by Elif Shafak
When I came back I found B-C striding around the house in an irritable mood. He noticed what I’d done to my hair right away. He said a few nice things, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere. I’d never seen him this troubled before.
‘If it keeps going like this it will take forever to finish this dictionary,’ he said while I was in the kitchen preparing a snack.
‘Excuse me, but it’s only been a few days since you started. I don’t even really understand what you’re doing yet.’
‘Come on!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Let’s not shut ourselves up at home tonight. Let’s go out.’
He must have been out of his mind.
ay çiçesi (sunflower): When the sunflower fell in love with the sun, the other plants all broke out laughing, ‘The sun never leaves his throne in the heavens even for a moment. He’s powerful and inaccessible,’ they said in unison. The sunflower said nothing. It planted its passionate eyes on the sun, and looked and looked and looked.
For a long time the sun noticed nothing, then finally one day he sensed the sunflower looking at him. At first he thought it was just a passing fancy, but in time he understood he was mistaken. The sunflower was so stubborn that wherever the sun moved his throne, she simply turned her head in that direction without being daunted or losing hope.
Then one afternoon, fed up with this surveillance, the sun roasted the sunflower with his bright yellow rage. While smoke was still rising from the sunflower, people rushed to see what had happened. ‘Wonderful!’ said one of them, ‘Now we can enjoy cracking this love between our teeth.’
That night, watching a sad love story on television, they cracked their sunflower seeds between their teeth.
‘We’re going out? We’re not avoiding other people’s eyes any more? Tell me, what’s changed?’
‘I’ve found a solution for our situation,’ he said lowering his voice, and squinting his dark chocolate eyes with childish delight. He remained silent for a few minutes just to fan my curiosity, then added smiling: ‘Tonight you and I are going out in disguise.’
ay tutulmasi (eclipse of the moon): Sometimes the moon in the sky manages to hide from the gaze of people on earth. As soon as no one can see, she freshens her powder.
As he’s getting ready, he continues to explain. To go out in disguise is to change your appearance. All of the Sultans used this method to see in person what their empires really looked like. Now we were going to follow this royal tradition, and change our appearance. If we don’t look like ourselves, we’ll be able to go out together.
‘Fine, but even if we’re disguised won’t someone recognise us?’ Someone would, of course, why wouldn’t they? I wasn’t at all reassured.
ayn-al-yakin:Ayn-al-yakin, which is understood as seeing God with the eye of spirit, is the second of three levels.
He shaved carefully. When I wiped the foam off his skin, it smelled like peaches. His peach fuzz quivering in the wind of his agitation gave me goose bumps. He undressed behind the screen. When he came out he was wearing one of my bras. As I was trying to figure out what he had stuffed it with, my eyes fell onto his hips. He passed coquettishly in front of me. I watched with alarm. It struck me with terror to see the man I love display an attitude I’d never seen him display before, and behave in a way that seemed not to acknowledge the past, to make a lie of the present, and to exclude me. How could he internalise his new appearance so quickly? As if his personality changed with his appearance.
I became restless. My heart sank at the thought of leaving the Hayalifener Apartments with B-C. No matter what we wore, how much could we hide from the eyes of others, and for how long? We didn’t please anyone’s eyes. Even if we were in disguise, and even at night, we didn’t suit each other.
I was afraid to go outside. I didn’t like the outside.
ayna (mirror): The odalisques in the harem couldn’t get their fill of looking at their unsurpassed beauty in the mirrors that had been brought from Venice. Their greatest desire was for the Sultan to see what the mirror showed.
He stood in front of me in a filmy, floral dress that swept the floor, and was wearing mascara as black as olive paste, false eyelashes, butterfly glasses, eye-shadow the colour of blackberries and sprinkled with glitter, with bronze foundation and powdered rouge on his face; his lips were smeared with cherry-coloured lipstick and lined with pencil; he wore a wig the colour of boiled corn, fish-net stockings, and shoes that made him much taller, with mind-boggling heels that from a distance looked like two toy towers. There were large hoop earrings on his ears, a coral necklace on his neck, jangling bracelets on his wrists, giant rings on his fingers, a pea-green, snake-skin bag on one shoulder, and a sad, furry animal tail draped over the other.
