My mother said that that day all the children had backed the frog, clapping, cheering. ‘But if you had been there, I bet you would have sided with the snail. Sometimes I worry about you.’
It was fine with me to be in the snail’s camp – as long as I didn’t have to keep up with those who lived at high speed, like some of the girls in my class. Our school was polarized. There were those like me, the swots, who ranged from ugly to ordinary at best, worked towards their O-levels and never got much attention save from the teachers. Then there were the slags. They couldn’t care less about their classes and were so eager for their life to start that they didn’t see the need to waste another minute on their education. The prettiest among them were the Barbies.
I would observe the Barbies, study their ways, as if dissecting a new species in biology class. They talked about nothing but boys, sharing meticulous information about which bloke fancied which girl. They kept detailed records of who went out with whom, curious as to whether they had done it yet, and, if so, how many times, and whether the bulge in so-and-so’s belly was because she was pregnant, and whether she would have the baby or put it up for adoption. They constantly fell in and out of love, romantically and frantically, experiencing every single day as an emotional rollercoaster that left longing in their eyes and juicy gossip on their tongues.
Their favourite pastime was shopping en masse. At times their mothers or elder sisters took them to department stores to buy lingerie. While the former tried to convince them to get sports bras, they chose lacey ones – sexy and dainty. The next day at school they showed them to each other in the loo, peppering their conversation with exclamations. If something was good, it was ‘brill’ or ‘ace’ Otherwise, it was ‘rubbish’. The same terms were applied to food, clothes, teachers, parents, even countries and world affairs.
The Barbies occasionally complained about their periods to their close and not-so-close friends, to their boyfriends, to their mothers, and some to their fathers – the thought of which was enough to make me flinch. I wondered, and it was almost a scientific inquiry, how these things could differ so much from one culture to another, let alone from one household to another. If I had spoken about my periods to my mother, she would have turned red with shame. Then she would have lectured me with words borrowed from Grandma Naze.
Would things have been otherwise had I attended the local school with other neighbourhood children? If the names of my classmates had been Aisha, Farah or Zeineb, instead of Tracey, Debbie or Clare, would I have fitted in more easily? Perhaps, but I didn’t think so. I knew it looked pathetic, but the truth was I preferred doing homework or reading a good book to hanging around with my peers. Still, I was proud of my achievement, thanks to my primary-school teacher Mrs Powell. Poor woman! The gossip was that her only son had been excluded from school and had moved out of the family home, she knew not where. In her distress Mrs Powell had dedicated herself to helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds find their feet. I was one of them.
Pleased with my moustache, I set out to draw a goatee on my chin. Yes, it was Mrs Powell who had come to our house and talked to my parents, convincing them to send me to a better school. Not a private school, but a grammar. After years of experience I can recognize a special child from miles away. In my professional opinion, Mr and Mrs Toprak, your daughter is able and talented. Mrs Powell had also spoken to the governors of the new school – predominantly white, Christian, English, middle class – and, whatever it was she had told them, it worked. Though a snail by heart, I had made a frog’s leap.
I wanted to be a writer, but not a female one. I had even decided on my pen-name. John Blake Ono – an amalgam that consisted of the names of my three favourite personalities, a poet, a writer and a performance artist: John Keats, William Blake and Yoko Ono.
I often wondered why female names were so different from male names, more whimsical and dreamlike, as if women were unreal, a figment of one’s imagination. Male names embodied power, ability and authority, like Muzaffer, ‘the Victorious One’; Faruq, ‘One Who Distinguishes Truth from Falsehood’; or Husam al Din, ‘the Sword of Faith’. Female names, however, reflected a delicate daintiness, like a porcelain vase. With names such as Nilüfer, ‘Lotus Flower’, or Gülseren, ‘Spreading Roses’, or Binnaz, ‘A Thousand Blandishments’, women were decorations for this world, pretty trimmings on the side, but not too essential.
J. B. Ono. A name for booksellers to mention in reverent tones. A bit mysterious and surely androgynous. A name in no need of a bra.
*
Having finished painting the goatee, I inspected my face. It was no use. Even when disguised as a man I was not much to look at. If only I had my father’s slimness and my mother’s eyes – green, large and slightly slanted. Instead I had all the wrong features combined, including my mother’s short neck and my father’s ordinary eyes. My nose was bulbous, my hair so curly it refused to be brushed down, and my forehead too wide. I had a mole on my chin, an ugly brown bump. Many times I had asked Mum to take me to a doctor to have it removed, but it was one of those things she never paid attention to. She was a beautiful woman – everyone said so. And my brothers were good-looking. It was unfair that in between the two sons, the beauty gene had gone on holiday, skipping me.
Yunus had an angelic face, although the glow of childhood was beginning to wear off. Iskender, too, was handsome, but in a different way. His was the sort of appeal that was smouldering and mean – dirty gorgeous, as the Barbies would say. I was aware that a number of my classmates fancied my dishy brother and that they had befriended me only for that reason. Iskender sometimes came to pick me up from school, sending tough-guy glances left and right that, to my wonderment, always worked.
