By day, the Sable-Boy sat in a circle defined by the length of the chain attached to his ankles, gnawing at the food that was thrown to him. When he’d eaten his fill, he’d sniff at the edge of the circle, trying to understand what kind of world he was in. In the evening he would get up on the table in the cabin and display himself. He was so ugly and so strange that there were those who changed their routes in order to pass through Tobolsk. People laughed when they saw him. Even though his appearance was wild, he was very obedient.
He never stood up for himself. He did exactly what he was told. Sometimes he would jump up and down on the table, sometimes he would approach the edge and let the spectators touch him, and sometimes he would turn his back and draw circles in the air with his tail. And he would also often get on all fours and run around in circles chasing his tail. Whenever he did this the spectators would crack up laughing. Whenever this happened, they would throw things onto the round, wooden table; either the curses on their tongues, or the boots on their feet, or the drink that was left in their glasses, or the prostitutes who wandered from lap to lap.
He was a Sable-Boy. In time, he earned the military governor far more than he could have earned in years in the fur trade. Then, one night, as he was showing himself off on top of the table, he collapsed to the ground. Faces and sounds became confused. He’d fainted. He’d become ill. In the following days, the military governor brought all of the physicians of the city to the cabin. Yet none of the physicians could put a name to the Sable-Boy’s sickness, or find a cure. In the end the military governor, seeing the patient wasting away day-by-day and being seized by a mind-shaking panic, finally sought the help of the shamans in the cells. Of all the shamans, only one had a sable as a soul-mate, and agreed to look after him.
The Sable-Boy’s condition improved somewhat, but the military governor became frightened that something might happen to him and his source of money would dry up completely. So as not to leave things to chance, he had to get some offspring from this strange creature. They would have to be half-human and half-animal just like himself.
Before long, they put the Sable-Boy in the arms of a prostitute. The Sable-Boy first sniffed the bed, then the prostitute, then, lying in the bed with the prostitute, sniffed himself. From among the smells of sweat and urine, faeces and drink, smoke and exile, he picked out and lay aside, as if he were plucking the finest of hairs, his favourite smell in the world, the only smell he loved; the smell of the cold! While he filled himself with the smell he loved, he gave the prostitute no trouble. He was as obedient as always.
Months later, early for humans and late for animals, the prostitute gave birth to twins. The first born had nothing strange about it. The military governor, who had refused to wait outside and was pacing back and forth next to the bed, scowled as he looked at the baby. His nerves were shot. Just then the second baby came. Its head emerged first; it was a human head. And then, finally, below the waist, a puny, wet tail appeared. The lower half of its body was sable. Screaming with delight, the military governor picked up the sable-baby and threw it into the air. He squeezed some gold coins into the prostitute’s hand. Leaving her and the first-born baby there, he set off for home with his new treasure in his arms.
For centuries, all sable-children were born as twins. Each time, one of the twins was human and one was a sable-person. The sable-babies were sometimes boys and sometimes girls. The human twins had little chance of surviving, and no one knew what became of them. Those that were born half-human and half-animal would survive, and continue to provide an ever-increasing fortune for the military governor, and later for his children and his grandchildren and the grandchildren of his grandchildren.
And so, the destinies of the two families were intertwined like two vigorous vines that had met by coincidence. For centuries, the descendants of the military governor and the descendants of the Sable-Boy were always together. In every generation, those carrying the military governor’s surname were the ones who displayed; those who inherited the Sable-Boy’s condition were the displayed. And perhaps these two lineages might have remained linked forever. That is if one of the military governor’s grandchildren’s grandchildren hadn’t loosened the last link in this very long chain.
The truth of the matter was that this man, one of the military governor’s grandchildren’s grandchildren, wasn’t very enthusiastic about the business he had inherited from his father. Although the Sable-Girl in his possession was among the ugliest of her lineage, so he could earn much more money, this wasn’t what the military governor’s great great grandson wanted. Instead of carrying on the profession of his forefathers in the land of his origins, he wanted to move to a new continent that everyone said was enchanting and attempt what had not yet been attempted. He was passionate about this dream, but somehow couldn’t rid himself of the Sable-Girl or of the profession he had inherited.
