10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

by Elif Shafak

  ‘Stop speaking nonsense. Your wedding is coming up. We have already sent out the invitations.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to deal with that. I won’t be here.’

  His father stood up, his voice cracking for the first time. ‘You cannot shame me!’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ The young man’s eyes fell on the carpet. ‘Those four women –’

  ‘Oh, stop that nonsense! I told you I had nothing to do with it.’

  He stared at his father, studying his stern features as though to memorize what he refused to become. He had thought about going to the police, but his father was well connected and the case would be closed as soon as it was opened. He just wanted to go away – with his beloved.

  ‘I won’t send you a single cheque, you hear me? You’ll come back to me on your knees, begging.’

  ‘Goodbye, Father.’

  Before he turned his back, he reached out, grabbed the newspaper, folded it and put it in his pocket. He didn’t want to leave Leila’s picture in this cold office. He still had her scarf.

  The thinner one had been celibate his entire life. He often talked about the inconsequence of the flesh. He was a man of ideas, universal theories. When the big boss had asked him to arrange prostitutes for his son, he had been honoured to be entrusted with a job so secretive and sensitive. The first time he had waited outside the hotel, just to make sure the woman arrived and behaved well and everything went seamlessly. That same night, as he was sitting inside the car, smoking, he had an idea. It occurred to him that maybe this was no ordinary job. Maybe there was something else he was expected to do. A mission. The thought hit him with a jolt. He felt important, infinitely alive.

  He broached the idea to his cousin: a coarse, simple-minded man with a quick temper and a quicker left fist. Not a thinker like him, but loyal, practical and capable of performing difficult tasks. The perfect partner.

  To make sure they got the right woman they came up with a plan. Each time, they would ask the fixer to tell the prostitute to wear a particular outfit. That way they could easily recognize the woman when she left the hotel. The last time it was a gold-sequinned, tight-fitting minidress. After each murder, they added another porcelain doll to their collection of angels. For that is what they did, he believed. They turned whores into angels.

  Not once had he touched any of the women. He took pride in that – being beyond the needs of the flesh. Cold as steel, each time he had watched from the side, until the very end. The fourth woman, unexpectedly, had fought back so hard, resisting with every ounce of her strength, that for a few minutes he feared he might have to get involved. But his cousin was strong, physically advantaged, and he kept a crowbar hidden on the floor.

  The Plan

  ‘I need a smoke,’ said Nalan as she opened the balcony door and stepped out.

  She glanced at the street down below. The neighbourhood was changing. Nothing felt familiar any more. Tenants came, tenants left – the new replaced the old. Areas of the city exchanged their residents like schoolboys trading football cards.

  She placed a cigarette between her lips and lit it. As she inhaled the first puff, she studied Leila’s Zippo. She flicked it open, snapped it shut, flicked it open, snapped it shut.

  There was an engraving in English on one side of the lighter: Vietnam: You Never Really Lived Until You Nearly Died.

  It occurred to Nalan that this antique Zippo was not the simple object it seemed to be, but a perpetual wanderer. It travelled from one person to another, outliving each of its owners. Before Leila, it had belonged to D/Ali, and before D/Ali, to an American soldier, who had been unfortunate enough to come to Istanbul with the Sixth Fleet in July 1968. The soldier, while running away from the young, angry, leftist protesters, had dropped the lighter in his hand, the cap on his head. D/Ali had picked up the former, and a comrade of his, the latter. In the ensuing commotion they were not able to see the soldier again, and even if they had, they were not sure they would have returned the items. Over the years, D/Ali had cleaned and polished the Zippo countless times. When it was broken, he took it to a repairer in a passageway in Taksim who mended watches and miscellaneous articles. But a part of him had always wondered what kind of horrors and carnage this little object might have witnessed in war. Had it watched the killings on both sides, seen at close hand the cruelties humans were capable of inflicting on fellow humans? Had it been present at the My Lai Massacre, heard the screams of unarmed civilians – women and children?

