The Gaze by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online Page B

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 could 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