Free The Gaze by Elif Shafak Page A

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.