Authors: Elif Shafak
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Literary, #Contemporary Fiction
I took stock in the bathroom, freezing at times or getting scalded at others under the shower that either heated up so much that it then suddenly turned icy, or turned cold and then became boiling hot, managing never to end up lukewarm. Even though it was unclear how I had found my way home last night imbibed, it was certain that I had called Ayshin with my drunken jellyfish-head. Okay, what then? If we had talked, a memory, a moment should have been left behind. A sentence… As I soaped my face, the headquarters of my brain sent the news that a sentence fitting the description of the sought suspect had been observed wandering around and been arrested: ‘Don’t you see that I will totally cease to care about you if you keep calling like this? Before we lose our respect for each other…’ I did not see anything. Even though I tried to open my soapy eyes for a moment, I again shut them when they started stinging from the soap. No, the information proved to be groundless. This was not the sentence I was
searching for. I remembered. I had not heard this one last night, but earlier, sometime before Ayshin had tried to change her phone number.
I stepped out when the manic depressive shower started to push my endurance. The pain in my stomach was unbearable. The kitchen was not too small, but became rather narrow after the installment, right in the middle, of an impressive burly refrigerator more or less the size of the cottages that low-income holiday-makers perch along sea shores and fill up with their families. Rather than insisting on taking from my old house this American bullock, designed to satiate the tribal appetites of consumer society’s nuclear families with their hangar-like homes, I should have gone and bought myself one of those box-like, knee-high refrigerators used in either hotel rooms or flats in Tokyo. I probably would have done so if Ayshin had not objected by stating ‘It’s too big for you.’ I had heard this remark twice in a row: firstly, for the king-size bed and secondly, for the refrigerator. It was only then, upon realizing that what was too big for me was not that big for Ayshin, had I been able to surmise that there was another man in her life and my place would be shortly filled up. So even though I did not cause any difficulties on any matter and was more compliant and docile than necessary so as to hurry along the divorce process, no one, Ethel included, could make out my uncompromising stubbornness concerning the bed and the refrigerator.
My loot might have been substantial but it was totally hollow. It looked pathetic empty like that. Large refrigerators are distant relatives of those old locomotives who gobble-up coal all along the way; they are, just like them, never full and as they get filled, constantly want to be filled some more. Forget sacks of coal, mine is bereft even of a shovel full of coal dust. On the top shelf there was a box of opened cream cheese coated with a thin layer of mould, inside the door are five cans of beer and half a large bottle of
rakι
, in the vegetable container sat three tomatoes and wilted leaves of lettuce. That was all. Then, on the bottom shelf
there was the mushroom pizza slice sent by that elderly woman neighbour. I had seen many who send puddings and the like, but had never before encountered one who made pizza and distributed it slice by slice. I was going to throw it away but forgot. Now, however, as the alcohol particles left over from the night slowly gnawed on the membrane of my stomach, I reached for the pizza slice with gratitude. It took three minutes to heat it up in the microwave oven and approximately thirty seconds to get it down my stomach. It was a bit stale but so what: it was great considering the conditions! Having thus appeased my stomach, just a tad, I embarked on preparing my medicine. This included a pot of skimmed milk with two heaped spoonfuls of Turkish coffee, one spoonful of pine honey, a generous quantity of cinnamon and a little cognac. This is my miracle medicine for hangovers, its curing power proven through experience. It may not suit every constitution. Actually every constitution should, through trial and error, develop its own cure. That is how I found mine. That day I made the proportions more generous than usual, as I needed to sober up as soon as possible. It was Thursday and since the beginning of the term, every Thursday afternoon I have taught the course I love the most to the class I love the most.
