The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Senator, Crivano says, you prosecute this suit against yourself with too much zeal. Were there no glories to be found in wars, they would have ceased long ago.

  Oh, glories can indeed be found in them. And where they are lacking, there they can be placed. The installation of glory after the fact is a trade, like any other. If you have seen the new paintings in the doge’s palace—miserable Francesco himself supplied one—then you know that I have participated in this unlovely business. Simply the price of governance, as the Florentine clerk said: the maintenance of the imago urbis. But as I sat in that dark room today, listening to Signore della Porta’s absurd encomium, I realized how noxious his words must seem to one who has seen battle with his own eyes, and not through a glass, darkly. Great God, that poem! Is it not startling, the way we still laud the old blind doge after all these centuries? A crusader who made war on Christians, whose ghost has all but escorted the infidel to our gates? But our poets and our painters cut him from the tapestry of his times, they push him ever forward through our history, until he comes to signify nothing but the valor of the Republic. Thus is he emptied: a perfect surface to reflect our greatness back to us. This will happen with Bragadin, too, in time. And with Lepanto. Perhaps it is already happening.

  In Bologna, Crivano says, I heard those two names fall often from thoughtless lips. But in this city they seem subjects wreathed always with silence, best not raised at all. I confess that this has been a source of confusion for me.

  The senator nods. I had hoped that the city would welcome you more warmly, Vettor, he says. That they would be more overt in their expressions of gratitude. But it was difficult for me to arrange even the few paltry gestures you have seen.

  I am hardly disappointed by my reception here, senator. I meant only—

  That you were surprised. That is understandable. But the explanation is simple. Had your galley not been captured by the Turks—or had you somehow returned with the relics of Bragadin in hand only a year after Lepanto—then today you would probably be married into a great family, grooming your sons for their eventual dogeship. As it is, the Republic quietly made a separate peace with the sultan during your long confinement, renouncing all claims to Cyprus. Then that sultan died, and a new sultan took his place, one who is friendly to us in matters of trade. Today, the relics of valiant Bragadin that you so bravely recovered serve only to remind us that he suffered and died for nothing. Furthermore, to diplomats like myself Lepanto has become an inconvenience best abandoned to the past. So far as the history of the Republic is concerned, the battle yielded naught but glory and corpses, and may as well not have happened at all. Let the poets and the painters take care of it. You heard about Polidoro, I suppose. Do you remember Polidoro?

  This is a name Crivano has not heard spoken in years, one that his sinews recall more than his brain: in the instant it takes him to place it, his limbs have already grown stiff with fear. Of course, he says. The man who stole Bragadin’s remains from the Turkish arsenal. He gave them to me, and when I escaped, I gave them to the bailo in Galata.

  Polidoro also escaped. Did you know that? The Turks recaptured him, and they tortured him most foully, but some weeks later he was somehow free again. He now resides in Verona, the city of his birth. A few years ago he petitioned the senate for a monthly pension of sixteen ducats, citing his heroism in the Republic’s service. The senate granted him five.

  Contarini is watching Crivano closely. Crivano shrugs. I knew Polidoro only as a pair of hands in the darkness, he says.

  Just as well, Contarini says. The man is a simple thief. Thieving put him at the oars of one of our galleys. That galley was taken at sea, so he came to row for the Turks. Winter brought him to the arsenal, where Bragadin’s relics were kept. Then thieving brought him back to the Republic again. I confess my own vote was to give the man nothing. Why should the Republic reward a thief for being a thief? Last week, an asp bit my enemy. This week, it has appeared in my garden. Do I offer it food on a dish of gold? No. I reach for my stick.

  Some of the silk has gone from Contarini’s voice; weariness is gathering, settling in. There will be no tour of the library today. Crivano studies the dry lines in the man’s face, the slight tremor in his strong left hand. What grand dreams must visit that snowy head, he thinks.

  I have a small favor to ask, the senator says.

  Of course.

