by Elif Shafak
Without taking their eyes off each other, they spun at the same moment and at the same speed in the snowstorm of their hearts. They spun so much that they made the world’s head spin. As they spun they were beside themselves. In that dark, narrow basket they discovered the boundlessness and the brilliance of their souls. And they loved each other. Later, when they emerged from the basket, each would go to the place where his body belonged, but their souls would not part. This, this was their secret. And this moment was their moment. The intimacy of the shaman and the animal.
Timofei Ankidinov had made a sledge from scrub and branches and he lay the sailor, who by the way his smiling face was growing pale seemed in danger of freezing, onto this sledge. His aim was first to get away from the sea and to find shelter. The rest he would think about later. Not that there was much to think about. He had a feeling he was going to make a fortune in these still undiscovered lands. This had to be a sable heaven. And who knew, perhaps it was even close to the Pogicha. Perhaps he was very close to that magnificence of which he’d always dreamed, to the boundless plenty, to his elegant lady.
As Timofei Ankidinov walked, pulling the sledge behind him, he kept his eyes on the land onto which they’d not yet stepped; his friend on the sledge, his eyes wide open, silently watched the road along which they’d passed.
Suddenly an indistinct shape passed in front of them. It was a sable, at least five times bigger than other sables. It passed without noticing the men and a little further on disappeared from sight.
When Timofei Ankidinov saw this enormous sable he was so surprised and so excited that he had difficulty keeping himself from crying out. He didn’t say anything to the sailor. He changed the sledge’s course, and started following the sable’s tracks. The tracks dwindled, and stopped in front of a small mound. As the sable trapper approached noiselessly and began brushing the snow off the mound, he understood that it was a large, overturned basket. This discovery excited him even more. Perhaps under this basket was a door that opened onto the Pogicha. Perhaps all the sables in Siberia were succeeding in hiding from the trappers by passing through this door. If it could swallow such a big sable as that one, there was definitely a priceless mystery inside it.
‘Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t look. It could be a trap for trappers. Or a Siberian curse.’
As the sailor said this, he was trying to straighten out. Timofei Ankidinov look sourly at his face. He would never allow the Pogicha and its enormous sables to belong to anyone else. He pretended to stop looking, returned to the sledge, and suddenly attacked the man lying on it. The sailor, who was very weak and who was not expecting an attack like this, was so astounded that even as his body was being stabbed he didn’t put up any resistance.
bloodinthesnowbloodinthesnowbloodinthesnowmansnowman.
Trembling wildly with excitement, Timofei Ankidinov looked around. There was a lot of blood around. Everything he saw had turned red. He cleaned off the blood that filled his eyes. He flung the bloody dagger far away and approached the overturned basket. He opened it and looked inside.
Sable and boy, two twin souls, two existences linked by blood, two balls of sadness, two strange faces, two confused hallucinations, boy and sable…Their two souls, causing each other to increase, were on the point of melting into one, but their union was left half completed. With the opening of the basket the daylight dove in with a brazen smile, followed by the stranger’s avaricious stare. And at such an intimate moment. They had to be far from watching eyes; they definitely ought not to be seen. The spell was broken. It was all left half finished, and temporary. Now the boy and the sable were struggling to bring back the half that was each one’s own body. Since there was only one body present. Because the spell had been broken right in the middle of their union, they could neither step back and return to their former states, nor could they step forward and complete their transformation.
The light that had torn that darkness, that counted intimacy for nothing, disappeared the way it arrived. Timofei Ankidinov’s mouth hung open with surprise, and his eyes grew to the size of crystal balls from terror as he looked at the creature under the basket.
The military governor of Tobolsk was lying on his back, gulping his drink and picking at the scabs of the wound that had appeared at the end of his nose several weeks ago and somehow wouldn’t heal. After all, Tobolsk had become the most important city in Siberia. Because the Russians saw Tobolsk not only as a commercial but also as a religious centre, they’d built a convent and a monastery side-by-side, as well as a religious school. The missionaries who sought to teach God’s name to the primitives and to uproot idolatrous practices were entertained here for a while before setting out into the wilderness. When it came to commerce, all the merchants saw it as an important place to visit regularly. Tadjik and Tartar tradesmen in particular used to bring valuable goods from the east to the markets of Tobolsk.
The military governor of Tobolsk looked at the blood on the tip of his finger. The wound had bled again when he had picked at it. He filled his glass again. When he came here he’d had fifty servants, five prostitutes who were always bickering among themselves, three priests, and hundreds of barrels of wine and drink. If things continued to go the way they were, he was sure that he would leave with nine or ten times more. The trapping season was about to reach its end. Soon, all of the native tribes along the border would deliver their tribute. Any day, the Cossacks who ranged further would be turning back, with their furs. Furs! The military governor of Tobolsk smiled as he crushed between his fingers the scab he had picked. He loved fur. If it wasn’t for fur he wouldn’t be able to stand this cursed place for a single day.
