10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

Jameelah, the woman who looked into people’s souls and, only when she saw what she needed to see, decided whether to open up her heart to them.

Jameelah had no intention of visiting the church again, but, a week later, she did. By the age of seventeen she had joined the congregation at the cost of infuriating her father and breaking her siblings’ hearts. As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t made a choice between two Abrahamic religions; she was simply holding on to an invisible thread that connected her to her mother. No one else saw it that way. No one forgave her.

The Africans in Istanbul came from all sides of the old continent – Tanganyika, Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Upper Volta, Ethiopia – escaping civil war, religious violence, political insurgency. The number of asylum seekers had increased daily over the years. Among them were students, professionals, artists, journalists, scholars … But the only Africans mentioned in the newspapers were those who, like her, had been trafficked.

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.

Leila grew still, her eyes focused somewhere outside the room. ‘It’s a serious thing to believe in someone,’ she said. And for a moment she was a girl in Van again, standing in the kitchen, watching the woman who had given birth to her chop lettuce and earthworms. ‘You can’t just say it like that. It’s a big commitment, to believe.’

‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard from your lips,’ said Zaynab122. ‘We all need dreams, habibi. One day you are going to surprise everyone. They’ll say, “Look at Leila, she moved mountains! First she walks out of one brothel to another; she has enough courage to leave an awful madam. Then she quits the street altogether. What a woman!” They will talk about you even long after you’ve gone. You’ll give them hope.’

Zaynab122, the diviner, the optimist, the believer; for whom the word ‘faith’ was synonymous with the word ‘love’ and for whom God, therefore, could only be Beloved.

Her brothers and sisters were fiercely against this dream of hers, which they saw as pure madness. But Zaynab was adamant. How could they possibly know how she felt deep within when Allah had created them so differently? What did they know about being a little person, clinging with your fingers to the edge of society? In the end, once again, it was her father who understood her better than anyone.

that perhaps her home was not where she was born but where she chose to die; that with what remained of her health, her years on earth, she wished to do what no one in the family had done to this day and become one of the journeyers.

Instead he wanted to know other things about her – what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give every city a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul?

D/Ali seemed to perceive the world through flavours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells.

And, once again in her life, she was torn between her gut and her heart. Her gut warned her that there was more to him than the considerate, gentle young man she saw and she had to be very careful. But her heart pushed her forward – just like it had done when, as a newborn baby, she had lain motionless under a blanket of salt.

A hushed concentration permeated his movements, and his eyes watched her intently, oblivious to everything else, as though she was, and had always been, the centre of the world.

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.

‘But I do have a dream, if you are wondering.’ D/Ali squeezed his eyes tight shut, not wanting to see her face when she heard what he was about to say. ‘It’s about you, actually.’ ‘Oh yeah? What is it?’ ‘I want you to marry me.’

‘Noticed what?’ Leila pulled her hand away as though from fire. ‘That I love you,’ he said. ‘Ever since I saw you for the first time … on the stairs … the day the Sixth Fleet came … remember?’

Strange as it was, it seemed to her that the border – where Turkey came to an end and Syria began – was not a fixed dividing line, but a living, breathing thing, a nocturnal creature. It shifted while people on both sides were sound asleep. In the mornings, it adjusted itself again, ever so slightly, to the left or the right.

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.

Later on, when Leila would pressure him about where he had got the money from, he would say his comrades had chipped in. The revolution, he claimed, was all for love and for lovers.

Leila knew that he wanted her to feel as passionately as he did about communism. He wanted them to be members of the same club, citizens of the same nation, dreamers of the same dream. This worried her deeply. Just as she had failed once before in believing in her father’s God, she worried that she might fail this time to believe in her husband’s revolution. Maybe it was her. Maybe she just didn’t have enough faith inside.

She wondered whether, just as too many cooks spoiled the broth, too many revolutionaries could ruin a revolution, but once again she kept her thoughts to herself.

Two days later, Nostalgia Nalan tried one last place, a clinic in Galata that she knew from before. And they confirmed that D/Ali had been brought there. He was one of the thirty-four fatalities, most of them trampled to death in the stampede on the Street of Cauldron Makers.

People behaved as if they were above their surroundings, confident in the knowledge that the city would be here for them the next day, and every day thereafter.

How wonderful that sounded: Know yourself. The ancients had been so fond of the motto, they had engraved it on their temple walls.

