Honour (3 page)

In her mind’s eye Pembe flipped a coin in the air and watched it land on her palm. There were always two sides, and two sides only. Win or lose. Dignity or disgrace, and little consolation for those who got the wrong one.

It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, Naze continued, whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other. As to why He had done that, it wasn’t up to human beings to question. What mattered was that the colour black didn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which revealed even the tiniest speck of dirt. By the same token, women who were sullied would be instantly noticed and separated from the rest, like husks removed from grains. Hence when a virgin gave herself to a man – even if he were the man whom she loved – she had everything to lose, while he had absolutely nothing to lose.

So it was that in the land where Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty were born, ‘honour’ was more than a word. It was also a name. You could call your child ‘Honour’, as long as it was a boy. Men had honour. Old men, middle-aged men, even schoolboys so young that they still smelled of their mothers’ milk. Women did not have honour. Instead, they had shame. And, as everyone knew, Shame would be a rather poor name to bear.

As she listened, Pembe recalled the stark whiteness of the doctor’s office. The discomfort that she had felt then returned – only now the feeling was magnified. She wondered about the other colours – periwinkle-blue, pistachio-green and hazelnut-brown – and the other fabrics – velvet, gabardine and brocade. There was such variety in this world, surely more than could be found on a tray of winnowed rice.

It would be one of the many ironies of Pembe’s life that the things she hated to hear from Naze she would repeat to her daughter, Esma, word for word, years later, in England.

A Village near the River Euphrates, 1962–7

Pembe was a woman of untenable thoughts and unfounded fears. This part of her personality wasn’t something that had evolved over the years. Instead, she had turned superstitious abruptly, almost overnight: the night Iskender was born.

Pembe was seventeen years old when she became a mother – young, beautiful and apprehensive. There she was in a room bathed in a dusky light, staring at the cradle, as if she was still not convinced that this baby with his pink, fragile fingers, translucent skin and a blotchy purple mark on his button nose had defied all the odds and survived; that he would, from now on, be her child, hers alone. Here was a son – the son that her mother had craved, and prayed to have throughout her entire life.

Naze had had one more full-term pregnancy after Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty. It had to be a boy this time – there was no other possibility. Allah owed her this;
He was in her debt
, she said, even though she knew she was speaking utter blasphemy. It was a secret agreement between her and the Creator. After so many girls, He was going to make it up to her. Such was her conviction that she spent months knitting little blankets, socks and vests in a blue deeper than stormy nights, all of them designed for her perfect little boy. She wouldn’t listen to anyone – not even to the midwife who examined her after her waters broke and told her, in a voice as quiet as the breeze, that the baby wasn’t positioned right, and that they had better go to the city. There still was time. If they set off now they could be at the hospital before the contractions started.

‘Nonsense,’ Naze retorted, holding the midwife’s eyes in her fiery stare.

Everything was fine. Everything was in His hands. She was forty-nine years old and this would be her miracle child. She was going to give birth here in her own house, in her own bed, as she had done with each and every baby before, only this time it would be a boy.

It was a breech birth. The baby was too big and it was pointing the wrong way. The hours passed. Nobody counted how many, for it would bring bad luck. Besides, only Allah was the owner of time, the Divine Clockmaker. What was unbearably long for mere mortals was only the blink of an eye for Him. Thus the clock on the wall was covered with black velvet, just like all the mirrors in the house, each of which was a gate to the unknown.

‘She cannot push any more,’ said one of the women present.

‘Then we’ll have to do it for her,’ said the midwife resolutely, but her eyes gave away the fear she was hiding.

The midwife put her hand straight through Naze until she felt the sleek, slippery baby squirm under her fingers. There was a faint heartbeat, like a sputtering candle that had reached its end. Gently but firmly, she tried to turn the baby inside the womb. Once. Twice. She was more relentless the third time, acting with a sense of urgency. The baby moved clockwise, but it was not enough. Its head pressed against the umbilical cord, dangerously stifling the amount of oxygen that went through it.

Naze had lost so much blood she was fading in and out, her cheeks the colour of winter. A choice had to be made. The midwife knew it would be either the mother or the baby. There was no way she could save them both. Her conscience was as silent as a moonless night, and just as dark. All at once, she made up her mind. She would pick the woman.

At that moment Naze, lying there with her eyes clamped shut, dancing with death, bleeding umbrage, lifted her head and yelled: ‘No, you whore!’

