Read Honor (9781101606148) for Free Online Page B

dark and green like two strands of ivy gently but firmly pulling him towards her.
    â€˜All right,’ Pembe said, sighing. ‘You win, I lose. You won’t be circumcised. I’ll not let anyone lay a hand on you.’
    â€˜Promise?’
    â€˜Promise, my sultan.’
    Her voice was warm, reassuring. As she spoke, Iskender found his panic oozing away. He moved his fingers, then his toes, and managed to descend a few branches, to where a man was waiting on the highest rung of a ladder that had been propped up against the tree. When he was safely on the ground again, he ran to his mother, sobbing out loud.
    â€˜My son,’ Pembe said, as if it needed to be verified. She hugged him so tightly he could feel her heart beating through her chest. ‘
Malamin
, * my sultan.’
    Iskender was happy to feel the earth beneath his feet, happier still to have been missed this much by his mother – and yet there was something suffocating about her embrace, sickly sweet. Her lips against the side of his neck, her breath, her clutch enclosed him like a coffin.
    As if she had read his mind, Pembe grabbed the boy by the shoulders, pushing him back so that she could stare him in the eye, and slapped him hard. She said, ‘Do not ever shame me again!’
    Half turning to the man with the leather bag, she added, ‘Take him!’
    Iskender’s face went pale. He was more surprised than distraught. His mother had deceived him in front of everyone. And slapped him. He had never been hit by her before. The possibility had never even occurred to him. He tried hard to speak, but words had become like marbles, clogging his throat.
    In the evening everyone commended Iskender for being brave during the circumcision. They said he hadn’t shed a single tear. But he knew his performance had nothing to do with courage. Because he was still thinking about what his mother had done and why she had done it, he hadn’t fretted over the operation. Never had it occurred to him that you could deceive the person you held dear. Until that day, he hadn’t known that you could love someone with all your heart and yet be ready to hurt them. It was his first lesson in the complexity of love.

The Wish Fountain
    A Place near the River Euphrates, 1977
    Pembe was gone now, her mirror image, her reflection in still waters. She slept under a different sky and every so often sent Jamila letters and postcards with pictures of red, two-tiered buses and immense clock towers. When she came home for a visit, her clothes smelled differently, and felt soft to the touch. That was the part that struck Jamila the most: watching her sister open her suitcase, bringing in aromas, tastes and fabrics from foreign lands. Pembe had left with the unspoken assumption that everything would be as it was upon her return. But nothing had remained the same. Nor had she come back for good.
    For years Pembe had been sending Jamila letters, telling her about her life in England. The children, too, jotted down a few lines every now and then, Yunus more than anyone else. Jamila kept these missives in a tin tea box under her bed, like hoarded treasure. She wrote back regularly, although she had less to tell, or so she believed. Recently she had asked Yunus if he had seen the Queen and, if so, what she looked like. He had responded,
    The Queen lives in a palase. So big she gets lost in it. But they find her and put her on her throwne again. She wears a diferent dress every day, and a funnee hat. It has to be the same colour as the dress. Her hands are soft because she puts on glouves and lots of creamz, and she doesn’t wash the dishes. I saw her picturse at school. She seems nice.
    Jamila could not understand how the family had been on
that
island for so long but still not set eyes on the Queen, save in magazines and newspapers. Sometimes she doubted whether Pembe had ventured from the neighbourhood where she lived at all. If she always ended up