“Eunuch or slave girl?” George asked.
“Slave
lady,
man. Slave woman, slave
grandma.
It was that old broad, Fatima.”
Mills hadn’t told Bufesqueu about his experience in the harem. He didn’t want to be needled. In
his
place, Bufesqueu would have said, if he’d had
his
opportunities …
“Fatima?” George said. “Wasn’t she surprised to find out that, you know, you still have your balls?”
“The way
I
went at her? I think she was surprised I only have two.”
“She didn’t want to show you off?”
“Show me off? Maybe. If the whore could charge money.”
“Hey,” Bufesqueu said a day or two later, “I may have to borrow more of that bribegold.”
Which he was willing to let him have though Bufesqueu could not have said what use Fatima could have made of money.
They lived, all of them, in a closed shop. Only the Chief Eunuch was free to come and go as he pleased. Even the guards at the gate, though Bufesqueu and Mills were so preoccupied at the time neither had noticed, were shackled and attached by long chains to the gates they guarded. A harem girl might leave the grounds of the seraglio but only to go to the Sultan’s bedroom and she had to be escorted there by a eunuch through a passageway that led from the Valide Sultan’s house to Yildiz Palace.
So not only was it a closed shop, it was also a sealed one.
Though they had the run of the grounds now and could go almost anywhere they wished. Mills liked to hang about the extensive stables. With the Chief Eunuch’s permission he was sometimes allowed to exercise the horses and, on occasion, even to hitch them up to the elaborate, exotic vehicles he had only read about until now.
But with no one actually to drive for, soon even this diversion lost its appeal. As everything did. He no longer dreamed his cabby dreams, no longer often thought about England. If he regretted anything it was that he might not live to get a son to whom, like the Millses before him, he could tell the story he continued to live and even, in private now, to rehearse. Bufesqueu he had told it to long ago, telling him all, telling him everything, bringing his tale up to the time their lives had begun to coalesce and willing to go over even that part of their history, if only for practice, had only Bufesqueu been willing to listen, Mills reserving to himself only that part of the story which dealt with his trip to the harem. He realized now it was not the fear of a scolding that caused him to withhold this incident from his friend—the man had taught him much, saved his life, George owed him; of
course
he could have his bribegold—but that if it ever got out, and too many people already knew—Mills dreaded another summons to the interdicted harem—he would be castrated. Then, even if he lived, there could be no son. His tale would go untold. And what a tale, he thought. Kings and sultans had shaken him down, royal princesses, slaves and high officers had. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Except his bachelorhood. Except his sonlessness.
For his part Bufesqueu continued to go to Fatima, returning one night and tossing the remains of George’s double portion of bribegold down on the cot.
“What’s the matter?” Mills asked.
“I’m saving you money,” Bufesqueu said. “If I ask for more bribegold don’t give it to me.”
“What’s the matter, what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t mind that she was old,” Bufesqueu said bitterly. “I didn’t even mind that I was paying for it. But I’ll be damned if I’ll pay out any more of your hard-earned blood money bribegold to some old whore who’s too fat to fuck back.”
“Fatima?”
“You could hitch her to one of those carriages you get such a kick out of. Though I don’t think she’d move.”
“Fatima?”
“You said it, Fatima.
Fat-
ima
.
”
“Fatima?”
“What’s wrong with you, Mills? They run out of nuts to cut on around here? They started on eardrums now too?”
“Fatima’s not fat.”
“No? You seen her lately? You could rupture yourself holding her hand.”
“Where do you get it?” George demanded. “The harem girls?”
“Get what? Take your hands off me. What do you think this is?”
“Where do you get it, Fatima? Who sells you the
halvah?
”
When he threatened to report her activities to the Kislar Agha, she confessed. Her supplier, she said, was Guzo Sanbanna.
“We could borrow equipment,” Mills told his friend. “We could go down to that field and play soccer.”
“No thanks, George, I don’t think so. But you go if you want to.” He was biting a fingernail, examining it.
“Suffi ben Packka’s in hospital again. Maybe we ought to pay him a visit.” Suffi was a eunuch whose wound had never healed properly.
“Jeez,” Bufesqueu said, “the mood I’m in, the way I feel, I don’t think I could cheer anyone up, even a eunuch.”
