“This time when they returned me to the table, they lowered two of the legs on hinges so that my reeling head was lower than my torso, the blood throbbing in my brain. This time they wanted me awake.”
I told her how they bound me tight about the abdomen with linen bands till the circulation pulsed to a stop. I told her how they made the cut, quick, clean, and close to the belly, with a piece of new-chipped obsidian as this was less likely than forged knives to fester. How they cauterized the wound with iron, red-hot from the fire. And how both cutting and burning caused pain enough to wipe heaven and earth from existence.
“And for this they wanted you awake, poor Abdullah?” my lady asked.
“They wanted me awake because for two hours after they have swabbed you with comfrey and myrrh—and I can’t bear the smell of these simples to this day, even at your hands, lady—after this, and after they have made a pack of clean desert sand to take the place of what you’ve lost—”
“‘In the desert,’ Old Whiny said, ‘we used to bury them up to their necks in sand. Well, we had the sand for it there. We hardly lost a one.’
“—After this, and while you vomit where there is nothing left to vomit, and faint as the pain rips down your legs and kills them, your torturers must keep you on your feet. They must walk you back and forth and back and forth in the tiny hut, the scene of your very death throes. Back and forth to keep the blood going to heal what you can never be healed of. And all the while, there in a bucket, gathering voracious spring flies, is all that’s left of your manhood.”
“Nur Banu—” Esmikhan gulped. “Nur Banu once had a eunuch that came to us all the way from China. He kept his—his parts with him always, preserved in honey, in a jar on a chain about his neck. He believed he would see no life in the hereafter if they weren’t buried with him.”
I felt a flush of fear. What if the heathen beliefs of a single man from the edge of the map might prove true after all? My own beliefs were so disturbed by what had happened to me that I gave this fear some moment’s dreadful credence.
Then I moved the scene quickly on to three days later, three days of which I have very little recollection, and that recollection is crucified with pain.
“I will gloss over those tortures except to remark that all those three days, I was unable to relieve myself. Though they refused even water for my parched tongue, the pressure on my bladder swelled up into the ghastly amputation.
“On the third day, they came to remove the bandages. They seemed to expect something, but nothing happened.
“Old Whiny whined: ‘A plug of pus. He cannot pass his urine. It’s death for certain, and in the most horrible way. I’m sorry, old man. We did our best—’
“Anger clenched my inflamed flesh and, when the easiest way would have been to avoid the pain—a pain greater than any I had known—anger pushed against it. Anger pushed out the hard, yellow plug, and a fountain of putrid, scalding urine followed. Old Whiny got all soiled and stinking, but he didn’t care. ‘You’ll have to give him a catheter, Salah, old man. But the khadim will live.’
“He could not have given me a harsher sentence. Life,” I concluded. I shook now from head to toe and vomited up the mulberries.
***
When my belly was empty, Esmikhan Sultan opened her palm. In it lay the catheter. She had found it earlier, much earlier, and tried to give it to me then. But I had been so caught up in the spilling of this horrible tale that no muscle left to me could sphincter off, I hadn’t taken it. I took it now.
“When we get home, Allah willing, I will have a jeweler make you a new one, Abdullah, a silver one,” she said.
I laughed harshly. That was a ridiculous substitute. But I did remember when I’d thought to buy a coral for old Piero’s ear. Where was he now, sleeping with fishes? I had lost my chance, for that as for so many things.
I took the catheter from her hand and turned my back. The brass was warm from her touch.
XLIX
Esmikhan Sultan couldn’t sleep.
“You expect me to go back to sleep after what you’ve told me?” she asked. “How can I sleep?”
She was having no trouble eating, however. She popped mulberries into her mouth like a nervous tic and, between whiles, scraped the leaflets off stem after stem of a patch of wild thyme our scrambles had uncovered by its thick scent.
“I eat when I’m distressed,” she apologized.
