CHAPTER 33

The Circassian Mistress (3)

The gypsy boy led them down a tight alleyway, and pointed wordlessly to a doorway that was partially sunken below the level of the stones outside. Rustem Bey looked at the building, and noticed that although the walls were particoloured, and pocked with what appeared to be bullet holes, it was in better condition than those that neighboured it. A musky odour seemed to emanate from it, and from within there came the cheerful sound of someone plucking an oud. He heard the laughter of a young woman, and the tinkle of something brassy being dropped to the floor.

Wordlessly, the boy held out a grubby hand, palm upward, and Rustem Bey pressed a coin into it. “Stay here,” he said, “I will need you to guide us back.”

On the door was a knocker in the shape of a small hand holding a ball, and he raised it on its hinge with some trepidation. Back home only the Armenians had door knockers, and having to use one gave him the same kind of misgivings that one might have upon mounting a horse for the first time.

The grille opened, and a pair of dark eyes peered out, heavily made up with kohl. “Who is it?” demanded a curiously strangulated voice. “I’m very busy just now, and I can’t go wasting my time.”

“I have come about … something,” said Rustem Bey, his cheeks colouring.

“Everyone comes about something, my aga. What might this little something be?”

Rustem had the distinct impression that he was being teased. “I was recommended to come to you by one of the attendants in the hamam. He said I was sure to find … what I was after.”

“Oh, those hamam boys, they’re just so mischievous,” said the voice, and the eyes rolled theatrically, framed as they were by the grille. “The things I could tell you! Still, I don’t know what we’d do without them.” The eyes examined him for a moment, and then the strange voice said, “Oh well, I suppose you look like a reasonably decent proposition. You wouldn’t believe the dreadful riff-raff we get turning up here sometimes. You’d better come in.”

The bolt was drawn back, and Rustem Bey told his servants and the gypsy boy to stay where they were. Down the steps he went, holding on to his new fez so that it was not knocked off by the lintel, and found himself in a surprisingly well-appointed room whose walls were hung with heavily made carpets of no mean manufacture. Oil lamps fixed to the walls spilled a dim, reddened light, and in the centre of the floor stood an ornate brass brazier which gave off the scent of charcoal and olibanum. The floor was thick underfoot with kilims laid across each other more or less at random, and cushions and low divans lay about the floor in a kind of ordered abandon. A large and ornate narghile stood by the brazier, with four tubes inserted into its bowl.

Rustem Bey removed his boots and placed them carefully by the steps, alongside three small pairs of Moroccan slippers, and one pair that seemed absolutely enormous.

This latter pair belonged without doubt to the creature who stood before him. This epicene person was stupendously tall and thin, and was garbed in richly embroidered robes of green and crimson, and an oversized white turban pinned at the front with an enamelled golden brooch in the form of a peacock. The face was pale but heavily rouged, and the thin lips were painted bright scarlet, in such a way as to make them seem fuller than they were. The eyebrows were plucked, and just at the point of showing stubble where they were beginning to regrow. What struck Rustem Bey particularly was a very large and prominent Adam’s apple that seemed quite out of place in one whose every care was quite clearly to manifest and emphasise the trappings of femininity.

“Do sit down,” she said, “I shall just nip inside and alert the girls. They’ll be so excited, I can’t tell you. Mind you, they always are.”

When she returned she stood for a moment looking at her guest, with her hands folded and her lips pursed. Then she produced a pouch from the folds of her robes and bent down to fill the bowl of the narghile, saying, “I expect you’d like a smoke, wouldn’t you? It’s quite a trip on those horrid boats, and as for these streets, well, horrid’s not the word, is it? I don’t know how I bring myself to live here, I really don’t. I used to be in Scutari, but the local people, what prigs! Honestly, it was impossible. They’d be banging on the shutters, throwing stones, they were such animals. And I’ll tell you something else, those very same people banging and throwing stones in daylight were the ones who came back at night hoping for a dip into one of my girls. The hypocrisy! It makes you sick. At least the scum around here know that that’s what they are, so that’s a good thing, isn’t it? I do hope you’re not a hypocrite, my aga, because if you are, I can’t be doing with you.”

