Finally the old lady left, moving so slowly that even the bells didn’t jingle as she opened the door. Now that it was her turn, Pembe nodded at the assistant, but he ignored her and went about organizing the pastries. Then he proceeded to arrange the metal trays, taking out the boxes, putting them back.
‘Excuse me,’ Pembe said, pointing at the chocolate eclairs. ‘May I have this . . . two, please?’
‘Wait your turn,’ the assistant muttered, wiping a pair of tongs.
Baffled more by his tone than by what he had said, Pembe hesitated for a moment. It was then that the other customer interjected, ‘It is her turn.’
It worked. Putting the tongs down, the assistant approached them, his eyes glued on Pembe. ‘So what do you want?’
Now Pembe had never confronted a racist before and the idea that someone could hate another person because of their skin colour, religion or class was as alien to her as snow in August. Not that complete strangers had never mistreated or belittled her, but those instances were all due to temporary flare-ups, or so they had seemed, rather than preconceived judgements over which she had no control. She was aware of how different the Topraks were from their English neighbours, and yet Turks and Kurds were different from one another too, and some Kurds were completely unlike other Kurds. Even in her tiny village by the Euphrates every family had another story, and in every family no two children were ever the same. If Allah had wanted to create human beings alike, He surely would have done so. Pembe had no idea why He had introduced so much variety into His creation, but she trusted His intentions. Accepting people the way they were born was tantamount to respecting the divine scheme.
The truth was, she was quite tolerant when it came to inborn differences. What she couldn’t adjust to were the variations introduced afterwards. A punk with hair as spiky as a hedgehog, a teenager with his eyebrows pierced, a singer with tattoos all over his body or Esma’s passion for wearing trousers and braces – these were the things she found hard to digest. Her linear logic put her in a quandary at times. When she met a homosexual person, for instance, she wanted to understand if he had been born that way or had turned that way over time. If it was God’s doing, it was okay; if it was that person’s doing, she didn’t approve of it. But since, in the end, everything was God’s work and His alone, she could not nurse disparaging sentiments against anyone for too long.
So when the assistant asked her what she wanted, Pembe heard the question but not the tone of scorn underneath it. Duly, dutifully, she answered, ‘I want this one and that one, please.’
The assistant stared off into the distance beyond and above her head, as if she were invisible to him. ‘Don’t they have names?’ he asked.
Thinking that the man had not understood her, Pembe approached the pastry trays from the side and pointed again at the eclairs without realizing that the hem of her coat was brushing against the cinnamon rolls.
‘Hey, don’t touch those,’ the assistant yelled. He picked up one of the rolls and inspected it. ‘Nah, I can’t sell these any more.’
‘What?’
‘Do you see this bit of fluff?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s from your coat. You have to buy the whole tray now.’
‘Fluff?’ Pembe pouted her lips as if the unfamiliar word had left a sour taste in her mouth. ‘No, no. I don’t want the tray.’ In her confusion she flipped her hands upwards, and one of her shopping bags knocked over a basket with rock cakes, sending them on to the floor.
The assistant shook his head. ‘Whoa, you’re a walking catastrophe.’
By now the commotion had drawn the owner’s attention and she clomped towards them to see what was going on.
‘This woman here ruined the rolls and spilled the cakes. I told her she has to buy them, but she doesn’t get it.’
Pembe’s cheeks turned red under the scrutiny of the owner.
‘I don’t think she even speaks English,’ added the assistant.
‘I speak,’ Pembe snapped.
‘Then surely you must have understood what you were told,’ said the owner speaking slowly, and unnecessarily loudly, as if Pembe were deaf.
‘But he says buy all tray. I don’t have much money.’
Folding his arms across his chest, the assistant remarked, ‘Then we’ll have to ring the police.’
‘No police, why?’ Pembe was beginning to panic.
‘Ahem.’ The customer standing behind coughed theatrically. Now all heads turned towards him, the silent onlooker. ‘I’ve been observing your eclair crisis,’ he said. ‘And I feel obliged to say a few words. If the law becomes involved, I’ll be the sole witness here.’
‘So?’ said the assistant.
‘So I’ll tell them the other side of the story.’
‘What other side?’
‘That you’ve mistreated your customer and you haven’t served her properly. You were slow, impolite, uncooperative, difficult, even aggressive.’
‘Now, now, gentlemen,’ said the owner, a placatory smile hovering over her lips, as she realized the situation was getting out of control. ‘Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. There’s no harm done. No need to go to the police.’
Quietly, as if through water, Pembe turned towards the other customer, seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time. He was wearing a sepia corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches over a beige turtleneck sweater. He had a long face, a prominent nose and light brown hair that had a golden tint in the light and was receding at the sides. His eyes were kind, though a bit tired; they were the colour of stormy weather, grey and intense behind a pair of glasses that made him look like a university professor – or so she thought.
The assistant, too, was inspecting him, albeit resentfully. He hissed, ‘Well, how can I help you, then?’
