Honour (14 page)

Later on, neither of them would remember who had come up with the idea to sit in the playground. Pembe told him, in her broken English, that she worked at a hairdresser’s and had taken a short break to buy ingredients for a rice pudding. She hadn’t been able to find hazelnuts, she said, like the ones she used back in Istanbul, and would have to make do with almonds instead. To her surprise, he listened sympathetically. She had never thought a man, any man, would show so much interest in cooking.

‘So you’re Turkish?’ he asked.

It didn’t occur to her to say she was Kurdish, for it never did. It always took her some time to reveal her Kurdishness, like an afterthought. So she nodded.

‘
Lokumcu geldi hanim, leblebilerim var
,’
*
he said in a singsong voice.

She looked at him, her eyes wide with incomprehension. To her amazement, he laughed and said, ‘I’m afraid that’s about it. I only know a few words.’

‘But how?’

‘My grandmother was Greek,’ he said. ‘She was from Istanbul. She taught me one or two words. Oh, she loved that city.
’

He didn’t tell her that his grandmother had left Istanbul at the time of the late Ottoman Empire, married off to a Levantine merchant, and that, till the day she passed away, she had missed her neighbours and her home by the Bosporus. Instead he tried to recall more words common to Turkish and Greek:
cacik-caciki
,
avanak-avanakis
,
ispanak-spanaki
,
ciftetelli-tsifteteli . . .
His accent made her giggle, which she did by lowering her head and closing her mouth – the one universal gesture repeated by people who were uncomfortable with either their teeth or their happiness.

He observed her for what felt like a long moment, and said, ‘I don’t even know your name.’

Pembe brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes, and, though she rarely mentioned her multiple names together, and never translated them into English, heard herself say, ‘Pembe Kader. It means Pink Destiny.’

He didn’t arch his eyebrows or chuckle the way she expected him to do. Instead he stared at her as if she had just revealed the saddest secret. He then said, ‘Your name is poetry.’

Now Pembe knew the word ‘poetry’ in English. Yes, she did. She smiled. She smiled for the first time in a long while.

Opening the bag from the bakery, she took out the chocolate eclairs, offered one to him and kept the other for herself. He, in turn, shared his fruit loaf. They ate, at first in silence, then with tentative words, such as ‘if’, ‘perhaps’, ‘I’m not sure but . . .’ Slowly, they spun a conversation around an exchange that had started with racism and rice pudding.

His name was Elias. Like her, it had been almost eight years since he had come to London. He liked the city, and had no problem with feeling like a foreigner because that is what he was in his heart: a stranger everywhere. As she listened to him, Pembe wished several times that her English was better. But you didn’t need to be fluent in a language to be able to speak it, did you? With her husband they spoke the same language and yet they rarely communicated any longer, if they ever had.

‘So you Greek?’ she asked.

She didn’t tell him what her brother-in-law Tariq thought about the Greeks, or all the negatives she had heard about them.

‘Well, not exactly. I’m a quarter Greek, a quarter Lebanese, a quarter Iranian and a quarter Canadian.’

‘But how?’

‘Well, you see, my grandmother married a Lebanese and my mother was born. Then she met my father. His parents were Canadian citizens originally from Tehran. I was born in Beirut myself but raised in Montreal, and now I’m a Londoner. So, what does that make me?’

So many journeys, so many ruptures and fresh starts in unfamiliar places. Wasn’t he frightened of bearing this much uncertainty around him?
Pembe recalled how she had dreamed of becoming a sailor, travelling to faraway ports in seven continents, but that was long ago.

As if reading her doubts, he smiled and said, ‘Hey, it’s not that bad. Some people are from everywhere.’

He tore his gaze from the wedding ring that he had suddenly noticed. She, however, had not realized that there was a faint mark where his wedding ring used to be, the shadow of a wife who wasn’t there any more, but who had not yet fully vanished.

‘You work?’ she asked.

‘Yup, I’m a chef.’

At this, her face lit up. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I bet I can make rice pudding just as good as you do.’

Pembe imagined him dicing onions or poking at some courgettes in a frying pan. The idea was so odd that she let out a giggle, and almost at once she grew quiet, worried about hurting his feelings. The men she knew would barely enter the kitchen to get a glass of water for themselves, which, now that she thought about it, was also how she had been raising her two sons, especially Iskender.

‘Your wife lucky,’ she said.

‘My wife and I are separated,’ Elias said, gesturing with his hands as if breaking a piece of bread.

Deftly, Pembe veered the conversation into another direction. ‘What did your father say? He said it’s okay you cook?’

