The Gaze (9 page)

It was a description of hell; not a hell after death, but a hell within life’s bosom.

At this stage of the show, the women who couldn’t look into the snake’s eyes any more, jumped screaming to their feet. Nauseating, bright yellow bugs were crawling around their ankles, their throats and their earlobes. The women would hastily begin taking off all their jewellery and throwing it onto the stage. Everyone wanted to purify themselves; to purify themselves as quickly and easily as possible and get away from this hell.

Then, the mirror closed just as it had opened. The snake-charmer bowed with a slight smile, deliberately picked up the jewellery that had been thrown onto the stage and put it into his basket, and then, in contrast to his slowness of a moment before, rushed off the stage as if he was fleeing. The snake slithered after its master like a whistled melody.

After the snake-charmer, Madame Kinar would come out with her puppets. She had little puppets on each of her ten fingers. She would represent the natural world through them. For a deluge, she would spray the place with water; for hail she would break the branches of young trees; for a wind storm she would tear apart a bird’s nest; for a flood she would sweep the crops away; for drought she would burn the soil; for famine she would empty the granaries; for a typhoon she would spray on whoever was in front of her; for a cyclone she would swallow all living creatures; for fire she would roast; for an earthquake she wouldn’t leave a stone standing. There was no evil that nature did not inflict on mankind.

When the dust settled, an anxious silence would fall over the audience. Seeing all of these natural disasters one after another had unsettled the ladies and spoiled their fun. On top of that, everyone knew there was worse to come. Because it was the Sable-Girl’s turn to appear on stage.

When it was the Sable-Girl’s turn, darkness would fall inside the cherry-coloured tent. Pregnant women would writhe in distress, babies would start to cry, elderly women would recite all the prayers they knew one after another; virgins and widows, believers and unbelievers, poor and rich, all of the women came together, and held their breath. In that momentary darkness, it would cross their minds that the door of the tent must still be open. That is, they could get out; right now they could get away. Changing one’s mind was certainly possible. But how was it possible to change one’s mind when the moment they’d been waiting for had arrived?

Some of the women who’d come to the tent for the first time couldn’t sit still; they would approach the stage with trembling steps, trying to imagine what this demon would be like. But such terrifying monsters appeared before them that they were shaken out of their dreams, and pulled back. Indeed, for the few minutes before the Sable-Girl took the stage, every single woman combed her most secret fear out of her hair, and out of the tangles of her brain. With every passing minute it became less tolerable, as fear incited fear. It wasn’t the object of fear but fear itself that was so frightening. And fear was everywhere; it leaned against every corner and grew everywhere. It could attack from the ground at any moment. In these moments the women didn’t have a chance to look at the stage because they were busy protecting themselves from the fear before them, behind them, beside them and around them. If they’d looked, they could have seen that the Sable-Girl had long since taken the stage and was watching the trembling audience with her sable-black eyes.

A little later, a huge fire was lit on the stage in order to draw the spectators’ attention in that direction. And then all of the women who just a moment ago had been knitting sweaters from the letters of fear all screamed for help in unison. The Sable-Girl was before them, the show had begun.

The Sable-Girl greeted those who watched her in terror in an indifferent manner. Of the thousands of eyes upon her, she only valued a single, watery eye.

Every evening when she took the stage, she watched this eye that was watching her. She watched its watching. The mallet would come down, the drum would resound. The Sable-Girl would start a laboured belly dance. The furs she was wearing were long enough to sweep the ground, and ample enough to cover her body completely. They were definitely made of sable. Among the women who filled the tent were some who had coveted these furs and had had similar furs sewn for them. As the Sable-Girl gyrated on the stage, they involuntarily stroked their own furs. Now the tent was as quiet and as calm as could be. This moment of indifference was as innocent as a dove flying through the sky unaware of the letter around its neck.

The mallet descended, the drum resounded. With harsh movements the Sable-Girl would take off her furs. She would be left stark naked. She’d approach the edge of the stage and, making strange sounds, would rain centuries-old curses upon the audience. Like all of her ancestors she fearlessly displayed her monumental ugliness. Like all of her ancestors she was fearlessly ugly. The top half of her body belonged to a woman, and the bottom half of her body belonged to an animal. The mallet descended, the drum resounded. Suddenly, like a caged animal, she would let loose all her rage. With her tail straight in the air, and growling through her clenched teeth, she would crouch on all fours and prepare to attack, looking around wildly for a victim, wearing the ancient anger of nature as a weapon. And at the least expected moment, she pawed at the eyes surrounding her. Unlike her great-great-grandfather the Sable-Boy, she was not obedient.

An ear-splitting voice was heard. ‘Close your eyes!’ If any of the spectators were still insisting on looking at the stage, they immediately closed their eyes tight when they heard this voice.

Every evening the show was punctuated in the same manner. The Sable-Girl would go, the curtain would come down, but the women with their eyes closed tight would continue to remain frozen in place for a moment. As if there was no place left for them to go except this cherry-coloured tent. They weren’t going to go out the door, they weren’t going to go down the hill, they weren’t going to go back. Who knows how long they would have stayed glued to their seats, holding on to the images of what they’d seen. But the same thing happened every evening. A baby would suddenly cry, or one of the old women would be overwhelmed and suddenly fall into a faint. Then, as if they’d received a command, or as if the owner of the house was chasing them out, all of the women would open their eyes and jump to their feet. They would rush out of the tent pushing and shoving each other, trampling on those who had fallen, trying not to look back if possible, as if they were fleeing from a ghost.

