The bazàr was also shiny and glittering and coruscating with precious metals and gems and jewelry. But of all the treasures for sale there, I was most taken with a particular sort. There was a merchant who dealt exclusively in sets of a certain board game. In Venice it is unimaginatively called the Game of Squares, and it is played with cheap pieces carved of ordinary woods. In Persia that game is called the War of the Shahi, and the playing sets are works of art, priced beyond the reach of all but a real Shah or someone of equal wealth. A typical board offered for sale by that Baghdad merchant was of alternate ebony and ivory squares, expensive all by itself. The pieces on one side of it—the Shah and his General, the two elephants, the two horsemen, the two rukhi warriors and the eight peyadeh foot soldiers—were made of gem-encrusted gold, the sixteen facing pieces across the board being of gem-encrusted silver. The price asked for that set I cannot remember, but it was staggering. He had other Shahi sets variously fashioned of porcelain and jade and rare woods and pure crystal, and all of those pieces were sculptured as exquisitely as if they had been miniature statues of living monarchs and generals and their men at arms.
There were merchants of livestock—of horses and ponies and asses and camels, of course, but also of other beasts. Some of them I had known only by repute and never seen before that day, such as a big and shaggy bear, which I thought resembled my Uncle Mafìo; a delicate kind of deer called a qazèl, which people bought to grace their gardens; and a yellow wild dog called a shaqàl, which a hunter could tame and train to stop and kill a charging boar. (A Persian hunter will go alone and with only a knife to challenge a savage lion, but he is timid of meeting a wild pig. Since a Muslim recoils even from speaking of pig meat, he would deem it a death horrific beyond imagination if he should die at the tusks of a boar.) Also in the livestock market was the shuturmurq, which means “camel-bird,” and it certainly did look like a mongrel offspring of those two different creatures. The camel-bird has the body and feathers and beak of a giant goose, but its neck is unfeathered and long, like a camel’s, and its two legs are ungainly long, like a camel’s four, and its splayed feet are as big as a camel’s pads, and it can no more fly than a camel can. Jamshid said the shuturmurq was caught and kept for the one pretty thing it can supply: the billowy plumes it grows on its rump. There were also apes for sale, of the sort which uncouth seamen sometimes bring to Venice, where they are called simiazze: those apes as big and ugly as Ethiope children. Jamshid called that animal nedjis, which means “unspeakably unclean,” but he did not tell me why it was so named or why anyone, even a seaman, would buy such a thing.
In the bazàr were many fardarbab, or tomorrow-tellers. They were shriveled, orange-bearded old men who squatted behind trays of carefully smoothed sand. A client who paid a coin would shake the tray and the sand would ripple into patterns which the old man would read and interpret. There were also many of the darwish holy beggars, as ragged, scabby, filthy and evil-looking as those in any other Eastern city. Here in Baghdad they had an additional attribute: they danced and skipped and howled and whirled and convulsed as violently as any epilept in a seizure. It was, I suppose, at least some entertainment in return for the bakhshish they beseeched.
Before we could even inspect any of the bazàr’s wares, we had to be interviewed by a market official called the revenue-farmer, and satisfy him that we possessed both the means to buy and also the means to pay the jizya, which is a tax levied on non-Muslim sellers and buyers alike. Wazir Jamshid, although he was himself a court official, privately confided to us that all such petty officials and civil servants were despised by the people and were called batlanim, which means “the idle ones.” When my father produced for that idle one a cod of musk, surely wealth enough to pay for a Shahi set at least, the revenue-farmer grumbled suspiciously:
“Got it from an Armeniyan, you say? Then it probably contains not the deer’s musk, but his chopped liver. It must be tested.”
The idle one took out a needle and thread and a clove of garlic. He threaded the needle and ran it several times through and through the garlic, until the thread was reeking with the garlic odor. Then he took the musk cod and ran the needle and thread just once through it. He sniffed at the thread and looked surprised.
