He leapt down from the tomb in a moment, ran this way and that, calling, “My rose! My fountain! Esmikhan!” The mist swallowed his voice at the edge of sight.
I thought I might now be discovered but a step first to one side and then to the other prevented it. And Ferhad Pasha did not look very hard. His search was more a bodily reflex which all along his mind knew was vain.
The mind soon regained control and brought him slowly back to the steps of the tomb. Now he sat limply on the marble and looked long and hard at the basket’s contents. They were all fruit of the end of the present autumn season: a bunch of grapes gone to raisins with a long twig of vine attached, leaves dry and near to dust; an apple, red-cheeked like one sickly but having difficulty breathing; a pomegranate, packed with tears; a quince, the ascetic; almonds still in the husk, tight-lipped and reclusive; and a bouquet of marigold, basil, fenugreek, and forced jasmine. “Petals of the jasmine on fenugreek,” the poet says, “are like tears on a yellow face.”
Ferhad Pasha fingered the various fruits in turn. Their confused covey of meanings exuded but one tenor.
“Oh, Allah,” Ferhad Pasha said when at last he’d made himself understand what he saw. “No! Never, by the All Merciful!” he cried.
He took a handful of the raisins then and bit into them so hard I could hear the seeds crack fi-om where I was. Then he tore into the pomegranate, ate none but left it bleeding over all the rest. At last he made a mad dash for the tree where I hid, and ripping branches from it by the handfuls, he brought them to the basket. The cypress, I remembered, is the symbol for eternity.
But there was nothing more to do than this compounding of symbol on sterile symbol and at last he realized it. In a moment, he had disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.
I waited a breath or two to be sure he’d gone, although I was quite sure he wouldn’t give a backward glance. Then I crept forward and retrieved the basket. It still exuded a heavy smell of bruised basil and marigold steeped in pomegranate when I presented it wordlessly to my mistress. She was sitting not a hundred paces away in another part of the cemetery at the tomb of Rahine, daughter of a famous dervish who died, they said, on her wedding night.
Esmikhan acknowledged me and the altered contents of her basket with the twitch of a weary smile that broke through her tear-stained face.
“Thank Allah,” she said, “I cannot walk, because more than a dozen times I so wanted to...”
Just then a bevy of young girls, chattering maids and grumbling eunuchs arrived at the tomb. Though from all I knew of her history it was difficult to see why, Rahine had become something of a saint to whom girls resorted to pray for husbands. So one in the palace blinked when Esmikhan said she wanted to visit her husband’s grave and we had also thought no passerby would find it odd to see a veiled woman sitting—for hours as it turned out—at Rahine’s. Still, as the innumerable strips of cloth left by the devotees testified, we were lucky she had not been disturbed before now and Esmikhan instantly took my hand to help her up.
“Let’s go,” she said.
But as soon as she began to make her labored progress to where her sedan waited, one of the newly arrived girls ran up.
“Auntie! Aunt Esmikhan, is that you?”
She threw back her veil to let us see: it was Safiye’s daughter Aysha.
Aysha looked more like her mother than anyone else, but she was her mother watered down ten parts to one. Her hair tried to be blond but the sort of grey-brown of dried oak leaves was the best it could manage. Her eyes were neither a rich brown nor yet a blue but something dully, muddily in between. Bright clothes and jewels, bunches of flowers in the hair or on her brea.st were things she had to wear just to compete with the meane.st serving maid around her. On her they always looked tottering and presumptuous.
Aysha’s personality, too, was lackluster, usually mousy, and when it tried to be merry, it generally came out brash and clumsy instead. The girl made just such an attempt now.
“Why, Aunt Esmikhan! Whatever you are doing at Rahine’s tomb? You don’t need to worry about finding a man.”
This discharge, Aysha realized after .she’d said it, was tactless. She tried to cover. “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course you should come here. I ju.st keep thinking anyone over thirty-five must be...” She found all her struggles did nothing but make her sink deeper and deeper, like one floundering in quicksand.
