The Gaze

by Elif Shafak

  I finished my diet cola and struggled out of the chaise-longe. In the blink of an eye I was in front of the refrigerator.

  Lamia: Before Lamia became a monster with a human head and the legs of a donkey, she was a woman whose beauty was much spoken of. Zeus had made love to her many times. And each time, she became pregnant by Zeus. And the jealous Hera killed each of the babies Lamia gave birth to.

  Lamia hated all women whose children were living. She couldn’t sleep at night for writhing with this hatred. Then she would go and kidnap the children of others and eat them.

  Finally Zeus pitied Lamia, and found the solution of taking out her eyes at night and laying them beside her bed. Then Lamia was able to sleep. As soon as night fell, she slept on one side while her eyes slept on the other.

  I opened the door. The light came on. With the light came the smell, a smell that was a mixture of cold and food, and that stroked my face. The refrigerator was smiling warmly.

  ‘Where have you been all this time?’ it asked reproachfully.

  ‘I’ve come,’ I said. ‘I’ve come back.’

  makyaj (make-up): The roughness of make-up renders stains invisible.

  On the first shelf there were several kinds of cheese. There was a big, unopened container of white cheese, a fat wedge of aged kasar, a half package of fresh kasar that was getting hard around the edges, a tub of cream cheese, and some tulum. I took out all of the cheese and lined it up in front of me. On the same shelf there was also some olive paste. I cut a loaf of bread lengthways down the middle and spread lots of olive paste on it. I ate alternately of the bread and olive paste in one hand and the block of white cheese in the other.

  When I ate I had to be alone, and away from people’s eyes. It was an intimate crisis, or rather a dirty secret between me and what I ate. I squatted down next to the refrigerator. I finished the bread very quickly. I ate the rest of the white cheese without bread. I didn’t really want the kasar or the tulum but they too were consumed before long. On the second shelf I found half of a spicy sausage. I finished this and the rest of the cheese. I was eating so quickly that my stomach, which had shrunk from weeks of dieting, didn’t even have the chance to be taken aback. While my stomach was still trying to understand what was happening, my eyes fell upon some stuffed grape-leaves. The rice had all dried out and the leaves had turned a pale colour. I left them all half-eaten. Suddenly, I noticed a bowl at the back of the fridge. This was the pudding the neighbour had given me. I hadn’t eaten it because I was on a diet, and B-C must have forgotten about it.

  A crust had formed on top of the pudding. When I lifted the crust, I saw the chick-peas, and rice, and figs, and pomegranate pieces, and beans. There were a lot of them, but not too many. When I’d finished the pudding, there was nothing but grapefruits left in the refrigerator. For weeks the grapefruit had been my main staple, and at the moment it was the last thing I wanted to eat. I got up and started to empty the kitchen cabinets. I found a half-eaten packet of crisps in a corner. They were stale, but this didn’t matter. Next, I came across two tins of tuna fish. One was for people who were dieting; low fat. I finished both of them. I was stuffed. From time to time I stopped and washed down the food in my throat with milk.

  As I ate I felt nothing.

  What I ate had no taste. But then I wasn’t looking for taste. At the moment what was important was food, not what I ate. Nothing I ate tasted any better than anything else. Everything tasted the same whether it was sweet or sour or spicy.

  In one of the cupboards I found a fancy box, from a patisserie, full of anise cakes and walnut biscuits. I’d bought them a long time ago, and had left them half-finished when I started my diet. They’d long since gone stale, but this didn’t matter. They still looked good. After eating them, it was time for B-C’s favourite hazelnut wafers. Then I came across a paper cone filled with spiced, yellow roasted chickpeas.

  As I was emptying the packets one by one in the kitchen, I heard typing sounds from inside. Having mastered his nerves some hours ago, B-C was pounding stubbornly on the keys. He was determined to continue with the Dictionary of Gazes. I hated this sound. I crumpled up the empty packets and threw them away.

  masa alti (under the table): Children, domestic animals and others who for whatever reason have problems with the sky, flee under the table in order to hide from eyes.

