touch me. Now close your eyes. Tight. And keep them closed until I tell you.”
I shrugged, and did as I was bidden, and heard her briefly moving about. Then she kissed me on my lips, in a shy and inexpert and maidenly way, but most deliciously, and for a long time. It so stimulated me that I was made quite dizzy. If I had not been holding onto the bench, I might actually have rocked from side to side. I waited for her to speak. Instead, she kissed me again, and as if practice was making her enjoy it more, and for even a longer time. There was another pause, and I waited for another kiss, but now she said, “Open your eyes.”
I did, and smiled at her. She was standing directly before me, and the flush of her cheeks had suffused her whole face, and her eyes were bright, and her rosebud lips were merry, and she asked, “Could you tell the kisses apart?”
“Apart? Why, no,” I said gallantly. I added, in what I imagined might be the style of a Persian poet, “How can a man say, of equally sweet perfumes or equally intoxicating flavors, that one is better than another? He simply wants more. And I do, I do!”
“And more you shall have. But of me? It was I who kissed you first. Or of Aziz, who kissed you next?”
At that, I did rock upon my bench. Then she reached a hand around behind her and drew him into my view, and I wobbled even more unsteadily.
“He is only a child!”
“He is my little brother Aziz.”
No wonder I had failed to notice him among the household servants. He could have been no older than eight or nine, and was small even for his age. But, once noticed, Aziz would have been hard to overlook again. Like all the local boy-children I had seen, he was an Alexandrian Cupid, but even more beautiful than the Kashan standard, just as his sister was superior to all the other Kashan girls I had seen. Incubo and succubo, I thought wildly.
I being still seated on the low bench, my eyes and his were at the same level. And his blue eyes were clear and solemn, seeming, in his small face, even bigger and more luminous than his sister’s. His mouth was a rosebud identical to hers. His body was perfectly formed, right down to his tapering tiny fingers. His hair was the same deep chestnut-red as his sister’s, and his skin the same ivory. The boy’s beauty was further adorned by an application of al-kohl around the eyelids and berry juice on his lips. I thought them unnecessary additions, but, before I could say so, Sitare spoke.
“Whenever, in my hours off from attendance on the mistress, I am allowed to wear cosmetics”—she talked rapidly, as if to ward off my saying anything—“I like to do the same decoration of Aziz.” Again forestalling my comment, she said, “Here, let me show you something, Mirza Marco.” With hurried and fumbling fingers, she undid and took off the blouse her brother wore. “Being a boy, of course he has no breasts, but regard his delicately shaped and prominent nipples.” I stared at them, for they were tinted bright red with hinna. Sitare said, “Are they not very similar to my own?” My eyes widened further, for she had whipped off her own upper garment, and was presenting her hinna-nippled bosom for my comparison. “See? His get aroused and erect, just like my own.”
Still she chattered on, though I was already incapable of interrupting. “Also, being a boy, Aziz of course has something I do not have.” She undid the string of his pai-jamah, and let the garment fall to the floor, and knelt beside him. “Is it not a perfect zab in miniature? And watch, when I stroke. Just like a little man’s. Now look at this.” She turned the boy around, and with her hands spread his dimpled pink buttocks apart. “Our mother always was punctilious about using the golule, and after she died so was I, and you see the superb result.” In another quick movement, and without any maidenly coyness, she let drop her own pai-jamah. She turned and bent far over, so that I could observe the under part of her that was not veiled by dark-red fluff. “Mine is two or three fingers’ breadth farther forward, but could you truly distinguish between my mihrab and his—?”
“Stop this!” I managed at last to say. “You are trying to importune me into sin with this boy-child!”
She did not deny it, but the boy-child did. Aziz turned to face me again and spoke for the first time. His voice was the musical small voice of a songbird, but firm. “No, Mirza Marco. My sister does not importune, nor do I. Do you really think I would ever have to?”
