The Architect's Apprentice

by Elif Shafak

It’s odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.

I think about Istanbul every day. People must be walking now across the courtyards of the mosques, not knowing, not seeing.

Whatever you do, she would have said, don’t hurt anyone and don’t let anyone hurt you. Be neither a heartbreaker nor heartbroken.’

Prayer should be a declaration of love, and love should be stripped of all fear and expectation, he said. One ought not fear boiling in cauldrons or wish for virgin houris, since both hell and heaven, suffering and joy, were right here and right now.

‘When you finish off an enemy, it settles in your gait,’ the soldier said. ‘For every dastard’s head you get a mansion in heaven.’

How unfair, Jahan thought, that only the humans would go to heaven, having attained martyrdom, while the animals that accompanied them and died for them were turned away from the gates of Paradise.

‘Sometimes, for the soul to thrive, the heart needs to be broken, son.’

‘We are not destroying the buildings, son. We are destroying our desire to possess them.

Languid and placid sunsets slipped by. Blissful days these were – though, as too often happens with blissful days, they would be appreciated only when they were no more.

Those who surround themselves with grovellers who praise everything they do will not forgive the honest man who tells the truth.’

‘If you wish to excel at your craft, you have to convince the universe why it should be you rather than someone else.’

The children of Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Georgians and Armenians were taken into the levy of boys, but not the children of Turks, Kurds, Iranians and Gypsies.

It was as if there were two invisible arcs: with our deeds and words we ascended; with our deeds and words we descended.

‘Greed puts gratitude to sleep.’

‘Does what we do in life matter so much? Or is it what we don’t do that carries weight?’

It was after this incident that Jahan understood his master’s secret resided not in his toughness, for he was not tough, nor in his indestructibility, for he was not indestructible, but in his ability to adapt to change and calamity, and to rebuild himself, again and again, out of the ruins. While Jahan was made of wood, and Davud of metal, and Nikola of stone, and Yusuf of glass, Sinan was made of flowing water. When anything blocked his course, he would flow under, around, above it, however he could; he found his way through the cracks, and kept flowing forward.

Nothing ruins the human soul more than hidden resentment.

Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.

‘Wisdom does not rain from the sky, it springs from the earth, from hard work,’

In that moment Jahan understood that life was the sum of the choices one did not make; the paths yearned for but not taken.

There were secrets a whole town might know about that still remained secrets.