This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (17 page)

Mirella, too, was surprised by her mother’s interest, and again the women settled into a moment of silence. Mirella poured coffee, placed the cups in front of the women, and sat down. She felt a sadness for Lili, and was concerned that what they were about to hear would shock Lili profoundly, as it would any Wesson-Cabot, or a Wingfield. Puritan New England has its lapses, but likes to see itself as pure.

The princess took a small Fabergé powder box of chased gold from her purse. The lid with its coat of arms emblazoned in diamonds caught the afternoon sunlight and showered prisms of color over her dress. Mirella watched the princess powder her nose and take a rather long look in the small mirror on the inside of the compact, snap it closed, and put it away.

“Western poets, painters, and travelers in the nineteenth century explored Turkey and described it to the world as a
mythical East, a lascivious East, an astonishing exotic and erotic East. They were wrong about only one thing when they spoke like that: Turkey was Asia Minor then, as it is now, not the East,” said the princess. She took a sip of her coffee and continued. “They were telling tales of the Ottoman Empire and its sexual grip on the East as well as the West, and the hub and the center of the Ottoman Empire was the sultan, the seraglio, the Constantinople, Turkey, of my childhood, of your mother Inje’s childhood.

“The sexually repressed, stiff, and upright Victorians were titillated by news of a court designed to cater to the sexual penchants of men. I am quite sure, Lili, that both you and Mirella might be titillated by it, but like the suffragettes of their day, and what you call the women’s-libbers of today, allow yourselves only to realize it as a rich male fantasy. One that should not be indulged in because of its domination over women and their human rights.

“There is no question that you are right to deplore female enslavement, but you would be very wrong to believe that it is only a male fantasy. It was very much a reality in your mother’s day, Lili. I am here to attest to that, and to the fact it is a reality even today. It may be unlawful, more discreet, and extremely rare in Turkey, but it lives on, as it does in the East and the Far East.”

The princess made a point of looking directly into Mirella’s eyes, and observing a long pause before she resumed talking. Mirella blushed, aware that the princess was reminding her of her recent erotic affair with Rashid, her near enslavement to him that even in her marriage was not wholly broken, and of Mirella’s night at Oda-Lala’s, the harem maintained by Rashid and a few of his friends.

It was true that Mirella had put that part of her life on the back burner of her mind, since the night she had run away from Rashid to Adam, love, and marriage. And now with the princess’s words and the look she gave Mirella, her erotic life in Turkey with Rashid ceased simmering and began to bubble.

As usual, Lili got it wrong when she said, “If you are referring to the unorthodox household my son-in-law Adam maintains, I can assure you that now, having married Mirella, all that will change.”

“No, Lili. I most certainly was not referring to Adam.
Adam has exactly what you described, an unorthodox household. He does not, however, keep it together by sexual slavery, but by the erotic delights he shares with its inhabitants. Those are governed by love, affection, mutual respect, and, above all, freedom. Quite the opposite of the things Inje and I were born to.”

“Born to! That brings us to my grandmother, Mirella’s notorious benefactor. What sort of woman was that who would bring a child into the world she lived in? And did she not have any regard for my mother? I imagine she had as little maternal feeling for her daughter as my mother had for me.”

“I wouldn’t presume to know about that, Lili. I only saw her once, when she came to visit Inje. It still remains a dazzling and unforgettable moment in my life, and she the most powerful and charismatic woman I have ever seen.

“The sultan was sexually besotted and controlled by Roxelana Oujie. The court was used to that, but not used to a Turkish sultan in love, as he was with Roxelana. In fact, Roxelana was not her real name but the name he gave her from an ancestor who became the most famous woman in the history of the Ottoman court, because he believed the wealthy, beautiful, and clever Jewess surpassed that woman in every way.

