Black Milk - Elif Shafak [64]
“Really?” I ask, inching closer to her.
“Yup,” she says, nodding. “Send it to Oprah. If she puts her stamp on your book you won’t have to work so hard anymore.”
“In America they stamp books?” I ask.
“Sí, claro mujer!” She rolls her eyes as if to add, “You don’t know how crazy these Americans can get.”
I thank her for the advice. Then I go back to my novel and she goes back to her work, walking her slow gait, dragging her vacuum cleaner and rolling a bucket of detergents and soaps beside her. She disappears among the aisles of hardcover books. Puff!
In the summer I visit Istanbul for a short while. I am here to pick up a few bits and pieces from my old apartment, to see my friends and my mother, to do some book readings and signings in the city and to seal a contract with my Turkish publisher for The Saint of Incipient Insanities, which I have just finished. Then in ten days, I will return to the States.
However, life is a naughty child who sneaks up from behind us while we draw our plans, making funny faces at us.
On my first evening back in Istanbul friends invite me to have a drink in Yakup, a well-known tavern that journalists, painters and writers have long frequented. Jet-lagged and slightly grumpy, I nevertheless agree to meet them.
When I enter the place, the sound of laughter and chattering greets me, along with a thick cloud of smoke. Either there is a chimney inside the tavern or everyone is puffing on at least two Havana cigars at the same time. It is quite a change of scenery after my sterile life at Mount Holyoke.
I walk up to my friends’ table, where I know everyone—except a young man with dark, wavy hair and a dimpled smile sitting at the end. He introduces himself as Eyup. It doesn’t occur to me that it happens to be the name of the prophet Job, of whom I have said not just a few critical things in the past. Once again in my life, the angels are pointing their milky-white fingers at me, giggling among themselves. Again, I am failing to foresee the irony.
I watch him throughout the evening, cautiously at first, then with growing curiosity. The more I listen to him the more I am convinced that he is the embodiment of everything I have excluded and pushed away from my life. Pure patience, pure balance, pure rationality, pure calmness, pure harmony. He is a natural-born fisherman.
I don’t even think I like him. I simply and swiftly fall head over heels in love with him. But I am determined not to let anyone at the table, especially him, see that. In order to hide my feelings, I swing to the other extreme, constantly challenging him and frowning at his every comment.
Hours later, as always happens in Istanbul when a group of women and men consume more than a carafe of wine and twice as much of rakı, people start to talk about matters of the heart. Someone suggests that we take turns quoting the best maxims about love that we know.
One of my girlfriends volunteers to go first: “This one is from Shakespeare,” she says with a touch of pride. “‘Love all, trust a few.’”
The quote is well received. Everyone toasts.
“This one is from Albert Einstein,” says someone else. “‘Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.’”
We toast again.
His eyes sparkling, Eyup joins the game after a few rounds. “This one is from Mark Twain,” he says. “‘When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.’”
Everyone applauds. I frown. But I join the toast all the same.
Ten minutes later everyone at the table is looking at me, waiting for me to utter my quote. By now I have drunk more than my usual, and my head is swirling. I put my glass on the table with a kind of borrowed confidence and a bit more forcefully than I intended. I wag my finger in the air and say:
“‘Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up.’ How stupid!”
For one stunned moment