The Gaze by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online Page A

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,