Reign of the Favored Women (24 page)

After a time, when the girl did not return, I thought perhaps I should go look for her. The cool of a balcony beckoned me outside and for a moment I forgot my search, entranced by the vision of the Aya Sophia Mosque just across the way. It was illuminated for the holy month against the black night sky, each of its four minarets twinkling with a thousand little oil lamps. Rising like heat from every home and cottage, bazaar, and dervish lodge were the sounds and warmth of the feast and celebration. They rose and filled my heart and I smiled at the inward peace I felt in my—could I say it?—adopted religion.

Then suddenly, for no reason I can tell, the celebrating seemed to die for a moment and—from clear across the water in Pera it must have been, with no more strength than an echo—there came two or three clangings of a Christian bell. Suddenly I remembered that Ramadhan happened to coincide that year with the Christians’ commemoration of the birth of Jesus. It was the very night. The event had just been announced, however faintly, to the world.

Those few distant bells suddenly recalled to my mind so clearly the Christmases of my childhood. I remembered the eerie skirl that seemed to rise like mist as the peasant folk came down from the mountains in procession with candles and led by their pipers. I remembered the chill, the thrill of nighttime, candlelit boat rides towards the old church on the island of San Giorgio. How, as a child, I had thought the holy season somehow special for me alone because San Giorgio was my saint.

My mouth was filled with a warm sweetness, for although Ramadhan cakes are sweeter than those old cook used to bake for our Christmas, those cakes of my childhood had a flavor all their own. That flavor must have been mixed with the warm taste of firelight and the care of loving arms about me. My back prickled and my eyes grew moist.

It was one of those sacred moments. All religions can create them. We often been aware of the same feeling as Islam creates it: upon seeing the minarets illuminated and several times among the brethren of the dervish order. Such moments are windows through which we catch a glimpse of the Eternal, of what true religion is. In me, however, I realized that Christianity had and will always have the advantage in prying open those windows. Those arms that first hold us, mother’s arms—or, in my case, those of my old nurse—are closer to God than anything we learn later in life. An irrational prejudice, I’ll admit, one never destined to help in the search for Truth. But a very real feeling, nonetheless.

Just as quickly the feeling was gone. A door from the selamlik opened below me and one of the master’s guests slipped into the garden, making it no further than the nearest rose bush before he had to empty his bladder. Then the sounds of Islam in celebration closed over creation once more, losing the divine moment for me. But something lingered to keep me above the most grimy of mundane thoughts presented by the view of the man in the gardens: that we are mere animals, no more.

A throttled sob called my attention to the next balcony. There in the dark I could just make out the very pregnant figure of the little Hungarian. I was going to call out to her cheerily to forget her sorrow and to come into the party again, but something about her stance stifled me with the realization that more than a few tears were at stake here. She was teetering dangerously, intentionally on the edge.

I’ll never know what it was that saved the little Hungarian’s life that night. Surely it wasn’t my presence—I don’t think she ever realized I was there. I cannot help but think she must have heard the distant ring of bells and remembered...I do not know what sort of Christmas Hungarians remember. I only have this impression: deep, all-silencing snow, and in the heart of that bitter cold and dark, warmth and light by a fire.

The little Hungarian collapsed with a fearful sob—on the safe side of the railing. And it was there, just moments later, that Nur Banu found her and caught her in her heavily bangled arms.

“There, there, don’t cry, my little mountain stream,” Nur Banu crooned as if the girl had been an infant. And when, after a time, the sobbing failed somewhat, the crooning turned into a sort of singsong, the words of which were these:

“Have I ever told you, angel? No, I suppose I have not. Of when I was a girl. I don’t tell many. There isn’t much to tell. I left, of course, when I was only four. Paros is the name of the island where I was born. Paros. And when the Turks conquered—” She limited this train of thought to: “Well, my life has never been the same.