“Lady, all your life you’ve slept under the watchful eye of creatures who’ve undergone torments similar to mine.” Personally, I was exhausted, suddenly more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. The reliving of the past six months had turned my joints to a stiff, achy gel.
“But I never knew,” she protested. “People don’t talk about things like that.”
“You assumed the sexless ones were born that way.”
“Perhaps. Yes. Why not?”
“Well, they’re not.”
“Don’t be angry with me. You can’t be angry with me for ignorance.”
“No. I’m not angry. Just tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
Her neat little mother-of-pearl teeth worked on another stalk with nervous precision. It must be distress that moved her. What else could make a person eat so much thyme straight without intervening pulse or meat stew?
“But I just can’t think how to make it better,” she fretted.
“Sleep would help—for a while, anyway.”
“All these years I’ve reaped the benefit...”
“Yes, and the benefit of little slave girls torn from the bosom of their families.”
“I don’t feel so badly about that. I don’t know a single girl—once she gets used to it—who isn’t better off in our harem than she was starving and shivering at home.”
“Maybe they are careful to move the malcontents from your ladyship’s view.”
“We are kind to them; their fathers used to beat them. Why, look, even Safiye—”
“Yes, let’s look at Sofia Baffo for an example.”
“Someday she— inshallah —will be the mother of a Sultan. She couldn’t have done that in Italy.”
“No, indeed.”
“And I think in many cases, eventually, it must be so with most of the khuddam, or more would be complaining, don’t you think?”
“Lady, at the moment, I am complaining for lack of sleep.”
“But I’m trying to sort out what I can do about your suffering.”
“I would admire the tenacity of your empathetic feelings, lady, if they weren’t interfering with sleep—yours and mine—and the good amount of walking we must do this afternoon if we are ever to get back to civilization.” “All of this, slaves and castration, is Allah’s will.” “That’s what Salah ad-Din and his cohort agreed upon.” “What can I, one little princess, do against Allah’s will?” “Yes. A whole system based on Allah’s will.” “It’s sinful even to contemplate thwarting Him.” “So let’s not thwart the divinely given need for sleep one moment longer.”
“You go back to the cave, Abdullah. You sleep. I can’t.” I took a step or two in the direction of compliance, but then turned quickly toward her once more. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, but in those two steps I had had a vision of some vague threat. Beast or brigand, what did it matter? Heedless of how tired I was, I couldn’t sleep as long as she was out here, exposed to God knows what.
“Look here, my lady. A man can suffer no greater defilement than what I have suffered. Death is preferable. There is nothing more to be said on the subject.”
“But what if he were to suffer the defilement of all his harem?”
“Pfah, that is nothing. I hate to disillusion you, but as long as he’s got his balls, a man can hope to return tit for tat and rape the other guy’s harem. You don’t know how many times I imagined Salah ad-Din’s sloppy fat wife wriggling and screaming under me—”
It wasn’t until I saw the ashen color Esmikhan’s face took on that I realized just how cruel my words had been
.
“That was what Crazy Orhan’s son was about, wasn’t it?” she asked.
I guess so.
Her voice had grown very faint. “I think what you have suffered must be like rape is for a woman.”
“Oh, no, lady. There is no comparison. After a rape, a woman gets up and goes on.”
“Do you think so?”
“There is no going on for the likes of a—a creature like me.”
“No, Abdullah. I am not at all certain I could have gone on if...if you hadn’t...stopped it last night.”
“Yes, well, look at Sofia.”
“Safiye is something else again, Abdullah.”
“A truer word was never said.”
“I don’t think you can say that what is true for Safiye is true for all other women or even many of them.”
“I’ve no doubt you’re right, lady.”
“Sometimes I think Allah put her by accident on the wrong side of the harem curtain—if it weren’t blasphemous to say so, for Allah makes no mistakes.”
“Well put.”
“She is difficult to rape and impossible to castrate.”
“A remarkable, dangerous combination.”