Esmikhan smiled, wearily, hut with indulgence and reached out a hand to rescue the girl. She was, after all, only a child, though growing up seemed to be doing nothing to help the habit of tactlessness.
“So tell me, Aysha,” she asked, “what are you doing here? You don’t need to worry about finding a man, either.”
“Oh, yes I do.”
“But your father has offered you to Ferhad Pasha. What more could any girl want?”
“Oh, but the Agha of the Janissaries is perverse and drags his feet. Why he drags his feet, I don’t know. Allah knows, he’s almost fifty.”
“Perhaps he does it out of consideration of your youth,” Esmikhan said gently. “You aren’t yet ten years old, Allah shield you, after all.”
“But the other Aysha, the Prophet’s favorite, he married her while she was still playing with dolls. I am much more grown-up than that.”
“Indeed. But let me tell you, child, it’s not very jolly being married to an old, old man.”
“No, but Ferhad Pasha is not like your old Sokolli Pasha. Ferhad is still charming and handsome.”
“Yes, yes, he is.”
“Why, Auntie! Are you crying?”
“No, no child. Go on now. Make your visit to the Lady Rahine. And I don’t mean to try and second-guess Allah’s will, but I think it is very likely she may grant you what you wish today.”
“Yes, you are. You are crying! Why, Auntie? Tell me.”
“It’s nothing, child, really. Just...just the inscription over Rahine’s tomb. It made me sad.”
“What does it say?” Aysha squinted at the curved archway. She knew enough to tell there must be writing interwoven with the tendrils of poppies and morning glories there, but she was never very clever at her letters. I suspect her eyes, which appeared muddy from the outside, were muddy to look through, too.
Esmikhan smiled. She had had nearly all day to sit and examine the archway and she recited now without even looking at it the either of the young woman who’d died on her wedding night.
“What is fate?
Before half my desires were fulfilled
I was snatched from the world.
That is fate—But Allah will resurrect.”
The last line caught on the hoarseness in her voice and she tried it again. “Allah will resurrect.”
LIII
Safiye flung herself into the room and onto the divan with heavy snorts of impatience.
“Why, my dear, what’s the matter?” Esmikhan asked.
“It’s that Ferhad Pasha.”
“What’s wrong with him now?
“Here Murad offers him the honor of his own daughter and he hems and haws. By Allah, he’s only a slave after all. He should do as he’s told.”
Esmikhan lowered her head and blushed, but she said nothing.
Safiye took that as an excuse to continue. “Allah, what can I do? If I cannot get Aysha to him, someone in Nur Banu’s camp will go. That man is destined to be Grand Vizier, you mark my words. He’s young enough and clever enough to hold that post for a long, long time. And if she gains control over him...”
“He still won’t marry her?” Esmikhan sat up straight and asked with agitation.
Safiye didn’t bother to confirm or deny the question, but forged ahead with her complaints.
“But he needs a young, strong wife who can give him sons,” Esmikhan said in utter disbelief.
Safiye ignored the statement and continued to rant and rave as she always did when nothing else seemed to work. One subject led to another in her stream of frustrations and she was soon on
another related problem.
“And what am I to do with that AH Pasha? He’s another powerful man who needs a well-placed wife so I can keep track of him.”
“Ah Pasha?”
“Yes, the new governor of Hungary. You know the dangers that go along with such newly conquered lands.”
“Yes. My late husband’s nephew in Buda. Allah save his soul.”
“Well, Ali Pasha has executed the government there quite remarkably. Outgrown that honor, we may say, and is busy looking around for more. He’s as dashing as could be. Why it should be so difficult to get him suitably married, I don’t know.”
“I...I would marry Ali Pasha,” Esmikhan said. “If you think...if you think it would help.”
“Help? Oh, my dear, it would be the most wonderful thing that’s happened around here in ages. He’s a man going somewhere, I tell you. And handsome—But would you really? You know, I’d often thought you must be lonely since Sokolli’s death—Allah favor him—but I never dared...”