“But still I do remember. We had a festival, too, during the winter. A festival called Purim. I don’t remember now what that means or what it was about, Purim. All I remember is that there was a very wicked man—Haman. Oh, how that name still sends shivers up my spine! They would say his name. I didn’t dare say his name with them. The very posts of the house would shake with fear. Grandfather pounding the floor with his cane. Grandmother shaking dried beans in her cooking pot. Brother battering the woodbox with the flat of his little ax. I was so afraid. I thought I should die.

“But there were my mother’s arms. ‘Esther, Esther,’ she crooned.
Esther
, that was my name. She placed on my head a crown made of woven palm. ‘Esther. Esther. Queen.’ And the darkness of Haman vanished. There was calm. And smiling. And sweet food. And finally, wonderfully, sleep, safe sleep to the sounds of ancient, ancient songs with words I do not know. Only the melodies linger. I always thought...I always thought, since that night...”

Here the singsong stammered to a self-conscious halt.

“Lady, what did you think?” the Hungarian had recovered enough to ask.

Nur Banu’s tone was more prosaic now and matter-of-fact. “In my saddest days, when I was sold and hungry, cold and alone, I would always remember that night, that crown. ‘Esther the Queen,’ I remembered, and I knew I was born for higher things. And you see, here I am. I can pin this diadem into your lovely black hair and it is not simple palm but real, emeralds and pearls. No, keep it on, my child. It’s for you. A gift. To remember this evening by as I remember that one so long ago. A queen. My sweet little cloud from a foreign land, rise and be a queen.”

And they did and went back into the festivities.

I have often wondered if the fact that that crown was real made the feeling it could convey to the heart less real in the more important realm of the mystical.

* * *

It was another night not too much later in the same month that I happened to be out in the streets breaking my fast on some sherbet bought of a street vendor. Since sundown he had been turning such a thriving business that he hadn’t had to clink his glasses together once for advertisement. Who should happen to be just behind me in line but Ghazanfer?

We exchanged polite
salaams
and then I asked, formally rather than from real interest, whether there was anything serious that caused him to be out instead of feasting at home.

“I was at the Fatih Mosque,” he explained.

“Come, come, my friend! This is Ramadhan,” I said. “We sit famished in the mosque all day, drowsing to the recitations, trying to find the strength to be interested in the relics which are on display these days and no others. But once the sun sets...”

“I had a vow to fulfill.”

I saw at once that the holiday had made me more jovial than I had meant it to, or than Ghazanfer was able to imbibe at the moment. He bade me good holy days and then went on his way. It was only afterwards that I realized what events lay behind the brief lines he had given me. I remembered then that he had made a vow to donate enough money to feed all the children of the orphanage associated with the Fatih Mosque for a year should his mistress be safely delivered.

Safiye had had her baby, then. And since I hadn’t heard the cannon boom from the fortress except to greet sunset, I knew it was a girl, and the fusiliers would put off announcement of the humiliating fact with three blasts until the morrow.

Safiye had paid the doctor a lesser price—but Ghazanfer had paid Allah all. The child’s name was set in the harem book as Fatima. Another simple, pious name. I guessed who’d had a hand in that naming.

Safiye’s face was not as black with shame as one might have expected. I noticed this at once the next time I saw her. It was the final feast of the holy month, and we’d been invited to spend it at the palace.

But why should she be downcast? Her Mitra was also carrying the Sultan’s child, and with the Venetian doctor to oversee the pregnancy from the beginning, it was sure to be male. Mitra was in such favor that, despite her condition, Murad insisted that she spend every night of the holy month with him. She had so enlivened his interest in the arts that when she was not in the presence, it was his old poets and musicians he called for, no other girl.

Even on the twenty-seventh night, the Night of Power, Mitra had been at his side, reciting in her sweet Persian singsong. Most men refrain from visiting their harems on this most holy night of the year. This is the night when Allah took all creation in His Hand, gave them their fates, and then demanded, “Who is your Lord?” To which we are all said to have replied, “Thou art, O Lord.” A visit to the harem might, I suppose, make some men give divinity a different answer.

To the Sultan, however, this sober prohibition does not extend. Should he sire a child on this night, it is seen as one destined to be very powerful indeed.