  Tomorrow, my family and I are to depart the city. The summer is upon us, and the warm weeks ahead are to be spent in the more pleasant air of our mainland villa. This evening, my vulgar young cousin is to return to the convent school of Santa Caterina. It would mean a great deal to me, and a great deal more to her, if you can spare a few idle hours to call on her while we are away. I suspect that she was a bit of an affliction upon you this afternoon, but I give you my word that she can at times be charming. Whether you choose to visit her or not, I hope you’ll make use of the library here while I am gone. Rigi, the porter, will grant you entry.

  The sun breaks under the window’s upper arch, and the senator’s features vanish into silhouette. Crivano squints and looks down at the desktop. Of the spectrum the crystal cast only an orange sliver remains at the desk’s dentiled edge. Crivano’s chest feels as if it has shrunk and tightened, like the wrinkled skin of a dry fruit.

  You are very generous, Senator. I shall comply happily with your request. May I also ask a question of you?

  You may.

  Why did Perina wish to speak with me about Lepanto?

  The senator’s shadowed form is very still for a long time. She didn’t tell you? he finally says.

  No, Senator.

  I had thought she would have.

  A brightly festooned galley passes on the canal outside, on its way to the Bacino. Young men in bright stockings sing and caper on its quarterdeck. The last night of the Sensa, Crivano remembers.

  Perina, the senator says, had a brother who was killed at Lepanto. A brother she never knew. She was too young, you see. Did she tell you—who she is?

  Crivano tries to moderate his breathing, the tone of his voice. Through the window, the blazing sun seems to spend all its dying light on him. She said she is your cousin, he says. She told me only that.

  Yes. She is the youngest daughter of my kinsman Pietro Glissenti, whom I am certain you remember from your youth in Cyprus. Your father was his chief secretary.

  My God.

  Pardon me?

  Her brother—

  Was named Gabriel, I believe. He was quite young when he died. About your own age, I should guess.

  That is not possible.

  I’m sorry?

  Lord Glissenti’s daughter died in the plague. She and her mother fled Cyprus before the invasion, and they came here, and they both died in the plague, seventeen years ago. So I was told.

  And that is all quite correct, dottore. But you are speaking, I believe, of Lord Glissenti’s elder daughter. Perina left Cyprus in her mother’s womb. She was born here. When her mother and sister died, she was five years old. Her father and her two eldest brothers were slain at Famagusta. And as I said, her youngest brother, Gabriel, died at Lepanto. She never knew those men. But you knew Gabriel quite well, didn’t you?

  Crivano realizes with a start that he’s been staring at the setting sun: when he turns toward the senator, the man’s face is blotted by a drifting gobbet of green. Gabriel was my dearest friend in my boyhood, Crivano says. We came here together from Cyprus to enroll at Padua, and we both signed on as bowmen when we heard that Nicosia had fallen. I was next to him when he died. He was blown to bits by a cannonball.

  I see. When you narrate your experiences to Perina, dottore, you might consider the omission of that last detail.

  I don’t believe it, Crivano says. I cannot believe it.

  But Crivano does believe it. He knows it to be true. Or true enough.

  Perhaps now, Contarini says, you can see why I was eager for you to make Perina’s acquaintance, even if my coordination
of the event was shamefully inept. You are for her the only tangible connection to her family’s past, about which she is quite curious. And—if you will forgive me once again for speaking frankly—I think it’s clear that a close friendship with Perina could be a substantial boon to you, as well. I am an old man, with few years remaining on this earth, so I shall come to my point. Perina is my charge, and I have great fondness for her, but she is not my child. The dowry I am reasonably able to supply for her is insufficient to attract a noble husband, and until now I have been at a loss to find a suitable match for her among the citizenry. As I said, her dowry will not be that of a Contarini daughter, but it will be a considerable sum, particularly for a gentleman like yourself: not old, but no longer young, and seeking to become established in short order. Keep in mind, too, that she is the last of the Glissenti, a noble line. Her children will sit in the Great Council. But, enough! I have said enough. Visit her. Speak with her. Consider.