“But Safiye is not the normal case of the world. All I can say is, had you not saved me last night, my life would now be worthless. I would have wanted to die—even as you did after your mutilation.”
“As I still do.”
“No, Abdullah. Say not so! If you had died, so must have I. For certainly no other khadim in the whole world could have saved me as you did.”
“Once a man is castrated, they can do nothing worse to him,” I recited my litany. “An arrow through the brain—it would have been much, much easier.”
“But only consider, Abdullah, what it is to us womenfolk.
Even if rape did not mean, as it very often does, rejection by our menfolk and eternal shame. Even if that were not the case, having known the fate worse than death, to live with the knowledge that it can happen again and again, any and every day of our lives until death. And having come so close and been rescued, that is still no release from the sentence of this curse. The realization of how vulnerable we are— it’s made only so much more vivid. Perhaps some of the bodies—male bodies—to whom this violation can only happen once must suffer it to spare females, in as far as it is possible, the horror of the potential for repetition. Isn’t our vulnerability worse than to know it can only happen once? You—you are free.”
“Freedom, you call it?”
“Free, in Allah’s hands. To know that now the worst is over and, Allah willing, you are free from any threat of any man.”
“But there are scars. By Allah, the scars, the crippling of muscle for even the simplest of functions—”
“And how do you know we don’t suffer scars, on the inside, where you can’t see. Scars just as vicious and debilitating.”
Esmikhan turned her face from me and I saw only the wind-whipped tail of her veil against the gentle roundness of her little shoulders.
“Perhaps you cannot think so, Abdullah, and if not, I am sorry if I’ve hurt you.” She turned to me again, her eyes sparking with the wind. “The fact of the matter is, I can only be grateful that by your suffering once, you were in a position to save me similar suffering last night.”
I grunted, even formulas failing me.
“I, at least, must say if Allah’s will was that it had to happen—what happened to you in Pera—I can at least show some gratitude for His Almighty will.”
“Gratitude! A curse on any God who could sit passively by and let such a thing happen to a dog. You can apologize and say ‘We are a civilized people, a pious people’ and ‘We have laws against such a thing.’ You still encourage it to happen if not clandestinely in Pera, then openly in Egypt. ‘They are pagan there. It doesn’t matter.’ By Allah, not a dog or a sheep or a steer should suffer so, much less a man, pagan or no. A curse on the God of all such creatures.”
My burst of blasphemy silenced her babble for a while and pressed her lips together, thin and white. In exhaustion, I slumped to the ground beside her, arms over my head and my head between my knees.
“No, Abdullah,” she said eventually, very quietly so perhaps she only thought it and, in the stillness, I was able to read her thoughts. “No, even now, try as I might, I cannot wish this thing undone against Allah’s will. You may think this very selfish of me, or cruel, but I can’t help it. For if Allah had never willed it done, I never would have known you and that—even after so brief a time, I can tell—that would be the greatest loss of my life.”
Over the high, distant midmorning call of birds, I heard her front teeth working vigorously on bits of thyme. No mouthful was ever enough to send back to the molars; her incisors just made quick little rhythmic, nervous chops. Sleep thrummed up from the earth like the night’s evaporating storm, like the hum of bees on a last-minute raid to the mulberries.
After a long, drowsy while, Esmikhan murmured as if in her sleep. “And Safiye has something to do with this, doesn’t she?”
I felt myself floating on the warmth of the sun and could reply with no more than a grunt.
“I’ve seen you watching her, heard how you speak her name. Did Safiye bring you to this pass, Abdullah?”
This time my grunt attained no more than a deep sigh.
“Never mind. Perhaps, inshallah, you will tell me that story another time.” Her voice drowsed into unburdened breath.
L
The recurring dream of dervish and death brought me suddenly wide awake. Perhaps I groaned or even screamed. My lady, sleeping nearby with her veils all awry, and pillowed on the tuffet of thyme, stirred, too.
