Crista Ermiya

1977

Memet Ali was eight years old when a woman on his estate gave birth to a cockerel. Elif. He remembered that her name was Elif.

Elif wasn’t exactly pretty, as such. She had a long torso and short legs, so that when she sat down, paradoxically she looked taller. Her hair was dark, thick and long with a slight kink to it that made it easier for tendrils to escape from under her headscarf. The skin on her face was lightly pockmarked on one cheek where she had scratched at chicken pox spots when she was eleven. Her almost-black eyes were large and set slightly too wide apart. Some of the other Turks on the estate, including Memet Ali’s grandmother, said they were the eyes of a woman who saw djinn. Despite these superficial flaws that edged her otherwise ordinary prettiness towards the plain, Elif had acquired the unwanted status of local siren. Although never fully articulated by the neighbours, the reason for this was unfairly straightforward: at the age of nineteen, Elif was already a widow.

She had arrived two years previously, hair wrapped in a scarf, legs encased in stiff indigo jeans, with a permanent shiver that meant the heating bills would always be high. At first everyone assumed she was Suleyman’s niece, or even an illegitimate daughter. It was a couple of weeks before he admitted that she was his new wife.

Those who were so inclined sucked their teeth. Memet Ali’s father restricted himself to a mutter, ‘That is not the modern thing to do.’ Mr Ali stubbed out his cigarettes in a metal union flag ashtray, and he insisted his family eat their dinner off plasticised place-mats adorned with the St Andrew’s Cross because when he was younger and newly arrived someone had told him he looked like a Hebridean fisherman with a suntan. On the subject of Suleyman’s folly, Mr Ali said, ‘But what else can you expect from a Turk?’

Suleyman was from Anatolia, whereas most of the other Turks on the estate were from Cyprus. With other personalities this wouldn’t perhaps have been a big deal, but Suleyman was a naturally conservative man, and although only slightly more than perfunctorily religious, he didn’t drink alcohol, even when it wasn’t Ramadan. Memet was afraid of him, because whenever they came across him in the street, Suleyman would start talking to his father, loudly, about whether Mr Ali would have Memet circumcised at the appropriate age. Mr Ali didn’t appreciate these extempore lectures from Suleyman, but he still insisted that Memet call the elder man Uncle Suleyman.

The neighbours were at first surprised (later transforming into malicious glee) when, a few weeks after Suleyman had returned from an extended visit to Anatolia in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, he came home one day with a teenage girl in the back of his cab, obviously just off the plane, and clutching a small vinyl suitcase to her skinny breast. Her wide-set eyes stared around at the estate unblinking, like a shocked kitten recently displaced from its litter. Memet was standing opposite, by one of the communal metal bins trying to throw a small bag of rubbish over the top. Suleyman saw him but instead of calling Memet over for a random harangue, as he would normally do, he pretended not to see the curious boy. Nor did he appear to notice the women leaning over their balconies. He quickly ushered the stranger into his stairwell.

Elif didn’t go out at first, and then when she did it was always with Suleyman. Memet longed to see her out by herself. He had taken to sitting on the bottom steps of his stairwell after school, in hope of catching a glimpse of her. He was even willing to risk Uncle Suleyman quizzing him over potential plans for circumcision and sometimes accompanied the couple to the shops on the pretence of needing to get a loaf or sugar for his grandmother. Elif didn’t talk much, and Memet couldn’t speak Turkish anyway, apart from a few basic phrases, so their conversation always ran along the same lines. ‘Nasselsen?’ Elif would ask how he was. ‘Choc e, merci.’ I’m fine, thank you, Memet would dutifully reply. ‘Sen Nasselsen?’ And she would ruffle his hair in lieu of her own reply. Uncle Suleyman smiled indulgently. ‘You’re a good boy, Memet,’ he said.

