‘What makes no sense?’ Selma said irritably.
‘In the Quran, God never instructed Abraham to go and sacrifice his son – the man got it all wrong.’
‘The man!’
‘But listen, wife, Abraham didn’t actually hear God order him to kill his son. He had a dream, right? What if he misinterpreted? I think God in His mercy saw how wrong Abraham got it all and in order to save His son, He sent the lamb.’
Selma sighed. ‘You are like a big, sulky boy. I’ve raised my children, thank God. I have no desire for another child in the house.’
Determined to buy her own sheep, Selma would put aside money. The animal would be kept in the garden, hennaed and fed, until it was sent to slaughter. Its meat would then be distributed among seven neighbours and the poor.
One such year – Peri must have been thirteen years old – the same neighbours decided to pool their liras to buy a bull. They had expected a majestic creature that radiated power, trailed by its dark shadow. The bull that arrived, though huge, looked nervous, almost crazed with fear. He was neither a meek sacrificial lamb nor a glorious offering. He was a disappointment.
They put the animal in the garage where, over the next two days, its distress escalated. At nights they could hear it struggling, trying to escape, roars that sounded like they came from deep down in his soul. Perhaps it had sensed its fate. On the third day, as soon as they took it out into the sun, the bull broke free. Galloping at full speed, it charged at the first man, a hapless passer-by in its path, dragging him to the ground. He managed to disentangle himself and hide behind a rubbish bin. Laughter rose from the spectators who had gathered in the meantime. Someone patted the survivor on the back. Children ran to find out what the hullabaloo was about. Climbing up on the garden wall, Peri could see the bull’s horns swinging, the lonely beast scattering the crowd, its terror now almost absolute.
Unlike lambs before slaughter, the bull was a fighter and what a fight he had put up – against twenty men chasing him from all sides. He charged on to the highway, a battleground of tarmac where he would be surrounded by an army of metallic monsters. It took the men three hours to get the animal under control, and then only after they had shot it with a tranquillizer gun before killing it. Later, a few people cautioned that its meat was not halal since the tranquillizers had made it dizzy. But by then no one cared an iota about their opinion.
‘What kind of barbarism is this?’ Mensur complained to his wife back home. ‘Islam says do not hurt anyone, animals included. That poor creature died in fear. They tortured him. I’m not eating this meat.’
Selma said nothing for a moment. ‘Don’t eat it, fine. Maybe I won’t either. But don’t say anything bad. Have respect, husband.’
Peri, who had expected a row, was surprised to see her parents agree for once. The meat that was their share was distributed to families in need.
That evening at the dinner table, Peri noticed her father refilled his glass rather too often. ‘What a day, eh?’ he said distractedly. ‘Chasing people chasing a bull. I haven’t felt this tired since you kids were born and kept us awake half the night.’ His words were slurred.
Peri, who was filling her glass with water from a jug, almost spilled it. ‘What do you mean, “you kids”?’
Mensur drew a hand across his forehead. His was the face of a man who just realized he had made a careless slip. For a moment he seemed to be debating whether to keep on talking. ‘Well, I’m sure you must remember.’
‘Remember what?’
‘There was a boy, your twin. He didn’t survive.’
Something was forming at the edge of her consciousness. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, bumblebee, don’t ask. It was so long ago,’ Mensur said, but then, overwhelmed by curiosity, added, ‘You really have no idea?’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Baba.’
‘I see, that’s odd … I always thought you might recall – things.’
It would take Peri years to discover what he meant by that.
The train pulled into Paddington Station. Shirin was waiting by the ticket machines, wearing a silver-grey fur coat reaching to her knees. In the heart of the city, she looked like a creature from the steppes.
‘How many animals have been killed for that thing?’ Peri asked.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not real,’ said Shirin, as she kissed her on the cheeks.
Peri studied her friend’s face. ‘You’re lying, right?’