It was a bizarre question, and yet it was the right question. His father had not spoken to Elias for years, he explained, his voice rising and falling, though later on in life they had made their peace. He said his interest in cooking had started when, as a boy, he was looking for things to raise his sister Cleo’s spirits.

‘Your sister was sick?’ she asked.

‘No, she was special.’

He said the children in the neighbourhood had another word for it: retarded. Born with severe Down’s syndrome, she was physically and mentally disabled. While he went to a local school where he was in a class of gifted children, Cleo had to travel a long distance every day to attend a special institution outside town. She was often grumpy, stressed, throwing her toys around, pulling out her hair, eating soil. The only thing that soothed her, young Elias discovered, was good food. A freshly baked apple pie put a smile on her face, helping her to become her dear old self again. And so, little by little, he learned to prepare delicacies for Cleo. In time he realized it wasn’t so much that he was helping his sister but that she was helping him to follow his heart.

When you kneaded bread, the earth seeped into your veins, solid and strong. When you grilled meat, the spirit of the animal spoke to you, and you had to learn to respect it. When you cleaned fish, you heard the gush of the water where it once swam, and you had to marinate it tenderly, so as to wash off the memory of the river from its fins. Pembe listened, mesmerized, missing many words, but, to her surprise, understanding him.

*

‘Oh goodness . . . I have to go,’ Pembe said, jumping to her feet, only now grasping how much time had gone by.

‘Shall I help you with your bags back to the hairdresser’s?’

‘No, no . . .’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll be fine.’

It flashed into her mind that one of the passers-by might see them together and tell someone else. People would gossip, and from there the word would reach her family’s ears. She understood, with a plunging heart, that there was no way she could see this man again. Unaware of her thoughts, he produced a card out of his pocket.

ELIAS STEPHANOS ROBERT GROGAN

CHEF

She looked at the words, surprised to see he had so many names, like the countries in his background. On the back of the card was the name of the restaurant.

‘If you come in the evenings, I won’t be able to leave the kitchen. Lunch-times are no good either. But should you stop by after four o’clock, I’d be most happy to show you around, and cook for you.’

In return she gave him nothing. No paper. No address. No promise.

He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, which she responded to by pulling back, which confused and embarrassed him, which she was mortified to see, so she gave him her hand, which he missed because he was still thinking about why she hadn’t let him kiss her on the cheek. In their mutual confusion, he ended up brushing her wrist and she patted his shoulder. The awkwardness of the moment would have made an onlooker laugh, but to them it was rather discomforting, so they backed away from each other, as if they had touched a live wire, and then as fast as they could they went their separate ways.

London, December 1977

It was Tobiko’s birthday. Less than a year before the Topraks’ lives went into a tailspin, seven-year-old Yunus was in the squatters’ house, deep in the throes of love.

Tobiko had turned twenty. ‘I’m a typical Sagittarius,’ Yunus heard her say
–
though he had no idea if that was good or bad. Yunus himself was a Leo but that didn’t mean anything to him either. The only thing that mattered was that the age gap between him and Tobiko had grown wider, his prospects of catching up with her now slimmer than ever.

So he sat there with a scowl, munching buttered popcorn out of a plastic bowl. He watched the squatters – bright and full of beans – hand gifts to the birthday girl: silver piercings, safety pins, a spiked collar, braided bracelets, a studded belt, ripped fishnet stockings and a pair of combat boots. There was a patchwork quilt with the words
Medicinal Marijuana
embroidered on the edge, several necklaces with signs, a poster of Patti Smith, books (
The Shining
by Stephen King,
South of No North
by Charles Bukowski), a police helmet (stolen from a police officer who had momentarily left it on a table at a local café), a poster that said
Boredom is Revolutionary
and a black T-shirt with a picture of a punk band
–
the Damned.

Yunus stayed away from the fuss, as he wanted to be the last to give Tobiko her present. There were two reasons for that. First, he hoped to be alone with her, even if for a few minutes. But also he was not sure whether she would like the gift he had chosen – a suspicion that had deepened after seeing the hotchpotch of things the others had given her.

Laden with doubts, the boy was still sulking in the corner when the Captain walked in, wearing the tightest jeans Yunus had ever seen, a leather jacket that seemed at least two sizes too small for him and biker’s boots. He did not bring Tobiko a present. Only a wet kiss and a promise: ‘Mine later, babe.’

For a brief moment and with a sinking heart, Yunus considered doing the same thing. He could get up and stride towards Tobiko in a slow, purposeful fashion, in his grey school trousers and the blue sweater, which Mum had knitted for him, and say, in a tone just as deep and mysterious, ‘Mine later, babe.’

