The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

  He proceeded to ask after my well-being, and that of everyone I knew, as if we had all day to dally in a tea shop, and as if he hadn’t left the capital on his rapid march more recently than I. The only thing he did not ask me was, “How fares your lovely mistress?” but this was not so much because he was polite as because he had already seen for himself.

  Ferhad spoke in detail of the duty that brought him to Konya: “...Disturbances on the Persian border since the Shah has learned of the death of Suleiman—Allah give his mighty soul rest. Troops are being mobilized to answer them. We have a long trek ahead over the sterile, mountainous regions of Upper Armenia and Azerbijian. We will be leaving to face this fate in another week, inshallah.”

  Some might have thought him a fool. Others would have found him indiscreet, treacherous, even, and worthy of court-martial for these confidences. But from events at the death of the great Sultan, I knew full well how Ferhad could hold his tongue when it was required of him.

  No, I recognized the symptoms. He was drawn to what stood behind my curtain as a man is drawn to answer the call of the Angel of Death. He would have been content to stand there silent and to bask in what he could feel and the rest of the world was sadly numb to. But as that was impossible, guilt pricked his tongue on to such animated talk that he was hardly recognizable or sensible.

  Esmikhan, however, had no difficulty recognizing him, nor of sensing the swift current that carried the flotsam-jetsam of his language on at such a rate. She stood where she was on the other side of the screen, transfixed by the vision of perfectly chiseled features. Plush, lusciously curled moustache and dark, gentle eyes so handsomely set off the brilliant purple and gold tassels of his uniform.

  Esmikhan would not climb into the sedan. She stood there until my seconds shifted and coughed nervously, and my arms ached from holding the curtain. But I did not resent that physical ache. It was, I realized, as close as I would ever come to the exquisite ache of mind that knotted these two hearts I stood between.

  Ferhad did not take his leave of me until the emotion had worn him out, and he was a man trained for superhuman endurance. I was exhausted and my lady’s small frame sank into the sedan at last as if she would never rise again. But there was strength enough in her to convey to me the glimmer of a thought. That tall, handsome vision of a man had been the first thing to greet her eyes when they had come, blinking, into the sunlight after the soft darkness of the mosque, and fresh from the intensity of her prayer upon the holy Stone of Rumi.

  XXXVI

  Tuesday there was relief: my lady stayed indoors. But I was all tension and vigilance when we repeated our Monday devotions on Wednesday.

  Esmikhan had no desire to sit upon the Stone again. “These things take time,” she explained. “One must be patient for the fulfillment. And to throw oneself too often and too violently at the saint’s door is to make yourself a pest rather than a welcome guest.”

  Although several times I caught her eyes wandering expectantly towards the public thoroughfare where Ferhad had appeared to her, the stone and glass of the mosque her father was building remained between them.

  Still, the vision enslaved her mind. Imagination, I know, can have ten times the effect on the individual as reality. But the world doesn’t feel the convulsions then, when they throb in the individual’s imagination. At the moment, it was the world’s face I had to keep unblushing.

  In spite of her imagination’s abandon, Esmikhan joined me in a sigh of relief when we reached the safety of the governor’s haremlik. She found her helplessness a discharge of burdens; she was glad she was not given the chance to make a decision she could not have made rationally. The pressure on me increased, however, and increased tenfold when my host divulged some news after dinner.

  “I held Divan today. What else have the men to do when the holy places are closed to them?” He said this with a chuckle and then continued, “Besides the usual peasants with their tiresome quibbles, I found it attended by the most decorous and charming young spahi, head of a division just lately come to town. In our conversation—which, I might add, I found most enjoyable—I discovered that he knows you. His name is Ferhad Bey.”

  “Yes, I know him,” I admitted.

  “By Allah! What a happy chance!” my host exclaimed.

  “He has rendered my master very useful service in the past,” I said, hoping not to make too much of it.

