Sofia (37 page)

Then I saw that the low, scrubby part of the copse was mulberry. Many of the bushes’ leaves had blown away in the storm, but numerous berries still hung among the tangled branches. They were overripe and black, but a handful in my mouth brought all the sweetness of those last autumn days on the Brenta River lands when I was a lad. My mother, my nurse, the maids, would all be busy packing for the return to Venice for the winter and I was left to wander, find mulberries and eat to my heart’s content until they called for me. They called all together, at once, and frantically at sunset, like a chorus of maenads. “Birichino! Birichino!” My pet name.

When I felt my heart grow discontent with its loss, I comforted it with another handful. At least I can still know the pleasure of mulberries, I thought, and set my mind instead on how the girls could eat these when they awoke. Then we could walk all afternoon. We could make good time in such brisk weather, downhill, even on foot. Certainly nightfall would find us among some humanity.

With such thoughts, I shifted my stance a bit so as not to splatter on breakfast and reached up into my turban for my catheter.

“Abdullah!”

In my start, the catheter dropped from my hand.

“Oh, there you are.”

“My lady.”

“I sensed, even in my sleep, that you had gone, and I was afraid. I—I dreamed that awful brigand was—”

“Yes, lady. I had a nightmare, too.”

“Did you?”

“It’s all right. The brigands are dead and can’t hurt you anymore. And I am just here.”

“Answering nature.”

“Yes.”

“As any man must from time to time.” She smiled, reassured.

“Yes, lady.” The safety of formalities again.

“Excuse me.”

“Go on back to the fire.” My breath smoked like the damp stones. The dampness of the whole world around me was agony on my bladder. “I’ll be back soon.”

The instant she was gone, I dropped to my hands and knees, shuffling wildly through the damp oak leaves, staining my fingers, making them sticky and clumsy with crushed mulberry. The rain showering down on me from the oak twigs seemed to send my brain into my bladder and my pelvis was ready to burst with the strain. I couldn’t find the damned catheter.

“Abdullah? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Go back to the fire.”

“But what are you looking for?” I blurted it: “My catheter. I dropped it—here—somewhere .”

“I don’t know what that is. A catheter.”

“And may you never have to know, lady.”

“But how can I help you look if I don’t know what we’re looking for?”

“I don’t want Your—”

Esmikhan Sultan reeled back from my words as from a physical blow and I regretted my tone as much as I was able to regret anything beyond my own need.

With a deep breath, I said: “It’s a thin brass tube about so long.” I was so full of urgency and dread that my forefingers and thumb shook as I expressed the size between them.

Esmikhan dropped to her hands and knees beside me. “Ustadh, ustadh, slowly, slowly. You move so wildly you’re bound to knock it away from us. Let’s go calmly and slowly and we’ll find it.”

Her plump little hand found mine under the leaves and pressed it until it stopped shaking.

“I...I might have a fever,” I suggested rashly. “The damp and all.”

“No, I don’t think so.” She swept my slipped turban back up out of my eyes with her other hand. What she saw in my face breached reserve with concern. “You mean to say you cannot relieve yourself without this little tube?”

I meant to be noncommittal while I searched under other leaves with my free hand. The truth was I could see better with the turban up where it belonged. I guess she could, too.

“Is this the case with all khuddam?”

“Not all are as... as radically served as I was. If one is younger...”

She pressed my hand again when I couldn’t go on. “Abdullah, we will find it.”

Desperate to change the subject, I asked: “Do you know the wooden Tower of Leander?” When I spoke slowly and deliberately, my hands searched that way, too.

Esmikhan shook her head. She had looped the ends of her veil up and under her cap to keep them out of her face. Her cheeks were flushed with the open air. Her black eyes sparkled with the wind like the last of the rain clinging to the grasses.

“It is in Constantinople. It sits on a lone rock right in the center of the bay where the waters of the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus all meet together, over against the Asian side. I am certain you can see it from your grandfather’s palace and have passed it in your caïque many times. Your grandfather the Sultan likes to draw a chain from this tower across the entire bay and keep either untaxed trade or entire navies out. But there is a story to the tower, above and beyond its practical uses. My uncle told it to me.”

