But only during the Daiwan sittings was the Shah’s palace a place of pious dread. On more frequent religious occasions, the palace was the scene of galas and gaiety. The Persians recognize some seven thousand old-time prophets of Islam, and accord to every one of them a day of celebration. On the dates honoring the more major prophets, the Shah would give parties, usually inviting all the royalty and nobility of Baghdad, but sometimes throwing open the palace grounds to all comers.
Though I was not royal or noble, and not Muslim, I was a palace resident, and I attended several of those feste. I recall one night’s holiday celebration of some long-defunct prophet, which celebration was held outdoors in the palace gardens. Every guest was given not the usual pile of daiwan cushions to sit or recline upon, but an individual, high-heaped mound of fresh and fragrant rose petals. Every branch of every tree was outlined in candles affixed to the bark, and that candlelight shone through the leaves in every shade and hue of green. Every flower bed was full of candelabra, and their candles’ light shone through the multitudes of different blossoms in every shade and hue of every color. All those candles were sufficient to make the garden almost as bright and colorful as it was in daytime. But, in addition, the Shah’s servants had beforehand collected every little tortoise and turtle to be bought in the bazàr or caught by children in the countryside, and had affixed a candle to the carapace of each one, and had let all those thousands of creatures loose to crawl about the gardens as moving points of illumination.
As always, there was more and richer food and drink provided than I had ever seen laid out at any Western festa. Among the entertainments there were players of musical instruments, many of which I had never seen or heard before, and to their music dancers danced and singers sang. The male dancers re-created, with lances and sabers and much foot stamping, famous battles of famous Persian warriors of the past, like Rustam and Sohrab. The female dancers scarcely moved their feet at all, but convulsed their breasts and bellies in a manner to make a watcher’s eyeballs spin. The singers sang no songs of a religious nature—Islam frowns on that—but quite the other sort; I mean exceedingly bawdy songs. There were also bear trainers with agile and acrobatic bears, and snake charmers making the hooded snakes called najhaya to dance in their baskets, and fardarbab telling the tomorrows in their trays of sand, and shaukhran clowns comically garbed and capering and reciting or acting out lewd jests.
When I had got quite addled on the date liquor araq, I dismissed my Christian scruples against divination, and applied to one of the fardarbab, an old Arab or Jew with a funguslike beard, and asked what he could see in my future. But he must have recognized me for a good Christian unbeliever in his sorcerous art, for he only looked once into the shaken sand and growled, “Beware the bloodthirstiness of the beautiful,” which told me nothing of my future at all, though I recalled having heard something like that before, in the past. So I laughed jeeringly at the old fraud, and stood up and twirled and pirouetted away from him, and fell down, and Karim came and supported me to my bedchamber.
That was one of the nights on which the Princesses Moth and Sunlight and I did not convene. On another occasion, Moth told me to find something else to do with my next few nights, because she was enduring her moon curse.
“Moon curse?” I echoed.
She said impatiently, “The female bleeding.”
“And what is that?” I asked, truly never having heard of it before then.
Her green eyes gave me a sidelong look of amused exasperation, and she said fondly, “Fool. Like all young men, you perceive a beautiful woman as a pure and perfect thing—like the race of little winged beings called the peri. The delicate peri do not even eat, but live on the fragrance they inhale from flowers, and therefore they never have to urinate or defecate. Just so, you think a beautiful woman can have none of the imperfections or nastinesses common to the rest of humankind.”
I shrugged. “Is it bad to think that way?”
“Oh, I would not say that, for we beautiful women often take advantage of that masculine delusion. But a delusion it is, Marco, and I will now betray my sex and disabuse you of it. Hear me.”
She explained what happens to a girl child at about the age of ten, which turns her into a woman, and goes on happening to her thereafter, once in every moon of the year.
“Really?” I said. “I never knew. All women?”
“Yes, and they must bear that moon curse until they get old and dry up in every respect. The curse is also accompanied by cramps and backaches and ill temper. A woman is morose and hateful during that time, and a wise woman keeps herself away from other people, or drugged to stupefaction with teryak or banj, until the curse passes.”
“It sounds frightful.”
Moth laughed, but without humor. “Far more frightful for the woman if there comes a moon when she is not cursed. For that means she is pregnant. And of the damps and leaks and disgusts and embarrassments which then ensue, I will not even begin to speak. I am feeling morose and ill-tempered and hateful, and I will betake myself to seclusion. You go away, Marco, and make merry and enjoy your body’s freedom, like all damned disencumbered men, and leave me to my woman’s misery.”
Despite the Princess Moth’s depiction of the weaknesses of her sex, I could not then, or ever since then, think of a beautiful woman as being inherently flawed or faulty—or at least not until she proved herself to be so, as the Lady Ilaria once had done, and thereby had lost all my esteem. Out here in the East, I was still learning new ways to appreciate beautiful women, and still making new discoveries about them, and I was disinclined to disparage them.
To illustrate: when I was younger, I had believed that the physical beauty of a woman resided only in such easily observable features as her face and breasts and legs and buttocks, and in less easily observable ones like a pretty and inviting (and accessible) artichoke mound and medallion and mihrab. But by this time, I had had enough women to realize that there were more subtle points of physical beauty. To mention just one: I am particularly fond of the delicate sinews that extend from a woman’s groin along the inner sides of her thighs when she opens them apart. I also had come to realize that, even in the features common to all beautiful women, there are differences which are discernible, and exciting for being so. Every beautiful woman has beautiful breasts and nipples, but there are innumerable variations in size and shape and proportions and coloration, all beautiful. Every beautiful woman has a beautiful mihrab, but oh, how delectably different each is from another: in its placement forward or underneath, in its tint and downiness of the outer lips, in its purse-likeness and purse-tightness of closure, in its zambur’s position and size and erectability … .
Perhaps I make myself sound more lecherous than gallant. But I only wish to emphasize that I never could and never did and never will disprize the beautiful women of this world—not even then, in Baghdad, when the Princess Moth, although herself one of them, did her best to show me their worst. For instance, one day she arranged for me to sneak into the palace anderun, not for our nighttime frolic, but in the afternoon, because I had said to her:
“Moth, do you remember that merchant whom we saw executed for his haram method of making zina? Is that the sort of thing that usually goes on in an anderun?”
She gave me one of her green looks and said, “Come and see for yourself.”
On that occasion, indubitably, she had to have bribed the guards and eunuchs to look the other way, for she did not merely get me unseen into that wing of the palace, but also put me into a corridor wall’s closet which had two peepholes drilled to look into either of two large and voluptuously furnished chambers. I peeped through one hole and then the other; both rooms were empty at the moment.