“I mused about my reaction to this meeting for some time. How I had screamed out during the long, awful summer of my pain for just such people to hear and rescue me. I had used the very same words of the mass, ready to let my savior be a Spaniard or a Pole, anything, so long as he was Christian. But he was a Christian who butchered me, at least he had been once, and for long enough to make a mockery of the liturgy I had hoped would save me. And he was Italian, too.
“Lest I make the mistake of condemning all my race, that very same day fate sent another young Italian into the market. When first I saw him, I wanted to turn and run, to avoid another scene like the one I had just escaped. But this young man approached graciously and addressed me in a stilted but polite Turkish. I couldn’t very well pretend not to understand that—indeed, it became my sudden concern to speak my Turkish flawlessly and without an accent so as to maintain my anonymity. When the young man actually used the word ‘ustadh’ to call me, I could not refuse, and met him in the eye.”
“Why should he not call you ustadh?” Esmikhan asked. “It means ‘teacher, master.’”
“Of course.”
“It is a term of great respect.”
“Of course.”
“And khadim are often addressed so.”
“I knew that, of course, but it was the first time I had been called that, and I was flattered. From one of my own country!”
“I shall always call you ustadh, if it pleases you, Abdullah.”
“If Allah wills, I may always deserve it from your tongue, lady. But you must try and imagine the shock it was to hear it from one of my own country.
“When I met his eye, I saw clearly that he meant no mockery, although he still struggled with the depths of a void he saw in something he could treat neither as a man nor as a woman. I did not blame him. I face the same struggle myself.
“‘Ustadh, please. Will you come and join me in a sherbet?’
“A lemon-flavored glass of his own sat on a small table under the sherbet seller’s grape arbor, where it had obviously been for some time. The snow had melted to water, and the flavors had separated. I was not the first to decline him. I even refused a seat, which made his face grow hot and his Turkish stiffer and more confused, but I did agree to hear him out.
“So what did he have to say?” Esmikhan asked.
“He introduced himself as Andrea Barbarigo, aide to the present Venetian ambassador to the Porte. Well, I needed to hear no more.”
“You knew him?”
“I knew him at once—as the youngest of that proud and ancient family. I smiled ironically to myself, for Sofia Baffo— Safiye—had once told me she intended to make a match with the Barbarigos, perhaps with this very young man.” I didn’t think it was necessary to speak of elopement.
“Safiye?” Esmikhan interrupted here. “Safiye knew this young man, too?”
“Yes. Long ago and far away.”
“Knew him so well she wanted to arrange a marriage with him?”
“If that name was any more to her than the very symbol of Venetian power and wealth.”
Esmikhan stared off into the night in the direction she imagined even now Safiye to be working a woman’s mysteries on her brother. Perhaps it was also the direction she imagined her future husband to lie and she wondered about her ability to work those same mysteries. Her eyes and voice were filled with that wonder as she said, “Such a strange land you and Safiye come from. Where a girl may think of choosing her own husband. No wonder Safiye is so—so much the way she is.”
I suppose I should have explained to her that all Venetian girls were not like that. Only Safiye, and she would be an anomaly in whatever land she found herself. Instead, I referred back to the young Italian nobleman, and told how in my heart I had thought, “There, but for the wrath of God, am I.”
It was from Andrea Barbarigo’s hands, of course, that I had received the notice of Governor Baffo’s offer of ransom for his daughter. I told Esmikhan about that, and again she wondered at the ways of a land that would foster such a lack of devotion in a daughter. Selim was not much of a father actually, and Esmikhan had probably never sat upon his knee or even received so much as a kiss of affection from him, but she could not believe that any daughter would tear up such a message from her sire instead of treating it with reverence. Again, I could have said, but did not, that this was only Safiye we were talking about, and not Venice as a whole.
At last, as the lamp burned very low, I made a confession to this saint of naive but deep and perfect understanding. “There is yet one more person I met in the bazaar.”
This was pushing time back, back closer to the horrors of Pera. Close, close enough, I thought, this occasion when I was on my first training errands for Salah ad-Din’s wife. But then I looked into my lady’s face and decided, not too close.
“And I must say he was the very last person on earth I wanted to face in this, my new condition. Only my father and my uncle could have made me wish more that I had never been born rather than to see the hurt in their eyes when they learned that their line and their hopes in me were extinguished. I had nightmares, actually, when the delirium was on me, of just those eyes...
“It was in Pera. That was all the further I was allowed