‘First the lady,’ the customer said. ‘You haven’t helped her yet.’
*
They left the bakery together – strangers united by happenstance. It seemed natural that they should walk together for a few minutes, reliving the experience, renewing their camaraderie. He insisted on carrying her bags, and that, too, seemed all right, though she would have never allowed it had they been in her neighbourhood.
They walked until they reached the nearby playground, which was empty, perhaps because of the blustery weather. By now the wind was so strong that here and there the leaves came whipping down as if caught in a whirlpool. However, for the first time since she had arrived in England, Pembe thought there was something enchanting about the weather – beyond the wind and the rain and the clouds, there loomed a kind of serenity she had got used to and come to love without realizing it. She grew pensive.
He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, noting how her face was free of cosmetics, and her hair, which had blown free of its headscarf, was the colour of autumn, bright chestnut with reddish streaks that were so subtle even she might not be aware of their presence. He found her full lips and single dimple very attractive but kept his thoughts to himself. Nature’s lottery was bizarre. This woman, if she were to dress differently and carry herself differently, would turn many heads on the street. Yet perhaps it was better that her beauty was half concealed.
‘That boy was mad,’ Pembe said, still thinking about what had transpired in the pastry shop.
‘He was not mad,’ the man objected. ‘He was a racist.’
She paused, taken aback. Racists were people who didn’t like the blacks – those who were against Rita. ‘I’m not black,’ she said.
He laughed at the joke. And when he realized she wasn’t joking, he stared at her in wonder. ‘You don’t have to be black for a racist to take against you. There are many kinds of racism, though they’re all the same, if you ask me.’
She listened, trying to wade through his accent, which was quite different from anything she had heard since she arrived.
‘The
re are whites who hate blacks,’ he went on helpfully. ‘Then there are whites who hate browns. To make matters more complicated some blacks hate browns and some browns hate blacks, not to mention those self-hating blacks, browns and whites, and the blacks, browns and whites who basically hate everybody. Then there’s religion, of course, the big divide. Some Muslims hate all Jews and some Jews hate all Muslims. Oh, and there are some Christians who hate them all.’
‘But why hate?’ she asked.
More than the question, it was the way in which it was asked, the sheer simplicity and innocence of it, almost childlike, that startled him. She was completely earnest, he noticed. Rising unemployment, poverty, xenophobia, ideological clashes, the oil crisis . . . At that moment none of these was a sufficient answer to a question so plain and basic. And he, a veteran sceptic, a dedicated disbeliever, an all-time pessimist, a man who didn’t trust the news or the newspapers and took everything with a pinch of salt, including his own truths, and harboured no hopes about humanity’s future, repeated, as if through a distant echo, ‘Mmmm, that’s so true. But why hate?’
Later on, neither of them would remember who had come up with the idea to sit in the playground. Pembe told him, in her broken English, that she worked at a hairdresser’s and had taken a short break to buy ingredients for a rice pudding. She hadn’t been able to find hazelnuts, she said, like the ones she used back in Istanbul, and would have to make do with almonds instead. To her surprise, he listened sympathetically. She had never thought a man, any man, would show so much interest in cooking.
‘So you’re Turkish?’ he asked.
It didn’t occur to her to say she was Kurdish, for it never did. It always took her some time to reveal her Kurdishness, like an afterthought. So she nodded.
‘Lokumcu geldi hanim, leblebilerim var,’* he said in a singsong voice.
She looked at him, her eyes wide with incomprehension. To her amazement, he laughed and said, ‘I’m afraid that’s about it. I only know a few words.’
‘But how?’
‘My grandmother was Greek,’ he said. ‘She was from Istanbul. She taught me one or two words. Oh, she loved that city.’
He didn’t tell her that his grandmother had left Istanbul at the time of the late Ottoman Empire, married off to a Levantine merchant, and that, till the day she passed away, she had missed her neighbours and her home by the Bosporus. Instead he tried to recall more words common to Turkish and Greek: cacik-caciki, avanak-avanakis, ispanak-spanaki, ciftetelli-tsifteteli . . . His accent made her giggle, which she did by lowering her head and closing her mouth – the one universal gesture repeated by people who were uncomfortable with either their teeth or their happiness.
He observed her for what felt like a long moment, and said, ‘I don’t even know your name.’
Pembe brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes, and, though she rarely mentioned her multiple names together, and never translated them into English, heard herself say, ‘Pembe Kader. It means Pink Destiny.’
He didn’t arch his eyebrows or chuckle the way she expected him to do. Instead he stared at her as if she had just revealed the saddest secret. He then said, ‘Your name is poetry.’
Now Pembe knew the word ‘poetry’ in English. Yes, she did. She smiled. She smiled for the first time in a long while.
Opening the bag from the bakery, she took out the chocolate eclairs, offered one to him and kept the other for herself. He, in turn, shared his fruit loaf. They ate, at first in silence, then with tentative words, such as ‘if’, ‘perhaps’, ‘I’m not sure but . . .’ Slowly, they spun a conversation around an exchange that had started with racism and rice pudding.
