The Gaze

by Elif Shafak

  That afternoon, under the surprised eyes of the others in the room, K1ymet Han1m Teyze ate perhaps fifteen plates of dumplings. When she’d finished the dumplings in the pots, she polished off the plates that the neighbour women insisted on passing to her. Finally, when she realized there was not a single dumpling left, she leaned back, said a half-hearted thank you, and added, ‘Elsa would have loved it too.’ Before she’d even finished the sentence, all of the women in the room shrieked as one. K1ymet Han1m Teyze’s mouth was full of blood.

  That afternoon, seeing K1ymet Han1m Teyze eat for the first time, the child became confused. It was clear that K1ymet Han1m Teyze wasn’t a robot or anything. She ate food just like everyone else; she was a person like everyone else, after all.

  But if she wasn’t a robot, how could she eat so many dumplings without exploding?

  ‘You and I will become very good friends. And you know that friends talk about everything.’

  The doctor was young and had no moustache. He wore thick-lensed glasses, and had bright blue eyes. The child was his first patient.

  As the lorry loaded with furniture left the neighbourhood, grandmother, who was sitting next to the driver, turned to look back with tears in her eyes at the house the colour of salted green almonds where she had lived for twenty-two years. That morning, she’d knocked on the door of the second floor to try her luck one last time.

  ‘K1ymet Han1m! Please don’t throw me out of my house. After all these years as your tenant, what fault do you find with me? Haven’t we been good neighbours all these years? We’ve looked into each other’s eyes. Tell me if there have ever been any problems between us. Believe me, she’s going to go. I’ve sent news to her mother and father. They’re going to come and get her. “You know, things are a bit confused at the moment. Let her stay with you for a while,” my son said, and I didn’t say anything. “We’ll come and get her later,” he said. “She’s my grandchild”, I said, and I accepted the situation. I’d never even seen her before. How was I to know she’d be such an imp? She must take after her mother. If I’d known, would I have wanted her to stay with me? Please, K1ymet Han1m Teyze, don’t throw me out of my house at my age. I swear on the Koran. She’ll be leaving soon.’

  K1ymet Han1m Teyze didn’t go back on her word.

  The truck loaded with furniture pulled up in front of a five storey apartment building on the other side of the city. This was where grandmother’s daughter lived; with her husband and three children. As she climbed the steps, grandmother cursed the reasons why, at her age, she would have to live as an unwanted extra person in her son-in-law’s house. The child followed one step behind.

  This house had no garden. It only had a balcony with empty flowerpots. At one point, the child went out onto the balcony and put several cherry pits into one of the flower pots. She knew that there was no earth in the flower pots. This wasn’t important. In any event, she was going to leave this place soon.

  ‘If something bad happened, you can tell me about it.’

  The doctor, whose anxiety increased as the silence drew on, took off his glasses every two or three minutes and cleaned them with a soft piece of velvet. When he took off his glasses there was a glimmer of shame in his bright blue eyes, with which he couldn’t even see beyond the end of his nose. The child liked him when he was like this. She liked to watch him.

  ‘All right, all right, OK.’ Said the doctor, opening his arms wide in a gesture of surrender. ‘But just tell me this. Before you moved out of your grandmother’s house you climbed onto the roof. You made everyone very worried. Do you want to tell me why you climbed onto the roof?’

  When the child arrived at the house the colour of salted green almonds, the summer season was just beginning. Grandmother opened the child’s suitcase, and arranged the contents one by one on the divan. Shorts, socks, underpants and hats came out of the suitcase. As well as multi-coloured marbles.

  ‘Don’t you have anything else to wear?’

  On the evening of the day the child put on the long-sleeved brown dress her paternal grandmother had bought for her.

  ‘Now you look more like a girl!’

  Grandmother closed the suitcase and put it on top of the closet. The clothes in the suitcase could be worn neither outside nor inside. The child could understand why she shouldn’t wear shorts outside, but she couldn’t understand who she would be hiding from inside. Who was going to see her at home, within the four walls? Her grandmother didn’t answer this question that day.