‘Huh!’ Shirin huffed. ‘It’s the first time you caught me out. Congratulations, I’m so happy for you, Mouse. Your eyes are opening.’
Peri knew she was teasing her. Much as she laughed, she felt a stab of unease as she detected a small truth in her friend’s words: Shirin had lied to her before, probably more than once, but about what or why Peri had yet to discover.
The Belly Dancer
Oxford, 2002
Peri opened the window, enjoying the touch of cold air. She was happy to be back in her room, though she longed for a bigger space. She sat on the bed with a book in her hand and pulled her legs towards herself. In one of his earlier classes Azur had asked the students to read an article on the idea of God in Kantian philosophy. She found Kant more puzzling on the second reading than the first. She could see why theologians were drawn to the German philosopher. But, then again, notorious thinkers in the opposite camp, e.g. Nietzsche or Darwin, could also be traced back to him. Peri concluded that Immanuel Kant, like Istanbul, had many facets to his nature.
No wonder Azur liked him so. He, too, was multifarious. There were Azurs, a whole cast of them. The self-confident debater in the panel discussion; the actor in daily life who loved and craved attention; the intimidating professor in the classroom; the demanding Inquisitor in his office; the gentle host in the privacy of his house – how many more faces did he have? Her thoughts flicked back to the New Year’s Eve dinner and its aftermath. Since then she had been avoiding Darren, although he had called numerous times and left messages that sounded increasingly concerned, if not hurt. She would have gladly locked herself in her room until she could clear her mind, had it not been for classes and the part-time job in the bookshop – and for Shirin, who always found a fresh excuse to knock on her door.
Her attraction to Azur had rendered daily life painfully intense. Whenever she visited him in his rooms to talk about the baby in the mist, his every gesture, every word, she read and misread, unable to see him with any degree of equanimity. Like a necromancer who found divine signs everywhere, she searched for hidden messages within the most mundane. She worked harder than ever, however, determined to make an impression on Azur with her intelligence and brilliance. But that opportunity to impress him, the revelatory moment that she waited and waited for, never came. She remained withdrawn next to him, most of the time, her stomach in knots. Every now and then she swung the other way. Armed with a burst of courage or desperation, she objected and debated, challenged and questioned, and then sank back into silence again.
This would never happen to her, she had thought. She was not one of those girls who developed an obsession with older men; girls who, in her opinion, were looking for the father figure absent in their lives. Why she was drawn to Azur, she didn’t think she could explain to anyone, least of all to herself. Not that she wished to share what she felt for him. Like the God-diary she had kept since childhood, like the baby in the mist, Azur had become a carefully guarded secret. Nevertheless, she developed the habit of holding one of his books in her hands before going to sleep, tracing the letters of his name with her fingers in the dark, some schmaltzy music on in the background. During the day she hung around near his college, furtively glancing round a corner in case he might be around. Whenever she didn’t have a lecture or a tutorial, she went out of her way to buy a morning coffee from the café that he frequented, although the few times when she saw him coming, she hid in the lavatory. As she kept doing all these ridiculous things, another part of her, distant and judgemen
tal, watched disapprovingly, hoping it was all a season of madness and would someday soon come to an end.
Now, unable to stand either her own thoughts or Kant’s, Peri put on her trainers and went out for a run. Despite the cold, the promise of joy lingered in the evening air like crystals of dew. The lack of noise that had struck her when she first moved to this town from Istanbul did not surprise her any more.
At the corner of Longwall Street, she saw a phone box. Given the two hours’ time difference, her father would be drinking at home – alone or with friends.
Mensur picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Baba … I’m sorry, did I call at a bad time?’
‘Peri, my dear,’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you mean “bad time”, you can always call. I wish you did more often.’
Her breath caught in her throat at the tenderness in his voice.
‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘How is Mother?’
‘In her room. Do you want me to call her?’
‘No, I’ll talk to her another time.’ She added, gently, ‘I miss you so much.’