A year into his marriage, Suleyman had a heart attack in his cab and died in the driver seat, his car lined up in a queue outside the controller’s office. No one noticed until the three cabs in front of him had gone off on jobs and he failed to respond to the next request. The neighbours were studiously over-sympathetic – Poor Elif, what will become of her? – predicting gloom with voyeuristic relish. She’ll have to go back home – yes, but I hear she has no family. Memet Ali’s grandmother, more practical and less susceptible to schadenfreude, went to visit her, widow to widow. She helped Elif organise the funeral: it had taken the astute grandmother less than a minute to understand that Elif was entirely without anyone to help her from amongst Suleyman’s acquaintance. The funeral was attended by members of Suleyman’s mosque, his fellow mini-cab drivers and some Turks from the estate. In the following weeks, the neighbours looked out for arrivals from Turkey, for either Suleyman or Elif, but no-one came. That’s strange, people said. Well, said others, what do we really know about her? Nothing. Maybe Suleyman’s family back home don’t even know he’s dead. How do we know she’s even told them? – He was an old man, maybe he has no close relatives left – He wasn’t that old – Perhaps they didn’t approve of his marriage to Elif – Well, you could understand that. So young! – Suleyman wasn’t that old – No, it’s true, these days 50 is nothing. Strange he should have a heart attack like that. All of a sudden – Are the council going to let her stay on in the flat? – What? And my son on the waiting list these past four years? – Maybe she hasn’t told the authorities about Suleyman’s death either.

 

One afternoon, when she was not well enough to go herself, Memet Ali’s grandmother sent her grandson over to Elif with some baklava. She was on the third floor of her block and Memet, against his natural inclination to go running up to see her as fast as he could, was careful to go slowly up the stairs so as not to drop the tray of sweets. When he got there he had to knock five or six times before she answered, and even then, only after he had called out to her through the letterbox. Inside, the flat was dark, all the curtains shut against the daylight, and all the electric lights off.

‘Nasselsen Elif?’ Memet asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied, in English. She walked into the sitting room, but Memet stood in the hallway, eyes unaccustomed to the dark after the light outside. He heard her draw the curtains and the dusty afternoon lit the room.

‘Come in then,’ she said.

He went in, put the baklava on to a low smoked-glass table and stood awkwardly with his hands clasped behind his back, sweating, his elbows jutting out on either side of his body.

‘Sit down, Memet,’ Elif said.

He sat down in an armchair upholstered in a large floral brown fabric that made his legs itch through his trousers. Elif sat down on the settee.

‘Baklava.’ She laughed.

Memet could see nothing especially funny about the Baklava. ‘From my grandmother,’ he said.

‘She’s very kind,’ Elif said. ‘Not everyone is.’

‘I can be kind to you,’ Memet blurted out.

‘The kindness of children. That’s something, I suppose,’ she said.

Memet couldn’t think of anything to say to this, and so they both sat in silence in the room as the dusty light slowly turned to evening. Memet thought it was like watching someone fall asleep with their eyes open. He should have been bored, sitting down in a room with nothing happening, but he felt a curious happiness watching her as she sat back on the settee, her head tilted up to the ceiling, eyes open but unfocused, her lips unsmiling. She still wore a headscarf, but it looked different these days, something to do with the way she tied it, that made Memet think of the three women in Charlie’s Angels.

‘Who is your favourite Angel?’ Memet asked.

Elif turned her head to look at him. She looked surprised and Memet thought, with a pang, that she had forgotten he was there.

‘Everyone likes the one with the blonde hair, but I like the one with the long dark hair, the one with the hair that waves at the bottom.’ He wanted to say, ‘I like her because she looks a little bit like you,’ but he didn’t. And then the doorbell rang. They both jolted, as if they were on a bus and the doorbell was the driver braking too quickly. His dad’s voice came ringing through the letterbox.

‘Memet! Are you in there?’

Elif got up and went to the door.

‘Merhaba Elif,’ he said, and then, spying Memet who had followed her into the hallway, hissed, ‘where have you been? Your grandmother has been worrying.’

To Elif he said, ‘Has he been making a nuisance of himself? I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ Elif replied. ‘Memet is a good boy.’ Suleyman’s stock phrase.

‘Come here, son,’ Memet called to him. Memet reluctantly edged through the front door past Elif.

‘Come again,’ she said, and Memet’s heart lifted and he smiled, until his father said, ‘Yes, I’ll drop by sometime,’ as if she had been speaking to him rather than Memet.

‘Poor girl,’ Memet Ali’s father said as they walked back home together to the grandmother. ‘She must be lonely.’