  After D/Ali’s death, Leila had kept the Zippo, carrying it with her everywhere. Except for yesterday, when, slightly distracted and unusually quiet, she had left it on the table in Karavan. Nalan had been planning to give it to her today. How could you forget your precious thingy? You’re getting old, honey, Nalan would have said. And Leila would have laughed. Me, old? No way, darling. It’s the Zippo that must have been confused.

  Nalan pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her nose.

  ‘You all right there?’ asked Humeyra, poking her head around the balcony door.

  ‘Yes, sure. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  Humeyra nodded, though she didn’t seem convinced. Without another word, she left.

  Nalan took a pull on her cigarette, releasing no more than a faint streak of smoke. The next puff she sent off towards the Galata Tower, the masterpiece of Genoese stonemasons and woodworkers. How many people in this city were doing the same thing just now, she marvelled, staring at the ancient cylindrical tower as though it held the answer to all their troubles.

  On the street below a young man looked up and caught sight of her. His gaze grew intense. He yelled – an obscene comment.

  Nalan leaned over the balcony railing. ‘Was that for me?’

  The man grinned. ‘You bet. I’m into ladies like you.’

  Frowning, Nalan straightened her back. She turned sideways, and asked the other women in her quietest voice, ‘Is there an ashtray somewhere?’

  ‘Um … Leila kept one on the coffee table,’ said Zaynab122. ‘Here.’

  Nalan grabbed the ashtray, weighed it on her palm. Then, all of a sudden, she hurled it over the railing. It shattered on the pavement below. The man, having managed to spring back and dodge the blow, gawped, his face pale, his jaw tight.

  ‘Idiot!’ yelled Nalan. ‘Do I whistle at your hairy legs, huh? Do I hassle you? How dare you talk to me like that?’

  The man opened his mouth, then closed it. Briskly, he marched off, followed by an eruption of sniggers from a teahouse nearby.

  ‘Get inside, please,’ said Humeyra. ‘You can’t stand on the balcony and throw things at strangers. This is a house in mourning.’

  Turning on her heels, Nalan entered the room, the cigarette still in her hand. ‘I don’t want to mourn. I want to do something.’

  ‘What can we do, hayati?’ said Zaynab122. ‘Nothing.’

  Humeyra looked concerned – and slightly drowsy, having taken two more pills on the sly. ‘I hope you’re not planning to go out and look for Leila’s killer.’

  ‘No, we’ll leave that to the police, not that I trust them.’ Nalan exhaled a plume of smoke through her nose and guiltily tried to fan it away from Humeyra, with little success.

  Zaynab122 said, ‘Why don’t you pray to help her soul – yours too?’

  Nalan scrunched her forehead. ‘Why pray when God is no good at listening? It’s called Divine Deafness. That’s what they have in common, Mr Chaplin and God.’

  ‘Tövbe, tövbe,’ said Zaynab122, as she always did when she heard the Lord’s name being uttered in vain.

  Nalan found an empty coffee cup and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Look, you do the praying. I don’t want to offend anyone’s feelings. Leila deserved a great life and she didn’t get it. At the very least she deserves a proper burial. We can’t let her rot in the Cemetery of the Companionless. She doesn’t belong there.’

  ‘You must learn to accept things, habibi,’ said Zaynab122. ‘There is nothing
any of us can do.’

  In the background the Galata Tower wrapped itself in purple-and-crimson gossamer against the setting sun. Over seven hills and almost a thousand neighbourhoods, small and large, the city extended as far as the eye could see; a city prophesied to remain unconquered until the end of the world. Far in the distance, the Bosphorus whirled, mixing saltwater with freshwater as easily as it mixed reality and dream.

  ‘But maybe there is,’ said Nalan after a brief pause. ‘Maybe there is one last thing we can do for Tequila Leila.’

  Sabotage

  By the time Sabotage arrived in Hairy Kafka Street, the inky gauze of the evening had settled upon the hills in the distance. He watched the last ray of light drift from the skyline and the day come to its end, filling him with a sense of abandonment. Normally he would be sweaty and irritable from all that time spent in traffic, fuming at the stupidities of drivers and pedestrians alike, but now he just felt drained. In his hands, he carried a box, wrapped in red foil and tied with a golden bow. Using his own key, he entered the building and climbed the stairs.

