Marry someone, drive her mad, burn the house down, marry someone else. Repeat.
An alarming prospect, but what could I do?
Reader, I’d married him. We had a child. I would leave if things got much worse, or if our boy seemed to be in danger.
Yet regardless of how stressful our marriage was, I would say that Mr. Rochester and I did a pretty decent job of co-parenting Little Edward.
Our son was growing into a happy, healthy child. Sometimes I thought that’s why my husband kept me around—as a first-rate governess he no longer needed to pay.
I practised passive resistance. I chanted these words inside my head: It was not a parrot. It was not a parrot.
The eye doctors kept their promises. My husband was seeing quite well, even without his spectacles. I was grateful and happy for him, and at the same time unnerved by those moments when he looked at me, and I thought: He doesn’t like what he’s seeing.
I took pride in not being a vain girl. But now I was letting my appearance go, as if that was what he expected.
We continued in therapy where we discussed my life as a series of traumas that absolutely had to produce a severely damaged adult.
Around the time Little Edward turned two, he began to cry a lot. We took him to the doctor, who pronounced him perfectly healthy. Then we took him to see a well-respected child therapist, Dr. Grey, who, unlike Dr. Collins, seemed to think that I was not a borderline lunatic but rather a plucky, resilient woman who had sailed quite bravely through a difficult early life. She said Little Edward wasn’t disturbed or depressed; there was nothing wrong with him. He was anxious and sad at times, but so was everyone, at times. We should wait and see, she said. She believed it would pass.
That was what I thought, too.
Dr. Grey also said in her opinion my husband—could she call him Big Edward?—had a strain of depression in his make-up and perhaps in his family history.
I believe that was the last time we consulted Dr. Grey.
Little Edward kept crying.
One day, my husband said that he had hired a governess to help with Little Edward. Someone who might cheer him up, make him more independent and less neurotically and morosely attached to me.
That was a big surprise! I thought I was doing a good job with Little Edward. I thought he’d grow out of this crying phase, as the therapist predicted. And I wasn’t really aware that he was so neurotically and morosely attached to me.
But my husband had already hired a vaguely pretty but slightly resentful and sullen-looking young woman to help me with childcare and with educating Little Edward.
Having been a governess myself, I would have felt like a traitor to the sacred sorority of governesses and former governesses if I’d told my husband not to hire an out-of-work governess, not to give the young woman a job.
She sat on the uncomfortable couch while Mr. Rochester and I sat on uncomfortable chairs. She told my life story as if it had happened to her. Being orphaned, passing into the care of a cruel aunt, a witch out of a fairy tale, then to a school where so many poor orphan girls suffered and died, and then to work as a governess for a man she fell in love with, but he was married to someone else. His wife lived in the attic and screamed like a parrot and stole into the house in the middle of the night and shredded our new governess’s wedding veil.
Mr. Rochester said, “There was no wife. That screaming you heard was a parrot.”
I looked at the new governess and wondered about the future. My future, to be more specific.
I felt as if I were someone else: a visitor from the future, looking into a mirror.
A MIGRATING BIRD
ELIF SHAFAK
WINTER, IN THIS FORSAKEN town, carries itself like a sultan, ceremonious and controlled, sending emissaries of howling winds and messengers of thunderstorms weeks before to let everyone know that it will be arriving soon. Not this year, though. This time winter descends in a day, if not in a couple of hours, as if determined to catch us unawares. Early in the morning we wake up to a piercing chill, and by midday entire streets are canopied by a white mantle. In the afternoon, the snow, no longer falling in soft flakes, comes down in thick flurries. Those of us who have been able to get to the university now realise we are trapped on campus until the roads are opened again.
My feet crunching in the snow, my boots as heavy as the sand buckets used for fire protection, I make my way to the canteen frequented by students, staff and assistants. I am surprised to find it filled to capacity. It seems as if everyone thinks this will be the best location to wait in until the weather calms down.
There, at a corner table, I see a stranger occupying my usual seat, invading my space, surrounded by my friends. The first thing I notice about him is his hair—wavy and brittle, a blond so pale that, in the anaemic light from the window, it appears almost silver. Amidst people who all have skin and hair of different shades of brown, he looks like a drawing in a colouring book that a child has forgotten to fill in.
As I approach the group, the stranger leans over a notebook and says something that I cannot catch over the noise. My friends clap and laugh. By the time I reach them, the laughter subsides, though their faces are still beaming.
“Ayla, come and join us. We have a visitor; he is learning Turkish!” says Yasemin, whom I have known since first grade.
Why an outsider would move to a place everyone is trying to get away from is a mystery to me. Well, maybe not everybody is eager to leave. I certainly am. Ours is not a fabulous university. Not even the dean cares to pretend otherwise. I cannot help but suspect that while I am wasting time here, my real life awaits elsewhere.
The visitor, having turned towards me, says with a notable accent, “Merhaba, benim adim Gerard. Senin adin ne?” My friends chuckle. We adore it when foreigners bend over backwards to utter a few words in Turkish. We will do anything to assure them they are speaking beautifully, even when we don’t understand a word they say.