Then, one day, a messenger knocked on the military governor’s great great grandson’s door. Without saying a word the messenger held out the sealed letter he’d taken from his shirt and then stood aside to wait for an answer. In the letter, someone with a strange name who had heard about the famous Sable-Girl wanted to buy her, and he was making a very generous offer. The military governor’s great great grandson didn’t hesitate for long. He felt that God had finally answered his prayers. He settled the matter quickly. As the messenger in the cherry-coloured gloves counted out the coins, the other man was writing a statement granting all rights to the Sable-Girl to the man with the strange name who had written the letter.
That very evening, the messenger and the Sable-Girl were about to set off on the road, when the military governor’s great great grandson came up behind them. He was curious about where the Sable-Girl was being taken. The messenger, who until then had not said a word, answered out of the corner of his mouth.
‘To the west! To Istanbul!’
After the evening call to prayer, the westward-facing door of the cherry-coloured tent at the top of the hill was opened for the women.
It was then that in threes and fives the women started to enter the westward-facing door of the cherry-coloured tent at the top of the hill. Bringing their noise and their togetherness with them.
The opening would be performed by a masked woman. The mask she wore, with its eyes frozen as if they’d witnessed a moment of terror, the tongue swollen as if it had been stuck in a beehive, a nose that had started to grow straight out and then had changed its mind and grown down as far as the lower lip, and a pointed chin covered in hair, was truly frightening. The masked woman said nothing and did nothing, but simply stood stock still on the stage. As if she’d been told to wait her entire life, and had obediently waited, without knowing why, or for what. Then, at a completely unexpected moment, she would lower the mask. Exclamations of surprise rose from the audience. Because the face they saw now was exactly the same as the face they’d seen before. From far away, very far away, barely audible, came the sound of a violin. When the violin stopped, the woman whose mask was her face, and whose face was a mask, greeted the audience in a graceful manner. On her signal, the purple curtains with the threadbare fringes began to open slowly.
On the stage, at the foot of a steep drop, in a pitch-black cauldron with a fire burning brightly under it, surrounded by fearful creatures, a tiny, ugly woman began to sing a cabaret song. Her name was Siranuş; her voice was very thin.
‘You were so beautiful, you were so lovely
If you’d been a
börek
I would have eaten you
With few onions, and much meat.
I got lost in conversation, you stuck to the pan and burned
At once I lost my desire.’
When the song was finished, the creatures pulled Siranuş’s cauldron to one side, as well as the fire underneath it. While she suffered the punishment of the whimsical, dripping beads of sweat, the Three Ugly Sisters appeared on the stage. The three sisters, each uglier than the other, were Mari, Takuhi and Agavni. One of them had one breast, the second had two breasts, and the third had three. Side-by-side, they bounced their breasts up and down as they did a belly dance. They were so busy following each other out of the corners of their eyes to catch each other’s mistakes that they forgot about the audience, and even that they were on the stage. Mari hated Agavni because she felt she’d stolen her missing breast. Agavni hated Mari for causing her to carry an extra breast. Both of them hated Takuhi more than anything in the world. They hated Takuhi who with her two breasts threw her sisters’ deformities in their faces, and who, shining darkly like a pearl in mud, was ugly but not deformed. Some evenings Mari and Agavni couldn’t control their tempers and stopped in the middle of their belly dance to start slapping Takuhi. When the audience saw them hit her, when they saw their belated revenge, their worn out enmity, their hearts melted, and they began to relax. Disagreeable to the tongue but pleasant to the eye, the hellish fire under Siranuş burned furiously; thick and languorous smoke would fill the western part of the tent. Finally, when the sisters took Takuhi by the arms and led her off the stage, the audience felt regret for having taken pleasure in the pain of others.