‘Maybe she needs more friends,’ Memet suggested, thinking of putting himself forward for the role.

‘Yes,’ Memet’s father agreed. ‘Friends.’

 

 

‘You’re not going over to Elif again?’ the grandmother asked Memet’s dad.

‘And what if I am? She needs a friend in these times.’

‘She has too many friends these days,’ Memet’s grandmother said.

‘I’m just being a good neighbour,’ he told his mother-in-law.

‘No. I’m a good neighbour. You are just another man.’

Memet’s father slammed the door on his way out.

 

I’ve heard she likes older men – Easier to get rid of! – Ain’t that the truth. The girl is sly. She just come, take the flat, take the benefit. I been here since 1963, waiting to move since 1973, the council still promising – You know what I’m saying! And all them men-friends. I hear not all them get it for free, you know – Yep, that girl is too clever with herself.

 

‘Gran, what are you doing?’ Memet asked.

‘It’s to protect our home,’ she said. ‘This keeps away the evil eye.’

His grandmother was putting up a mobile with three blue glass beads hanging down from thin leather straps on the inside of the front door, with a white blob in the middle of each bead. Sort of like eyes, Memet conceded.

‘What’s the evil eye?’

‘It can be many things, Memet. Sometimes it’s a look, sometimes it’s a person, sometimes it’s the devil himself.’

‘Why would the devil come here?’

‘There are all sorts of unlikely places for evil to come through,’ Memet’s grandmother said. He didn’t know what she was talking about; but this was often the case.

‘Mother, what is this?’ Memet’s dad asked when he got home. ‘Are we living in the dark ages? No. This is modern Great Britain in the 1970s. We are not peasants.’

Memet’s grandmother shuffled in the kitchen, frying blobs of mincemeat for kofte. ‘I promised Emine I would look after you and Memet. Let me do it my way.’

Memet listened hard; neither his father nor his grandmother ever mentioned his mother. But they didn’t say anything further about her, and Memet’s father let the talisman remain.

‘We should tell Elif to get one,’ Memet suggested.

Neither his father nor his grandmother replied.

‘No-one goes to see her now that her belly has got round,’ Memet said.

There was a brief silence.

‘You’re right, Memet,’ said his grandmother. ‘Why don’t you go to see her?’

Memet’s father shot her a look that Memet couldn’t quite understand. She continued, ‘Open the top left drawer in the dresser in my bedroom. There’s another . . . decoration . . . in there. Take it and give to Elif. After you’ve eaten your tea.’

Memet, unencumbered this time by pastry sweets, ran up Elif’s stairwell, so that by the time he arrived on her floor he could hear his own breathing, which had got loud in the way that it sometimes did when he was in the playground. Elif was stood in her doorway.

‘You’re out of breath, little man,’ she said.

Memet panted a little until he couldn’t hear himself any more, and he reached into his pocket.

‘My grandmother sent you this,’ he said, holding out the triumvirate of blue glass beads towards her. Elif took it from his open hand and examined the talisman in her palm.

‘Yes.’ She nodded to herself. She continued to stand in the doorway.

‘What are you doing?’ Memet asked.

‘Nothing,’ Elif said.

‘You can’t see anything from there,’ Memet advised her. ‘If you want to look out properly you have to look over the balcony.’ And he stood at the balcony wall and peered over. He was just about tall enough to do so now, and took great pride in it.

‘I can see our bins from here.’

Elif laughed. ‘Nice view,’ she said.

She stepped over to the wall and bent forward to lean her arms over it, shielding her protruding stomach. ‘Back home, none of our houses were this tall. But we could see all the way to the end of the world. Miles and miles of grass, and trees, and cotton.’

‘My dad says that where he grew up you could hear the sea all day, even when you were in school.’

‘He’s from an island,’ Elif said. ‘I’ve never seen the ocean.’

Memet was incredulous. ‘But even I’ve seen it, and I’m only little. Haven’t you ever been to Southend?’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s the seaside, everyone knows that.’

‘No. I haven’t been to Southend. Even when I came over here on the airplane I couldn’t see the ocean out of the window. Except once, when the cloud cleared, I saw some mountains.’

