Honor (9781101606148) by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online Page B

possibility, however slight, of evil disguising itself. As she followed the man into the still of the night, Jamila was aware that he could kidnap, rape and kill her. She had to trust. Not him but Him. Yet it was also true that there were unwritten rules nobody in his right mind dared to violate. A midwife, someone who brought babies into this world, was semi-sacred. She dangled between the invisible world and the visible one, on a thread as delicate as a strand of spider’s silk.
    Feeding the flames in the fireplace with more wood, Jamila put the copper
cezve
on the fire. Water, sugar and coffee – all these items were in short supply. But families brought her presents all the time – henna, tea, biscuits, saffron, pistachios, peanuts, and tobacco smuggled from the other side of the frontier. Jamila knew that if she had received money, she would have been paid once and that would have been it. But if you were paid in trinkets, such giving went on for a lifetime.
    She mixed the coffee carefully, gently.
Coffee was like love
, they said,
the more patient you were with it, the better it would taste.
But Jamila didn’t know much about that. She had been in love once, and it had tasted sour and dark. Having scalded her tongue, she never spoke of it any more.
    As she kept her eyes on the rising foam, she pricked her ears to sounds near and beyond. The valley was alive with spirits. There were creatures here no bigger than grains of rice, imperceptible to the naked eye but potent and perilous nevertheless. Birds tapped on the windows, insects bounced off the water in the buckets as if skittering across the surface of a lake. Everything had a language, she believed. The thunderstorm, the morning dew, the ants crawling in her sugar bowl . . . Sometimes she thought she understood what they said.
    She loved nothing more than she loved being a midwife. It was her mission, her one fortune. So it was that in the fog, or scorching sun, or thirty inches of snow, any time during day or night, she was on call, waiting for the knock on her door. This nobody knew, but in her heart of hearts she was married already. Jamila was married to her destiny.
    *
    Outside the night wind rattled against the windowpanes. Jamila took the coffee off the flames and poured some into a small earthenware cup with a chipped handle. She drank it in slow sips. The fire was a bit like her life, smouldering within, not letting anyone come too close, precious moments burning into embers, like dying dreams.
    Far away a bird cried out – an owl, which the locals called the mother of ruins. It hooted again, this time more boldly. Jamila sat there with her eyes clamped shut, her thoughts wavering. Despite the hardships, she remembered her childhood as a happy one. At times one of the twins would pretend to be the Mummy and the other the infant. Though older by three minutes, Pembe would always be the baby while Jamila would be the mother, trying to constrain, control and comfort her. She would rock her little one, singing lullabies, telling stories. Looking back on those games, Jamila was surprised to see how serious they had been.
    She recalled how once her father, Berzo, took them to a town where they discovered a Wish Fountain. Women who longed to have babies, mothers-in-law who wanted to put a spell on their daughters-in-law, and virgins who yearned for well-to-do husbands came here, tossing coins into the water. When everyone had left, Pembe rolled up her hems, climbed into the fountain and collected the coins. Then they both ran, as fast as they could, shrieking with excitement, to the closest shop, where they bought boiled sweets and sticks of rock.
    Much as Jamila enjoyed the adventure, she felt guilty afterwards. They were thieves. Worse. Stealing people’s wishes was far more despicable than stealing their wallets.
    â€˜Don’t be sentimental,’ Pembe said, when Jamila revealed her worries. ‘They had already