The women had set up a rhythmic chant of “Allah akhbar, God is great!” Esmikhan was encouraged to join in as she could, and all of them let their words blur into one long, sustained wail when the contractions came.
“The baby is buttocks first,” the midwife elaborated, “and I have so far been unable to get it turned around.”
Although my notion of a woman’s insides was very vague, I knew a slave girl in the palace had died from just such a difficulty within the last six months. The thought made me viscerally sick. But as there was nothing I could do, I went to my room and tried to spend an evening as usual.
Echoes of the women’s chant pursued me to my room and I found I could neither eat nor sleep nor read. My assistants and the khuddam who had come with the women from the palace were finding distraction in the general room by singing, telling tales, and playing chess. Careless clouds of laughter timed to the wails of the chant helped them forget that they were half women; that if the demon of childbirth brought death, they would find themselves on the slave block again.
Still, let them escape as they can, I thought, though I could not join them.
I let the women’s wails chase me out of the house, through the garden, and into the dark streets. Their echoes even seemed to come to me in the refuge I took in the hollow mosque at the end of the street. There I alternately prayed, paced, and wept, returning always to the weeping again (unmanly, but that did not bother me) whenever realization of my true helplessness struck me again.
I was not alone in the mosque. I joined a man, a tinsmith by trade, who with his two young sons, bundled in blankets and trying to sleep, was also waiting for a woman to deliver—his wife of their sixth. He came and spoke to me quite merrily of children, begetting and bearing. There was nothing to it, he assured me.
Had his wife never had any difficulties at all? I asked.
“The first was not so easy,” he admitted, tousling the head of the eldest son. “Before it was over, I was called into the room and she relinquished all claims she had on me if only my seed would stop hurting her and come forth. After that bit of magic, the child came readily enough, Allah be praised. Since then, I could divorce her at my heart’s desire without having to return the bride price to her father or anything. But why should I bother? She is a good wife, Allah bless her, and now produces with the ease and fecundity of a rabbit.”
I grew angry at the man for such careless talk, and for latching onto me when I would have rather been alone. But he did know how to make time pass. And when his daughter came to announce the successful birth of vet another son and he left me with wishes for equal joy, I was pleased to discover it was already after midnight.
But nobody came with glad tidings for me.
I considered taking a description of the little ritual that had delivered the tinsmith’s wife of her first child to Esmikhan’s midwife. But this, I decided, was madness. First of all, the Quince was the best money could buy. If there was any good in this practice, no doubt she would have already tried it. Secondly, what man should be called in to acquit her? Even if Sokolli Pasha were in town, I knew, Esmikhan knew, perhaps even the midwife knew, that it was not his seed. Whether Ferhad was among the thousands dead in Astrakhan was not yet known. Assuming that he was, my mind played with the scenario that he was in Paradise, still had control over his seed, and was attempting to bring his true love to the other world to join him. Martyrs for the faith on the battlefield go straight to Paradise, they say, whatever their sins. So do women who die bringing forth Muslim children.
This thought caused me such sorrow that I startled the silent mosque with a sob. What about myself? I thought. On no account was I guaranteed to be in Paradise with her. In this confusion of paternity, where did I fit? Neither legally nor physically had I any claim upon this child struggling to be born. Both were so impossible as to be laughable.
But the memory came to me as I sat in that great empty mosque, of a night some few weeks ago as Esmikhan and I had sat by the fire playing chess. I reminded her of just such a night three years previous when she had first laid eyes on Ferhad. I mentioned it laconically, for there were others in the room, and at first her silence made me suppose she, too, had missed my meaning. But at length she smiled slightly and said, with equal cryptics, “You know, Abdullah, my first thought when I saw him was how much he looked like you.”
“If I were a man.”
“Yes.”
Esmikhan made a move then, a very astute play which I had totally overlooked. But before I could condemn my stupidity or she could gloat, she cried out, “Oh, Abdullah! it moved! The baby moved! Come and feel. There it goes again! It’s always lively in the evening. Come on, Abdullah, don’t be shy.”
And I went around the table and let her place my hand on that great mound—like bread set to rise. By kneeling, my face had been brought very close to hers. I remember staring at the round, pink curve of her cheek and being more amazed at the life I saw there than at that I felt beneath my hand. She was so pleased to feel life within her that she was blushing. But even as I stooped there, waiting for the next infant kick, there passed through my mind the image of the hollow bones beneath that cheek as if I were being given a vision of what the future held and how my same, blushing lady would someday rot in the grave.
I had since, perhaps in self-defense, extracted a different meaning from this moment of vision than that of a morbid prophecy it seemed at first to warrant. Life at its most intense is often found in contrast to death, for it’s by opposition that opposites take on meaning. And when the light and angle between two poles is so perfectly set, as they seemed to be on that evening, then, like two mirrors, they reflect one another and whatever is caught between them is thrown likewise into the depths of eternity.
