgian, Circassian and Baluchi they serenaded the women silhouetted in the windows, figures bathed in mystery, more shadow than flesh.
On one occasion, moved by the beauty of the voice she heard, Leila, who until then had always kept her curtains firmly closed, drew the drapes aside and glanced out at the furniture workshop. She saw a young man there, staring directly up at her as he kept singing the saddest ballad she had ever heard, about eloping lovers lost in a flood. His eyes were almond-shaped and the colour of burnished iron; his jawline was prominent and his chin was marked by a distinct cleft. It was the gentleness of his gaze that struck Leila. A gaze not clouded by greed. He smiled at her, revealing a set of perfect white teeth, and she couldn’t help smiling back. This city always surprised her; moments of innocence were hidden in its darkest corners, moments so elusive that by the time she realized how pure they were, they would be gone.
‘What’s your name?’ he shouted at her over the wind.
She told him. ‘And what’s yours?’
‘Me? Don’t have a name yet.’
‘Everyone has a name.’
‘Well, true … but I don’t like mine. For now you can call me Hiç – “Nothing”.’fn1
The following Friday, when she checked again, the young man wasn’t there. Nor was he the week after. And so she assumed that he had gone forever, this stranger who had been composed of a head and a half-torso, framed by the window ledge like a painting from a different century, as if a product of someone else’s imagination.
Yet Istanbul continued to surprise her. Exactly a year later she would meet him again – by a fluke. Except this time, Nothing was a woman.
By now, Bitter Ma had started sending Leila to her esteemed customers. Although the brothel was sanctioned by the government, and all transactions made on the premises remained legal, those outside the premises were unlicensed – and thereby tax-free. By delving into this new venture, Bitter Ma was taking a considerable risk – though a profitable one. If discovered, she would be prosecuted and, most probably, jailed. Yet she trusted Leila, knowing that even if she were caught, she would not tell the police who she was working for.
‘You are a little clam, aren’t you? Good girl.’
One night, the police raided dozens of nightclubs, bars and off-licences on both sides of the Bosphorus and scores of underage clubbers, drug users and sex workers were arrested. Leila found herself alone in a cell with a tall, well-built woman who, after giving her name as Nalan, threw herself down in a corner, humming distractedly and tapping out a rhythm on the wall with her long fingernails.
Leila would probably not have recognized her had it not been for the familiar song – that same old ballad. Her curiosity piqued, she studied the woman, taking in her bright, warm brown eyes, her square jaw, the cleft in her chin.
‘Nothing?’ Leila asked with an incredulous gasp. ‘Do you remember me?’
The woman cocked her head to the side, her expression unreadable for a moment. Then, with a winsome smile that filled her face, she jumped up, narrowly avoiding bumping her head on the low ceiling.
‘You are the girl from the brothel! What are you doing here?’
That night in custody, neither of them able to sleep on the dirt-smudged mattresses, they talked, at first in the darkness, then in the half-light of the dawn, keeping each other company. Nalan explained that, back when they had met, she had been only temporarily employed at the furniture workshop, saving money for sex-change treatment, which had proved to be more arduous and expensive than she had expected – and her plastic surgeon was a complete arsehole. But she tried not to complain, at least not too loudly, because, damn it, she was determined to go through with it. All her life she had been trapped in a body that felt as unfamiliar as a foreign word on the tongue. Born into a well-off family of farmers and sheep breeders in Central Anatolia, she had come to this city to correct the mistake that God the Almighty had so blatantly made.
In the morning, even though her back ached from sitting through the night, and her legs were as heavy as timbers, Leila felt as though some weight had been lifted from her – she had all but forgotten the sense of lightness that now suffused her being.
As soon as they were released, the two of them headed to a börek shop, urgently in need of a cup of tea. That one cup became many. After that day, they never lost touch, regularly meeting in the same corner shop. Realizing they had much to say to each other even when they were apart, they began to correspond. Nalan often sent Leila postcards with notes scrawled on the back in biro, full of spelling mistakes; whereas Leila preferred notepaper and used a fountain pen, her writing neat and careful, the way she had learned years ago at school in Van.
Now and then, she would put the pen down and think about Auntie Binnaz, recalling her quiet dread of the alphabet. Leila had written to her family several times, but never heard back from them. She wondered what they did with her letters – did they keep them in a box away from all eyes or did they tear them up? Did the postman take them back, and if so, where? There had to be a place, some obscure address, for letters that remained unwelcome and unread.
Nalan lived in a dank basement flat – on the Street of Cauldron Makers, not far from Taksim Square – with sloping floorboards, crooked window frames and leaning walls; a flat so oddly arranged that it could only have been designed by an architect on a high. She shared this space with four other trans women, as well as a pair of turtles – Tutti and Frutti – that only she seemed able to tell apart. During every rainstorm it seemed that the pipes would burst or the toilets would overflow, though thankfully, Nalan observed, Tutti and Frutti were good swimmers.
‘Nothing’ not being an ideal nickname for a woman as assertive as Nalan, Leila decided to call her ‘Nostalgia’ instead – not because Nalan was dewy-eyed about the past, which she was clearly happy to leave behind, but because she was profoundly homesick in the city. She missed the countryside and its cornucopia of smells, yearning to fall asleep in the open air under a generous s
ky. There, she would not have to guard her back at all times.
Spirited and spunky, ferocious to her enemies, loyal to her dearest: Nostalgia Nalan – Leila’s bravest friend.
Nostalgia Nalan, one of the five.
Nalan’s Story
Once, and for a long time, Nalan was called Osman, the youngest son of a farming family in Anatolia. Redolent of freshly turned soil and the breath of wild herbs, his days were busy: ploughing the fields, raising the chickens, taking care of the dairy cows, making sure the honey bees survived the winter … A bee would work her entire brief life just to make enough honey to fill the tip of a teaspoon. Osman would wonder what he was going to create in his lifetime – the question both exciting and frightening him to the core. Night came early upon the village. After dark, as soon as his older siblings had gone to sleep, he would sit up in bed beside the wicker lamp. Slowly, bending his hands this way and that to a melody he alone could hear, he would form shadows that danced on the opposite wall. In the stories he invented, he would always take the main role – a Persian poetess, a Chinese princess or a Russian empress; the characters changed wildly, but one thing remained the same: in his mind, he was always a girl, never a boy.
At school, things couldn’t have been more different. It wasn’t a place for stories, the classroom. It was a place for rules and repetition. Struggling to spell certain words, memorize poems or recite prayers in Arabic, he found it hard to keep up with the other children. The teacher – a cold, dour man who paced up and down with a wooden ruler, which he would use to slap misbehaving students – had no patience with him.