Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken novelists

Ella 
NORTHAMPTON, AUGUST 12, 2008
Balmy and sunny, it was an ordinary day in August. A day like any other. Ella woke up early in 
the morning, prepared breakfast for her husband and children, watched them leave for work and 
chess and tennis clubs, went back to her kitchen, opened her cookbook, and chose the day’s 
menu: 
Spinach Soup with Creamy Mushroom Mash
Mussels with Mustard Mayonnaise
Seared Scallops with Tarragon-Butter Sauce
Garden Salad with Cranberries
Zucchini Rice Gratin
Rhubarb and Vanilla Cream Lattice Pie
It took her all afternoon to cook the dishes. When she was done, she took out her best china. She 
set the table, folded the napkins, and arranged the flowers. She set the oven timer for forty 
minutes, so that the gratin could be warm by seven o’clock. She prepared the croutons, put the 
dressing in the salad, thick and fatty, just as Avi preferred. It occurred to her to light the candles, 

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but she changed her mind upon second thought. It was better to leave the table like this. Like an 
immaculate picture. Untouched. Unmoving. 
Then she grabbed the suitcase she had earlier prepared and left her house. As she walked out, she 
murmured one of Shams’s rules. “It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the 
life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’ 
“Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every 
moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one 
way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”
Aladdin 
KONYA, APRIL 1248
Blowing hot and cold, changing my mind every passing minute as to how I should behave 
toward others, three weeks after Shams’s death, I finally mustered the courage to go and talk to 
my father. I found him in the library, sitting alone by the firelight, as still as an alabaster statue, 
shadows leaping across his face. 
“Father, can I talk to you?” I asked. 
Slowly, hazily, as if swimming back to the shore from a sea of reveries, he looked at me and said 
nothing. 
“Father, I know you think I have a role in Shams’s death, but let me assure you—” 
All of a sudden, my father raised his finger, interrupting my words. “Between you and me, son of 
mine, words have dried up. I have nothing to hear from you and nothing to tell you in return,” he 
pronounced. 
“Please don’t say that. Let me explain,” I begged, my voice shaking. “I swear to God. It wasn’t 
me. I know the people who did it, but it wasn’t me.” 
“My son,” my father interjected again, the sorrow draining out of him, replaced by the chilling 
calmness of someone who has finally accepted a terrible truth, “you say it wasn’t you, but there 
is blood on your hem.” 
I flinched and instantly checked the ends of my robe. Could it be true? Was there blood on me 
from that evening? I inspected my hem, and then my sleeves, hands, and fingernails. It all 
seemed clean. When I raised my head again, I came eye to eye with my father and only then 
understood the little trap that he had set for me. 
By inadvertently checking my hem for blood, I had given myself away. 

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It is true. I did join them in the tavern that evening. I am the one who told the killer that Shams 
had the habit of meditating every night in the courtyard. And later that night, when Shams was 
talking to his killer under the rain, I was one of the six men eavesdropping by the garden wall. 
And when we decided that we should attack, because there was no going back and the killer was 
taking things too slowly, I showed them the way into our courtyard. But that’s it. I stopped there. 
I didn’t take part in the fight. It was Baybars who attacked, and Irshad and others helped him. 
And when they panicked, Jackal Head did the rest. 
Later on, I lived that moment over and over in my mind so many times that it is hard to tell what 
part is real and what part a figment of my imagination. Once or twice I conjured a memory of 
Shams escaping from our hands into the pitch-black night, and the image was so vivid I almost 
believed it. 
Though he is gone, there are traces of him everywhere. Dance, poetry, music, and all the things 
that I thought would vanish once he was gone have stayed firmly planted in our lives. My father 
has become a poet. Shams was right. When one of the jars was broken, so was the other jar. 
My father had always been a loving man. He embraced people of all faiths. He was kind toward 
not only Muslims but also Christians, Jews, and even pagans. After Shams came into his life, his 
circle of love became so vast it included even the most fallen of society—prostitutes, drunks, and 
beggars, the scum of the scum. 
I believe he could even love Shams’s killers. 
There was, and still is, only one person he could not manage to love: his son.