  Suddenly, as I was rummaging through the last cupboard, I found it. Chocolate!

  It smelled so lovely…as its bright, tight foil wrapping was ripped open, the dark chocolate smiled coyly. This was chocolate! That which was most forbidden to me.

  Because if you are as fat as I am, and after so many diets you have to diet again, eating chocolate isn’t the fun it is in advertisements, but is something rancorous. With just one bite of chocolate, the will power that the person has with time and effort wrapped around the spool begins to unravel. And it’s too late to reel it back in. Because after you’ve eaten chocolate, you can eat anything. Just as a sinner who has once committed the gravest sin considers other sins too insignificant to cause suffering, so any kind of food seems harmless after you’ve eaten a box of chocolates.

  merak (curiosity): On the morning after their wedding night, the prince knelt before his wife. ‘Wander about as you wish,’ he said. ‘Live as you wish in this palace of forty rooms. But on no account whatsoever are you to try to open the fortieth door!’

  ‘As you wish,’ said the young woman with a compliant expression. The moment her husband had gone outside, she was standing in front of the fortieth door with a bunch of keys.

  The stomach is a mythical land.

  Guards made of chocolate wait all along the borders.

  Once you’ve eaten the border guards, there’s nothing left to prevent you from breaking your diet. When you cross the border you throw open the doors of a world without rules and restrictions. The stomach is a mythical land. And in this mythical land the distance between man and animals, the elegant and the coarse, the beautiful and the ugly, the civilised and the wild, the attractive and the repugnant is a small mouthful. And this is quickly gobbled up.

  maske (mask): A face that shows the face to be other than what it is.

  There was nothing left in the kitchen that I could eat. I went to the bathroom. I closed the door. Then counted silently to three.

  I was living with my body now. My body was grinding and digesting the nutrients, tearing them into pieces and piling them up, separating the wheat from the chaff with a mind-boggling speed. I had to be faster than it was. Before what I’d eaten had become mine, that is before it has become part of my system; before it was completely cut off from the outside and digested; I had to act at once to stop this feverish process. Since I’d gobbled everything down in the knowledge that I might vomit, now I had to get back out everything I’d eaten.

  mikrop (microbe): An evil too small to be seen with the naked eye.

  I started to vomit.

  model (model): Praxiteles was in love with the courtesan Phryne, and preserved her exquisite beauty in marble so that even centuries later people could admire it.

  From here on I knew by heart what to do. I brought it all neatly to a conclusion. I flushed the toilet. I washed out my mouth. I brushed my teeth. I soaped my hands. I washed out my mouth. I washed my face. I washed out my mouth. I brushed my teeth. I washed out my mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror. I washed out my mouth.

  I looked worn out. Worn out and broken. Because there were still something that had stayed inside me. No matter what I did, I vomited less than I ate. I suspected that pieces of chocolate were still trying to work themselves into my digestive juices. Perhaps if I tried harder…perhaps this time I could get them out. I started to vomit again.

  Morpheus: Morpheus, the god of dreams, is the offspring of a union between night and sleep (research!).

  That’s how it started.

  That’s how my life started going backwards, and returning to what it used to be. When I was in the Hayali
fener Apartments with B-C, I thought I’d been completely freed from the claws of my former unhappiness, but now it was manifesting itself again. Indeed it was rapidly growing stronger as if to make up for lost time. Which meant that everything could return to the past, and the old somehow doesn’t grow old. B-C was right. Time didn’t proceed in a straight line from yesterday, through today, and into the future. Sometimes it went forwards and sometimes it went backwards; sometimes it walked and sometimes it stood still; it staggered about drunkenly.

  mucizevi göz (miraculous eye): While the city was grumbling and moaning under a siege, a monk was frying fish beside the Well of the Holy Fish. ‘What are you doing?’ cried the people. ‘Is this a time to be frying fish? They’ve breached the walls. The city is being taken.’

