Three Daughters Of Eve

The narrative flashes back to the 1980s. Peri’s family lives on Mute Poet Street on the Asian side of Istanbul. Peri is the youngest of three children, with her two older brothers already in their teens when she was born. Peri’s father, Mensur, has a fondness for liquor and believes in democracy, insured by Atatürk, the founder of Turkey. Peri’s mother, Selma, is deeply religious and disapproves of both. Peri’s oldest brother, Umut, aligns more with Mensur, eventually turning into a “fully fledged Marxist” (20), while the second brother, Hakan, takes Selma’s side. A baffled Peri is constantly stuck in the middle.

Back in the narrative present, Peri catches up with the children who snatched her handbag. They congregate around the “tramp” she spotted earlier. When Peri demands her bag, the man empties its contents, causing a Polaroid photograph to fall out of Peri’s wallet. It contains “a man and three young women” (23). One of them is Peri, and the photo was taken at Oxford.

Even as Peri yells at the man and the children that help is on the way, the man takes out a tube of glue for him and the children to sniff together. The children leave, and as Peri contemplates trying to save the photograph—the only one she has of Professor Azur—the man, now intoxicated, steps toward her with a knife.

Peri is a little girl. The police arrive at her house late one Friday night and raid the place, searching for something belonging to Umut. They eventually find a gun hidden beneath Peri’s toys and take Umut away immediately. He is kept in solitary confinement for seven weeks and tortured until he confesses to being a member of an illegal communist organization and to the ownership of the gun.

Umut is sentenced to prison for more than eight years without parole. Peri would regularly write him letters, but he never responded. Umut’s fate drives Mensur and Selma further apart, with each blaming the other for what befell him. The incident changes Peri’s relationship with God: She stops praying every night and starts arguing instead, directing all her anger toward a God who was supposed to be all-knowing and merciful and still allowed injustice to prevail. This begins her lifelong search for what God was.

Mensur extracts a promise from young Peri that she would never believe or buy into things she hasn’t seen, experienced, and comprehended entirely herself, unlike her mother. He also makes her promise that she will go to the best university and use her education well, as well as never fall in love with a man who doesn’t believe in science. Mensur gifts Peri a turquoise leather notebook to journal her thoughts and questions about God, advising that she constantly erase and rewrite in the same book. Years later, Peri interprets this advice as a way to exist between belief and doubt, as she finds herself constantly stuck in between.

In the narrative present, the man attacks Peri with the knife, injuring her right hand before holding her down and attempting to rape her. As Peri fights back, a familiar apparition appears to her: “The baby in the mist. Rosy cheeks, dimpled arms, sturdy, plump legs; wispy, golden hair that had not yet turned dark. A plum-coloured stain covered one cheek” (42).

With renewed strength, Peri manages to throw the man off, kicking, punching, and swearing at him until he begins to weep. Deniz appears horrified at Peri’s condition. Peri reassures her, and together, they collect the contents of her handbag while the man slinks away. Peri cannot find the Polaroid, however, and later discovers that her phone is also missing.

Peri first sees the “baby in the mist” when she is eight years old (46). The neighborhood is involved in a day of communal carpet washing, where every household washes and cleans their carpets out in their yards. Selma accidentally brushes up against a hot cauldron, and while the adults are occupied with tending to her, Peri slips out of the garden and onto the road in pursuit of a cat she spotted. A strange young man approaches her and tries to lure her away into his car with a promise of more kittens down the road. However, the baby in the mist appears, and Peri pauses long enough to hear Selma call out to her; she immediately scampers back home. Only much later does she understand how the apparition, which keeps returning at different intervals throughout her life, saved her from possibly a terrible fate.

A week later, Peri tells her father about the vision, but he meets her with disappointment and cynicism, so she doesn’t pursue the topic. The next time the baby appears, however, she tells Selma, who immediately whisks her away to a “hodja,” a Muslim scholar. The hodja claims that Peri was “prone to darkness” and attempts to exorcise what he believed was a “jinni” (55)—a spirit with supernatural powers—that possessed her. However, Selma stops the hodja before he can start beating Peri and takes her back home, making her promise to tell Selma if the vision reappears. However, Peri grows convinced that she ought to keep them to herself henceforth. Years later, she reflects in her “God-diary” about an “other space for things that fall under neither belief nor disbelief” for people like her (57).

