Before I managed to get us out of sight down the corridor, the haunted woman had lurched into her garden, pursued by the Fig. Here the Quince stood, saying the same things over and over to the barren earth, the denuded trees: “Babies. Dead. Their insides bleeding out.”
And then I had the task, which I finally gave up as hopeless, of trying to explain this mystery to my little one, apologizing for the will of Heaven that made drugs that eased pain but also wildly deranged.
“What pain does the midwife have?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer.
Gul Ruh took it bravely and soon was distracted with other things that loomed larger in her childish life. But, unlike the previous explanation of the sexes, I could tell she wasn’t satisfied. How could she be, when I brought no comfort even to myself? I could not understand why the Quince should have turned suddenly so violent. And worse, why that violence should have been turned so personally, so specifically against my little angel.
Unless—unless it had something to do with Yavrube.
XVI
A week before the day the astronomers had picked as auspicious for the beginning of the festivities, preparations for the young prince’s circumcision were well under way. One thousand poor boys had been chosen to join Muhammed in this rite at the cost of the palace. Their presence would give the young prince the honor of mass charity and the unfailing devotion of these boys and their families for the rest of his life.
Each boy had already been sent a new suit of clothes—nothing to compete with the cloth-of-gold in twenty changes that were being readied for Muhammed, but rich enough, with a striped silk turban each that would be worn with feathers. Tent stakes were driven into the lawn both within the palace walls and outside in the Hippodrome to take the overflow of entertainments from the kiosks.
And heat from the kitchens filled the whole palace.
My lady had abandoned her own harem for the palace’s “to help,” as she said, “with the preparations.” What a woman who could hardly walk might do to help was never asked. She would sit and bask in the excitement, of course, and her daughter would learn something about what made boys different from girls as she watched this ceremony in her cousin’s honor. That was enough.
As soon as we arrived, I went to the kitchen. I had to supervise the deposit of ten trays of tiny tartlets filled with ground dates, nuts, or apricots, heavy with honey, all arranged in elegant pyramids which my lady had had her women prepare at home as a gift. Although not more appreciated, they were more practical than the jewels and fine fabrics that were to be her main gifts to the boy, his mother, and grandmother later on.
In spite of the extensive remodeling and rebuilding the palace has undergone between that morning in April and the present, the form of the kitchens has proven so functional as to always be renewed along the same lines. And even those who have never been within the Sublime Porte will have some idea of their layout. The row often stone chimneys rising like the necks of wine flasks from their individual domes is the most distinctive palace structure the average citizen can possibly view from a boat on the Marmara.
The average citizen, too, will have a good notion of the activities of that complex of kitchens. Turning live sheep and goats, sacks of hard, raw grain, and whole fruits and vegetables into the numerous hot and cold dishes upon which people feed happens in his own home: merely multiply it a hundredfold.
The average citizen will certainly have a clearer notion of these activities than many a child born and bred in the harem does. Sometimes such royal children know no better than that Allah Himself must have created meat just so in bite-sized pieces tangy with herbs and spices.
They never imagine that there should be separate plants for fennel, basil, and coriander, that pepper must come from so far away or that salt is really a mineral mined from the earth, and that only the skill of the cook blends them with success.
The harem had its specialists in sherbets, preserves, and candied delights, of course. But for the majority in the heart of the harem, much of cookery was likewise a mystery. The women liked to regale one another with tales of how far and at what expense snow was brought from distant mountains packed in straw, as they told tales of flying carpet rides. But one for whom “far” may be to the end of the garden and back, she may suppose that the white cold falls on those mountains in perfect little rounds of sherbet flavored with raspberry, lemon, or rose-water.
Whereas in most kitchens the women do the cooking, in the palace, it is a profession for men with years of training; women never set foot inside. The kitchens must, after all, feed the outer, men’s palace as well, sometimes several thousand mouths on a Divan day.
Young eunuchs and young odalisques both begin their duties by picking up the steaming trays in the outer harem corridor and delivering them to the rooms where the women wait in happy, chattering clusters. Male servants called halberdiers actually cross the open court from kitchen to harem. The halberdiers leave the trays on special heating stones in the corridor; careful to glance only circumspectly through the long fake tresses dangling from their hats, careful to vanish before the head eunuch rings a bell announcing dinner.
Each of the ten chimneys seen from the Marmara surmounts not only its individual hearth, but an entire kitchen. Each kitchen has a
