by Elif Shafak
Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi was very clever and agile. Every night he wrestled with a different group of demons. He climbed mountains no one else had the courage to climb, he was quick to develop a thesis in his mind, but once he had developed it he grew bored with it. If he wanted, he could squeeze blood out of a stone, or imprison the wheel of fortune within itself. Then leaving the poor wheel of fortune as it is, he would be seized by lust in sinful hidden places. Everybody knew that he regularly visited houses of ill repute. According to rumour, he loved listening to the stories of the regulars and the working women; he distributed gold in exchange for the stories he heard and for the pleasure he had received.
From time to time he also went out hunting. The aim of hunting was not to gallop across the meadows with a bow in his hand, it was to spend the whole day painstakingly and delicately laying the completely undetectable traps he’d spent such tremendous effort preparing; but at the end of the day, because he hadn’t the motivation to return to collect whatever had fallen into his traps, he always returned from the hunt empty-handed. He’d long since been as rich as Croesus and as wise as Solomon. Nevertheless, if it crossed his mind, he’d give everything he had at hand to charity, and be left without a penny. Later, he’d straighten things out again. If he wanted, he could sell a crow as a nightingale, or an old horse as a donkey, could even fool the devil himself and gather seven neighbourhoods for his show. He also loved to surprise people, but grew cold toward them when they were surprised by the unsurprising. However, it wasn’t Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s intelligence or proficiency that people found odd, it was his eyes.
His eyes were already like that when he was a child. They were always like that.
His eyes didn’t give away what he felt. Perhaps he didn’t feel anything.
His childhood passed like this. On one side there were his elder sisters. The sisters who found new games every day simply so he wouldn’t get bored, who lit rows of oil lamps day and night, winter and summer in every corner of the wooden house to replace the warmth of his departed mother, who gathered in his room and set up a shadow play for him that would last until morning, on the evenings when the child was being punished, who went from door to door in every corner of the city in order to collect the best tales, not hesitating to give away their favourite parts of their trousseaus; who would get sick with envy if one of the others told him a tale that had never been heard or told before, who continued to love their youngest brother above all else even after they’d married and started families, despite their husband’s beatings and their children’s reproaches.
On the other side there was his father. The father who, once night fell, didn’t hide the fact that he didn’t like to see his son; who until his last breath slept in the bed in which his wife had died, and never touched another woman; who some nights would wake up suddenly and smash all the oil lamps in the house to pieces; who forever opposed the affection the girls showed this little boy; who would fly into abrupt rages, and take out his cherry-wood stick; who would ask after his son as soon as he came to his senses the next day; who would feel pangs of regret and beg forgiveness when he saw his son’s bruised and purple flesh; but who before a few days had passed would fly into a worse rage, and give him an even worse beating; who drank constantly, and swore constantly; who was not good at anything…
So he spent his childhood lurching between these opposites. On the one side his sisters’ undying affection, and on the other his father’s passing rages. Indeed Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s strangeness was already apparent then. But whether he was treated with respect and deference or whether he was put down and treated with contempt; whether he was fed more than he could eat or whether he was taught a lesson with dry bread and water, whether he was loved or whether he was beaten, it had no effect on his expression. Not once did his eyes ever give away what he felt. It was as if those two narrow, slanting slits of eyes were devoid of any emotion. He was like that as a child and he’s still like that today. Even when he married, and saw his fate before him, his eyes, as always, were as mute as ever.
Then, there was a difficult turning point. On his wedding night, he broke the mirror that reflected him. And he looked at himself harder and longer than he’d ever looked before.
It was like a shaman’s patched and threadbare cloak
Reflected in the broken pieces of mirror
Ready to unravel, it was like a piece of unravelled thread
Scattered randomly,
There was order in its randomness.
Time was without end, space was without limit
So why did it end up squeezed into this form?
He took the scissors and
Cut up the story on which the name had been stamped;
Scattering the pieces through time and space
In another time
Either much later or very soon
And in another place
Very far away but also just here
On the point of returning to the world
It had immediately to cease existing.
He was here but didn’t want to exist, and when he saw that he was trapped here in this form, even though he didn’t want to exist, his days became difficult. He was torn apart like a mad laugh. But he lived. And much later, early one morning he went out into the streets again. Not as before though, there was something altered about his going out into the street. He looked at his surroundings. Not as always though, there was something different about the way he looked at his surroundings. His pupils were pincushions. They were covered with holes made by evil eyes and evil words pinched into their halo. Water leaked from some of these holes. This was how he wept.
It had been so long since he’d walked that he could neither keep his legs from trembling at each step nor determine where he was going. It was as if every direction was the same, as if every passageway led to the same dead end, and every street looked exactly like the other. Life was as he’d left it; it was aware neither of how long Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi had been absent nor of the crisis he had passed through.
A woman was passing along the street; young and healthy, and a bit flighty. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi planted himself in front of the woman like a thief blocking the way to the fountain.
‘Where are you going like this?’
