by Elif Shafak
Leila went instead to the front of the house and opened the main door, strong and solid with die-cast bolts and iron chains, though strangely light to the touch. In her bag she carried four hard-boiled eggs and about a dozen winter apples. She headed straight to the Lady Pharmacist’s shop but did not dare go in. She wandered around outside, ambling through the old cemetery behind the shop, reading the names of the dead on the tombstones and wondering what kind of lives they might have led, as she waited for her friend to return from school.
The money that she needed for her bus fare Sabotage Sinan stole from his mother.
‘Are you sure about this?’ the boy kept asking as they walked together to the station. ‘Istanbul is massive. You don’t even know anybody there. Stay in Van.’
‘Why? There is nothing here for me any more.’
A flicker of pain crossed his face, which Leila noticed, albeit too late. She touched his arm. ‘I didn’t mean you. I’m going to miss you so much.’
‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said, a fuzz of hair shadowing his upper lip. Gone was the roly-poly boy; he had grown thinner lately, his round face had narrowed somewhat, his cheekbones had become more pronounced. For a second he seemed to be about to say something else, but he lost courage when he allowed his gaze to shift away from her face.
‘Look, I’ll write to you every week,’ Leila promised. ‘We’ll see each other again.’
‘Won’t you be safer here?’
Although Leila did not say this aloud, somewhere in her soul echoed the words she had a feeling she had heard before: Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you.
The bus smelled of diesel exhaust, lemon cologne and fatigue. The passenger sitting in front of her was reading a newspaper. Leila’s eyes widened when she saw the news on the front page: the President of America, a man with a sunny smile, had been assassinated. There were pictures of him and his pretty wife in her suit and pillbox hat as they rode in a motorcade, waving to the crowds, just minutes before the first shot. She wanted to read more but the lights were soon turned off. Out of her bag she took a hard-boiled egg, peeled it and ate it quietly. Then time slowed down and her eyelids closed.
So unsuspecting and uninformed was she back then, she thought she could handle Istanbul, beat the megalopolis at its own game. Yet she was no David; and Istanbul, no Goliath. There was no one praying for her to succeed, no one she could turn to if she didn’t. Things had a way of disappearing easily around here – she learned this as soon as she arrived. While she was washing her face and hands in a toilet at the bus station, someone stole her bag. In a second she lost half her money, the remaining apples and her bracelet – the one her little brother had held up in the air on the day of his teeth-cutting ceremony.
As she sat on an empty crate outside the toilet, collecting her thoughts, an attendant carrying a bucket of car-wash soap and a sponge approached her. He seemed polite and considerate, and upon discovering her predicament he offered help. Leila could stay at his aunt’s place for a few months. His aunt had recently retired from her job as a cashier in a shop, and she was old and lonely, in need of company.
‘I’m sure she’s a nice person, but I must find a place of my own,’ said Leila.
‘Sure, I get it,’ said the young man, smiling. He gave her the name of a hostel nearby that was clean and safe, and wished her good luck.
As darkness descended, the sky drawing in around her, she finally made it to the hostel: a dilapidated building on a side street that didn’t seem to have been painted or cleaned in years, if ever. She didn’t realize that, as she had found her way to the address, he had been following her.
Once inside, she walked over to the corner of the room, past a couple of stained and chipped chairs, and a bulletin board plastered with scruffy, out-of-date notices, where a gaunt, taciturn man was seated at a wobbly trestle table that functioned as a reception desk, behind him several room keys hanging from numbered hooks on a mildewed wall.
Now upstairs in the room, feeling on edge, she pushed the chest of drawers behind the door. The sheets, yellowed like old newspaper, smelled musty. She spread her jacket over the bed and lay down in her clothes. Exhausted, she fell asleep faster than she thought. Late at night she woke up to a sound. Someone was outside in the corridor, turning the door handle, trying to get in.
‘Who’s there?’ Leila yelled.
Footsteps in the corridor. Measured, unhurried. After that she slept not a wink, alert to every sound. In the morning she returned to the bus station, the only place she knew in the city. The young man was there, carrying water to the drivers with a long-limbed grace.
This time she accepted his offer.
The aunt – a middle-aged woman with a shrill voice and skin so pale that one could see the veins beneath – gave her food and nice clothes, too nice, insisting she must ‘enhance her assets’ if she was planning to go to job interviews, starting next week.
Those first days passed in a glow of ease. Open and searching as it was, her heart was vulnerable, and, though she refused to admit it to herself, then or later, she fell under the spell of this young man and his studied charm. She was gripped by something akin to relief that she was able finally to talk to someone – otherwise she would have never told him about what had transpired in Van.
‘You can’t go back to your family, that’s clear,’ he said. ‘Look, I have known girls like you – most were from shitty towns. Some did all right here, got places, but many didn’t. Stick with me if you are clever enough, or Istanbul will crush you.’
