10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

No, she would insist on the present tense – even though she now realized with a sinking feeling that her heart had just stopped beating, and her breathing had abruptly ceased, and whichever way she looked at her situation there was no denying that she was dead.

Her skin was already turning greyish-white, even though her cells were still abuzz with activity. She could not help but notice that there was a great deal happening inside her organs and limbs. People always assumed that a corpse was no more alive than a fallen tree or a hollow stump, devoid of consciousness. But given half a chance, Leila would have testified that, on the contrary, a corpse was brimming with life.

She wished she could go back and tell everyone that the dead did not die instantly, that they could, in fact, continue to reflect on things, including their own demise.

So the police would have to go to her friends instead. The five of them: Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122 and Hollywood Humeyra.

She felt awful for having to put them through what was clearly going to be a painful ordeal. But it was a relief to know that they would give her a brilliant funeral. Camphor and frankincense. Music and flowers – particularly, roses. Burning red, bright yellow, deep burgundy … Classic, timeless, unbeatable.

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.

Even at so early an hour, sunlight just beginning to brush the minarets, the rooftops and the uppermost branches of the Judas trees, people were already rushing in this city, already late for somewhere else.

She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she had believed to be lost forever.

She still had nothing, Binnaz often thought; all her possessions were as ephemeral and rootless as dandelion seeds. One stiff breeze, one torrential downpour, and they would be gone, just like that.

At times he recognized that something was broken inside him and he dearly wished he could mend it, but these thoughts never led him anywhere. He was fond of alcohol and fearful of religion in equal degree.

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

Her gut said, Oh, I like it here; I’m not going up there again. Her heart protested, Don’t be silly. Why stay in a place where nothing ever happens? It’s boring. Why leave a place where nothing ever happens? It’s safe, her gut said.

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.

‘Good girl,’ said the midwife. ‘What took you so long? Cry, my dear. Never be ashamed of your tears. Cry and everyone knows you’re alive.’

This wasn’t her first encounter with mental illness, but it would remain her most vivid. Even years later, every time Binnaz wondered when and how her sanity had sneaked away, like a thief climbing out of the window in the dark, this was the moment she would always hark back to, the moment that she believed had debilitated her forever.

She was to be Leyla Afife Kamile, full of virtue, high in merit. But years later, after she had turned up in Istanbul, alone and broke; after she had seen the sea for the first time, amazed at how that vast expanse of blue stretched to the horizon; after she had noticed that the curls in her hair turned to frizz in the humid air; after she had awoken one morning in a strange bed next to a man she had never seen before and her chest felt so heavy she thought she could never draw breath again; after she had been sold to a brothel where she was forced to have sex with ten to fifteen men each day in a room with a green plastic bucket on the floor, collecting the water that dripped from the ceiling every time it rained … long after all that, she would be known to her five dear friends, one eternal love and many clients as Tequila Leila.

They respected him the way cruel and powerful people have been respected since the dawn of time – with abundant fear, and not a speck of love.

There were also days when Auntie appeared to be without a care in the world. Relaxed and radiant, she spent hours playing with Leila in the garden. Together they dangled strips of fabric from apple boughs laden with blossom, calling them ballerinas, took their sweet time to weave little baskets out of willow or crowns out of daisies; tied ribbons around the horns of the ram waiting to be sacrificed next Eid.

There was something ghost-like about Auntie: she didn’t take possession of things, but merely floated through them.

Leila looked around as though in search of an answer. Everything was the same. And nothing would be from now on.

Bitter Ma was fond of Leila – partly because she was honest and hard-working; partly because she bore an uncanny resemblance to the sister Bitter Ma had left, decades ago, in the Balkans.

She was sure she had caught some horrible disease. Invisible parasites were crawling under and over her skin. In the local hammam that the prostitutes visited once a week, she washed and scrubbed herself until her body burned red; and upon her return, she boiled her pillowcases and bedsheets. It was no use. The parasites kept coming back.

Spirited and spunky, ferocious to her enemies, loyal to her dearest: Nostalgia Nalan – Leila’s bravest friend. Nostalgia Nalan, one of the five.

A bee would work her entire brief life just to make enough honey to fill the tip of a teaspoon. Osman would wonder what he was going to create in his lifetime – the question both exciting and frightening him to the core.

Leila beamed, delighted at the prospect of being the boss for once. During the rest of the journey, Uncle happily played along. At every pit stop, he opened the door for her, brought her drinks and biscuits and, after a little rain in the afternoon, carried her over a puddle in the road so that her shoes wouldn’t get dirty. ‘Is she a football manager or the Queen of Sheba?’ said Baba, watching from the side. Uncle said, ‘She’s the manager of our football team and the queen of my heart.’

Up the road, a giant mulberry tree towered in the fields. When the wind came whirling down the mountain and slammed against the tree, it rained purple mulberries, staining their clothes and hands.