His name was Elias. Like her, it had been almost eight years since he had come to London. He liked the city, and had no problem with feeling like a foreigner because that is what he was in his heart: a stranger everywhere. As she listened to him, Pembe wished several times that her English was better. But you didn’t need to be fluent in a language to be able to speak it, did you? With her husband they spoke the same language and yet they rarely communicated any longer, if they ever had.
‘So you Greek?’ she asked.
She didn’t tell him what her brother-in-law Tariq thought about the Greeks, or all the negatives she had heard about them.
‘Well, not exactly. I’m a quarter Greek, a quarter Lebanese, a quarter Iranian and a quarter Canadian.’
‘But how?’
‘Well, you see, my grandmother married a Lebanese and my mother was born. Then she met my father. His parents were Canadian citizens originally from Tehran. I was born in Beirut myself but raised in Montreal, and now I’m a Londoner. So, what does that make me?’
So many journeys, so many ruptures and fresh starts in unfamiliar places. Wasn’t he frightened of bearing this much uncertainty around him? Pembe recalled how she had dreamed of becoming a sailor, travelling to faraway ports in seven continents, but that was long ago.
As if reading her doubts, he smiled and said, ‘Hey, it’s not that bad. Some people are from everywhere.’
He tore his gaze from the wedding ring that he had suddenly noticed. She, however, had not realized that there was a faint mark where his wedding ring used to be, the shadow of a wife who wasn’t there any more, but who had not yet fully vanished.
‘You work?’ she asked.
‘Yup, I’m a chef.’
At this, her face lit up. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I bet I can make rice pudding just as good as you do.’
Pembe imagined him dicing onions or poking at some courgettes in a frying pan. The idea was so odd that she let out a giggle, and almost at once she grew quiet, worried about hurting his feelings. The men she knew would barely enter the kitchen to get a glass of water for themselves, which, now that she thought about it, was also how she had been raising her two sons, especially Iskender.
‘Your wife lucky,’ she said.
‘My wife and I are separated,’ Elias said, gesturing with his hands as if breaking a piece of bread.
Deftly, Pembe veered the conversation into another direction. ‘What did your father say? He said it’s okay you cook?’
It was a bizarre question, and yet it was the right question. His father had not spoken to Elias for years, he explained, his voice rising and falling, though later on in life they had made their peace. He said his interest in cooking had started when, as a boy, he was looking for things to raise his sister Cleo’s spirits.
‘Your sister was sick?’ she asked.
‘No, she was special.’
He said the children in the neighbourhood had another word for it: retarded. Born with severe Down’s syndrome, she was physically and mentally disabled. While he went to a local school where he was in a class of gifted children, Cleo had to travel a long distance every day to attend a special institution outside town. She was often grumpy, stressed, throwing her toys around, pulling out her hair, eating soil. The only thing that soothed her, young Elias discovered, was good food. A freshly baked apple pie put a smile on her face, helping her to become her dear old self again. And so, little by little, he learned to prepare delicacies for Cleo. In time he realized it wasn’t so much that he was helping his sister but that she was helping him to follow his heart.
When you kneaded bread, the earth seeped into your veins, solid and strong. When you grilled meat, the spirit of the animal spoke to you, and you had to learn to respect it. When you cleaned fish, you heard the gush of the water where it once swam, and you had to marinate it tenderly, so as to wash off the memory of the river from its fins. Pembe listened, mesmerized, missing many words, but, to her surprise, understanding him.
*
‘Oh goodness . . . I have to go,’ Pembe said, jumping to her feet, only now grasping how much time had gone by.
‘Shall I help you with your bags back to the hairdresser?
??s?’
‘No, no . . .’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll be fine.’
It flashed into her mind that one of the passers-by might see them together and tell someone else. People would gossip, and from there the word would reach her family’s ears. She understood, with a plunging heart, that there was no way she could see this man again. Unaware of her thoughts, he produced a card out of his pocket.
ELIAS STEPHANOS ROBERT GROGAN
CHEF
She looked at the words, surprised to see he had so many names, like the countries in his background. On the back of the card was the name of the restaurant.
‘If you come in the evenings, I won’t be able to leave the kitchen. Lunch-times are no good either. But should you stop by after four o’clock, I’d be most happy to show you around, and cook for you.’
In return she gave him nothing. No paper. No address. No promise.
He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, which she responded to by pulling back, which confused and embarrassed him, which she was mortified to see, so she gave him her hand, which he missed because he was still thinking about why she hadn’t let him kiss her on the cheek. In their mutual confusion, he ended up brushing her wrist and she patted his shoulder. The awkwardness of the moment would have made an onlooker laugh, but to them it was rather discomforting, so they backed away from each other, as if they had touched a live wire, and then as fast as they could they went their separate ways.
Beauty and the Beast