Rustem Bey was much disconcerted by this bizarre and garrulous stranger. He was used to a stiff and carefully patterned formality in his dealings, and always felt uncomfortable to find that there were other worlds than his. He fumbled in the pockets of his Stamboul frock coat, and found the amber mouthpiece that he carried with him. He inserted it into one of the tubes, and sucked as, with a pair of small tongs, his host held a glowing coal to the bowl of tobacco. “Well, that’s something,” she said, “a real gentleman always brings his own mouthpiece. You’ll be surprised at the number of slovens who turn up here and expect us to let them slobber on ours. Makes you sick, it really does. I like to call myself ‘Kardelen,’ by the way. It’s such a pretty little flower, and I was born right at the end of winter, and when you see them peeping out you always know that spring’s not too far off.” She added, “Where I come from, anyway.”

“It is indeed a lovely name, Kardelen Hanim,” agreed Rustem Bey, who had never seen a snowdrop in his life, and had not a clue as to what she was talking about. He puffed on the pipe, and detected a taste that was unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. His head began to swim a little, and he blinked his eyes.

One wall of this room was a false one, and behind the hanging carpets three young women, stifling their giggles, listened, whispered excitedly and watched through three strategically placed holes.

Kardelen threw herself with some dramatic skill down on to a divan, and smiled playfully at Rustem Bey. “Tell me about yourself. You are rich, I hope. I never allow my girls to be taken into poverty. Their welfare is always uppermost in my mind, you know. One gets so fond of them, they become like one’s own daughters, and it would break my heart, it so much would, if any of them ended up in the gutter, or in a brothel, God help us.”

“I have a very large amount of land,” Rustem Bey told her, embarrassed by the reference to brothels. “I have many servants, and I employ a considerable number of people in my town.” He paused and added, “I have a great number of clocks.”

“And where would your town be, my aga?”

“Beyond Smyrna. The nearest large town is Telmessos, but my town is large enough. We have everything. It is very peaceful.”

“Not too peaceful, I hope. None of my girls cope with boredom, you know. Too much peace can be so tedious, don’t you think? Absolute peace is altogether too much like death, in my opinion.”

“It’s a town like any other. It’s very old, it’s mainly on a hillside, we have a river below in the valley, and the sea is just over the hill. Let me see. There is a beautiful pine forest that you ride through when you approach it, and we Muslims bury our dead among the trees. It’s a nice thing to see those whitewashed graves among the trees. When you see them you feel you have at last come home.”

Kardelen shuddered archly. “Oh no, don’t. Please let’s not talk about graves. It makes me feel so … so mortal. What else is there, apart from graves?”

Rustem Bey struggled to think. “Well, we have lots of Christians, you know, the Greek kind, but they’re quite harmless, and most of them don’t even speak Greek, and we have some Jews doing the usual things that Jews do, and we have some Armenians—the apothecary is Armenian—and we have nomads at harvest time, and all the pedlars who go to Telmessos come to us too. We have a fine mosque.” Here Rustem Bey hesitated. “I have sworn an oath that if I find a good woman here, I will build another mosque.”

“Forgive me,” said Kardelen, delicately, “but it strikes me as surprising that you don’t have a wife. I mean, a man in your position …”

“I have a wife,” said Rustem, “but I have put her aside. She was a slut.”

“My aga, a good slut is not to be sniffed at,” said Kardelen, and before Rustem Bey could think about this, she asked, “You are divorced?”

“No, but I have put her aside.”

“And your family have found you no one else?”

“My family are all dead. It was the fever that comes back with the haj.” At this moment a young black woman appeared as if from nowhere with a tray upon which there were two small glasses of coffee. She placed it on the low table between them, and vanished just as neatly as she had arrived.

“Oh yes,” observed Kardelen drily, “God reaps a goodly harvest from the haj. Every year He looks around paradise and finds literally thousands of new recruits, all in green turbans. So becoming.”

“Who was that?” asked Rustem Bey, ignoring Kardelen’s last remark, and tossing his chin in the direction that the girl had taken.

“One of my girls. So, tell me, what exactly have you come here for?”

Rustem Bey flushed, reached for his glass of coffee and, avoiding Kardelen’s gaze, said, “I have heard very good things of Circassian women.”

The black girl behind the carpet pouted and whispered, “He won’t want me then. Damn, he’s so sweet!”

“He’s too serious!” whispered the Arab girl with the merry face. “You need a man who laughs.”

“But he’s so lovely,” whispered the ebony girl with the satin skin. “I could go all night with him! Every night, believe me!” She rolled her eyes and puffed out her cheeks.

The two other girls put their hands to their mouths and pretended to be shocked. “You’re such a little fitchet,” said the one with porcelain skin and long black hair, “you’d probably make him die of exhaustion.”

The black girl put her finger to her lips, and they nudged each other and stifled their laughter as they continued to eavesdrop.