The Lady Pharmacist shook her head. ‘Nothing,

Sinan, her sheltering tree, her refuge, a witness to all that she was, all that she aspired to and, in the end, all that she could never be. Sinan, one of the five.

His father may have been gone but he was present in everything. The boy did not think he himself would leave such a big void if it were he who had gone.

Now and then he caught his mother staring at him pensively, wearily, and it occurred to him that she might be wondering why he had not died instead of his father. It was in such moments that he felt so lonely and ugly that he could barely move.

Mother was gentle with the dead, less so with the living. But the boy thought one should be even gentler with the living than with the dead, because, after all, they were the ones struggling to make sense of this world, weren’t they?

Everyone seemed a little lost, vulnerable and unsure of themselves, whether they were educated or not, modern or not, Eastern or not, grown up or a child. That’s what he reckoned, this boy. He, for one, always felt more comfortable next to people who were not perfect in any way.

Leila’s smile grew wider. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a feather drifting away – perhaps from a pigeon hiding on the roof or an angel flying overhead. Despite her reservations about school, she decided that she liked Auntie’s version of Paradise.

Instantly, the baby’s expression softened. He reached out towards his sister, pulled off Leila’s bracelet – of brown leather braiding with a blue satin cord woven through it – and held it in the air.

‘Don’t worry, child, your brother doesn’t understand anything.’ ‘He does!’ Leila yelled, her voice like shattered glass. ‘He understands everything.’

She was the only one who thought him capable of doing extraordinary things.

‘Those clandestine radio broadcasts you keep telling me about,’ said Leila as the two of them sat under the only tree in the playground. ‘I was thinking, you are like that, aren’t you? Thanks to you, I follow what’s happening in the world.’ His face lit up. ‘I am your sabotage radio!’

Because Tarkan stayed at home all the time, so did Auntie. They were not close any more, Leila and Auntie; each passing year seemed to pull them further apart.

He pointed towards the cupboards, as if hell were between the jars of pickled cucumbers that lined the shelves.

‘What if …’ Leila breathed in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. ‘Let’s say, what happens if you have done something wrong, and you know it’s wrong, but you really didn’t mean to do it?’

She had filth in her, of this she was convinced. Filth that wouldn’t wash away, like a crease in her palm. And now here was Baba telling her that Allah, who knew everything and saw everything, would not forgive her.

She, too, blamed herself and would continue to do so for years to come. Back then she was used to that – everything she did and thought tended towards an all-pervasive guilt.

The circle, the shape of captivity for an old Yazidi man, but a symbol of freedom for a young American model, thus became a sad memory for a girl in an Eastern town.

While Mother had seemed secretly relieved to hear this and quickly changed the subject, Auntie had stared at her with sorrowful eyes, recognizing in Leila’s miscarriage one of her own. ‘It will pass,’ she had said in a soft murmur. ‘It will be over soon.’ It was the first time in years anyone had told Leila anything about the mysteries of the female body.

‘Don’t be rude to your aunt,’ said Baba. ‘Which aunt? I thought she was my mother. Is she or is she not?’ No one answered. ‘This house is full of lies and deceptions. Our lives have never been normal. We are not a normal family … Why are you always pretending?’ ‘Enough, Leyla!’ Mother said, her frown deepening. ‘We are all trying to help you here.’ Leila spoke slowly. ‘I don’t think so. I think you are trying to save Uncle.’

The day Tarkan died, they threw open all the windows in the house so that his soul could swap places with light, and his breath could turn into air, and whatever remained of him could fly away in peace. Like a trapped butterfly, thought Leila. That’s what his brother had been in their midst. She feared they had all let this beautiful child down, one by one, including herself, mostly herself.

Although Leila did not say this aloud, somewhere in her soul echoed the words she had a feeling she had heard before: Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you.

‘Don’t phone us again,’ he said. ‘If you do, we’ll tell the operator we are not accepting the call. We don’t have a daughter called Leyla. Leyla Afife Kamile: you don’t deserve those names.’

That evening, as Leila looked over at the young black woman sitting across from her, she did not see her foreignness. Instead she saw her braided bracelet and remembered the one she had lost; she saw the talisman she had sewn inside her cardigan, and remembered all the talismans that had failed to protect her; she saw the way she hugged her rucksack against her chest, as if expecting to be kicked out of this place, if not of this country, at any second, and recognized in her manner a familiar loneliness, a forlornness. She had the odd feeling that she might as well be staring at her own reflection.

Then, one afternoon, months after that initial exchange, Jameelah reached out from the opposite bench, crossing an invisible wall, and dropped something light inside Leila’s palm. It was a braided bracelet in periwinkle and heather and dark cherry – shades of purple. ‘For me?’ Leila asked softly. A nod. ‘Yes, your colours.’