Chapter 04: Cities and Eyes 02

In this city of sight, she saw people everywhere, from the midday market to the winding streets of the elegant district. Children dressed in linen and velvet stood on dusty stone rooftops and watched the farmers trudging out from the fields in their empty wagon carts. Men wearing leather helmets stood on the tops of watchtowers in the square and threw darts at the ground or at the bright orange shadow of pigeons sitting on a nearby pillar. The old men on their porches in the stooping wooden buildings, the solitary women sipping tea or chatting on benches in the square, and the young lovers holding each other and kissing each other in front of the open door of the building before sweeping off into the evening darkness, like invisible ghosts.

But here and there on the busy streets, she caught a glimpse of one of them. Sometimes, she stared for as long as she could at the beggars, trying to see their eyes. Some stared back at her. In this city of sight, seeing one another’s eyes was something completely forbidden and only done for an instant when someone had caught sight of another’s eyes and had looked a little more closely than he should have. Looking at someone else’s eyes, seeing their bright, insistent expression, their transparent skin and their pale eyeballs not wholly white in the glass of the streetlamp, was an act of the very worst sort, a thing you might do only when you didn’t care what the other person thought or felt.

She saw more than that. She saw what they did when they looked at each other. She saw what they pretended not to do, what they saw when they pretended not to see.