What would Tobiko do then? Would she smile at him the way she had at the Captain? Yunus didn’t think so. He closed his eyes as he felt the nervousness bubble up in his stomach. His mother always warned him, ‘Be careful with girls. Boys are simple, girls are not. They will play you like a
saz.
’
*
If that was the case, if Tobiko was playing him like an instrument, the tune coming out of Yunus that day was bleak and melancholy, slightly off key.

‘Hey, mate, you want a puff?’

Yunus opened his eyes to see a young man with long, thick dreadlocks lying at his feet. His close-set eyes were glued on an invisible spot in the ceiling, and he was holding a newly lit spliff in his hand. On his arm there was a tattoo:
When the Rich Fight, it is the Poor Who Die.
The boy couldn’t help thinking to himself that if his mother could see him, she would be appalled.
But how do they wash their hair?
Pembe would ask, and add uneasily, as a new realization came upon her,
They do wash their hair, don’t they?

Now, Yunus had sipped beer before and taken a puff from a discarded dog-end, but he had never come anywhere close to doing drugs. It was a highly controversial topic in the squatters’ house. There were those (Black Panther supporters, radical feminists, Marxists, Trotskyites) who were strictly anti-drugs and looked down upon the people who used them; those (hippies and ex-hippies) who favoured certain drugs – cannabis – but not others; and then there were those (punks, nihilists, situationists) who snubbed weed in favour of pills and chemicals that gave you high energy, high anger. Yet it wasn’t the ongoing disagreement in the house that had kept Yunus from drugs all this time. It was the fear of his mother’s fury.

But now that he had been offered
just a puff
, the boy didn’t see why he should reject it. Politely, he took the joint and inhaled so deeply that he immediately coughed it all out.

‘
Did they teach you this song at school?’ the man-in-dreadlocks yawned before he began to chant, ‘
Roll, roll, roll a joint, gently down the line.
’

Yunus giggled and puffed.

‘
Have a whiff from my spliff, blow your fucking mind.
’

Yunus puffed and giggled. Between the two of them they made so much noise that they caught the others’ attention, including Tobiko’s. She walked towards them with a sad and startled look.

‘Don’t do that, darlin’,’ she said, as she snatched the joint out of the boy’s hand and put it between her own lips. ‘Why’re you trying to be like everyone else? You’re different. That’s what makes you special.’

At the playfulness of her gaze, the apprehension in her voice, Yunus swallowed hard. Instead of uttering the laconic words he had planned to say earlier, he blurted out: ‘But I have a present for you.’

‘Is that so?’ Tobiko said, faking surprise. ‘What is it, pet, may I ask?’

Yunus stood up, holding his head high and thrusting out his chest, like a soldier ready to take orders. He handed Tobiko the package he had been keeping all evening – gold box, gold tissue, gold ribbon.

Inside there was a musical snowglobe – pink, purple and perfect. Two figures – a princess and an ogre – stood in front of a charming castle, holding each other. She was wearing a splendid dress, while the hulky monster stood by her side in a shy, awkward manner. When you wound the key, they began to dance to a tinkling tune that sounded as if an ice-cream van was passing near by. As soon as he saw this and learned it was from a tale, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Yunus recalled that Tobiko was very fond of a David Bowie song with the same title. If she enjoyed that, she might like this too.

In truth Yunus had at first planned to purchase a different snowglobe in which flakes of rice rained on a bride and groom as they kissed in front of a church, but then he doubted whether Tobiko would like it. She was against marriage, against religion, and for all he knew she could also be against throwing rice in the air like that. So he chose the other snowglobe
–
even though it was more expensive and drained him of his savings.

In his eyes Tobiko was no different from the princess, gorgeous and flawless, whereas he was a bit like the monster. He was the beast in his elegant costume leading her on to the dance floor
–
the unlikely hero in the story, not yet a man but with the potential to become one someday. The boy carried his childhood like a bad spell, hoping against hope for it to be broken soon.

The glaring naivety of the object caught Tobiko unprepared. Holding the snowglobe in her palms as if it were a baby bird, she glowed with pleasure. ‘Oh, this is fantastic!’

Yunus beamed. He was going to marry her.

‘What is
fan-tas-tic
?’ the Captain asked from the other side of the room, but Tobiko didn’t answer him.

Yunus’s smile grew wider and wider – so big that it turned into a mantle that canopied the house, hiding the spider webs, the moths circling the candle flames, the termites in the wooden chairs, everything and anything that he wished to make disappear, including all potential rivals.