“Circassian women,” repeated Kardelen. “Round faces, pale as the moon. I suppose you know that story about why so many women wear the veil? It’s rather droll.”

“I might have heard it,” replied Rustem Bey, “but it escapes my memory.”

“Oh, it’s such fun!” Kardelen leaned forward, as if imparting a confidence. “The story is that when the capital was still at Bursa there was a positive invasion of Circassians because those Russians, dreadful people, such rapists and drunks, were persecuting Muslims again, and anyway they all arrived in Bursa seeking sanctuary, and the women were so beautiful that all the local men fell in love with them, and every night there were such brawls and arguments and murders because of the men squabbling over the beautiful Circassians! So one day the Sultan, I forget which one, they’re all equally mad, summons the leader of the Circassians, and says to him, ‘You’ve got to tell your women to cover up their faces, because they’re so beautiful that there isn’t any peace around here any more.’ So the leader tells the women to cover up because the Sultan Padishah wants all the fighting to stop. So the women cover up, and then all the other women cover up too, and do you know why? It’s out of vanity! It’s because they want everyone to think that they’re beautiful as well! So all the old hags start to wander about in the marketplaces pretending to be too beautiful to show their faces! It makes you laugh, it really does. Still, it has spared us from having to look at all the ugly women all this time, so some good came out of it after all. Where were we?”

Rustem Bey had listened to the end of this story with some unease, since he had had direct experience of what ugliness might be hidden beneath a veil, and was not sure what to say next. Finally he offered, “I think I might have heard that story before, but I had forgotten it.”

(“He’s so solemn!” whispered the Arab girl behind the hanging carpet.)

Kardelen sipped her coffee coyly, and continued. “Of course, there probably isn’t one little iota of truth in it. The best stories are always lies, I find.”

(The white-skinned girl sighed, and whispered, “I think he might be just what I need. He’s so handsome! And gentle too!”

“You’re so lucky,” whispered the black girl.

“If he chooses me.”

“He couldn’t resist you,” said the Arab girl, “nobody can.”

The fair one pulled a grimace. “That last one was a nightmare. If he ever finds me, I’m going to kill myself.”)

Kardelen sipped at her coffee again, adopted a confiding expression, and said, “I do happen to have a Circassian girl.”

(“Completely brazen!” whispered the black girl.)

“It’s such a sad story too,” said Kardelen.

(“Hark at this!” whispered the Arab.)

“Her father was a bandit, quite a notorious one, and you know what these Circassian bandits are like. They keep their sons and teach them to be brigands, and the daughters they give away to be brought up by someone else, and then they come back for them when they’re ready to get married off. Well, in this case the bandit got killed by the gendarmes, and no one ever came back for poor little Leyla.”

(“Leyla?” repeated the fair one. “Is that what I’ve got to call myself?”

“Well, you can’t call yourself Ioanna if you’re going to be Circassian,” whispered the Arab.)

“Poor little Leyla!” continued Kardelen, emotionally. “Fragrant as a rose, sweeter than the apples of Nevsehir! Intoxicating as the honey of Pontus!”

(“Brilliant!” whispered the black girl.)

Rustem Bey began to feel even more strange, and wondered if there was something odd about the tobacco. He was experiencing a pleasant but disorientating light-headedness, a kind of unbalanced serenity. “Might I see the young woman concerned?” he asked.

Kardelen leaned forward and touched his knee with her hand. “If only you saw her naked …”

“Is such a thing possible?” asked Rustem Bey, much to his own surprise. He was abruptly overcome with such shame that he looked about the room, as if to check whether anybody else had been witness to it. Stronger than his shame, however, was his animal instinct, and stronger even than that was the common-sense determination that if he was going to disburse an enormous sum of money to this loquacious androgyne, he would make very sure that the goods were worth the expense.

Behind the hanging carpet, the fair one with the black hair cursed under her breath and whispered vehemently, “God, I hate it when I have to do this! I never get enough warning!” She slipped away as silently as she could, and the other two girls exchanged glances of amused complicity.

“It so happens that Leyla likes to be naked when she’s in her room,” said Kardelen, raising one eyebrow and shaking her head salaciously, “and I happen to know where there’s a little chink in the hangings.” She took Rustem Bey’s hand, and he found that he was unable to resist her. It was as if he had been mesmerised into docility. He stumbled after her, still holding on to her bony fingers, and shortly afterwards found himself most uncomfortably bent double, peering into a poorly lit but richly furnished chamber through a knot-hole in the planking.

