The grief and fear in her voice could not have been greater had Esmikhan just learned that the Empire of Islam had collapsed. And I knew I was to blame.
At our halt in Inönü, I had learned that this town on the edge of the high plateau was the recipient of one of Sokolli Pasha’s minor pious endowments. It was only the corner of a shopfront that dispensed bread and a goats’ milk gruel to the poor twice a day. But Esmikhan had insisted that I visit it, take a silver necklace of her own as a donation so that vegetables and perhaps some meat might be added to the fare, and then report back on all I had seen and heard in every detail.
At first this task had seemed simpleminded, but by the time I returned to give my report, I’d been brought up short several times by the massiveness of the task, if I were to do it honestly and thoroughly. How to describe the apricot light of late afternoon filling a small town’s bazaar in undiluted strength to someone who has never seen light without its being strained through the confines of a harem garden? How to describe the faces of poverty to one whose lowliest slave eats far too much and wears cast-off brocades?
It was in fumbling desperately for words she might understand to describe one of the endowment’s patrons that I accidentally said, “Well, she had the same sun-worn face as the master’s mother.”
I meant nothing malicious by neglecting to mention earlier that greatest bane of a new bride—her mother-in-law. The simple fact of the matter was that Sokolli’s harem’s sole occupant was such a shadowy figure that she slipped my mind when we were on related subjects. My good intentions to bring it up as soon as possible were always renewed when either I or the conversation seemed too far away to do so gracefully. All thought of the endowment was now forgotten in my lady’s mind and I must say I had to fight her feelings of betrayal boldly. I tried my best to explain that it was the old woman’s very lack of threat that had made me put off mention of her existence.
“She is a small, mousy woman, my master’s mother, and her feet will no longer carry her weight. So she never moves, day or night, from the divan in the largest room of the haremlik. Her eyes and her fingers are as keen as ever, though, and she spends her days at needlework from sunrise until the colors blur into one another at dusk. Her work is delightful, intricate, colorful patterns of flowers and birds such as I have never seen before.”
“It sounds rather idolatrous,” Esmikhan attempted.
“Anathema to pious Muslims, perhaps, but I suspect such designs are native to Bosnia where the master was born. Clearly her religious education has been lacking, but I could not speak to her of that. I couldn’t speak to her of her work— I could speak to her of nothing, for in the twenty years since her son brought her to share his fortune, she has learned not a single word of Turkish. Visits from her son—which he performs not because he especially likes his mother, but because they, too, are a duty—they are the only dialogues she ever has. I suspect the babble with which she greeted me was incomprehensible as much from senility as it was from foreignness. Though I smiled and nodded in reply, I was convinced life in Sokolli’s harem would be as lonely as its great halls were empty and full of echoes.
“‘Don’t fret,’ old Ali’s wife, who cleans and cooks for the woman, said when she read my thoughts. ‘The bride will soon fill this place with life.’ I see it is Allah’s will that her words become reality.”
Esmikhan tried to take comfort from what I said, first because she knew I wanted her to desperately and secondly because I was still her only friend in this strange new harem that was now peopled by a mother-in-law. I have only just begun to realize what a truly remarkable, powerful thing it is to wink in the face of what anyone else would call an unforgivable betrayal, to wink and come back with more unfeigned grace and desire for friendship than before.
At the time, I thought it was either fate or something of my own virtue that made sharing our lives so easy, even after such a mistake on my part. I see now that it was effort, great effort, like an army of slaves straining to raise a stone the size of a small hill, their veins and muscles popping, their skin a-shower with sweat. This effort was all Esmikhan’s, the strength of her little hands, soft brown eyes, and boundless heart. After all, there was very little of a previous life she had to barter with me for mine. Sheltered as she was in her father’s harem and but fourteen years old, her life, as she said, was “more like a poem than a story,” and she recited these verses from the poet:
Think, in this battered caravanserai
Whose portals are alternate night and day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his pomp
Abode his destined hour, and went his way.
But she had that divine skill of listening whereby the speaker is made to feel not as if he has won a bargain with his words, but that his words are more precious than gems in the ears of his hearer. It was remarkable how she turned from her fears of Sokolli Pasha’s mother and made my fears overshadow them.
There, alone in the night rooms of Inonu’s governor’s harem, with my lady tucked under strange quilts for bedtime, I told her of my childhood and of my adventures at sea. That was easy enough; I could hide behind the voice of a market storyteller and delight us both with how exotic it was to our present lives.
But with the skillful fingers of a blood-letter, Esmikhan also drew from me scenes from my more recent past. I did not give her details of what happened to me in the close, dark house beyond Pera, the real poison festering my core. That I avoided like a hot stove. But she prodded closely, as close as I thought I should ever let anyone venture. She gleaned and I gave, enough, I thought, in a couple of brief events that happened to me in the bazaar while I was making the purchases for her nuptials.
“Given plenty of coin,” I told her, “and the name ‘Sokolli Pasha’ to throw around, the task was easy and also quite pleasant.”
I did not say, but I prided myself that my taste was more to a woman’s liking than Ali’s had been. At first I had hoped for praise from the master, but I knew enough now not to hope for that. Still, I found I wanted praise for a job done well and with sensitivity. It was all I could do to keep from spoiling the surprises to get praise from Esmikhan before we got home.