  “Ah, I knew he was a man of diligence and promise. He sat in on my judgments and made such astute observations that I would not be surprised if that young man finds himself with his own sandjak to rule in a very few years.”

  “Pray Allah he does not take yours,” I said with what can only be called bitterness.

  My host was startled. “Oh, I’m sure that was the farthest thing from his mind. In spite of his many qualities, he is altogether unassuming and without guile.”

  “Yes, I know he is,” I said at once, fearing I might have spoken too bitterly. “A day at the mosque has made a philosopher of me, I suppose. I only meant to suggest that sandjaks, like virtue, come in limited supply. One man’s gain must needs be another’s loss.”

  “I have taken the liberty of inviting him to sup with us tomorrow night. I hope you will have no objection.”

  What could I say? I was only a guest and a eunuch, after all. But for the next full week there was no rest from the tension for me, either with my lady out of doors nor inside the palace. It was the first and only thing I have ever felt grateful to the Persians for: their unruly behavior that soon sent the corps marching off to the border. But even when I had seen the young horseman out of Konya with my own eyes (he considered my attention flattery), I was jumpy for a day or so. I kept imagining him to have forgotten something, to have turned coward and defected, or that peace had been most suddenly declared.

  Only on that Thursday could I at last thank Allah or my lucky stars, or whatever it was that had kept my lady from finding out how her love had ingratiated himself to our host, and just how many long evenings he had spent in the selamlik under the same roof as her harem.

  I took relief in both body and spirit, and wandered through the city on my own, ending up at the Ala ud-Din Mosque. I remembered having been there before, but the reason escaped me. In the mad flurry over Ferhad, I had forgotten about my strange dream that had driven me to search for dervishes.

  And now as I entered the holy building, such a feeling of well-being and calm came over me that I couldn’t ascribe it to the absence of the spahis alone. Seeking a rational explanation for my feeling, I began to enumerate the ways in which a mosque is different from and, at the moment, seemingly superior to a church. One has to remove one’s shoes. Like Moses: “For the ground on which thou standest is holy.”

  I liked the great hollowness within, uncluttered by statuary, benches, and altars. I liked the feel of plush carpet beneath my bare feet and the breath of air made by the flight of an occasional pigeon which, like the people, had found sanctuary there. The Ala ud-Din Mosque is particularly blessed in the possession of an intricately carved pulpit of great antiquity and exquisite tile work along the wall facing Mecca. Thinking it was perhaps this feature that gave the building beneath that great dome such a holy feeling, I stepped closer to investigate it. Suddenly my progress was arrested by a low murmuring at my feet. There was a man whose presence I had not noticed because he blended so perfectly with the surroundings. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he had a lectern and a holy book before him from which he was quietly reading:

  Love burns this icy clay with mystic fire,

  And leaping mountains dance with quick desire.

  Blest is the man that drowns in seas of love,

  And finds life nourished by food from above.

  They were verses from the Matsnavi Sharif of the Sufi Rumi, and their reader was dressed in the patchwork rags of the order of wandering dervishes.

  My legs folded beneath me, and I sat, knee touching knee. “Tell me, my friend,” I said sm
iling, remembering that day so long ago when we’d set sail together. “Does the saint mean ‘sea’ to be male or female in that line?”

  Husayn—for that’s who the emaciated dervish was—lifted a finger for silence and continued to read, only raising his voice a little so I should not miss a word.

  He read the entire poem. His low, whistling tone and the mystical words and images soon drew me up with them until I thought the deep reds and blues of the mosque’s tiles and carpets had become like the colors shed by stained glass—wonderfully vibrant, yet of no substance one could hold—and this iridescent light moved as if with the cycle of the sun.

  Husayn finished with a long pause. Then, at last, he answered my question. At least, he thought he was answering my question, and at the time, with my head still whirling from the rhythms of the poems I thought he was, too.

