George Mills (68 page)

“Multiply this. Compound it by all the techniques indigenous to whatever culture she’s been entrusted to and you have a girl—enslaved she may be—who is indisputably more cultured and knowledgeable than her unsold sister in the sticks. You have more. You have a girl who’s probably more knowledgeable than the woman in whose charge she finds herself if only because she knows—please, you
must
forgive me, Tedor, but it was you who introduced this business of ends—
two
ways of wiping her behind while the mistress knows only one.”

Several of the women applauded, their left hands making a delicate brushing motion against their right. Others blew against the veils which covered their mouths, briefly exposing bits of naked jaw, chin, flashes of mouth, the mysterious flesh paler than the skin which covered their cheeks and the thin strand of brow just visible beneath their
chadors.

“Qum gets that round, Tedor,” a woman said. Bufesqueu nodded in pleasant agreement. “Have you anything to add, Mr. Mills?”

George shook his head.

“I can lift five of you at once,” a big eunuch said.

“
Five
of us? At once? Oh, I don’t think so. Your arms aren’t long enough to fit around
five,
” said the Oriental woman whom Mills had seen there the last time.

“Yes,” he said, “five.” A dozen women volunteered and the eunuch who would be doing the lifting began to choose among them.

“Sodiri Sardo’s picking only the lightest,” a fat Negress whose name was Amhara objected.

“Oh no,” the eunuch said and chose Amhara too. He led her to a chair and directed the others to sit on her lap, arranging them in the order of their size.

“See? He doesn’t have to get his arms around all five of us,” said the woman on top.

“I didn’t know there was a trick to it,” the Oriental said.

“It isn’t a trick, it’s strength,” the eunuch said. “Is everyone ready? Don’t squirm now.”

The women, clumsily balanced, were stacked in a heap of diminishing laps. They couldn’t stop giggling. The other eunuchs moved around them, professionally estimating Sodiri Sardo’s task as they might a golf ball along a difficult lie.

The big eunuch squatted, one arm under the black woman’s thighs, the other behind her back. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to pick everyone up now. Stay still as possible.”

He lifted them easily and crossed the room with them. He set them down carefully.

There were more brush strokes of applause, more veil blowing.

“Sodiri’s strong,” a eunuch admitted, “but let him try that stunt with
me
underneath and the girls in
my
lap.”

“Are you saying I can’t?” Sodiri challenged. “Go on then, sit in the chair.”

They started to arrange themselves again, the eunuch on the bottom this time. “Amhara got to hold all of us last time,” a woman said. “She’s not that much heavier than I am. You rest, Amhara. The girls can sit on
my
lap.”

“Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

Amhara sat on top of the woman who had displaced her and the others piled on top of her.

“You ready now?” Sodiri asked. “They ready, En Nahud?”

“Not quite,” the eunuch said. “They’ve got the giggles. Let them calm down first.”

“Go on,” Amhara said, “see can you pick us up.”

He picked them up.

“See can you carry us cross the room and back,” Amhara said in the air.

He carried them across the room and back.

“See can you climb the stairs,” En Nahud said.

Sodiri climbed a few stairs at the rear of the lounge. He set everyone down. The women who had been carried professed astonishment. They shook their heads vehemently, their veils flaring like the ballooning skirts of dancers.

“Did you think he could do it?” they asked each other.

“No,” they answered, shaking their heads wildly, raising the edges of their veils, “did you?”

“No! Did you ever see someone so strong?”

“
No! Never! Not!
” they answered, doing that thing with their heads again. “How about you?”

“
Negative! No! Not me! Not one time!
Eunuchs are the strongest!”

Which gave Bufesqueu his opening.

He discoursed on the proposition of whether it was possible for eunuchs to rupture.

Bufesqueu was brilliant, locating his argument scientifically but saving his great point till the end of his speech when he announced in a low, husky voice that if eunuchs
couldn’t
rupture it had to be because they were without testicles. He drew the word out and mentioned it repeatedly. He need hardly point out, he said, the women, too, were without
tesss
ticles but had love holes where
tesss
ticles would go if they were men, and everyone knew that women with love holes—he called them love holes—could rupture. He said “love holes” repeatedly also.