In the narrative present, Peri and Deniz finally arrive at the seaside mansion where the dinner party is taking place, after having stopped at a pharmacy to attend to Peri’s wound. Adnan, Peri’s much older husband, greets her with concern, and Deniz lets slip that they are late because Peri was chasing thieves. Peri doesn’t have time to explain as their hosts, the businessman and his wife, usher Peri and Deniz in. Peri excuses herself to use the washroom before joining the others. The washroom sports a giant aquarium, and Peri is inexplicably overcome with an urge to smash it to smithereens. She reflects on how “[s]ometimes her own mind scares her” (65).

After Umut’s imprisonment, Mensur begins to drink more heavily, Selma takes to prayer, religion, and compulsive cleanliness, and Peri begins to have nightmares. Mensur’s drinking takes a toll on his physical health and he is forced into early retirement. Now constantly at home, he quarrels intensively with Hakan, who dropped out of university and joined an ultra-nationalist newspaper.

Amidst the growing tension and resentment in her house, Peri throws herself into books and her studies, finding refuge there. She consistently tops her class, making Mensur proud and igniting in him a dream that one day, Peri will continue her education at Oxford.

The summer that Peri turns 11, Selma goes on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. While she is away, Peri has her first period; however, not wanting to have grown up so fast, Peri resolves to keep this fact hidden for another couple of years.

Selma returned two weeks later, and she and Mensur promptly get into a fight about a mosque-shaped clock that Selma brought back with her and wants to put up on their wall. That same evening, Mensur has a heart attack and is rushed to emergency care.

A stricken Peri grows convinced that what she considered an early appearance of her menstrual cycle was what brought on the heart attack. For the first time, she joins Selma in prayer at the hospital, promising to pray every night if God makes her father well again. Mensur quickly recovers and is sent home for a few days with instructions to stop drinking; however, newly unafraid after his brush with death, Mensur disregards these instructions completely.

In the narrative present, Peri steps out of the washroom to find Deniz waiting for her. Deniz shows her the Polaroid which she found and pocketed, asking about the people in it. Peri points out Mona, an Egyptian American woman in a headscarf, and Shirin, an Iranian woman, claiming they were university friends of hers. The man was their professor, Azur, who taught a seminar on God. Deniz is amazed to learn that Shirin went to Oxford, and Shirin untruthfully claimed she didn’t finish her education because she found the classes too hard.

The back of the photograph carries an inscription in Shirin’s writing, calling Peri “Mouse” and quoting a line of poetry: “I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel or even a pure soul” (83). Peri pockets the Polaroid without any further explanation to Deniz as they both head to join the rest of the guests.

True to her promise to God, Peri continues praying every night. However, her voice is never pure or “monophonic,” with a cacophony of speakers clashing in her mind. She remains perpetually in limbo about God and her religion, as she reflects in her “God-diary.”

In the 1990s, after Peri graduates from school at the top of her class, Mensur promptly takes her to an educational agency where they apply to school abroad for her together. Later that day, Peri asks Mensur about his views on religion. He explains how his criticality of belief is rooted in the kind of prejudice and intolerance he sees it foster, which is missing in some of the traditions he was fond of, like the Bektashi, Mawlawi, or Melami Sufis. Mensur doesn’t feel the need for the sense of security religion offers, either, happy to experience the world as it is. He eventually redirects the conversation to Peri’s university applications, convinced, despite Peri’s wariness, that she will find a place in Oxford.

Back in the narrative present, Peri joins the dinner party. Halfway through the meal, Deniz tells the others that Peri went to Oxford. One of the guests, a PR woman, proclaims that her brother attended the university around the same time as Peri, and Adnan mentions Peri’s Polaroid. As the PR woman looks closely at it, she claims to recognize Azur as a famous professor who was eventually disgraced and forced to resign following a scandal. The staff brings in the next course, which saves Peri from responding, and she puts the photograph away with trembling hands.