Sofia (16 page)

“It is quite common, my friend, for poor families in the wild hills of Caucasia for example to sell their sons and especially their daughters to Constantinople-bound merchants. Not only do they need the money, poor souls, but most importantly, they know their children will eat more, dress better, and have a better chance of advancement here than in their poor land where a decent living cannot be eked out.”

In this room, Husayn had his slave plaster him with a caustic, whitish putty concocted of lime and water with a touch of arsenic. I did not need the warning to be careful how I touched it to my lips or my eyes. No amount of coaxing could get me to undergo the treatment which, after about a quarter of an hour, the slave skillfully scraped off with a mussel shell. This was how Husayn maintained his unnatural hairlessness, which fashion he was obliged to rescind every time business brought him to the west.

“You know, Suleiman the Lawgiver—our present ruler, may Allah find favor with him—he is a very strange case for a sultan. He married the mother of his sons. Usually the women of a sultan’s harem are purchased—every one of them—and what an advancement for a girl! To rise from poverty so desperate that she must run barefoot through deep snow, to become Valide Sultan—the highest post any woman can reach in our empire—a post only slightly less powerful than that held by the Sultan himself. What is to be pitied there? All our sultans, you see, are the products of slave women.”

Husayn recited this while he deftly shifted his red-and-white toweling this way and that so the slave could eyen attack his genitals. I certainly would never allow that, no matter how much time I was forced to spend among the Turks. Perhaps it was an accident with just such a purple mussel shell that had first set the absurd fashion of circumcision into play.

I did allow myself to be scrubbed by a bathhouse slave. After slathering me with suds from a bowl filled to the brim with musk-scented soap, he encased his hand in a sleeve of nubby toweling. This he adroitly alternated with horsehair cloth and the dried skeleton of a gourd named from the Arabic luffa. The only thing he didn’t use on me was wire gauze, but all of his implements felt like it, abrading and tingling the flesh. I had been afraid to loose more vital parts to a mussel shell. This treatment cost me a good deal of skin. I think, in fact, that my attendant commented with a gap-toothed grin something to the effect that he had never found so much filth to flay on a client.

It was quite touching to watch, at another basin, a young man about my age giving the same treatment to his enfeebled grandfather. Altogether, soap and skin was flushed from us down the marble channels with bowls full of tap water.

“Slavery is not so hopeless nor as powerless as you imagine,’ Husayn gurgled between dousings. “Especially not for a young woman with the looks and talents of your signorina.

“And you must admit she was quite content when we left her.” he reiterated. “Do you think, my friend, that, having tasted those dainties she breakfasted on today, she could ever be satisfied with what you could provide her? Forgive me, my friend, but she is a vain and frivolous young woman. She has expensive tastes and I despair for you if you should try and meet them, an orphan as you are now and a sailor.

“Come, come, be merry. Let me send the little black girl to you again tonight and this time do not shove her away. Enjoy her. Her life will be improved if you do. And so, Allah willing, will be yours. Lose yourself in her and see if the memory of Sofia Baffo is not gently coaxed away. Madonna Baffo is content with the fate Allah has willed for her. My friend, be you content as well.”

With a violent hand to my head, I signaled I could never be content as we went on to the bath’s third room.

The ceiling of this third room was held up over its central pool by four columns whose elaborately foliate capitals were of obvious Byzantine provenance as well. More architectural details, however, escaped me as the room’s main feature—its heat—grabbed me by the throat.

Heat rose up off the pool’s surface as from a pot shortly before the cook tosses in the pasta. Heat throbbed up from the floor. Heat shot out in sulfuric jets within alcoves spaced around the perimeter of the pool. Heat glowed from the skins of two score Turks lounging about in attitudes of the most grotesque indolence. Shapes floated toward me through mists of steam. In slow motion, they revolved and vanished like wraiths. Form blurred at the pressure of heat in the corners of my eyes.

In short, nothing on earth has ever so closely re-created one of the lower cauldrons of Dante’s
Inferno
as a Turkish bath. The self-indulgent denizens of Sybaris and the cardinally slothful are condemned to a fantastic parody of their sins. The Foscari stage came nowhere near this apparition of strigils and luffas as whips and scourges, the masseurs as torturing demons.

