Black Milk - Elif Shafak [71]
Always a fighter, when she got cancer she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She saw even her illness as a mistake that needed to be corrected. And she did “correct it,” managing to beat the cancer. For her it was another victory of the brain over the body. A confirmation of her viewpoint.
But in 1982, she suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack.
Today, literature enthusiasts from all around the world post their views on the Internet by asking questions such as “What kind of a psycho would I turn out to be if Ayn Rand had been my mother?” or “What would my life be like if I were married to Ayn Rand?”
Maybe they are right. Ayn Rand hadn’t been born to be a mother or a wife. If she had been a mother she would very likely have been a dominant one, seeing each of her children as a different scientific experiment. But perhaps we are all badly mistaken. She may have found motherhood to be a “wonderfully intense intellectual excitement”—the way she described school and classes as a young girl in her diary. I am curious to know what she would have done when her child turned into a rebellious teenager.
It is equally plausible that early on she realized that in the motherchild relationship, the child always wins. Perhaps that was the real reason why she didn’t want children. Ayn Rand liked to win.
Giving birth to books was enough for her.
When the Grand Bazaar Smiles
Exactly a year later we are sitting in a café at the Grand Bazaar, Eyup and I.
The finger-women are nowhere to be seen and I suspect each is shopping in a separate store. After Mount Holyoke I was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I taught courses in women’s studies, and slowly I started writing my new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.
Now it is summer again. I am back in the city. We are sitting here, my love and I, between silver bracelets, smoke pipes, carpets and brass lamps that remind me of Aladdin’s. A rumpus is going on around us. Young men pushing carts loaded with merchandise, old men playing backgammon, merchants haggling in every language known to humankind, tourists struggling to keep pushy sellers at bay, apprentices carrying tea glasses on silver trays, cats meowing in front of restaurants, children feeding the cats when their parents are not looking—everyone is in their own world.
Suddenly, Eyup holds my hand and asks, his voice raised over the din in the background, “Honey, I was just wondering. Are you still against marriage?”
“I certainly am,” I say with conviction, but then add, “theoretically.”
“And what exactly does theoretically mean?” he asks sweetly.
“It means, generally speaking. As an abstract idea. As a philosophical model—” I try to explain.
“In plain language, please?” he says, swirling the spoon in his tea glass.
“I mean, I am against human beings getting married, at least most of them, because they really shouldn’t, but that said—”
“That said?” he repeats.
“I am not against me marrying you, for instance.”
Eyup laughs—his laughter like a sword being pulled out of a silken sheath before the final thrust.
“I think you just made the most roundabout marriage proposal that a man has ever received from a woman,” he says.
“Did I?”
He nods mischievously. “You can take it