Bufesqueu had become melancholic since he’d stopped seeing Fatima. He was nervous and listless at once.
“I could teach you to drive a team,” Mills offered. “Hey, why don’t I do that?”
“Thanks, George. I appreciate what you’re trying to do but I don’t think I could concentrate. Really, George, thanks.”
“It’s just that, you know, you shouldn’t wallow.”
“I’ll be all right,” Bufesqueu said. “I’m sorry I’m such bad company. I’ve got time on my hands.” He forced a thin smile.
“Listen,” Mills said, “I’ve still got the rest of my bribegold left. Maybe you should take it and, well, you know.”
“No,” Bufesqueu said. “Out of the question.”
“No, not with Fatima. Somebody else.”
“Who, man? Don’t you think I tried? It’s absolutely no go.” He pulled a hair from his head and, using it like floss, tried to run it through his teeth. He set it down and looked at George. “You know,” he said, “when she began to blow up like that, I thought maybe I’d knocked her up.”
George nodded solemnly.
“But she’s too old,” Bufesqueu said.
Mills held his chin sagely.
“I even asked if she’d missed her period.”
And raised an eyebrow.
“You know what she said?”
He shook his head.
“She hasn’t had a period in five years.”
“Well,” Mills said, “that lets you off.”
“It was the fucking,” Bufesqueu said. “I fucked her to fat.”
“We could drop in on a class,” Mills said. “You know, not take it for credit. I don’t think they’d object to auditors.”
“I have this high-caloric jism. Fatima must have told them. That’s why they tell me I can shove my bribegold.”
“All right,” Mills said and watched his old pal, the flashy Janissary who had taken Constantinople and was eating his heart out, destroying himself. And he told him about the harem.
Bufesqueu was in seventh heaven again, happier than Mills had ever seen him. He raved about the girls and invited George along whenever he went for a visit.
“I can’t,” Mills said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Listen,” Bufesqueu said, “nothing
happens.
They’re running some Arabian Nights scam over there. But like I always say, ‘In the country of the blind.’ You’ve just got to be patient is all. They’ll come round. But they’re really charming. A little heavy, but what the hell, right? They ask for you all the time, you know. You must really have charmed them. They still talk about that hard-on you had.”
“He told us to watch our step. It’s too dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I think? This harem thing is an old business. I mean it’s really an ancient institution. Who’d think that in a civilized world such things could go on? I mean, really George,
eunuchs?
Concubines? Novices? Favorite ladies? I mean
slaves,
for God’s sake! Or even sultans for that matter. I’ll tell you the truth, George, I honestly think it’s had its day. It was all very well when everyone rode around on a flying carpet, but in the nineteenth century? It’s all but finished. They’re all gone soft. All right, individually, individually they’re incorruptible and won’t give me a tumble, but as a group? As a group they’re flawed as old Rome. How much more time can it possibly have? Fifty years? Sixty? These are the final days, George, and more especially the last nights, if you know what I mean. Just like the Janissaries. The last nights of the final days and I don’t want to miss a minute of the outrageousness. I don’t want to miss a second. Come on, Georgie, what do you say?”
“I’ve got a class,” Mills said.
He’d been taking lessons in Court protocol with the Sultan’s bastard children. For aristocrats they seemed surprisingly docile. At first, as he had on the day Lady Givnora had brought him to the harem, Mills stood at the window and listened, but when their teacher saw him she motioned him in and asked his business.
“I have this interest in protocol,” Mills said.
The children giggled. Even their teacher smiled.
“Yes,” George said, “I suppose that’s funny.”
“Well it
is,
” a young man said. “I mean I’m going to be twenty and I’ve been coming to the schoolhouse all my life. You know why? I keep getting these crushes on my teachers. But I’ve never even
been
to Court. I’ve never seen my father.”
“I have,” Mills said quietly, “I’ve seen your father.”
“What, you? You work in the laundry.”
“I was even presented at Court once,” he said.
“You never were,” the young man said.
“Perhaps he’d like to tell us about it, class,” the slave girl said. “Would you? Would you like to tell us about it?”
“So you see,” George said when he’d finished, “if I’d known more protocol I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in today.”
They listened carefully to everything he said and, when he’d done, even asked questions. They wanted to know what the throne room looked like. They were curious about the furniture. They asked him to describe their half brother, Abdulmecid, and to suggest, if he could, what sort of voice their father had. Was it deep? Was it breathy? Could Mills list any mannerisms for them he might have noticed?