There was additional applause, tunes genteelly whistled into veils, astonishment registered by a forceful constriction of the brows, a general female giggling and swooning, heads vigorously thrown back till veils were hiked midnose.

They loved, they said, metaphysical discourse.

Someone raised the metaphysical question of whether or not eunuchs could expose themselves. Debate raged angrily on both sides of the question. Mills thought the eunuchs might come to blows.

Yoyu, the Oriental woman, interceded shyly.

Theory, she said, was all well and good when one had recourse only to theory, but might she point out that here they were with an entire roomful of eunuchs. It was rather like arguing whether rain were falling outside when all one had to do was look out the window, she said.

The eunuchs ceased their quarrel and looked from one to the other.

“Yoyu is right,” En Nahud said. “The only thing left to decide is which of …”

“Let Mills!” said Bani Suwayf, the young woman who had exchanged places with Amhara.

He could almost do it, Mills thought. He was so terrified by the strange goings on in the lounge that his testicles were completely retracted, his penis no more surfaced than the scab on the peel of an orange.

But Sodiri Sardo had already dropped his trousers.

“Aaaiieee,” said the girls, and Sodiri adjusted his pants.

“He is built like a soccer ball,” Yoyu said, modestly averting her eyes.

The women laughed.

“He’s seamed like one too.”

“
He
sure wasn’t flashing.”

“More like mooning.”

Mills could see the big eunuch was getting angry. Even muscles seemed to flush.

The women laughed so hard their veils were askew again, dangling from one ear, or hanging beneath their chins like bibs.

“Hsst,” Mills said, poking Sodiri Sardo’s hard belly with his elbow. The strongman turned to him fiercely. “No no,
look,
” he whispered. The eunuch glared impatiently in the direction Mills pointed. “Nostrils,” George whispered. “And look there. Those are
lips,
man! Male
lips
! Huh? Huh?” The big fellow nodded. “Huh?” George said. “Huh?” Sodiri squinted. “How about those
teeth?
Would you look at the gums on that one? Is she built? Huh? Huh?”

“Were you staring at our mouths?” one of the women asked. They had arranged their masks again. “I asked if you were staring at our mouths,” she repeated coolly.

“Nothing human is alien to me,” Mills mumbled lamely.

It was time to go, George knew, but Bufesqueu was in no hurry. And neither, evidently, were the eunuchs. Nor, for that matter, the ladies themselves.

So the salon continued its philosophic investigations, what Bufesqueu had called their “marvelous talk.” The men and the women. The men and the women and the eunuchs.

They discussed whether what a sultan felt toward his favored ladies might not actually be a form of love.

They discussed whether what the concubines felt toward their round-the-clock, day-cared-for children was.

Bufesqueu laid down a premise: that a woman in a harem necessarily entered a sultan’s bed, particularly a sultan who was also the head of a vast empire, with a certain amount of fear. In such circumstances, he speculated, was it possible to achieve orgasm?

“Define your terms,” Bani Suwayf said.

Was fate a question of bone structure, an individual geometry that made one woman a concubine and the other a slave?

Were all human skills acrobatic, Sodiri Sardo’s strength acrobatic and the girls’ jackknife fucks too?

“Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mills told Bufesqueu. They were back in their dorm.

“You worry too much, George. It’s very simpatico.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“No way, pal. That private army the Kislar’s always talking about? They’re deployed
out
side the walls. They’re over them like graffiti.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Look here, Mills. Look here, George. Don’t you think I know what you’re up to? Your problem’s written all over your face. You want a kid so bad, knock up one of the harem girls. Take her aside and rape the cunt. They catch you, they take your balls off. Big deal, it makes you strong.”

“A son. It’s got to be a son.”

“Yeah,” Bufesqueu said, “I see what you mean. You get one shot. If it’s a girl or it don’t take, then——pffftt.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Maybe you could adopt.”

“We’ve got to get out of here, Bufesqueu.”

“Yeah, well, I know it. Don’t you think it’s all I think about morning, noon and night? In the laundry or out? Don’t you think it’s all I think about?”

He didn’t, no. Because he understood now what the Chief Eunuch had warned them of on the occasion of their interview.