He started to do the accounts in his head. Indeed his favourite thing was to go to his room at the end of the day and gulp his drink while adding up what he had made. This time he’d even succeeded in fooling the devil. When he’d thought of kidnapping the children of the troublesome Tunguz tribe, who hadn’t paid their protection money for some time, he’d solved the problem once and for all. Now he was selling the children back to their parents for sable furs. To tell the truth, kidnapping the leaders of the tribe was very difficult, but quite profitable. He could get sledges full of furs in exchange for them. When some of them unnecessarily tried to resist, the military governor dealt out their punishment himself. He branded them with an iron whose capital letters had dropped off. He always branded them in the same place; right between their eyes. Wherever the prisoners went in the future, none of them would ever pick up a mirror again, and they would remind everyone who saw them of the military governor’s power.
There were also shamans among those who were kidnapped. They were quite strange. They made such startling sounds in their cells at night that none of the guards liked to watch over them. They would ululate until dawn and stamp their feet, and they’d spin for hours, tearing their rattling chains and jingling walrus tusk necklaces to pieces. Sometimes the military governor would go down and watch them from a corner. He would throw maggot-infested meat that had been put aside for the sledge dogs in front of them. Until now, none of them had refused it. They’d chew heavily on the repulsive, stinking meat; the colour of its rottenness wrapped itself around the eyes. Every time he saw this, the military governor became nauseous and rushed away.
It was not long before he’d be free of this cursed place. He was going to leave in the near future. If he’d sunk his teeth in just a little bit more, he would have been one of the wealthiest men in the country when he left. His train of thought was broken by the pounding on the door. It was his orderly.
‘Sir, there’s a sable trapper outside. He says he has something very valuable in his sack. He won’t show it to anyone but you.’
‘All right,’ said the military governor. He sighed in distress. ‘Let him come in. Let’s have a look and see what he has in this sack.’
A little later, Timofei Ankidinov, with a haughty expression, followed the orderly inside. He had straightened his back and
was about to recite the pretentious sentences he’d prepared days before, when the military governor cut him short with a harsh expression, and asked for the sack to be opened at once. Meanwhile, the military governor was unable to speak for a moment because of the pain from the wound he’d made bleed again by picking at it. When he came to himself, the first thing he did was to pat Timofei Ankidinov on the back with one hand and raise his wine glass to the honour of the sack. Quickly filling every empty wine glass he saw, he repeated the same sentence no one knows how many times.
‘This kind of ugliness is something everyone has to see.’
In a low, airless cabin in Tobolsk, the Sable-Boy used to get up and dance on top of a round wooden table. The overflowing crowd around the table would consist of merchants, trappers, adventurers, exiles, outlaws, holy men, Cossacks, prostitutes, the Czar’s spies, high officials and their underlings, that is, everyone chance had set on the road to this distant land; shouting, cursing and insulting one another as they gulped their drinks, watching the Sable-Boy. Every evening the military governor of Tobolsk would drop by and look things over; he’d count the number of spectators. Since he’d managed to get Timofei Ankidinov out of the picture with a little money and many threats, it was all his. No one could interfere. Every night, he earned the value of at least two sledges full of sable furs from the people who came to see the Sable-Boy.
What had happened was that the boy, who hadn’t become the tribe’s new shaman, had become stuck somewhere between being a human and being a sable. Indeed he was a sable-person, because he had a sable for a soul-mate. And inside that overturned basket, when the moment came for his soul to embrace its twin; that is, at the moment when he was about to draw the sable’s soul into himself and blow his own soul into the sable; I mean, at the moment when he was about to complete the transformation he had to undergo in order to become the tribe’s new shaman, first becoming two beings in one with the sable, then later becoming one being in two; everything remained half finished simply because a hand had opened the basket from outside, and a pair of uninvited eyes had seen what they shouldn’t have seen and the light from those eyes had shredded that intimate moment to pieces. The soul-mates had become separate within the same body. Indeed he was a sable-person. He was half sable, and half human. He was an unfortunate creature, imprisoned in order to display his unfortunate ugliness.
By day, the Sable-Boy sat in a circle defined by the length of the chain attached to his ankles, gnawing at the food that was thrown to him. When he’d eaten his fill, he’d sniff at the edge of the circle, trying to understand what kind of world he was in. In the evening he would get up on the table in the cabin and display himself. He was so ugly and so strange that there were those who changed their routes in order to pass through Tobolsk. People laughed when they saw him. Even though his appearance was wild, he was very obedient.
He never stood up for himself. He did exactly what he was told. Sometimes he would jump up and down on the table, sometimes he would approach the edge and let the spectators touch him, and sometimes he would turn his back and draw circles in the air with his tail. And he would also often get on all fours and run around in circles chasing his tail. Whenever he did this the spectators would crack up laughing. Whenever this happened, they would throw things onto the round, wooden table; either the curses on their tongues, or the boots on their feet, or the drink that was left in their glasses, or the prostitutes who wandered from lap to lap.
He was a Sable-Boy. In time, he earned the military governor far more than he could have earned in years in the fur trade. Then, one night, as he was showing himself off on top of the table, he collapsed to the ground. Faces and sounds became confused. He’d fainted. He’d become ill. In the following days, the military governor brought all of the physicians of the city to the cabin. Yet none of the physicians could put a name to the Sable-Boy’s sickness, or find a cure. In the end the military governor, seeing the patient wasting away day-by-day and being seized by a mind-shaking panic, finally sought the help of the shamans in the cells. Of all the shamans, only one had a sable as a soul-mate, and agreed to look after him.