*

The evening flowed with music from the Clash, the Cockney Rejects and the Sex Pistols, and with a huge chocolate-banana-hashish birthday cake. There were no candles on the cake to blow out, but the brass and pewter lanterns nicked from a shop the same day provided the celebratory air needed.

By now Yunus had had more than a few sips of beer and several slices of the dubious cake. His head wasn’t exactly swimming, but his stomach certainly was. Doing his best not to vomit, he sat back, his gaze panning the walls. There, in the flickering light, he noticed a picture he’d not seen before. A man with hefty shoulders, a protruding nose, salt-and-pepper beard and hair in need of combing. Since it was Tobiko’s birthday, he assumed the man must have something to do with her. ‘Is that your grandfather?’ he asked, pointing at the photograph.

Before Tobiko could make out what he was talking about, let alone answer him, the man with the dreadlocks overheard the question and turned to the others, yelling mirthfully, ‘Hey, the boy is asking if Karl Marx is her granddad!’

There followed a ripple of laughter. ‘He’s everyone’s granddad,’ someone remarked gleefully.

‘And our granddad will change the world,’ the Captain said, clearly amused.

Realizing he had said something stupid, Yunus blushed up to his ears. Yet he had to stand up to the Captain. So he asked, ‘Isn’t he a bit too old for that?’

‘He’s old and wise,’ came the answer.

‘And he’s fat too,’ Yunus insisted.

This elicited another collective chuckle, but the Captain turned serious, his eyes suddenly narrowed to slits. ‘Shouldn’t you be a bit more respectful, my friend? That man was on your side. He fought for the rights of people like you.’

‘Was he Turkish?’ Yunus asked despite himself.

The squatters laughed so hard, one of them fell off the sofa. Wiping the tears from their eyes, still chuckling, they listened, hungry for more.

‘
People like you
means the have-nots,’ explained the Captain.

‘What is a have-not?’ Yunus asked.

‘The have-nots are the people who have been denied the right to have, so that the haves can have more than they should have.’

Yunus stood biting his bottom lip, frowning.

‘No other species on earth is as arrogant and cruel and greedy as humans,’ went on the Captain. ‘The entire capitalist economy is built on the systematic exploitation of the have-nots by the haves. You, me, our little friend here, and his family, we are the Commoners! The Salt of the Earth! The Great Unwashed!’

‘My mother is always cleaning the house,’ said Yunus, this being the only objection he could think of to the last comment.

They laughed but it was different this time. There was a gentler edge to their laughter
–
a mixture of pity and sympathy.

Carried away by his own righteousness, the Captain, however, failed to notice that the mood among his audience had changed. ‘Wake up to the truth, lad!’ he said. ‘People like your parents are being exploited all the time so that others can fill their pockets.’

Stifling a gasp, Yunus leaped to his feet, a bit unsteadily. ‘My parents are not exploited and we are not unwashed. My brother is a boxer.’

It wasn’t only pride that made him talk this way. Yunus had never thought of his family as
poor
. True, his mother sometimes complained about making ends meet. But at home no one referred to himself as
needy
,
deprived
,
low-class
or, for that matter, as a
have-not
.

Nobody laughed this time. Outside, the night darkened. Somewhere not that far away, under a faint light from the street lamps, Pembe was waiting in the kitchen by the window, sick with worry about where her younger son was, her body cloaked in thick silence and solitude, like a figurine in a snowglobe.

‘Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ the Captain said and chortled, so that his next words would not be taken as a reproach. ‘I suppose you’re too young.’

Summed up in those last few words was everything Yunus absolutely hated: his age, his incompatibility, the impossibility of love. He eased himself into a chair, depressed.

‘Don’t mind him,’ Tobiko whispered. ‘It’s getting late. You should probably go.’

‘Right, I’d better leave,’ Yunus conceded, his face set in a frown, his stomach feeling funny again.

‘Goodnight, babe.’

Yunus waved them goodbye, not by putting his right hand on his heart, the way his father and uncle had taught him, but by raising his first and second fingers in a V-sign, the way the squatters did. No sooner had he taken a step than the room began to spin. The lights dimmed into a soft, pearly glow and he slipped into some other realm. Without warning and in front of everyone present, the boy puked not on the floor but on the birthday dress of the woman he loved. ‘Oh, no,’ he whined before closing his eyes, acutely aware that now she would never love him.

That night the squatters carried Yunus home. They rang the doorbell and ran away seconds before a devastated Pembe opened the door and found her son happily snoring on the threshold.