‘Oh, you are going to make me cry, bumblebee.’
‘I feel terrible for not being able to come home for New Year’s Eve.’
‘Ah, who cares about New Year’s Eve?’ Mensur said. ‘Your mum overcooked the turkey and burned the pilaff. So we ate bone-dry meat and black rice. We played Tombala. Your mum won. She claims she didn’t cheat but can we believe her? Oh, and we watched a belly dancer on TV – I mean, I did. That was all.’
There were things he hadn’t mentioned but Peri heard them nonetheless: Mensur’s persistent drinking and the scantily clad dancer shaking her hips, both of which would have enraged Selma; the quarrel her parents had had, yet again.
As though he had read her thoughts, Mensur said, ‘I had a few, yes. What better occasion? You know what they say, the way you spend the first hours of the New Year will be how you spend all the other days of the year.’
Peri’s heart fell.
‘It’s all right that you couldn’t come,’ Mensur said. ‘We’ll have many more years to celebrate. School is the most important thing.’
School … Not university or college, but school. That basic word that had an almost sacred quality for countless parents who, though not fully educated themselves, believed in education and invested all they could in their children’s future.
‘How is my brother?’ Peri inquired. She didn’t feel the need to specify which one. It had to be Hakan, since they rarely talked about Umut, and, when they did, it was always in a different tone.
‘Good, good. They’re expecting a baby.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Mensur said, his voice soaring with pride. ‘A boy.’
It had been more than a year since that terrible night at the hospital, but the memory of it was still fresh in her mind. The smell of disinfectants, the moss-green paint, the red crescents on the bride’s palms – and now Feride was having his baby. Her mother’s words echoed in her head: Many a marriage has been built on shakier foundations.
‘I don’t think I could ever do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Marry someone who treats me badly.’
Mensur huffed – half sigh, half laugh. ‘Your mother and I love you,’ he said and paused, unused to mentioning the two of them in the same breath. ‘Whatever makes you happy, we’ll support.’
Tears welled in her eyes. She always felt more vulnerable when people treated her with compassion than with animosity.
‘What’s wrong, my soul? Are you crying?’
She ignored the question. ‘But, Baba … what if one day I shame you? Would you reject me?’
‘I’ll never reject my own daughter no matter what,’ Mensur said. ‘As long as you don’t bring home a bearded imam for a son-in-law. Now that’d kill me! And you probably shouldn’t date one of those musicians with tattooed biceps either, what are they called? Metalheads. I wouldn’t mind but that’d drive your mum mad. So other than an imam or a metalhead, there are plenty of options.’
Peri laughed. She remembered their rituals in front of the TV, the times he had taught her how to whistle, how to blow a bubble with chewing gum, how to eat salted sunflower seeds, deftly breaking the shells between her teeth.
‘Seriously, who is this lucky boy?’ Mensur asked.
That last word, ‘boy’, was sobering. From her father’s perspective she could only love a boy, someone her own age.
‘Oh, just a student, it’s nothing serious. I’m too young for anything serious.’
‘Yes, Pericim.’ He sounded relieved. ‘It’ll pass. Focus on your lessons.’
‘I will, Baba.’
‘Oh, don’t mention this to your mother. There’s no need to worry her.’
‘Of course not.’
After she hung up, she ran for a good hour. Her feet slipped on the icy paving stones but she persevered. By the time she returned to the quad, she had pushed herself so hard her calves throbbed with pain and her throat felt sore every time she swallowed, the first signs of a nasty flu. She fell asleep immediately, still running in her dreams, clutching a note Shirin had written and left on her bed.
Peri, I’ve found the perfect home for us! Get ready, we’re moving out!
The List
Istanbul, 2016
‘Did you hear what just happened? Awful, awful!’
It was the PR woman, addressing her question to the room at large. She had stepped out to visit the lavatory, but returned immediately, her face flushed.
‘What is it this time?’ someone said.
