The Gaze by Elif Shafak

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 off 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.
    ‘You were so beautiful, you were so lovely
    If you’d been a
börek
I would have eaten you
    With few onions, and much meat.
    I got lost in conversation, you stuck to the pan and burned
    At once I lost my desire.’
    When the song was finished, the creatures pulled Siranuş’s cauldron to one side, as well as the fire underneath it. While she suffered the punishment of the whimsical, dripping beads of sweat, the Three Ugly Sisters appeared on the stage. The three sisters, each uglier than the other, were Mari, Takuhi and Agavni. One of them had one breast, the second had two breasts, and the third had three. Side-by-side, they bounced their breasts up and down as they did a belly dance. They were so busy following each other out of the corners of their eyes to catch each other’s mistakes that they forgot about the audience, and even that they were on the stage. Mari hated Agavni because she felt she’d stolen her missing breast. Agavni hated Mari for causing her to carry an extra breast. Both of them hated Takuhi more than anything in the world. They hated Takuhi who with her two breasts threw her sisters’ deformities in their faces, and who, shining darkly like a pearl in mud, was ugly but not deformed. Some evenings Mari and Agavni couldn’t control their tempers and stopped in the middle of their belly dance to