“The smell is all gone, totally absorbed. Verily, you have genuine musk. Where on this earth did you meet an honest Armeniyan?” And he gave us a ferman, a paper authorizing us to trade in the Baghdad bazàr.
Jamshid took us to the slave pen of a Persian dealer who he said was trustworthy, and we stood among the crowd of other prospective purchasers and mere lookers-on, while the dealer detailed the lineage, history, attributes and merits of each slave brought to the block by his burly assistants.
“Here is a standard eunuch,” he said, presenting an obese and shiny black man, who looked quite cheerful for a slave. “Guaranteed placid and amenable to orders and never known to steal more than the allowable. He would make an excellent servant. However, if you seek a veritable Keeper of the Keys, here is a perfect eunuch.” He presented a young white man, blond and muscular, who was quite handsome but who looked as melancholy as a slave might be expected to look. “You are invited to examine the merchandise.”
My uncle said to the wazir, “I know, of course, what a eunuch is. We have castròni in our own country, sweet-singing boys neutered so they will always sing sweetly. But how can a totally sexless creature be differentiated as standard and perfect? Is it because one is an Ethiope and the other a Russniak?”
“No, Mirza Polo,” said Jamshid, and he explained in French, so we would not be confounded by unfamiliar Farsi words. “The eunuque ordinaire is deprived of his testicles when he is yet a baby, to make him grow up docile and obedient and not contrary of nature. It is easily done. A thread is tied tightly around the roots of a boy infant’s scrotum, and in a matter of weeks that cod withers, turns black and drops off. That is quite enough to make him become a good servant of general utility.”
“What more could a master want?” said Uncle Mafìo, perhaps sincerely, perhaps sarcastically.
“Well, to be a Keeper of the Keys, the eunuque extraordinaire is preferred. For he must live in and watch over the anderun, the quarters in which reside his master’s wives and concubines. And those women, especially if they are not often favored in the matter of the master’s bed, can be most enterprising and inventive, even with inert male flesh. So that sort of slave must be shorn of
all
his equipment—the rod as well as the stones. And that removal is a serious operation, not so easily done. Look yonder and observe. The merchandise is being examined.”
We looked. The dealer had directed the two slaves to drop their pai-jamah, and they stood with their crotches exposed to the scrutiny of an elderly Persian Jew. The fat black man was hairless down there, and bagless, but he did have a member of respectable size, though of a repellent black and purple color. I supposed that a woman of the anderun, if she was so desperate for a man and so depraved as to want that thing inside her, might contrive some kind of splint to stiffen it. But the far more presentable young Russniak had not even a flaccid appendage. He showed only a growth of blond artichoke hair, and something like the tip of a small white stick grotesquely protruding from the hair, and otherwise his groin was as featureless as a woman’s.
“Bruto barabào!” grunted Uncle Mafìo. “How
is
it done, Jamshid?”
As expressionlessly as if he was reading from a medical text, the wazir said, “The slave is taken into a room dense with the smoke of smoldering banj leaves, and he is set in a hot bath and he is given teryak to sip, all that done to dull his sense of pain. The hakim doing the operation takes a long ribbon and winds it tightly about him, starting at the tip of the slave’s penis and wrapping inward to the roots, bundling in with it the cod of testicles, so that the organs make a single package. Then, using a keenly sharp blade, the hakim removes that whole beribboned package with a single slicing stroke. He immediately applies to the wound a styptic of powdered raisins, puffball fungus and alum. When the bleeding stops, he inserts a clean quill, which will stay there during the slave’s whole life. For the chief danger of the operation is that the urinary passage may close in the healing. If, by the third or fourth day afterward, the slave has not passed water through the quill, he is certain to die. And sad to say, that does occur in perhaps three out of five cases.”
“Capòn mal caponà!” exclaimed my father. “It sounds gruesome. You have actually witnessed such a procedure?”
“Yes,” said Jamshid. “I watched with some interest when it was done to me.”
I should have realized that that accounted for his always melancholy aspect, and I should have kept silent. Instead I blurted, “But you are not fat, Wazir, and you have a full beard!”