“Tell me the story.”

“It is said that the fair Hero of ancient times lived in that tower and every night her lover Leander, of whom her family disapproved, would swim out across the water to be with her. Just before dawn, he would swim back again.”

“How could he see his way?”

“Hero would light a lamp for him and set it in her window.”

“That’s a sweet story.”

“Not so sweet. One night, a storm blew out the lamp. As the brave Leander floundered without guide, the high waves overcame him and he was drowned.”

“Oh, no.”

“When Hero looked out of her lonely tower with the morning light, she saw her lover’s body washed up on her rock. For grief, she flung herself down from the tower and died.”

“How awful! I liked the story better when it ended earlier.” “But this way is more like real life—it never ends soon enough.”

“Ah, say not so, Abdullah. Not the day after you have rescued me from a fate worse than death.”

“Look for the tower when you cross back into Constantinople. You cannot miss it. I could see it even from Pera, from the high little window, through its bars and over the red-tiled roofs while I suffered my end. And there was nobody to save me from a fate worse than death.”

I meant to stop right there. That was already more than enough to say, in fact. But I found myself speaking with an urgency suddenly more desperate than my physical need.

I told Esmikhan Sultan all about that dark little house beyond Pera, how it was set in the midst of gnarled old olive trees.

“That must have been nice,” my lady exclaimed.

“So no one could hear my screams,” I quickly disabused her. “So no one would come to my rescue.”

I continued. I couldn’t stop myself. “The trees were in bloom and the pollen swelled my eyes shut while I slept. Sometimes sheep wandered through the orchard, shifting boulders in the springtime mist.”

“It was in spring?”

“Yes.”

“A hard time for such a fate.”

“Ramadhan came.”

“Yes, I remember. Most of my life, the holy fast has been in the summer and we haven’t been allowed a sip of water in the heat until after sundown.”

“You know, the first time I heard the cannon from the walls—”

“The cannon that announces the end of the fast every night at sundown?”

“Yes. The first couple times I heard that, I thought, ‘It’s my countrymen. They’ve turned their big guns on Serai Point. They’ve come to rescue me.’

“But they hadn’t. They wouldn’t. And once I thought about it, I decided I didn’t want them to. Not like this. There can be no recue from this fallen state.”

I took a breath and continued: “Then there was the Night of Power, just when I was starting to feel—well, not myself again. I shall never be myself. But—better. A little better. The Night of Power, what irony! When Muhammed was translated to the moon on his fabulous steed—”

“Blessings on Allah’s Prophet.”

“And all the minarets are lit with lamps.”

“Like Hero’s tower. I will always think of that from now on.

“There was such a minaret just over the tops of the olive trees, a low one, a little neighborhood mosque with moss on its tiled roof. Five times a day, the call came, measuring out the time of my torture. I found it a most melancholic sound.”

“Did you?”

“Void of all hope.”

“It must just have been that muezzin.”

“Perhaps. But the birds in the orchard—to torment me, there were lots of birds about their spring rites. And a nightingale, even. I heard a nightingale, just returned from the south. He sang every evening.

“And when the mist cleared, I could see all the way to the water, to Leander’s Tower, from the tiny barred window of my second-story cell. The view was like a painting. The festival, and all that came after it. A painting. Captured. Artificial. Cropped. A painting your religion believes it is presumptuous of mere mortals to make in tortured imitation of Allah’s creation. That painted world, that world of happy, bustling people had nothing to do with me. No more. I would never enter it again.”

Yes, slowly and deliberated was easier.

“They gave me nothing but plain water for a day after my arrival—like a pullet is starved, or a sacrificial goat. To make the cleaning easier. And on the morning of the second day, they brought me a warm posset and I was so hungry that I drank it right off without considering its contents. Only later, with the cramps, the diarrhea, and the terrible unquenchable thirst, did I realize it must have been a special brew. To purge me.”

“Aloe? Autumn crocus? Mandrake? Mustard?”

“All of those, any of those, more besides. Yes, I remember the smell of mustard and garlic, but that may have been to cover the other things and make me think the mess was edible. Anyway, while I was in agonies in the privy, I overheard Salah ad-Din and another man with a high, whiny voice discussing my case. I’d had to stand before them—in my sickness—like Michelangelo’s
David
.’”