  ‘What do you see in the picture?’

  In the picture, next to a stove on which chestnuts were roasting, there was a puffy cushion and a red ball of wool.

  ‘You didn’t even look properly,’ said the young doctor as he thrust the picture back into the child’s hands. ‘Please look more carefully.’

  In the picture, on the puffy cushion next to the stove on which chestnuts were roasting, there was a cat playing with a red ball of wool.

  ‘Do you know that I have a cat too? Perhaps I can bring it here one day. Do you like cats?’

  Grandmother was tall and wiry. She chewed so slowly that when she finally swallowed the mouthful that her toothless mouth had dissolved into strands from which the taste had long since been leached, she’d forgotten what she had eaten. It didn’t matter anyway. Being picky about food amounted to ingratitude. That’s what she used to say. That’s what she used to say sometimes, and she would deliberately cook badly. Sometimes she didn’t add any salt, or else put in too much hot pepper, or didn’t use oil. The child had to become accustomed to eating everything. And also, of course, to not eating.

  Grandmother fasted frequently. The days she had to make up for from past and future Ramadans never lessened. On these days, even though it wasn’t stated openly, the child was expected to keep the fast with her. She wouldn’t put anything into her mouth when she was in her grandmother’s presence, but the moment she went into the back garden she went straight to the cherry tree. But one day, at a completely unexpected moment, she had to give up this mischievous game. Because that day, taking the child’s cherry stained fingers and squeezing them tightly, grandmother looked straight into her eyes. When she finally spoke, her lips, which were as hard and mottled as a pomegranate rind, twisted into a mottled smile.

  ‘Let’s say, for instance, that you managed to deceive me. Did you think that Allah wouldn’t see you secretly eating cherries?’

  ‘Don’t talk if you don’t want to. But if you don’t talk that means you’re not my friend. If you’re not my friend, that means you won’t see me again.’

  He took off his thick-lensed glasses and set about polishing them. The threat had worked. The child, whose mouth could not until now have been pried open with a knife, started to talk hurriedly. She told the doctor all of the fairy tales she knew. After that, she started to make up her own fairy tales. She talked and talked and talked, without minding that her mouth was drying up and without worrying that her tongue might bleed.

  As she talked, the young doctor’s bright blue eyes clouded, and his face darkened.

  The child opened the package her grandmother had given her. She had been expecting a new dress, but this time a muslin cloth emerged from the package. It was a cherry-coloured cloth with little seashells sewn in the corners.

  That day she learned how to pray. As she copied what her grandmother did on the prayer rug, she listened to the voices of the seashells. The seashells always spoke with one voice. When grandmother folded up the prayer rug and put it in a corner, the child followed her.

  ‘When does he watch me, then?’

  ‘Isn’t God’s time different from yours or mine?’

  God was timeless. Even during the hours when time naps, he doesn’t sleep, and continues to watch people. The child folded up her prayer rug and put it on top of her grandmother’s prayer rug.

  ‘Why does he watch, then?’

  ‘This is your mother and father’s fault,’ said grandmother in an irritated tone
. ‘They didn’t teach you anything. They wanted to make you the way they are.’

  It was as if the child hadn’t heard what had been said. It was as if her thoughts were elsewhere. Just as her grandmother was about to leave the room, she shouted after her.

  ‘What about the night? When it gets dark? Can he see in the dark?’

  Grandmother turned and examined the child from head to toe as if she had never seen her before. That’s when she said those words.

  ‘People should hold their tongues. Talkative people’s tongues bleed.’

  When grandmother left the room, a thousand sentences formed from the letters of the answer she hadn’t received flocked through the child’s mind. She understood that during the day, whether she was inside or outside, she had to be careful about what she did and to keep in mind that she was constantly being watched. But perhaps the night was different. Perhaps at night God didn’t watch the world. This was why the night was so dark. The night was as black as coal. Coal shed black…

  After that day, she started to go to bed later at night.

