“I was no longer quite so walling as at first,” Ghazanfer said, “when I made my way as directed to a house tucked in beside the aqueduct later that evening. Bizarre, barbaric sights and sounds greeted me before I reached the door.
“The fanatics at the medrese must hear this, I thought, and hesitated to enter. You know, as a work of charity, I have established a religious school in the neighborhood of the aqueduct. I am ashamed to say that some of my scholars were among the most vicious to Jews and Christians during the recent disturbances. I cut funding to the most disruptive, but I can’t have rooted them all out. They were barbaric to the People of the Book. I could imagine what they’d do to such an assembly as this was, even before I knocked at the door.
“But then I thought, Well, if I’m in the lodge, instead of here, outside, I may be able to save some lives when the mob comes, just by being recognized. And I suppose I must have been recognized by the sullen doorkeeper or spoken for by the Fig, for I was admitted without question.
“Every African in Constantinople must have been there. And I, a minority of one. A minority not only in color but in soul. A pair of our like from the black eunuch’s college were flailing on waist-high drums. At least these are colleagues, I thought. But they were not.
“These khuddam had stripped to the hips, and without the camouflage of long fur robes, the tortures a man’s body suffers without its male parts was grotesquely evident on them: the sunken barrel chest, over-long arms like those who’ve been stretched on a rack—and somehow survived. Together and in turns they beat out the rhythm with hands so bony and twisted they couldn’t lay them flat. When such a deformity overcomes a khadim, he orders the sleeves of his robes cut longer and tucks those hands up under the sable cuffs.
“But I can hardly say these men were our colleagues. They had no impulse to hide. Their talons flew like birds of prey over the untanned hides of their painted drums. They beat with such vigor! I began to suspect that every man who’d ever hurt them from the first moment of their capture in the bosom of their mother Africa until their last bastinado was getting his just deserts under those twisted hands.
“The beat was so heavy I could feel each reverberation in the core of my sternum. It twitched in my joints. I could hardly keep from leaping to my feet and dancing myself. None of the others in the room made any attempt to resist such impulses at all.
“Chickens were brought in to the midst of the dance, black capons, squawking, fanning with their feathers. Their throats were quickly cut, and presently the smell of cooking birds mingled with that of pine smoke, raw blood, and sweat on hot, black bodies. The bodies of porter and scullery maid, laundress and many, many eunuchs seemed to swell in that environment like purple grapes in the sun. They acquired a luscious, sweet juiciness. For here was a mingling of the sexes that would have turned the beard on any medrese studenta premature grey. A mingling, charged with bestiality. And yet somehow totally innocent at the same time. Even the khuddam were affected by the spirit—by the throbbing virility.
“There is nothing for me here, I was convinced. It’s too wild, too strange, nothing to do with my world. The mob from the medrese may come if they must and do their worst. Against this strangeness I cannot, will not stop them.
“But as if she had been watching me, as if she read my thoughts, the moment I turned to leave, the Fig made her entrance into the assembly from a curtained inner door. And then I couldn’t leave. You know how buffoonish the midwife usually looks in her Turkish dress, how overdone, how ostentatious. Well, suddenly I saw what clothes Allah had created her to wear.
“Simple lengths of brilliant fabric in unusual patterns skirted from her hips. Great, simple golden hoops in her ears, feathers of the sacrificed chickens sticking with a little blood but mostly of their own accord in the round, wiry black pincushion of her hair. Her neck was draped in strings of gems, but also other things that seemed more precious: shells. The severed, spurred legs of cocks, talons flexed. Claws. Bones. Between these ornaments and the first roll of cloth at her waist, there was nothing. Only smooth, blue-black skin, smooth, black, purple-tipped breasts that swung slightly with each step as if tossing out a challenge to the world.
“I thought. Did the Quince ever see the Fig thus? Did the Quince ever come to the lodge, looking for new cures, perhaps? If she did, I no longer question the rumors that they were lovers. Indeed, I found myself envying the Quince her fortune.
“The Fig moved in and out of the crowd, greeting everyone by name, accepting kisses to her hands, her hem, her feet, accepting gifts and offerings. We exchanged nods, no more.
“Then the drummers who had seemed to be fading somewhat with exhaustion, suddenly leapt with new life. A new rhythm sprang off the young, tight drumskins. And almost in the same instant I saw—I actually saw the rhythm enter the Fig. Something like a pulsing sheen, just below the black hull of her skin.
“She moved, but the movement was no longer hers. At first another jerked her joints, sometimes at impossible angles, as if she were
