by Elif Shafak
Still, she came to help. She was accompanied by her son, Sinan. The boy was about the same age as Leila. An only child raised by a single working mother: it was unheard of. The people of this town often gossiped about them, sometimes with scorn, even ridicule, but trod with caution nevertheless. Despite their whispers, they still had a lot of respect for the Lady Pharmacist and had found themselves, at unexpected moments, in need of her help. Consequently, the mother and son lived on the edge of society, tolerated, though never quite accepted.
‘How long has this been going on?’ asked the Lady Pharmacist as soon as she arrived.
‘Since last night … We’ve done everything we could think of,’ said Suzan.
Binnaz, by her side, nodded.
‘Yes, I can see what you’ve done – with your onions and potatoes,’ scoffed the Lady Pharmacist.
Sighing, she opened her black leather bag, similar to the one carried by the local barber to boys’ circumcision parties. She took out several silver boxes, a syringe, glass bottles, measuring spoons.
Meanwhile, half hiding behind his mother’s skirts, the boy craned his head and stared at the shivering, sweating girl in the bed.
‘Mama, is she going to die?’
‘Shh, don’t speak nonsense. She’ll be fine,’ said the Lady Pharmacist.
Only now turning her head to the side, trying to trace the sound, Leila looked at the woman and saw the needle she held in the air, the droplet on its tip glowing like a broken diamond. She began to cry.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,’ said the Lady Pharmacist.
Leila meant to say something but she lacked the strength. Her eyelids fluttered as her consciousness slipped away.
‘Okay, can one of you two give me a hand? We need to turn her on her side,’ said the Lady Pharmacist.
Binnaz volunteered instantly. Suzan, equally eager to help, searched around for a meaningful task and settled on pouring more vinegar into a bowl on the bedside table. A sharp smell filled the air.
‘Go away,’ Leila said to the silhouette by her bed. ‘Uncle, go.’
‘What’s she saying?’ Suzan asked with a puzzled frown.
The Lady Pharmacist shook her head. ‘Nothing, she’s hallucinating, poor darling. She’ll be fine after the injection.’
Leila’s crying turned raw – deep, rasping sobs.
‘Mama, wait,’ said the boy, his face etched with concern.
He approached the bed, leaning in close to Leila’s head, and spoke softly in her ear. ‘You need to hug something when you get injections. I have a stuffed owl at home, and a monkey, but the owl is the best.’
As he spoke, Leila’s sobs ebbed away into a long, slow sigh and she fell silent.
‘If you don’t have a toy, you can squeeze my hand. I wouldn’t mind.’
Gently, he took the girl’s hand, light to the touch, almost lifeless. Yet to his surprise, just as the needle pushed in, she laced her fingers into his and did not let go.
Afterwards, Leila fell asleep immediately. A thick, heavy slumber. She found herself in a salt marsh, wading alone through a thicket of reeds, beyond which extended the vast ocean, the waves rough and choppy, crashing one after another. She saw her uncle calling from a fishing boat in the distance, rowing with ease despite the weather, approaching as fast as a heartbeat. Alarmed, she tried to turn back, but she could barely move in the glutinous mud. It was then that she sensed a comforting presence beside her: the son of the Lady Pharmacist. He must have been standing there all along, carrying a duffel bag.
‘Here, take this,’ he said, as he pulled out of his bag a chocolate bar, wrapped in shiny tin foil. As she accepted the offer, despite her unease Leila felt herself start to relax.
When her temperature dropped and she opened her eyes, able at last to eat some yogurt soup, Leila immediately enquired about him, not knowing that they would meet again before long, and that this quietly intelligent, slightly awkward, kind-hearted and painfully shy boy would become her first true friend in life.
Sinan, her sheltering tree, her refuge, a witness to all that she was, all that she aspired to and, in the end, all that she could never be.
Sinan, one of the five.
