Sofia (21 page)

***

“But now, as midday prayers will soon be upon us, we must hurry and finish the business for which Nur Banu Kadin sent me to you in the first place,” the Quince said. “We must perform an engrafting, child.”

The charwoman had no idea how to translate the word into Italian. She interpreted the word with long, detailed explanations and gestures. She even brought Sofia to a grilled window on the second floor. Here they watched a number of gardeners, recognizable by their tall cylindrical hats of red felt, busy in a potting section of the grounds. Among heaps of manure and cabbage seedlings, the gardeners moved with stubby, curved blades and balls of string along a row of saplings. All Sofia could learn was that they managed to put new twigs into young trunks where there were none before.

“This is engrafting,” the charwoman said.

“But surely you don’t mean to put a—a new limb on me!” Sofia exclaimed.

Everyone laughed at the preposterousness of the idea, Sofia a little more hesitant than the other two. Who knew what the Turks had in mind to do to her? They were barbarians, after all. She was in their power; her search for power had brought her to this and there was no doubt power could be dangerous as well as attractive.

“Let me try another tack.” The charwoman gestured to the Quince and then turned to speak her own words to Sofia, for the first time that day and with an earnestness Baffo’s daughter could not ignore.

“When I was a child,” the charwoman began, “a long, long time ago, I lived, like you, among an ignorant people.”

Sofia did not believe the Serene Republic to be a den of ignorance and the thought must have registered in her face, for Faridah’s earnestness increased until it brought tears to her eyes.

“No, no. They were ignorant. Ignorant of a great means of health that merciful Allah has vouchsafed to the people who worship Him. If this were not true, would I wear the scars of ignorance in my face?”

“Smallpox?”

“Yes. I had it as a child. Most of my family died of it and I was left, left like this. Ruined.”

“I’m sorry.” Sofia didn’t know what else to say to such intensity and pain.

“You have never had smallpox.”

“No, thank San Rocco.”

“Thank Allah, not a saint. It reads in your beautiful face.”

“I have been lucky.”

“Allah has preserved you. Until you could come to know the Quince. The Quince, in her wisdom, will engraft a bit of smallpox into you.”

“What? You mean give me smallpox?”

“Yes.”

“Make me sick?”

“Yes, a little.”

“No!”

Sofia looked to the hairy, slightly greenish face with horror. She saw her world on its shaky pillars of good luck crumbling around her into unredeemable ugliness and along with it, powerlessness.

“I’ve no desire to come anywhere near that plague,” she reiterated when she could find more words.

What were these people, jealous? Did they crush any threat to them with such ferocity? Is this how they ruled the world?

“I have been fortunate enough to avoid smallpox until now.” Sofia took a few steps backwards. “I intend to do everything in my power to avoid it in the future.”

“The Quince will make you sick, but only a little sick. After that, you will be immune. Like me.”

“But my face—”

“Yes, some pustules may grow on your face, but they will scab and then fall off without scars. The Quince does this to preserve your health and your beauty, Madonna. Trust her. You don’t want to run any risk of ending up like me. Such beauty is too great a gift of Allah not to put it under His protection. The girls we get, from all over the world. Who knows where they come from, what diseases they bring? All are engrafted when they first arrive, even—no, especially those who are destined for the honor of the Sultan’s presence. They are engrafted to prevent what could only be the worst of disasters among these, the most beautiful women in the world, living so on top of one another and confined as we do.”

Sofia looked from the charwoman to the midwife now in wonder. The Quince had been listening to this tirade of words she couldn’t understand with complacency, her hands folded quietly across the girdle at her waist.

“You—she can do this?” Sofia asked, her voice echoing with awe.

“She can,” Faridah said.

The Quince nodded after her with the same quiet confidence.

“Nur Banu Kadin wants me to have it done?”

“Yes. Please, you must undergo it.”

“I suppose you would force me if I disagreed.”

“We would, but it needn’t be that way. Please. Do not be afraid. For your beauty’s sake.”