  Sabotage was in his early forties now, of medium height and stocky build. He had a protruding Adam’s apple, grey eyes that almost disappeared when he smiled, and a recently grown moustache that didn’t suit his round face. He had been balding prematurely for years – it was especially premature given that he believed his life, his real life, had not yet started.

  A man with secrets. This is what he had become when he followed Leila to Istanbul a year after she had gone. Leaving Van and his mother behind had not been easy for him, but he had done it, for two reasons, one clear, one hidden: to continue with his education (he was able to earn a place at a top university) and to find his childhood friend. All he had from her was a pile of postcards and an address no longer in use. She had written a few times, not saying much about her new life, and then, suddenly, the postcards had stopped coming. Sabotage sensed something had happened to her, something she did not wish to talk about, and he knew he had to find her no matter what. He had looked for her everywhere – in cinemas, restaurants, theatres, hotels, cafes, and then, when those places yielded nothing, in discotheques, bars, gambling parlours and, finally, with a heavy heart, in nightclubs and houses of ill repute. It was after a long, relentless search that he was able to locate her, thanks to a sheer coincidence. A boy he had been sharing a room with had become a regular in the street of brothels, and Sabotage overheard him tell another student about a woman with a rose tattoo on her ankle.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t found me. I have no desire to see you,’ Leila had said when they met again for the first time in so long.

  Her coldness had stabbed him in the heart. In her eyes there was a glow of anger and little else. But he sensed that, beneath the stern expression, what prevailed was shame. Worried and wilful, he kept coming back. Now that he had found her he was not going to let go of her again. Since he couldn’t bear that notorious street with its sour smells, he often waited at its entrance, in the dappled shade of ageing oaks, sometimes for hours. Occasionally, when Leila walked out to buy herself something, or to get Bitter Ma her haemorrhoid cream, she saw him there, sitting on the pavement, reading a book or scratching his chin over a maths equation.

  ‘Why do you keep coming here, Sabotage?’

  ‘Because I miss you.’

  Those were the years when half the students were busy boycotting classes and the other half boycotting the dissident students. Almost every day something happened on university campuses in the country: bomb squads arrived to detonate packages, students clashed in the cafeteria, professors were verbally abused, physically attacked. Despite it all, Sabotage managed to pass his exams, graduating with high honours. He found a job at a national bank and, save for a few company outings that he went on out of social obligation, he spurned all invitations that came his way. Whatever free time he had he tried to spend with Leila.

  The year Leila married D/Ali, Sabotage quietly asked a colleague on a date. A month later he proposed to her. Though his marriage was not a particularly happy one, fatherhood was the best thing that would happen to him. For a while his career advanced rapidly and with conviction, but just when it looked like he might make it to the highest levels, he pulled back. Despite his brains, he was too shy, too withdrawn, to become a major player in any institution. The first time he gave a presentation he forgot his lines and broke into a terrible sweat. Silence swept across the conference room, punctured only by awkward coughs. He kept glancing at the door, as if he’d had second thoughts and longed to run away. He often felt that way. And so he chose to content himself with a mediocre position and settled into a passable life – as a good citizen, a good employee, a good father. But at no stage in this journey did he give up on his friendship with Leila.

  ‘I used to call you my sabotage radio,’ Leila would say. ‘Look at you now. You are sabotaging your reputation, darling. What would your wife and colleagues say if they knew you were friends with someone like me?’

  ‘They don’t have to know.’

  ‘How long do you think you can keep it from them?’

  And Sabotage would say, ‘For as long as is needed.’

  His co-workers, his wife, his neighbours, his relatives, his mother, long retired from the pharmacy – none of them were aware that he had another life, that with Leila and the girls he was a different man altogether.

  Sabotage spent his days with his head buried in balance sheets, conversing with no one unless absolutely necessary. Come twilight, he would leave the office, hop into his car, much as he hated driving, and head to Karavan – a nightclub that was popular with the unpopular. Here he relaxed, he smoked, and sometimes he danced. To cover for his lengthy absences, he told his wife that his piddling salary required him to work night shifts as a security guard in a factory.

  ‘They produce powdered formula, for babies,’ he had told her, only because he thought it would make it sound more innocent, the mention of babies.

