Sofia
rejoiced greatly in that.”“And as a bride,” Esmikhan said, lying back against her pillows with a great sigh of relief, “I rejoice, too.”
Unfortunately, there was little time for her relief to be exploited in true relaxation there under the oak tree. The call went up that it was time to be moving if we were to reach our night’s lodgings. Esmikhan allowed me to take her hand and help her to her feet. I packed her into her sedan, then closed the lattice behind her with tenderness, like closing the lid on a jewelry case. I gave signal to the bearers that they might at last approach and heave the burden to their shoulders. I walked along side for a few hundred paces with my hand still on the grille as if for further security. But my thoughts were far away.
My first and, to date, my only meeting with Sokolli Pasha still played through my mind, and it was not in the hopes that I might glean further details from it to lighten Esmikhan’s fears. The strength of our union made me remember some part of that meeting I had ignored until then.
There I had sat, among bolts of fabric and packets of spices purchased against the wedding. I was one gift among many, and that fact did little to make me feel proud of my role. It chafed my humanity to be treated like just so many dry goods and I had, so far, been unable to form the words “my master” on my lips in the dreadful fear of how bitter they would taste.
Then Sokolli Pasha had entered the room. Black Ali, who had made the purchases—more with the gaudy eye of an old spoiled slave than with any sense of a delicate young lady’s taste—had to call the master’s attention to the pile, reminding him that they needed his perusal to make the purchases final.
Sokolli Pasha obviously had other things on his mind and wanted to return to them instantly. “Fine, fine, Ali,” he said quickly, cutting explanations, apologies, and little marketplace triumphs short.
Then his falcon’s eye fell on me. I bowed, as I had been taught, but I did it stiffly, hoping to express in that one movement how I thought a government, his government, that would allow such things happen to honest men, stank to high heaven.
“The khadim you ordered, master,” Ali said, grinning.
“So I see.”
“A fine khadim. And I got a good deal on him besides.”
“Good, Ali. Very good.”
Sokolli Pasha spoke the words, but had to clear his throat on them, and he blanched noticeably until I dropped my eyes before his obvious discomfort. He did not ask my name or whether I knew my business—which I truly did not. He simply stared at me for a moment or two as if struggling with a memory he thought he had long ago dispelled. When he gained control of that memory and was his usual man of severe restraint again, he laid his hand ever so briefly on my shoulder, then quickly turned and left the room. At the moment, I had been too relieved that he did not decide to reject me and send me back to that slave market again.
But now I found, with my hand similarly on Esmikhan’s grille, that the moment still haunted me. I said nothing to my lady, of course, for what was I to make of it, even to myself?
XLI
“His mother? Oh, Abdullah, Sokolli Pasha has a mother? Why didn’t you let me know before this?”
The grief and fear in her voice could not have been greater had Esmikhan just learned that the Empire of Islam had collapsed. And I knew I was to blame.
At our halt in Inönü, I had learned that this town on the edge of the high plateau was the recipient of one of Sokolli Pasha’s minor pious endowments. It was only the corner of a shopfront that dispensed bread and a goats’ milk gruel to the poor twice a day. But Esmikhan had insisted that I visit it, take a silver necklace of her own as a donation so that vegetables and perhaps some meat might be added to the fare, and then report back on all I had seen and heard in every detail.
At first this task had seemed simpleminded, but by the time I returned to give my report, I’d been brought up short several times by the massiveness of the task, if I were to do it honestly and thoroughly. How to describe the apricot light of late afternoon filling a small town’s bazaar in undiluted strength to someone who has never seen light without its being strained through the confines of a harem garden? How to describe the faces of poverty to one whose lowliest slave eats far too much and wears cast-off brocades?
It was in fumbling desperately for words she might understand to describe one of the endowment’s patrons that I accidentally said, “Well, she had the same sun-worn face as the master’s mother.”
I meant nothing malicious by neglecting to mention earlier that greatest bane of a new bride—her mother-in-law. The simple fact of the matter was that Sokolli’s harem’s sole occupant was such a shadowy figure that she slipped my mind when we were on related subjects. My good intentions to bring it up as soon as possible were always renewed when either I or the conversation seemed too far away to do so gracefully. All thought of the endowment was now forgotten in my lady’s mind and I must say I had to fight her feelings of betrayal boldly. I tried my best to explain that it was the old woman’s very lack of threat that had made me put off mention of her existence.
“She is a small, mousy woman, my master’s mother, and her feet will no longer carry her weight. So she never moves, day or night, from the divan in the largest room of the haremlik. Her eyes and her fingers are as