10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.

‘Kader ’, people called it – ‘destiny’ – and said no more, because people always gave simple names to the complex things that frightened them.

Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.

Once they secretly cut the rope that kept the animal fastened to the shed. But the ram did not break loose as they had planned. After meandering here and there in search of fresh grass, it returned to the same spot, finding the familiarity of captivity more reassuring than the strange call of freedom.

Her aunt said that storks – unlike humans – were loyal to their memories. Once they had made a place ‘home’, even if they found themselves miles away from it, they always returned.

Nobody wanted to buy tomatoes that had been touched, squeezed and sullied by other customers. Better if all the tomatoes in the market were carefully packaged and preserved. Same with women, the sheikh said. The hijab was their package, the armour that protected them from suggestive looks and unwanted touches.

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

Just as the sour could hide beneath the sweet, or vice versa, within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity.

Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden – that such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards. This was the only form of affection she had learned from grown-ups, and the teaching would come with dire consequences.

She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them.

In a world they could neither fully understand nor prevail in, music was the only joy that was free of charge.

This city always surprised her; moments of innocence were hidden in its darkest corners, moments so elusive that by the time she realized how pure they were, they would be gone.

Leila had written to her family several times, but never heard back from them. She wondered what they did with her letters – did they keep them in a box away from all eyes or did they tear them up? Did the postman take them back, and if so, where? There had to be a place, some obscure address, for letters that remained unwelcome and unread.

Leila wondered if he understood that he would never be like other children. She hoped not. For his own good. It must be painful to be different and to know it deep within.

How could the same shape that separated and trapped one human being become a symbol of ultimate freedom and sheer bliss for someone else?

Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind – a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood.

She was thinking, maybe she was only a half-broken horse, too frightened to bolt, too lame to dare, but still able to remember the sweet taste of, and therefore to yearn for, freedom.

she is, my pasha: Tequila Leila! She’s one of my finest.’ ‘Is that her name? Why do you call her that?’ He eyed Leila from head to toe. ‘Because she’s impatient, that one. She wants life to run fast. But she’s resilient too; she can guzzle the sour and the bitter, like downing tequila shots. I gave her that name.’

The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.

Always being sent somewhere, never able to stay put, she had the bizarre feeling that they wanted her both to remain within reach and to disappear completely.

But Leila always told Humeyra to set her mind at ease. She assured her friend that she was one of the lucky ones, the resilient ones, and, like the walls of the monastery she had grown up looking at, like the cat they had saved together that fortuitous night, she was, despite all the odds stacked against her, destined to survive.

Know yourself and know an arsehole when you see one. Knowledge of self and knowledge of arseholes had to go hand in hand.

In a land where justice often came late, if it came at all, many citizens sought their own revenge, reciprocating hurt with bigger hurt. Two eyes for an eye, a jaw for a tooth. Not that all crime was planned – most was committed on the spur of the moment, in fact. A glance perceived as dirty could be grounds for manslaughter. A word misunderstood could be an excuse for bloodshed. Istanbul made killing easy, and dying even easier.

Like all the unclaimed dead, she, too, would be consigned to the Cemetery of the Companionless. No Islamic burial rituals would be performed for this woman. Nor of any other religion, for that matter. Her body would not be washed by the next of kin; her hair would not be braided into three separate braids; her hands would not be placed gently over her heart in a gesture of eternal peace; her eyelids would not be closed to make sure that from now on her gaze was turned inward. In the graveyard, there would be no pall-bearers or mourners, no imam leading the prayers and not one professional weeper hired to cry and wail louder than everyone else. She would be buried the way all the undesirables were – silently and swiftly. Afterwards, she would probably have no visitors. Perhaps an old neighbour or a niece – one distant enough not to mind the shame brought upon the family – would show up a few times, but eventually the visits would cease. In just a few months’ time, with no marker or stone, the woman’s grave would fully blend in with its surroundings. In less than a decade, no one would be able to locate her whereabouts. She would become yet another number in the Cemetery of the Companionless, yet another pitiable soul whose life echoed the opening of every Anatolian tale: Once there was, once there wasn’t …

If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.

‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’

Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home. As for the water family, this was formed much later in life, and was, to a large extent, of your own making. While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot. It was therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined. But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years. They would never know that there were times when water ran thicker than blood.

It wasn’t that death scared her. Nor did she believe in an afterlife where the wrongs of this world would be miraculously righted. The only professed atheist among Leila’s friends, Nalan saw the flesh – and not some abstract concept of the soul – as eternal. Molecules mixed with soil, providing nutrition for plants, those plants were then devoured by animals, and animals by humans, and so, contrary to the assumptions of the majority, the human body was immortal, on a never-ending journey through the cycles of nature. What more could one possibly want from the hereafter?

Humeyra believed there was something markedly similar about the experience of being overweight and being prone to melancholy. In both cases society blamed the sufferer. No other medical condition was regarded this way. People with any other illness received at least a degree of sympathy and moral support. Not the obese or the depressed. You could have controlled your appetite … You could have controlled your thoughts …

‘I don’t care who your uncle is. Rules are rules.’ Even children knew this was not true. Rules were sometimes rules. At other times, depending on the circumstances, they were empty words, absurd phrases or jokes without a punchline. Rules were sieves with holes so large that all sorts of things could pass through; rules were sticks of chewing gum that had long lost their taste but could not be spat out; rules in this country, and across the entire Middle East, were anything but rules.