Reign of the Favored Women (51 page)

Safiye was gracious enough, however, to return gift for gift. Exquisite jewels and fabrics were sent off to that distant island and something Elizabeth craved even more was arranged there on the shores of the Golden Horn—trading privileges which equaled or excelled those of any other Christian nation.

Safiye corresponded with most other sovereigns of the East and West at one time or another as it suited her needs. But since they were all men, to those in the East she went through the harems, whose power she trusted more anyway. The West frustrated her, and she spent hours agonizing over the powerlessness of a woman in those countries, not even excluding Catherine and Elizabeth. Any communication she undertook with those princes had to be through agents. Fortunately, they were usually servants of the Grand Viziers who, with Sokolli gone, more and more came to be her own creatures, picked, groomed, and elevated to this office by her own hand.

Under Safiye, the realm of the Ottomans reached greater extent than it had had even under Murad’s grandfather, the great Suleiman. Successful expeditions pushed into Moldavia, Poland, the Crimea, Daghistan, Transcaucasia, Georgia, Persia. There were setbacks—rebellions in Egypt and Syria—as there must be when the head of power is unable to move swiftly to trouble spots on her own. Her agents moved quickly and decisively enough, however.

The Druses in their mountain fastness, for example, were put down—with unparalleled severity, I understand—by Safiye’s Ibrahim Pasha. Though until the matter found its way into the memoirs of retired soldiers, we, safe in Constantinople, safe in the harem, knew nothing of it.

Closer to home, the janissaries rebelled in April 1589, the
spahis
three years later. We did know of that: No one could escape the clatter of their overturned cooking pots and rattling weapons, the choking smoke of their campfires turned to torches and firebrands and arson, the threatening growl of their hunger up through the Third Court to the very gates of the harem. I stood with other eunuchs at the gate, arms crossed on our chests, trying not to flinch at the threat of what the wave of angry, armed men could do to us if they chose. In the end, the mystique of sexlessness turned them—though I never felt power in myself, even a coarse and bloodthirsty mob felt it in me. My crossed chest was as far as either party got and decided then to take terms.

My chest was, in fact, the very core of their complaint. Both mutinies were against “interference in our affairs by the harem,” as well they might be. Sometimes I rue that I ever stood sentinel with my back pressed to the gates’ silver studs. Perhaps I should have taken the first man in the press, spitting venom beneath his wild mustache. I should have taken him quietly by the arm and led him straight to Safiye’s rooms. I could have let him cut one throat to spare tens of thousands in the years to come.

But Esmikhan was also cowering behind those silver studs. I could never be certain the man and his fellows, leaping with impotent rage as they were, would leave just so quietly afterwards. I could risk no guarantee they would not stop in every other room of the palace to do all the other things soldiers do. For Esmikhan’s sake, I stood and crossed my arms in the troops’ hot breath and did not flinch.

Safiye, the euphemistic harem, survived by our flimsy protection and by judiciously cutting her losses, making certain “necessary sacrifices.” For instance, she let the janissaries have her Kira. Esperanza Malchi, who’d become a plump and very well-to-do widow, was not protected by harem walls. She was dragged from her house along with one of her helpless grown sons and torn to pieces by the soldiers’ bare hands. Another son barely managed to escape and fled into exile.

The thousandth year of the Muslim era occurred during this time and was preceded by much end-of-the-world fanaticism. Christian and Jewish minorities suffered greatly and the government did little to stop the more radical elements. Here again Safiye cut her losses, gave the rebellious a vent for their emotions. The vent in fact came nowhere near touching the true cause. And the true cause, though couched in pious Suras, was of course that, as they waited for judgment day, pious Muslims must suffer a Christian—and worse, a woman—to rule over them. But the fanatic, once he has larded his purpose with loftiness, can rarely see his satisfaction clearly, either.

Safiye allowed a number of churches within the capital to be converted into mosques, churches the Conqueror himself had promised might remain Christian. This, though the Greek Patriarch hovered about outside the harem door for days on end.
She
was born and raised a Christian.
She
must show mercy. Like a bedraggled raven he was, fasting until he had to be carried away for weakness. To no avail. It was his church that first had the icons smashed and the minaret foundation dug.

