Marie concentrated on finishing the domestic chores she shared with her sister-in-law, then, saying she had a migraine, went up to her room. Her sister-in-law scowled. They were both very young (there was barely a year between them), and they were in the habit of sitting down to gossip after the housework was done each day, until Marie’s mother came to put a stop to their girlish chatter. “She worries that I might be telling you the secrets of my married life!” Marie’s sister-in-law used to say with a muffled giggle. Marie, for her part, bit her lip.
She had heard a few of the secrets, actually, especially the day before her engagement was made official, and then more in the course of the following few weeks. Her eyes blazed with curiosity as she drank in her sister-in-law’s sparse words, constrained by modesty and good manners to a mere trickle — whereas she thirsted for a raging torrent, as if she were lost in a desert.
But just recently, to the great surprise of her sister-in-law, who was inclined to be more open about things as Marie’s wedding day drew near, the young woman had stopped asking about intimate matters.
The sister-in-law shrugged. What could you expect from a family of lunatics whose different members followed different religions?
She had been genuinely surprised when she found out that the family of her future husband, like many households of Albanian descent, had maintained over the generations the custom of including within its bosom members of different, that is to say opposite, faiths. Her father-in-law, Aleks Ura, was a Christian, but one of his sons, who had gone into the navy, had been brought up a Muslim; whereas the other, her future husband, remained a Christian. Maybe the father would have done the same with daughters had he had two of them, but since Marie was the only one, he had tried, in a sense, to split her in two. As he could not raise her in two different faiths at the same time (though such cases were not unheard of), he had given her two first names, each from a different religion. So for her first family and close friends, her name was Marie; for the rest of the world, including her fiancé, it was Miriam.
Her future husband had tried to explain to her the reasons for such duplication, which had to do with the fate and history of their far-off homeland, Albania, but she did not really get much out of his knotty explanations. All that was plain in her eyes was that the brothers of Aleks had followed two different faiths, and that their forebears and ancestors had always done the same.
In the course of the several weeks during which preliminary discussions relating to her engagement were held, she had been astonished at her own family’s determination to become allied to this strange tribe, but it was not long before she learned the truth. The house she was going to join was related — distantly, it is true, but related nonetheless — to the famous Köprülü clan. To the degree that its name, Ura, was none other than the former and original patronymic of the Quprilis — translated, for reasons of state, from Albanian into the Ottoman Köprülü.
In fact, since her marriage she had not seen so much as a twig of the famous family tree, except for a nephew, a pasty-faced boy of ten or twelve, who had come to visit with his mother about a year ago. The boy was named Mark-Alem. He didn’t say much, and when her father-in-law Aleks, who was eager to try to explain the origin of the family’s name to the boy, had drawn a sketch of a three-arched bridge for him — a bridge located somewhere in central Albania where some kind of sacrifice had occurred in the dim and distant past — the lad just shook his head obstinately, and muttered: “I don’t want to hear those gruesome tales.”
A madhouse! the young woman thought once more, as her eyes wandered toward the staircase Marie had taken on the way up to her room. What in heaven’s name could she be doing up there on her own for hours on end?
She was not accustomed to spying on others, but after a brief inner struggle curiosity overcame her scruples, and she tiptoed silently to the top of the stairs. Once on the landing, she took a deep breath, looked around to make sure no one else was nearby, then crouched down and looked through the keyhole of Maria’s bedroom door.
What she managed to glimpse left her dumbfounded. Marie was standing stark naked in front of the dressing mirror, putting on and taking off a pair of lace-edged silk panties.
Already? How can that be? the young married woman wondered, unable to take her eyes off Marie as she shifted her marble-white body from one slinky pose to another. For a second her crotch displayed its troubling black triangle before the silk swallowed it afresh.
No, she thought, as her mouth went dry, heaven only knows why. A woman cannot make movements of that kind unless she has experienced love. But was it conceivable that such was already the case?
Apparently the young wife must have made the floorboards creak because Marie swung round suddenly and put a hand over her breasts. But she soon relaxed, probably because she saw that the door was bolted on the inside.
Her sister-in-law slowly withdrew and with muffled steps went back down the stairs as silently as she had gone up. They must have already slept together, she thought. That was also the only way of accounting for the lack of curiosity Marie had been showing recently.
She could not get that unbearably smooth white body out of her mind. The curvaceous hips that swayed at the slightest movement troubled her, and she thought to herself once again: Yes, yes, that must be it. There’s no other explanation.
She was right. Two weeks earlier, something had happened quite suddenly between Marie and her fiancé which, to her mind, should not have occurred until their wedding night.
It was true that the family, like many others who had come down from the Balkan Peninsula, was relatively easy-going, at least in comparison to Muslim families in the capital But however relaxed their behavior and however eccentric the paterfamilias, no one within that family would have dreamed that Maria had spent time alone in a bedroom with her fiancé. And they could simply not have imagined she might have prematurely lost her virginity.
The day it happened had been no ordinary day, however. The new edict plunged everyone in the house into something like an inner maelstrom. From the nearby square came the roll of drums, then the voice of the town crier, declaiming the text of the qorrfirman. Marie had been unable to take her eyes off her father’s face. It had turned quite livid.
She quietly went up to him and, as was her habit, placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, asking him sweetly: “What’s worrying you so, Father dear? There isn’t anything like that in our family, is there?”
Aleks shook his shoulders as if to cast off a cloak of weariness.
“No, of course not. . Of course there isn’t, my child.”
She looked at her father with a quizzical expression, which repeated the same question in silence. He pretended not to notice, though it’s possible that in the kind of trance he had fallen into he really didn’t register his daughter’s glance.
“And besides, the Köprülüs are distant cousins of ours, aren’t they?”
“What?” the father almost shouted. “Cousins of the Köprülüs? Yes, sure we are, but in these kinds of circumstances that is of no use whatsoever.”
Gradually his eyes narrowed, grew smaller, and at the same time his voice fell almost to a whisper. “In these kinds of circumstances it’s better to have no cousins at all!”