“I don’t know what that is,” Esmikhan reminded me.

I had seen the famous Florentine statue in small plaster copies, but of course my lady had not. I began to try to explain it to her, but the notion of nakedness was too offensive to her sensibilities to even imagine trying to capture it in art.

“Well, I certainly didn’t feel as beautiful, as nonchalant as young David,” was the best assurance I finally found for her.

“‘What beautiful lines! What physique!’ said Salah ad-Din, just as if I had been a masterpiece. Heedless of what I felt, he poked and prodded with his bony fingers.” I closed my eyes at the memory. “He poked until I rose in spite of myself. The two of them had a laugh at this and commented how that would be the last time I enjoyed that sensation. This was Allah’s will for me. I don’t think they realized I spoke Turkish this well. I didn’t realize it myself, until I became a subject and it seemed a matter of life and death.

“‘We must drag and crush him so he can still function,’ Salah ad-Din said. Drag and crush. Those were words a client might use when he complained of what had happened to his cargo in transit.

“Salah ad-Din was not complaining. ‘Such reflexes! There’s many a high-born lady will pay top price for a certified eunuch with such looks, such youth, if he can satisfy her without the ill effects.’

“‘But look,’ said the whiner. ‘He’s already got a bit of fuzz. He’s too old. To drag and crush when they are this old is too dangerous.’

“‘You are a skilled artist, my friend.’

“‘There is art and there is foolishness. To drag and crush will kill him.’

“‘Try it.’

“‘I daren’t.’

“‘He’s a strong, sturdy lad.’

“‘I can see that.’

“‘There’s nothing builds them more rugged than a sailor’s life.’

“‘I appreciate that.’

“‘He’ll survive—
inshallah
.’

“‘
Inshallah
, perhaps, but I can’t guarantee it. Maybe one chance in ten.’

“‘It’s a risk I’m willing to take.’

“‘Not I.’

“‘You’ll have your price, by my life, whether he lives or dies.’

“‘What guarantee have I of that?’

“‘My word.’

“‘No, old man. I’ve dealt with Salah ad-Din the Cutter before.’

“‘I’ll give it to you up front.’

“‘Still, the death on my hands—’

“‘What are you squeamish for? You who spent twenty years in the cutting huts of Upper Egypt? You who’d do twenty or thirty little black lads a day? With the heat and the flies to exacerbate things?’

‘I’m not so young anymore.’

“‘Can’t keep down your old man’s gruel?’

“‘I’ve got the hereafter to think about.’

“‘Well, suppose we drag and crush him first and, after a day or two, if it doesn’t look good, we quickly stop the spread of infection with the knives.’

“‘Do it to him twice in other words?’

“‘Only if it’s necessary. To save his life.’

“‘And you’ll pay me up front?’

“‘I’ll give you the purse right now.’

I told Esmikhan how Salah ad-Din went then and made his wife give up the coins she was saving for a new sash. The only girdle she had to her name strained so thin in places you could see the color of her dress through the threads.

“They spoke idly after that, of market gossip. The next soul I saw was Salah ad-Din’s wife, she with the wide girth and thinning sash. She brought me a cup of wine. But because it had a strange smell and because I could tell she hadn’t forgiven me the loss of her coins yet, I decided to dump it out the window. I was asleep when they came for me—sheer boredom, I guess. But I was wide awake and struggling by the time they tried to strap me, naked and splayed, to the table in a windowless hut. The leather straps were black and stiff with blood.

“The second time I broke free of his grasp and managed to kick him, if not in the groin, at least close enough to count, Old Whiny said, ‘Salah, you fool. This fellow’s not drugged.’

“‘Of course he is. He’s strong and resilient, that’s all.’

“Another good kick.

“‘Oooh—! He’s not drugged.’

“‘I had my wife—’

“‘Maybe she drank it herself. Instead of getting her sash. Quick, have her brew more or he’ll break your corroded old straps while we work on him.’

“‘I told you he was strong.
Mashallah
, what a fighter!’ Salah ad-Din said, full of pride, as he hurried off to comply.