So did Safiye deal with those who had been most faithful to her. But I had always known that was her style.

Safe within the harem, Esmikhan and I ignored all this in the world. Safiye wanted nothing more from us, my two ladies and me, so she left us in peace. And Allah—all praise to Him—sent us a great distraction from her.

Not too many months after her grandmother Nur Banu died, Gul Ruh gave birth to her first child, a son. Two years did not pass afterwards that she did not birth another, strong, healthy child: two girls and three boys in the end. It was always Esmikhan’s wonder that Gul Ruh suffered very little to gain her progeny. Indeed, each new blossom seemed to make her bloom all the more herself.

Esmikhan and I spent a great deal of time at the old Mufti’s house on the Golden Horn. It was always a delightful bit of instruction to me to arrive there and see all the things a harem was not, things most in the West insist that it is. The raven Patriarch himself seemed to have imagined his enemy to be like these wild rumors. And maybe he was closer to being right, in Safiye’s case, where the world of men intruded. But not in Gul Ruh’s.

The silent, somber, somnolent world stifled with boredom and frustration is a better description of Abd ar-Rahman and his brothers’ selamlik than the harem. In the selamlik in dusty, crinkly tones, the scholars and legists pursued their endless discussions. Their topics might have something distantly to do with the wars and mutinies of more active men. But to assure judicial detachment, they always carefully reduced the cases to flat pages of black and white, to some theoretical man named a generic Amr or Zeyd, to a woman named Hind or Zeyneb. All was strained to the clearest broth without the least pother lump into which to sink an emotional tooth. And in this state they dissected un-passionately, weighing all against the immutable Word of Allah, and filed appropriately for future reference.

How unlike the world that burst upon us when we finally reached the harem doors! The
selamlik
was like the somber black veils of a woman, to slip quietly by, a phantom. But when she removed them, she was revealed to be in her holiday best, blinding with silks and gems and fragrance and lark-like trills of laughter. The selamlik was the rough, dirty grey-green rind of a melon, thwarting the hungry. Opening revealed the sole purpose such things were grown in the first place: the brilliant burst of orange, sun-warmed flesh, swathing the nose with sweetness and juice.

Entering Gul Ruh’s harem was like opening a melon, hungry, thirsty, on a hot day. Every day was crammed with events which, while none was earth-shattering enough ever to gain a place in the historians’ annals, were certainly always thrill and worry and joy, the recurring joy, enough for my life to contain. They were all the new wonders of budding teeth, first steps, first spelled word. The little disasters of a skinned knee. A fever. A family tiff. These events for all Gul Ruh’s lively bunch as well as for her brothers-in-law’s waives, children, nurses, pets, and friends.

“Why don’t you come and live with us permanently, Esmikhan Sultan?” Umm Khulthum asked every time we arrived, every time we left.

I wondered the same myself, even though my lady gave the ritual response over and over: “A woman belongs in her brother’s harem if she cannot have her husband’s. Or her father’s.”

We’d stay for weeks on end, sometimes the whole month of Ramadhan. But in the end we always returned under Murad’s roof. Under Safiye’s. I’ll confess I sometimes ached to return to the imperial harem for the quiet. But that was water stilled by terror. In truth, I would never trade that quiet for the rowdy joy.

I know for a fact that Abd ar-Rahman could hardly keep away, obliged to run his hands all day over the dull, unyielding rind of the melon. Every day when his work was done, he would run almost like a schoolboy, even as the passing years made him stout. He would run to revivify himself in that happy chaos. Would Gul Ruh have had so many children? Or bloomed so happily with each one if it had been otherwise? No guilt festered in her singing heart. No regret. No neglect. No unfulfilled ambition.

But I think I need say no more of that. It is a private joy. In fact, it is
haram
, prohibited, sacred. To allow men’s eyes to pry, to reduce to black-and-white chronicles, has been an evil I gave my manhood—and my life—to guard against. To expose it further would allow the blood-soaked ills of the outer world to intrude. And I, who had to straddle both worlds, appreciated as perhaps no harem denizen could, that sanctuary was a hallowed privilege, a great blessing of the One Creator.

