Black Milk - Elif Shafak [78]
Week 12
On TV Christiane Amanpour interviews AIDS orphans in Africa. The CNN crew has ducked into an adobe hut, placed their cameras on strewn straw. The landscape is harsh, unforgiving. With a napkin in my hand, I watch and cry.
These days, all sorts of things bring me to tears. There is a pair of shoes—faded blue Converse sneakers—that dangles from the electric pole around the corner, and every time I pass by them I feel a sense of sorrow well up inside of me. I wonder who they belonged to. How did they end up there? Rain or shine, they are always there—by themselves, so vulnerable, so alone.
It isn’t only the sneakers. Boys bullying one another at the playground, two stray cats fighting over a slice of meat in the garbage, the skinny Kurdish street vendor who sells chestnut kebabs with worms, the neighbor lady who beats her carpet out the window and showers the passersby with dust, the melting icebergs in Antarctica, the polluting of the atmosphere, the quagmire in Palestine, a piece of crushed bread on the ground. Everything, and anything, is so distressing. The world crumbles in my fingers like sandstone in the wind and my days are painted with melancholy.
On the evening news they show a dog—a terrier puppy with brown ears and a white body. It has a huge, dazzling bow around its neck. Its owner is a retired chemistry teacher. As the lady chemist plays the piano, the puppy sits at her heels and begins to howl along.
I watch the scene and my eyes fill with tears.
“Why are you crying again?” asks Eyup, his famous patience wearing slightly thin.
“Poor puppy,” I say, sobbing.
“What is poor about that puppy? He is probably better fed than thousands of children who go to bed hungry every night.”
“Thousands of children go to bed hungry every night,” I repeat, on the verge of tears.
“Oh, God, I should never have opened my mouth,” Eyup says softly.
He doesn’t understand me. How can I make him see that I feel bad for the puppy? I feel bad for all terriers with dazzling bows around their necks. Our lust for baubles of fame, our inability to cope with mortality, our expulsion from the Garden of Eden—my lungs fill with the heaviness of being a mere human. I can’t breathe.
Week 16
Mama Rice Pudding hands me a box of CDs. “Take these and listen to each of them at least three times,” she commands.
I glance at the box and mumble, “But I don’t really like opera.”
“They aren’t for you, they are for the baby,” she says as she starts the CD player and turns it up full blast. A second later Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers pours into the room and out into the entire neighborhood.
The rug beater across the street pops her head out of her window and looks left and right trying to figure out where the deep male voice is coming from. Suddenly her face comes apart in terrible recognition that the music is coming from our apartment. Squinting her dark, piercing eyes, she peers through our window into my shivering soul.
“Could you please turn the volume down?” I implore Her Majesty.
“Why? The baby is getting her first taste of culture—and learning French. Do you know that babies can hear sounds while in the womb?”
She puts on another CD. We hear the sound of rain hammering a tin roof, followed by the bleating of goats and the tinkling of bells in the distance.
Aghast, I ask, “What is that?”
“The peaceful sounds of Mother Nature,” says Mama Rice Pudding. “It is recorded specially for pregnant women. It has a soothing effect on them. A perfect nondrug sleep aid.”
“I’m not having any problems falling asleep; actually I’m sleeping a lot,” I say, trying to reason, trying to stay calm.
I don’t know about the baby, but these sounds are starting to piss me off. “Birds chirping in an Australian rain forest seem like the perfect sleepless aid if you ask me.”
“What do you want to listen to, then?” she asks.
“Punk, postpunk, industrial metal. This is the kind of music I always listened to while writing my novels. I could use a dose of Pearl Jam, Chumbawamba, Bad Religion—”
“No way,” she says, scrunching