  Everywhere Crivano looks he sees pulsing green shapes—ghost-images of the sun, obliterating everything. The floor beneath the chair seems to move, as if the palace has slipped off its piling and now floats freely on the waves. A sound fills his ears like someone blowing softly into them.

  But, Senator, Crivano whispers, the young lady is wedded to Christ. Is she not?

  She is not. She is betrothed to Christ. And I am not at all certain that he is the best husband for her. No man could be more constant, of course, but it is not difficult to imagine others who might be more attentive. Are you feeling all right, Vettor? In this light you look quite pale.

  30

  By the time Crivano is on his feet again—roused from his faint by a pinch of sal volatile from the senator’s laboratory, fortified with a glass of strong brandy—the sun has nearly set, and he’s late for the Uranici banquet. He makes his apologies, says his farewells, and pulls on his cloak, stepping through a side entrance off the courtyard, where the grizzled porter packs crates for the trip to the mainland. Old Rigi trains a skeptical eye on Crivano as he rushes past.

  The Morosini palace is halfway back to the Riva del Vin, on this same bank of the Grand Canal. The fastest way to reach it is by boat, but Crivano feels like walking, so he walks. He needs to think, to clear his head, to situate himself. If that means he must miss the banquet as a result, well, at the moment he’s not particularly hungry.

  The Sensa is approaching its frenzied end. Every palace spills its inhabitants into the dusk: greasy boys with skintight hose stretched across their buttocks, plump girls divulging their breasts’ upper hemispheres to the cooling air. Crowds of them teeter into boats, parade through secluded alleyways. All wear masks. Soon the night’s first bell will ring, linkboys will emerge to sculpt the darkness with their lanterns, and the city will begin to play at forgetfulness once more: what is permitted, what is forbidden. In the milling street Crivano feels invisible again, a tessera blended into a mosaic.

  His feet move him at the pace of his thoughts, carrying him past glazed windows, frescoed walls, the opened and closing shutters of unfamiliar thoroughfares. No matter which way it roams or how far, his mind returns always to the same location: the girl Perina, the question that her existence poses. How is it possible? How is it possible? How is it possible?

  He and the Lark left Nicosia some nine months before it fell, almost two years before their fathers and brothers died at Famagusta. The news came while the fleet was at anchor at Guiscardo, about to sail inland for fresh water. The Lark had been scraping the pan of his arquebus, blowing down its barrel. We have just gotten word, my boys, that Famagusta has fallen. Captain Bua on the quarterdeck, his voice quaking with rage. General Bragadin, God rest his soul, surrendered to Lala Mustafa with honor. And that son of a whore, he cut off his nose and his ears. The infidel savages flayed him alive, they stuffed his skin with straw, they paraded it through the streets on the back of a cow. And they will suffer heartily, my boys, for what they have done. The expression on the Lark’s face—anguished, frightened, furious, thrilled—echoed the contents of his own heart. Fatherless now. The last of their clans. Both thirteen years old.

  Until today he has never once tried to imagine what it must have been like for the women: searching the harbor at Kyrenia for some Genoese or Ragusan captain willing to make arrangements, then crushed in the dark hold of a rolling ship among splintered crates and bolts of cloth, palms clamped over their children’s wet faces, because what if the Turks were to hear? During the sack of Tunis in 1574, word got round to Crivano’s orta that the wife of a Spanish officer had barricaded herself and her five daughters in a house on the harbor’s edge. The taunting janissaries took an hour to break her door, by which time the wife had smashed each young skull with a belaying pin and slit her own throat. What stories did young Perina hear from the downturned mouths of her mother and sister before the plague came for them? What might she remember of those stories now? How is it possible?

  Could Narkis know about her? It seems unlikely. If he did, why would he care? A pure product of the Ottoman boy-tribute system, he’s always seemed perplexed by the tangle of agnatic bonds that defines the Frankish world. I come from Macedonia, from high in the mountains. Before the Ottomans took me, I had never seen a church, or a mosque. I had seen no writing of any kind. I had not seen gold, or glass. Now I have traveled to Mecca, to Punjab, to Kathmandu, to China. I do not think of my family. If they ever try to think of me, then they have no way of understanding what it is I have become. Likewise, Narkis could hardly understand what Perina signifies to Crivano. But what does Perina signify? If none but Crivano himself can say, can she be made to mean whatever he wishes? Can she be said to mean anything at all?

