The balcony was crowded with janissaries like a harvest basket with fruit, their blue trousers pressing through the railings like plump, ripe plums through wicker. Their songs were Turkish and familiar—my master would recognize them as those that came from the camp of the Faithful after Allah had granted them victory. Now these songs were being blasphemed.
That was my first reaction: to wish to throw up a curtain before my master as if he were part of the harem, to keep these renegades from seeing his nakedness and dishonoring him. Or is it the harem we would protect from profanation with the world? At any rate, God alone knows where I might have found a curtain so big as to keep Good from Evil in the world. By the time I’d freed my gaze from the powerful latch impiety has, I saw that Sokolli Pasha, too, had already seen, and his reaction was now beyond my power. All I could do was to command our rowers to do their best to bring the women, at least, away from there.
I saw my master giving orders to his sailors to find a landing on the beach and then to one of his servants to run quickly and find the first sober squadron he could to come and arrest these miscreants. The servant, I could tell, didn’t much like the idea. He’d rather they were on the Hungarian front and he’d been asked to run espionage behind enemy lines. Surely the chances of death were no greater; it was the grade of honor attached to the death that worried him. Nonetheless, when the beach was hit, he got off the boat and disappeared up among Pera’s firetrap jumble of raw wooden houses.
I’ve always had the impression that our outing was known and that the entire episode was staged. What happened next tends to confirm this.
Drink had made the lookout in the inn (if indeed the caution to post such a man had been taken) very lax. Now at last we were sighted from the shore. The vision of my master in white and gold beneath his canopy—and only the Sultan himself is allowed more rowers, more pomp, and more horsetails on the prowl for a pleasure outing—could not help but silence even the most indigent lush, and the words passed back from the railing in a hush: “Sokolli! Sokolli Pasha is come!”
Up from their midst there arose—if a man of just over five feet can be said to rise in the midst of the finest figures of manhood the western provinces can produce, all topped by the tall turbans typical of the elect troops—the round, bloated figure of none other than Uweis the Turk. He heaved his great belly onto the railing for support and the two antagonists stared at one another across it for some time.
A jewel even more remarkable than usual hung in the little man’s ear: It was a pearl the shape and size of a bantam’s egg.
Then the little Turk, the bantam-egg pearl a-dangle from his ear, raised his right hand in a salute. In that hand was a goblet full of the forbidden drink. With great but mock solemnity, he toasted: “Sokolli Pasha, your health.”
Behind him, all the troops stood as to attention, likewise raised their flasks and repeated, “Your health, Sokolli Pasha!”
Then they all drank deeply and in unison. But the riot of laughter into which this formation disintegrated was like no other loss of discipline the Ottoman army had ever seen before.
A shower of rotten fruit and vegetables pocked the water like cannon charges. There was also a skin or two of wine thrown as the revelers invited the Grand Vizier to join them in a practice that was “as lifting to the heart as if we’d all died and gone to Paradise already. To hell with martyrdom on the battlefield!”
But wine was too precious to spend in a jest so. The men soon toppled one of their number over the rail and into the water to flounder drunkenly about in an attempt to retrieve those skins. Throwing one man over offered such amusement that two or three soon joined him, along with the innkeeper’s wife...
Our rowers were laying to as hard as they could, and after this, distance added to the general chaos so I could no longer tell details. I could no longer bear to, either.
For the women behind their curtains, the episode passed without effect, almost without comment. Even if they did understand in a vague sort of way what it meant, certainly none of them took it to be a personal threat to themselves. The rest of the excursion was so pleasant, in fact, that my lady played at seasickness in an attempt to make it last longer.
The segregation of sexes, we are always told, is to keep the weakness of women from interfering in men’s more important business. Once again I wondered if it isn’t also to keep women in honor above the ugly mire that men’s business wallows in.
My master returned much, much later, having spent hours arguing his case with Murad. To no avail, of course. The Sultan would not hear of injuring the honor of one with whom he’d just enjoyed the pleasant camaraderie of the hunt, much less injuring his neck on the chopping block. Even the honor of a Grand Vizier, the honor of the State, were trivial matters in comparison.
Like other similar laws before it, that law has never been rescinded. It remains on the books for future rulers to ignore or to apply as the