Sinan’s Story
Their home was above the pharmacy. A tiny flat that overlooked on one side a pasture where cattle and sheep grazed contentedly, and, on the other, an old, decrepit cemetery. In the morning his room was bathed in sunlight but turned gloomy after dusk – and that was when he returned from school. Every day he would open the door with the key he carried around his neck, and wait for his mother to come home from work. There would be food ready on the kitchen worktop; light meals, since his mother had no time for anything more complicated. She would put easy snacks in his school bag – cheese and bread, and way too often eggs, despite his protests. The boys in the classroom made fun of his lunch boxes, complaining about the smell. They called him Egg Tart. They themselves brought proper home-made dishes – grape-leaf sarma, stuffed sweet peppers, ground-meat börek … Their mothers were housewives. Everyone else’s mother was a housewife in this town, it seemed to him. Everyone’s but his.
All the other children had large families and talked about their cousins and aunts and brothers and sisters and grandparents, whereas in his house it was only him and his mother. Just the two of them, ever since his father had passed away last spring. A sudden heart attack. Mother still slept in the same room, their bedroom. Once he had seen her caressing the sheets on the other side of the bed with one hand, as if feeling for the body she used to snuggle up against, while touching her neck and her breasts with the other, driven by a longing Sinan had no understanding of. Her face was contorted and it took him a moment to realize she was crying. He felt a sizzle of pain in his stomach, a tremor of helplessness. It was the first time he had seen her cry.
Father had been a soldier, a member of the Turkish army. He had believed in progress, reason, Westernization, enlightenment – words whose exact meaning the boy had not understood and yet felt comfortable with, so accustomed had he been to hearing them. Father had always said this country would one day become civilized and enlightened – on a par with European nations. One cannot change geography, he’d say, but one can trick destiny. Although most people in this eastern town were ignorant, crushed under the weight of religion and rigid convention, with the right kind of education they could be saved from their past. Father had believed in this. And Mother too. Together they had toiled away, an ideal couple of the new Republic, determined to build a bright future together. A soldier and a pharmacist, both strong-willed, stout-hearted. And he was their offspring, their only child, endowed with their best quality, their progressive spirit, though he feared he didn’t resemble them much, not really, neither in character nor in appearance.
Father had been tall and lean, his hair slick as glass. So many times, standing in front of the mirror with grooming lotion and a comb, the boy had tried to emulate his father’s hairstyle. He had used olive oil, lemon juice, shoe polish, and once a chunk of butter, which had caused an awful mess. Nothing had worked. Who would have believed that he, with his chubby features and clumsy ways, was the son of that soldier with the perfect smile and perfect posture? His father may have been gone but he was present in everything. The boy did not think he himself would leave such a big void if it were he who had gone. Now and then he caught his mother staring at him pensively, wearily, and it occurred to him that she might be wondering why he had not died instead of his father. It was in such moments that he felt so lonely and ugly that he could barely move. Then, just at his loneliest, his mother would come and hug him, brimful of tender love, and he would be embarrassed by his own thoughts, embarrassed and slightly relieved, but still with the nagging suspicion that, no matter how hard he tried and how much he changed, he would always fail her somehow.
He looked out of the window – a quick, furtive glance. The cemetery scared him. It had a strange, haunting smell, especially in autumn, when
the world turned tawny. Generations of men in his family had died far too early. His father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather … However tenaciously he tried to control his emotions, the boy couldn’t escape a feeling of foreboding that someday soon it would be his turn to be buried there. When his mother visited the cemetery, which she did often, to clean her husband’s grave or plant flowers or, sometimes, just to sit there doing nothing, he spied on her from his window. He had never seen his mother without make-up or with a hair out of place, and watching her sitting there in the mud and dirt, with dead leaves clinging to her clothes, made him flinch, and fear her a little bit, as though she had turned into a stranger.