Something in his tone made her wince, a controlled anger that she now understood was lodged inside his soul, hard and heavy as a millstone. She quietly resolved to herself to leave this place at once.
He sensed her discomfort. He was good at that, picking up on people’s anxieties.
‘We’ll talk later,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t worry too much.’
It was this same man and the woman – who was, in truth, not his aunt but his business partner – who sold Leila to a stranger the same night, and within a week to several others. Alcohol, there was always alcohol, in her blood, in her drinks, on her breath. They made her drink a lot so that she could remember little. What she failed to see earlier she saw now: the doors were padlocked, the windows sealed, and Istanbul was not a city of opportunities, but a city of scars. The descent, when it started, spiralled rapidly, like water sucked through a plug. The men who visited the house were from different age groups, held various low-skilled, low-paid jobs, and almost all had families of their own. They were fathers, husbands, brothers … Some had daughters her age.
The first time she managed to call home, she couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. By now she had become so deeply engulfed in this new world that they let her walk on her own in the vicinity, confident that she had nowhere to go any more. The night before it had rained, and she saw snails out on the pavement, absorbing the same moist air that made her feel like she was suffocating. Standing in front of the post office, she fumbled for a cigarette, the lighter shaking in her grasp.
When she finally decided to go inside, she told the operator she wished to make a reverse-charge call, and hoped that her family would agree to pay. They did. Then she waited for Mother or Auntie to pick up the receiver, unsure which woman she would rather talk to first, trying to fathom what each might be doing at this moment. They answered – together. They cried when they heard her voice. And she did too. Somewhere in the background rose the ticking of the clock in the hall, an unwavering rhythm of stability, sharply at odds with the uncertainty surrounding them. Then, silence – deep, dank, dripping. A gooey liquid into which they sank lower and lower. It was clear that both Mother and Auntie wanted her to feel guilty, and Leila did – more than they could ever imagine. But she also understood that after she had left, Mother’s heart had closed like a fist and, with Tarkan dead, Auntie was unwell again. When she hung up the phone, heavy with a sense of defeat, s
he knew she could never go back and this slow death that she found herself in was now her life.
Still, she continued to call them at every opportunity.
Once Baba, home early, answered the phone. Upon hearing her voice, he let out a gasp and fell quiet. Leila, acutely aware that this was the first time she had ever seen him vulnerable, fumbled for the right words.
‘Baba,’ she said, her voice betraying the strain she was under.
‘Don’t me call that.’
‘Baba …’ she repeated.
‘You’ve brought us shame,’ he said, his breathing laborious. ‘Everyone is talking behind our backs. I can’t go to the teahouse any more. I can’t walk into the post office. Even at the mosque they won’t talk to me. No one greets me on the street. It’s as if I’m a ghost; they can’t see me. I had always thought, “Maybe I don’t have riches, maybe I couldn’t find treasures, and I don’t even have sons, but at least I have my honour.” Not any more. I am a broken man. My sheikh says Allah will curse you and I will live to see the day. That will be my compensation.’
There were drops of condensation on the window. She touched one gently with her fingertip, held it for a second, and then let go, watching it roll down. A pain throbbed somewhere inside her body, in a place she was unable to locate.
‘Don’t phone us again,’ he said. ‘If you do, we’ll tell the operator we are not accepting the call. We don’t have a daughter called Leyla. Leyla Afife Kamile: you don’t deserve those names.’
The first time Leila was arrested and tucked into a transport van with several other women she kept her palms pressed together, her eyes fixed on the chink of sky visible through the window bars. Worse than the treatment they were given at the police station was the follow-up examination at the Istanbul Venereal Diseases Hospital – a place she would visit regularly over the years. She was handed a new ID card – one on which the dates of her health check-ups were written in neat columns. If she missed a check-up, she was told, she would be detained on the spot. Then she would have to spend the rest of the night in jail, or go back to the hospital again to be tested for STDs.
To and fro, from the police station to the hospital and back again.
‘Hooker’s ping-pong’, the prostitutes called it.
It was on one of those hospital visits that Leila met the woman who would become her first friend in Istanbul. A young, slim African named Jameelah. Her eyes were round and exceptionally bright, their lids almost translucent; her hair was woven in tight cornrows against her scalp; her wrists were painfully thin, scarred with red marks, which she tried to cover with multiple bracelets and bangles. She was a foreigner and, like all foreigners, she carried with her the shadow of an elsewhere. They had seen each other several times before but never exchanged so much as a greeting. By now Leila had learned that the women rounded up in various corners of the city, whether natives or non-natives, belonged to invisible tribes. Members of different tribes were not supposed to interact.