The Sable-Boy’s condition improved somewhat, but the military governor became frightened that something might happen to him and his source of money would dry up completely. So as not to leave things to chance, he had to get some offspring from this strange creature. They would have to be half-human and half-animal just like himself.
Before long, they put the Sable-Boy in the arms of a prostitute. The Sable-Boy first sniffed the bed, then the prostitute, then, lying in the bed with the prostitute, sniffed himself. From among the smells of sweat and urine, faeces and drink, smoke and exile, he picked out and lay aside, as if he were plucking the finest of hairs, his favourite smell in the world, the only smell he loved; the smell of the cold! While he filled himself with the smell he loved, he gave the prostitute no trouble. He was as obedient as always.
Months later, early for humans and late for animals, the prostitute gave birth to twins. The first born had nothing strange about it. The military governor, who had refused to wait outside and was pacing back and forth next to the bed, scowled as he looked at the baby. His nerves were shot. Just then the second baby came. Its head emerged first; it was a human head. And then, finally, below the waist, a puny, wet tail appeared. The lower half of its body was sable. Screaming with delight, the military governor picked up the sable-baby and threw it into the air. He squeezed some gold coins into the prostitute’s hand. Leaving her and the first-born baby there, he set off for home with his new treasure in his arms.
For centuries, all sable-children were born as twins. Each time, one of the twins was human and one was a sable-person. The sable-babies were sometimes boys and sometimes girls. The human twins had little chance of surviving, and no one knew what became of them. Those that were born half-human and half-animal would survive, and continue to provide an ever-increasing fortune for the military governor, and later for his children and his grandchildren and the grandchildren of his grandchildren.
And so, the destinies of the two families were intertwined like two vigorous vines that had met by coincidence. For centuries, the descendants of the military governor and the descendants of the Sable-Boy were always together. In every generation, those carrying the military governor’s surname were the ones who displayed; those who inherited the Sable-Boy’s condition were the displayed. And perhaps these two lineages might have remained linked forever. That is if one of the military governor’s grandchildren’s grandchildren hadn’t loosened the last link in this very long chain.
The truth of the matter was that this man, one of the military governor’s grandchildren’s grandchildren, wasn’t very enthusiastic about the business he had inherited from his father. Although the Sable-Girl in his possession was among the ugliest of her lineage, so he could earn much more money, this wasn’t what the military governor’s great great grandson wanted. Instead of carrying on the profession of his forefathers in the land of his origins, he wanted to move to a new continent that everyone said was enchanting and attempt what had not yet been attempted. He was passionate about this dream, but somehow couldn’t rid himself of the Sable-Girl or of the profession he had inherited.
Then, one day, a messenger knocked on the military governor’s great great grandson’s door. Without saying a word the messenger held out the sealed letter he’d taken from his shirt and then stood aside to wait for an answer. In the letter, someone with a strange name who had heard about the famous Sable-Girl wanted to buy her, and he was making a very generous offer. The military governor’s great great grandson didn’t hesitate for long. He felt that God had finally answered his prayers. He settled the matter quickly. As the messenger in the cherry-coloured gloves counted out the coins, the other man was writing a statement granting all rights to the Sable-Girl to the man with the strange name who had written the letter.
That very evening, the messenger and the Sable-Girl were about to set of
f on the road, when the military governor’s great great grandson came up behind them. He was curious about where the Sable-Girl was being taken. The messenger, who until then had not said a word, answered out of the corner of his mouth.
‘To the west! To Istanbul!’
Pera — 1885
After the evening call to prayer, the westward-facing door of the cherry-coloured tent at the top of the hill was opened for the women.
It was then that in threes and fives the women started to enter the westward-facing door of the cherry-coloured tent at the top of the hill. Bringing their noise and their togetherness with them.
The opening would be performed by a masked woman. The mask she wore, with its eyes frozen as if they’d witnessed a moment of terror, the tongue swollen as if it had been stuck in a beehive, a nose that had started to grow straight out and then had changed its mind and grown down as far as the lower lip, and a pointed chin covered in hair, was truly frightening. The masked woman said nothing and did nothing, but simply stood stock still on the stage. As if she’d been told to wait her entire life, and had obediently waited, without knowing why, or for what. Then, at a completely unexpected moment, she would lower the mask. Exclamations of surprise rose from the audience. Because the face they saw now was exactly the same as the face they’d seen before. From far away, very far away, barely audible, came the sound of a violin. When the violin stopped, the woman whose mask was her face, and whose face was a mask, greeted the audience in a graceful manner. On her signal, the purple curtains with the threadbare fringes began to open slowly.
On the stage, at the foot of a steep drop, in a pitch-black cauldron with a fire burning brightly under it, surrounded by fearful creatures, a tiny, ugly woman began to sing a cabaret song. Her name was Siranuş; her voice was very thin.