One day I met Gul Ruh dawdling about the mabein door when I brought the new girl the evening meal. My young lady was there when I came out again so I knew it was not just by chance.
“Abdullah, let me in to see her, please. I won’t scratch her eyes out like Mother would.”
“Off with you, silly girl,” I said, giving her backside a playful swat.
Gul Ruh’s eyes watched me narrowly as I replaced the mabein key carefully into my belt for safekeeping.
“Abdullah,” she stopped me to ask a day later. “Do ladies in your country relieve themselves standing up?”
“We are not like the wild Arabs of the desert,” I told her decidedly. “Our women squat the same as you. Why do you ask such a question, little monkey?”
“No reason. Just wondered.”
As she turned to run off, I noticed a smear of dirty red brick color on one sleeve and across the neighboring hip. I called her attention to it, warning how angry the laundress would be when she saw that on new yellow silk.
“Oh, she’ll get over it,” Gul Ruh said carelessly, dusting vigorously as she disappeared down the hallway.
Thinking, she’s always running somewhere, I turned myself in the opposite direction and proceeded about my own business. As I did, I felt an unusual draft and then saw that the latch on one of the lattices on the windows of that hallway was open. When I went to close it, I paused a moment before the vision of sky, iron-grey with a relapse into winter. Then I saw a clean patch on the red tile just below the window. It was the very same dirty brick red as Gul Ruh had worn on her jacket sleeve.
And then I saw something that made my heart stop. Not far from the smear of red was a missing tile. My young mistress had come within a hand’s breadth of falling to the courtyard, two stories below. By Allah, and she hadn’t even been out of breath!
Looking to either side to see I was not watched (even as she must have done), I climbed onto the ledge myself and then onto the tiles, my legs shaking as they felt for other loose spots. I looked down and grew dizzy, not fearing for myself, for I usually have no such fear, but fearing for her. On the pebbles of the courtyard below I saw a glint of gold—a woman’s broken bangle in a place it could never have gotten except from the air, for that yard was in the public selamlik.
Very well, it was quite clear Gul Ruh had been out on that roof and saved from a horrible accident only by the Merciful One. But what had she been doing there? To the left, the housetops of the city lay in a fascinating jumble: the back alleyways and open markets, the parks, mosques, and caravanserais. To the right, over the rather ill-defined mass of the palace, ships on the Bosphorus with the hills of Asia, gauzed that day like women’s breasts, lay in the distance. There was much for a child to see there, indeed, a child grown oh-so weary of being cooped up like a rabbit in a hutch.
The view towards Asia was blocked somewhat by the cupola that domed over the mabein. I could just press between it and the wall of the harem—it would be easier for a ten-year-old—and when I had done that, I saw what she must have seen. There, on the other side of the cupola, was a tiny courtyard with a dried-up fountain, weedy beds and trees sadly in need of the pruner’s hook. It was a courtyard that could only be reached from the mabein, where the architect had imagined the lord and his favorite could spend many delightful hours together. Although in demand throughout the Believing world, Sinan the architect had woefully misread the needs of this particular client—until now. Now I saw how commodious the yard was. There was even a tiny outhouse in one corner, open with large windows to let in fresh air—and the spying glance of a girl on the harem roof.
So I discovered that Gul Ruh must have seen—well, something. I climbed back inside, latched the window tightly and immediately called in workmen. They fixed the tile and then hammered a well-placed nail in the lattice to hold it to the frame. While they were at work, I cordoned off that part of the harem for them and made sure one of my seconds watched their every movement. I also dropped a word to the veiled figure in the mabein: She should keep indoors during daylight hours if she didn’t want to be seen.
Then I went down into the courtyard of the selamlik and retrieved the broken bangle. When I’d had it repaired, I found an opportunity to speak with Gul Ruh alone. I caught her by the wrist from which the ornament had broken and replaced it, saying simply as I did, “I hope you don’t make me do this again.”
I think she understood my message, for I left her fingering the mended hoop in a subdued manner.
XXXV
What Gul Ruh suspected after that I didn’t know. But I had begun to have suspicions of my own.
It was incredible. Such things happened only in the Thousand and One Nights. Gul Ruh, for whose child’s idealism life still had the qualities of a fairy tale, might leap to such conclusions easier than I. That I should begin to reach them, too, was one more point towards substantiation.
The matter was clinched, in my mind, at least, by the events of the very next morning.
“Abdullah, come here.”
From my master’s tone I caught the fact that we were on display now. From his eye I