  The monk was very calm. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve stopped believing what people say. But if these fish jump out of the pan, I’ll believe the city is falling,’ he said. At that moment the moment the fish began jumping one by one, half cooked, into the sacred well.

  Within a few days I fell ill. All day I lay about like a pudding. I was delirious, in a state between wakefulness and sleep. B-C had become a propeller and was spinning around me. The top of the commode was filled with sweet syrups and bitter pills. My fever didn’t fall. I constantly slept, hid and dreamt. Banging sounds were coming from the centre of the earth, someone was hitting the legs of my bed. Later I understood that in order to keep an eye on me, B-C had brought the computer into the bedroom and was writing the Dictionary of Gazes at my side. He must have found the inspiration he’d been seeking for so long, because the clacking of the keyboard didn’t stop.

  nokta (point): A single point can blin( )d the ey( )e.

  In my dreams I saw multi-coloured balloons. Standing below, I watched them patiently. They climb and climb, and then just at the moment they’re about to rise above the clouds, they burst. Pieces of balloon rain down on me.

  Oryantalizm (orientalism): A Western traveller was burning with passion to make love just once to an Eastern woman hiding behind her thin veils among her carved, inlaid wooden cages. He continually walked through the back streets in the hope of finding an open door he could sneak through or for the wind to play with a veil so that he could peer under it.

  When he returned to his own country, though he hadn’t touched any Eastern women nor seen their milk-white skin, their smooth thighs and their fleshy lips, he spoke at length to his friends as if he had. He returned to the East every year without fail.

  Years later his fantasy finally came true. An Eastern woman returned his desire. When the traveller arrived at the woman’s house, he saw that the door had been left ajar for him. For reasons he couldn’t explain to himself, this didn’t please him at all. He went inside, and saw that the Eastern woman had begun to undress. In panic he said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t take it off. By no means take off what you’re wearing.’ When the woman looked at him with surprise, the traveller fled.

  When he returned to his country, he gathered together the friends who were eager to hear his latest amorous adventures with Eastern women. As was the case every year, he had a great deal to tell them.

  When I woke my stomach felt as if it had been scraped. I had no idea how long I’d slept; perhaps a few hours, perhaps a few days… Step by weary step, holding onto the walls for support, I wandered through the house. On the living room table, as if it had been left there for me, was a bowl of roasted chick-peas. And right next to it was a transparent file folder… I must have been asleep for a long time. And B-C must have thought I’d sleep even longer, because since the day he’d started writing he’d never ever left the Dictionary of Gazes lying about.

  Pandora: Because she’d lifted the lid in order to see what was in the box, all of the evils were scattered across the face of the earth.

  First I finished the roasted chickpeas; after that, I started reading the Dictionary of Gazes.

  Darkness was falling. Night was before us. The key turned in the lock. B-C had come home.

  Pamuk Prenses (Snow White): The dwarves wept at Snow White’s death, and were heartsick to think they’d never see her beauty again. In the end they decided to put her in a glass coffin so they could look at her forever.

  ‘So you’ve read the Dictionary of Gazes. I haven’t finished it yet, though,’ he said in a bitter voice. ‘There’s still quite a bit of material I haven’t organised.’

  He sat in his rocking chair and started rocking angrily back and forth.

  ‘So, since you’ve read it, why don’t you tell me what you think? To tell the truth I’m not at all pleased that you went and read it without permission, but I suppose that’s what relationships are like. You lose your privacy.’

  paravan (folding screen): The daughter of the Ambassador of the Two Scillies, Mademoiselle Ludauf, and her friend Mademoiselle Amoureu were invited to visit Hatice Sultan. According to the wishes of their hostess, the two beautiful young women danced gaily all day. They thought they were alone. They didn’t know that Sultan Selim III was watching them from behind a folding screen.

  He wasn’t even aware.

  I looked into B-C’s face with pain.

  Istanbul — 1980

  In the afternoons, time used to nap in the back garden. Time never varied its routine. Every day, its eyelids would grow heavy at the same hour, its eyes would stay closed for the same length of time and would always open at the same hour.