So—this brings us to the Sultan. In fact, many may wonder that I have not mentioned Murad before. But was Murad actually Sultan at all? I have certainly suggested otherwise. And the chroniclers suggest it, too, when they call this era euphemistically “The Reign of the Favored Women”.

Murad, in fits of pique whenever he discovered his own weakness, would sometimes insist on flexing what was left of his power by deposing or beheading one Grand Vizier after another. But Safiye was always careful to have another man waiting in the wings, a flatterer to the Sultan long enough to get in, her man entirely the moment the clouds seemed to have lifted and Murad had retreated again to his artists and his poets.

The Sultan went from illuminating to composing poetry to playing the oud. His was a nature weaned on opium and convinced that the arts were the only truth in the world. Yet ever and again he found that truth to be as elusive as a desert mirage. And no matter what joy it gave him, sooner or later art would turn to politics in his—as he sometimes called them in a fury—”leprous Ottoman hands.” Sooner or later a music instructor would begin asking other favors-—for his nephew, his cousin. The poet came to have something else besides ethereal images on his mind and weighted his verse with flattery and untruth.

“But a poet, too, must eat!”

I remember the last time I saw Sultan Murad alive. Unexpected as the sighting was, yet unlike the case of Nur Banu his mother, the sovereign gave no indication of his approaching fate.

It was on the Night of Power and I can imagine how upset Safiye was that Murad would not spend it with some hand-picked virgin of hers. But Murad had come to take the dervishes’ view: Union with the Almighty was more auspicious.

I’d been watching the faces in the tekke that night with more than usual interest. I don’t suppose I really expected my friend Hajji to put in an appearance. He had not done so for many years now. I was told he’d gone on a pilgrimage to the land of the Afghans and had not been seen since. But if he would deign to visit—or to send someone in his place—this, of all nights of the year, would be the one.

The circle of faces whirled around, losing their natural solidity and individuality, sending off sparks like fireworks, sparks that did not soar and burn out, but continued to glow as they fused with neighbors and then rose to fuse with Infinity. Still, with its, last shred of individuality I recognized one of the faces. I recognized it with a start, and my first reflex was to think it was my friend. Only Hajji’s face would have seemed more startling there because I had given up all hope of ever seeing it again.

Second glance assured me it was not Hajji. It was the face of none other than Murad, the Sultan of all the Faithful. The Grand Turk was neither getting heirs that night, as was his legal right, to capture fortune for his people, nor eating and drinking in royal style. Rather, here he was in the tekke, allowing, inviting, profane hands to touch his person—gestures that might be met with death if attempted elsewhere—and losing his royal self in the greater Self.

How many of the other brethren also recognized him I do not know. None gave a flicker of profane recognition although they took him in wholly as one of those who seeks, souls who recognize one another the world over.

With the whirl of the dance we were brought side by side. I took his hand, stripped of gold and gems for the night, and forgot eternal love for a moment. Not only did I think. This hand has power of life and death over me and everyone else in this room. But I also remembered a night when this hand had sought to destroy me in a very personal wrath, in an individual jealous rage over my singular relationship with what he took to be his own.

Time had been when such feelings had made me stumble in the dance when I took our sheikh’s hand, too. Our present sheikh had once been called Andrea Barbarigo and had pulled down a nobleman’s mask to stare at me with scorn.

In both cases I recovered my steps, however, by the power and mercy of God. Murad and I became no longer sovereign and subject nor rivals for a mundane affection that had limits and conditions. Our feet moved as one, our hands melded. We were equals, partners, at peace before the One.

Later I overheard this conversation:

“And what made you a Seeker, Brother?”

“Another search, a profane search, was consuming all my life away. It brought me eventually to this Search, the Good Search, the Search which is the archetype of all others.”

“Yes. It is even so with me.”

The two speakers were none other than the Sultan and Andrea Barbarigo, talking together as if they were no more than two strangers in beggars’ clothes, meeting one another for the first time on some deserted back road. Before the night was over, even I forgot to have that little ache in the back of my neck, that knot of tension that reminded me the Caliph of all the Faithful and my particular master was present. I did not think of it nor wonder again until the midst of the next day’s fast when the weight of material creation was heavy upon me.