‘I’ve never seen a mountain,’ Memet said, impressed.

‘You could see mountains from my house,’ Elif said. ‘On the horizon, right at the edge of the world, I used to think.’

Memet and Elif contemplated the sight of two kids who had come out of one of the opposite blocks and were now walking round a blackened car. It had been burnt out the night before. Memet had thought it looked pretty then, like bonfire night, but then some firemen came and put it out. The fire engine was quite exciting, but Memet had seen plenty of those already.

‘Elif, have you got a mummy and daddy?’

Elif shook her head.

‘Do you wish Uncle Suleyman was still here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about you? Do you miss your mummy?’

Memet didn’t want to answer this, so instead he asked her something that had been bothering him for ages. ‘Why is your belly so big now? Have you eaten lots and lots of baklava?’

‘No,’ Elif laughed, but it sounded odd to Memet. Too loud, somehow, too short. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘A baby? Why?’

Elif didn’t say anything for a bit, and then she said, almost to herself, ‘It will keep me company, I suppose.’

‘Back home, the old women told me I would never have children,’ she added.

‘Were you naughty?’ Memet asked. ‘Is that why they wouldn’t allow you?’

Elif looked down at him through narrowed eyes.

‘No, I wasn’t naughty.’

‘Then why wouldn’t they let you have children?’

‘It’s not like making someone stay in their room, or stopping them from having any sweets,’ she said. But then she continued, ‘You’re right though. They did think I was naughty.’

‘Why? What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Elif said, looking back at the burnt-out car. ‘But people in the village thought I was doing naughty things.’

‘Like playing in the road when you’re meant to be getting bread from the shops?’

‘No, like cursing chickens so they don’t lay eggs. Or looking at someone’s husband and then the next day he’s ill.’

‘How did you do that?’ Memet asked. This was even more impressive than the mountains.

‘I didn’t!’ Elif cried. ‘Or maybe I did, I don’t know. Maybe we all do things without knowing what we’re doing.’

The two kids down below heard Elif’s cry, and looked up. They shouted rude words at her, and held up their fingers in an ‘up yours’ gesture.

‘Be careful,’ an adult admonished them from an unseen window. ‘She’s a witch, she’ll put a spell on you.’

‘She doesn’t scare me!’ declared one of the kids, but the other one looked away.

‘Come inside,’ Elif said to Memet. ‘I’ll make you some toast.’

Inside was just as it always was, dark and dusty and overheated. This time Memet sat in the kitchen while Elif made some toast under the grill, and boiled water for tea. He dipped his toast into the milky tea Elif made for him and watched the crumbs swirl around on the beige surface.

‘Your tea will get cold,’ he said to her, imitating something his grandmother would say.

Elif smiled and took a sip from her own cup.

‘Would you like to see some mountains?’ she asked him.

Memet was uncertain. ‘I can’t be away too long, or Gran will get worried.’

‘I have some pictures from home,’ Elif said. ‘You can see the mountains in the background of some of them.’ She lifted herself up off the chair with a little heave and went out of the room. Memet heard a shuffling noise from what was most likely the bedroom, and then Elif returned, carrying the small navy vinyl suitcase she’d had when Memet had first seen her exit Suleyman’s cab two years before.

‘I’ve not shown these to anybody, not even your grandmother.’ She dusted off the bottom of the case, placed it on her lap and opened it. She took out a bundle of small square photographs, three inches by three inches with a white thin border, and passed them over to Memet. ‘Wipe your hands first,’ she said. ‘I don’t want tea and toast on them.’

Memet wiped his hands on his trousers and mutely took the proffered photographs. They were all from Elif’s wedding to Suleyman. Even to Memet’s untrained eye, he could see that Elif now looked much older than she had in the photographs, even though they were only from a couple of years ago. A lot of the pictures had been taken in the evening, and Elif’s wedding headdress glittered red and gold in the flashbulb. She didn’t look happy, exactly, Memet wouldn’t say that, but there was a look in her face that she didn’t have now, sitting opposite him.

‘Hope,’ Elif said, suddenly. ‘I had so much hope.’ Memet looked at her and noticed, with a child’s acuity, the fine lines developing around her dark eyes, which had acquired a sunken look as if they were being sucked back into her face. It was the kind of look his mother had when she had been vomiting.