  What if the haseki sultan knows? The idea stops him in his tracks, as if the wall he walks beside has just collapsed to reveal an unsuspected maze of hidden passageways; for an instant he’s lost, dislodged from whatever current has been guiding his mindless path through the streets. A short while ago he crossed a bridge. Was it the bridge behind the house of the Garzoni, or the one behind the Corner palace? He dithers for a moment at a constricted junction until a pack of revelers—four wigged and rouged young men wearing ladies’ gowns, in pursuit of a plump fifth diapered like a baby and otherwise nude—charges around the north fork and scrambles past him. Crivano spits a curse at their backs, continues the way they came.

  He met the haseki sultan only once. Her summons arrived some months prior to his first encounter with Narkis, and Crivano thought nothing of it at the time: she was negotiating with a group of Genoese bankers and needed an interpreter’s services. I have heard favorable reports about you, Messer Crivano. The sound of that old name on the air—not Tarjuman, the name the viziers had given him—raised gooseflesh under his fine new caftan. You were born in Cyprus, yes? Tell me about that.

  Even in middle age she was relentlessly beautiful, nestled like a jewel among her cushions. Her scarlet entari worked with gold thread, the gömlek that billowed from her sleeves sheer as spidersilk. Terrifying. Grotesque. Like anything made beautiful by pure necessity must be. And after the fleet returned from Tunis, your orta went east to fight the Safavids, is that so? A full hour of questions, each one put to him in his native tongue. Her speech inelegant and tedious, but clear, and free from errors. The Genoese bankers never arrived; in time, Crivano was dismissed. Practice, he assumed. Although he never could decide whether the haseki sultan was practicing a language new to her, or one from years before that she’d forgotten. He’d heard the rumors, of course: the sultan’s favorite concubine was the daughter of one of the Republic’s most ancient families, installed in the harem after being abducted by pirates from a family galley when she was little more than a child. Crivano had always found the tale difficult to believe. Having now spoken with her, he figured her more plausibly as the issue of Dalmatian fisherfolk than any sort of displaced Frankish noble. Still, it was remarkable, wasn’t it, how rapidly the sultan’s favor turned toward the Republic after this girl bore him a
healthy son?

  So the rumors persisted. And always at their margins, in whispers that were not even whispers, a more profound fantasy lurked. If this haseki sultan truly was a child of the Republic, wasn’t it possible—however remotely—that her supposed abduction had been orchestrated from the outset by the Council of Ten? That an unlikely ploy to place one of their operatives inside the harem had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes? That their girlish spy had risen to become the Turks’ de facto empress, and had birthed the sultan his heir? It was marvelous and perverse to imagine: where for centuries all the armies of Christendom had been thwarted, this once-nubile creature had prevailed. Small wonder Lepanto could be so easily forgotten.

  A ridiculous scenario. But like a weaving drunkard measuring his steps, the more Crivano tries to steer his mind away, the more insistently it returns. If it were so—and it couldn’t be—what would it mean for him? If the long puppet-strings that guide his movements do not terminate in Constantinople, but merely round the pulley of the haseki sultan to end somewhere in the darkening streets he now treads, how would that change the nature of his mission? Where might the unknown architect of this peculiar conspiracy have placed Perina in its structure? How is it possible?

  However Crivano tries to conceive the plot, it refuses to hold a shape, and remains formless as a gob of spit. What preoccupies him in these speculations about the haseki sultan—in these conjectures about a woman who, so far as he can judge, simply hungers after flat mirrors and intends to see them manufactured by her subjects—are the echoes of his own story he hears in them. A child of the Republic sails the pirate-haunted seas, there to be redirected and transformed. A Christian child bows toward Mecca; who can say what is in that child’s heart? When, after many years, the child encounters a face from home, what recognitions occur? Which are disallowed? Which can be evaded?