The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (3 page)

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THE SULTAN’S GIFT

To the members of the Sultan’s intimate circle his manner of dealing with the Chief Body Physician’s defection was mystifying. In the strict code of Ottoman service, failure to answer a call to the battlefield promptly, and with enthusiasm, was tantamount to treason. Yet this Jewish doctor who, it was said, had refused the Sultan’s order to serve in the spring campaign, was still occupying the Doctor’s House and walking about the palace grounds unpunished. There was only one possible explanation for such a violation of protocol. The doctor had cast a spell on the Sultan. He was a sorcerer.

Then again, if Judah del Medigo did possess magic powers, how was it that he could not bring his own son back to good health? The boy continued to wander the grounds pale, listless, and silent, never seen to express the trace of a smile much less to laugh aloud or to show signs of behaving like a normal eleven-year-old. For his part the doctor’s disappointment in his son’s recovery gave him little hope of remaining at his post as the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician. Still, the Sultan was making no effort to find a replacement for his body physician. Or so it seemed.

Then one morning, a cart pulled up in front of the Doctor’s House unannounced, hauling a horse van driven by a groom with the Sultan’s
tugra
embroidered on his cap. When the doctor’s servant answered the bell, the groom announced he had come bearing a gift for the doctor’s son, Danilo del Medigo.

Hurriedly, the boy was washed and dressed and led out sleepily to receive his caller. Whereupon the Sultan’s groom opened the rear door of the horse trailer and led out a brindle pony — clearly a thoroughbred — caparisoned with a gilt-edged saddle and a bridle etched in gold.

Standing at his door with a protective arm around his son’s shoulders, the doctor was perfectly positioned to witness a vision he had all but given up hope of ever seeing. The moment the boy caught sight of the pony, his eyes widened. And when the groom offered him the animal’s lead, he sprang forward to take the rein in hand as would any eleven-year-old boy who had been offered a thoroughbred pony.

“Is it for me? Can I keep it?” he asked his father with an eagerness he had not shown for any one of the many distractions the doctor had tried to tempt him with.

Giving the doctor no chance to reply, the groom answered for him. “In the Ottoman Empire it is an insult to refuse the Sultan’s gift,” he announced. “The pony is the Sultan’s gift.”

The matter was settled. And, with Judah’s lukewarm acquiescence, the groom led the boy and the pony out through the Gate of Welcome to the Sultan’s stable in the Second Court, where a stall was set aside to house the animal.

What occupied Danilo for the remainder of that day, his father could only guess. Although he did take note that the boy, who had walked the animal away to the Sultan’s stables on a lead that morning, had returned in the afternoon mounted on the animal’s back. But not until Judah witnessed with his own eyes his son’s evident pleasure as he rode his brindle into the courtyard did it occur to him to wonder why he had never thought to tempt the boy with a pony. Yet the answer was obvious. Judah del Medigo took no pleasure in a horseback ride. Given his choice, he always picked a coach or a litter. And if a mounted steed was the only available mode of transport, the doctor far preferred a docile mule to a frisky thoroughbred. With such a limited feel for horseflesh, he could only acknowledge that a daily gallop offered his son a distraction so demanding as to overcome the boy’s searing memory of his mother’s death. What the doctor did not understand was that, far from helping Danilo to forget his mother, galloping over the fields on his pony brought back to him many happy years of his daily rides at her side; that in the saddle, he was in her presence.

Nor was Judah witness to the scene at the end of each day in the horse barn, where the princes of the Harem School stabled their ponies and gathered to groom them at the end of their afternoon ride. All young, all competitive, it was inevitable that an occasional pony race should break out among the riders when they met up on the bridle paths, and that they would quickly move on to compete with each other on the jumps behind the Harem School.

When Danilo cleared the highest hurdle with room to spare on his first try, he instantly earned himself a place in the fraternity of princely athletes. True, the new boy was unable to converse in any of the civilized tongues (these being Turkish, Arabic, and Persian), but among the princely athletes, the fastest pace and the highest jump easily trumped a lack of language skills. The Ottomans were still, in their hearts, people of the horse. They were also famously devoted to the principle that merit is rewarded over birth, race, and personal eccentricities like yellow hair. And when his new companions challenged the foreign boy to a jousting contest with the
gerit
,
and he proved to have a flair for that popular Turkish lance, his place among them was firmly secured.

With so much to occupy him away from home, Danilo began to spend less and less time at the doctor’s side and more and more time at the Harem School with his new comrades. As the weeks went by, the doctor found that the only times his son was with him were the evening and day of the Jewish Sabbath, when they attended services together. The Sultan’s plan was unfolding. Without anyone noticing, the doctor’s son became an unofficial student at the Harem School. And Judah’s reasons for refusing to leave the son whom he hardly ever saw evaporated.

Quite informally, a pattern for the boy’s life was established. Weekdays and Sundays he would ride back and forth from home to school and school to home, accompanied by a groom. Saturdays, he pursued his Jewish studies at the Ahrida Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Istanbul, founded in the previous century by Jewish traders from Salonika. Ever since their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jewish refugees had been welcomed by the Ottoman sultans. So by the 1520s, when Judah del Medigo arrived to serve the Sultan, the Jewish population of the capital supported close to a dozen synagogues, and a canny liturgical shopper could take his pick among Sephardic, Roman, and Ashkenazi rites.