Except, I am not smiling. Gerard has extended his hand towards me, waiting.
I don’t shake hands with men. My family is religious, very religious. Since the age of eleven, long before I started bleeding, I have worn a headscarf tied tightly under my chin—a detail impossible for anyone not to see, and yet somehow Gerard has missed the message. Still I nod politely in a clumsy attempt not to offend him. Realising his mistake, he pulls his hand back. A shade of pink creeps up his cheeks, which are spattered with freckles, like the cinnamon powder we sprinkle on hot milk on such bleak days as this. I have never seen a man blush before. And that, more than anything, endears him to me: his vulnerability. To make it up to him, I smile and say my name, “Ayla.”
“Ay-la,” he repeats in an anxious echo.
I sit with the rest of the group, careful to stay on the fringes, looking sidelong at Gerard. Everything about him is pale—his skin, his knuckles, his grey-green eyes speckled with hints of amber. He is simply too light for this part of the world. Strangely, he invokes in me a desire to protect him, though from what or whom, I cannot tell.
When I was a little girl, my mother, determined to cheer me up after I had my tonsils removed, gave me a chick that had just hatched. All day I held the dainty creature between my palms, too terrified to move, listening to its tiniest of hearts drum in its chest. I lived with an intense fear that a cat might swallow it or someone would sit on it. So profound was my terror that in the end the chick had to be taken away. This pale foreigner reminds me of that yellow ball of down. I want to cup my hands around him, without touching, just to make sure he is safe.
The next day, the snow already turned into a muddy slush, Yasemin finds me after the first class. “What do you think is the Dutchman’s real aim?” she says, displaying the mistrust she feels towards people she does not share the same surname or roots with.
“He told us. It’s an EU-supported programme. He’s an exchange student.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Yasemin clucks her tongue. “The EU doesn’t want to let
Turkey in, so why would they send their students over?”
“Aren’t you exaggerating?”
Oblivious to my objection, she carries on, “Did it ever occur to you he could be a missionary?”
I pause. “You think?”
She nods fiercely.
Once again, with that same childhood trepidation of being unable to protect the fragile, I try to say something in his defence. “He’s clearly into languages. He’s going to be a linguist.”
Yasemin scrunches her nose in disbelief. “Or a spy.”
“What would a spy do in this town?” I protest.
“You never know!” she says, and repeats in hearty agreement with herself, “You never know!”
Then we both fall quiet because we see Gerard sitting alone on a bench. When he catches sight of me he raises his arms in the air, as if I have pulled a gun on him. I understand. He is not going to try to shake my hand ever again. Now it is my turn to redden.
Slowly, slowly Gerard and I begin to talk, to get to know each other. I start to look forward to seeing him again each morning. Yasemin, whose eyes are as sharp as a hawk’s, and whose temperament is no less fierce, warns me. “What are you doing, Ayla? Have you lost your senses?”
“He’s my friend. And you’ve got a dirty mind!”
“He’s a man. A non-Muslim man to boot. People will talk. Your father—”
She doesn’t need to complete the sentence. She can just leave it like that, as though it were an unwrapped candy no one wanted to taste.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say firmly. “I know myself.”
Yasemin shrugs—a gesture to make it clear that were I to tumble down some day, she won’t be the one lifting me up.
Later in the semester, when we have become good friends, Gerard makes me promise I will always correct the mistakes he makes in Turkish. “Don’t be too kind. Otherwise, how can I improve myself?”
Under that easily bruised skin and blushing face, he hides a strange confidence—like an underground city within a city.
One lunch break, he and I reminisce enthusiastically about the day we first met, weeks ago, the snow, the cold, the canteen. I explain to him how his hair was the first thing I saw, a roiling of silvery foam over a dark sea of bodies. Laughing, he says his hair is yet another thing he inherited from his mother, alongside his bad teeth, poor eyesight and incurable sentimentality.
“Whereas when I first saw you,” Gerald adds, “I mistook you for an angry soul.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You were frowning. A lot. Angry people scare me.”
His words, so unexpected and so sincere, shake me to the core. Seeing the change in my expression, he pulls his chair closer to offer sympathy, careful not to touch. “But then I got to know you better, and I understood how flawed my first impression was.”
We sit in silence for a while. I cannot bring myself to tell him that I know all about angry souls, as my father happens to be one of them. Baba was a difficult, cantankerous man back when he used to frequent clubs of ill repute, tales of which reached our ears, though we feigned ignorance; and he remained just as angry after he repented of his ways and turned to religion. With or without God, he is always incensed.
As if he reads my thoughts, Gerard asks me about my family, my parents in particular. He questions me about faith and God, gingerly, as though treading in murky waters, afraid of saying the wrong thing or making the wrong move, but unable to resist the temptation to proceed just the same. Such is his timid insistence that I find myself revealing things I never thought I would share with another person—least of all a stranger.
Grandma is the most pious person under our roof, yet the way she lives her faith is different from Baba’s. I start telling her about Gerard, little by little, so urgent is the need to open up to someone.
“Don’t bind your heart, my lamb,” Grandma says.
“Because he is a Christian?”
“Because he is a migrating bird,” Grandma says. “Here today, gone tomorrow.”