Inside, he beheld the marble-white form of a young naked woman, reclining on her cushions, apparently absorbed in combing out her long, shining black hair. Occasionally she puffed delicately on a very slim cigarette that she held to her lips by means of a small pair of ornate silver tongs. Languidly the young woman moved, and Rustem saw her round plump breasts, the gentle mound of her stomach (whose navel was embellished with a blood-red garnet set in silver), the graceful curve of her neck, and the sensual tapering of her thighs. Conquering his better inclinations, he tried to see what there was at the apex of her legs, but her pose and the shadows made it impossible. He felt short of breath. He had never seen his own wife Tamara as naked as this. He had never really seen her naked at all. He suddenly realised, with a sense of profound wonder, that he had never appreciated before how beautiful a woman was, and how strange and unlike anything else this beauty was. He found himself wondering with a pang whether Tamara had been beautiful like this. He was borne in upon by a disturbing sense of the sacred.

The young woman moved on to her belly in order to polish her nails, and Rustem took in the pert roundness of her backside and the quick contours of her back. He saw how small her feet were, and that she had a gold chain about one of her ankles, but most of all he saw how full of life she was, how much she seemed to glow with inner light, how little she was akin to the oxen-like women who worked in his field and drudged away their unavailing lives in Eskibahçe. He backed away from the wall and returned silently to the antechamber.

“Sit down,” said Kardelen, and Rustem Bey sat down. “I have seen what I should not have seen,” he said, his voice weak and uncertain.

“You poor thing,” drawled Kardelen, her voice expressing both sympathy and sarcasm. She always found it very tiresome when people’s niceties and scruples got in the way of pleasures or beauty, but she realised that Rustem Bey was in a state of some perplexity.

“As you can see,” said Kardelen, suddenly becoming businesslike, “she is the ideal of beauty. Her face is slightly oval, her skin is very fine and white, her eyebrows are black and meet in the middle, her lips are very red and fresh. She is neither tall nor squat. Furthermore, she plays the oud very delightfully, and she sings. She makes coffee as well as any girl I have ever known. She is educated reasonably well, and I have myself taught her everything she could possibly need to know about how to please a man.”

Rustem Bey looked worried. “She is a virgin?”

Kardelen smiled indulgently. “Well, naturally she is a virgin, my aga. She is as virgin as the day she was born, and no one can be more virgin than that, not even Mary Mother of Jesus, may she rest in paradise. I have told her everything she needs to know, in very great detail, I may say, but she has had no direct experience of it.”

(Ioanna, soon to be renamed Leyla, but still naked, had by now rejoined the two girls who were observing these proceedings, and the Arabess put her hand to Leyla’s ear and whispered, “Guess what? You’re a virgin again!”

Ioanna bit her lower lip and wagged her head. “Again!” she exclaimed. “Our dear Kardelen works so many miracles with chicken blood.”)

“And how old is she?”

“She is fifteen years old, just at the very beginning of what will be a long period of beauty, in my estimation.”

(“You’ve got young again!” whispered the Negress, her white teeth sparkling in her suppressed mirth.)

“And how much are you selling her for?” asked Rustem Bey.

Kardelen bridled visibly. “She is not for sale. I sell nobody, and there have been no slaves in Istanbul for more than fifty years. You must know that, surely.”

“How do I … acquire her, then?” asked Rustem Bey.

“This is what happens,” said Kardelen. “I take in these poor girls who are orphans, or fugitives, or whatever, and have no one to care for them. Clearly they have nothing of their own, and I am by no means rich, and so the poor things have no dowry, so marriage is difficult or out of the question, although not always impossible. When they reach the age of attractiveness I find men for them who are seeking another kind of arrangement, but I do it with the utmost care. My girls are such darlings, and I grow fond of them. We have a happy time here, and I don’t like to let them go at all, to tell the truth, but naturally one needs the money.”

“The money?” repeated Rustem Bey.

“The money,” said Kardelen. “The money is to recompense me for the time and toil that I have put into their education, their clothing, their feeding, and suchlike. Naturally the money must be sufficient for me to be able to begin again with a new girl.” Kardelen paused portentously, and then announced rather quickly, “In the case of Leyla, who is exceptional, the recompense will have to be sixty thousand piastres.”

Rustem Bey winced. “Do you have any other girls?”