There are two kinds of cities in the world: those that reassure their residents that tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, will be much the same; and those that do the opposite, insidiously reminding their inhabitants of life’s uncertainty. Istanbul is of the second kind. There is no room for introspection, no time to wait for the clocks to catch up with the pace of events. Istanbulites dart from one breaking news story to the next, moving fast, consuming faster, until something else happens that demands their full attention.
‘I saw it on my Twitter feed, an explosion,’ said the PR woman.
‘In Istanbul?’ asked the businessman. ‘When?’
The three fundamental questions, always in this order: What? Where? When? What: a terrible explosion had been reported. Where: in one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in the historic quarter of the city. When: no more than four minutes ago. Such was the magnitude of the blast, it had demolished the façade of the building where it happened and shattered the windows all the way down to the next street, injuring passers-by, setting off car alarms and altering, for a fleeting moment, the colour of the night sky to a rusty brown.
Most of the guests, led by the businesswoman, rushed upstairs to watch the news on TV. Peri followed them, if slowly, into a bright, comfortable room. She stood at the back of the group, from where she could get a glimpse of the large flat screen. An agitated reporter – a young woman with hair so long she could have used it as a cloak – spoke fast, holding the microphone with both hands. ‘We still don’t know how many have been killed, how many injured, but it’s not looking good. Not good. All we know is that it was a powerful bomb.’
A bomb. The word, like a toxic fume out of nowhere, hung in the middle of the room. Until that point, the guests had secretly hoped it might have been a gas leak or a faulty generator that caused the mayhem. Not that it would have diminished the gravity of what had occurred. But a bomb was different. A bomb meant not only a tragic incident, but also an intent to kill. Disasters were scary, all right. Evil combined with disasters was terrifying.
Even so, they had learned to live with bombs – or the possibility of them. Random and erratic though they were, terrorists were believed to follow certain patterns. They did not strike at night. They almost always chose daylight hours, when they could target the greatest number of people in the briefest amount
of time and make it into the next day’s headlines. The night, dangerous though in other ways, was safe from such violence. Or so they had thought.
Hence, the businesswoman asked, ‘A bomb? At this odd hour?’
‘Probably the terrorists got stuck in traffic too,’ quipped the businessman. ‘Nothing runs on time in Istanbul any more, not even Azrael.’
They laughed – a brief, mirthless chuckle. Jokes in the face of calamity made one feel dirty, guilty; they also dissolved the fear and lessened the weight of uncertainty, of which there was too much to bear.
Meanwhile on the TV screen, in the background, a crowd of children and men had gathered, hanging on the reporter’s every word, hoping to be the one chosen to be interviewed. A boy, no older than twelve, waved his hand, excited to see the lens pointed at his face.
Now the screen switched to a helicopter view, showing the neighbourhood from above. Houses built on top of one another, clustered so densely that they resembled an uninterrupted block of concrete. Upon closer inspection the differences, however, were discernible. One building, in particular, looked as if it had been through years of civil war. Blasted-out windows, burned-down walls, broken glass on the pavement outside.
‘We were at home, the whole family, in front of the TV, we heard this sound, the ground shook. I thought it was an earthquake,’ said an eyewitness – a short, stocky man in pyjamas. In his voice there was an excitement he could barely contain – dumbfounded that he was now on the same network he had been watching only minutes ago, being viewed by millions. As he went on to describe ‘how he felt’, at the reporter’s request, a red banner ran along the bottom of the screen announcing the death toll.
In the seaside mansion, the guests returned to the salon, one by one, to bring the rest of the group up to date. ‘Five dead, fifteen injured.’
‘That number might increase. Some of the injured are in critical condition,’ said the journalist, who had stayed put to call his office.
With the ease with which they passed on plates of meze at the dinner table, they now exchanged morsels of gory detail. Redundancy did not matter, much less repetition. The more they shared, the less real it all felt. Tragedy was a commodity like any other. It was meant to be consumed – individually and collectively.