‘Wouldn’t say no to that!’ the girls whispered.
‘He looks so like Michael Corleone in The Godfather. All he needs is a gun!’
‘When was the last time you had an eye examination?’ I grumbled, unable to see any resemblance between Iskender and Al Pacino. But even if they heard the sarcasm in my voice, they didn’t pay any attention to me. They found my brother irresistibly masculine.
Since our father had moved out, Iskender had changed a lot – full of himself, crabby, peevish. Always hanging with his mates, and that needy girlfriend of his. Hitting his punch bag day and night, as if the world was teeming with invisible enemies. If this was what they called teenage angst, I didn’t think I wanted to grow up.
We had been very close, me and my mother, but all that changed the moment my breasts started to bud and I had my first period. The only thing she was interested in now was my virginity. She was always preaching about the things I should never/ever/not even in my wildest dreams do. Not once had she told me about what was possible and permissible; her powers of communication were reserved solely for rules and prohibitions. My mother warned me about boys, saying they were after one thing and one thing only. At this age most boys were selfish, and pushy, and many would never grow out of it. Yet she didn’t impose the same rules on my brothers. Yunus was still too little, perhaps, but with Iskender she was totally different, open. Iskender didn’t need to be careful. He could just be himself. No holds barred.
What Mum didn’t understand was that I was not the least bit interested in boys. I found them boring, shallow, hormonal. Had she not talked about the subject day and night, I wouldn’t have given sex a second thought. After all, snails were hermaphrodites, having both female and male reproductive organs. Why couldn’t human beings be like that? If only God had modelled us on snails, there would be less heartbreak and agony in this world.
Heart of Glass
A Place near the River Euphrates, April 1978
The patient in the bed was burning up. Jamila checked his temperature by putting her lips to his forehead, the way she did with babies. She laid a gentle hand on his wrist, taking his pulse. It was both weak and rapid. Heartbeats were like drums heard from afar
, like sounds of war. The human body was a mystery. It loved to fight. Though most people didn’t realize this, the body was a warrior, and far more resilient than the soul. But, like all great warriors, it had an unexpected weakness. It was frightened of the unknown. It needed to understand its enemy so as to be able to resist, strike, deter and pulverize it. If it didn’t recognize what it was fighting against, it couldn’t prevail. That was where Jamila came in. Since time had begun, healers like her helped patients to regain their strength so that they could get to know their illness. She didn’t cure them so much as enable them to cure themselves.
As she soaked a towel in distilled vinegar and placed it upon the smuggler’s forehead, Jamila couldn’t help but wonder, with the briefest of hesitations, what kind of a man she was nursing. There was no question in her mind that everyone deserved to live, but did everyone deserve to be brought back from death? It was a dilemma she contemplated every so often, arriving at no definitive conclusion. Were human beings born virtuous, and then grow to be corrupt? Or were they furnished with the seeds of vice even at the time of their conception? The Qur’an said we were all created from a clot of blood. How much of our present selves had been implanted in that droplet, Jamila wanted to know. A pearl, though pure and perfect, grew out of a speck of dirt that had penetrated the oyster shell by coincidence, if indeed there was such a thing. Even a bad seed could change into something exquisite. Yet there were also times when a smidgen of evil generated only more of the same. Some of the babies she had brought into this world would turn into swindlers, liars, thieves, rapists, even killers. If she possessed a way to predict how each and every child would develop, would she choose not to deliver some of them? Could she leave an infant in his mother’s womb, comfortably entombed, so as to prevent him from bringing woe and misery into the world?
Each time she took a newborn into her arms, Jamila admired its little toes, the rosebud mouth, the button nose, and felt confident that nothing but good could come from a creature this perfect. But every now and then she also sensed that some babies were different. Right from the beginning. Not necessarily more insensitive or spiteful, but different. The mothers, too, might have detected this, had their intuition not been screened by a curtain of love. Not her, though. Jamila could see things. She just didn’t know what to do with them afterwards.
Hard though it was to believe, there had been midwives who had killed the babies they had brought into this world. That was how the story of Abraham went – the story Jamila and Pembe had heard from their father.
One sunny day Berzo had taken his eight daughters to visit a consecrated pool in Urfa. Naze was about to give birth again, despite her age, and the family had gone there to pray for a son. The clouds were buffeting across the vast, generous sky. People were everywhere, a soft murmur of voices, like the faint rustling of leaves. Overwhelmed by everything they saw, the girls huddled together, timid but thrilled. They fed the fish. On the way back their father had told them the legend behind the place. Berzo was a different man on that day, his eyes not yet hard, his smile genuine. It was before everything had gone terribly wrong.
King Nimrod was a man of endless ambitions and cruelties. One day, his chief stargazer informed him that when a boy named Abraham was born his reign would come to an end. Not ready to let go of the throne, Nimrod ordered all the midwives in his empire to murder every newborn boy. Rich or poor, there would be no exceptions. Thus the midwives set to work. They first helped mothers to deliver babies, and if they turned out to be boys, then and there, they would strangle them. But Abraham’s mother managed to escape the brutality. She gave birth on her own, in a cave in the mountains – dark, damp but otherwise safe.