Of them all, the little Ahrida Sephardic congregation appealed to Judah as a house of worship because the Sultan’s Jewish physicians had always worshiped there. And that congregation became the center of his son’s Jewish life when the doctor went off to campaign. Thus, with his father’s half-hearted acquiescence, the boy began his life in Istanbul dodging nimbly between Muslim weekdays in the Princes School and Jewish weekends in Balat, soon becoming adroit at straddling the gap between the two worlds, overseen in his father’s absence by the first lady of the land, the Valide Sultan.

The Jewish part was easy. The members of the little Ahrida Synagogue were quick to offer warmth and welcome. But in the Princes School the language barrier proved far more impenetrable than did the high hurdles.

The Sultan had given his word that the doctor’s son would be as well educated as a prince. But the boy’s lack of fluency in the common tongue stood in his way from the beginning. And, as the weeks went by, Danilo felt himself falling farther and farther behind his classmates in his studies.

What was to be done? In desperation, his teacher turned to the Valide Sultan, a woman who had spent her life finding remedies for problems her son didn’t even know he had.

Like herself, the Valide’s solution was elegant and practical. Clearly young del Medigo needed a tutor, someone to read with him every day to accustom his mouth to the Turkish tongue. Any one of the older princes would have done. But best of all, thought the Valide, would be her ward, the Sultan’s motherless daughter Saida. Just short of eleven years old, the princess was far and away the best student in her cohort; Saida would be the ideal mentor to keep the foreign boy occupied with his lessons, while his father was absent on the Sultan’s service. In making this arrangement neither the tutor nor the student was consulted.

Given a choice, Danilo would never have picked a girl as a tutor. But he understood he had no say in the matter and decided simply to learn quickly and rid himself as soon as possible of the encumbrance of the girl.

Had Saida been asked, she also would have refused the favor. This Danilo looked oddly pale to her, with straw for hair and eyes of a bright blue more suited to floor tiles than human eyes. But she was too well brought up to express herself outright. However, she did make her displeasure evident with a small pout.

“What is the difficulty, Princess?” asked the teacher. “The stranger is clever and will learn easily.”

Her mouth set in a tight little knot, the girl muttered, “He slouches.”

“He what?”

“He slouches,” Saida repeated. “He is not well mannered.” In her grandmother’s book of etiquette, a straight back was the key to a place in paradise.

“But he does not slouch when he’s in the saddle,” the teacher pointed out tactfully. “Tomorrow, watch him in the riding ring. Watch how he sits his mount.”

The next afternoon, as she cantered around the ring, Saida took careful note of Danilo del Medigo and, to be sure, she had to admit that the very moment he put his foot into the stirrup his spine straightened and that, once in the saddle, he sat his mount as tall as any of her brothers. Reluctantly, she agreed to take him on.

Having been given her choice of a text for them to study, the princess picked a Turkish translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
. It was a volume that had been given to her by her father, the Sultan. From the first page, the tale of Scheherazade, a young girl forced to spin out stories night after night to save herself from being beheaded, became her favorite.

Had Danilo been asked, he would have preferred to be reading one of the old Turkish epics of
ghazi
warriors. But these the princess disdained as suitable only for soldiers and peasants.

“We will study
The Thousand and One Nights
,” she explained as if to a backward child, “because the great difference between those of us who are educated in this
saray
and those educated outside the palace derives from our familiarity with a fine style. Besides, this old story contains many words in Persian and Arabic for you to learn.”

No boy likes to be ordered about by a girl, especially by a girl younger than him. It was humiliating. “She’s more bossy than an old
lala
,” Danilo complained to his father.

But he had played enough games to know when he was outclassed. So he agreed to his tutor’s choice with good grace, and in the space of a few months, the princess managed to lead him through the adventures of “Aladdin and His Magic Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Sinbad the Seaman.” As Danilo read each tale aloud, the princess corrected his pronunciation. By the time they were ready to take on the less popular, longer tales, Danilo had become as much the captive of Scheherazade as the husband who had a habit of marrying virgins and murdering them the morning after the wedding. In the end, like thousands of readers before him, the boy was unable to resist the magic, the adventures, the disasters, and the jokes that had kept Scheherazade alive over centuries.

It was a few days after they began to read “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” that their tutorial took a sudden turn. In this story, the porter is picked up in the marketplace by an honorable woman who wears shoes bordered with gold and spends money like water. When the porter is invited to accompany her home, he doesn’t hesitate to accept, not for a moment.

The lady leads him through a gate made of two leaves of ebony inlaid with plates of red gold and into an elegant salon. There he is introduced to a second lady — a model of beauty, loveliness, brilliance, symmetry, and perfect grace. In Saida’s text, the woman’s forehead is flower white, her cheeks ruddy-bright like the anemone, and her eyebrows shaped as is the crescent moon which begins Ramadan. These details, which the princess relished, left Danilo cold.
Who cares?
he thought to himself.

But the porter in the story is dazzled. After some wining and dining and dancing and laughing, the porter, now drunk, begins to carry on with both women: kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering.

As Danilo read he became intrigued in spite of himself. And he was more than a little put out when Saida announced in her pedantic little way that it was time to stop for the day. He found himself pleading to read just one more page. She acceded. He read on.

Now one of the ladies is stuffing a dainty morsel into the porter’s mouth, and the other slaps him and cuffs his cheeks. This porter is in paradise. It is as if he is sitting in the seventh sphere among the houris of heaven.

Just then, as tended to happen in Scheherazade’s stories, a visitor knocked at the gate. It was the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, gone forth into the night from his palace to see and hear what new things are stirring in his kingdom.

Harun al-Rashid
. The name echoed in Danilo’s memory. In his head he heard it spoken in the soft musical timbre of his mother’s voice. He had heard his mother, Grazia the Scribe, speak the name Harun.