“My newly acquired mare!” the dealer was raging, in Farsi, still kicking the slave. “You indescribable wretch!”
“The mischievous horse was wandering, master,” whined the wretch, his arms raised protectively around his head. “I had to follow—”
“The horse wandered
up?
And climbed into a
wagon?
You lie to me as readily as you lie with innocent animals! You execrable pervert!”
“But give me due credit, master,” whimpered the pervert. “Your mare could have gone farther, and been lost. Or I could have gone with her, and escaped.”
“Bismillah, I wish you had! You are an insult to the noble institution of slavery!”
“Then sell me, master,” sniveled the insult. “Foist me onto some unsuspecting purchaser and get me out of your sight.”
“Estag farullah!” the dealer prayed toward Heaven at the top of his voice. “Allah pardon me my sins, I thought I had done just that. These gentlemen might have bought you, abomination, but now they have seen you caught in the act of raping my best mare!”
“Oh, I dispute that accusation, master,” said the abomination, daring to speak with an air of righteous indignation. “I have known much better mares.”
Speechless of words, the dealer clenched his fists and teeth and roared, “Arrrgh!”
Jamshid interrupted this singular colloquy, saying sternly, “Mirza Dealer, I assured the messieurs that you were a trustworthy seller of dependable merchandise.”
“Before Allah, that I am, Wazir! I would not sell, I would not give them this walking pustule! I would not sell him to the harridan wife Awwa of the Devil Shaitan, I swear it, now that I know his true nature. I sincerely apologize to you, messieurs. And so will this creature apologize. You hear me? Apologize for that disgraceful exhibition. Abase yourself! Speak, Nostril!”
“Nostril?”
we all exclaimed.
“It is my name, good masters,” said the slave, unapologetically. “I have other names, but I am most often called Nostril, and for a reason.”
He put a grimy finger to his blob of nose and pushed up the tip of it so we could see that instead of two nostrils he had only one large one. It would have been a sight repulsive enough, but was made more so by the profusion of snotty hair growing out of it.
“A minor punishment I once incurred for an even more minor misdemeanor. But be not prejudiced against me on that account, kind masters. As you can perceive, I am otherwise a distinguished figure of a man, and I have countless virtues besides. I was by profession a seaman, before I fell into slavery, and I have traveled
everywhere,
from my native Sind to the farthermost shores of—”
“Gèsu Marìa Isèpo,” said Uncle Mafìo, marveling. “The man’s tongue is as limber as his middle leg!”
We all stood fascinated and let Nostril babble on. “I would still be traveling, but for my misfortunate seizure by slavers. I was making love to a female shaqàl when the slave-raiders attacked, and you gentlemen doubtless know how a bitch’s mihrab enclasps the loving zab and holds it trapped. So I could not run very fast, with the shaqàl bitch dangling from my front and bouncing and squawling. So I was caught, and my sea career ended and my slave career began. But I say in all modesty that I quickly became a nonpareil slave. You will have remarked that I am now speaking in Sabir, your trade language of the West—and now hearken, auspicious masters, I am speaking in Farsi, the trade language of the East. I am also fluent in my native Sindi, in Pashtun, in Hindi and Panjabi. I speak also a passable Arabic, and can get along in several of the Turki dialects and—”
“Do you never shut up in any of them?” asked my father.
Nostril went on, unheeding. “And I have many more qualities and talents of which I have not begun yet to speak. I am good with horses, as you must have noticed. I grew up with horses and—”
“You just said you were a seaman,” my uncle pointed out.
“That was after I grew up, perspicacious master. I am also an expert with camels. I can cast and divine horoscopes in the Arab manner or the Persian or the Indian. I have refused offers from the most exclusive hammams to hire them my services as a rubber unsurpassed. I can dye gray beards with hinna, or remove wrinkles by applying quicksilver salve. With my single nostril I can play a flute more sweetly than any musician with his mouth. Also, employing that orifice in a certain other fashion—”
In unison, my father and uncle and the wazir severally exclaimed:
“Dio me varda!” and
“This man would disgust a maggot!” and
“Remove him, Mirza Dealer! He is a blot on Baghdad! Stake him out somewhere for the vultures!”