‘Where are the mountains?’ he asked.

Elif shuffled through the pictures until she found one.

‘Here,’ she said. The photograph was blurry, and obviously one taken by mistake. There were no people in the picture. A disembodied arm jutted into one side but behind that all you could see was a blurry, sunny distance, with dark shapes in the distance. Elif pointed to one of the tiny dark peaks. ‘That’s where my mother came from,’ she told him. ‘People used to say she was naughty too.’ She paused. ‘The old women told me that when my mother first came to the village, she was already carrying me in her belly but no one knew at first. She wouldn’t tell them who the father was, and some people said I had no father, that my mother was a witch and got me from the devil. They didn’t say that to my face. Not the grown-ups anyway.

‘I used to ask my mother if I could have a father like most of the other children, and she said I already had one, but that he stayed out all night instead of coming home to her, and once, when he had done this three nights in a row, when the sun came up he turned into a cockerel. She said there was nothing she could do, so she left him there on one of the farms, and came down to our village on the plains.’

‘My dad says my mummy went away because of cancer.’

‘Yes,’ Elif said. ‘I know.’ And she kissed Memet on the cheek.

 

That was the last time he saw her. She had bundled the photographs back into her little suitcase, given Memet a round red boiled sweet to take away with him, and told him to thank his grandmother for the talisman. About a week later, when he came home from school, he saw his grandmother coming out of Elif’s block.

‘Have you been to see Elif?’ he asked her, anxious that he had missed the chance of a visit.

‘No, Memet, she’s not here any more,’ his grandmother said.

He stopped in front of her. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘Come inside for tea, child,’ his grandmother said, and took him by the hand.

Instead, Memet heard from others on the estate what had happened, or at least, their versions of it. The baby had decided to come early. Elif had been screaming from inside her flat for hours before one of the neighbours decided to call the police. When they arrived, they had to break down the door, and immediately called an ambulance. Accounts varied as to what was actually delivered. The more sedate versions were that the baby was stillborn, but wilder imaginations postulated everything from the birth of a two-headed boy to a goat. ‘What is wrong with these people?’ Memet Ali’s father would say. ‘Why do they believe such nonsense?’ Whatever Elif had given birth to, it hadn’t survived. People felt sorry for her, but not that much. They found out she wasn’t meant to be here, of course – I could have told them that a year ago – So what’s going to happen to the flat? – What’s going to happen to her? – They’ve sent her home. Wish I could have my plane ticket bought for me. I could do with a bit of proper sunshine.

For several weeks, Memet would take a short detour after school to walk up to her flat. The door and windows had been boarded over with pale chipboard. Memet would stare at the cheap wood for a few minutes and then go home for tea. Then one day, there was a proper front door again. Memet knocked but no-one answered. When he got home, he asked his grandmother, ‘What happened to the baby?’

‘What baby?’ she asked, lighting the oven.

‘Elif’s baby.’

She put in a baking tray. ‘It died,’ she said.

‘Was it my brother?’ Memet asked.

His grandmother stood up. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t know. I just thought it would be nice to have a brother. Or a sister.’

Memet’s grandmother eyed him carefully. ‘This will be a while cooking. Why don’t you go out and play? You shouldn’t be with grown-ups all the time.’

Memet went slowly down the stairs and out into the courtyard. A girl from his school was skipping rope by herself.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ Memet said. ‘I’ve got a brother.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ she said.

‘I have too.’

She stopped skipping. ‘Then how come I’ve never seen him?’

‘He doesn’t live here. He lives on a farm.’

‘Is he a farmer?’

‘No, he’s a cockerel.’

‘You can’t have a cockerel for a brother,’ she said.

‘Well I have. And Elif’s father was a cockerel too.’

The girl nodded thoughtfully. She’d heard funny things about Elif.

‘I think I heard your brother this morning,’ she said. ‘When I woke up I could hear him crowing.’

‘Yes,’ Memet said, ‘that was him.’

And then they went to look for bloodstains in the stairwell three blocks down, where a man was supposed to have been stabbed the night before.