Taken aback by the direct question, I had to say, “No.” But then I rallied my Christian principles and said accusingly, “Flaunting is as reprehensible as importuning. When I was your age, child, I barely knew the
Aziz looked as hurt as if I had slapped him, and knit his feathery brows in seeming perplexity. “I am still very young, Mirza Marco, and perhaps ignorant, for no one has yet taught me how to be a sin. Only how to be al-fa‘il or al-mafa’ul, as the occasion requires.”
I sighed, “Alas, I was again forgetting the local customs.” So I momentarily dismissed my principles in favor of honesty, and said, “As the doer or the done-to, you probably could make a man forget it is a sin. And if to you it is not, then I apologize for castigating you unjustly.”
He gave me such a radiant smile that his whole naked little body seemed to glow in the darkening room.
I added, “I apologize also for having thought other unjust things about you, Aziz, without knowing you. Beyond a doubt, you are the most bewitchingly beautiful child I have ever seen, of either sex, and more tantalizing than many grown women I have seen. You are like one of the Dream children of whom I have recently heard. You would be a temptation even to a Christian, in the absence of your sister here. Alongside her desirability, you understand, you must take only second place.”
“I understand,” the boy said, still smiling. “And I agree.”
Sitare, also a figure of glowing alabaster in the twilight, regarded me with some amazement. She breathed almost unbelievingly, “You still want
“Very much. So much, indeed, that I am now praying that the favor you desire is something within my power to grant.”
“Oh, it is.” She picked up her discarded clothes and held them bunched in front of her, that I should not be distracted by her nudity. “We ask only that you take Aziz along in your karwan, and only as far as Mashhad.”
I blinked. “Why?”
“You said yourself that you have never seen a more beautiful or more winning child. And Mashhad is a convergence of many trade routes, a place of many opportunities.”
“I myself do not much want to go,” said Aziz. His nudity was also a distraction, so I picked up his clothes and gave them to him to hold. “I do not wish to leave my sister, who is all the family I have. But she has convinced me that it is for the best.”
“Here in Kashan,” Sitare went on, “Aziz is but one of countless pretty boys, all competing for the notice of any anderun purveyor who passes through. At best, Aziz can hope to be chosen by one of those, to become the concubine of some nobleman, who may turn out to be an evil and vicious person. But in Mashhad he could be presented to and appreciated by and acquired by some rich traveling merchant. He may start his life as that man’s concubine, but he will have the opportunity to travel, and in time he can hope to learn his master’s profession, and he can go on to make something much better of himself than a mere anderun plaything.”
Playing was much on my own mind at that moment. I would have been happy to conclude the talking and start doing other things. Nevertheless, I was also at that moment realizing a truth that I think not many journeyers ever do.
We who wander about the world, we pause briefly in this community or that, and to us each is but one flash of vague impression in a long series of such forgettable flashes. The people there are only dim figures looming momentarily out of the dust clouds of the trail. We travelers usually have a destination and a purpose in aiming for it, and every stop along the way is merely one more milestone in our progress. But in actuality the people living there had an existence before we came, and will have after we leave, and they have their own concerns—hopes and worries and ambitions and plans—which, being of great moment to them, might sometimes be worth remarking also by us passersby. We might learn something worth knowing, or enjoy a laugh of amusement, or garner a sweet memory worth treasuring, or sometimes even improve our own selves, by taking notice of such things. So I paid sympathetic attention to the wistful words and glowing faces of Sitare and Aziz, as they spoke of their plans and their ambitions and their hopes. And ever since that time, in all my journeyings, I have tried always to see in its entirety every least place I have passed through, and to see its humblest inhabitants with an unhurried eye.
“So we ask only,” said the girl, “that you take Aziz with you to Mashhad, and that in Mashhad you seek out a karwan merchant of wealth and kindly nature and other good qualities … .”
“Someone like yourself, Mirza Marco,” suggested the boy.
“ … And sell Aziz to him.”
