I understood then that she had begun to cry. Her shoulders rocked; she cowered into herself. And then, like that, she’d blinked away the tears. “I’m such a vile thing,” she said. “I despise my father, which is a huge sin. God sees, I know. And I despise Him too — my god.” She snatched out of her pocket the headscarf I’d collected from the ground and threw it carelessly across the nest. “I renounce Him day after day. Each day in jeans, each day hiding the shamiya like a knife in my pocket. My friends in the city, they don’t know I’m Muslim. I’d kill myself if they found out. And yet, I love my god. I love my father. And yet, I hate them as much as a living heart can hate.”
Her father, she began to tell me, was the village imam. His father had been the village imam, and then before him his father’s father had been the village imam too. A great spiritual tradition ruled over her bloodline, and so when she herself was brought into this world a girl, her father grew sick at heart. For a whole month after her birth he did not leave the mosque, praying to Allah for forgiveness. “I am a sinful wretch, Elif,” he’d often told her when she was still a child. “Why else would God punish me with someone like you, a girl?” He never hugged her, never gave her a kiss, not when she fell and bloodied her knees, not when she suffered, feverish and sick.
And when her sister was born, her father, upon hearing the baby’s girlish cries, lay down, closed his eyes, and had a stroke right there on the floor of the birth room. Entirely out of spite. An ambulance picked him up and he spent a month, this time in the city hospital, licking his wounds. Because of the stroke, his mouth froze forever in a frown and twisted like a dagger every time he spoke to his girls. Which he did rarely. At dinner, they ate their meals in silence, the only noise that of his lips smacking and of his hand wiping grease from his mustache and his beard. Some days the only time they heard their father was when he climbed the minaret and summoned everyone to prayer. There was no muezzin in the village.
“When I was little,” Elif said, and filled her lungs with smoke, “I’d watch the minaret from the yard and listen to my father singing, his voice so pretty, deep, loving. And I’d imagine he sang not for Allah, but for me. I was a really stupid girl.”
No television, no radio, no books other than the Qur’an. Only a handful of girls were deemed decent enough to be her friends. No boys allowed. She was sixteen before her father let her travel to the city, and even then he came along to guard her. “For sixteen years,” she said, “I hadn’t set foot off this mountain. Can you imagine this?”
No. I could not.
“I have become a master of retaliation,” Elif went on. “I know exactly how to get each little thing I want.”
Her first pair of jeans? She cut herself for a whole month before her father caved in. That’s when he took her to Burgas. They walked into a Levi’s store — oh, how people looked at them. Their jaws on the floor. Elif in her colorful shalwars, a scarf on her pretty little head. In the dressing room, she hung the shalwars on a nail and watched them the way the snake must watch the skin it’s shed. She stared at the cuts on her thighs, on the insides of her arms, and wondered if it was really worth it. Then she put on the jeans and absolutely hated how tight and coarse they felt. And absolutely loved this tightness, which only gave her wings. Oh, it was worth it. Dear God, was she beautiful in that mirror. Did she feel strong, invincible. All right, you old fool, she told herself. I got you now. In the palm of my hand, under my thumb, just where I want you. And when she walked out, her father could see it in her eyes. For the first time he’d lost a battle, and then he knew — the real war was only now beginning.
It’s here I burst out laughing. I slapped my knees. I doubled up. None of what Elif was telling me was even remotely funny. And yet it was, incomprehensible, surreal, so far removed from my own life that I could think of no other way to deal with it but by laughing.
“You little prick,” she said. “I’m glad you find my misery amusing.”
But by the way she watched me I knew she was pleased. I had surprised her with my laughter.
“I got a thousand other jokes like this,” she said. “Get this.”
Her father had planned to marry her off right after high school. He’d found her a husband. This boy, a good kid really, from a village two hills east from here. But on the day she collected her diploma — this was three years ago, early May, just before her sister started burning with the saint’s fever — Elif went to the mosque. Her father was in his little room, getting ready to call out the adhan. “Father,” she told him, “I’m going to Burgas.” She would enroll at the university and in the fall she’d be a student there. She’d find a roommate, rent a room, and get a job. She wouldn’t bother him for money. But she was going, no matter what he had to say.
Her father walked right past her, as if she hadn’t even spoken. Stepped out for his prayer and shouted at the top of his lungs from the minaret for everyone to hear how great Allah was. All right then, Elif told herself, Allah is great. And for six days she did not put a morsel to her lips. Drank water only once a day. Her mother would not stop crying. “Why are you doing this?” she’d say. Elif would answer, “I’ll let the earth eat me before I eat a bite.” On the fifth day of Elif’s strike, Aysha started burning with the Christian fever. In her room, Elif fell on her knees. Thank you, Allah, she said, ashamed that her baby sister too had to suffer because of her. Grateful that the Merciful had picked her side in the war.
All this was more pressure than her father could bear. At last, they struck a deal. She could study in Burgas, but not live there.
“And so,” Elif said, “each morning I take the bus to town for sixty kilometers. Two hours on a good day. Each afternoon, when my classes are over, I run to the station and ride the bus back home. Four hours of my life, each day, squandered.”
Elif, Elif, her friends would say at first. Come watch a movie with us. Come to a party. Walk with us by the sea. But she would tell them, no, I can’t. Her mother was sick, needed her home. Poor old Elif, her friends would say. And then one day they simply stopped asking.
“And no one knows where you live? That you’re Muslim?”
She shook her head.
“Not even your boyfriend?”
She closed her eyes, leaned back. “What boyfriend, amerikanche?” she said. “And now Aysha is sick again and I have so much to study. I have exams, and if I fail … It’s all for naught. And nothing really matters anymore.”
I shifted in my seat. “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked. Maybe from the smoke, my accent had gotten lighter. Or maybe I didn’t mind it now. “If you’ve never told anyone, why are you telling me?”
“You weren’t here two days ago,” she said; “you won’t be here tomorrow. Our lives are not connected, nor will they ever be. What difference does it make?”
And really, what difference did it make? Tomorrow I would be gone. This moment was already slipping through our fingers, like four hours lost on a bus. Tomorrow I would be elsewhere, while Elif remained, fighting one little battle after another. She’d win some, lose some, but in the end she’d stay, chained to her father, to Klisura, to the mountain. I’ve fought enough, she’d say one day. Tired, she’d marry that promised boy and bear his children. She’d grow old and watch them scatter and through her offspring she would pretend to know the taste of freedom. Only her heart would keep the bitter truth.
“They think they have me figured out,” she said, and her voice dipped, raspy and low from the smoke. “My father. My mother. All of Klisura. But they don’t know what I’ve cooked up. The little plan I’ve plotted out.” She leaned in closer and whispered, her eyes bloodshot and swimming, the pupils themselves as large as stork nests. “The day I pick up my university diploma will be the day I disappear. Like smoke in air, like flame in wind. I’ll vanish without a trace. Without a note, without a word goodbye.”