And I would give her a look that said “Nur Banu” and she would blush and say “Oh, yes,” apologize, and fall into a confused silence for the next half hour.
It was Nur Banu’s night and some such careless phrasing sent the Hungarian, who had seemed volatile ever since we’d known her, flying from the room in tears. Esmikhan was in great distress and blamed herself although I couldn’t remember anything threatening that might have been said.
“It’s pregnancy, you know,” Nur Banu assured us. “She cries all the time—for no reason. But, thanks to Allah, she gets over it just as quickly.”
After a time, when the girl did not return, I thought perhaps I should go look for her. The cool of a balcony beckoned me outside and for a moment I forgot my search, entranced by the vision of the Aya Sophia Mosque just across the way. It was illuminated for the holy month against the black night sky, each of its four minarets twinkling with a thousand little oil lamps. Rising like heat from every home and cottage, bazaar, and dervish lodge were the sounds and warmth of the feast and celebration. They rose and filled my heart and I smiled at the inward peace I felt in my—could I say it?—adopted religion.
Then suddenly, for no reason I can tell, the celebrating seemed to die for a moment and—from clear across the water in Pera it must have been, with no more strength than an echo—there came two or three clangings of a Christian bell. Suddenly I remembered that Ramadhan happened to coincide that year with the Christians’ commemoration of the birth of Jesus. It was the very night. The event had just been announced, however faintly, to the world.
Those few distant bells suddenly recalled to my mind so clearly the Christmases of my childhood. I remembered the eerie skirl that seemed to rise like mist as the peasant folk came down from the mountains in procession with candles and led by their pipers. I remembered the chill, the thrill of nighttime, candlelit boat rides towards the old church on the island of San Giorgio. How, as a child, I had thought the holy season somehow special for me alone because San Giorgio was my saint.
My mouth was filled with a warm sweetness, for although Ramadhan cakes are sweeter than those old cook used to bake for our Christmas, those cakes of my childhood had a flavor all their own. That flavor must have been mixed with the warm taste of firelight and the care of loving arms about me. My back prickled and my eyes grew moist.
It was one of those sacred moments. All religions can create them. We often been aware of the same feeling as Islam creates it: upon seeing the minarets illuminated and several times among the brethren of the dervish order. Such moments are windows through which we catch a glimpse of the Eternal, of what true religion is. In me, however, I realized that Christianity had and will always have the advantage in prying open those windows. Those arms that first hold us, mother’s arms—or, in my case, those of my old nurse—are closer to God than anything we learn later in life. An irrational prejudice, I’ll admit, one never destined to help in the search for Truth. But a very real feeling, nonetheless.
Just as quickly the feeling was gone. A door from the selamlik opened below me and one of the master’s guests slipped into the garden, making it no further than the nearest rose bush before he had to empty his bladder. Then the sounds of Islam in celebration closed over creation once more, losing the divine moment for me. But something lingered to keep me above the most grimy of mundane thoughts presented by the view of the man in the gardens: that we are mere animals, no more.
A throttled sob called my attention to the next balcony. There in the dark I could just make out the very pregnant figure of the little Hungarian. I was going to call out to her cheerily to forget her sorrow and to come into the party again, but something about her stance stifled me with the realization that more than a few tears were at stake here. She was teetering dangerously, intentionally on the edge.
I’ll never know what it was that saved the little Hungarian’s life that night. Surely it wasn’t my presence—I don’t think she ever realized I was there. I cannot help but think she must have heard the distant ring of bells and remembered...I do not know what sort of Christmas Hungarians remember. I only have this impression: deep, all-silencing snow, and in the heart of that bitter cold and dark, warmth and light by a fire.
The little Hungarian collapsed with a fearful sob—on the safe side of the railing. And it was there, just moments later, that Nur Banu found her and caught her in her heavily bangled arms.
“There, there, don’t cry, my little mountain stream,” Nur Banu crooned as if the girl had been an infant. And when, after a time, the sobbing failed somewhat, the crooning turned into a sort of singsong, the words of which were these:
“Have I ever told you, angel? No, I suppose I have not. Of when I was a girl. I don’t tell many. There isn’t much to tell. I left, of course, when I was only four. Paros is the name of the island where I was born. Paros. And when the Turks conquered—” She limited this train of thought to: “Well, my life has never been the same.
“But still I do remember. We had