  It was a verse from the Koran:

  And He—may the majesty of our Lord be exalted—has taken no consort neither has He any offspring.

  This was followed by another pause after which Husayn slowly closed the book and the lectern, packed them under his arm and returned them to the caretaker of the mosque.

  Such a black wall off piety! I began to think. He has gone mad, and only the Turks in their own madness call it piety. This thought so grieved me that I decided I must take my leave of him as quickly as possible. I cleared my throat to speak, but it was drowned out by a sound right over our heads: the muezzin in his tower calling the faithful to evening prayers. I couldn’t very well run out of the mosque against all the men who would be coming in, so I dumbly followed my old friend to the fountain, copied him in making my ablutions, then returned to face Mecca, and to fall to my knees on the floor.

  As I bent and straightened, knelt and prostrated like a drop of water in the vast sea of lapping Muslim waves, a memory came to my mind of the number of times I had watched Husayn eat pork and pray “Hail Mary” to hold his ducats intact. Now here I was, returning the pretense in kind. But where, a moment before in the midst of skepticism I might have chuckled at the thought, I now felt myself deeply touched. And by the time the prayers had finished, I was willing to stick by my friend’s side, silence or no. Once we had reached the courtyard of the mosque, he at last spoke words of his own. “The brethren meet tonight. Will you come?”

  “Nothing,” I replied, “would flatter me more.”

  Without another word, my friend led me away from the main streets, through a maze of alleys, monastic buildings, and rooms for the study of religion to the hall where Sufis of his order held their particular devotions.

  At first I thought I would merely watch, but events proved otherwise. I did watch as first the sheikh and then the invisible spirit of their founder received obeisance from the congregation, and I watched the recitation of the first prayers, for I didn’t know the words. But then, suddenly there was a squeal on a shawm and a rattle of drums, and the hall rose to its feet as one man. Before I could think, I found myself linked arm in arm with Husayn in front of me and a stranger behind me, and slowly, to the music, we began to move in a circle around the room.

  Someone somewhere began to chant the ninety-nine names of Allah, over and over again. With each ninety-nine he grew faster and faster, and we moved and chanted to the rhythm he set. Faster and still faster we went until I saw nothing but a blur of whirling robes that seemed to be the physical embodiment of all the mystical names. I grew numb to the steps that had at first jarred my frame; it seemed as if I was lifted above the stumbling of my feet and I floated.

  And then I felt myself truly losing touch with reality. By God, if I kept this up much longer, I should lose my individuality altogether and fade like one drop into the great ocean of creation never to be extracted again. The thought threw me into a panic.

  “No,” I murmured, my head whirling. “No!” off the rhythm of the pounding names of Allah.

  I broke from the circle and staggered to the edge of the hall. The dance went on without me, and I saw with reeling eyes that the circle had melted back into itself as if I’d never been in it at all. The smell and heat of bodies and the continuous pound of drums and chant were still quite overwhelming and I staggered out of the hall to escape them.

  I took one or two breaths of pure air, then threw my head back to the sky. By the stars I could tell that the night was already half gone; we had been dancing for hours. Then, the stars seemed to be not only mechanical tellers of time but also the eyes of an old, old man, twinkling with compassion.

  All praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds!

  The Compassionate, the Merciful!

  Quietly I murmured the words Muhammed is said to have received from the Angel when he was first called to be Prophet. Then suddenly those stars became Husayn’s eyes and my dream from Baba Ahlam repeated itself. The old dervish lost his gray, grew younger, and put on flesh. But the vision had another scene added to it. This time I saw Husayn as I had left him in the market five years ago when the pain and shame of my condition had been new upon me and I had been unable to feel anything beyond that.

