Black Milk

“Poser!” hisses Little Miss Practical.

“My point is, how can you follow Melville’s adventures of Ishmael and Captain Ahab, and not contemplate our tiny little place in this universe? What about Hemingway’s epic battle of wills between the old fisherman and the giant fish he longs to catch? And take Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea-you will be thinking twice as hard as you ever have about the roles of good and evil. You see how fishing is intertwined with philosophy?”

“All right, all right, I get the point. While you’re at it, you might want to tell the philosophers over there something about efficiency,” says Little Miss Practical. “There must be, what, thirty of them. Why don’t they, say, rent a fishing boat together? Then, when they go out to sea and cast their nets, their output would increase tenfold.”

Miss Highbrowed Cynic heaves a sigh. “Fishing has depth. It has wisdom. You will never understand if your only concern is productivity. Why am I wasting my breath? No philosophy or art will ever come from the shallow waters you swim in.”

“You’re all big talk! You always talk about depth,” grumbles Little Miss Practical. “What are you, a scuba diver?”

“Ladies, ladies, please,” I interject. I know I need to handle this as delicately as I can. “Let’s not argue on this beautiful morning.”

“What is wrong with arguing?” objects Miss Highbrowed Cynic. “The German philosopher Ernst Bloch used the concept noch nicht-not yet what things could be. Instead of trying to be complete, we should embrace the idea of being without a beginning and an end, a state of continuous regeneration. That is why questions should not be answered. They should be deepened with more questions.”

“That is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a long while!” comes a grumpy voice from around the corner.

We turn our heads and see Miss Ambitious Chekhovian ahead of us, standing amid the feet of the fishermen. I am scared out of my wits that someone will accidentally step on her, but she doesn’t seem the least bit concerned.

“Deepen dilemmas with more questions? What next? Do you know how much time this stupid Sunday morning walk has already cost our career? Elif, you should be writing right now. Not wasting your time like this!”

I shoot a glance left and right. The fishermen are busy staring at the water. I wonder if there is anyone other than me who can see Miss Ambitious Chekhovian.

I drop my voice to a menacing whisper. “What are you doing?”

“Well, I was hoping you might have had time to reconsider what we were talking about several weeks ago,” she says nonchalantly. “You know, the hysterectomy.”

“You are nuts,” I say, and the two finger-women on my shoulders show their support by clapping their hands.

“All right, if you want to become a moon woman, I’m not going to stop you,” Miss Ambitious Chekhovian says. “Go and get pregnant, gain all the pounds, and worry about breast-feeding, then raising the child, sending him to school, sending him to college, and before you know it, you will forget all about literature and writing.”

I want to protest but she doesn’t give me a chance.

“Don’t you dare tell me that the literary world is not a competition, and you don’t have to rush or push, because that is gibberish. Even if you’re not racing against other writers, you are racing against yourself, and your own mortality.”

I open my mouth again, and again she interrupts me.

“And don’t you forget that the writer was Leo Tolstoy, not the moon woman Sophia.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means what it means. Remember the woman on the steamboat. The woman who was twenty-five years old but looked forty. The woman who collected pounds and resentments like free cakes. Do you want to become her?”

“You talk as if she were the only one who is unhappy in this world,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic, “whereas all humanity is in a similar position. Melancholy is central to being human.”

We ignore her.

“Yo. Women can be both good mothers and good career women. And they can be happy… It’s simple. The key is time management.” This from Little Miss Practical.

Miss Ambitious Chekhovian snorts. “Of course, there are women like that, and I call them circus jugglers. Send the kid off to school in the morning, cook the husband a perfect omelet, two eggs and a tablespoon of butter, dress in a hurry, make it to work, rush home in the evening, set the table, feed the kid, then pass out on the couch while watching TV… Yes, those women do exist. But they never write novels.”

“You are the Queen of Hyperbole,” I chide.

Her dark eyes smoldering with agitation, Miss Ambitious Chekhovian gives me a faint smile. “The point is, my dear, jugglers can manage only the moment. That’s it. They can do motherhood and do their jobs. That much is true. But just how far can they rise in their careers? That is another question.”

“Literature and writing is more than a career,” I say.

“Exactly,” she says. “It is a lifestyle. It is a lifetime passion. An artist needs to be ambitious and passionate. You don’t work nine to five. You breathe your art twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s why you should consider a hysterectomy.”

Half an hour later, we are back in the park, sitting on another bench-the four of us, feeling drab, almost drowsy. That is what happens when more than two finger-women get together. This much quarreling tires us all, draining our energies, yet these Thumbelinas do not know how not to quarrel.

“Hello, everyone! May I join you?” It is Dame Dervish, suddenly mushrooming on the bench, like a Sufi version of Houdini.

She wears a plain smoky-gray dress and a long cloak of the same color, fastened with a pearl brooch. The hem of her dress is fluttering softly in the breeze. She wears a necklace sporting the name Hu, [7] written in Ottoman script.

“Welcome, dear Sufi,” I say. “Come and join us.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I feel welcomed, but I wish you could as well. Look at yourself, always evaluating, always in haste. Sometimes you try to do five things at once and then fall flat from exhaustion. Do one thing at a time. What is the hurry? Give yourself over to the moment. Time does not exist beyond that. The Seven Sleepers in the Qur’an slept for three hundred years in a cave, but when they woke up they felt like only a few hours had passed.”

“Do you want me to sleep?” I frown.

“I want you to stop competing with time.”

I try to give myself over to the moment, and realize I don’t have a clue what that really means.

“Dame Dervish…”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think… I mean, if I ever were to do this, not that I want to, of course, just a question, if I were to someday… I mean, hypothetically…” I take a deep breath and try again. “Do you think I could make a good mother?”

Her dark green eyes widen, creasing around the edges. “If you fulfill three conditions you will make a wonderful mother.”

“What three conditions?”

“First of all, God needs to want it, so a new chapter must be written in your storybook,” she says. “Second, you need to want it, of course, deep in your heart, and your partner’s, too.”

“Well, what is the third condition?”

“The third condition has to do with the fishermen,” she says. “You have to learn what they know.”

“Not the fishermen again!” Little Miss Practical says with a snort, raising her hands, palms up.

I look around in bewilderment. What could these fishermen possibly know about becoming a mother? What could they know that I don’t know?

“Dear Elif,” says Dame Dervish, as if writing me a letter.