“While in the market,” I hurried on with the story to resist the temptation, “I saw two men of my native land. In their feathers and hose, they stood out as if they had been silly peacocks in a crowd of sensible, domestic hens. Now I was thankful for my somber clothes—the long robes I had feared at first would surely trip me—and I hoped to avoid their notice, for I was suddenly burning with shame. Still, I was as exotic for them as they were for me and, as they took no care to guard their speech, I heard one say to the other, ‘By Jesù, there’s another one!’
‘Poor devil. He’s a young one, too.’
“‘And very fair-skinned. I’ll bet he’s a Christian lad the damned Turks have stolen and lopped. Say, try some of your Christian tongue on him, Brother Angelo.’
“With this encouragement, the second Venetian began to babble mass-Latin at me which anyone born from Ireland to the shores of Crete should have stopped for. I ignored it studiously, however, by pretending to take an interest in some pink satin in one of the shops. Actually, I had found much nicer stuff at a better price not half an hour before, and it was a difficult pretense to maintain in the face of a pushy shopkeeper. But, I felt, worth the trouble.
“‘Leave him, Angelo,’ the first of my countrymen said at last. ‘He doesn’t understand. Must be a Christ-killing Jew, a Protestant heretic, or some other such soul, already damned before the Turks got to him.’
“I mused about my reaction to this meeting for some time. How I had screamed out during the long, awful summer of my pain for just such people to hear and rescue me. I had used the very same words of the mass, ready to let my savior be a Spaniard or a Pole, anything, so long as he was Christian. But he was a Christian who butchered me, at least he had been once, and for long enough to make a mockery of the liturgy I had hoped would save me. And h
e was Italian, too.
“Lest I make the mistake of condemning all my race, that very same day fate sent another young Italian into the market. When first I saw him, I wanted to turn and run, to avoid another scene like the one I had just escaped. But this young man approached graciously and addressed me in a stilted but polite Turkish. I couldn’t very well pretend not to understand that—indeed, it became my sudden concern to speak my Turkish flawlessly and without an accent so as to maintain my anonymity. When the young man actually used the word ‘ustadh’ to call me, I could not refuse, and met him in the eye.”
“Why should he not call you ustadh?” Esmikhan asked. “It means ‘teacher, master.’”
“Of course.”
“It is a term of great respect.”
“Of course.”
“And khadim are often addressed so.”
“I knew that, of course, but it was the first time I had been called that, and I was flattered. From one of my own country!”
“I shall always call you ustadh, if it pleases you, Abdullah.”
“If Allah wills, I may always deserve it from your tongue, lady. But you must try and imagine the shock it was to hear it from one of my own country.
“When I met his eye, I saw clearly that he meant no mockery, although he still struggled with the depths of a void he saw in something he could treat neither as a man nor as a woman. I did not blame him. I face the same struggle myself.
“‘Ustadh, please. Will you come and join me in a sherbet?’
“A lemon-flavored glass of his own sat on a small table under the sherbet seller’s grape arbor, where it had obviously been for some time. The snow had melted to water, and the flavors had separated. I was not the first to decline him. I even refused a seat, which made his face grow hot and his Turkish stiffer and more confused, but I did agree to hear him out.
“So what did he have to say?” Esmikhan asked.
“He introduced himself as Andrea Barbarigo, aide to the present Venetian ambassador to the Porte. Well, I needed to hear no more.”
“You knew him?”
“I knew him at once—as the youngest of that proud and ancient family. I smiled ironically to myself, for Sofia Baffo— Safiye—had once told me she intended to make a match with the Barbarigos, perhaps with this very young man.” I didn’t think it was necessary to speak of elopement.
“Safiye?” Esmikhan interrupted here. “Safiye knew this young man, too?”
“Yes. Long ago and far away.”
“Knew him so well she wanted to arrange a marriage with him?”
“If that name was any more to her than the very symbol of Venetian power and wealth.”
Esmikhan stared off into the night in the direction she imagined even now Safiye to be working a woman’s mysteries on her brother. Perhaps it was also the direction she imagined her future husband to lie and she wondered about her ability to work those same mysteries. Her eyes and voice were filled with that wonder as she said, “Such a strange land you and Safiye come from. Where a girl may think of choosing her own husband. No wonder Safiye is so—so much the way she is.”
I suppose I should have explained to her that all Venetian girls were not like that. Only Safiye, and she would be an anomaly in whatever land she found herself. Instead, I referred back to the young Italian nobleman, and told how in my heart I had thought, “There, but for the wrath of God, am I.”
It was from Andrea Barbarigo’s hands, of course, that I had received the notice of Governor Baffo’s offer of ransom for his daughter. I told Esmikhan about that, and again she wondered at the ways of a land that would foster such a lack of devotion in a daughter. Selim was not much of a father actually, and Esmikhan had probably never sat upon his knee or even received so much as a kiss of affection from him, but she could not believe that any daughter would tear up such a message from her sire instead of treating it with reverence. Again, I could have said, but did not, that this was only Safiye we were talking about, and not Venice as a whole.