The real, enduring Esmikhan, I decided, was neither the physical, living body who had bloomed and caught Ferhad’s young eyes, nor the thing that hung like a dead weight from Sokolli Pasha’s marriage contract. Her essence was something else again, no easier to describe than the nature of a reflection. I remembered the first evening I’d met her, dressed as a bride, and that secret, invisible thing that had passed between us on the road from Kutahiya which has made me say on occasion that we were married, she and I. Being neither male nor female, but having in me the attributes of both, it was I who was most qualified to love the eternal reflection of my lady that was neither living nor dead. Indeed, I believe, when there is true love between mortals of any sex or between man and God, that is the part that is loved. If so, then I was, in a certain way, the child’s father more than either of those two men who were away, fighting their wars, and neither of whom bothered to sit quietly on a winter’s evening, feeling the child’s first movements, and being reflected in eternity’s mirrors.
And, too, I was responsible in a very acute way for the terrible pain that was tearing my lady apart at just that moment. It was not sheer blind vengeance that made husbands kill the eunuchs as well as the adulterous wife when the crime was discovered. If it were that this strange God Allah, whose will I had, perhaps, misunderstood, were taking it upon Himself to punish the sin even when it was still a secret to mortal eyes, He would have revenge on me as well. I was certain I could not live if Esmikhan were dead and that reflected, eternal part of her beyond my reach. If Sokolli Pasha did not have me killed, I would, I decided alone in the mosque, be obliged to kill myself.
When the morning call to prayer brought ranks of men to interrupt my sanctuary, I participated, but without much faith, as if this Allah were a capricious master I could not trust. Then I went back to the house.
During the night, the child had begun its descent down the birth canal.
“Thanks be to Allah,” I blurted.
The Quince shook her head soberly but wearily. She had had no time to enjoy her own drugs, and reality, more than the long hours, was telling on her.
“Now your lady is so exhausted she cannot push. The pains come like swift waves and merely wear her away lik
e the crumbling of a shoreline. I do not know if she can do it. Allah alone knows.”
I escaped this news into the streets of Constantinople once more. Making some attempt to learn word of the army was diversion, although very little and seemingly very useless. By evening the rumors had begun to have a common tint, which spoke of some truth, behind them. There had been disaster. Some ships of the fleet had been sighted off Pera, but they were loathe to enter the harbor before nightfall.
“Sokolli Pasha dares not show his face by daylight in this city,” one man said. “You mark my words, the Sultan will replace him for this.”
There was no word of joy I could take home with me, nor did I meet one at the birthing room door.
“It is useless,” the Quince said. “We can do no more. She cannot even hold herself up on the birthing stool. She will die in any case. As Allah is my witness, I have no choice but to cut the child out.”
To cut the child out, to murder the mother. “I will take that same knife and use it, still warm, on myself when you have done that!” I cried.
So saying, I pushed the old woman out of the way, sending the numerous charms on her headdress and bosom a-jangle. I stepped over the gunpowder in one great stride: in a moment or two we could all come and go as we pleased, for my lady would be dead and the gunpowder of no earthly purpose but to fill cannon and cause more death. I passed the bundles of dead-weary women, whose “Allah akhbars” were no more than sighs, and whose hands fanned themselves instead of the woman in labor. I picked Esmikhan up off the floor. She lay there like some discarded rag with all life drained from her, but when I moved her, the increased pain brought some stiffness of life in her limbs.
“Abdul...,” she murmured.
Her lips were white, cracked, and dried as if they were made of mosaic. Her face had begun to take on in reality the aspects of the death mask I had envisioned several weeks before, but I ignored it, searching for the life that still glimmered in the other mirror. I grasped my own elbows around her distended waist and squatted to the floor, holding her tightly between my thighs. I felt a spasm of pain go through her, and I took it on myself.
“Push, my lady.”
“Can’t.”
“You must.”
“Hurts.”
“You must. You will die if you don’t.”
“Already...”
“No, by Allah. Think of the child,” I hissed in her ear, hoping the other women would not be listening, but of course they were. “Think how it was conceived. Think of Rumi’s Stone in Konya and the blessings of the Almighty. Think of the nightingale’s song.”
“Uh-uh,” she gave a little grunt of refusal.
I could feel the swell of another pain building in her and I countered it with the vise of my arms.
“Esmikhan,” I shouted. “Push! Push!”
“Allah’s will…”
“Esmikhan. I will not let you die. If you die, I will die as well. By all that is holy, I swear it. I will not live without you. I love you, Esmikhan. More than life. Do not kill me as well.”
I think she could feel my tears hot upon her neck where the sweat was already clammy as a corpse.
“Abd...” She began to say my name, but turned her strength into a push instead.
“That’s it,” I exclaimed. “Again. Once more.”
“No...,” she said, but she did, sucking strength from my arms until they felt as weak as mint jelly. Again.
She did, and suddenly there was a sound of rushing water. Through my slippers, my feet got wet. And a tiny wriggle of white and red slipped out into the Quince’s hands.
The attendants opened their mouths to rejoice as if they had witnessed a miracle. They shut them again immediately and went about their work in silence. Whatever the miracle of life, etiquette would not allow them to jubilate.