“Yes, I’ll marry him,” Esmikhan said again.
One thing Safiye forgot to mention to my lady was that AH Pasha was already married with two sons and a daughter. But it went without saying that for the honor and advancement of marrying into the royal house, he’d divorce her in a minute.
* * *
Ghazanfer Agha was present at the divorce as one of the witnesses—the witness who would carry word of the transaction back to the harem, to let Safiye know that all was clear. Ali Pasha, he informed us, was a man of sharp features, slick and sure of his good looks. His brows, like two black daggers, met at the base of his hook of a nose and that nose thrust down to almost meet the black point of a beard that sheathed a dagger of a chin. He had just returned from the frontier and was lean and brown and hard and healthy from the rigors of a soldier’s life.
“I felt,” Ghazanfer confessed, “like a spark in the tail of a great comet.
As if I should feel myself fortunate to be even remotely associated with such glory.”
Then he described how that glory swept in upon the soon-to-be divorcee.
Having once belonged to the palace harem, the woman had both a natural beauty and a fine cultivation of manners and spirit that had been at least considered material for the Sultan’s bed. When, at twenty-six, she had seen other, younger girls move in to take her place and her hopes, she was given as a favor to this up-and-coming Pasha.
She had still considered herself fortunate and diligently set about founding a life and an orderly harem of her own to be the backbone of this man and his ambition. Love humbly gave way to respect and even a bit of awe in the look with which she met the return of her husband from the front.
Her three children had had their faces scrubbed until they gleamed like polished brass and wore brand-new outfits to welcome their father home. He had been gone so long that the two youngest could not remember him, but the oldest, in spite of all training in manners and decorum, could not resist springing from his ranks at the first sight and shouting, “Father!”
It was the woman who first realized something was wrong. From Ghazanfer, a eunuch, she feared nothing. But the other witness was both a man and a stranger and she had an instinctive fear of such creatures as cats have of dogs. She instantly threw the edge of her veil over her face and began to back towards the door in confusion. She had made some awful miscalculation, she realized, but what it could be escaped her and she floundered on unfirm ground.
“No, wife. Stay. Just a moment,” Ali Pasha said.
She obeyed, but he had not told her to be at ease and she certainly did not take that liberty.
“Gentlemen, witness,” Ali Pasha said, unsheathing a smile from the black of his beard. Then, “Woman, I divorce you.”
The wife staggered as if she’d been struck.
“I divorce you.”
And again, finally, “I divorce you. Be gone from my house and trouble me no more.”
As the blows fell, so had the woman’s veil, from utter astonishment. What sense she had left by the last pronouncement went to the protection of her children: She grabbed the little girl and pressed one side of her head to her breast, the other with both hands, so her daughter might be spared the world-shattering sound of those words.
The woman tried to move her lips. “Why? What have I done? Oh, husband, forgive it, for surely I never meant it. Why, for the love of Allah?” But nothing would come out. After another brief moment of hopeful disbelief, disbelief vanished. Clutching the little girl so tightly now that the mite was whimpering, and with the younger boy at her heels, she fled back into the harem.
The older boy stood still in his exuberance. Surely his worshipped father’s quarrel with his mother could have no effect on him. She was, after all, only a foolish woman. They were men.
But, “Off with you, boy.” Ali Pasha dashed the child’s hopes and sent him to howl in the harem with the rest. “Go stay with your mother. We have grown-up things to discuss now, these gentlemen and I.”
“I do not think that divorce will hold up in a court of law if the facts be known,” Ghazanfer confided to me after he had finished his tale.
“How so?” I asked, for hadn’t he just come from informing Safiye that there was no doubt now that all was legal for her and Esmikhan to proceed with the wedding plans?
“The law requires the presence of two Muslims as witnesses,” he answered my question.
“So?”