Everyone in the neighbourhood visited the pharmacy, old and young. Occasionally, women in black burqas came, pulling their children along behind them. Once he had heard a woman asking for a cure to stop her from having babies. She already had eleven kids, she had said. Mother had given her a small, square package and sent her off. A week later the woman had returned, complaining about severe stomach pain.
‘You swallowed them?’ Mother had exclaimed. ‘The condoms?’
Upstairs the boy had gone still, listening.
‘They weren’t for you, they were for your husband!’
‘I know that,’ the woman had said, sounding tired. ‘But I couldn’t convince him to use them, so I thought I’d better take them myself. Maybe it will help, I thought.’
Mother was so enraged she kept mumbling to herself even after the woman had left.
‘Ignorant, simple-minded peasants! They breed like rabbits! How can this poor country ever modernize if the uneducated continue to outnumber the educated? We make one child and raise him with care. Meanwhile they produce ten little brats, and if they can’t look after them so what? They let them fend for themselves!’
Mother was gentle with the dead, less so with the living. But the boy thought one should be even gentler with the living than with the dead, because, after all, they were the ones struggling to make sense of this world, weren’t they? He, with bits of butter stuck in his hair; that peasant woman, with condoms in her stomach … Everyone seemed a little lost, vulnerable and unsure of themselves, whether they were educated or not, modern or not, Eastern or not, grown up or a child. That’s what he reckoned, this boy. He, for one, always felt more comfortable next to people who were not perfect in any way.
Five Minutes
Five minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila recalled her brother’s birth. A memory that carried with it the taste and smell of spiced goat stew – cumin, fennel seeds, cloves, onions, tomatoes, tail fat and goat’s meat.
She was seven years old when the baby arrived. Tarkan, the much-coveted son. Baba was on cloud nine. All these years he had been waiting for this moment. As soon as his second wife went into labour, he downed a glass of raqi and locked himself in a room where he remained sprawled on the sofa for hours, chewing at his lower lip, fingering his rosary beads, just like he had done on the day Leila was born.
Although the birth took place in the afternoon – on an unusually balmy day in March 1954 – Leila was not allowed to see the baby until later in the evening.
She ran her hand through her hair and approached the cradle, cautiously – her face set in an expression she had already decided on. How determined she was not to like this boy, an unwanted intruder in her life. But the very second her gaze landed on his rosebud face, doughy cheeks and knees dimpled like soft clay, she knew it was impossible for her not to love her brother. She waited, utterly still, as though she expected to hear a word of greeting from him. There was something extraordinary in his features. Just as a wayfarer, entranced by a sweet melody, might stop and listen intently for its source, so she tried to make sense of him. She was surprised to notice that, unlike anyone else in the family, her brother’s nose seemed flattened and his eyes were slanted slightly upwards. He had the air of one who had travelled from afar to get to this place. This made her love him even more.
‘Auntie, can I touch him?’
Sitting up in the wrought-iron, four-poster bed, Binnaz smiled. There were dark bags under her eyes and the delicate skin over her cheekbones seemed stretched tight. All throughout the afternoon she had been in the company of the midwife and the neighbours. Now that they were gone, she savoured this quiet moment with Leila and her son.
‘Of course you may, my dear.’
The cradle, which Baba had carved out of cherrywood and painted sapphire blue, was decorated with evil-eye beads dangling from its handle. Every time a lorry passed outside, rattling the windows, the beads, caught in the glare of the headlights, slowly rotated like planets in a solar system of their own.
Leila held out her index finger to the baby, who instantly grasped it and pulled it towards his velvet mouth.
‘Auntie, look! He doesn’t want me to go.’
‘That’s because he loves you.’
‘He does? But he doesn’t even know me.’
Binnaz winked. ‘He must have seen your picture in the school of heaven.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you know, up there in the seventh heaven there is a huge school with hundreds of classrooms.’
Leila smiled. For Auntie, whose own lack of formal education was a source of enduring regret, that must have been her idea of Paradise. Now that Leila had started school herself and had seen what it was like, she strongly disagreed.