“Inje was Roxelana and the sultan’s firstborn. She was allowed to remain in the seraglio, and only because she was a girl. The boy who came later and another girl had been taken away in secret after the sultan had seen them, hidden from the intrigue and murder the seraglio was famous for. Roxelana had powerful enemies and both she and the sultan wanted them safe until they were mature and had grown powerful enough to return to the court and defend themselves. They never did return to the court, Roxelana saw to that. They were children fathered not by the sultan but two of her lovers, and she was afraid that the sultan might find out and take some cruel action against them. But I am digressing, and I mustn’t.

“Inje was removed from her mother hours after her birth and placed with a wet nurse as most of us were in the harem. One thing is for certain, her mother was not a direct part of Inje’s everyday life, although she did dominate it from afar. She grew up in the nursery, along with the other children of the harem. And we led quite an ordinary everyday life
surrounded by women and children, except that the men in our lives were eunuchs, whom we were guarded by, day and night. We played and learned to pray, and studied the rudiments of sewing, cooking, dancing, and singing. For our future was unknown, except for the fact that we would remain in seclusion in this harem or another all our lives until our death. Our father figures were the black or white eunuchs who replaced the complete and virile men absent from our lives.

“It was a happy, colorful life where everyone visited each other. There was gossip and intrigue everywhere, plots and counterplots, and many, many quarrels. But when you are five years old, you don’t understand, and just accept the sometimes volatile atmosphere as normal. But it wasn’t always like that. There was also the excitement of women in the harem giving birth, and raising children, the endless arrangements and celebrations of marriages, and deaths, and women consoling women on growing old, and being in and out of favor.

“The nurseries were extremely well organized, like the rest of the harem, which was a realm all its own. A girl could remain there until way past nursery age, until the complicated ritual and protocol of the harem, which even the sultan followed to the letter, allowed her to move on to one of the minor offices in the harem — unless of course she was lucky enough to catch the eye of the sultan. Then she was called a
gozde
and given separate rooms, special attendants, and taught every aspect of erotica to please the sultan. And there she would wait for the imperial summons, which might come at any time, or never at all.

“There was something else besides eunuchs that made life in a harem nursery different from a Boston nursery. We were never squawking, spoiled children. We were obedient little women, pampered and dressed in silks and satins and jewels, little dolls of flesh and blood, who from infancy were petted and fondled with oil of sandalwood, and jasmine, sexually aroused by the mouth, the hand, the nipple, by caressing fingers, lips, and tongues, so that by the age of five we were sensual children, awake to erotic feelings.

“There were, after all, sultans and emirs and foreign kings and princes whose sexual preference was for children, and if
not chosen for one of those, we were at least primed for the next step in sexual preparation.”

“And my grandmother condemned my mother to that? How disgusting, how vile,” Lili said.

“Not disgusting and vile as far as they were concerned, at that time. Remember, your grandmother was a concubine, and her daughter, your mother, was born to a favored concubine and a sultan, and treated as such. For them the worst thing that could happen was that they should not have been taught the ways of erotica, not have been prepared to satisfy a master.

“How would Roxelana Oujie find Inje an important master, and hence an important position in life, one at least worthy of the daughter of Roxelana Oujie? One mustn’t forget Inje’s mother was not only the most favored concubine in the court, but she was independently wealthy. She was the only daughter of the wealthiest Jew in the East, a grand vizier to the sultan, who managed the sultan’s fortunes, and was given to the sultan with her own fortune intact. Inje would go to a very important man, or no man at all.

“On one of the occasional visits of the sultan and Roxelana to the harem, twenty of the sultan’s concubines were playing ball with some of the children in a courtyard trellised with roses, and cages of singing birds. Several of the women caught his eye, and after conferring with Roxelana, together they chose three of them for his bed. He was charmed by the beauty and manner in which Inje played with the women. From that day on she was called gozde, child of his or not. Any girl lucky enough to have caught the eye of the sultan was called a gozde.”

“You are not going to tell me that my mother slept with her own father, Eirene? It is simply not possible. I will never believe that.”