“So even though we knew already that Allah had filled her womb, we were very thrilled and flattered by Murad’s choice,” Safiye explained. Mitra had been returned to the harem now and Safiye sat holding the girl’s hand and speaking as if for both.

Safiye, dressed in lush ruby reds set with golds, riveted the eye with her beauty. She had already regained her former willowy figure: No one would ever guess she was the mother of three—and the little dead prince besides.

Mitra herself did not look so well, although in the glare of her mistress few would notice. Pregnancy excuses one from the rigors of the fast, still I could see that the month of sleepless nights had not been easy on her. And Mitra wept outright when the traditional roast lamb was brought in. Her memories of previous lambs included the encirclement of her mother’s arms.

And I could not help but think that, even though her new Fatima was only a girl, Safiye was missing out on a great claim to power by allowing a nurse’s arms to hold the babe at that time instead of her own.

I was not present, being safe in Sokolli Pasha’s palace with my ladies at the time. But the events were discussed so often over the next weeks that I might have been and can reconstruct the story well.

The Quince had fallen asleep over her water pipe. Most remembered the old midwife as one who understood and controlled the workings of things too well to have to resort to hysterics. Fussiness or a sharp bite of sarcasm were her old methods of dealing with life’s difficulties. So when she woke up screaming, it curdled the blood. Such a sound could only be imagined coming from unearthly realms of ghosts and jinn. Or from the flaming pits of the damned.

“Babies!” was the first coherent word the Fig, who came running with rose water and valerian, could make out.

Then, “Their insides all bled out.” As she had done on that day in the presence of my little lady and me.

When the Quince had recovered herself somewhat, the Fig adjured her to tell what horrors she had dreamed. But the old midwife pursed her lips tighter than ever, turned green, and would not. She would not tell even when the nightmare came again. Again, and then when she dared not go to sleep days on end because it came every time she closed her eyes.

Thinking the drug was the cause, Nur Banu and the Fig tried to keep the pipe from the old woman. But they could not keep her from her pharmacopoeia because her skills were needed, now more than ever as the Hungarian came near to her time. If anything, the prohibition served to intensify the Quince’s intoxication.

And the Hungarian came to her time, but without the Quince. At first the old woman said to her assistant, “Well, see how she does for a while and call me if you need me.”

At the end of the first day the Quince sent potions to help, but no one was ever quite sure they were administered correctly. At the end of the third day, Nur Banu had her eunuchs drag the midwife to the birthing room by force.

The Quince, it was clear from her staggering and stammering, had fortified herself—not the laboring woman—heavily with drugs. But to no avail. As soon as the midwife stepped over the line of gunpowder into the smell and warmth of the birthing room, the dream came to her awake. Her screams evidenced more torture than those of the Hungarian.

In sore straits now Nur Banu sent for Safiye’s midwife. The closest assistance turned out to be the Venetian doctor. She let him come, but it was too late. Or it was too early, and he was the final cause. What happened depended on whom one asked. The Hungarian died and her child as well, that is all we know for sure. The girl, like her country, could no longer bear the battles of empires being fought over her small body and what it contained.

Some shook their heads and said, “Four days of labor and then death. But think if she had lived, she and her son. What ravage then…? Allah favored her with mercy.”

Nur Banu lost her Hungarian, but Safiye lost her doctor; he was not trusted in the harem again on anybody’s word.

As for the Quince, her mind slowly stewed to the viscous consistency one gets if one cooks the seeds of that fruit with a bit of pulp for a long time. I don’t think she spoke another coherent word, although her babble was perpetual. I never saw her again, for as I had already noted, she had developed a particular aversion to my mistress. The mere report that Esmikhan was visiting sent the older woman in a frenzy to the highest parapet or darkest cellar of the harem. Sometimes we would hear her, the sharp, inhuman barks of a tortured soul, and they sent shivers down our backs.

The Quince lived on in this state for years. Indeed, I don’t remember her death at all. She simply faded away, mind first, into the world that tormented her so, the voice lingering on last of all, finally coming only at haunting times. One came to think of it as no more than the sound of rain on the harem’s copper roof.