The Direction of Intention

photo by Tiikka

Stories are about change and change is never easy. Often in stories the tricksters (the outsiders) are truth tellers. They are the agents of change and are initially rejected or labeled as swindlers by the status quo. This is a story about people pretending to see, pretending not to see, or simply not being able to see because they are afraid of what they might see.

The Invisible Silk Robe

I. Invisibility

For months the young wife had been abused, pushed around and cursed.  Through it all she’d managed to maintain her calm. But now, as the cook backed her into a corner, a cleaver just a few inches from her face, she resolved that she must do something. She must fight back or leave. The cook was demanding that she “keep in her place,” in other words, she had to disappear. She was desperate to keep this job, regardless of how unpleasant it became.

Every day she was called a liar or a thief.  Every disaster in the kitchen would be blamed on her and she knew it. She was different, she was a foreigner. When the staff captain asked her to respond to the charges she always stood tall and looked directly into his eyes and quietly said that she was not a thief nor was she a liar. He believed her. He knew the fate of foreigners in the kitchens. Now, even he cautioned her to keep a low profile. “Not being seen” was the only solution anyone could offer her. Disappear and survive.

I don’t know why it is but when you are new to a country, even a country of prosperity and great riches, newcomers are rejected and treated poorly. They’re granted access only through the most menial forms of labor. And that was true of the young wife. Here, she was a foreigner. Her own country was suffering through a terrible war and she’d fled to the neighboring kingdom to save her life. She’d lost her husband and her child to the fighting; their land and all their possessions were confiscated to feed the endless hunger of the armies. She was a woman alone. In her country, at the end, she had to hide to survive and she knew that she would not survive long if she stayed there. Hiding was only a temporary solution. So, she fled looking for a better life.

She was well-educated. She was a master weaver, famous in her country, and assumed she would be able to find plenty of work in her adopted country but the natives ignored her or rejected her, sometimes physically. Local vendors would not sell her thread, at least not any thread that was useful. She didn’t know what was worse: being ignored by people pretending not to see her or being spat upon by people who didn’t want to see her.

She refused to become invisible even though she often found visibility to be as dangerous in her new country as it had been in her old one; she knew that the locals where adept at pretending not to see her, visibility was not always her choice, so she often had to remind herself that she was real, they were pretending not to see her.

Eventually, she found a job in the kitchens of a wealthy man, an advisor to the King. Her job was to scrub the pots and the dishes, to scrub the floors and to scrub the ovens; she worked her hands raw from before dawn until late at night. But, no matter how hard she worked, she could do no right in the eyes of the cooks; the counters were not clean enough, the pots were not clean enough, “these foreigners do not know what clean means!” they would rant. “They’re dirty people, they’re lazy, they’re stupid….” She knew her job was not about scrubbing but about taking blame. So, with each new accusation, she worked harder and harder, determined not to fulfill their expectations, determined not to disappear.

Because she worked harder and better than anyone in the kitchen, she was noticed by the staff captain and given a compliment, and that is what brought about her troubles this day. The cooks were incensed that she was noticed and they were not. The largest of the group, a thick woman with a vegetable face, waited for the captain to leave and then backed her into a corner with a cleaver. All the others watched and laughed as the young wife lowered her eyes and promised not to do so well in the future, preparing her self to receive the blow she knew would come, the blow meant to remind her to disappear.

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