“I hear and obey, Wazir,” said the dealer. “After I have shown you some other wares, perhaps?”
“It is late,” said Jamshid, instead of what he might have said about the dealer and his wares. “We are expected back at the palace. Come, messieurs. There is always tomorrow.”
“And tomorrow will be a cleaner day,” said the dealer, glaring vengefully at the slave.
So we left the slave pen and the bazàr and wended our way through the streets and garden squares. We were nearly back at the palace before Uncle Mafìo thought to remark:
“You know? That despicable scoundrel Nostril never
did
apologize.”
AGAIN we had our servants dress us in our best new raiment, and again we joined the Shah Zaman for the evening meal, and again it was a delicious repast, again excepting the Shiraz wine. I remember that the concluding course was a confection of sheriye, which are a sort of pasta ribbons like our fetucine, these cooked in cream with almonds and pistachios and tiny slivers of gold and silver foil so very thin and dainty that they were to be eaten along with the rest of the sweet.
While we dined, the Shah told us that his Royal First Daughter, the Shahzrad Magas, had asked his permission, and he had given it, to act as my companion and guide, to show me the sights of the city and its environs—with of course the additional company of a lady chaperon—as long as I should be in Baghdad. My father gave me a sidelong glance, but thanked the Shah for his and the Princess’s kindness. My father further declared that, since I would obviously be in good hands, it would be unnecessary to buy a slave to look after me. So he would head southward the very next morning toward Hormuz, and Mafìo toward Basra.
I saw them off at dawn, each of them riding away in the company of a palace guard assigned by the Shah to be their servants and protectors on the journey. Then I went to the palace garden, where the Shahzrad Magas waited, again with her grandmother discreetly shadowing, to give me my first day of sightseeing under her tutelage. I made her a very formal greeting of salaam, and said nothing of what else she had hinted at giving me, and neither did she speak of it for a while.
“Dawn is a good time to see our palace masjid,” she said, and escorted me to that temple of worship, where she bade me admire the exterior of it, which was admirable indeed. The immense dome was covered with a mosaic of blue and silver tiles and topped with a golden knob, all shining in the sunrise. The manaret spire was like an elaborate giant candlestick, richly chased and engraved and inlaid with glowing gemstones.
At that moment I formed a private surmise, and I would speak of it here.
I already knew that Muslim men are bidden to keep their women sequestered and useless and mute and veiled from all eyes—in pardah, as the Persians call that lifelong suppression of their females. I knew that, by decree of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran he wrote, a woman is merely one of a man’s chattels, like his sword or his goats or his wardrobe, and she differs only in being the one of his chattels with which he occasionally couples, and that with the sole purpose of siring children, and those valued only when they are male, like him. The majority of devout Muslims, men and women alike, must not speak of sexual relations between them, or even the relation of mutual companionship, though a man might be leeringly frank about his relations with other men.
But I decided, on that morning when I gazed at the palace masjid, that Islam’s strictures against the normal expression of normal sexuality has not been able to stifle all expression of it. Look at any masjid and you will see each dome copied from the female human breast, its aroused nipple erect to the sky, and in each manaret a representation of the male organ, likewise joyously erect. I might be mistaken in discerning those similarities, but I do not think so. The Quran has decreed inequality between men and women. It has made indecent and unmentionable the natural relation between them, and distorted it most shamefully. But Islam’s own temples bravely declare that the Prophet was wrong, and that Allah made man and woman to cleave to each other and to be of one flesh.
The Princess and I went inside the masjid’s wonderfully high and broad central chamber, and it was beautifully decorated, though of course entirely with patterns, not pictures or statues. The walls were covered with mosaic designs made of blue lapis lazura alternating with white marble, so the chamber was a soft and restful pale-blue place.