  ‘You’re eating a lot these days. Isn’t that so?’

  The child nodded with a heartfelt smile. Because she didn’t want to lose her friend, she leaned back and started talking. Without hurrying, and without taking a break, and in great detail, she told the story of Hansel and Gretel, who fell under the power of the world’s most wicked witch, while they were nibbling at the glazed sugar windows, and the door made of marzipan, and the chimney of dough, and the lawn of strawberry pudding, the fences of double whipped cream, the rooms of nougat, and the chocolate roof.

  As she told the story, the doctor sat with his head in his hands, looking straight ahead. In front of him, on the table, was the child’s half-eaten simit.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said the strange man. ‘Don’t move at all, all right?’

  There was no need for him to say this. The child wasn’t moving anyway. And she’d stopped so suddenly, it wasn’t as if she was frozen in place, but as if she had never moved even once in her life, and couldn’t move. Her 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. The water glass had an outside, of course. But the child wasn’t there. She was in the coal shed.

  ‘Good for you,’ said the strange man. ‘Now I’m going to play a game with you. A counting game.’

  In the back garden of the house next door there was a coal shed; with a zinc roof, and two doors. One of the doors was always closed, and the other was always open. There was a big padlock on the door that was closed. They kept wood and coal there in the winter. There was no need for a lock on the door that was left open. Thieves couldn’t steal emptiness.

  There was a tiny window inside. The glass was broken. Two steps from the rays of sunlight that entered there, it was completely dark inside. There were pieces of broken glass, pieces of wood, countless lost marbles, yellowed newspapers, a single lady’s shoe with a broken heel, a tattered tea-strainer, rusty fingernail-clippers with a piece of fingernail stuck in them, broken razors, scattered chick-peas from a torn paper cone had all gathered together in the darkness and were whispering to each other. And children stopped by sometimes, children who were playing hide-and-seek.

  In truth, the coal shed always confused the person who was ‘it’. Because it was the easiest place to guess, no one hid there, but because no one ever hid there, ‘it’ didn’t feel it necessary to look there, and like every place where ‘it’ is unlikely to look, it remained a favourite hiding place.

  ‘You know how to count, don’t you?’

  Actually the child had come to the coal shed to escape from numbers. As soon as ‘it’ turned his head to the wall, she and the other children were off together like a shot. After a brief hesitation, she decided to climb the garden wall and hide behind Red Show-off. Just then, ‘it’ shouted ‘one!’ in a loud voice. Red Show-off was K1ymet Han1m Teyze’s oldest son’s new car. Every time Abdullah emerged without a scratch from accidents that turned his cars into scrap metal, he would throw himself to the ground in tears, and swear to the whole neighbourhood on the Koran that not a drop would ever again pass his lips; managing to keep his oath for a few days, he told everyone he met that he was a completely new man, and on top of this he would say that he had always been a good man and that he was a victim of bad company and wayward friends; before long, forgetting all his promises and all his tears, he would show up in a brand new car; as he drove the young men of the neighbourhood around in his new car, he would advise them that they had to become men, and go beyond what their elders had told them, and he would continue giving this advice at the tavern; at the end of the evening, at best, weeping next to the wreckage of the new car he had wrapped around a tree, he would be making vow after vow. Everyone knew that K1ymet Han1m Teyze had never given any money to her sons. It was a mystery where Abdullah managed to find so much money. Most people thought that he stole the cars; stole them and painted them. They were always the same colour: bright red.

  Red Show-Off was a Mercedes. It hadn’t been enough just to paint it, it had waves and waves of highlights on the bonnet. Because, for whatever reason, Abdullah had disappeared soon after parking Red Show-Off in front of the house the colour of salted green almonds, for almost two months now Red Show-Off had been dozing sweetly in the middle of the neighbourhood, with a peace that no other bright red car had ever known.

