Black Milk - Elif Shafak [33]
Half an hour later, we are back in the park, sitting on another bench—the four of us, feeling drab, almost drowsy. That is what happens when more than two finger-women get together. This much quarreling tires us all, draining our energies, yet these Thumbelinas do not know how not to quarrel.
“Hello, everyone! May I join you?” It is Dame Dervish, suddenly mushrooming on the bench, like a Sufi version of Houdini.
She wears a plain smoky-gray dress and a long cloak of the same color, fastened with a pearl brooch. The hem of her dress is fluttering softly in the breeze. She wears a necklace sporting the name Hu,7 written in Ottoman script.
“Welcome, dear Sufi,” I say. “Come and join us.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I feel welcomed, but I wish you could as well. Look at yourself, always evaluating, always in haste. Sometimes you try to do five things at once and then fall flat from exhaustion. Do one thing at a time. What is the hurry? Give yourself over to the moment. Time does not exist beyond that. The Seven Sleepers in the Qur’an slept for three hundred years in a cave, but when they woke up they felt like only a few hours had passed.”
“Do you want me to sleep?” I frown.
“I want you to stop competing with time.”
I try to give myself over to the moment, and realize I don’t have a clue what that really means.
“Dame Dervish . . .”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think . . . I mean, if I ever were to do this, not that I want to, of course, just a question, if I were to someday . . . I mean, hypothetically . . .” I take a deep breath and try again. “Do you think I could make a good mother?”
Her dark green eyes widen, creasing around the edges. “If you fulfill three conditions you will make a wonderful mother.”
“What three conditions?”
“First of all, God needs to want it, so a new chapter must be written in your storybook,” she says. “Second, you need to want it, of course, deep in your heart, and your partner’s, too.”
“Well, what is the third condition?”
“The third condition has to do with the fishermen,” she says. “You have to learn what they know.”
“Not the fishermen again!” Little Miss Practical says with a snort, raising her hands, palms up.
I look around in bewilderment. What could these fishermen possibly know about becoming a mother? What could they know that I don’t know?
“Dear Elif,” says Dame Dervish, as if writing me a letter.
“Yes?”
“Have you ever seen a fisherman run at the sea? You can’t have—because he, who you call fisherman, doesn’t chase fish. He waits for the fish to come to him.”
“Which means . . . ?”
Dame Dervish regards me for a beat before she answers. “It means: Stop running after the waves. Let the sea come to you.”
Just then a young mother pushing a stroller passes in front of us and jolts me back to my senses. Despite myself I look at the baby—her pink fingers, powder-soft hair, dimpled cheeks—and I find myself smiling.
“Come on, let’s go. What are we waiting for?” asks Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, pulling at my arm. “Time is money.”
“Let’s go and read novels,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.
“The shortest route,” orders Little Miss Practical. “Let’s catch a cab.”
Suddenly, I don’t want to hear or see any of them. At least for a while. “Go ahead,” I say gently, but firmly. “I’m staying.”
Thankfully, after a few protests, the four finger-women leave. Arguing among themselves as to which road to take, they walk away on their little feet, their voices trailing off into the air.
I notice a fat, tawny cat nearby, following them with his fixed eyes. Can the cat see them? The thought first excites, and then frightens, me. What if the cat confuses them with mice or birds and tries to gobble them up? But to my relief, even if the feline could see my finger-women, he shuts his eyes and resumes his nap, realizing, perhaps, that they would give him indigestion.
Taking a deep, deep breath, I watch the little women exit the