It was a cry so shrill and forceful, it didn’t sound as if it had come out of a human being. The woman in bed had turned into a wild animal, famished and feral, ready to attack anyone who stood in her way. She was running in a thick forest where the sun cast shimmering gold and ochre reflections on the leaves – free in a way she had never been before. Those within hearing distance suspected she had lost her mind. Only the mad could scream like that.

‘Cut me, you bitch! Take him out,’ Naze ordered and then laughed, as if she had already crossed a threshold beyond which everything was a joke. ‘It’s a boy, don’t you see? My son is coming! You spiteful, jealous whore. Take a pair of scissors! Now! Cut my belly open and take my son out!’

Swarms of tiny flies whirred in the room, like vultures circling a prey. There was too much blood everywhere. Too much rage and resentment smeared on the carpets, the sheets, the walls. The air inside the room had become heavy, listless. The flies . . . if only the flies could be made to disappear.

Naze did not survive. Nor did the baby for long – the baby whose gender she had been wrong about the whole time. Her ninth infant, the child who killed her and then quietly passed away in her cot, was another girl.

So on that day in November 1962, as she lay awake in her maternity bed late into the wee hours, it was the thought that God could be so arbitrary that distressed Pembe. Here she was, only seventeen and already breastfeeding a son. She couldn’t help suspecting that from somewhere in the heavens, under a watery light, her mother was watching her with envy.
Eight births, five miscarriages, one dead baby, and not one was a son . . . And here You are already giving a healthy boy to my hare-brained daughter. Why, Allah? Why?

Naze’s voice echoed in Pembe’s ears until it became a ball of fury that rolled down to her chest and nestled in her stomach. Hard as she tried to fend off her anxieties, she ended up only building new ones. They drew circles in her mind, spinning like a pegtop, and suddenly there was nowhere to hide from the evil eye that was her late mother’s gaze. Once she started paying attention to it, she noticed that gaze everywhere. It was in the grain and cashew nuts that she pounded in a stone mortar, turned into a paste and then consumed to enrich her milk. It was in the rivulets of rain that streamed down the windowpanes, in the almond oil that she applied to her hair at every bath, and in the thick, bubbly yoghurt soup that simmered on the stove.

‘
Allah the Merciful, please make my mother shut her eyes in her grave and make my son grow up strong and healthy
,’ Pembe prayed, rocking herself back and forth, as if it were she who needed to be put to sleep, not the baby.

*

The night Iskender was born, Pembe had a nightmare – as she had had many other times during her pregnancy. But this one felt so real that a part of her would never recover from it, never return from the liquid land of dreams.

She saw herself lying supine on an ornamental carpet, her eyes wide open, her belly swollen. Above her a few clouds slithered across the sky. It was hot, too hot. Then she realized the carpet was stretched over water, a rowdy river swirling under her weight.
How is it that I’m not sinking
, she thought to herself. Instead of an answer, the sky opened up and a pair of hands descended. Were they the hands of God? Or the hands of her late mother? She couldn’t tell. They cut open her belly. There was no pain, only the horror of being aware of what was happening. Then the hands pulled out the baby. It was a plump little boy with eyes the colour of dark pebbles. Before Pembe could touch him, let alone cuddle him, the hands dropped the baby into the water. He floated away on a piece of driftwood, like the prophet Moses in his basket.

Pembe shared the nightmare with only one person, her eyes bright and burning as she spoke, as if she had a fever. Jamila listened, and, either because she truly believed in it or because she wanted to free her twin of the terror of Naze’s ghost, she came up with an explanation.

‘You must have been jinxed. Probably by a
djinni
.’

‘A
djinni
,’ Pembe echoed.

‘Yes, sweetheart. The
djinn
love to take a nap on chairs and sofas, don’t you know? Adult
djinn
can make a dash for it when they see a human coming, but infants are not so fast. And pregnant women are heavy, clumsy. You must have sat on a baby
djinni
and crushed it.’

‘Oh, my God.’

Jamila twitched her nose as if she had caught a foul smell. ‘My guess is the mother must have come for revenge and put a spell on you.’

‘But what am I going to do?’

‘Don’t worry, there’s always a way to appease a
djinni
, no matter how enraged,’ said Jamila authoritatively.

And so, while Pembe was nursing her newborn, Jamila made her toss dry bread to a pack of stray dogs and rush away without looking back; throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder and a pinch of sugar over her right; walk through newly ploughed fields and under spiderwebs; pour sacred rosewater into every cranny in the house, and wear an amulet round her neck for forty days. She thus hoped to cure Pembe of her fear of their late mother. Instead she opened the door to superstitions – a door Pembe had always known existed but through which she had never before ventured to go.

