The Sultan's seal

30

“I’m like the cook on a Black Sea grain ship. The cook is set afloat in a small dinghy attached to the ship by a long rope, so that when he cooks over a fire, he doesn’t endanger the ship with its combustible cargo.”

Violet and I were walking in the garden. Over my shoulder, the sky smoldered orange behind the hill. Our leather slippers made delicate scuffing sounds on the paving stones as we approached the pavilion. The sky over the strait had been leached to ash.

“How do they get the food from him?”

“They wait until he has put out the fire, then pull him back in. But it’s dangerous. If there’s a storm or a fire, he is lost.”

“How do you know this?”

“Hamza told me.”

Violet said nothing, but I sensed her disapproval. She never liked Hamza and spied on us when he visited until I scolded her for it.

I had not heard from Hamza since the dinner at our house in Nishantashou, even in the weeks since Amin Efendi’s attack. This weighed on me. If he had sent a message, Aunt Hüsnü might not have bothered to pass it on to me here. Nevertheless, I was hurt by his silence. He must have heard what Amin Efendi had done. The city vibrated with the news.

My feelings had not been steady since the attack. Self-pity overtook me during sleepless nights. I disowned it and wished to cut it from me like a useless limb. The bitter rage I relished, as it made the pain recede. But my anger flooded over. I snapped at Violet, and raged silently at mother, Ismail Dayi, and Hamza for not protecting me, even though I knew they could have done nothing. Most of all, I was angry at myself for having gone along with the charade of visits. But beneath the anger was a calm lucidity, a new confidence that I was closer now to understanding death. That it was really rather simple, after all.

THE GARDEN PATH wound around the base of the small hill on which perched the glass-walled pavilion. Violet wandered a few steps ahead of me, but my eyes were drawn to a motion inside. At first I reached out to alert Violet, but then withdrew my hand at the thought it might be Hamza. Her dark profile turned back toward me. Behind her, the sky was ash gray.

“Go inside,” I told her. She looked surprised, then displeased. Without a word, she swung around and marched toward the house, the tail of her head scarf swinging hard with every step.

I waited, gazing toward the water, until she had closed the door. My ears strained for Hamza’s nightingale call, but found only the commotion of common birds. The ashes in the sky bled and infected the air, now dense with dusk. An owl mourned in the forest.

I turned and climbed the path to the pavilion. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and slipped inside. No one was there. I sat heavily on a cushion. Most of the shutters were closed and the room was dark and chilly, but I no longer cared enough to rise. I heard a moan and realized it had come from my own chest.

I remember clearly the small, cool hand that settled on my arm out of the darkness. I looked around at a bright shimmer suspended in the dark, like a white veil. Startled, I said nothing.

The apparition settled beside me. Its hand moved to my cheeks and stroked them dry, first one, then the other. A small kindling.

“You mustn’t cry,” the face said in English.

“Mary? Is it you?”

“I came ’round to see you, but your maid said you weren’t at home. So I decided to rest here for a bit before driving back. It’s such a long way. I left the driver snoring in his carriage outside the gate. I guess he’s used to long-winded women’s visits.”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“You weren’t at the Palais des Fleurs at the usual time, so I sent you a message at your father’s house. I was worried you might be ill. Then I heard about what happened to you and that you were staying up here, so I had to come see you. I didn’t realize it was so far. I sent you a message to let you know I’d be visiting today, but you never responded.” She shrugged. “I came anyway.”

“I never received any messages from you, Mary, either at Nishantashou or here.”

Mary sat back, frowning. “But I sent them. The messenger said he gave them to your maid.”

For a few moments we gazed at the ink-washed sky outside the unshuttered pavilion window, each lost in our own thoughts. What else had Violet kept from me?

“So you had no idea I was coming,” Mary said incredulously.

“No,” I responded, smiling at her, “but I’m very pleased you’re here. I too wanted to see you, but life became too, how shall I put it, different. Else I should have sent you a message too-or responded to yours. You are so kind to come all this way.”

“I’m sorry about what happened, Jaanan.” She moved closer, linking her arm through mine. We looked for a while at our reflections in the black dusk of the window.

“You know,” she whispered finally, “something like that happened to me too.”

Her hand remained hot through the cloth of my sleeve.

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my eye on her reflection. Her hair looked like it was made of light.

“Your fiancé?” I asked finally, to help her.