How and when did he turn into this? When I touched his body to try to sense its secret, he fluttered his false eyelashes flirtatiously. He was in a completely different state of mind, and if I didn’t take myself in hand quickly, it was clear he was going to go out in disguise without me.
Babil Kulesi (Tower of Babel): People were so curious about God that they decided to build a tower that would pierce the heavens. The construction proceeded quickly. All of the workers worked in harmony and with mutual understanding. But just as they were struggling to reach the limits of the seventh level of the heavens, God gave each workman a different language. The construction stopped because no one could understand each other.
Because God didn’t want to be seen.
I scurried to get ready
basilisk: The basilisk is a poisonous animal, and its poison is fatal. The basilisk was a nightmare for travellers who set their sails for unknown lands. These travellers carried all kinds of protective objects to evade its poisonous looks. But the most intelligent of them felt no need for anything but a mirror.
What else in the world could stop a basilisk except its own appearance?
It took hours. With B-C pulling the corset strings from one side, and me from the other, we succeeded in squeezing in my fat layer by layer. I was covered in sweat. My fat was used to wobbling about freely, and didn’t know how to respond to this unexpected pressure. Some of it was weeping with abandon, some of it was swearing heavily, and some of it was begging pitifully for mercy. Some of it, seeking a hole or a rip through which to escape, soon had to accept defeat. The corset squeezed me so tightly it was a miracle I could even move. I was pressed in on all four sides. I was girded in to the north, south, east and west; there was no place for my fat to escape.
The rest of the preparations didn’t take long. Indeed after such struggle, I had neither strength nor patience left. I sprinkled lots of hair all over myself. My hands, chest and legs were covered with hair. I combed back my coal-black hair and gathered it under my cap. My moustache wasn’t so thick, but it would pass. Besides, there was no need for a beard. I’d become a coarse young man. I raised my eyebrows to tell B-C to walk in front of me. As I locked the door, he was giggling on the stairs.
He was right. No one would recognise us like this.
bayküs (owl):The aunts and uncles used to feed the canaries. They used to love the doves, fly the pigeons, chase away the crows, and make the parrots talk. But the child used to love owls. ‘That’s an unlucky bird. Don’t utter its name, don’t call it to your roof,’ the aunts and uncles would say. The owl is an unlucky bird because it sees at night, because it sees the night.
That night we kept the main avenue in sight while we walked through the back streets. With every step, smells of food drifted to me. My nose was constantly following the traces of each smell in this confusion where the most wonderful smells and the most dreadful smells were so mixed together that nothing smelled as it should. The corset was squeezing me, and B-C was pulling me along. Finally, after passing I don’t know how many stuffed-mussel stands, I decided I couldn’t stand it any more. Before long the stuffed-mussel boy’s shoulders were shaking with laughter as he removed the empty shells two by two. ‘Enjoy yourself, brother!’
Meanwhile,
B-C was getting out of control. He wanted to stop and knock back a few beers at every bar we passed, otherwise he’d make a fuss. The more he drank, the more he lost control, and the more he lost control the more he drank. When he started trying to pinch the cheeks of the thuggish bouncers outside the bars, it was the last straw. I tried to drag him along by the arm. My brain was throbbing with irritation. As I grew irritable I became more hungry. While I was thinking about where I could eat some gözleme, B-C was muttering something to the effect that, ‘I’m a free woman, I can do what I wish.’ Holding his arm roughly, I tried to drag him to the gözleme stand at the end of the street. At that moment, very nearby, a newly rolled gözleme was sizzling on the dome-shaped griddle, absorbing the butter, and was just on the point of turning crisp, while I was writhing with hunger because of some stupid argument. I had to hurry. But before I’d taken two steps, a shout from behind made me turn around.