Every evening without fail, a number of children were torn from their mothers’ hands and got lost. Some of these children were lost for hours and later were reunited with their mothers in tears, and others would be delivered to angry fathers the next day. It happened that some of these children remained unclaimed, and they would begin to live in the cherry-coloured tent among Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s strange creatures.

The forgotten children in the westward-facing section of Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s cherry-coloured tent would advance, step-by-step, day-by-day, they were bent into shape, through a variety of illnesses, embracing a number of crises, passing from apprenticeship to mastery of ugliness with castrated smiles and nocturnal anger. When the time was just right, they would take their places on the stage and cut through this place of confusion with ear-splitting screams.

‘Don’t move!’

I don’t know why, but I wasn’t at all pleased that the man had said this. And there was no need for him to repeat his warning. I wasn’t moving. And I knew what my motionlessness resembled. My motionlessness resembled a hard-working ant running around a dead bee lying on its back at the bottom of an empty water glass; from the same starting point it always watched the world turn, and turn again, with the same delighted amazement. My motionlessness was like a memory that resembled a consumptive spitting out his unforgettable memories into a handkerchief; spending each day in quarantine infecting his sickness with loneliness. My motionlessness was like the warm, yellowish pudding that’s poured over homemade cakes; it slowly covered everything with its sweetness. Of course the water glass had an outside; a land where my memory was exempt from coughing or a layer that the pudding had not yet covered. Me, I wasn’t outside in that dry, faraway land but: I wasn’t m-o-v-i-n-g.

I was waiting motionlessly because I was stuck in a door again. This kind of thing happens to me all the time when I pass through those double doors and only one side is left open. If I have to confess, I don’t fit through this type of door. I have to go through sideways. And even then I get stuck.

The front door of the Hayalifener Apartments is one of those double doors. One of the wings was bolted to the floor and ceiling, and only a narrow space was left to pass through. Usually I’m careful going in and out, but today I was in such a hurry to get home that I found myself in a situation where my sweater had been caught on the lock between the two wings of the door. As if that wasn’t bad enough, while I was caught there by the threads of my sweater, I was caught by the neighbourhood ladies returning with their bags from the nearby market. As always, they examined me from head to toe. Just to escape their stares I rushed to move aside and let them through, but I didn’t think to take off the sweater first, and I became even more badly entangled. The neighbourhood ladies, after talking for some time about how the unravelled strand could never be restored to its former state but should at least be pulled inside the sweater so it couldn’t be seen, and about how this might be done, went inside to their homes.

As they were going up the stairs, an old man was coming down. I moved aside to let him pass too. But instead of looking and passing by like the others, he insisted on staying to help and took it upon himself to get me out of the situation and to rescue the strand from my sweater. For close to ten minutes he struggled with his trembling hands and his weak eyes, telling me again and again not to move.

Having to wait without moving, I was reminded of how it was for B-C in the studio. One day a week he modelled there for hours. He felt like a slave, on his way to be sold at a festival, who felt something deep in his heart, knowing that he would never see in the falcon mirror the reflection of the time when he could run free and hunt. He looked hopelessly at the merchants and customers at the auction. It didn’t make any difference who bought him; either that one or the other one. So with indifference he posed for people he didn’t know. He doesn’t know why he goes to that miserable studio, or why he behaves this way; I find it odd that he’s so untroubled.

Perhaps I thought it was my duty to take on the anxieties he was neglecting. In his place I would have been anxious. And when I’m anxious I destroy my cuticles.

This is a sensitive matter. First, when hunting, one has to flush the prey out into the open. The devil’s wiles made things difficult for me in regard to my cuticles. Anyway, they are as curious as they are wily. To be curious is to want to see; this was the weakest point of my cuticles, the cause of their downfall.

In the drawer where I hid what I saw as a child, there was an attendant from a woman’s bathhouse who looked like an ogre. With all her strength, the woman was scrubbing a child who was so thin that you could count her bones. I can’t get it out of my mind. As the giant attendant, on her knees, scrubbed off layer after layer of skin and dripped drops of sweat onto the heated marble, she was making kissing sounds. She knew well that, as the skin was made sleepy by the steam and the scrubbing, the rough cloth she was using would soon be black with dirt. Because the dirt loved to have kisses sent to it. It would immediately stick its head out to see who was blowing it kisses. The sound of the bath attendant’s kisses was like a siren’s call. The dirt that came out of the child’s body turned its rudder without thinking and didn’t even have time to think that this melody was a sad and bankrupt death. When the rocks ground up the huge ships, because of the excitement of the overseas discovery, not a single bone was left behind. The dirt’s corpse, draining away with the filthy water of the bathhouse, was rushing with due speed towards an unknown exit.

I laid the same trap for my cuticles that had been used by the huge bath attendant I’d seen when I was a child. I called them with kisses and they stuck their little heads out to see where the sound was coming from. Then I bit each one of them off with my teeth. The taste was unpleasant, but it wasn’t about taste. Sometimes it hurt; and sometimes the area around my cuticles bled. Sometimes I completely forgot that they existed; and sometimes I bit them off so regularly that I had to wait a long time for new ones to emerge. Being fat doesn’t just make me irritable, it also makes me anxious.

Whenever I went to see B-C at the studio, I became so anxious that I didn’t have any cuticles left. I just couldn’t understand. How could a person display himself; and why? B-C would leave my questions unanswered. On top of that he would say, ‘That’s the way it is, out of stubbornness.’ That’s how what is? What is stubbornness? Perhaps I didn’t want to understand.