“Take me out of here!” I begged of Husayn, struggling for breath in the dense atmosphere.

But all comprehension of Venetian had steamed out of Husayn’s mind. My words were lost in the murmuring undercurrent of sound made by subdued laughter and whispered conversations—or the awe we all felt to find ourselves the objects of eternal damnation.

I had no choice but to follow my host down two steps into the cloudy, neck-high depths of the pool. We kept our red-and-white knee-length skirts about us as we did so and the cloth floated up to the surface about our waists until the water saturated it.

This pool is hot enough to boil an egg, I thought, but couldn’t say it aloud. My voice box seemed hardened already beyond any vibration. The heat cut the tendons in my joints and flattened me, like the water itself, against the marble at a level.

It was quite remarkable that in this place of everlasting torture I caught my first good glimpse of a Turkish woman. She was upon us before I knew it, skirting the poolside with rapid steps as she took the shortest route from door to door. I never actually saw her face, as she held both hands before it and glimpsed the world—at least so she wouldn’t tumble into the pool and join us—through the narrowest of spaces between her fingers. But that she was a woman left no doubt, and had there been any blood left that wasn’t already on the surface of my skin, I would have blushed.

A number of men were watching the woman’s progress with interest, and Husayn felt obliged to offer some apology. “She is accused of adultery,” he said, proving that he hadn’t lost all use of Venetian after all. “She runs this gauntlet to prove her innocence, her husband and brother observe. She wears no
shalvar
and, if she is guilty, her skirts will blow up over her head.”

“If they do—?” I gasped. I was more concerned for my own temperature, and relieved to find voice, than for the woman.

“If this happens, her husband has the right to kill her, same as a wronged husband would in Venice. This gauntlet is an old custom, existing, like the capitals of these pillars, from the time of the Greeks.”

“She is innocent,” I judged, as did husband and brother.

“Of course,” said Husayn, looking away from the spectacle with disinterest.

“Why do you say ‘of course’?”

“Because if she has the courage to do this, she mustn’t have a guilty hair on her head. I can only think it will make her look at her husband differently from now on. She will have learned he is not the only creature Allah made so, and that He, all praise to Him, made many much better. I’d say any man is a fool who demands this of his wife in the first place.”

With this dismissal, Husayn returned to his soaking and I must confess that my own discomfort soon numbed me to anyone else’s.

I was aware of the curious and rather unpleasant sensation of other men’s naked, parboiled flesh against mine under the water, but again, I was too numb to think much about it. I didn’t think of it, in fact, until Husayn suddenly leapt up out of the water, steam curling from his skin, and began a most shocking tirade. I thought for a moment that it was aimed against me, and that he’d forgotten once again that he needed to go easy on the Turkish for me.

“A curse on your religion!” This harangue started where the Venetian began and progressed from there to “May Satan stick his finger up your ass!” and “They found your grandfather’s shoes under your mother’s bed, you know that?”

I recoiled from the horrible blackness of such thoughts as from a physical blow. He was better in this language than he was in Venetian, I had to grant him that. Cursing is the first thing a traveler becomes fluent in, I reminded myself, and, if I couldn’t comprehend the reason for the abuse, I could at least learn the flair.

But presently the realization sank through the heat-fog in my brain that the object of his abuse was not me. It was the creature who’d been pressing so restlessly up against my opposite side.

I blinked against the steam as the figure retreated before Husayn’s barrage and then vanished at Hades’ rim. The steps were more exaggeratedly feminine, I thought, than those of the accused adulteress. It was only then that I realized what neither Husayn nor I could express in each other’s tongue. I’d been picked out by a sodomite as a likely candidate to share his vice by my shoulder-length locks, my hairless chin, and the air of not quite belonging, all of which matched his.

I couldn’t even meet Husayn’s eyes to give him thanks for my deliverance. My shame was too great—the helpless, polluted guilt of a victim. I hadn’t the strength to shove the blame off where it belonged—on the aggressor. Where was the gauntlet I could run to prove my innocence in this case?

