Reign of the Favored Women (44 page)

“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 in 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.

“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.

Not only did the fact that she sat behind her screen serve to disembody my lady’s presence, but an allover dimness and light in irregular and deceptive blotches conspired to do so,-too. Her voice seemed to come not from behind the screen particularly but from everywhere at once, to bathe the hearer like the gloom, to be incorporeal and yet very present and very, very tangible all at once. Like the thick fog that sometimes rises off the Danube, it seemed to enter the lungs as if it were water and they a sponge; it entered the brain like wool stuffed a pillow.

And suddenly Ali Pasha knew it would be useless to try and fight this fog with his poor weapons—a sharp appearance and swaggering manners. It would be as useless to fight this as to throw one’s dagger and oneself against a Danubian fog for rising unbidden and misleading his troops. Esmikhan’s voice was the voice of conscience if not epiphany.

“A woman came to see me today,” the voice repeated, having once let us catch our bearings on no ground at all. “I did not remember her, though she had been a serving girl under my stepmother in her youth. Naturally I greeted her as such. She had come to me as the last friend she had in the world. She had no place else to go besides the brothel, being after all a former slave, kin- and defenseless. Of course I said at once that she must stay with me, she and her three children.

“‘But tell me,’ I could not refrain from asking, ‘how is it you come to be in such a pitiful state? My father, the Sultan of the Faithful, surely he did not leave you so. He would be nothing if not a man of honor and no man with a shred of honor would do such a thing.’

“Then she told me. She told me how her husband, the man to whom my father had trusted her honor and care, had been swollen by ambition to marry another and had cast her off without a backwards glance at the ten years she had served him in perfect faithfulness.

“You would have recognized this woman. Pasha, long before I did. She had to spell it out more clearly before I realized—before I could believe—that she was your wife. Pasha, and that I was the one for whom you so carelessly threw her fair face, supple body, and delicate manners away.”

AH Pasha made some movement to protest that the face and manners of a slave could not compete with those of one of the house of Othman. But he knew full well it was too late and did not get far with his protestations. Esmikhan refuted them all quickly anyway.

“No! How can you think to debase the royal blood of Othman with a nature so lacking in honor and devotion as that! I’m sure you will consider yourself fortunate if I do not call for your death—the usual punishment for treason against the throne—and simply refuse the suit of marriage that has been brought to me. Beyond that, I can hardly wish you peace and good day. Pasha. As Allah lives, I pray He may harrow your soul with guilt even a fraction of what it deserves. That should be enough to make you long for hellfire.”

You may be certain Ali Pasha left the palace with her voice licking his heels like flame.

Safiye was furious when she learned what her creature, or so she counted Esmikhan, had done. At first she tried everything from cajolery to cursing to sway the Sultan’s daughter, but my lady, still harboring the divorcee and her abandoned children, resisted with the spirit if not the physical force of a lion. Finally Safiye desisted, realizing that any more discussion on a point of view Esmikhan found so clearly immoral would only serve to lose her this important ally.

In the meantime, Nur Banu had sent her emissaries to Ali Pasha with some tempting offers concerning the Ottoman daughters of her slaves...

“Ali Pasha refused Nur Banu!” Safiye exclaimed, elated, when she learned the news. “He’s refused the old girl. But why? I can’t believe I overestimated him.”

“No,” Esmikhan said with a quiet smile. “I think you underestimated him.” And she took the hand of the divorcee who’d sought her protection and who sat dandling her youngest on the divan next to my lady.

There were three months of waiting. The sham marriage to another man, hired for the purpose. And then at last—-but not one day later than the minimum the law allowed—Ali Pasha and his wife were reunited and with hardly less joy and passion than I have seen between love matches and virgins. Within another three months, the new bride vas with child.

And Ali Pasha, though this business proved to be the end of his ambition, was not totally cut off from all routes to advancement. His wife now had powerful strings to pull in the heart of the imperial harem that she had not had before. The last time I saw the Pasha, I noticed with interest how the bladelike features of his former self had been buried, as it were, in dunes of sand-colored flesh. And though not particularly dashing any longer, one could not say he looked either unbecoming or unhappy.

“What a remarkable mistress you serve” was Ghazanfer’s comment on the matter, and I had to agree with him. But he went further. “In many another time and place—less civilized, we might say—a woman who had been so used for no other fault than coming in the way of her man’s ambition or his lust, she would have had no recourse. Even the lawyers and jurists in such a situation would be swayed either by the man’s wealth or his power, for she had modestly kept herself from all such things. But see, here, that very modesty and, some might say, helplessness won her favor in your lady’s eye and thus helped her simple desires. And, I may add, a just and merciful Heaven’s will as well. That is how the harem with its all-powerful calls of honor upon the less powerful world of men should work. Your lady understands it well and hence carried the day. If only it were so with my lady! She persists in using the tactics of the selamlik, and everything I try to say to her she takes as treason.”