At last, as the lamp burned very low, I made a confession to this saint of naive but deep and perfect understanding. “There is yet one more person I met in the bazaar.”
This was pushing time back, back closer to the horrors of Pera. Close, close enough, I thought, this occasion when I was on my first training errands for Salah ad-Din’s wife. But then I looked into my lady’s face and decided, not too close.
“And I must say he was the very last person on earth I wanted to face in this, my new condition. Only my father and my uncle could have made me wish more that I had never been born rather than to see the hurt in their eyes when they learned that their line and their hopes in me were extinguished. I had nightmares, actually, when the delirium was on me, of just those eyes...
“It was in Pera. That was all the further I was allowed to wander in my training as yet, so he must have crossed over the Golden Horn specially.”
“Looking for you.”
“Perhaps. In the bazaar in Pera I saw my friend Husayn talking business with some fellow merchant, and though I had longed and cried out for him so during my time of pain, now I immediately turned and fled. The priest in my old parish church in Venice would have liked the image—the sinner flees from the face of God and His final judgment, and cries out for the very mountains to fall on him and hide his shame.
“But it was too late. Husayn had seen me, and he called out my name. The catch of emotion in his voice tripped up my feet. I turned clumsily, helplessly, and, when the little round man flung himself at me like a ball shot from a cannon, he forced the breath from me in a sob.
“At first Husayn wanted me to come home with him. He said that he would find my captor and pay any price, call down the law, petition the Sublime Porte itself for redress.
“I said, ‘I can’t spare the time.’
“‘You are content with your life? The young lady—that was one thing. But you, my friend, content with such a life—?’
“‘What life is left to me? My time is no longer my own.’
“He said, I noticed, no word of Venetian glass.”
“Venetian glass?” My lady asked, but I didn’t answer her directly.
“He gave no apology but settled for a pair of seats under the nearest grape arbor. He paid for our sampling of the strong black brew called coffee.”
“Coffee? I have not heard of such a drink.”
“No. It is new in Constantinople. Very popular among some circles, but frowned upon by the most pious. Let me tell you, lady, it is not worth the trouble in my opinion. And that day it curdled my stomach.
“Anyway, over this coffee, Husayn’s friendliness and joy was matched only by his delicacy. ‘How I worried for you,’ he said. ‘I went to the slave market the very next morning, and they pretended never to have heard of you. It was then that I assumed something like this must have happened. Our laws forbid it, and raids are made almost monthly, but the practice cannot be stopped, to our great shame. It is too profitable.’
“Husayn would have been willing to stop all mention of my condition here, and speak on as man and man. But I found myself unable to do so. It was I who persisted, weeping, ‘My friend, O my friend. Why didn’t you seek me out? Why didn’t you come to find me? You can’t imagine the pain I have suffered.’
“‘I knew I would find you sooner or later,’ Husayn replied. ‘If Allah were willing.’
“‘What about me? Your Allah showed no mercy to me at all.’
“‘True, it may not seem so. But when your apprenticeship is over, you may be purchased by a great man, a great master. Who can say what doors may be open for you if you please him in your service? Allah willing, you will become a greater man with him than you could ever become with me.’
“I choked with sobs on his word ‘man,’ but I said no more. What was the use? Husayn had not changed at all since I’d seen him last, whereas I myself had stepped from a world of light into utter darkness and was groping, helplessly trying to find my way.”<
br />
As if heaven itself suddenly took a hand in the telling, the lamp over our heads now sputtered itself out, and I finished my tale in darkness. “I cut our meeting short and left feeling it would be the last I ever wanted. Husayn might seek me out again, but I would have difficulty trusting that friendship. No doubt he will only bother if he thinks my position in Sokolli Pasha’s household could win him some favor.”
“You are being hard on your friend,” Esmikhan said. “A friend who was more than a father to you? How can you value him so cheaply?”
In the dark she was disembodied, like a voice of the spirits. But I ignored her optimism and finished the tale in two short, hard lines. “‘Do you realize,’ Husayn said as a parting offering, ‘You have been speaking Turkish all this time? You have learned it remarkably well.’
“‘I am forced to,’ I replied, and walked on toward my master’s house.”
XLII
Baffo’s daughter thrust out her lower lip in a luscious, round pout. Had we been in the company of men, its effect would have been devastating. All resolve, will, and concentration would vanish before the passion of slaking their appetites upon that fruit. One would gladly give one’s throat to the ax just to have the sweet, cool juice trickle down it. The effect of that lip on women, too, was not negligible. Esmikhan stammered in confusion at the sight and could only repeat lamely, “But I gave that necklace to charity, O sweetest Safiye.” She knew before she said them that her words would not be accepted but, by her life, in her simplicity, she was incapable of understanding why not.
“Then you must go back to Inonu and get it.” Again the words curled like fruit syrup over that pout.
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can. If charity really means so much to you, you can give them some other trinket, but that silver chain goes too well with my blue jacket for me to allow you to throw it away on peasants. As I’ve said, I mean to wear the blue tonight—for your brother, Esmikhan. I’ve all but promised him. You must go back and get it.”
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