Sofia

by Ann Chamberlin

  Nur Banu had time to enter and arrange things to her liking before her son came. This she did with the precision and display of a man of the theater. Lamps were lit and set in all the niches. Bowls and trays of nuts and sweets were loaded on a low table until it groaned. The cushions on the divan were plumped up in four places, one for Nur Banu, two, close together, for Esmikhan and Fatima, the sisters, who would also join in this party, and the fourth for the young prince himself.

  A row of beautiful slaves, Aziza and Belqis still nursing hopes among them, was lined up against one wall, arms crossed upon their breasts, heads bowed, to await their mistress’ further orders. But as for the actual performance, for which the Prince’s arrival in the room would be the cue, Safiye could not be a witness to that. As soon as the excited whisper ran, “He comes! He comes!” the door to the harem was quietly but hurriedly shut, and Safiye had to remain on the women’s side of it.

  Of the initiatory salaams and embraces, Safiye heard nothing at all. The first thing she did hear was a voice rather thin and weak for a man’s (but that might only be from tedium, she thought) saying, “Dear Mother, send your silly girls away.”

  Now the harem door opened and the row of girls filed in. Upon their faces Safiye read all she could of what had transpired. Upon those who had cherished hopes, in spite of every previous reason to abandon them, the disappointment was as clear as if seen through glass, and threatened to spill immediately into tears. The others could greet Safiye with smiles and murmurs of “Allah bless you” —for, so far, all was going according to Nur Banu’s script.

  Now they must be seated, now Nur Banu must offer him the dainties on the table. The meat of the sacrifice must be brought in. Murad must eat of that, of the accompanying rice, pulse, and yogurt with cucumber. He must finish with a nibble on a favorite pastry out of politeness. A sherbet. Then rose water and incense must be offered for cleansing. And then, finally, his mother must suggest the water pipes...

  Safiye counted the entrances of the serving eunuchs and ran the scenario over and over in her mind so many times that her heart began to race with the idea that something must have gone amiss. But to actually play a scene takes much more time than to rehearse it in one’s mind and Murad really had found but brief diversion in anything up to the mention of pipe.

  The three sharp claps came soon enough. Safiye took the pipe from Aziza who stood behind her—the stem and mouthpiece lightly in her right hand, the small silver tray in her left as she had been carefully taught. Then Aziza opened the door for her and she stepped into the close and dusty air of the mabein alone.

  Slow, measured steps had been rehearsed and came naturally as she felt, not only the burden of the pipe, but that of four pairs of eyes upon her.

  “Four,” she told herself. “I know it is four and he is not just looking at the pipe,” though she did not dare to raise her eyes to confirm this feeling.

  She brought the pipe down to the smoker’s level and carefully worked the mouthpiece through her fingers toward him, all without so much as a glance to affirm that it was indeed the man in the room that she approached. A hand of white, skeletal fingers relieved her of that lightest part of her burden and assured her that so far she had done well. But as she set the main body of the pipe down upon its little tray, Nur Banu spoke to her.

  “O my fair one, I shall have a pipe, too.” That was a cue that things were not progressing as rapidly as hoped; it was necessary to draw the meeting out.

  Now Safiye found her performance interminable. She returned for the second pipe and, offering it to her mistress, felt Nur Banu killed the time all too obviously before she took the mouthpiece in her hand and Safiye could set it down on the table. Then she had to return to the harem—slowly, slowly—get the brass brazier from Aziza, return, and, kneeling before each smoker, place a glowing coal in each one’s bowl with a little pair of tongs. She paused there on her knees until assured that each pipe bubbled well. The smokers drew and the sweet aroma filled the room. Then, and only then, could Safiye retreat to the corner where, the brazier nursed beside her feet, she stood with each hand upon its opposite shoulder, head slightly bowed, waiting for a further order.