Husayn offered none, but ushered me quickly back to the room where we’d begun our ceremony. Here our clothes still waited in their little cubicles and the cooler air seemed to fist space for breath in our lungs once again.

But there was to be no safety in clothes yet. The smirking African quickly replaced my dripping, loin-clinging towel with a dry one. He then threw another over my shoulders, a third over my head. I tried to smile some gratitude back at him and I saw the smirk lose its edge.

At this point, Husayn brought a Turk across the room for me to meet. The stranger was towel-draped like everyone else. Why my host should pick this Turk and not any of the identical others escaped me, and I have no recollection of his features beyond the fact that he was over fifty.

I assumed at first that this introduction was to distract me from my recent shame by presenting decent examples of the race for me to know. Acquaintance was bound to be minimal. The stranger knew no Venetian at all and the sickness in the pit of my stomach kept me still preferring the African’s softened smile.

Still, Husayn persisted in making the introductions. He gave a name I’ve now forgotten and modified it with “From Iznik, where he is head of the tile works there. His kilns are famous. No one else in the world knows the secret he keeps of firing that brilliant cobalt blue that is so valued. He is the man I brought you here hoping to find.”

When I made no reply, the man salaamed, a gesture of graciousness as it is incumbent on the younger to bow first. I tried to imitate the gesture, unsuccessfully on the platforms of my pattens. After that, there was very little else to do but stand and grin awkwardly at each other until by mutual though nonverbal consent we retired to our cubicles. I went to one, Husayn and the tilemaker together to the one next door.

The African, now sharing some of his hidden rhythm with me under his breath, saw me couched on a pile of pillows and rugs within the cubicle. He swaddled me as any infant in yet more towels, these holding the delicious warmth of sitting by the furnace still in their tiny pockets of nap. He then proceeded to wick the wet from my body by pressing his long, black, pink-tipped fingers gently up and down the toweling.

I found the sensation quite pleasant but had no desire to be handled in any way by any man, I didn’t care whose chore it was. I gestured him away, refusing likewise the signs I took to mean “Massage?” and “Narghile?” I did take the offer of “Coffee,” a word novel to Turkish that I did understand.

Two similar thimbles full of the sweet, thick, frothy, muddy Arabic stuff went next door as well. And I supposed it was the tilemaker who was smoking that medicinal, relaxing weed first discovered by the savages in the New World but lately cultivated in the lands around the Black Sea. The warm, dark, tangy balsamic odor filled the air, one of the first times I ever smelled burning tobacco. Such was the latest fashion in that drain of all the world’s indulgences, Constantinople.

I’ve heard it said the seduction of tobacco can also affect others in the room besides the smoker. Certainly combined with the purgative of heat and water, the sweetness of the coffee, and the emotional storms I’d been through that day, it had its consequences. I found I could no longer stave off a gradually enveloping and voluptuous drowsiness. I suppose I did doze, and perhaps for quite some time as the interminable and soporific asking after health and welfare droned on in the next cubicle.

I could not at first determine what it was that brought me awake until I heard it again. I heard the slats of a packing crate creaking open, the nestle of straw. Even more to the point were the words I heard. In sharp relief, as foreign words always are when they tumble into the otherwise smooth stream of native speech, I heard Husayn pronounce the names of Filippo and Bernardo Serena.

Venetians. Not just any Venetians, either. These were two brothers, now deceased and succeeded by their sons. Close to thirty years ago the Serena brothers had patented the almost magical process by which canes of opaque glass— usually white but sometimes the very skillful managed blue as well—could be imbedded in otherwise clear crystal. The masterpieces the Serena factory had been turning out—goblets, jugs, plates—continued to amaze the world. And shortly it was not just Serena but the entire glass-making lair of Murano that worked the magic. Venice set little store by patents when there was city wide profit to be made.

Letting the profits go beyond the Republic, however, was a different matter altogether.

I had imagined there might be a few of these pieces among Husayn’s imports. It was only natural, as there was never enough supply to fill the Turks’ luxuriant demand. My suspicions were confirmed when I heard the tilemaker’s husky exclamation as the straw parted to reveal its contents followed by Husayn’s pronunciation of the Italian term for the technique, “
vetro a filigrana
.”