  While time slept, the child would sit drowsily under the cherry tree, eating the cherries that had fallen to the ground. When the cherries on the ground were finished, she would start to crave the cherries on the branches. But this usually wasn’t necessary. Every day, dozens of cherries would leave behind their branches and fall to the ground. If it was that easy, why didn’t she do the same thing? Why didn’t she leave this house behind?

  The house she could not leave behind was the colour of salted green almonds.

  The house the colour of salted green almonds was her paternal grandmother’s house.

  But whenever time took a nap, a person could believe that it was possible to get up and go without leaving a trace, and now, at this very moment, be in a completely different place. Who knew when, following whose trail of cherry pits, without waiting for growth of the cherry trees in the footprints, simply going and going… Not in order to arrive, but simply to leave and keep going.

  Until time woke from its nap, she could eat as many cherries as she wished; first the ones on the ground, and then, if she dared, the ones on the branches. Who was going to see her? In any case, everyone and everything fell asleep when time fell asleep. The lower floor of the house the colour of salted green almonds resounded with her paternal grandmother’s snores, and the upper floor with those of K1ymet Han1m Teyze, the landlady. The whole neighbourhood became a giant cradle, and the breeze murmured lullabies. The children slept deeply, and so did cats, and even itinerant peddlers; kites, paper dolls and even nougat. Until they woke, she could eat as many cherries as she wished. She would fling the cherry pits as far as she could. Far, as far as the zinc roof of the neighbour’s coal shed.

  Open the door, chief merchant, chief merchant

  What will you pay as a toll, what will you pay

  One rat, two rats, the third escapes to the trap.

  The street was calm and quiet. The jinns were playing ball. They were always awake during the hours when time slept. And in this deep silence, the jinns, in their cracked voices, would sing the same songs the children had sung in the street before going to bed.

  In the back garden of the house next door there was a coal shed; with a zinc roof, and two doors. That’s where the child would throw the pits of the cherries she had eaten. When the cherry pits made a rattling noise as they fell on the zinc roof, the child would believe hail was falling. Sooner or later, every cherry pit she threw would open a hole. In the end, every cherry pit would become lost in the hole it had opened. Perhaps if she ate enough cherries, that is, i
f she finished not just those on the ground but those on the branches as well, she would cause the zinc roof to be completely full of holes. Each hole that was opened by each cherry pit would merge with another one just like it, and when there was no place left to make any more holes, any more wounds, the coal shed would make one last effort to hold on to its pock-marked roof. When the flaking plaster had fallen off, and the emptiness beneath it had swallowed it, the coal shed would disappear completely. Forever.

  Because the coal shed could not hold its tongue. It talked away as the cherry pits rained down on it. It didn’t know that it was necessary for it to hold its tongue. It didn’t know that ‘the tongues of the talkative bleed.’

  Her grandmother used to say that people who cannot hold their tongue will see it bleed. She would say this, and keep her lips, which were as hard and motley as pomegranate rinds, tightly shut. If this rind split open, words would spill out like pomegranate pieces, but it never split. Her grandmother didn’t resemble the other women. Because they talked a great deal.

  It was the day the women made depilatory wax. Early in the morning they gathered in the lower floor of the house the colour of salted green almonds, and placed the little pans with blackened bottoms on the stove; as they breathed in the heady smell of the wax, they gossiped a great deal to help the wax maintain its consistency. Towards afternoon the women would sit in a row and wince as they peeled the thin layers of wax off their legs; as for the child, she would wander around, licking at a pencil that she had dipped into the wax. She was restless. It was understood that until waxing day was over, she was not to touch anything in the house. As if her fingers would stick even to the wall if she touched it by mistake. The only solution was to sit by the window. It had been raining since morning. She watched the raindrops caress and freshen the back garden as they buffeted it and knocked it about. Soon, the women would wash their hands and legs with soapy water, and turn their attention to the dumplings. The child made an effort not to look in their direction. She knew that there was something shameful about waxing; she didn’t want to be party to an unpleasant secret.