“Yes, let’s look at Sofia Baffo for an example.”
“Someday she— inshallah —will be the mother of a Sultan. She couldn’t have done that in Italy.”
“No, indeed.”
“And I think in many cases, eventually, it must be so with most of the khuddam, or more would be complaining, don’t you think?”
“Lady, at the moment, I am complaining for lack of sleep.”
“But I’m trying to sort out what I can do about your suffering.”
“I would admire the tenacity of your empathetic feelings, lady, if they weren’t interfering with sleep—yours and mine—and the good amount of walking we must do this afternoon if we are ever to get back to civilization.” “All of this, slaves and castration, is Allah’s will.” “That’s what Salah ad-Din and his cohort agreed upon.” “What can I, one little princess, do against Allah’s will?” “Yes. A whole system based on Allah’s will.” “It’s sinful even to contemplate thwarting Him.” “So let’s not thwart the divinely given need for sleep one moment longer.”
“You go back to the cave, Abdullah. You sleep. I can’t.” I took a step or two in the direction of compliance, but then turned quickly toward her once more. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, but in those two steps I had had a vision of some vague threat. Beast or brigand, what did it matter? Heedless of how tired I was, I couldn’t sleep as long as she was out here, exposed to God knows what.
“Look here, my lady. A man can suffer no greater defilement than what I have suffered. Death is preferable. There is nothing more to be said on the subject.”
“But what if he were to suffer the defilement of all his harem?”
“Pfah, that is nothing. I hate to disillusion you, but as long as he’s got his balls, a man can hope to return tit for tat and rape the other guy’s harem. You don’t know how many times I imagined Salah ad-Din’s sloppy fat wife wriggling and screaming under me—”
It wasn’t until I saw the ashen color Esmikhan’s face took on that I realized just how cruel my words had been.
“That was what Crazy Orhan’s son was about, wasn’t it?” she asked.
I guess so.
Her voice had grown very faint. “I think what you have suffered must be like rape is for a woman.”
“Oh, no, lady. There is no comparison. After a rape, a woman gets up and goes on.”
“Do you think so?”
“There is no going on for the likes of a—a creature like me.”
“No, Abdullah. I am not at all certain I could have gone on if...if you hadn’t...stopped it last night.”
“Yes, well, look at Sofia.”
“Safiye is something else again, Abdullah.”
“A truer word was never said.”
“I don’t think you can say that what is true for Safiye is true for all other women or even many of them.”
“I’ve no doubt you’re right, lady.”
“Sometimes I think Allah put her by accident on the wrong side of the harem curtain—if it weren’t blasphemous to say so, for Allah makes no mistakes.”
“Well put.”
“She is difficult to rape and impossible to castrate.”
“A remarkable, dangerous combination.”
“But Safiye is not the normal case of the world. All I can say is, had you not saved me last night, my life would now be worthless. I would have wanted to die—even as you did after your mutilation.”
“As I still do.”
“No, Abdullah. Say not so! If you had died, so must have I. For certainly no other khadim in the whole world could have saved me as you did.”
“Once a man is castrated, they can do nothing worse to him,” I recited my litany. “An arrow through the brain—it would have been much, much easier.”
“But only consider, Abdullah, what it is to us womenfolk.
Even if rape did not mean, as it very often does, rejection by our menfolk and eternal shame. Even if that were not the case, having known the fate worse than death, to live with the knowledge that it can happen again and again, any and every day of our lives until death. And having come so close and been rescued, that is still no release from the sentence of this curse. The realization of how vulnerable we are— it’s made only so much more vivid. Perhaps some of the bodies—male bodies—to whom this violation can only happen once must suffer it to spare females, in as far as it is possible, the horror of the potential for repetition. Isn’t our vulnerability worse than to know it can only happen once? You—you are free.”
“Freedom, you call it?”
“Free, in Allah’s hands. To know that now the worst is over and, Allah willing, you are free from any threat of any man.”
“But there are scars. By Allah, the scars, the crippling of muscle for even the simplest of functions—”
“And how do you know we don’t suffer scars, on the inside, where you can’t see. Scars just as vicious and debilitating.”
Esmikhan turned her face from me and I saw only the wind-whipped tail of her veil against the gentle roundness of her little shoulders.
“Perhaps you cannot think so, Abdullah, and if not, I am sorry if I’ve hurt you.” She turned to me again, her eyes sparking with the wind. “The fact of the matter is, I can only be grateful that by your suffering once, you were in a position to save me similar suffering last night.”
I grunted, even formulas failing me.
“I, at least, must say if Allah’s will was that it had to happen—what happened to you in Pera—I can at least show some gratitude for His Almighty will.”
“Gratitude! A curse on any God who could sit passively by and let such a thing happen to a dog. You can apologize and say ‘We are a civilized people, a pious people’ and ‘We have laws against such a thing.’ You still encourage it to happen if not clandestinely in Pera, then openly in Egypt. ‘They are pagan there. It doesn’t matter.’ By Allah, not a dog or a sheep or a steer should suffer so,