Complacency, lassitude, getting used to things. The piecemeal slide of the heart. All submissive will’s evolutionary easement. Seventh heaven was seven heavens too high. They were having, Mills knew, the time of their lives. (Even the smells, he thought. Balmed, luxurious as jungle, sweet and fruity as tropic, as florid, shrubby produce. He’d had a cold a week——fever, runny eyes, headache, stuffy nose. The pampered, lovely smells had still insinuated themselves onto his very breath, caught on his tongue, snagged on his teeth, so that what he tasted, its flavors overriding the very food he chewed or liquids he drank, was like some perfumed, sexual manna, the gynecological liqueurs. A sort of climate raged in him, headwinds, the fragrance in his head, mingling sweetly with the ache in his bones, swooning his soupy sleep like delicious ether. And he’d experienced, as he experienced now, as he’d experienced that first time in the harem—why did he have the impression that he had come not among women but into some vast and sensual female wardrobe?—a useless and cozy semitumescence, idle and abstracted.) And they could live there comfortably, whatever the mysterious authority for their dispensation, in their strange sanctuary forever, for as long as their lives, immune as diplomats, tenured in tease and tea party, servicing some ideal of fairy tale pornography, as, when they’d been Janissaries, they serviced some ideal of epic viciousness.

Complacency. Acceptance. Bufesqueu was used up. Had probably been used up on those Janissary prayer rugs. “Incense” he’d said to a Mills too dumb to scoff.

Mills had his first conviction and suddenly seemed dangerous, even to himself.

He sought out Fatima.

“All right,” he said, “his name is Sanbanna. I want to see him. I want to find out what’s going on.”

And Fatima mollifying him, all over him with her slave’s flattery as earlier she’d been all over him with her hands. “He’s only a tradesman, Master. A niggling peddler. Foolish women dicker in the millets with him over
kurus. A
street Arab. Common as straw. It isn’t drama, Lord. It’s barely negotiation. He’s a cheat, Honesty. A rascal, Righteousness. Let Fatima do for you.”

“I want to see him, Fatima.”

And changed her tack. “What, you think only the males in this place get operations? The women too. The royal princesses have their wombs cut out. They lose breasts. Or their faces are so disfigured beneath their veils that not even a eunuch will look at them.”

“The royal princesses?”

“And offending slaves, offending slaves do. There are harem women, some of them once highly regarded concubines, some of them once favored ladies, who insulted the Sultan, who didn’t writhe enough to suit His Majesty, or who entered his bed by the side rather than raise the coverlet at the foot and hold it to their faces to crawl the bed’s length like some veiled reptile, who’ve been carved into fright masks and sent out into the world again. Think, Boss, if they cut off a hungry man’s hands for picking up lost coins in the gutter, what would they do to a woman’s lips for speaking out of turn or returning unlawful kisses?”

“What did they do to you, Fatima, when you lay with Bufesqueu?”

“I disfigured myself,” the now grotesque fat woman said. “Shameless, shameless,” she said. “Oh,” she said, “I’m such a greedy greedy girl. I’m so
hungry.
Oh, I have such a sweet tooth. Bribegold. Will you give me bribegold?”

He gave her the last of his bribegold. In a week or so, she said, when Guzo Sanbanna might next be expected, though he made no regular rounds, she said, she would introduce him, she promised.

Three weeks went by and still no Sanbanna.

“You’ve put on a few pounds,” Mills said. “Where is he, Fatima?”

“I hoard,” she said. “He’s old, he could die, so I hoard.”

She came into the laundry. Bufesqueu spotted her and went into the back.

“The Kislar Agha wants to see you,” she said.

“Hey, Bufesqueu,” Mills called.

“Not Bufesqueu. He didn’t ask to see Bufesqueu.”

Four months earlier a summons from the Kislar would have terrified him, but Bufesqueu was right, the man wasn’t a bad fellow. At the salons—he was no regular, and neither was Mills, but he came to their affairs perhaps once every three weeks, always on the afternoon preceding an evening when a virgin was scheduled to attend the Sultan—the Chief Eunuch was often the most amusing man there, outdoing Bufesqueu and Qum el Asel himself on the thorny philosophical points they so loved to raise. Nor was the sexual horseplay, though not proscribed, so much in evidence when the Kislar was there. Although the sexuality of these afternoons was even more forthright than any Mills had witnessed when the great eunuch was absent.