The Janissary Tree

[ 73 ]

The ambassador’s wife, at that very moment, was being helped to undress by five eager handmaidens, who took each garment as it was relinquished and examined it with varying degrees of excitement and admiration.

The valide’s suggestion that she should bathe with the women of the sultan’s harem, coming on top of her offer of a puff on the narghile, had temporarily robbed Eugenia of the power of speech. She was not easily nonplussed, but it had occurred to her immediately that the sultan might take it into his head to enjoy a bathe himself. Alternatively, that he might choose to enjoy the spectacle from a concealed lattice. Finally she wondered if the valide was simply teasing her.

“It’s quite all right,” the valide said. “The sultan never uses the women’s bath. The girls would be delighted, but if you’d rather not…”

That’s two of my three concerns answered, at least, Eugenia thought. “I’d be charmed,” she answered.

Minutes later she was laughing as the girls examined her stays, pulling funny faces. One girl puffed up her cheeks and blew. Another, to general merriment, mimed turning a little lock with a key. With a shrug of her firm, creamy shoulders, she demonstrated to Eugenia that Ottoman women enjoyed certain freedoms denied their European cousins. But when Eugenia stepped out of her petticoat, they stood back with what looked like sincere admiration for the effect—until they caught sight of her pubic hair. At this, with equal sincerity, they simply goggled in surprise. Then they helped her unlace, and escorted her into the bath.

Later, Eugenia was to reflect on the difference between a Turkish bath, and a Russian one. On her father’s estates outside Moscow she had often leaped from the steamy log cabin to gasp with pleasure in the snow, while the bathing attendants scrupulously beat her skin to a glow with a whippy bundle of birch twigs. In the harem bath the pleasure was attained without the pain, such as it was: the pleasure seemed infinite and curiously detailed. She was soaped, and rubbed, and massaged, and it seemed that no part of her body escaped the attentions of the girls, or of the stalwart woman who flexed her limbs, cracked her neck, and even bent her fingers and toes. It was only through a massive effort of will, which she afterwards half-regretted, that she conveyed her opinion of the hot wax and a razor which the bath attendant automatically produced. By the time she had bathed, and she was lounging naked on a sofa in the room beyond, surrounded by other women smoking, sipping coffee, and assessing their prize—and all her clothes—Eugenia had no idea how much time had passed. The chirruping of the women was very restful, and their birdlike cadences mingled with the smell of applewood and tobacco to take her back, when she closed her eyes, to a childhood in autumn, by a river far away, and not so long ago.

She was woken by a cool hand on her shoulder. Automatically she pushed herself upright and found the Kislar Agha staring down at her impassively. Then he nodded several times, and showed his little teeth, making a gesture that she was to rise.

She got up slowly, smiling to her new friends. They smiled back, but fleetingly, and helped her to dress. She climbed into her petticoat first, then wrapped her corset around her front. One of the girls laced it at the back; she would have preferred it tighter, but somehow the atmosphere of levity that would have let her ask the girl to pull harder was missing now. She glanced to where the chief black eunuch was standing by the door, his gaze flickering around the room. When she was dressed she tilted her chin and looked him lazily in the eye. He gave a barely perceptible bow, and opened the door.

When she regained the valide’s suite, she found the old lady on her divan, chatting with a plump middle-aged man who sat straddling a western chair, rocking it back and forth.

The sultan turned and rose with a slight effort.

“Princesse!” He bowed, took her hand and pressed it to his lips. Eugenia sank in a low curtsey.

“Bravo!” The valide clapped her hands. “You escaped, I see, dressed just as beautifully as before. The girls,” she explained, “might easily have stolen her clothes.”

“Her clothes?” The sultan looked confused. “But we send to Paris every year, valide.”

Eugenia laughed pleasantly.

“I think, Your Majesty, it’s not the clothes themselves we women find interesting. It’s the way they’re worn. And everyone,” she added, unable to think of a suitable epithet for the sultan’s women, “has been delightful.”

By everyone she did not include the Kislar Agha. The Kislar Agha gave her the creeps.