Right after the Three Ugly Sisters, Snowball Vergin would emerge onto the stage. Or rather he jumped out onto the stage. With him jumped the open syphilis sores all over his body. His mother, who was a famous Galata whore, caught the sickness from a famous sweet little gentleman who lived from his inheritance. The poor woman tried everything she could to get rid of the burden in her womb, but she gave up when she realised the baby, who was nourished not only by his mother’s blood, but the also by time itself, clung to her womb like a mussel clinging to its shell. The wealthy gentleman swore that he would undertake the treatment, but a few months before the baby was born he found that both his fortune and his desire had been consumed. Vergin was born gasping for breath and with sores all over him. He was a half-wit from birth; he could not understand the clumsiness he saw. But Vergin grew anyway, not little by little, but by leaps and bounds. He grew so quickly that when he stopped to catch his breath he could see the changes in his body. He bent over and looked with curiosity between his thighs. Amazing. There wasn’t even a single sore there. None of the festering wounds that had pierced his body, none of the aches that left his mind shorn, nor the memories that gripped the heart…none of them, none of them had touched him there. He was pleased.
He called his crotch snowball. No one asked him the meaning of snowball, and he didn’t explain it to anyone. Indeed all of the personalities around him hadn’t been given their share of gratitude from the world, but had been given too many nicknames. Vergin’s nickname was accepted without question in the sidestreets of Galata.
He didn’t grow much after that day. Because he’d already grown enough. He grew just like a snowball rolling down a hill, and the more he grew the further downhill he rolled. And he lived in his own haggard, tattered world, with his low and untamed dreams, just like a snowball that melted itself with its own warmth. While the shouting of passers-by echoed off sinister houses on the streets of ill-repute and broke up, happy faces, young, tender bodies scattered one by one; lifting wine glasses as they slowly chiselled names on tombstones, only Snowball Vergin, only he remained the same. He was neither bound to life nor was life bound to him.
Just then, Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi appeared. When they sensed that this man, about whom all of the whores of Galata loved to tell strange stories, wanted Vergin instead of any of the beautiful women present, there was a commotion. But because they had long since become inured to all of the strange things in the world, the commotion soon died down. Snowball Vergin took his sack and left this damp and dingy place that he considered home.
When he first stepped out onto the stage, his eyes were as wide as saucers as he looked at the crowd before him. Hundreds of eyes were on him; they were spread out in groups in the darkness. He was quite pleased with the situation. From that day to this, every evening, he would wait his turn impatiently in the westward-facing section of the cherry-coloured tent, and when the time came he would rush like an arrow onto the stage.
After Snowball Vergin it was the snake-charmer’s turn. When the ladies saw the snake-charmer, with a silver amulet on his arm, hoop earrings on his ears, and a cummerbund around his waist, they went pale with fear. Those of them who were pregnant closed their eyes tight. By now the snake-charmer would have reached the centre of the stage; he would greet the audience by raising his eyebrows slightly and gently nodding his head, and open the basket. The ladies held their breath, and clung to each other to keep from fainting. The snake would emerge from the basket, slither to the edge of the stage, and stare with its emerald-green eyes. As it stared and was stared at, the audience began to see.
The world was reflected in reverse in the snake’s eyes.
In the world shown in the mirror of its eyes, virgins were widows, and masters were slaves. It was crawling with life under the black earth; it flowed into those who stepped on it. Among the thirsty tree roots, its rotten bones, its evil vipers, its useless structure, wasted seeds, among the wriggling worms, satin was sackcloth, shining copper coins were worthless. The worms gnawed at the young and the old, the rich and the poor with equal appetite. They were everywhere. They made a faint crunching sound as they gnawed; they could destroy the world with this faint crunching sound. If a sacrifice was performed on the dome of the city, and divided into pieces, with equal portions being placed in bowls in front of them, it wouldn’t even begin to satisfy their appetite. When death takes a person’s life, it leaves behind his cloak; when fire consumes a new-born baby, it doesn’t touch the gold it’s wearing. In a world like this one would rather be a cloak than the person wearing it; or be born as gold rather than as the baby wearing it.