On each shared visit, they would perch on the benches along a narrow corridor that smelled so strongly of antiseptic they could taste it on their tongues. The Turkish prostitutes were seated on one side and the foreigners on the other. Since the women were called into the examination room one by one, the waits were unbearably long. In the winter, they would keep their hands under their armpits and their voices low, saving their energy for the rest of the day. This section of the hospital, which other patients and most of the staff steered clear of, was never heated properly. In the summer, the women would stretch out languidly, picking scabs, slapping mosquitoes, carping about the heat. They would take off their shoes, massaging their tired feet, and a faint smell would permeate the air, curdling around them. Occasionally, one of the Turkish prostitutes would make an acerbic remark about the doctors or the nurses, or those on the opposite bench, the foreigners, the invaders, and there would be laughter, not of a happy kind. In such a narrow space, enmity could surge and circulate with the speed of an electric charge, and die down equally fast. The locals particularly disliked Africans, whom they accused of stealing their jobs.
That evening, as Leila looked over at the young black woman sitting across from her, she did not see her foreignness. Instead she saw her braided bracelet and remembered the one she had lost; she saw the talisman she had sewn inside her cardigan, and remembered all the talismans that had failed to protect her; she saw the way she hugged her rucksack against her chest, as if expecting to be kicked out of this place, if not of this country, at any second, and recognized in her manner a familiar loneliness, a forlornness. She had the odd feeling that she might as well be staring at her own reflection.
‘That’s a pretty bracelet you have.’ Leila pointed at it with her chin.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the other woman lifted her head and surveyed Leila with a direct gaze. Although she said nothing in return, there was a stillness about her expression that made Leila want to keep talking to her.
‘I had a bracelet just like that,’ Leila said, leaning forward. ‘I lost it when I came to Istanbul.’
In the ensuing silence, one of the local prostitutes made a lewd comment, and the others giggled. Leila, now beginning to regret having spoken in the first place, lowered her eyes and retreated into her thoughts.
‘I make myself …’ said the woman, just when everyone thought she would never speak. Her voice was a long, drawn-out whisper, slightly raspy, her Turkish broken. ‘Different for everyone.’
‘You choose different colours for each person?’ asked Leila, now engaged. ‘That’s lovely, how do you decide?’
‘I look.’
After that day, every time they met they exchanged just a few more words, shared just a little more, gestures filling the silences where words were unavailable. Then, one afternoon, months after that initial exchange, Jameelah reached out from the opposite bench, crossing an invisible wall, and dropped something light inside Leila’s palm.
It was a braided bracelet in periwinkle and heather and dark cherry – shades of purple.
‘For me?’ Leila asked softly.
A nod. ‘Yes, your colours.’
Jameelah, the woman who looked into people’s souls and, only when she saw what she needed to see, decided whether to open up her heart to them.
Jameelah, one of the five.
Jameelah’s Story
Jameelah was born in Somalia to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. Her early years had been blissfully free, though she would only realize this long after they were gone. Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind – a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood. Even today, if Jameelah closed her eyes and listened intently, she could hear them: her younger siblings’ peals of laughter, her father’s doting words as he broke his fast with a few dates, her mother’s singing while she prepared the food, the crackle of the evening fire, the rustling of the acacia tree outside …
Mogadishu, the White Pearl of the Indian Ocean. Under the clear sky, she would shield her eyes to look at the slum dwellings in the distance, their presence as precarious as the mud and driftwood they were built with. Poverty was not something she had to worry about back then. Days were uneventful, and dreaming was easy and as sweet as the honey she drizzled on her flatbread. But then the mother she adored died of cancer after a long, painful decline that did not dim her smile until the very end. Her father, now a shadow of the man he had been, finding himself alone with five children, was unprepared for the burden he had to shoulder. His face darkened and, gradually, so did his heart. The family elders urged him to marry again – this time someone from his own religion.
Jameelah’s stepmother, a widow herself, was jealous of a ghost, determined to erase all traces of the woman she felt she was the
re to replace. Soon Jameelah – the eldest daughter – was clashing with her stepmother on nearly everything, from what she wore to what she ate and how she spoke. To restore some calm to her disconcerted spirit, she began to spend more time on the streets.
One afternoon, her feet took her to her mother’s old church, the one she had stopped attending but had never completely forgotten. Without giving it much thought, she pushed open the tall wooden door and stepped in, inhaling the smell of candle wax and polished wood. By the altar was an aged priest, who spoke to her about the girl her mother had been, long before she became a wife and a mother, stories from another life.
Jameelah had no intention of visiting the church again, but, a week later, she did. By the age of seventeen she had joined the congregation at the cost of infuriating her father and breaking her siblings’ hearts. As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t made a choice between two Abrahamic religions; she was simply holding on to an invisible thread that connected her to her mother. No one else saw it that way. No one forgave her.
The priest said she should not be too sad since now she had found an even bigger family, a family of believers, but, hard as she tried, the peaceful fulfilment she was told would come, sooner or later, escaped her. Once again she found herself alone, without family or church.