I kicked a pebble in the path, the young man vanished before I could blink an eye. We all took normal breath and spoke again, though the words seemed loud and harsh at first.
“How have you been?” I asked my lady tentatively. “Fine,” Esmikhan said. “Just fine,” as if it were a lie. I didn’t dare call her on it, but you may be certain I was twice the khadim after that, and I never let her out of my sight unless she was safe inside the harem.
My lady spent a lot of time over the next few days standing at the grille and looking down into the selamlik, even when Ferhad was not there. She called for no ladies, nor could I draw her to finish our chess game, or into a new book of poetry. Still, there is no harm done but a little palpitation of the heart, I thought. A little exercise in that direction might do Esmikhan good. I control the doors between the worlds. We are still safe. Where there are no words, there can be but little love. I found comfort and an excuse for apathy in such musings until one day when my mistress called me to her.
“Here, Abdullah,” she said, handing me a pink rose and a pale narcissus. “Would you be so kind as to take these flowers down to the selamlik and place them in a vase for me.” Then she added as a sort of apology, “I thought it might be more pleasant for our guest if he could have something new and bright to look at besides the same four empty walls.”
“Just the two?” I asked. “Surely he would be more flattered by an armful of roses. Let me send one of the girls to the garden to cut them for you. Or perhaps a whole dish of narcissus would be nice—one of those that you so carefully forced in gravel.”
“Perhaps,” she said, blushing, “another day. Today I would like just these two.”
I nodded and went to fulfill her wish, finding it odd, but certainly not amiss. Flowers were some diversion and one more innocent, I thought, than love poetry or long, sad songs. She was certainly not asking me to carry letters down to the selamlik, or anything else forbidden.
In the selamlik, I hunted for the fine Chinese vase in its usual place in the wall niche, but it wasn’t there. I was about to call for Ali to ask where it might be when I saw it already out—placed curiously on the top of a low wooden chest. There were flowers in it, too, and they seemed very fresh. They couldn’t have been cut any earlier than that very morning.
And it was a very curious bouquet altogether, not unattractive or slovenly, but very masculine. It consisted of really only one flower—an ox-eye daisy—which was flanked on one side by a leaf of a plane tree, and on the other by a sprig of cypress.
“Now I see,” I thought. “My mistress has taken pity on our guest’s poor hand at arranging flowers, and thought it only polite to send him others...”
But that thought hardly lived to take a breath before I knew it would not do, and condemned it, like some pre-Islamic father his unwanted girl-child, to the dust. In its place came, for no apparent reason, the lines of the Persian poet, so popular in the Turkish harems:
I cried so much that I heard
moaning and wailing from the cypresses.
They confided in me and said,
“0 that your heart could find peace with us,
For your beloved was flourishing, and so are we.
She was tall, and we are a hundred times taller.”
Often since I’d first heard that poem recited, I had listened for “moaning and wailing from the cypresses” as a wind passed, and often thought, like the poet, of my love who was tall and fair, but now no more. And, like the poet, I had sadly whispered back to the trees:
But what use are you to me
When it comes time for kisses?
So it was not strange that now, as I reached out to remove the cypress sprig from the vase, the lines should come to me again. What was strange was that I should also remember that the cypress, because it never loses its leaves like other trees, was often used by poets as a symbol of eternity.
Plane leaves and ox-eyes also have their set meanings in the intricate melodies of romantic verse: the first, because it so resembles a hand, means touch or holding, and the flower is an emblem for the beloved’s face.
Now I suddenly saw clearly that there was no coincidence here at all. The odd assortment of plants had been chosen and arranged with exquisite care and the message read: plane leaf, ox-eye, cypress, “I will hold the image of my beloved’s face in my hand forever.”
So what did the rose and the narcissus mean—the reply that I was delivering like some furtive love letter? My mistress had sent message bouquets by me before—to other women: a bunch of rue or musk for remembrance because the scent staved in the hand long after the flowers were gone, or a pair of pomegranates, like breasts, to felicitate a friend upon the weaning of a child. Before I had always known the code. This would be a little more difficult.
The narcissus, I knew, usually had reference to the eve, but the rose had innumerable meanings: as a bud, it was a new baby; it could represent the cheek, the face, the bosom, the nose, the lips...
The possible images were infinite, but when I hit upon the right one, I knew it at once. It was one of my mistress’s favorite verses by the poet
