The Gaze (22 page)

Later, looking deeply into my eyes, it tore off one of the camel’s legs and started eating it ravenously.

I heard B-C’s voice from afar. It was coming closer. I opened my eyes a little. I’d fallen asleep again, and again at an inappropriate time. He was perched on the edge of the armchair I was sitting in, looking at me. Right behind him were the peels of the grapefruit I’d eaten as soon as I’d come home. I didn’t want to see any peels. I tried to say something but B-C brought his finger to his lips.

‘Quiet, don’t speak,’ he whispered. He was smiling. ‘It’s not a good idea to leave you home alone. How many kilos of grapefruit did you eat?’

I smiled bashfully.

‘I don’t know what you dreamed tonight, but from the look of you it was a nightmare. It’s passed now. Don’t tell anyone what you saw, keep it to yourself.’

I looked at him with surprise. As if he wasn’t the same person who was always pestering me to tell him my dreams. But I was very pleased that he didn’t ask any questions, that he preferred calmly and quietly stroking my hair to talking.

I didn’t say anything to B-C, but my dream had left me irritable. I didn’t want to see fruit with peels, whether it was grapefruit or oranges, for at least a few days. Of course, I knew that my body was the problem; this is all. Of course, I knew that the problem was my body; and also that I shouldn’t be so obsessed about it. But when you’re as fat as I am, your body becomes magnified in your mind. As if…as if what you live within, the air you breathe, becomes a place, a place to which you belong. And a person can’t easily leave behind a place to which she belongs.

In any event it was I who had been making touching speeches to the children at the nursery about the inner person being more important than the outer person. I told them that their appearance was of no importance at all. They sat and listened very calmly; without making a sound or any comic gestures. They weren’t all that interested in what I had to say. They kept turning around to look out the window. That morning we’d all sprayed the classroom windows with fake snow; we’d made snowmen with carrot noses, shrub brooms and coal eyes. It was nice. Their minds were still on the windows.

Only one of them, a likeable, freckled, curly-haired boy, didn’t take his eyes off me for a moment and listened carefully to what I said as he was picking his nose. I knew this little boy’s family. He had a very young, curly-haired mother. The woman had told the story herself. They’d been married five years, and after the son was born they wanted to have daughters. They did; but the little girl was lame from birth. The woman couldn’t hold back her tears when her mother-in-law likened the girl to a three-legged goat. But there was hope, that’s what the doctors had said. Because the girl was still very small they couldn’t operate. The doctors said that later on, when she was older, there was a chance they could operate. The mother and father did everything they could not to let the little girl understand the situation. They also cautioned the boy constantly. He would have been beaten if he’d done anything to throw the girl’s handicap in her face. But there was no need to warn the boy. The woman said that the boy was closed within himself but always behaved lovingly towards his sister. Until now there had been no problem because the little girl never left the house, and no one outside the family ever saw her. But now she was a little older, and she wanted to go outside, she would see herself through the eyes of others…

While I was standing in front of the snow-sprayed windows, talking about how people’s appearances were not important, the freckled, loveable, curly-haired boy looked deep into my eyes and picked his nose. At another time this would have made me angry, and I don’t know why but I preferred to pretend I didn’t see. Then it was time for lunch. The children sat at the round table and ate their
köfte
and potatoes, but because I was on a diet I didn’t touch my plate. I just drank milk. One glass of milk. When I turned my head I saw that the freckled, loveable, curly-haired boy was watching me from a distance. With a faint smile he brought his finger to his nose, but instead of picking his nose as usual, he began to pretend to comb his upper lip with his finger. Without taking his eyes off me, he repeated this gesture until he was sure I understood what he wanted to say.

The milk I’d been drinking had left a moustache on my lip. This is what he’d been trying to tell me. Immediately I wiped the moustache off. When I turned my head again, the freckled, loveable curly-haired boy wasn’t watching me any more.

To tell the truth, the nursery made me nervous. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, and I couldn’t breathe easily until I was back at the Hayalifener Apartments. I liked being at home.

At home I’m comfortable, more comfortable than I ever am outside. I loved the newspapers, books and pictures that accumulated day by day, the hundreds of photographs that are scattered willy-nilly throughout this heaven; that no piece of furniture has a fixed or obligatory place; the ability to hide from outside eyes, the privacy, the intimacy. I was comfortable with the confusion created by the daily accumulation of material for B-C’s Dictionary of Gazes.

