Finally, I realized it was hopeless. She would continue to mangle my name that way day in and day out.
“But what shall I call you then?”
“Just call me a man—”
“A man?” There was no insult in her voice. Just surprise.
“No, I cannot be called even that any more. Just call me a soul whom God—Allah—has seen fit to curse beyond any other. Adam got off lightly compared to me.”
Perhaps my struggle with the Turkish failed to convey all the bitterness I meant with it.
“You are Allah’s servant,” she stated.
“His slave, his khadim.”
“So are we all, Abdullah. So are we all when we have the humility to know it. Some are more blessed because Allah helps them to learn it more readily than others. Yes, so are we all.” Was she merely reciting something Turks learned by rote? Or was this her own intelligence? “So. I will call you Abdullah—Allah’s servant.”
“Abdullah.” At least it was male. “That was the name my friend Husayn always teased he’d give me if I came to play Turk in his homeland. Like I called him Enrico.”
“Do you mind?”
What did it matter? What did anything matter anymore? I shrugged my acquiescence.
“Abdullah it is then.” She wrung her cloth out in its bowl with renewed determination. “Yes, I do think it suits you. Much better than Lulu. You are different from other khuddam. Perhaps you are newer at it than others?”
“Perhaps.”
“Is this your first post?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps that explains it.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, I shall do my best to see it is the only one you ever have. It isn’t easy, so I understand, for khuddam to change mistresses once they’ve become attached, like family.”
Attachment to anything seemed impossible, but I said, “At your service, my lady.”
For the first time, I felt some gratitude for the patience Salah ad-Din’s fat, sloppy wife had had in trying to teach me the stiff formalities of my new station. She insisted on teaching me when becoming a more marketable commodity was the last thing I wanted to do, when I was too consumed with rage to breathe evenly for days on end. There was some purpose in these forms. They were an escape.
“Is there truth in what the others were saying?” Esmikhan began again.
“What others?”
My lady bit her lip, flattening its usual roundness, until it was more like an average mouth. “Sokolli Pasha—my betrothed—perhaps he made a mistake in sending you, one so young and inexperienced.”
“I think he hasn’t much experience with eunuchs, lady, that is true.”
With a sigh, she turned more merry. “Well, I see nothing wrong with you. The way you stood up to my brother— I’d trust you on my side against anyone.”
“It’s only when I knew he was your brother that I let him get off so easily. Anyone else—”
“I appreciate that, ustadh. Anyone else would need more help than Safiye can offer him tonight.”
She finished with the water. It was getting cold in any case. She tossed the cloth into the bowl with a little splash and gestured for the maidservant to remove it.
When the girl was gone, she said: “You know Safiye, don’t you?
“Safiye? Is that what you call her?” Not she-demon? Not bitch?
“You know her? From before?”
“From before.”
“She is Italian, too. Is it such a very small country? You Italians certainly give my Grandfather the Sultan trouble enough in battle and on the high seas.”
“Italy was a long, long time ago.” Couldn’t we finish with the subject?
“I see.” I think she did make an attempt to change the topic, though it wasn’t far enough for me. “Well, Safiye has certainly brought life to this harem. Life to my brother, too, which you tried to knock from him again tonight. I have never had such a dear, dear friend as Safiye is.”
“What pleases my lady pleases me.” Another one of those good, noncommittal phrases.
“I do hope Sokolli Pasha will allow me to continue to see her.”
“I am sure that what pleases my lady will also please my master.”
Selim’s daughter chuckled.
What was so humorous about the way I ran through a eunuch’s dialogue? “My lady?”
“Nothing. Just—wasn’t it funny when my brother finally discovered that he, not you, was the intruder here in the haremlik? How he soon skulked back into the mabein with his seriously wounded pride? He is such a blustering bag of hot air. You mustn’t mind him.”
“I shouldn’t mind him so much if my eve wasn’t throbbing like it is.”
My lady laughed again, louder. “And Safiye, how she turned so indignantly from you and quickly followed her lover. Nobody ever brought her to heel before like that.”
“She would follow her lover.”
“Oh, not Murad. She only does what Murad says when it pleases her. You, Abdullah. You, with your put-down. ‘Looking for lovers among the khuddam?’ I wonder who’ll recover sooner, Murad from his black eyes or Safiye from your words.”
My lady and I had met only briefly before, just long enough for me to register her plump, healthy youthfulness in my mind. I had weighed it sadly against the sharp middle age of my master, who was to be her husband—and even more sadly, equated it with a younger form of Salah ad-Din’s wife. But now, I saw how truly pleasant she was to look at. Not overwhelmingly beautiful, perhaps, with her round face and round, dark eyes, black curls and round mouth dimpling with her laughter over a round chin. A prominent mole marred the left side of her nose. But she was good-natured and pleasanter still when her personality bubbled unhampered to the surface.
I laughed in spite of myself and she laughed back.
Then, with sudden and inexplicable unity, Esmikhan and I laughed together. It was infectious, a fever of laughter. We laughed and laughed until the tears flowed, until our sides ached. We couldn’t look at one another without