‘Leave the lady alone, man.’
‘Did you say something?’ I blustered to the round-faced man who was walking up to me.
‘I said lady, so what? Or isn’t she a lady?’
cadi (witch): Before roasting Hansel in the oven, the witch wanted to be certain he’d been fattened enough. Every morning she inspected the child’s index finger. But the finger was always bony and thin. Because Hansel was tricking the witch by showing her a twig instead of his finger. Since the witch couldn’t see well, she never managed to eat Hansel.
B-C was winding his finger through his corn-coloured wig, and watching us with a smile that froze my blood.
Just as we were about to start fighting, the man and I both stopped to look carefully at what kind of lady we were risking injury for. And both of us decided at the same moment not to drag the matter out. In a hoarse voice I told him to get lost. He made a short speech about not stirring up trouble. We started to back away, without neglecting to give each other dirty looks, until we both bumped into the same invisible wall.
camera obscura: An instrument that reverses images.
I began to feel my way along the invisible wall that enclosed me. When I’d made it half way around the circle, I found myself nose to nose with the round-faced man. As far as I could understand, he too had been feeling his way along the wall, and had made it half way around the circle. This way, when we met again we’d both have completed the invisible circle. A crowd had gathered around us. We were surrounded by eyes that had flocked around to watch a fight. It was then that I understood that the flame of every street fight is fanned by the eyes that gather around to watch it. Every street fight is caused by spectators.
cemal: Beauty. A beautiful face. In Sufism, a manifestation of God in the form of goodness and beauty.
I landed my first punch in his stomach. He doubled over and fell to the ground. I didn’t think he’d be able to pull himself together quickly, but I was wrong. It was clear he wasn’t as inexperienced as I was. He threw his first punch at my nose. My eyes went dark. I tasted warm blood. B-C, who’d been left on the other side of the invisible circle, started to scream like mad when he saw the blood. The invisible circle was a boundary. We, the fighters, couldn’t get out, and no one from outside could come in to help. B-C, with tears in his eyes, was trying to climb the invisible wall that separated us, struggling to reach me.
At that moment something unexpected happened. First, the crowd began to exchange meaningful smiles. Then, just to make the fight more colourful, they opened a door in the invisible wall to let B-C through. As if in a dream, I saw B-C dive through the gap with a blood-curdling scream, jump on me, cover me with kisses, then furiously begin destroying his pea-green, snake-skin bag on the round-faced man’s head. The rest was a blur.
cennet-cehennem (heaven and hell): The eyes of those who have suffered their punishment in hell and have then been accepted in heaven must forget what they have seen there before they can enter.
They took hold of my arms and helped me get up. I didn’t have the strength to stand on my feet. I looked at B-C, and saw that his tears had made tracks through the thick rouge on his cheeks. In front of everyone, his eyes shone with pleasure at my having fought for him. We sat on some empty crates outside a grocery store. For a while, we didn’t talk. As people started to drift away in ones and twos, B-C began to kiss my bruises softly with his cherry-coloured lipstick. ‘Bruised cherries,’ I whispered. We embraced each other, and swore once again that we would never hurt each other. I was filled with peace. The wind was blowing bruised cherry, I was aching with bruised cherry, my lover was kissing bruised cherry.
ceviz asaci (walnut tree): The walnut tree records everything it sees in the shells of its walnuts. That’s why no one wants to make love under this tree.
When we left with our arms around each other, I thought we would take the shortest route back to the Hayalifener Apartments. But B-C dragged me into the first bar we passed. It was gloomy inside. B-C sat at the bar knocking back one beer after another; I couldn’t do anything except retreat into a corner, lean my head back, and wait for the blood to clot. When I did this, I couldn’t see B-C. As long as I couldn’t see him, I was terrified.
As I grew frightened, I grew hungry.
cin (jinn): According to the Holy Koran, jinns were created a thousand years before Adam. Jinns made of black clay are visible to the human eye, but jinns made of smokeless fire are invisible. There are many types and categories of jinn. Some among them can cause madness.