Just as there are no images in Muslim temples, there also are no altars, no priests, no musicians or choristers, no apparatus of the ceremonial, like censers and fonts and candelabra. There are no masses or communions or other such rites, and a Muslim congregation observes only one ritual rule: in praying, they all prostrate themselves in the direction of the holy city Mecca, birthplace of their Prophet Muhammad. Since Mecca lies southwest of Baghdad, that masjid’s farther wall was to the southwest, and in the center of it was a shallow niche, a little taller than a man, also tiled blue and white.
“That is the mihrab,” said Princess Moth. “Though Islam has no priests, we are sometimes addressed by a visiting wise man. Perhaps an imam, one whose deep study of the Quran has made him an authority on its spiritual tenets. Or a mufti, who is similarly an expert on the temporal laws laid down by the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him). Or a hajji, one who has made the long hajj pilgrimage to Holy Mecca. And to lead our devotions, the wise man takes position yonder in the mihrab.”
I said, “I thought the word mihrab meant—” and then I stopped, and the Princess smiled naughtily at me.
I was about to say that I had thought the word mihrab meant a woman’s most private part, what a Venetian girl had once vulgarly called her pota, and a Venetian lady had more fastidiously called her mona. But then I took notice of the shape of that mihrab niche in the masjid wall. It was shaped exactly like a woman’s genital orifice, slightly oval in outline and narrowing at the top to close in a pointed arch. I have been inside many another masjid, and in every one that niche is so shaped. I believe it to be an additional corroboration of my theory that human sexuality has influenced Islamic architecture. Of course I do not know—and I doubt that any Muslim knows—which use of the word mihrab came first: the ecclesiastical or the bawdy.
“And there,” said Princess Moth, pointing upward, “are the windows which make the sun tell the passing days.”
Sure enough, there were openings carefully spaced about the upper periphery of the dome, and the new-risen sun was sending a beam across to the dome’s opposite inner side, where there were inset slabs with Arabic writings entwined in their mosaics. The Princess read aloud the words where the beam rested. According to that evidence, the present day was, in the Muslim reckoning, the third day of the month Jumada Second in the 670th year of Muhammad’s Hijra, or, in the Persian calendar, the 199th year of the Jalali Era. Then Princess Moth and I together, with much muttering and counting on our fingers, did the calculations necessary to convert the date to the Christian reckoning.
“Today is the twentieth of the month September!” I exclaimed. “It is my birthday!”
She congratulated me and said, “You Christians sometimes are given gifts on your birthdays, are you not, as we are?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Then I will give you a gift this very night, if you are brave enough to run some risk in receiving it. I will give you a night of zina.”
“What is zina?” I asked, though I suspected I knew.
“It is illicit intercourse between a man and a woman. It is haram, which means forbidden. If you are to receive the gift, I must sneak you into my chamber in the anderun of the palace women, which is also haram.”
“I will brave any risk!” I cried wholeheartedly. Then I thought of something. “But … excuse me for asking, Princess Moth. But I have been informed that Muslim women are somehow deprived of—of their enthusiasm for zina. I have been told that they are, well, somehow circumcised, though I cannot imagine how.”
“Oh, yes, tabzir,” she said casually. “That is done to the general run of women, yes, when they are infants. But not to any infants of royal blood, or any who could in future become the wives or concubines of a royal court. It was certainly not done to me.”
“I am happy for you,” I said, and meant it. “But what is done to those unfortunate females? What
is
tabzir?”
“Let me show you,” she said.
I was startled, expecting her to undress, right then and there, so I made a cautionary gesture at the lurking grandmother. But Moth only grinned at me and stepped to the preacher’s niche in the masjid wall, saying, “Are you much acquainted with the anatomy of a female person? Then you know that here”—she pointed at the top of the arch—“toward the front of her mihrab opening, a woman has a tender buttonlike protrusion. It is called the zambur.”
“Ah,” I said, enlightened at last. “In Venice it is called the lumaghèta.” I tried to sound as clinical as a physician, but I know I blushed as I spoke.
