It is customary to give a bride a week or so of festivities and rituals to get her used to the idea of being a wife before the night of the actual consummation, I thought. But was the nervous bride I spoke of Gul Ruh—or myself.
I returned to my room alone to brood over these matters most of the night. But at one point I was drawn to leave that haven and creep back down into the selamlik. The master, I discovered, could not sleep either. More than that, the Grand vizier of all the Faithful had been unable to bear this night alone. The sputtering of lamps had not been enough company for his troubled soul. He had called tor his personal secretary—and though the man grumbled and nodded with craving for his own bed, he was obliged to watch the night with his employer.
The secretary was not like Sokolli’s previous one, Feridun Bey, whom we’d hidden all those days in the mabein. He was a man of the Porte, a slave of the Sultan. Of course Feridun Bey had been, too, but never in quite the sense of this man. We all knew this new secretary to be neither more nor less than a spy of Uweis’s faction. How my heart wrenched with pity to see this great man, my master, reduced to such a one for company!
Of course there could be no intimate conversation with such a man. Sokolli Pasha was having him read instead from the history of Murad’s predecessors on the throne of Othman. Nothing, being reported back to unfriendly parties, could be discovered to be more loyal and pious and at the same time harmless and innocuous. Had he only wanted to be loyal and pious, Sokolli could have read the book for himself, I suppose. But he needed it read aloud. Such was my master’s craving for even so much as the lifeless drone of a fellow human voice on that dark night.
As I stood outside the door, they came to the part in the tale where Murad the First, after all his great victories, is mortally wounded by the Serbian rebels. Here my master waved his hand for the reading to stop.
The secretary who had seemed to be reading with glazed eyes now took on some life. I suspect the coincidence of names—Murad the First with our present Murad the Third—made him hope vent might be given to seditious comments. But it was not so. My master was as true to the present son of Othman as he had been to Selim and Suleiman before him. He simply used the pause to recite the first Sura of the Koran for the dead Emperor’s soul.
That image of my master is branded forever on my eyelids. An unearthly light filled him as he recited, though his body remained so very grey. He huddled with age against contact with the divan beneath him, the dusty old cushions behind him and anything else physical around him. I had never thought him old until that moment. I could not help exclaiming in my heart: Here is one truly good man according to anyone’s upbringing. By Allah, I love...
I did not finish the confession that at any other time would have been disgusting to me. My thoughts were interrupted by spoken words. “Would that the All Powerful might give me,” Sokolli Pasha said with a quiet fervor, “just such a death in His service.”
And I slipped off before I was seen.
Sometime near dawn I must have slept for I totally missed the call to prayers and the master’s early departure in full procession to attend the Divan. But the moment I awoke, all my tumultuous concerns for our future life together, once these confessions had been made, came crashing down upon me again. I began to wish Gul Ruh would soon get married. Then I could ask to go with her to her new home.
But what sort of betrayal was this? I had promised to help her stay unwed, not hurry her enslavement to that shy, dull Mufti’s son. Praise Allah, what wisdom there is in keeping the sexless ones unburdened with matters of love.
Would we could always remain so uninvolved.
My first duty of the day, then, was to think no more about myself, but to find my young mistress and hear her mind on the matter.
Questioning the first of her maids I discovered in the hall, I learned that she had been up since first prayers, had dragged our old seamstress out of bed, and taken her to the main sitting room where, for all the maid knew, they were at that moment busily working on the young lady’s trousseau. For had I not heard the good news? “Our lady is to be married.”
This report I found heady with over-romanticized nonsense. Our seamstress had once declared aloud and to everyone in general that she would rather make a million sheets and pillowcases herself than have to supervise Gul Ruh in one more stitch, for the girl was hopeless with a needle and it took four times as long to unpick every mistake as to do it oneself.
No one had been more relieved than our little monkey to hear that news and she had danced off declaring herself the happiest girl alive if she should never hear the word trousseau again. Obviously the maid had been dreaming her dreams onto another. Nonetheless, I took her at her word and headed off in that direction.
On my way I saw something which made me forget all concerns for the future, both hers and mine. Through a window, my eye chanced to be drawn (although I know now there was
