Sofia
an hour had passed before the artist had completed one hand.When it was finished, Nur Banu held the hand over a dish of glowing coals. Then the older woman placed a gold coin in the palm and wrapped it with linen strips, finally covering the whole with a silken bag. Then the process began all over again with the left hand.
Safiye liked being the center of all this attention, of course, but her body throbbed with the effort of holding still. Her throat ached with thirst, her stomach with hunger, her bladder with its burden she wasn’t allowed to release. Her head reeled.
Ribald jokes passed among the older women about how men had to assert their dominance and women had to pretend to go along. Is this active forcing of passivity to teach me this? Safiye wondered. No. Alluring as is this safe, enclosing feeling of all these women about me, I will not succumb to it. I have strength enough to go through passivity to even greater power.
“I am not as skilled at this as our Lady Nur Banu is,” Esmikhan apologized. Her hand was soft with plumpness, white, warm, and pressing Safiye’s with the strain of her concentration.
“Nonsense.” Nur Banu watched the work with close scrutiny in spite of her words. “Besides, a girl about to lose her virginity—Allah willing—must count it auspicious to have those who’ve never known a man among her attendants.”
Esmikhan and Fatima Sultan, her younger sister who sat nearby, blushed deeply at their stepmother’s words. They were both close to Safiye’s own age and also both Selim’s daughters, princesses of the royal Ottoman blood. This fact was betrayed by the “khan” suffix on the name of the eldest. Safiye spent much time studying both girls’ plump, happy faces and full red lips that always wore smiles under the yellow light. Since they were Murad’s half-sisters, she might discover some resemblance.
“Don’t bother.” Esmikhan divined Safiye’s thoughts and bent over the hand she was painting to warn her in a whisper. “I am nothing like my brother at all.”
The older women passed another joke, putting verbal shackles on a man who wasn’t present to defend himself, and was shackled by his male nature in any case.
This did not keep Safiye from wondering all the same.
After both hands and the painted soles of both of Safiye’s feet were bandaged, she was finally allowed to use the latrine, which she couldn’t do without assistance, and then offered food and drink. Meanwhile, the rest of the harem had availed themselves of the remaining henna.
And then, at long last, came the dancing while the low-burning lamps scalded down. Safiye could hardly contain herself. The thunk, thunk-a-thunk of drums and the squeal of shawms fairly tickled her feet and her hands, which she was forbidden, forbidden, forbidden to scratch. There was nothing for it: she must leave the dancing to those whose allotment of henna had not been so incapacitating.
A harem is nothing like a convent, Safiye mused in her inactivity. She wondered what her aunt would have said to the gyrations now executed in the tight space of floor in front of her.
It was one thing to perform the dances as she was taught them, feel the Tightness of the roll and thrust as her body reached for the tugging rhythm of the music. It was another thing altogether to watch Esmikhan work out the tense burden of a long time at delicate work, to watch the exquisite release and expect none of her own, no, not even from clapping.
Is this what henna night is all about? Safiye felt the tension of her shoulders and arms slipping down to the glowing heart of her pelvis. She must no more release that than she must scratch her hands and feet.
Esmikhan and Fatima Sultan began the dance by trying to outdo one another with mimicries of their brother. They are not very respectful, Safiye thought. Can you imagine if the nuns had taken it in their heads to characterize Father Confessor so? Father Confessor had not been a young man like the dance portrayed: sometimes swaggering, full of himself, sometimes reeling from his opium, sometimes broiling with rage. But the priest had had equal foibles at which Safiye might have enjoyed poking fun.
Do they mean to turn my thoughts from Murad altogether? If I am to love this man, revere him as a master, why do they portray him to me thus, now? Is this sisters’ tease to answer the hunger I feel?
But then Safiye realized that the sisters danced by way of promise. They offered her the power of objectivity, of refusing to take the outside world of men too seriously. Whatever should come of her dance with Murad, whatever needs he might not fulfill, or however brief his infatuation, there was, they promised, nothing like other women for understanding and compassion.
The lamps swayed and burned like kettles over a fire. The music rose to match their glowing heat and the Sultan’s daughters, exhausted with their efforts and with laughter, gave way to other dancers. Other arms and legs delineated other fantasies with the shimmer of bangles and the float of gauze. No convent girl could imagine what Safiye saw in the dancing that night, what she learned. But then other things are expected of convent girls when they come to their marriage beds than are expected of odalisques when they come to the heir of the Sultan.
Last of all, way was given to Belqis and Aziza. Safiye thought she could see Murad in their dance as well, but it was a different picture of the young prince they painted altogether. The two young slaves reeled and arched, the clicks of their wooden spoons pulsing faster and faster. The sway of their sash ends plunged and rose; the metallic cicles of their waists throbbed in the lamplight like arterial blood.
Safiye’s throat grew dry and her breast constricted with sympathetic desire which no amount of Esmikhan’s proffered pomegranate juice could quench. Climax