At the end of the two hours—even their teacher was taking it all in—he was asked to return.
“Well,” George said, agreeably conscious that he was giving stipulations to the highborn, “only if I get to listen next time.”
He soaked up the protocol lessons.
“Did you know,” he asked Bufesqueu, “that only someone who has been to France may inquire after the Sultan’s health?”
“Oh,” Bufesqueu said, “why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” George admitted, “it’s tradition and it goes back thirteen hundred years.”
“You know more than any of them, Mills,” Bufesqueu told him once. “You’re the one who ought to teach that course.”
George shrugged deprecatingly.
“No, you should.”
“It’s not my place,” he said shyly.
Though it was probably true. The school he’d attended that first day was not the only one in the seraglio. He went to all of them. Some teachers were better than others but each had something to teach him. He absorbed it all.
He learned other things too. About the Sultan’s strange, sluggish, unacknowledged children. Evrevour, the little boy he’d heard that first day he’d passed the schoolhouse, had become a sort of friend.
“I have seventy-four half brothers,” Evrevour told him. “I have eighty-one half sisters. You think it’d be fun, so many children.”
“It isn’t?”
“We have to be very careful about the incest,” Evrevour said.
“They’re burned out on birthday cake,” Mills told Bufesqueu.
“You ought to hang out with me in the harem, George,” Bufesqueu said.
“Too dangerous.”
“That’s the thing. It really isn’t.”
“He told us himself.”
“The Kislar Agha? He’s a pussycat. You should get to know him. Sometimes he comes to the salons.”
“The Kislar Agha does? Salons?”
“Salons, teas, open house. I don’t know what you’d call them exactly, but sure, he’s there. Lots of the eunuchs are. And I’ll tell you something else, George. They’re not bad fellows. They’ve got some great stories to tell. There’s marvelous talk.”
Mills thought his friend was under a spell, a kind of enchantment. He thought they all were. When he saw them in the harem—he agreed to go when a eunuch brought Ali Hakali’s invitation to him personally in the laundry—they, the men as well as the women, seemed immensely sociable, hugely cheerful, terribly gay. He did not see the Kislar Agha.
“Oh, there you are, Mills,” Bufesqueu said, rising up off his cushion like a host when he spotted George. “Perhaps you can settle a little argument for us.”
“It isn’t an argument, Tedor. We weren’t arguing,” a eunuch Mills didn’t recognize said.
“It’s about the female slaves,” Bufesqueu said. “Qum el Asel contends they’re actually improved by servitude while I hold that whatever civilizing effects their condition provides, is motivated by the universal hope of getting on, being noticed by their mistresses, et cetera. It’s merely public relations, a sort of show business, a means to an end rather than the end itself.”
“Oh please, Tedor,” Qum el Asel said. “Ends? Means? Mean you to end so meanly, man?” He looked at the harem women and George followed his glance. They batted their eyelashes, silently fluttering their gauzy veils with their tiny poutlike breaths. “I
mean,
” and he looked at them again before he continued, “toward what end should any discussion strive? Fact,
I
should say.
“All right, what
are
the facts? You take a girl out of the jungle—I know, I know, many of these girls are as white as you are, Tedor—out of her
village
then, whatever tiny patch of cultivated wide spot in the road—all right, I
know,
some of these ladies are from no farther off than downtown Constantinople—she’s accustomed to distinguish by the name of ‘home,’ but anyway you
take
her, and, to this point, probably all she’s learned of the observable world is how to prepare a
couscous
or, if she is from that jungle, the local mean sanitation practices for—please forgive me—wiping her behind.
“But what happens? You steal the girl or perhaps buy her from her parents or a surviving brother (and I’ve known of cases, girls right here at Yildiz incidentally, where the seller has actually been a bona fide husband), and introduce her into a totally alien milieu,
say
the Yildiz seraglio, though it could be anywhere really, the British Empire, suburban San Francisco, the Argentinian pampas, and all of a sudden, if she’s assigned to the kitchen say, she’s learning new recipes, preparing alien dishes in alien pots and pans and eating the alien leftovers with an alien cutlery. She’s
learned,
you see, her experience broadened perforce by force itself.