Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

Time, like a skilful tailor, had seamlessly stitched together the two fabrics that sheathed Peri’s life: what people thought of her and what she thought of herself.

Like a magic wand in the wrong hands, the traffic turned minutes into hours, humans into brutes and any trace of sanity into sheer lunacy.

Madness coursed through this city’s streets, like an intoxicating drug in the bloodstream. Every day millions of Istanbulites downed another dose, not realizing that they were becoming more and more unbalanced. People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead. There was something inscrutable about the collective loss of reason: if enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth; if enough people laughed at the same misery, it became a funny little joke.

But solitude was a rare privilege in Istanbul. There was always some important event to attend or an urgent social responsibility to fulfil as if the culture, like a child scared of loneliness, made sure everyone was at all times in the company of others.

She had always suspected that if chewing-gum flavours were political regimes, peppermint would be Fascism – totalitarian, sterile, stern.

Compassion never came as an afterthought: it was either spontaneous or absent entirely.

Their marriage had been so deeply woven with mutual resentment that they no longer needed a reason to feel wronged and frustrated.

Like the majority of the people in this land, they talked most about the things they liked least.

‘In a democracy, when a man gets drunk, he cries, “What happened to my sweetheart?” Where there is no democracy, when a man gets drunk, he cries, “What happened to my sweet country?”

Early on she learned that there was no fight more hurtful than a family fight, and no family fight more hurtful than one over God.

God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together. If only she could solve this mystery, she could bring meaning to senselessness, reason to madness, order to chaos, and perhaps, too, she could learn to be happy.

So many prayers are carbon copies of one another. Protect me, love me, support me, it’s all about me … They call it piousness; I call it selfishness in disguise.’

In the end, wasn’t that the only real aspiration to be fulfilled in life: to do a better job than our parents, so our children might be better parents than we were?

All she wanted was some sort of ceasefire. A temporary suspension of pain.

Peri would come to understand that nothing swells the ego quite like a cause motivated by the delusion of pure selflessness.

How could they be so certain of the superiority of their truths when they knew so little, if anything at all, about other cultures, other philosophies, other ways of thinking?

The arrogance of the secular modernists. The pompous and pretentious ease with which they placed themselves outside and above society, looking down on centuries-old traditions. How could they call themselves enlightened when they knew so little, if anything at all, about their own culture, their own faith?

Was the way of God one of camouflage, a trick to disguise calculated revenge?

Whether in the name of God or science, there was no satisfaction for the ego quite like the satisfaction of converting someone to your side.

Maybe I want too many things at once and nothing passionately enough.

In the name of religion they are killing God. For the sake of discipline and authority, they forget love.’

there’s no such thing as a small god. Once somebody starts playing God, sooner or later, things will get out of hand.’

placing another human being, if not at the centre of your life then somewhere close to it, was a lot of effort.

as though, he, too, were trying his hand at the art of feigning happiness.

There were different ways of growing of old, perhaps. Some withered first in body, others in mind, yet others in soul.

Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?

I, as a simple human being, need both faith and doubt. Uncertainty, gentlemen, is a blessing. We do not crush it. We celebrate it. That’s the way of the Third Path.’

‘People who apologize unnecessarily are also inclined to thank unnecessarily.’ Peri swallowed hard. ‘Maybe they’re just anxious souls trying to get by. They do what they can to keep up with others but they know there’s always a gap.’

It was easier – and somehow less offensive – to say the unsayable in someone else’s language, like a masquerade party-goer dropping her guard behind a costume and a mask.

Bach could make you a believer – or a true sceptic.’

‘But I’d rather forget. The past is a burden. What’s the use of remembering when we can’t change anything?’

‘Only the young have the luxury to forget,’

Fate was a gambler who loved raising the stakes.

Those who went away in search of better lives in foreign lands were at once envied and belittled. It wasn’t about New York, London or Rome. To those who stayed behind it was the very idea of life elsewhere. They, too, longed for new skies to walk under. Over breakfasts and brunches they made elaborate plans to move abroad – almost always meaning the West. But their plans, like sand castles, slowly eroded with the rising tide of familiarity. Relatives, friends and shared memories anchored them. Little by little, they forgot their yearnings for another place – until the day they ran into someone who had actually done what they had once wished to do. That’s when resentment kicked in.

Her memory she treated as a duty, a responsibility that had to be honoured to the very end – even though she sensed that a burden so large could only pull her down someday.

She carried the absence of God within. No wonder it felt so heavy.

There was something paradoxical about public disgrace that, insofar as it robbed one of social roles and respectability, was liberating.

When we fall in love we turn the other person into our god – how dangerous is that? And when he doesn’t love us back, we respond with anger, resentment, hatred

‘There’s something about love that resembles faith. It’s a kind of blind trust, isn’t it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love – or by faith – it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of the gods that we ourselves created.’