“What...What...?” Esmikhan found strength to ask, for the Quince was keeping the child to herself for a moment—a long moment of internal struggle, or so it seemed.
The Quince blinked away some nagging thought and then said, with a faint smile, “I’m just tying off the cord, lady. She’s a perfectly healthy girl, Allah shield her. There, the cord’s all done.”
“Don’t remember...,” Esmikhan murmured with confusion and gratitude. But then she fainted dead away.
Her body was as limp as if she had pushed her own life from her as well as that of the child. Between breast and thighs she was so misshapen as to be unrecognizable as human, but her breath still came in shallow little tugs. I laid her down on a mattress and tried to give her senselessness some comfort. Shyly, tenderly, I planted a kiss on either bruised eyelid. Then I bent my head and wept, harmonizing with the dry, healthy yells of the baby.
“Shall I go tell the master?”
It was one of my seconds who addressed me, everyone coming and going over the gunpowder now as they pleased. At first I couldn’t imagine whom he meant by “the master.”
“Sokolli Pasha,” he said. “He’s come home, Allah be praised. Been in the house this hour or more.”
“No, no. I’ll go,” I said, groping for water to wash away my tears.
“My lady wishes to announce to you that her face is black. It is Allah’s will.” I stood and faced the tall figure of a man whose beard seemed to have gone completely white since I’d last seen him. He had not bothered to dye it during the last month or so.
He looked at me closely as if trying to read something more in my message than the traditional way of saying, “The baby is a girl.” Then he smiled and said, “He who allows dark shadows to settle on his face when a girl is born to him, or decides to keep her only with disgrace—does it not say in the Koran that his judgment is faulty?”
“Then may I offer my congratulations, Master?” I asked.
“Congratulations?” Sokolli Pasha laughed a very dry, horrible laugh. “Congratulations. We have lost Astrakhan and for this I get congratulations?”
“Master, I meant...”
“Abdullah, I know.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, which Sokolli Pasha soon stirred as a mother may rock the cradle of her silent child to see it stir and comfort herself that it only sleeps.
“The young men fell like rain “he said, “thousands of them. I may not be vizier tomorrow morning, you may as well know that, Abdullah. Then I shall be obliged to divorce your mistress and the child...And all because of that Lala Mustafa, may Allah plague him. Yes, he has his beady black eye on my post. He would like nothing better than to be Grand Vizier himself. He’s been plotting for it ever since the business with Bayazid. That handsome young son of Suleiman’s would never have rebelled if Lala Mustafa had not meddled with the correspondence between Constantinople and Bayazid’s sandjak. Though lively and popular, Bayazid was not a rebellious son. But Lala Mustafa and the boy’s mother, that Russian...”
Sokolli Pasha stopped here as if he were afraid to say more. Then he smiled at me.
“I know what gossip among slaves is like,” he said. “I am a slave myself and was once the lowest of the pages in the palace. Gossip may lose me favor in Selim’s eyes faster than a drunken rage could. So I’d thank you, Abdullah, if you’d let it be known among whomever you gossip with the truth about Lala Mustafa in Astrakhan. Although he pretended to be behind it, he wanted the mission to fail for no other reason than that he knew how dear it was to my heart. From the moment we marched off, he was among the soldiers, whispering.
“‘What is this land of Russia we must fight?’ he asked. ‘It is a land where the nights are unnaturally long in winter and the days too long in summer. In order to keep Allah’s laws and to pray, both after sunset and before dawn, one must deprive oneself of healthful sleep. During the month of fasting, when food and water may be taken only during the nighttime hours, surely the long days will kill us. This is a land Allah created to remain in heathen hands, for clearly, one cannot be a good Muslim in Russia.’ “
“He got the Mufti convinced of this philosophy, too. B
y the time we were set upon, the men had no will to fight and defend themselves. Allah’s will was against it, they thought, so what good were their arms? Even Selim the Sot had known better than to come to that forsaken place. They were cut down miserably as they fled. Now we shall never have that canal, the only thing that could have broken this deadlock between Persia and our empire. Now we will fight against each other with no progress on either side until we are both weak and exhausted and open prey for Christians. You mark my words, some day...And for all of this, you congratulate me?”
Sokolli Pasha sighed wearily and shook his head. But then he remembered where he was, my presence, and the news I had just brought him.
“But how can I be downcast?” he asked, trying to fight the sarcasm inherent in his words. “This night I have become a father at last. Good Abdullah, send my best wishes to my wife. I shall come and have a look at the child whenever you think it wise. In the meantime, here. Here is a little present for the girl.”
Sokolli Pasha laid a little wooden figure in my hand. It was round-bodied and colorfully painted—very un-Muslim. The body opened to reveal another figure inside, and another and another—seven little dolls nesting cozily all together. I raised my head from this toy’s examination to smile in amazement at my master. Who would have thought the Grand Vizier capable of such things?
The Sultan's Daughter Page 31