‘There, the students are unborn babies,’ Binnaz carried on, unaware of the child’s thoughts. ‘Instead of desks, they have cradles facing a long blackboard. Do you know why?’
Blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes, Leila shook her head.
‘Because on that blackboard are pictures of men, women, children … so many of them. Each baby chooses the family he’d like to join. As soon as your brother saw your face, he said to the angel on duty, “That’s it! I want her to be my sister! Please send me to Van.”’
Leila’s smile grew wider. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a feather drifting away – perhaps from a pigeon hiding on the roof or an angel flying overhead. Despite her reservations about school, she decided that she liked Auntie’s version of Paradise.
Binnaz said, ‘From now on, we’ll be inseparable – you, me and the baby. Remember our secret?’
Leila drew a sharp breath. Since that waxing day last year, neither of them had brought up the subject.
‘We’ll tell your brother that I am your mother, not Suzan. Then the three of us will have one big secret.’
Leila considered this. In her experience, a secret was meant to stay between two people. She was still thinking about this when the sound of the doorbell reverberated through the house. She heard her mother open the door. Voices amplified in the corridor. Familiar voices. Uncle and his wife and their three sons had come to congratulate them.
No sooner had the guests entered the room than a shadow passed across Leila’s face. She took a step back, extricating herself from her brother’s silky grip. Her brows pulled into a frown. She fixed her gaze on the rows of fallow deer that walked clockwise around the border of the Persian carpet in perfect symmetry. They reminded her of the way she and the other children, clad in black uniforms and carrying satchels, marched in single file to their classrooms each morning.
Quietly, Leila sat down on the floor and pulled her legs up beneath her, studying the carpet. Upon closer inspection, she noticed that not all the deer were following the rules. Was one of them standing still, front hooves poised, head turned longingly backwards, tempted perhaps to set off in the opposite direction towards a wooded valley, rich in willows? She squinted at the wayward creature until her vision blurred, and the deer, as though magically animated, moved towards her, sunshine radiating through its majestic antlers. Inhaling the scent of the grassland, the child extended her hand towards the animal; if only she could jump on its back and ride off out of this room.
Meanwhile, no one was paying Leila any attention. They were all gathered aro
und the baby.
‘He’s a bit chubby, isn’t he?’ said Uncle. Gently, he took Tarkan out of the cradle and lifted him up.
The baby seemed very floppy, and appeared to have a very short neck. Something was not right. But Uncle pretended not to have noticed it. ‘He’ll be a wrestler, my nephew.’
Baba raked his fingers through his copious hair. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want him to be a wrestler. My son will be a minister!’
‘Please, not a politician,’ said Mother.
They laughed.
‘Well, I told the midwife to take his umbilical cord to the mayor’s office. If she can’t get in, she promised to hide it in the garden. So don’t be surprised if my son becomes the mayor of this town one day.’
‘Look, he’s smiling. I think he agrees,’ said Uncle’s wife, her lipstick a bright pink.
They all fawned over Tarkan, passing him around, making cooing sounds and uttering pleasantries that might not even have been words.
Baba’s eyes fell on Leila. ‘Why are you so silent?’
Uncle turned towards Leila with an inquisitive expression. ‘Yes, why is my favourite niece not talking today?’
She did not answer.
‘Come, join us.’ Uncle fingered his chin, a gesture she had seen him make before when he was about to utter a witticism or launch into a funny story.
‘I’m fine here …’ Her voice trailed off.
Uncle’s gaze shifted from curiosity to something that resembled suspicion.
Seeing him scrutinize her like that, Leila was overcome by a wave of anxiety. She felt ill to her stomach. Slowly, she stood up. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and composed herself. Her hands, after straightening the front of her skirt, became perfectly still.
‘May I go now, Baba? I’ve got homework.’
The grown-ups smiled at her knowingly.