“I have a fine young Abyssinian who was abducted from her master in Alexandria (not by me, I hasten to say) and abandoned in Adrianopolis, and I have a plump little Arabess from Lebanon, who is a complete sweetheart. Neither of them is Circassian, by any stretch of the imagination, since one is black and the other is golden.”

“Sixty thousand piastres is far more than I have come with,” said Rustem Bey, who by now had set his heart upon having the Circassian, mainly because he thought he saw her slipping out of his grasp.

“If she likes you, I might drop the price,” said Kardelen. “Perhaps you will excuse me for a few minutes.” She got up with great dignity and swept out of the room, as if disgusted by Rustem Bey’s ungentlemanly stinginess.

Kardelen, Ioanna and the other two girls convened in the kitchen, and chattered excitedly to each other. “What do you think?” asked Kardelen.

“He’s gorgeous,” exclaimed the Negress, “you’re so lucky!”

“He is handsome,” agreed Ioanna, “and his clothes are very smart. And his accent is so sweet and funny! Do they all talk like that in the south?”

“He must be quite rich,” said the Arabess, adding, “Don’t you think he looks sad, though?”

“The point is, do you think you would enjoy pleasing him?” asked Kardelen, and Ioanna smiled coyly. “I think I would. For a while, anyway. You know me.”

“You mustn’t run away again and get me into even more trouble,” said Kardelen, her voice full of mock reproach. “I can’t tell you what a horror it was having to move everything at such short notice. Twice! I could have killed you.”

“I was bored with him,” Ioanna excused herself, “and he was mean, and he was a pig. At least I’ve earned you money twice over. The best thing about this one is that he comes from so far away that no one will ever find me.” She paused, and then a thought occurred to her. “Do I really have to be Leyla? Don’t you think he’ll realise I’m a Greek?”

“He wouldn’t know a real Circassian if one fell out of his backside,” said Kardelen. “They don’t have any in the south, and anyway, you’re not any old shitty Greek from a hole in the ground. You’re practically Italian, darling. Come along, put your clothes on and make us some coffee.”

“And I get half the money?”

“Of course you do, sweetie, but I don’t think I’ll get sixty thousand, so don’t expect too much.”

“What if I have to go in the mosque?” asked Ioanna, but Kardelen had already left. She re-entered the selamlik, her hips swaying perhaps a little too much, and folded her long limbs and bony ankles beneath her on the divan. Rustem Bey extracted his mouthpiece from the narghile, and put it back in his pocket. He was feeling even more light-headed, and a little sick. “I can offer you thirty thousand piastres,” he said. Kardelen merely raised her eyebrows and smiled condescendingly.

“There are conditions,” said Kardelen.

“Conditions?”

“One: you cannot hire Leyla out to anyone else, and you cannot sell her or pass her on without her consent. If, after twelve years, she wants her freedom, you must grant it, and make provision for her. If she declines it, you must keep her as before. If you marry her, she must be the equal of any other wife, and if she has children they must be cared for as your own. And, by the way, thirty thousand piastres is quite out of the question. I might possibly consider fifty thousand.”

“How do you enforce these conditions?” asked Rustem Bey, genuinely puzzled.

“Enforce them? I only allow my girls to go to honourable men, and so I make them promise. You would have to promise. You are an honourable man?”

“Of course.”

“And do you promise?”

Rustem Bey felt confused. The strange tobacco and the heavy atmosphere of the room had fuddled his intellect. “What were those conditions again?”

The gynandrous Kardelen repeated them, again adding, “Do you promise?”

“I promise,” said Rustem Bey at last.

“Very well. Tomorrow you must return with fifty thousand piastres and a couple of hamals, and Leyla will be packed and ready, inshallah. Not that she’s ever on time for anything, in my experience.”

Rustem Bey emerged into the polluted sunlight with his head thumping, and gripped himself hard across the temples between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He stood with his head bowed, screwing up his eyes. Finally he lifted his head, shook it as if to clear away its buzz of disconnected thoughts and impressions, and signalled his servants and guide to walk ahead. The suspicion occurred to him quite instanter that the somewhat intersexual Kardelen might have been a deviant man rather than a masculine woman, if indeed she was either, and he was brushed simultaneously by an uncomfortable intuition that the flow of his destiny had veered off course. He braced himself for whatever was to come, and took a caique back to Scutari, where he made his way to the Ayazma Mosque, to pray once more to the Deity whose unaccustomed aid he had so recently thought to enlist. As he touched his forehead to the prayer mat, he had the distinct impression that no one was listening, and when he emerged back into the meydan, he felt as though he had begun to inhabit a life other than his own.