  The nervous energy created by being the center of attention now slowly drained from her. It had made her want to skip in with the pipes and say aloud, “Here you are, you drugged excuse for a man. But wouldn’t you really rather have me instead?” just to get it over with. Glad she had not succumbed to this temptation, Safiye could now afford to be aware of other things besides her every knotted muscle, and she began to follow the conversation taking place there in the room with her. It was no more than pleasantries and it was immediately clear that Nur Banu was in a rising panic—or, at least as close to panic as such a controlled woman would ever allow herself to come.

  Esmikhan said nothing. Fatima did sometimes try to help out with a giggle, but the young man did not even chuckle. Though from time to time he did say a word or two, they were as weak and as bored as ever.

  Nur Banu had prepared some patter for herself, but she had always stopped not two minutes into the rehearsal to say, “Well, by now he surely will have noticed you and said something. After that—it is Allah’s will.”

  Now it was clear she was out of script and, though never one to be at a loss for words and always easily capable of filling any hour with pleasantries, Nur Banu was leaving great gaps of silence, which she kept desperately hoping her son would fill with the question. The question—it mattered not what question it was. All that mattered was that it asked something about the new slave girl—her age, how long she’d been in the harem, where she’d come from, her name perhaps. The question would not be answered, but the girl would be called forth to kiss her master’s hem, then left to answer all questions on her own in the best way nature could teach her.

  The bittersweet smell of opium filled the room, but Safiye knew it came from her mistress’ pipe, not the master’s. She had watched with care as they were loaded. Into Nur Banu’s pipe had gone a sliver of the brown, sticky stuff, but into the young man’s had gone only cinnamon bark and gum of mastica mixed with a little bran to make it burn. This was not a concoction that would fool any smoker, but it was hoped that politeness and the aroma from his mother’s pipe would keep him from complaining about it.

  Safiye had seen both wads of fuel in place, packed neither too tightly nor too loosely, but as the interview dragged on, she could not resist a glance up to make certain she had given the right pipe to the right person. Yes, the glint of silver was in Murad’s hand while Nur Banu’s mouthpiece was of green jade.

  She quickly dropped her eyes again, for they had met head-on with the young man’s. Two or three more glances at minute intervals were enough to assure Safiye, “Well, at least he isn’t ignoring me.” They also gave grist to the millstones of her mind.

  They were not dull eyes that met hers from the sunken ash-pits of their sockets. They glinted with life and intellect. One could even go so far as to say interest and humor. But that these features suffered difficulties breaking through clouds of boredom, inactivity, irresponsibility, studied disinterest, and the drug was also easy to see. (Yet to place these principles in clear genealogies of cause and effect would not be such a simple task.)

  A few more glances satisfied Safiye that the eyes alone betrayed the young man’s complexity. As to his further features, they were quickly discerned and with but little excitement. He had a thin, sunken face framed by a sparse beard that only appeared such an inflamed and infectious red because the flesh it grew from was so pale. The color of his beard would actually come closer to the natural glow present in the flesh of a much healthier man. Khurrem Sultan, his grandmother, had come from Russia. Safiye had heard her hair described as being the color of paprika, so Murad came by his shade legitimately.

  Beyond that, he was of medium height—perhaps shorter than Safiye herself—with thin limbs that ennui and a stronger taste for the drug had kept from ever gaining flesh on
ce their height had been attained. That his clothes were masculine was the only thing that made them interesting to her after five months shut up with women and eunuchs. A pale yellow silk summer caftan revealed the boniness of his elbows and knees, and brown and blue stripes on his sash echoed the turban. Apart from the ruby and the feathers in the aigrette, nothing had been chosen with any interest or desire for effect.

  Even in the presence of his mother and his sisters, the young man sprawled across the cushions and the divan, one hand making the effort to hold the mouthpiece to his lips but the other lifeless at his side, as if he hoped at any moment to escape the scene into sleep. One thing only—the eyes—continued to disturb the somnolence of his person.