As we sat at the nearest gözleme place, waiting for the waiter to bring our spinach gözleme, I did the best I could to behave well towards B-C. It was clear that I couldn’t tolerate a second fight that night. Though he didn’t seem to notice how tense I was. He was frightfully drunk. He was provoking passers-by, talking nonstop about things I didn’t understand at all, and laughing loudly at his own words. Everyone’s eyes were on us. This wasn’t my idea of going out in disguise.
çekirdek (seed): Tired after travelling a long way over hills and valleys, a traveller stopped to rest under a plane tree. He had olives and bread in his bundle. As he was eating, just for fun, he started spitting the olive seeds as far as he could.
A giant approached with enormous steps. He shook his fist and shouted, ‘Just now one of the olive seeds you flung killed my son. You’ve murdered my only son.’
The traveller was bewildered. ‘How could that be? It’s impossible. Think about it. What’s a tiny little seed next to a huge giant?’ The giant was confused. In order to understand whether or not the traveller was in the right, he started looking at one of the olive seeds that had fallen to the ground. He looked and looked…he looked day and night, through sun and rain, over seasons. He went away, then came back and looked again.
A long time later the giant roared, ‘Ah, so, what’s a tiny little seed next to a huge giant, ha? Before long I was going to start believing this lie.’
The giant thought it was just for the traveller, who somehow couldn’t convince the angry giant of the difference between looking at a seed ‘now’ and ‘looking at it years later’, to bow his head for his punishment under the olive tree that was growing next to the plane tree.
‘Why are you so uncomfortable, sugar? Or does it frighten you that everyone’s looking at us?’ B-C asked ill-temperedly. And then, jumping to his feet, he continued talking in a voice that everyone could hear, knowing that everyone was watching him.
‘Of course. Within the four walls of home you want us to be playful and flirtatious, even whorish, but as soon as we step outside you want us to be demure and proper little ladies. You have no idea that when you’re playing with our appearance you’re playing with our pride. Aren’t you men? You’re all the same. If we went out and did a tenth of what you want us to do at home, you’d cry for blood immediately. Am I lying? Enough! I object to the splitting of my personality.’
If only the earth had opened and swallowed me up, or one of the bus-boys had showed me a secret passage under the table through which I could slip away, or my corset had burst a
nd me and my warmly dripping fat had been flung for miles, if only I could immediately have disappeared forever. By now everyone in the place must have stopped whatever they were doing and were waiting to see what my reaction would be. For my part, I couldn’t take my eyes off the stains on the edge of the plate, full of warm spinach gözleme, that the waiter had just brought.
Dabbetülarz: The animal that will emerge from the earth on the Day of Judgement. It has the head of a bull, the ears of an elephant, the legs of a camel and the tail of a hyena. It will paint the faces of the believers white, and the faces of the unbelievers black. The good and the evil will be known by the colour of their faces.
When we finally returned to the Hayalifener Apartments at the end of that long night, B-C couldn’t wait for me to open the door. And wouldn’t you know it, the key got stuck in the lock. While I was struggling with the door, he suddenly threw back his head and made a sound as if he was choking. Just in time I realised what the sound meant, and was able to get out of the way. He vomited all over the walls, the corridor, and his boiled-corn coloured wig. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he went and vomited on the neighbour-lady’s doormat. I was hurrying so much I was shaking. In any event, the key didn’t give me any more trouble, and the door opened.
As the door opened, B-C pushed me aside and rushed inside in one motion. Just in front of the bathroom he lost his balance and fell noisily off his lofty high-heels. He was so drunk he wasn’t even aware he’d hurt himself.
Efî: The female viper Efî first lost the eyes with which she saw. Later, when she encountered the Razyanc tree, she lost her blindness. (Research: The dried heart of Efî, who first lost the eyes with which she saw, and then lost the eyes with which she didn’t see, is considered a talisman against any kind of spell.)