Spotting in her words a thread of hope, I cling to it. “But you don’t mind that he comes from another religion. I mean . . . if he’s serious, he could always convert, no?”
A look of dismay crosses her face. “Your father won’t like such talk.”
“But you are older. You are his mother! He should listen to you.”
Grandma’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “Only Allah can soften your father’s heart, and He will, we just don’t know when. Until that day comes, we must wait and pray and not do anything to make his blood boil.”
Even though it is spring, there is a creeping chill in the air. I shudder as if it were I with old bones.
The next morning I try to give Gerard a wide berth, but it doesn’t work. Before the afternoon is over we are talking and laughing together again. People look at us. A blond European and a headscarved girl walking side by side—close enough to whisper secrets—is surely not a sight to miss.
At nights in the bedroom I share with my sister Fatma, I rack my brains to find reasons not to like Gerard. He has a funny way of sucking his teeth after he has eaten lunch, which if I put my mind to it, I know I can find annoying. His skin reminds me of a fence badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. Those freckles, I tell myself, must continue all the way down to his arms, his back. The thought of this, however, rather than being off-putting, proves to be arousing. It dawns on me that I have been trying to picture him naked.
If we ever get married what will our children look like? I wonder. Will they have my dark eyes or his fair hair? Maybe we will go and settle down in Holland, though preferably in a Muslim neighbourhood. Gerard, by then, will have become a Muslim, of course. He will have to change his name.
Fatma has found out. She must have gone through my notebooks.
“Father will kill you,” she says.
I rip out all the pages with his name written on it. I destroy the mementos he has given me, silly little presents, and the notes and letters and drawings with his diligent handwriting, each dot on a “ü” or an “ö” a plump blot of ink. I find out that it is possible to erase months in the scope of an hour.
Gerard needs to go home for Easter. Last winter he was disappointed not to see any Christmas decorations around. He tells me about Easter customs, chocolate eggs delivered by the Dutch Easter hare, though carefully avoids any talk of his prophet or his holy book. I listen to everything he says, and I also listen to his silences.
Before he leaves he gives me a book: The Beloved by Khalil Gibran. “I have the exact copy,” he says. “If we read the same book at the same time, we’ll still be connected. And then when we meet again, we can talk about the expert.”
“Experience,” I correct him.
A loving expression flits across his face, though he holds himself ramrod straight. I look around. There is no one down the corridors. I kiss him on each cheek to say goodbye. Freckles of fire burn my lips.
I was not yet seven when Baba, after squandering all our money with a woman of the night and being beaten by the bodyguards of the club she worked at, saw the error of his ways and decided to devote the rest of his days to balancing out all the sins he had heretofore accumulated. First the ashtrays in the house disappeared, then the empty wine bottles we piled under the sink and sold to gypsy boys over the weekends. Mother was thrilled. No more smells of tobacco and alcohol and cheap perfume, no more dried vomit to wash off the clothes, no more disdainful looks from the neighbours.
Soon after, when I returned home from school, instead of the TV set inside the cabinet, I found a glass vase with plastic roses.
“Where’s the TV?” I asked, trying not to let my panic show. There was a programme I was keen not to miss. I had promised a friend who had gone to visit her grandparents that I would watch it and bring her up to speed on it afterwards.
Mother stared at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. “Your father gave it away.”
“When will he get it back?”
“We do not need a TV,” Mother said, in the quietest of voices.
I cried. I kicked the vase. I raised as much ruckus as I could. When Baba came home in the evening, though, I was a mouse. Fatma and Mother, tired of listening to my objections all day, exchanged glances. They knew I would never dare to rise up against Baba. Nor would they. Whatever spell of insanity or burst of rebellion, we made sure it would not reach Baba’s ears.
He never beat us. At no stage in my life did I remember him hitting anyone. But we were terrified of him. He had a way of looking at you, looking through you, his gaze sharp and formidable enough to make you weep, and if he gave you an earful in this state, it was not words that spilled from his lips, but arrows of pain and bolts of rage. Mother was the most frightened of him, and her fear, like a contagious virus, had passed on to us children.
Following Friday prayers, Mother, her hair escaping from its pins, pulls me aside. Her grasp on my arm is so tight it hurts. Fatma must have told her. “You want everyone to spit in our face? Have you no shame?”
I have nothing to hide. I love him and, even though he has yet to express this, I am sure he loves me too. “He wants to marry me!” I blurt out. “He will convert to Islam!” Right now truth is not as important as courage.
Mother opens and closes her mouth, at a loss for words. “You will stop this minute, you hear me? Or else your father will kill you—and kill me too.”
That same night I sleep fitfully but roam around inside a placid dream. There is a man beside me; I don’t need to look at him to know he is Gerard. We are in a strange place, not a church, not a mosque, but some other sacred space. He is holding my hand. I notice his fingers are covered in warts and flinch. “How can we be together if you don’t like me?” he says. Only then do I see what I am wearing: a long, pearly gown. We are getting married.
In the morning, I wake to a lightness of heart and a clarity of mind. I will tell Baba. But first, I will explain everything to Gerard.