How polite he was – and how broken. He didn’t have the courage to stand up to his father, nor did he want to forgo the comforts he was accustomed to, and for this he probably hated himself, and would do so for the rest of his life.

The car was speeding now. ‘Take the next right,’ Leila said. The man glanced at her in the rear-view mirror, something at once frightening and unbearably sad in his eyes. A shiver ran down her spine. She sensed, too late, that he would not listen to her.

The five of them: Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122 and Hollywood Humeyra.

Leila did not think one could expect to have more than five friends. Just one was a stroke of luck. If you were blessed, then two or three, and if you were born under a sky filled with the brightest stars, then a quintet – more than enough for a lifetime.

On nights when she was mistreated by a client, she would still find the strength to hold herself up, knowing that her friends, with their very presence, would come with ointment for her scrapes and bruises; and on days when she wallowed in self-pity, her chest cracking open, they would gently pull her up and breathe life into her lungs.

Now, as her brain came to a standstill, and all memories dissolved into a wall of fog, thick as sorrow, the very last thing she saw in her mind was the bright pink birthday cake.

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.

Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?

Perhaps a person’s thoughts survived longer than his heart, his dreams longer than his pancreas, his wishes longer than his gall-bladder … If that were true, shouldn’t human beings be considered semi-alive as long as the memories that shaped them were still rippling, still part of this world?

People used to say to me, Don’t be so sad, Kameel Effendi. What difference does it make in the end? She’s buried, aren’t we all going to join her six feet under someday? Maybe they meant well, but God knows how I hated them for saying such things. Funerals are for the living, that’s for sure. It’s important to organize a decent burial. Otherwise you can never heal inside, don’t you think? Anyway, don’t mind me, I’m just blabbering. I guess … I wanted to tell you, I know what it feels like not to be able to say goodbye to a loved one.’

‘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.’

But Nalan had always assumed that she would die first. In every group of old and tested friends there was one person who knew instinctively that they would leave before the others. And Nalan had been certain that that person was her.

What deepened Nalan’s sense of helplessness was not only Leila’s sudden death, or the brutal and horrific way it had happened, but the absolute lack of justice in everything. Life was unfair, and now she realized death was even more so.

It was not fair that they had dumped Leila in the Cemetery of the Companionless when she wasn’t companionless at all. Leila had friends. Lifelong, loyal, loving friends. She might not have had much else, but this she surely had.

As she set off at a brisk pace, Nalan had already made up her mind. She would fight back, the way she had always done. Against social conventions, judgements, prejudices … against silent hatred, which filled the lives of these people like an odourless gas, she would fight.

No one had the right to cast aside Leila’s body as though she didn’t matter and never had. She, Nostalgia Nalan, would make sure her old friend was treated properly and with dignity.

He had sneaked out the previous evening when Tequila Leila had left for work. This wasn’t unusual, as Mr Chaplin was a nocturnal flâneur. He would always get back before dawn, thirsty and tired, knowing that his owner would have left the door ajar for him. But this time he was surprised to find the door closed. Since then he had been waiting patiently.

‘Three more women were killed this month … all of them in the same horrific way. And guess what? I know them, too. All of them. They are the women you sent me. Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?’

‘Oh, this … a gift for Leila. It was in the office. I had been planning to give it to her tonight.’ He pulled off the bow, opened the box. There was a scarf inside. ‘Pure silk. She would have loved it.’ A lump came to his throat. Unable to swallow it down, he gasped. All the sorrow he had tried to suppress now burst out. His eyes pricked and before he knew it he was crying.

A gust of wind blew in from the balcony, fluttering the curtains. For an instant, it was almost as if there was a new presence in the room. A barely perceptible tickle, like a stray hair on the back of one’s neck. But it grew stronger, and now they could all feel its power, its pull. Either they had stepped into some invisible realm, or another realm was seeping into theirs.

Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening.

No number of manicures could compensate for that. And she had the strong, solid hands of a farmer, which she had been ashamed of all these years. But tonight she was grateful for them. Leila would have been proud of her.

In Istanbul it was the living who were the temporary occupants, the unbidden guests, here today and gone tomorrow, and deep down everyone knew it. White headstones met citizens at every turn – alongside highways, shopping malls, car parks or football fields – scattered in every nook, like a broken string of pearls.

The confession, because that’s what it was, had only deepened Sabotage’s concern. He, before anyone, and more than anyone, had seen through her pain.

A heavy and dense sorrow had settled in him; a fist had closed around his heart. A sorrow he’d kept hidden from everyone, and nourished all these years, because what was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?