  If one must be more precise, it was upon her hair that he trained his eyes, her hair that spilled in golden vapor from her braids. Safiye fancied that he was undertaking experiments upon that hair as an alchemist may do to test the veracity of his metal. Both eyes would close, then first one would peek and then the other in turns, squint, stare, roll around, open wide, then close again. If Nur Banu noticed this peculiar behavior (and they were her eyes the young man had inherited), she despaired of it as just one more sign that her son was hopelessly lost to a world of visions and dreams.

  I wish Nur Banu Kadin had given me a little part in this farce not connected with the water pipe, Safiye thought. Something unpredictable and lively to show this young man the difference between waking and sleeping. Well, if she is too much mother to wish cold water thrown on her son, then I must do it on my own. Something — but what? I cannot very well interrupt their talk with singing and dancing.

  Shortly Safiye had devised her plot. Never moving her hands from their positions on her shoulders, she slowly, slowly worked the ring off one of her fingers. Then with a twist of the wrist more subtle than was needed to manipulate a narghile’s mouthpiece into position, she let the jewel drop to the floor. Its landing on the carpets at her feet was silent and unnoticed by either Nur Banu or the princesses, who were too busy wondering what they could possibly say or giggle next.

  But Murad saw. She knew he saw, for both eyes opened at once and forgot their flirtation with sleep. Still, he said nothing, not even, “Mother, why do you waste money on slave girls who are so careless with their jewelry?” which would have been all the question needed.

  It was not long after this that Nur Banu admitted defeat. She did not say so aloud, nor did she lose the tone of graciousness in her voice. But she began to make her farewells, and that was exactly the same thing. With a sinking heart, Safiye picked up the brazier, carried it out, and returned for the jade-mouthpieced pipe for which her mistress had long ago lost the taste. An impatient wave of dismissal from the bangled hand told her that the young man was to be left with his smoke, mock though it was—to choke on it, if Allah were so merciful. Safiye held the door open for mother and sisters, followed them into the harem, then closed the door behind her.

  XXXV

  The stony silence with which Nur Banu greeted the anxious subjects of her domain told them immediately to stifle their questions. They did not want to share the fair Venetian girl’s awful punishment—two weeks, maybe three, of being ignored, talked of only in the most defaming of terms behind her back. In the closed world of the harem, death was preferable.

  Nur Banu swept to the retreat of her own room and every other woman was dragged along by her draft. Every other woman except Safiye, who remained at the mabein door, the site of her defeat.

  “At least he has not touched me,” Safiye tried to combat her misery even when it had hardly had time to begin. “He is not Sultan—yet—so I may still be given to another man when—if—I win Nur Banu’s favor again and she has in some way forgiven what truly wasn’t my fault at all.”

  Yet, as she stood deserted there by the door, Safiye clung to one last hope: the ring still lay where she had dropped it on the rug in the mabein. Surely none could blame her if she returned to get it.

  “Now, what do you expect to gain by this?” Safiye scolded herself even as she did it. “Do you expect Murad to be on his feet, hunting for the ring himself, and to be obliged at least to say, ‘I found it!’?”

  No, of course not. She entered the room, made the deep bow she had been taught to do, retrieved the ring, and returned to the door again without reaction. Indeed, it occurred to her that the room might well be deserted. Just to make sure she had not bowed to empty space, she ventured one last look up to the spot where the young man lav. He hadn’t so much as changed the hand holding his mouthpiece and his eyes were now half-shut in a sort of self-satisfied drowse.

  The indolence! she almost cried aloud. Who would want you anyway, you lethargic, useless bag of bones? I shall become great without you, just you wait and see! And she did not hesitate to give the young man a glare that would relay this message to him, even if it were not in words.

  Halfway into her good, vindictive glare, Safiye stopped quite short. Something about the young man was moving. Ever so slightly, but it was. Had it been his chest, she would have credited him with breathe which at the moment was otherwise doubtful. Had it been his knee, she would have passed it off as a nervous twitch such as happens when one settles into sleep. But it was a finger. The forefinger of the long, pale hand at his side, it was crooking ever so slowly but definitely. Definitely, yes, it was beckoning her to approach him.

