Free Honour by Elif Shafak

something. I had to have a word with her about that too. I took out my key, put it in the keyhole and turned it back and forth, but it didn’t budge. The door was bolted. Suddenly I heard footsteps down the corridor.
    ‘Who is it?’ came my mother’s voice.
    ‘It’s mm . . . me,
MM . . . Mum.’
    ‘Iskender, is it you?’
    There was a trace of panic in her voice, as if something bad were about to happen. I heard a whisper, low and rapid, and I knew it wasn’t my mother. My heart started to pound and I felt the air go out of me. I could neither move forward nor go backward, so I kept struggling with the key. This went on for another minute, maybe more, then the door opened.
    My mother stood blocking the entrance. Her lips were curved up in a smile, but her eyes were oddly sharp. I noticed a strand of hair had come out of her ponytail and one of the buttons in her white blouse was in the wrong hole.
    ‘Iskender, my son,’ she said. ‘You are home.’
    I wondered what surprised her more – that I was home almost three hours early or that I was her son.
    ‘Are you all right?’ my mother asked. ‘You don’t seem well, my sultan.’
    Don’t call me that, I wanted to say. Don’t call me anything. Instead I took off my shoes and pushed past, almost knocking her over. I went straight to my room, slammed the door and put a chair in front of it so that no one could get in. I climbed up on the bed, pulled the sheets over my head and concentrated on breathing – the way they had taught us in boxing class. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale . . .
    Outside, there were secretive noises: the floorboards creaking, the wind blowing and a drizzle falling on the city. Amid the mixture of sounds, I could hear our front door opening and someone stepping outside, quiet as a mouse.
    She used to love me more than anything – her first child, first son,
roniya chavemin
.
*
Everything was different now. Ruined. A tear rolled down my cheek. I slapped myself to stop it. But it didn’t help. I slapped again, harder.
    I listened to her feet coming down the corridor, soft and steady as heartbeats. She stopped by my door but didn’t dare to knock. I could sense her movements, touch her guilt, smell her shame. We waited like that for God knows how long, listening to each other breathe, wondering what the other might be thinking. Then she was gone – as if she had nothing to say, no explanation owed, as if my opinion didn’t count anyway, or my anger, or my pain. She walked away from me.
    That’s when I knew what Uncle Tariq had told me about my mother was true. That’s when it occurred to me to buy the knife. Wooden handle, folding blade with a curved point. Illegal, of course. Nobody wanted to get into trouble with the Old Bill by selling a flick-knife, especially to a bloke like me. But I knew where to get one. I knew just the man.
    I wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. I only wanted to scare her – or him.
    Iskender Toprak

Picnics in the Sun
    Istanbul, 1954
    Adem had spent his entire childhood torn between two fathers: his sober
baba
and his drunken
baba
. The two men lived in the same body, but they were as different from each other as night from day. So sharp was the contrast between them that Adem suspected the drink his father downed every evening to be some kind of magic potion. It didn’t morph frogs into princes or dragons into witches, but it changed the man he loved into a stranger.
    Baba (the Sober One) was a stoop-shouldered, talkative person who liked to spend time with his three sons (Tariq, Khalil and Adem), and had the habit of taking one of them with him wherever he went, a random lottery of love and care. The lucky boy would accompany his father to see his friends, on strolls along the Istiklal Avenue and, occasionally, to his workplace – a garage near Taksim Square where he was the head mechanic. Big cars with complicated names pulled in there either for repair or parts. Chevrolet Bel Air, Buick Roadmaster,