  Now I saw how my friend had left our meeting with grief and guilt heavy upon him. I felt how much he considered me and loved me as his son, and the duty he felt to protect me in the absence of all my other kin. These thoughts weighed on him for weeks and wore down his native good humor and stoicism until he was certain he would go mad. He found his family—his father-in-law, his wife, his little son, and second child as yet unborn—no consolation at all. Indeed, their affections were only salt on the wounds my fate and my bitterness had caused him. Finally he determined he must take revenge. Denouncing my butchers to the court of the land would not suffice. He had to see that they never operated again, either in Pera or any place on earth. So one night, shielded by darkness and a heavy cloak, anger giving his stodgy figure strength and agility, my friend ambushed the wiry slave merchant Salah ud-Din and stabbed him to the heart.

  And when he had removed him from humanity, he removed him from maleness as well. I had helped to wash the body; I had seen.

  How I would have gloated over that hated body coiling with pain like a flimsy figure of wire in the forge. Yet Salah ud-Din died with more surprise than pain or lingering remorse. And the vision I received of this death would not even let me linger, staring with the satisfaction of revenge, but carried me on at once to the realization that Husayn was now a man with blood on his hands. No matter how foul that blood, normal society would ever be banned to him.

  So he took to the secret brotherhood of dervishes. At first it was only a disguise and an excuse to be wandering without ties or means. In such a state, the hideout of brigands had been the perfect place for him.

  But slowly, the true meaning of the rites began to impress him. In my vision I saw and felt the depth of his remorse as he repented of his previous sins, not only that of murder, but also the worship he had earlier paid to lucre and to trade. Completion of the great pilgrimage to Mecca, on foot and with nothing more than his begging bowl, allowed him to change his name to Hajji. One thousand and one days of initiation followed at the end of which time his rags and his bowl were no longer a disguise, but the real essence of Husayn—Hajji—to the end of his days.

  Once he had found himself, Husayn had been led by dreams and visions to find me and, having found me, he had sat and read in the mosque every day until I found him. I had, I realized, passed him by on more than one occasion even after my dream at Baba Ahlam, and not noticed him, for my mind had been burdened with the duties I owed the world. But my friend had been content to wait quietly until the world should give me peace.

  The compassionate stars had whirled much closer towards dawn—the dawn of Friday, the Muslim Sabbath—before the vision and the dance were over and Husayn came out to stand quietly by my side.

  “My friend,” I began, wanting to blurt out all that I had seen and felt. But I realized at once by his calm demeanor, he knew it all already. Then I could say nothing but “Thank you,” and, as
I studied his quiet form longer, I realized that even “Thank you” was redundant.

  Thus began my association with the Sufis, which continued throughout the summer. I shared their communal meals, their rites on all but the most solemn occasions. It kept me busy and entertained in a period that otherwise would have meant a great deal of lying about sipping sherbets, and listening to my lady gossip with the governor’s wife. But it was more than just diversion that I found among these ragged men of Allah. I found true acceptance as I had not felt since I was still a man among the sailors on my uncle’s galley.

  I was a eunuch? That did not matter. “Many are made eunuchs for the love of Allah,” one Sufi explained to me. “Many take vows of abstinence of their own accord—such as our brother Hajji here who first brought you among us. They realize that children and dalliance with women are mere vanities and distractions from union with the All-Merciful.”

  I was a slave? That, too, did not matter. “We are all—like your name—slaves to Allah.”

  I knew my informant meant this sincerely, but it was a simple fact that, being a slave more than just figuratively, I could not join them as completely as a free man might. Once or twice, after a particularly moving ritual, it was suggested to me, both by the brotherhood and by my soul, that I should seek to undergo initiation and begin the thousand-and-one-day novitiate to become like them. But it was a simple fact—I was not free to commit myself to serve another master. I could not vow to obey every challenge the sheikh of the order might lay upon my head when the needs of my mistress might call me to her side at any time, or even out of Konya altogether. Many Sufis insist that one can and should be pious while at the same time fulfilling a profession. But it is one thing to be a shopkeeper who can pull down the shutters and lock the door when religion calls; it is quite another to have some other master stand in one’s way to Allah.