  Safiye had half a mind to refuse so weak and slovenly a gesture. But ambition got the better of her spite and she approached until she stood directly before him, just to one side of the table covered with untouched festive dainties. The young man continued to scrutinize her with his half-closed eyes until finally these squinted into a dry, soundless laugh which contorted his face and shook his flimsy body.

  At last he spoke, not to her, but to himself aloud. “Well, guess you fooled her this time, Murad, my old friend. She thought she could take your vision with her when she went, the old sorceress, your mother. But see, we have just proved her wrong. Here the vision is, and she is gone. But it would not obey your commands and mental summons while she was here as other visions do. It is a very curious vision, this one, which probably explains why it is so lifelike. I think, Murad, you may look upon this day as a day you reached a new level of experience with the Milk of Paradise.”

  Safiye knelt now beside the divan in an attempt to prove to the young prince that he did not control her actions. That did not work, however, and so she decided she must speak.

  “I am not a vision,” she declared. “I am not a figment in your mind. I am as real as you are.”

  Murad laughed and shook his head, “All my visions say that. They do that to teach me that my life is nothing, not that they are something. No, I will not let you fool me, you least of all.”

  His laughter made him shut his eyes now, but they immediately reopened.

  “Curious,” he said. “Though all my dreams tell me they are real, you are the first that has vanished when I shut my eyes.”

  “That is because I am real,” Safiye declared. “Your mother put no opium in your pipe—only mastic and cinnamon. See, I will show you.”

  And, against the protests that it disturbed his smoke, she sifted through the ashes in the bowl and insisted that he look and see that there was little left but charred bran and gummy mastic.

  “I knew that,” the prince sulked. “You think I didn’t know that? I knew that from the first. Yet, you came with the pipe. I knew there must be something extraordinary in it. Tell me what it was so I can get some for myself next time.”

  “You cannot control me like that,” Safiye cried. “Yes, I am a slave and you are my master, but I am Sofia Baffo, daughter of the Governor of Corfu. You did not will me from the harem and, just to prove it, I shall now return there. You can’t stop me.”

  Safiye returned her hands to their place upon her breasts, but it was with a sort of contemptuous dare. With the same attitude, she gave a little nod of farewell and began to get to her feet.

/>   Murad watched this whole performance without other response than to smile as if the antics of his unpredictable vision were highly diverting. Unseen by Safiye, however, he was fumbling in his sash for his dagger and while her head was bowed, he used it to make a lunge at her.

  XXXVI

  It was not a deep wound, for Murad had not bothered to remove the sheath and besides, since it was never used, its sharpness had never been of any concern to him. He had fully expected, however, to stab at the nothingness of vision through which his hand should pass unhindered to the table behind her. Such was not the case, as he discovered, and the rough edges of the sheath’s encrustation caught upon her very real flesh in such a way that he was jolted awake.

  For her part, Safiye gasped aloud at the pain and, fully chastised for the presumption of her last speech, remained humbly bowed, her hands where they belonged across her breast, though the right one where the knife had hit shook with pain. Tears began to curl from her eyes and blood from her hand.

  With these proofs, Murad was forced to admit, “Well! May I never be my father’s first-born son! It is real!”

  “May I return to the harem, then, good master,” Safiye murmured, “and never bother you anymore?”

  She was, for all her ambition, a child of but fourteen after all, and the pressure of all this very real playacting suddenly crushed her.

  Before he could give her a reply, however, the harem came to them. Nur Banu flung open the door and stood there with a barrage of abuse for her willful slave girl on the tip of her tongue. The scene that met her eyes—her son bent over the kneeling girl with more concern than he had shown for anything short of Indian poppies in over a year—took her aback for just a moment and, in that moment, Murad spoke instead.

  “Mother, if you please.”

  Just that much, and Nur Banu closed first her mouth and then the door. Murad got to his feet and locked the door behind her. As he turned to the room again, he chuckled with ill ease.