“The exact position of the zambur may vary slightly in different women,” Moth went on, herself unblushingly clinical. “And the size of it may vary considerably. My own zambur is commendably large, and in arousal it extends to the length of my little finger’s first joint.”
Just the thought of it made
me
arouse and extend. Since the grandmother was present, I was again grateful for my voluminous nether garments.
The Princess blithely continued, “So I am much in demand by the other women of the anderun, because my zambur can service them almost as well as a man’s zab. And women’s play is halal, which means allowable, not haram.”
And if my face had been pink before, it must have been maroon by now. But if Princess Moth noticed, it did not deter her.
“In every woman, that is her most sensitive place, the very nub of her sexual excitability. Without the arousal of her zambur, she is unresponsive in the sexual embrace. And lacking any enjoyment of that act, she does not yearn for it. That of course is the reason for the tabzir—the circumcision, as you called it. In a grown woman, until she is very much aroused, the zambur is modestly hidden between the closed lips of her mihrab. But in an infant female, that zambur protrudes beyond the little baby lips. An attending hakim can very easily snip it off with just a scissors.”
“Dear God!” I exclaimed, my own arousal going instantly limp from horror. “That is not circumcision. That is the making of a female eunuch!”
“Very like it,” she agreed, as if it were not horrible at all. “The child grows up to be a woman virtuously cold and devoid of sexual response, or even any desire for it. The perfect Muslim wife.”
“Perfect?! What husband would want such a wife?”
“A Muslim husband,” she said simply. “That wife will never commit adultery and make him a cuckold. She is incapable of contemplating an act of zina, or anything else haram. She will not even tease her husband to anger by flirting with another man. If she correctly keeps pardah, she will never even
see
another man—until she gives birth to a man-child. You understand, tabzir does not hamper her function of maternity. She can become a mother, and in that she is superior to a eunuch, who cannot become a father.”
“Even so, it is a ghastly fate for a woman.”
“It is the fate decreed by the Prophet (may blessing and peace be upon him). Nevertheless, I am thankful that we upper classes are exempted from many such inconveniences visited upon the common folk. Now, about your birthday gift, young Mirza Marco …”
“I wish it was already night,” I said, glancing up at the slow-creeping sunbeam. “This will be the longest birthday of my life, waiting for night and zina with you.”
“Oh, not with
me!”
“What?”
She giggled. “Well, not exactly with me.”
Bewildered, I said again, “What?”
“You distracted me, Marco, asking about the tabzir, so I did not explain the gift I am giving you. Before I explain, you must bear in mind that I am a virgin.”
I started pettishly to say, “You have not been talking like—” but she laid a finger across my lips.
“True, I am not tabzir and I am not cold and perhaps you would call me not entirely virtuous, since I am inviting you to do something haram. It is true, too, that I have a most charming zambur, and I dearly love to exercise it, but only in ways halal which will not diminish my virginity. In addition to my zambur, you see, I have
all
my parts, including my sangar. That maiden membrane has not been breached, and never will be until I wed some royal Prince. It must not be breached, or no Prince would have me. I should be lucky if I were not beheaded for letting myself be despoiled. No, Marco, do not even dream of consummating the zina with me.”
“I am confused, Princess Moth. You distinctly said you would sneak me into your chamber … .”
“And so I shall. And I shall remain with you there to assist you in zina with my sister.”
“With your
sister?!”
“Hush! The old grandmother is deaf, but sometimes she can read simple words from the lips. Now keep silent and listen. My father has many wives, so I have many sisters. One of them is amenable to zina. In fact, she can never get enough of it. And it is she who will be your birthday gift.”
“But if she is also a royal Princess, why is her virginity not equally—?”
“I said keep silent. Yes, she is as royal as I, but there is a reason why she does not treasure maidenhood as I do. You will know everything tonight. But until tonight I will say no more, and if you pester me with questions I will rescind the gift. Now, Marco, let us enjoy the day. Let me command a coachman to take us for a ride about the city.”