“No. Punishment.” Her voice was bitter.

“For what?”

“For not wanting them.”

I didn’t understand the meaning of her words, but saw she was sad and angry. She withdrew her hand and sat, head bowed, in the shadow.

“There were three of them. A lodger and his cronies. They saw me kissing a woman friend. They spied on me in my room while we were together.”

“What evil is there in a kiss among women?”

Mary looked at me wonderingly.

“When my friend left, they forced their way in and said they’d hurt me if I didn’t do the same to them.”

“How awful,” I exclaimed, remembering the stories of young women who flung themselves to their deaths rather than be touched by a man before their wedding day. I supposed that included a kiss, although now that seemed harmless enough to me.

“What did you do?”

She said softly, “I did what they wanted. What else could I do? They threatened me. They said they’d tell the landlady. I worked there, in the kitchen. I would have lost my position. I had no place else to go.”

“What about your friend?”

Mary stared at the dark window for a long moment before answering. “She’s the one who told them where to look. She sold me for a few pence.”

I didn’t see why men would pay to see women kiss. Perhaps in England women were kept hidden as they are among the Ottomans, and unscrupulous men paid to look at them.

“People heard about what happened anyway. They went around bragging about what they had done. No one would hire me. I lost everything.” I could hear Mary quietly crying, her face in shadow. “The wife of the minister of our church took pity on me and gave me a good reference, but only if I promised to reform. So I came out here.”

I leaned over and caressed the silken filaments of her hair. She let me stroke her hair, as she had my cheeks. She was lovely, taut, confused. I thought to gentle her in the way among women.

When after a while she touched her lips to mine, I misunderstood and she fell back.

“You startled me,” I said.

“It’s only a kiss,” she said breathlessly. “Won’t you let me?”

“You are right,” I admitted, ashamed of having repulsed her. “There is no shame among women, only comfort.”

We smiled bashfully at one another, our faces close enough to see in the gloom. I allowed her to kiss my mouth, then my neck. It reminded me of the balm that ran through me when Violet calmed my fears as a child and, after Hamza no longer visited, eased my sorrow. I had not desired Violet’s pity since Amin Efendi’s shameful attack, but this pale woman’s touch brought me back to my body. It is a blessing of womanhood that we may gather strength and pleasure from one another.

Like a mariner in uncharted seas, her hand traced the pulse in my throat to the top of my breasts, sheathing them in flames. Our lips lay together as twins. I felt myself arching back against the cushions as her hands pulled away the layers of cloth between us.

“Never strangers,” she breathed into my ear. “Not from the very beginning.”

She did not speak again, not even when I lay shuddering in her arms, my body her supplicant.

This was not the bread and water of Violet’s caress, but a veneration.

AFTER THAT WE resumed our weekly meetings. As the months passed, I thought less and less about Hamza, who did not come again. Instead, I savored the unfamiliar sensations of my first real friendship with a woman. Mary rented a carriage and we went for drives through the autumn countryside. When we discovered the abandoned sea hamam, we began to go there for our picnics. The driver returned at a given time or waited, snoring, by the road.

I unstacked the copper warming pots and laid them in a circle on the table. We threw a fringed cotton blanket on the mattress to cover the damp boards. Our bare feet hung in pairs, hers pale as milk, mine the color of fine china. As always, Mary had brought coal and kindled a small fire in the brazier. The jewelry I had given her winked from the shadows as she heated water for tea. From a corner nook, I extracted two tea glasses, the cheap kind bought in the market.

Perched on the mattress under a quilt, we fed each other pockets of flaky dough stuffed with cheese and parsley, tart fingertips of grape leaves rolled around rice and currants, fragrant bread kept hot in the tinned copper pans. After we ate, we smoked cigarettes and threw the remnants from the shady portico into the bright captive square of water. In another season these walls would hold the racket of children’s calls, shrill volleys of sound amid the placid murmur of their mothers’ voices telling and retelling. Their legs shyly entering the sea up to the ribbon at the knee. Bathing costumes worn like daring fashion gowns. The vulnerable body quickly pressed between plush towels so it did not sicken from a draft.

But not yet. It was still our sun and sea, our banging shutters, our sighing under the weathered boards. We lay still like split mussels, gathering a crust of salt. Her yellow hair was cut short, like a boy’s, and when she slicked it back wet, her face became naked.