“Well, that’s good, Lili, because she didn’t. He did, however, fall in love with her, and had her removed from the nursery that very day and placed in the hands of the eunuchs and attendants I spoke of before. She was adored by him. He could deny her nothing. He was besotted with her much as he had been with her mother. She was taught to read and to write and to speak four languages, but that was secondary to her erotic education. He was determined to have her as soon as she bled as a woman, and he made his intentions no secret.
But the entire court knew it would never happen: Roxelana would never allow it. She did, however, titillate him with their daughter. There was no question about that.

“And as for Inje, well, by the time she was thirteen, between the women and the eunuchs who taught her everything there was to learn about the intrigues and pleasures of sex, all she wanted and waited for was her first bleeding, so that she could lie with a man and experience all she had learned.

“Don’t look so shocked, Lili. We were all the same, you know. Remember, we had been turned into sexual playthings, and were looking for other sexual toys for ourselves. We were watched over night and day to make sure we remained virgins, but that never hindered us from getting our sexual satisfaction in one way or another, nor from falling in love.

“Both were very dangerous. Unbelievably cruel punishments were meted out for lesbian relationships, and the women who had been bedded by the sultan and were no longer virgins and were long-forgotten, who resorted to sex with the eunuchs and were caught, suffered dreadful deaths. And a eunuch who had only lost half his masculinity, so that he could not only satisfy women but could do so enormously, since he had very large erections and very long performance, his fate was unspeakable.

“Inje knew all this and had no fear. She learned to intrigue, and survived all her childhood transgressions. For us, she was as special as her mother, because not only was she gozde but she was the only one of us virgins who had actually been touched by a real man, and the sultan at that. Who cared if he was her father? To us it was the greatest privilege in the world.”

“You were all corrupt, and corrupted,” said Lili, looking very sad, “and what’s worse is that you didn’t even know it.”

“Yes, that’s true, Lili. Sad but true.”

“What happened to Inje?” asked Mirella, unable at that moment to think of Inje as her grandmother.

“Roxelana was, as I told you, a very clever woman. She knew that in time she would have only one serious rival for the place of power she held with the sultan and the court, and so she removed Inje.”

“Please don’t tell me she was cruel to her, did something
physically violent to her. I couldn’t bear it. If so, then clearly my grandmother was a monster,” said Lili.

The princess looked at Lili and realized that indeed she would never be able to bear the sordid details of Inje’s sexual life, any more than the niceties of depraved cruelty Roxelana was supposed to have been capable of practicing. Though never consummated with the sultan, there had obviously been a strong sexual relationship between father and daughter. Lili would never be able to understand that any more than she would the sexual life Inje created with the elderly Balkan king who made her the first woman in his kingdom — and a nymphomaniac.

Eirene had no intention of embarrassing Lili, only of making her understand where her mother came from and how remarkable she was. Because, aside from the sexual devil in Inje, she was in every way a kind and generous, elegant and charming woman. And as for Inje’s own mother, Roxelana, although not a total monster, she certainly had some monstrous traits which she had been known to use from time to time. Eirene chose not to expose these intimacies to this very unhappy lady from Boston. There would be no point. She would not appreciate such knowledge. And so she said, “No, Lili, not a monster exactly, just a product of her time and place in the wheel of fortune. And if you had ever seen her you would never call her a monster, just utterly remarkable. An example of just how remarkable she was is Inje’s departure from the court.

“Although steeped in the old regime of the Ottoman Empire to the end of her life, Roxelana saw the end coming for the corrupt, debauched, and depraved empire. Europe and the opinions of Europeans, their wars and their victories, their morals and their rules for Western civilization had no room for the bizarre excesses of the Ottoman Empire.

“Europeans were advising the sultan. All Europe, and even England and the United States, was working through diplomacy to moderate and mediate with Turkey. She saw the beginning of the end. Western civilization and the Ottoman Empire’s own weakness and inner rot would destroy them.

“Through the years she cleverly convinced the sultan that small reforms would keep the West quiet, and by the time Inje bled as a woman, Roxelana had convinced the sultan that the West would never deal with a man who openly had a sexual
affair with his own daughter. He would be marked a barbarian, a depraved despot.