While waiting for the milk to boil, I looked through the brochures Ethel had thrust into my hand. Another private university was being founded in Istanbul. I had been aware of some of the details for a long time, like the long preparation process for example. What I did not know was that Ethel the Cunt was involved as well; she was actually at the very centre of it all and told me more than I ever wanted to learn at dinner. Only two minutes after we had met, she introduced the topic with a ‘plop’ and talked of almost nothing else until the end of the night when, under the weary looks of the skinny Kurdish waiter who could barely keep his long black eyelashes open, we wobblingly departed from the restaurant that had no other customers left except us. She kept talking continuously about how this university was not a financial investment but a
moral one; how she had not so wholeheartedly believed in a project for quite a long time; she personally knew the founders and that she herself was actually one of the eight investors behind the scenes; she had enjoyed life much more since she got involved in this and that she was sure when she looked back in her old age this would be the job she would be most proud of in her life; about how they would educate a group of youth much more conscious and knowledgeable than their generation within five years at the most; how the size of this group of youths would increase from year to year and how they would altogether affect the fate of our haggard country. As she kept speaking, I kept on drinking. If I had drunk less, or more slowly, the summary of the night would have been something like this: Ethel talked, I laughed; Ethel got angry, I burst out; Ethel shouted, we fought. So in order not to cause a scene, not to muddy the waters for no good reason, and not to spoil the night, Ethel talked and I drank.
What upset me was more the perpetrator of the words than their content. Of course, Ethel the Cunt could go and talk about this bullshit with anyone she wanted, anywhere she wished, but of all the people in her life, she should not have acted like this to me. Not that I take it personally. The issue is not personal, but rather ‘linguistic.’ At dinner yesterday, for whatever reason, Ethel either decided to break our tradition or simply forgot the language we have been speaking when alone for as long as I can remember.
‘Language’ is one of the most nonsensical words in a language. It is by definition something more than the sum of all words but in the end it, too, is a word. Should there be the need for a connection with another word, you could say that the word ‘language’ is like the word ‘meal.’There is just as little sense in labelling everything a ‘meal’ – which totally overlooks very different food mixtures with differences in taste, nutritional value and calories – as there is in labelling as ‘language’ all the expressions that play totally different tunes, talk about different words at random and emerge in different
styles. I should of course add that in making this observation, ‘linguistic’ differences such as the Chinese cuisine, Turkish cuisine, Spanish cuisine and so forth are not even taken into account. Otherwise, I would have to multiply all these with a global coefficient. In short, hundreds of ‘languages’ reign even within a single ‘language’. Just as we do not all eat the same ‘meal’ in a restaurant we also do not and can not speak the same ‘language’ with everyone all the time, and just as meals have residues, languages have remnants. A garbage dump language comprises words we not only do not use everyday but are reluctant to even pronounce, words we silently pass over, nonsensical words we keep to ourselves because they would not be proper, criticisms that come to the tip of our tongues but we lack the courage to voice, innuendos we slice into thin strips at the tip of our tongues to then gulp back, curses that blow up in our palate before we can take out the fuse and throw them away, expressions that are too loaded or jokes too light for our milieu. There might also be a remnant left over from the attention we pay, the tact we demonstrate and the care we take when we talk or write to others. We can call this a recyclable language of ‘Solid Accumulated Waste (SAW)’; accumulated, if not in the basement or the attic or under the pillow, then on the nasal passage, in between the palate and under the tongue; a language which, once adequately accumulated, we fill into a bag, tie up and throw away to stop the smell and the stink.
I should say right out I never leave evidence of this language lying around and not only do I not use it in front of my students in class, I do not like to hear it from them either. Yet just like a teenager secretly smoking in a secluded spot without his parents’ knowledge, I too am occasionally thrilled to ‘sass’ – as Ethel and I call it – in this language as I open my caché in a dark and dingy corner, unbeknownst to my moral principles and conscience. It is exactly at this point that Ethel’s presence acquires significance. For ‘sassing’, just like making love or quarrelling, requires that someone else be there with you at the
same time. You might smoke alone but to speak in this kind of garbage-language you definitely need a companion.
For years, whenever left alone, Ethel and I would speak, or used to speak until yesterday, in SAWish. Whenever we got together, without stating that one needs to be serious to call the other silly, without making any claims to be just or equitable, we loved to recklessly and coarsely belittle everything and shower this or that person with insults. Just like a bully brushing off an attack to then plunge into a fight by randomly pruning the noses and ears of his adversaries, we attacked social life with our cutting tongues and did our best to prune the maladies and blunders of whomever chanced to appear in front of us.
