Free Honor (9781101606148) by Elif Shafak Page A

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, Cadillac Fleetwood or the new Mercedes-Benz. Not every man in town could afford these models – their owners were mostly politicians, businessmen, casino patrons or football players. On the walls of the garage there were framed pictures in which the mechanics beamed next to their influential customers.
    Sometimes Adem would escort Baba to the local tea house, where they would while away the day sipping
sahlep
, * linden or tea, and watching men of all ages play backgammon and draughts. Politics was a hot subject. That, football and the stories in the tabloids. With a general election coming up, the tea house was abuzz with fervent debates. The prime minister – the first democratically elected leader in the country’s history – claimed that his Democratic Party would win a landslide victory. Nobody could possibly guess that he would indeed get re-elected for another term, at the end of which he would be hanged by a military junta.
    On such languid afternoons, Adem would imitate Baba (the Sober One), smacking his tongue on a sugar cube, holding the tea glass with his little finger raised in the air. There would be so much smoke around that when they returned home his hair would stink like an ashtray. Frowning ever so slightly, his mother,