‘Home,’ said the woman. Gesturing with her hand as if she lived just over there. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi drew himself up very close to the woman. He felt an urge to see the woman’s lips, and to kiss them, but before he’d even finished thinking this, he tasted a sweetness in his mouth.
‘The walnut man,’ explained the woman. ‘I made walnut baklava. The sugar stuck to me. I’ve become like baklava, sticky and sweet. Soon I’ll be as wrinkled as pudding. I didn’t want to end up like this.’
‘All right, then how would you have like to have been?’ shouted Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi from behind as the woman walked away from him.
‘Ah! I’d like to have been like the sweets in shop windows. They’re so bright and colourful.’
She said other things, but she was so far away now that he couldn’t understand what she said. Just as she was about to disappear from sight around the corner, she stopped to rub her sprained foot. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi took this opportunity to ask another question.
‘Where can such sweets be found?’
The woman had bent over while rubbing her ankle, and as she did so the wind teased her. Sometimes the wind came slyly from the front, plastering the woman’s scarf to her in such way as to show off her body; sometimes it played to the left or right, trying to loosen the woman’s hair; sometimes whistling from behind to grasp her hips. The woman let herself free for one moment; for one moment she revealed whatever had remained hidden. It all happened in the blink of an eye; it was all a deception of the eye. By the time the woman’s answer reached its destination, she had long since stepped off on her way.
‘In Pera! T
o Pera! Pera!’
That was when Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi understood that something had happened to the women of his country. Had they changed during his withdrawal into solitude, or had they been this way for a long time, and it was he who was late to see it? Was life really as it had been when he left it, or had things changed a great deal in his country while he was experiencing his crisis at home? In any event, he understood well on that day when he went out into the street and looked around in a different manner, that there were new things happening. Indeed anything new or European was very much in demand. It was clear that the trays of sweet walnut baklava paled in comparison to the deceptive attractions of the colourfully wrapped gelatine sweets. Baklava was served in large portions; sweets are served one by one. Baklava was to be eaten and finished; sweets were to be savoured. Sweets were to be enjoyed alone; baklava was what was served to neighbours and visitors. Sweets were unfamiliar; baklava was known. However you sliced it, baklava’s taste and essence was the same; but one understood even from the different coloured wrappers that the sweets were all different from one another. Once a person has become used to the taste of baklava, it becomes dull; when it comes to sweets, one is always in pursuit of taste without ever reaching it.
One addressed the stomach first; the other the eyes.
Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi didn’t care that this was only one woman among many. How many more women would he have to meet in order to have met enough women? How many books did one have to read in order to be wise, how many lands did one have to see in order to be a traveller, how many defeats did one have to suffer in order to become discouraged? How much was too much and how much was too little? Since the mirror had been broken, one was enough for Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi. One could be divided into a thousand; decreasing drastically through famine and drought, one can be multiplied by a thousand and become abundance and plenty. Indeed, he found the number One to be extraordinary,
Wherever a person hurts, that’s where his heart beats. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi pressed his fingers on his eyes. To no avail. It didn’t stop. His heart beat in his eyes. And suddenly, the pieces were riveted together. He found a way to unite women’s suffering with his own suffering. Because everything was dependant on everything else.
His inner thoughts took their proper shape just like dye poured onto water to make marbled paper. Just as his eyes were the sole reason he had been thought strange since childhood, from now on he would address only the eyes. However much he had lost because of his own eyes, he would gain even more from the eyes of others. And in order to succeed he would observe carefully the winds that were blowing in his country. He wouldn’t flee from the wind’s rage, nor run after it in order to kiss its hands and skirts, nor gather the pieces it had dropped and scattered. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s intention was to go right up on top of the wind and look into its eyes.
Because when the wind blew wildly in a person’s face it wove a curtain of lime, tar and clay, sticks and twigs, bugs and dusty earth in front of open eyes. The curtain caused so much pain that anyone foolhardy enough to want to look was obliged to close his eyes. For this reason everyone believed that the wind couldn’t be seen with the eye. However, Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s eyes, the very eyes that were the cause of his strangeness and unhappiness, those two narrow slits that had been drawn on his face, that is, the eyes that had never opened, could look at the wind comfortably. When he looked straight into the wind he could read the state of his country and understand the way things were going, and know what to do in order to take advantage of what was going on. With this discovery, the eyes that until now had been a source of suffering would be the source of fulfilment.
For the first time since he’d deliberately broken the mirror on his wedding night, he’d found a reason to live. Wherever a person hurts, that’s where his heart beats. Now, Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi’s heart beat in his eyes. Now the pain of the loneliness that his eyes had caused him would be relieved by drawing thousands of people around him. The life that his eyes had made distasteful would become sweet. The eyes that had seen what no one else could see would cause every glass raised to be filled with an elixir distilled from the contagious blindness of the people. For this reason, he would first ascertain the situation of his country, so he could gather those who believed in this situation as if he was picking mushrooms.
Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi had made his decision. Since the women of the Ottoman State only thought about appearances, he would present them with a world of spectacle. And since the answer to the question he had asked was Pera, then that’s where he would do whatever he was going to do.
Theatres were already popular, and competition was fierce and heated. To start from nothing and reach your goal took not only time, but effort. But Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi had to see the results of his efforts right away. It was clear that the clothing business was very profitable, but this isn’t quite what he meant by establishing a world of spectacle. At one point it had occurred to him to start a circus of a thousand faces that would be a feast for the eyes and painful on the pocket, but he quickly changed his mind. After collecting quite a few ideas, he spent a long, long time thinking them over and then finally made his decision. He would erect an enormous tent. A tent the like of which would be remembered not just for days or for years, but for centuries. A tent that, like a snake swallowing its tail, would begin where it ended.
The colour of the tent would be the colour of cherries.
In the cherry-coloured tent he would present a world of spectacle to thousands of women. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi, who was born to a woman who paid the ultimate price in order to have a little son, who was raised by his six older sisters and crossed the border that separates the two sexes; who for a long time had found himself observing how each of his elder sisters managed her own husband, and thought that there was no coincidence in how these methods of management resembled each other, and that there were rules that all women knew but never mentioned, and understanding that he had been brought up according to the same rules, and could never forget the morning of his wedding night and having since birth possessed extraordinary intelligence, clearly had little trouble envisioning this world of spectacle he would present to the eyes of women. He was aware that women were deeply pleased to see women uglier than themselves. He was going to show them what they wanted to see. In the cherry-coloured tent he wasn’t going to display ugly women, or the ugliest women, but ugliness itself.
There was one only reason these various women, who did not mention each other in their prayers and who did not let each other exist in their dreams, struggled up the hill to meet at the westward-facing gate of the cherry-coloured tent: Sable-Girl! The women had come here to see her, the ugliest of the ugly, the strangest of creatures, the despicable, plague-ridden Sable-Girl.
In order to understand what the Sable-Girl was seeking in Pera, in a cherry-coloured tent that had been pitched on the top of a hill, while the Ottoman Empire was Westernising with the panic of a boy who’d stolen an apple from a neighbour’s garden and hadn’t the courage to look back, it’s necessary to go back some way. Back past all of the glazed secrets. It’s necessary to travel in time and space. Not that far back; about two centuries earlier. Not that far away either; to the lands of Siberia. Because it is two centuries ago in Siberia that the story of the ugliest of the ugly, the strangest of creatures, the despicable, plague-ridden Sable-Girl begins.
But to tell the truth it is possible to skip this part altogether. It’s possible not to write it; and not to read it. You can jump ahead to the next one without tarrying here, the next number, that is. In any event they may not even have lived what happened. No matter how ugly she was, she might not have become a spectacle, and had the right not to be seen, and keep herself distant from curious eyes. Indeed she wouldn’t have been so ugly if she hadn’t been seen.
(Anyway, if we’re going to see what we c
ould have passed over without looking at, we have to go to the Siberia of 1648 now.)
Siberia — 1648
God was above, and the Czar was far away.
The witches were wandering about. The witches were blowing the mouldy poison they hid under their knotted tongues onto the hops. As the villagers fell one after another, the acrid stench of death could be smelled for miles. Wet snow blessed the rows of corpses lying in the ditches who had opened their mouths hungrily. Indeed it had been going on for a long time. Czar Alexis had forbidden the sale of hops. But the witches had to find another way to spread the poison they kept under their knotted tongues. There had to be another way, this deluge didn’t ebb, this massacre didn’t end. The plague was rampaging through Russia.
The year 1648 was as famous for the plague as it was for its evil consequences. That year, the Voyvod of Belgorod found himself ordered by Czar Alexis to capture the witches immediately. He quickly rounded up the known witches in the area. Fires were lit in the square, and they smoked for days, and the soot was somehow impossible to wipe away. They caught fire, and so did their poison. Their rotten breath became mixed with the air. The air became heavier; as if it was going to vomit – murky and leaden. It enveloped everything. It was not the witches who were spreading the poison, despite the hundreds who were so hastily captured, but the air itself, which could not be grasped, and therefore could not be captured. Those who still managed to stay alive faced one of two possible deaths. Those who didn’t catch the plague were burned as witches; those who weren’t burned as witches had the plague.
The air was spreading poison, but it wasn’t possible to see it spread. The air was an invisible place. It was at the same time boundless and small enough to be consumed in a single breath; at the same time far away and right under one’s nose. ‘Take care not to breathe!’ said the guardians of the Czar. The villagers were obedient. By no means did they breathe when they were outside. They worked away all day, picking edible plants, draining the pus from the corpses, sitting on the graves, sweeping up the witches’ ashes, and then, giving the day to the care of the night, closed themselves into their houses. It was then that they drank in the air as desperately as the lungs of the victims of accidents at sea, urgent and pitilessly longing for air, deep under the sea and struck with the terror of not being able to get out, as they rush to the embrace of the surface of the sea. The sickness was spreading rapidly.