“Abdullah? What is it?” she murmured.
“It makes sense. Finally, it makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
I doubted she could make much sense of anything, still half-asleep as she was. “Just a mystery that’s been preying on my mind for a while.”
“What mystery?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep, lady. I’m sorry I disturbed you.
“I’m awake now. Besides, it seems late.”
“The sun is past its zenith. We should be on our way soon. Rest until then, to build your strength. It was only something I dreamed.”
“Now you must tell me. A dream untold brings misfortune. It must be told and analyzed.”
“Is that a Turkish custom?”
“Custom? It is only common sense.”
“Oh, I see.”
“It will help me lose the drowsiness. Of what mystery did you dream?”
“Just something having to do with Salah ad-Din’s death.”
She sat straight up now without a hint of sluggishness. “Salah ad-Din is dead?”
“Yes.”
“The man who made you a slave and mutilated you is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Mashallah! You never said that.”
“I didn’t?”
“Mashallah! How?”
“Murder.”
“Abdullah—? Not you—?”
I gave a brief laugh at the horror in her face. “No, lady. Calm yourself.”
“Well, I have seen what you did to the brigands. I know you’re fully capable.”
“Certainly I wished his death, wished it at my hands, every waking moment.”
“Mashallah. Allah turn the evil of that thought from you.”
“At first, of course, I was too weak to consider it. Later, as I mended in spite of myself, I began to look for opportunities. But he was wily, that Salah ad-Din, very wily. Mostly he had his wife see to me and kept his distance.”
I continued: “Coward! Damnable coward, hiding behind his woman. I was allowed no knife. My food was heavy on the sweets and dairy foods they say make tractable eunuchs. Once in awhile a little veal, but not often, because of the cost and then always prepared in bite-sized pieces.” “It’s a wonder you healed so well without flesh to eat,” Esmikhan commented.
“And the other knife with which I would have taken my revenge on the wife, they’d done away with that as well.”
“You never tried to escape?”
I had to smile at my lady’s explicit faith in the proportions of my heroism. “I thought of it, yes. But you know Pera. I was kept in the center of Pera.”
“It is the home of your countrymen.”
“Exactly.”
“But you could have escaped to them.”
“Could I? And what sort of life was there for me back in Venice? Now?” I couldn’t keep the cry of anguish from my voice.
“Your women have no khuddam?” Her voice was full of sympathy—for Venetian women more than for me.
“Of course not,” I snapped. We are not barbarians, I almost continued. Then I thought better of it and sought to ease any hurt my curtness might have caused with: “Unless they can sing.”
“With you they make khuddam just to sing?”
“Now, that is odd, isn’t it? Well, I can’t sing. I’ve never had a voice. In any case, I couldn’t bear the shame. I’ve already told you about those two countrymen of mine I overheard in the bazaar, how mortified I was for them to see me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what an effective fence Salah ad-Din had created in his location. What other life had he left for me to return to?”
“I see. But the murder, Abdullah. Get to the murder.”
“I’m coming to it. As I was saying, I had about decided just to kill myself and at least deprive the bastard of the profit of his deed. I had even fashioned a rope from old sheeting that
I hoped could bear my weight. I had it hidden under my pallet for the hour I should get my courage up. I was about to do it, too.”
“Speak not of that, Abdullah, only to thank Allah your hand did not succeed against yourself. But the murder —”
“I actually had the rope swung over a dubiously rotten rafter when they brought the body home.”
“From where?”
“Salah ad-Din had gone across to the City that day to see to his shop in the bazaar. Most days, actually, this was his custom. He often slept across in Constantinople, to save himself the trip. Whatever there was between him and his wife—and a mismatched pair they were, too, he so thin and she so fat—it was nothing the Greek prostitutes—or his own merchandise, for that matter—couldn’t see to just as well. They had no children. In this he resembled his merchandise .
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