A large, glimmering tear slid from Kalbiye’s gleaming eye down her cheek, and at the first opportunity, your good-hearted Esther decided to find Kalbiye a better husband than the one she’d recently lost.
“My late husband didn’t often share these concerns of his with me,” Kalbiye said cautiously. “Based on whatever I could remember and piece together I’ve concluded that everything happened on account of the illustrations that took him to Enishte Effendi’s house on his very last night.”
This was some manner of apology. In response, I reminded her how her fate and Shekure’s, not to mention their enemies, were the same if one considered that Enishte Effendi had perhaps been killed by the same “scoundrel.” The two large-headed fatherless waifs staring at me from the corner suggested another similarity between the two women. But my merciless matchmaker’s logic quickly reminded me that Shekure’s situation was much more beautiful, rich and mysterious. I let Kalbiye know exactly what I felt:
“Shekure told me to tell you that if she has wronged you, she’s sorry,” I said. “She wants to say that she loves you as a sister and as a woman who shares her fate. She wants you to think about this and help her. When the late Elegant Effendi left here on his last night, did he mention he’d be seeing anyone besides Enishte Effendi? Did you ever consider that he might’ve been going to meet somebody else?”
“This was found on his person,” she said.
She removed a folded piece of paper from a lidded wicker box, which contained embroidery needles, pieces of cloth and a large walnut.
When I took up the crumpled piece of rough paper and examined it, I saw a variety of shapes drawn in ink that had run and smudged in the well water. I’d just determined what the forms were when Kalbiye voiced my thoughts.
“Horses,” she said. “But late Elegant Effendi only did gilding work. He never drew horses. And no one would’ve ever asked him to render a horse.”
Your elderly Esther was looking at the horses which had been quickly sketched, but she couldn’t quite make anything of them.
“If I were to take this piece of paper to Shekure, she’d be quite pleased,” I said.
“If Shekure desires to see these sketches, let her come get them herself,” said Kalbiye with no small hint of conceit.
I AM CALLED BLACK
Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. I’m not saying we can’t relate to other souls overwhelmed by these feelings, on the contrary, we sympathize with them. What we cannot fathom is the odd disquiet our souls sink into at such times. This silent turmoil dims our intellects and dampens our hearts, usurping the place reserved for the true joy and sadness we ought to experience.
I had buried her father, thank God, hurried home from the funeral, and in a gesture of condolence, embraced my wife, Shekure; then suddenly, in a fit of tears she collapsed onto a large cushion with her children, who were glaring at me with spite, and I didn’t know what to do. Her misery coincided with my victory. In one fell swoop, I had wed the dream of my youth, freed myself from her father who belittled me, and become master of the house. Who would ever believe the sincerity of my tears? But believe me, it wasn’t like that. I truly wanted to grieve, but couldn’t: Enishte had always been more of a father to me than my real father. But since the meddlesome preacher who’d performed Enishte’s final ablution never stopped babbling, the rumor that my Enishte died under mysterious circumstances spread among the neighbors during the funeral-as I could sense standing in the courtyard of the mosque. I didn’t want my inability to cry to be interpreted negatively; I don’t have to tell you how real the fear of being branded “stonehearted” is.
You know how some sympathetic aunt will always attest that “he’s crying on the inside” to prevent someone like me from being banished from the group. I did in fact cry on the inside as I tried to hide in a corner from the busybody neighbors and distant relatives with their astonishing abilities to summon a downpour of tears; I thought about being the master of the house and whether I should somehow take charge of the situation, but just then there came a knock at the door. A moment of panic. Was it Hasan? Regardless, I wanted to save myself from this hell of whimpering at whatever cost.
It was a royal page, summoning me to the palace. I was stunned.
As I exited the courtyard, I found a mud-covered silver coin on the ground. Was I afraid to go to the palace? Yes, but I was also happy to be outside in the cold among the horses, dogs, trees and people. I thought I’d befriend the pageboy like those hopeless daydreamers who, believing they might sweeten the world’s cruelty before facing the executioner, attempt a lighthearted conversation with the dungeon guard about this and that, the beauties of life, the ducks afloat on the pond, or the strangeness of a cloud in the sky; but alas he disappointed me, proving a rather morose, pimply, tight-lipped youth. As I passed the Hagia Sophia, noticing with awe the slender cypresses delicately stretching into the hazy sky, it wasn’t the horror of dying right after marrying Shekure after all these years that made my hair stand on end. It was the injustice of dying at the hands of the palace torturers without having shared one good session of lovemaking with her.
We didn’t walk toward the terrifying spires of the Middle Gate, beyond which the torturers and the quick-handed executioners saw to their work, but toward the carpentry shops. As we headed between the granaries, a cat cleaning itself in the mud between the legs of a chestnut horse with steaming nostrils turned but didn’t look at us: The cat was preoccupied with its own filth, much as we were.
Behind the granaries, two figures, whose rank and affiliation I couldn’t determine from their green and purple uniforms, relieved the pageboy, and locked me into the dark room of a small house, which I could tell was new by the smell of fresh lumber. I knew locking a man up in a dark room was meant to arouse fear before torture; hoping they’d begin with the bastinado, I thought about the lies I could tell to save my hide. A crowd in the adjoining room seemed to be raising quite a ruckus.
There are most certainly those of you who can’t attribute my mocking and mirthful tone to that of a man on the verge of torture. But haven’t I mentioned I consider myself one of God’s luckier servants? And if the birds of fortune that alighted upon my head these last two days after years of deprivation aren’t proof enough, surely the silver coin I found outside the courtyard gate must be some indication.
Awaiting my torture, I was comforted by the silver coin and had complete faith it would protect me; I palmed it, rubbed it and repeatedly kissed this token of good fortune that Allah had sent me. But at whatever time they removed me from the darkness and brought me into the next room where I saw the Commander of the Imperial Guard and his bald-headed Croatian torturers, I knew the silver coin was worthless. The pitiless voice within me was absolutely correct: The coin in my pocket hadn’t come from God, but was one of those that I’d showered Shekure with two days ago-that the children overlooked. Hence, in the hands of my torturers, I had nothing in which to take refuge.
I didn’t even notice that tears began to fall from my eyes. I wanted to beg, but as in a dream, no sound issued from my mouth. I knew from wars, deaths and political assassination and torture (which I’d witnessed from afar) that life could be extinguished instantaneously, but I’d never experienced it this closely. They were going to strip me from this world just as they’d stripped off my garments.