“I must confess I’ve never felt less like a Muslim in my life, to have to be a witness to that crime,” he said wistfully. “My lady was so quick to save me from my suffering in the Seven Towers, which Allah would have been pleased to end in death sooner rather than later. I cannot understand how she can now use that very same power of hers to cause suffering I doubt even Paradise can heal.”
Hours after hearing of the match between Ali Pasha and Esmikhan Sultan, Ferhad Pasha finally agreed to marry Aysha, the daughter of Sultan Murad. As soon as due pomp and display allowed, the formal nikah ceremony took place. The actual consummation would be performed sometime later, when the girl was mature, but the nikah was binding in every way and could only be broken from either side with great loss of honor. As the girl in this case was an Ottoman, in fact it couldn’t be broken at all by anything other than death.
Carried along by the momentum of this match, preparations for the nikah and consummation between Esmikhan and Ali Pasha moved on apace. The day before it was scheduled to happen, my lady called me to her and asked if I could arrange an interview for her with the groom. Such a request was rare, but it was not unheard of. It is Islamic law, after all, that the bride must not be married without her consent. A token meeting is always arranged, although granted it usually does not take place until the nikah is moments away from finalization. The bride is then usually too shy or frightened to do more than let her guardians speak for her.
No, if a woman doubts her guardians’ opinions in the matter, she had better see she uses some other means at her disposal to prevent things from getting so far along.
In a case such as this, however, where the woman was a widow, where the all-important maidenhead was not in the scales and where she was of a much higher class than the groom, arrangements could be made without raising too many eyebrows. I told Esmikhan so and promised I would do my best to make them as soon as possible. I had only two reservations.
The first was that my lady’s pale face and agitated manner spoke of something more serious than just a simple concern for compatibility and the chances for conjugal happiness. Second, I wondered why she had suddenly decided to go through me instead of through Safiye and her agents, who had been the only contact with the groom until then.
The greatest delay in bringing about the meeting, however, was caused by the governor of Hungary himself trying to decide which robe to wear to most favorably impress his royal bride.
“Does my lady prefer red or blue?” he asked.
When I told him that she looked best i
n pink or red, knew it, and always chose those colors for herself in spite of what others might prefer, he did not take the suggestion, but complained, “No, not the red. The blue is by far the most lavish with nearly an asper of silver woven into it and so many fine large pearls.”
In the end he opted for ostentation to carry the day rather than any sense of aesthetics. This was my first meeting with the man and I found him to be all that Ghazanfer had described and more. My most difficult task in this new harem, I decided, would be orchestrating the comings and goings of concubines, for a steady stream would be called for to match Ali Pasha’s high opinion of himself.
LIV
“A woman came to see me today,” Esmikhan said to Ah Pasha.
I had been busy serving our guest a tray of five little silver bowls, each with its own tiny spoon and a different jelly or preserve: rose petal, date, apricot, orange, plum, and bright green mint. I noticed he took date—it was the most costly and difficult to make.
I had only half listened to their talk until now. It consisted mostly of Ali Pasha, as carefully as he could without overstepping the bounds of prenuptial modesty, professing the honor he felt by both the proposed marriage and this interview. How beautiful and gracious he knew by all reports this daughter of Selim—Allah favor him—was. She was safely behind the screen so he could say it without a flinch. And he would serve and love her all of his life, with Allah’s favor.
These seven words of my lady were the first either of them had spoken out of formula and her first full sentence all together. But it was more than this that made me suddenly jerk up and stare. As it fell on our ears at this far end of the chamber, her tone held something so cold and vaporous that it sent chills down my spine.
Over the years, Esmikhan’s bulk had grown and come to consume a greater and greater proportion of my concern: How to move it here and there, how to make it comfortable and so on when it was half again as large as my own. With so much concern for the physical, I suppose I tended to forget the spiritual—what she symbolized not only for me, but even more so for men with both feet placed firmly in the material world such as Ali Pasha. The symbol was brought to me suddenly and with a shock, and I could tell it had come to the governor as well.
The Reign of the Favored Women Page 34