Free Honor (9781101606148) by Elif Shafak Page B

Aisha, would rush him to the bathroom. He wished she wouldn’t do that. It made him feel grown-up to have the smell of tobacco in his hair. When he confessed this to his father one day, Baba laughed, and said, ‘There are two things in this world that make a man out of a boy. The first is the love of a woman. The second is the hatred of another man.’
    Baba (the Sober One) explained that those who knew only the former softened into wimps and those who knew only the latter hardened like rocks, but those who experienced both had what it took to become a Sword of Steel. As skilled artisans knew, the best way to solidify a metal was to heat it in fire and cool it in water. ‘So it is with a man. You need to heat him in love, cool him in hatred,’ concluded Baba, pausing for his lesson to sink in.
    It worried Adem that he never had emotions this profound, but he kept such anxieties to himself. That same year he had his first asthma attack – a malady that would disappear in his teenage years, but never really abandon his body, chasing him throughout his life.
    From time to time, Baba (the Sober One) would bring home leftovers from a slaughterhouse near by – chunks of meat, bones and entrails. On such occasions, he would borrow his manager’s pick-up van, taking the family on a barbecue picnic. Adem and his two brothers would sit on the bed in the back, boasting about how many sausages or calves’ feet they could eat in one sitting. Baba in the front, with his wife sitting next to him, would make jokes, and, if in an especially mellow mood, would roll down the window and sing. The songs would invariably be tearjerkers, but he rendered them so merrily no one could tell. Their van loaded with pots, pans and linen, their hearts light and gay, they would head to the hills over the Bosporus. It troubled them that there was a cemetery in the vicinity. Yet there wasn’t much they could do. So it was that since time immemorial the dead in Istanbul had resided in the greenest areas with the best views of the city.
    Once there, the boys would look for a suitable spot in the shade. Before sitting, however, their mother would pray for the souls of the deceased, asking their permission to spend time on the land. Fortunately, the dead always answered in the affirmative. After a few seconds of waiting, Aisha would nod, and spread out the mats for everyone to sit on. Then she would light the portable stove, and set up everything needed to prepare the food. Meanwhile, the boys would romp happily about, destroying ant colonies, chasing crickets and playing zombies. As the smell of sizzling beef filled the air, Baba would clap his hands, indicating that the moment had come to open his first bottle of
raki
.
    Sometimes he would start slowly and gradually pick up the pace. At other times, he would set off fast, downing three glasses in the time it would normally take him to finish one. But, one way or the other, by the end of the lunch he was always a few sheets to the wind.
    No sooner had Baba emptied the first bottle than he would start to show telltale signs. He would scowl more often, cursing himself, and every few minutes would scold the boys over something so trivial nobody could remember what it was afterwards. Anything might annoy him: the food was too salty, the bread stale, the ice not cold enough. In order to soothe his nerves, he would open up a second bottle.
    Towards the end of one picnic, as the sun was beginning to set and the seagulls were shrieking, time seemed to come to a halt, a sharp smell of anise hanging in the air. Baba added some water to his drink, watching the translucent liquid turn to a milky grey, as blurred as his thoughts. After a while, he rose awkwardly to his feet, his eyes solemn, his chin raised, and made a toast to the cemetery.
    â€˜You fellows are so damn lucky,’ he said. ‘No rent to pay, no petrol to buy, no mouths to feed. No wife nagging you. No boss