I liked the Hayalifener Apartments. If only there weren’t such frequent electricity cuts…

Judging from the frequency with which the Hayalifener Apartments were left in darkness, the electric company must have had a grudge against us. Whenever the electricity was cut we would go to the windows and, without rancour, look at the showy lights of the lashless-eyed houses all along the hill. There was nothing that the building supervisor, for whom this was a matter of pride, had not done, no one he hadn’t tried to persuade or flatter, no hand he had left unkissed, but in the end nothing changed. ‘A simple bureaucratic error, a typical case of negligence,’ they said. ‘Every problem has a past. Don’t you have any respect for the past?’ The building supervisor was bedridden because of his distress. He took pride in his past.

Our hands were tied. On the outdated map of the neighbourhood that the authorities were using, there was a swamp where the Hayalifener Apartments should have been. According to the records, this swamp was quite old; at least a century old. ‘It’s like a wound with a scar on the surface that’s festering underneath. It was never drained,’ said the garrulous civil servant. Yet he was still hopeful. Funds had been appropriated for the draining of the swamp, and it would be taken care of in the near future.

The authorities accepted the absurdity of the fact that nothing prevented an electric bill being sent to an address they claimed didn’t exist, but as they said so many times, ‘What doesn’t go wrong in this country!’ In truth they could have drawn a new map, or corrected the mistakes on the older map. The fact that the swamp had long since dried up and gone, that in its place a large building had been built and that this building had been named the Hayalifener Apartments, could have made its way into their records. But it was an old neighbourhood, a very old neighbourhood, where morally upright families and freethinking single people frequently lived side-by-side. It was so old that, with false teeth and withered gums, dye in its thinning hair, with a clouding memory that retained nothing but tried to remember its youth in the pitiful manner of a flirtatious old shrew, it reminded everyone else of their youth. The reflection of this beauty that was so much spoken of clutched the yellowing map in her ageing fingers. There was no possibility that she would ever accept a new map.

Furthermore, it’s not a matter of drawing a new map, but of working out how electric cables that had been laid according to a map were so incomprehensible. At times like these, as soon as the electricity slowly climbed the hill to visit the Hayalifener Apartments, it saw the ogress of night and went back down. Then, the voltage in the houses further downhill rose so much that people had to turn off their televisions. At the same moment the Hayalifener Apartments were plunged into utter darkness.

‘It’s like the clogged veins of a forty-year smoker. Once they clog, the blood doesn’t flow any more,’ said the same municipal employee. ‘It climbs the hill, it comes this far easily enough, but the poor thing doesn’t flow past this point.’

It wasn’t enough that the electricity cuts left us in the dark at night, we couldn’t see anything during the day either. There’d been a thick fog in the city for a week. In the meantime, the building supervisor had decided that the Hayalifener Apartments, upon which electricity does not smile, needed to be restored from top to bottom. First he went from flat to flat, convincing us that the facade should be painted in lively colours that would open our eyes and our hearts. And who knows, perhaps with restoration the Electric Company’s attitude to us would change.

The painters were working away in the fog. Though B-C didn’t really seem quite aware of what was going on around him. In fact it had been a long time since he’d taken an interest in anything except the Dictionary of Gazes. We would neither go out in disguise, nor tell each other in the evening what we’d done alone during the day as if we had actually done it together, nor did we visit each other’s dreams. The Dictionary of Gazes was more urgent and more important that anything else. It was as if our relationship grew and developed with the accumulation of material for the dictionary. Now, at the point when the Dictionary of Gazes had become stuck, our love entered an impasse.

He became so irritable… Most of the time he paced about restlessly, picking arguments for the slightest of reasons. The flat was too warm, it was too cold outside; the irritable next-door neighbour’s television was too loud, the child upstairs was jumping about too much, the supervisor had found he had too much work to do. It was too messy; or it seemed too messy to him. The cat was shedding too much fur, I was asking too many questions. Everything and all of us were too much for him. The only time he ever calmed down was when he found new material for the Dictionary of Gazes.

One Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t look down from the balcony because of the fog, and I couldn’t find peace in the house because of B-C. I had to go to the nursery because this time the meeting that the director arranged at least once a month in the belief that it was helpful for the teachers and parents to meet happened to fall on a weekend. I was late. On the stairs I met the elderly man who’d freed me the time the thread from my sweater was caught in the front door. The fog clinging to his Fedora hat was like a saint’s halo. He gave me a blank look. He didn’t recognise me. Presumably because of the fog. The fog was pulling layers of leaden curtains between people.

The fog was so thick I couldn’t even see a step in front of me. I could only move by feeling my way along. Somehow I managed to reach the foot of the hill, but further along it was frightening. Frightening because I couldn’t see.