  ‘It’ shouted, ‘Twooo!’ Just at that moment, the child was passing in front of the coal shed. Suddenly, Red Show-Off seemed very far away. She changed her mind. Quickly, she dove into the coal shed and pulled the door closed behind her.

  There was someone else inside. Someone who was not part of the game.

  There was a man inside. He was a stranger. He was just standing there, under the broken window, where the rays of sunlight shone in. Half of his face was in the light, and half was in the dark. He was leaning his back against the wall, and held his head in his hands. He looked very worried.

  Perhaps he was crying. He was well-dressed. His shoes were very shiny despite being covered with coal dust. It was clear that the man was not a gypsy. The child knew that one had to stay away from gypsies. Gypsies’ shoes were never like this.

  This man is a stranger. (I wonder who he is?) Strangers were to be avoided. (How unhappy he looks!) The best thing to do is to tell someone. (What is he looking for here?) She should leave the coal shed at once. (The moment she left she would become ‘it’!) There was a strange man inside. (‘It’ was outside.)

  The child sat near the door, trying hard not to make a sound. She didn’t take her eyes off the man. Outside, ‘it’ was swearing at the children he had found but who were not listening to him. ‘It’ had such a foul mouth that one child’s mother, unable to stand it any longer, rushed out into the street, said she would complain to ‘it’s’ father that evening, and got involved in the children’s quarrel. In the middle of this uproar, faint padding sounds were heard in the coal shed. As if someone was walking gingerly across the zinc roof; someone…or else a cat…

  A while later, the strange man slowly straightened himself up. His movements were so slow and heavy that a person might wonder whether or not he was alive. Perhaps this man who had lost his way was really one of those puppets that women sewed while looking at fashion magazines. There must not have been enough cloth, because his jacket looked a little tight. The child had a puppet like this in the drawer where she kept things she had seen. A puppet she had seen at the amusement park. A puppet who waited patiently, hanging on a string, among the dolls with yellow hair and painted lips, the electric cars that did somersaults, the multi-coloured tops, the phosphorescent yo-yos, the tailed kites and the jigsaw puzzles that were useless when a single piece was missing. They gave her three balls. If she could knock it down with the balls, the puppet would be hers. She hadn’t been ab
le to knock it down.

  The man’s eyes were an olive green, and much more beautiful than the puppet’s eyes. He had no whiskers on his face, and perhaps he was naturally beardless. The child sat motionless, with her eyes on the man, listening to the children fighting outside. Outside, ‘it’ was wandering around swearing; he kept finding the same children in the same hiding places, and always complained in the same way. As her voice could no longer be heard, the woman who had come out to scold ‘it’ had probably gone home. It was clear that the game was coming to an end. At this rate, all hell was going to break loose soon. She had to go out soon.

  ‘Will you play a game with me? A counting game? Would you like to play?’

  His voice was just as beautiful as his eyes.

  ‘Now we’re going to count to three together,’ he whispered. ‘You know how to count, don’t you? What do you say, shall we count?’

  Of course the child knew how to count: after a brief hesitation she nodded her head. Then the man caressed the child’s cheek. His hands were beautiful, just like his voice and his eyes.

  ‘Good for you! When I say “one” you’re to close your eyes. When I say “two” you’re to open them. The game isn’t over until I say “three”. There’s no leaving the coal shed until I say “three”. Do you understand?’

  Outside, the children were calling her. They were going to start the game over again, someone else was going to be ‘it’. They were calling her name. She had to go out.

  ‘One!’ said the man. ‘Close your eyes!’

  The moment the child closed her eyes she was in darkness. She looked straight into the darkness, and there she saw the number One. One was not a run-of-the-mill number. It was extraordinary. It was like a pregnant woman; its singularity was only a matter of time. Soon another life would emerge from its life, and its anxiety about what that life would look like was already showing on its face. The child was seized by fear as she looked at One. She had to flee this place right now, without waiting another moment, before it was too late to act on her decision, before it was time for One to give birth. In order to flee she first had to open her eyes, but unfortunately her eyes were fastened on One.