“Very well. Very well, I will undergo the—the engrafting ; “

“
Mashallah
! That’s good, Safiye.” The charwoman couldn’t contain herself and reached out to press Sofia’s arm.

“Sofia,” Baffo’s daughter said. “My name’s Sofia. With an
o
.

“No. Safiye,” the charwoman insisted with all the intensity of which her already intense face was capable. “Safiye. It means ‘the fair one.’ And fair you will stay. I promise you, as Allah is Merciful.”

“Come then, to my infirmary,” the midwife said.

She led the way down a hall of a dozen doorways that must all be opened at once to catch a glimpse of trees in their first green haze of spring at the end. Under the trees, as the women made a right turn at the end of the hall, Sofia caught a brief look at the freshly shooting perennials in a carefully tended and well-stocked herb garden.

The bellies of row upon row of Chinese porcelain, Japan-ware, and blue Persian jars leaned in upon the patient from the walls of the narrow infirmary. On a matchingly narrow table were stacks of books, mortars and pestles in three sizes, scales, a filigree stand to hold a small glass bowl over a lamp’s flame.

Sofia couldn’t tell Turkish labeling from the elaborate tendrils that twined about the pharmacopeia, but her nose was assailed by the smells of their contents. Sweet cloves and cinnamon, sharp garlic and bitter gentian. There were the darker odors of moss, clay, and virgins’ blood, as if she’d walked into the very heart of her own pelvis. Animal parts preserved in brine—all slaked with a wash of alcohol. For ever after, the sharp, clean odor of alcohol would return the scene to Sofia’s mind, the scene and the pervading sense of power.

She had seen apothecaries before, of course. There was even a sister in the convent. The Quince’s domain differed on two counts. The first was that any Venetian herbalist, when he wanted to praise a remedy as the best, most powerful of its kind, most fail-proof, even bordering on black magic, would never hesitate to dress it up in adjectives indicating “secret of the East,” “the Muslim’s cure,” “ripe with the wisdom of the most wise Avicenna.” Turks, from Avicenna down, were known to be the most skilled physicians in the world. The wealthiest Western noblemen hired them when they could, and here she was, Sofia Baffo, in the presence of one who treated Eastern nobility. The Quince had no need to point elsewhere for her justification.

The second impressive point was that this was a woman. The best medicine in Venice came from men, for women were never allowed in medical universities, in Padua or Seville. The convent herbalist made it clear—and Father Confessor behind her made it clear as well—that she was only good for the day-to-day comfort of women. Serious ills required male power and a man would certainly be called when they occurred.

There was none of this in the Quince’s air. She was the best money could buy and she knew it. Ironically, a great deal of her confidence came from the harem walls and the close society they created. Here, plainly, even if more serious disease did crop up, a man could never be resorted to.

And now this woman was going to work a miracle and make Sofia impervious to smallpox.

Ever after, when she’d smell alcohol, Sofia would remember the sense of power in that room. A shiver would run down her spine every time she thought of it, remembering having to strip naked in that unheated room. Remembering the Quince’s scrutiny of her. And remembering all that power focused on her unprotected skin. This, for once in her life, was not power she could aspire to. A power of life and death, a power to thwart even the almighty will of God. She shivered again for neither cold nor nakedness.

But she could aspire to make such power subservient to her own.

“Engraft away!” she ordered.

“We usually do this in the fall,” the Quince described as she made her preparations.

Sofia sat and waited with a quilt about her shoulders on a small cot with Faridah translating beside her.

“After the hot weather is past is the best time, but Nur Banu Kadin agreed with me that we were early enough in the season that there will be no complications.”

“
Inshallah
,” Faridah added.

“And that your beauty was too precious a thing to trust to the tender mercies of a summer.”

The Quince went on. “All those to be engrafted—children around seven or eight are our prime subjects, but all the new girls, too. All these we usually take on something of an outing to the Sweet Waters of Europe. It is a diversion. Women ask their friends, ‘Shall we take the children to get smallpox next week?’ much as they may ask them to come for sherbet.”

“I can hardly believe such a thing,” Sofia said, fishing for assurances.