When Abraham came of age he stood up against the cruelty of Nimrod. The patriarch was infuriated. He instructed everyone, old and young, to gather driftwood for a bonfire so huge that it would go on burning for days on end. Then he had Abraham thrust into the flames. But a while later the prophet walked out of the fire, unhurt except for a strand of his hair that had turned white. In an instant, God had turned the flames into water and the red-hot embers of wood into fish. Thus was born the sacred pool of Urfa.
Despite everything, Jamila didn’t resent her life. After Pembe and Adem got married, she convinced her father to let her remain single and assist the midwives in the region. He had agreed, thinking it was a temporary wish. She had persevered. Today her only regret was not being able to become a doctor. If the circumstances had been different, that would have been her aim. To work in a large, clean hospital and wear a white coat with a tag that said ‘Doctor Jamila Yeter’. Doctor Enough Beauty.
*
Leaning a little closer, Jamila cut two onions into thick slices and placed the rings under the patient’s feet, wrapping them with linen scarves. While the onions drew the fever from the head towards the lower parts of the body, she kept changing the wet towel on his brow every few minutes and did what she always did when there was nothing else to do: she prayed. By midnight the smuggler’s temperature had dropped. Satisfied, Jamila fell asleep on the chair, tumbling into a disturbing dream.
She was in a city on fire, alone and heavily pregnant. She had to find a place to give birth but everywhere she turned there was turmoil. Buildings came crumbling down, people dashed left and right, dogs howled in fright. In the midst of the commotion Jamila saw a huge bed with thick carved posts and silky pillows. She lay there and gave birth to a baby girl. Someone inquired as to her daughter’s name, and she said, ‘I shall call her Pembe after my dead twin.’
Jamila woke up, her heart racing. She checked the smuggler’s temperature. It was now nearly back to normal. He had made it. Outside, the day had broken. Rubbing her aching limbs, Jamila downed a glass of cold water and tried not to think about the dream. Quietly, she lit the stove and started to prepare breakfast. She heated a chunk of butter and cracked three eggs, adding a pinch of salt and some rosemary. Cooking had never been her strength. Mostly she was content with simple dishes, and, as she had no one to care for, she had never felt the need to refine her culinary skills.
‘That smells good. What are you making?’
Jamila flinched, turning back. The smuggler was sitting up in bed, his hair unkempt, his stubble gold and brown. She said, ‘Oh, it’s just eggs.’
He gave a grunt that might have been appreciation and might not. ‘And who on earth are you?’
‘I’m Jamila, the midwife.’
His expression grew reproachful. ‘Why am I here?’
‘You were shot. It’s a miracle that you survived. You’ve been here for a week now. Here, have some tea.’
He took a sip and spat it out. ‘Yuck! What’s this? It tastes like horse piss.’
‘It’s a cure,’ she said, trying not to feel offended. ‘You’d better drink it, and you’d better not spit in my house.’
‘Sorry,’ he said in a coarse whisper. ‘I guess I have to thank you for saving my life.’
‘You should thank Allah, He’s the one who saves lives.’
He pulled a face at the thought, and was silent for a while. ‘Hey, midwife, do you have a cigarette?’
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ Jamila said.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Only a puff.’
Struggling through a range of emotions, Jamila produced a pouch of tobacco and some papers. As she began to roll a cigarette, he observed her hands, rough, red and chapped, sore from being washed thousands of times in cold water, the palms callused from chopping wood.
‘You’re a strange woman,’ he said.
‘So they say.’
‘How can you live here on your own? You need a man to protect you.’
‘Does your wife have a man to protect her now? I bet she’s as lonely as I am. Some women are married and alone. Some, like me, are merely alone.’
The smuggler grinned, a half-humorous glint in his eyes. ‘I can marry you. My wife wouldn??
?t mind. She’d be happy to have company.’
Jamila lit the cigarette, took a drag and blew out the smoke. She passed it to him, unwillingly, ignoring his hand brushing her fingertips ever so slightly. ‘That’s very generous of you, but I’m happy the way I am.’
He gave her a judgemental look but made no comment. Then he spoke again, smoke streaming out of his nostrils, his voice trailing off, ‘There were four of us crossing the border. Did they tell you what happened to the other man?’
Jamila shook her head, not sure she wanted to hear this.
‘He stepped on a landmine. That’s the worst, believe me. I’m not afraid of being shot or going to prison, only of landmines. It won’t happen to me, though. I’ll be buried intact. All my organs with me. No missing parts.’ Not knowing how to respond, she asked, ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Three boys. One more on the way. He’ll be a boy, inshallah.’
‘Any daughters?’
‘Yeah, four of them.’ He bent forward, coughing up phlegm, his face twisted in pain. ‘I must go back. They need me.’
‘Well, they need you strong and healthy, not weak and wounded. You should get some rest first. Then you may leave.’
‘I’ve heard people talking about you. They say you have a djinni husband who visits you on moonless nights. He’s the one who provides you with the secret cures, right?’