He did not rebuke my impertinence. He replied, “Those who endure castration in infancy never grow a beard, and their bodies grow corpulent and feminine of contour, often even growing heavy breasts. But when the operation is done after a slave’s passing puberty, he remains masculine, at least in outward appearance. I was a full-grown man, with a wife and son, when our farm was raided by Kurdi slave-takers. The Kurdi sought only robust worker slaves, so my wife and little boy were spared. They were merely raped several times apiece, and then slain.”
An appalled silence ensued and might have got uncomfortable, but Jamshid added, almost offhandedly, “Ah, well, can I complain? I might have been a mere millet farmer to this day. But having been relieved of a man’s natural desires—to sow and cultivate land and lineage—I was freed to cultivate my intellect instead. Now I have risen to become Wazir to the Shahinshah of Persia, and that is no small attainment.”
Having so graciously dismissed the subject, he summoned the slave dealer to come and give ear to our requirements. The dealer left his assistants to oversee the inspection of the two slaves already on display, and came smiling and rubbing his hands together.
I had half hoped that my father would buy for me a comely girl slave, who could be more than a servant, or at least a young man of my own age, who would be a congenial companion. But of course he told the dealer not what I might want, but what he wanted for me :
“An older man, well versed in travel, but still agile enough to travel farther yet. Wise in the ways of the East, so that he can both safeguard and instruct my son. And I think”—he flicked a sympathetic glance at the wazir—“not a eunuch. I had rather not help to perpetuate that practice.”
“I have the very man, messieurs,” said the dealer, speaking good French. “Mature but not old, wily but not willful, experienced but not inflexible to command. Now, where has he got to? He was here just moments ago … .”
We followed him about through his herd—or herds, I should say, for there were a considerable number of slaves in the pen, and also a number of the tiny hinna’ed Persian horses which drew his wagons from town to town. The pen was partly fenced and partly enclosed by those canvas-hooped wagons, in which he and his assistants and his merchandise traveled by day and slept by night.
“The ideal slave for you, messieurs, this man,” the dealer went on, as he kept looking around. “He has belonged to numerous masters, hence has traveled widely and knows many lands. He speaks several tongues, and has a vast repertoire of useful talents. But where is he?”
We continued circulating among the men and women slaves, who had lengths of light chain connecting their ankle rings, and among the midget horses, which were not fettered. The dealer began to look slightly embarrassed at having misplaced the very slave he was trying to peddle.
“I had loosed him from the skein,” he muttered, “and shackled him to one of my mares, which he was currying for me—”
He was interrupted by a loud, piercing, prolonged equine whinny. With a ripple of orange mane and tail, a little horse came flying out through the front flaps of one of the covered wagons. Literally, it was in flight for a moment, like the magic glass horse of which the Shahryar Zahd had told us, for it had to bound from the interior of the wagon bed and clear the driver’s bench and the dashboard to get to the ground below. As it made that high arcing bound, a chain attached to its rear leg came trailing in the same looping arc, and at the other end of the chain a man popped out legs-first through the canvas flaps, like a stopper yanked from a bottle. The man also flew over the front of the wagon and hit the ground in a thump of dust. Because the horse tried to flee farther yet, the man got dragged about and raised quite a cloud of dust before the slave dealer could catch the frightened animal’s bridle and bring that brief entertainment to a halt.
The little horse’s orange mane was silkily combed, but its orange tail was disheveled. So were the man’s nether regions, for his pai-jamah were down around his feet. He sat for a moment, too winded to do anything but make several faint exclamations in several languages. Then he hastily rearranged his garments, as the slave dealer came and stood over him and bellowed imprecations and kicked him until he got upright. The slave was about my father’s age, but his scruffy beard appeared to be only about two weeks’ growth and did not adequately conceal a receding chin. He had bright, shifty pig’s eyes and a large fleshy nose that drooped over fleshy lips. He was no taller than I, but much thicker, with a paunch that drooped as did his nose. All in all, he looked something like a camelbird.