“Well, you wouldn’t. Men don’t know the secret, actually. No male physician could engraft you. The secret is kept among women, and mothers get their sons protected before they leave the harem, before they can remember just what happened to them.”

The Quince had availed herself of a large, sharp needle which she heated over her lamp. In her left hand, she held a walnut shell filled with a yellow, pus-like matter.

“The best smallpox,” the midwife described it. “Sometimes we have to send for it from quite a distance, although the foreign communities in Constantinople are usually able to provide. Sealing it in a shell keeps it from drying out before it is needed. There is cowpox here, too, taken from the udders of cows. It was the observation that maids who milked cows with the pox were immune to the pox themselves that first taught my teachers this method.

“Now, the Greek Christians,” she went on, “when they perform this engrafting, believe one should mark each arm, the breast and the middle of the forehead as a sign of their cross. But as each place I touch with this needle will leave a scar, I prefer to let the forehead alone. And the breast where a lover may rest his head. Let the Christians have their superstition. I will mark four spots instead, one on each hip and on each arm. Believe me, if the master gets so far with you, he will not contain himself for a little dimple in each of these places.”

The Quince eased down the quilt and made a quick jab at Sofia’s right arm. The newest slave flinched, but it was no more painful than a scratch. Then the midwife gathered up as much of the pus as would fit on the end of the needle and smeared it into the blood beading at the wound. The application was a little cold, but it didn’t sting. Faridah helped to cup the place with another walnut half which she bound on with linen strips. They repeated the process on each limb and then Sofia was allowed to get dressed.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

The Quince nodded. “Now we would just let the children romp about if we were on an outing, feed them sweets, weave garlands for their hair. I’m sorry I can’t pamper you with that diversion today. I don’t suppose you’re quite as frisky as an eight-year-old, either, but you are free to go. Your time is your own—and that of the moon—until the mistress comes for your religious instruction.”

“Religious instruction” smacked much the same as it had in the convent. Prayers and scriptures memorized in Arabic were not much different from prayers and scriptures in Latin, although they presented themselves much deeper in the throat. The postures and prostrations had parallels, too. Sofia concerned herself with the meaning to the same degree.

The main difference—and benefit—she found in Islam was that in a harem, unlike the theoretically feminine world of a convent, no bishop or priest would ever come to catechize her. The religious instructress certainly took her duty just as seriously as Sister Seraphina had, but she was much more content with a mindless mimicry. Greek and Armenian girls balked at declaring God to be One and Muhammed his Prophet. They, who clung to their native beliefs with tearful fervor and cared to argue Trinity and Transubstantiation, took much more of that woman’s attention than Sofia, who held her tongue. Of course one recalcitrant girl in the whole convent declaring when pressed (and there was a lot of pressure) that it was all a waste of time did not present quite the challenge of a shipment of a dozen new girls a week from as many different lands and creeds.

Reprieve also came with the fact that, on account of her menses, Sofia was barred from the harem mosque for the whole first week of her stay, for all that it was a shrine exclusively for women to begin with. She was expected to pray on her own, which she never did unless someone was watching, not till the end of her life.

By the time she was required to take her place in the ranks of new girls, her personality, bleeding or no, had made its mark. Everyone had already forgotten that she was a novice and that all eyes should scrutinize her every move. Since prayer and recitation were always performed in groups, Sofia perfected the skill the convent had first taught her of keeping no more than one syllable or posture behind the leader. In this fashion, her dissent—if passive lack of care deserves the name—was never remarked.

But with the end of her period and the dropping of the walnut shells from her limbs of their own accord, Sofia began to feel the limits of her new station. She had impressed everyone there was to impress among the charwomen and frightened new girls who shared her quarters. Already she was their undoubted leader, even over the language barrier. The religious instruction turned quickly into reading and writing at which she studiously remained no more clever than was necessary. Here, too, nothing taxed either mind or soul. But she had yet to see the wonderful Nur Banu Kadin again. Or anyone else of more than menial or spiritual account—which meant no account at all.