  Fortunately, his wife did not ask questions. If anything, she seemed almost relieved to see him leave the house every evening. It troubled him sometimes, simmered in the cauldron of his mind – did she want him out of her way? Still, it wasn’t so much her that Sabotage worried about, but her large family. His wife came from a proud line of imams and hodjas. He would never dare tell them the truth. Besides, he loved his children. He was a doting father. Should his wife divorce him on grounds of his night life with tarts and transvestites, the courts would never give him custody of his children. They probably wouldn’t even allow him to see them again. Truth could be corrosive, a mercurial liquor. It could eat holes in the bulwarks of daily life, destroying entire edifices. If the family elders learned his secret, all hell would break loose. He could almost hear their voices hammering inside his head – bawling, insulting, threatening.

  Some mornings while shaving, Sabotage practised his defence speech in front of the mirror. The speech he would give if he were caught by his family one day and put through the wringer.

  Are you sleeping with that woman? his wife would ask, her relatives at her side. Oh, I rue the day I married you – what kind of a man wastes his children’s allowance on a whore!

  No! No! It’s nothing like that.

  Really? You mean she’s sleeping with you free of charge?

  Please don’t say such things! he would plead. She is my friend. My oldest friend – from school.

  No one would believe him.

  ‘I tried to come earlier but the traffic was an absolute nightmare,’ Sabotage said as he sat back on a chair, tired and thirsty.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Zaynab122 asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Humeyra, pointing to the box in Sabotage’s lap.

  ‘Oh, this … a gift for Leila. It was in the office. I had been planning to give it to her tonight.’ He pulled off the bow, opened the box. There was a scarf inside. ‘Pure silk. She would have loved it.’

&n
bsp; A lump came to his throat. Unable to swallow it down, he gasped. All the sorrow he had tried to suppress now burst out. His eyes pricked and before he knew it he was crying.

  Humeyra dashed to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and a bottle of lemon cologne. The latter she sprinkled into the water, which she handed to Sabotage. ‘Drink. This’ll make you feel better.

  ‘What is it?’ Sabotage asked.

  ‘My mother’s remedy for sadness – and other things. She always kept some cologne handy.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ Nalan demurred. ‘You’re not going to give him that, are you? Your mum’s remedy could ruin a man with no alcohol tolerance.’

  ‘But it’s just cologne …’ Humeyra muttered, suddenly unsure.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Sabotage. He returned the glass, embarrassed at being the centre of attention.

  It was a well-known fact that Sabotage could not handle his liquor. A quarter of a glass of wine was enough to destroy him. On several occasions, having drained a few tankards of beer in an effort to keep up with the others, he had blacked out. On such nights he had adventures of which he had no recollection the next morning. People would tell him in painstaking detail how he had climbed up on a roof to watch the seagulls, or had conversed with a mannequin in a window, or had leaped on to the bar in Karavan and thrown himself at the dancers, assuming they would catch him and hoist him on to their shoulders, only to plummet to the floor instead. The stories he heard were so mortifying he would pretend to have nothing to do with the awkward figure at their centre. But of course he knew. He knew he could not tolerate alcohol. Perhaps he lacked the proper enzyme or had a dysfunctional liver. Or perhaps the hodjas and imams in his wife’s family had put a curse on him to ensure he never strayed from the straight and narrow.

  In striking contrast to Sabotage, Nalan was a legend in Istanbul’s underground circles. She had got into the habit of downing shots after she had her first sex reassignment surgery. Though she had happily ditched her old blue identification (given to male citizens) for a new pink one (for female citizens), the post-operation pain had been so excruciating that she could only endure it with help from the bottle. Later, there had been further operations, each more elaborate and expensive. No one had warned her about any of this. It was a subject not many even in the trans community wished to talk about, and when they did it was in hushed tones. Sometimes the wounds became infected, tissue refused to heal, acute pain turned chronic. And while her body had been fighting against all these unexpected complications, her debts had piled up. Nalan had looked for a job everywhere. Anything would have done. When too many doors had been closed in her face, she even tried the furniture workshop where she had worked before. But no one would employ her.