Meanwhile Iskender was growing. His skin the colour of warm sand, his hair dark and wavy and gleaming like stardust, his eyes brimming with mischief and his birthmark long gone, he smiled copiously, winning hearts. The more handsome her son grew, the more Pembe became terrified of things over which she had no control – earthquakes, landslides, floods, wildfires, contagious diseases, the wrath of Naze’s ghost, the vengeance of a mother
djinni
. The world had always been an unsafe place, but suddenly the danger was too real, too close.

Such was Pembe’s unease that she refused to give her son a name. It was a way of protecting him from Azrael, the Angel of Death. If the baby had no particular affiliation, she thought, Azrael would not be able to find him, even if he wished to. Thus the boy spent his first year on earth without a name, like an envelope with no address. As well as his second, third and fourth years. When they had to call him, they would say, ‘Son!’ or ‘Hey, lad!’

Why didn’t her husband, Adem, object to this nonsense? Why didn’t he take control of the situation and name his heir like every other man did? There was something holding him back, something stronger than his quick temper and male pride, a secret between the two of them that empowered Pembe and weakened Adem, pushing him away from home towards an underground world in Istanbul, where he could gamble and be the king, even if only for one night.

Not until the boy had turned five did Adem take the reins in his hands and announce that this could not go on for ever. His son would soon start school, and if he did not have a name by then the other children would make sure he had the most ridiculous one imaginable. Grudgingly, Pembe complied but only on one condition. She would take the child to her native village and get her twin’s and family’s blessings. Once there, she would also consult with the three village elders, who, by now, were as old as Mount Ararat, but still dispensing sage advice.

*

‘It was wise of you to come to us,’ said the first village elder, who was so frail now that when a door slammed near by its vibration shook him to the core.

‘It is also good that you did not insist on naming the baby yourself, like some mothers do nowadays,’ remarked the second elder, who had only one tooth left in his mouth – a little pearl shining out like the first tooth of a toddler.

The third elder then spoke, but his voice was so low, his words so slurred, that no one understood what he said.

After a bit more discussion the elders reached a decision: a stranger would name the boy – someone who knew nothing about the family and, by extension, Naze’s spectre.

With a borrowed confidence Pembe agreed to the plan. A few miles away there was a stream that ran low in winter and frantically high in spring. The peasants crossed the water in a makeshift boat attached to a wire that had been stretched between the two banks. The journey was unsafe, and every year a few passengers would fall into the river. It was decided that Pembe would wait where the boat landed and ask the first man who got across to name her son. The village elders, meanwhile, would hide behind the bushes and intervene should the need arise.

Thus Pembe and her son waited. She was attired in a crimson dress that reached below her ankles and a black lace shawl. He was wearing his only suit and looked like a miniature of a man. Time crept by and the child got bored. Pembe told stories to entertain him. One of those stories would stand out in his memory for ever.

‘
When Nasreddin Hodja was a boy he was the apple of his mother’s eye.
’

‘Did she have apples in her eyes?’ he asked.

‘That’s an expression, my sultan. It means she loved him very much.
The two of them lived in a nice cottage on the outskirts of the town.
’

‘Where was the father?’

‘He had gone off to war. Now listen.
One day his mother had to go to the bazaar. She said to him, “You should stay at home and watch the door. If you see a burglar trying to break in, start shouting at the top of your voice. That’ll frighten him away. I’ll be back before noon.” So Nasreddin did as he was told, not taking his eyes from the door for even a moment.
’

‘Didn’t he have to pee?’

‘He had a potty with him.’

‘Wasn’t he hungry?’

‘His mother had left him food.’

‘Pastries?’

‘And sesame
halva
,’ Pembe said, knowing her son well. ‘
After an hour, there was a knock at the door. It was Nasreddin’s uncle, checking on how they were doing. He asked the boy where his mother was and said, “Well, go tell your mother to come home early and prepare lunch for us. My family will stop by for a visit.
”’

‘But he is watching the door!’

‘Exactly.
Nasreddin was puzzled. His mother had advised him to do one thing and his uncle another. He didn’t want to disobey either of them. So he pulled up the door, saddled it on his back and went to get his mother.
’

The boy chuckled but he quickly grew serious. ‘I wouldn’t do that. I would always choose my mother over my uncle.’

No sooner had he said this than they heard a noise. Somebody had crossed the stream and was walking towards them. To Pembe’s – and the village elders’ – surprise it turned out to be an old woman. She had a spectacularly aquiline nose, hollows under her wrinkled cheekbones and a set of crooked teeth. Her small, beady eyes constantly moved, refusing to settle anywhere.