Who says you cannot make fun of other people’s defects? With spears in our hands and waterproof goggles on our eyes, we would dive headfirst into the seven depths of the sea of flaws-faults-failures and bring each defect captured to land, with the intent of examining it at great length and tearing it to shreds. Sometimes, not content with this, with an appetite befitting calamari-lovers we would lift our catch up in the air and hit him against this or that rock for hours on end. In the final instance, no one escaped our tongues but some received from our shower of generalizations more of their share than others. Peasants, the lumpen proletariat, advertisers and academics, housewives and lawyers…all were a target, albeit for different reasons. Yet the diameter of our net was rather wide, enough to easily contain all sorts of people. There was a place for everyone there.
We pitilessly and coarsely belittled those we saw to be unsteady or those who attempted to look smart. We were irritated by those who cared about their appearance but totally drowned in derision those who dressed tastelessly as well; had no respect for the masculine heroes of the ‘have-nots’ but were beside ourselves with anger at the prima donnas of the ‘haves’. We turned up our noses at those who feared death to then merrily trample on those who had no concern about death. We
could not bear to read a poorly written article, story or novel but also slung mud left and right on those well written ones. We did not even take note of those who turned religious in the aftermath of a serious surgery or trauma but also carelessly cast aside the ones who remained at exactly the same level of belief either with or without religion, all through their lives. We did not forgive the decent ones because of their decency but also took the crookedness of the crooked and danced around with it. We threw on the ground and trampled on those guilelessly naive secularists who thought Christianity was less interventionist or Judaism less patriarchal than Islam; gleefully gnawed on those who were unaware of the variations within Islam but also bruised with cannon salvoes those who imagined themselves privileged for happening upon mystical movements; and tore to pieces those who, in the name of the trinity of ‘Being, Becoming & Transcending Sainthood’, sought alternative Indian, Chinese, Tibetan messiahs for themselves. We rammed into those breeders married with kids but laughed our hearts out at those who regarded not getting married a form of political resistance. We also covered in tar and paraded naked before us both those who perceived their heterosexuality to be a socially given ‘for once-and-always’ yet craved to take at least a petite bite of the apple of sodomy, as well as those who regarded their homosexuality as entirely an individual choice to then sluggishly sit in the oases of isolation, closing themselves off to all. We did not like those we knew personally but also expended recklessly those we knew intimately.
We did not feel the need to express all of these attitudes and beliefs at length and were content with using codes instead. With the meticulousness of the archivist, we one by one classified and filed everyone and everything. We were deliberately, recklessly unjust, to everyone and everything. In any case, if you combed through the section covering the letter ‘J’ of the basic illustrated dictionary of the SAW language, you would never come across either ‘just’ or ‘jurisprudence’, just as you would not be able to find under ‘S’, ‘sacred or sacredness’,
or under ‘E’, ‘exalted’ or ‘exaltedness’. As for injustice, the definition given in this dictionary is as follows:
Whenever Ethel and I spoke SAWish, we committed injustice against this or that person in the second meaning of the word. We’d never sugar-coat our words when alone. Yet last night at dinner while Ethel the Cunt talked about her grandiose goals in relation to this private university to be founded in Istanbul, it seemed as if she had checked our mutual language into the cloakroom at the entrance.
‘Don’t you realize? Your all-time dream is finally becoming a reality,’ she exclaimed as she held her jasmine cigarette-holder tightly between her teeth. No more political appointments from above, or the usual sterility and similarity that budgetary restrictions produce in state universities. Instead they will gather the highest calibre faculty in Turkey, recruit the most brilliant minds snatched away by the universities abroad, and bring to Istanbul lots of foreign experts from different corners of the world. ‘Just think, we’ll put a stopper on this chronic brain-drain, and within the first five years we will even reverse the current. Then Western minds will be at our service. We’ll cure the inferiority complex of the nation,’ she added with a giggle, as if she had made a witty, naughty remark.