“I even asked if she’d missed her period.”
And raised an eyebrow.
“You know what she said?”
He shook his head.
“She hasn’t had a period in five years.”
“Well,” Mills said, “that lets you off.”
“It was the fucking,” Bufesqueu said. “I fucked her to fat.”
“We could drop in on a class,” Mills said. “You know, not take it for credit. I don’t think they’d object to auditors.”
“I have this high-caloric jism. Fatima must have told them. That’s why they tell me I can shove my bribegold.”
“All right,” Mills said and watched his old pal, the flashy Janissary who had taken Constantinople and was eating his heart out, destroying himself. And he told him about the harem.
Bufesqueu was in seventh heaven again, happier than Mills had ever seen him. He raved about the girls and invited George along whenever he went for a visit.
“I can’t,” Mills said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Listen,” Bufesqueu said, “nothing happens. They’re running some Arabian Nights scam over there. But like I always say, ‘In the country of the blind.’ You’ve just got to be patient is all. They’ll come round. But they’re really charming. A little heavy, but what the hell, right? They ask for you all the time, you know. You must really have charmed them. They still talk about that hard-on you had.”
“He told us to watch our step. It’s too dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I think? This harem thing is an old business. I mean it’s really an ancient institution. Who’d think that in a civilized world such things could go on? I mean, really George, eunuchs? Concubines? Novices? Favorite ladies? I mean slaves, for God’s sake! Or even sultans for that matter. I’ll tell you the truth, George, I honestly think it’s had its day. It was all very well when everyone rode around on a flying carpet, but in the nineteenth century? It’s all but finished. They’re all gone soft. All right, individually, individually they’re incorruptible and won’t give me a tumble, but as a group? As a group they’re flawed as old Rome. How much more time can it possibly have? Fifty years? Sixty? These are the final days, George, and more especially the last nights, if you know what I mean. Just like the Janissaries. The last nights of the final days and I don’t want to miss a minute of the outrageousness. I don’t want to miss a second. Come on, Georgie, what do you say?”
“I’ve got a class,” Mills said.
He’d been taking lessons in Court protocol with the Sultan’s bastard children. For aristocrats they seemed surprisingly docile. At first, as he had on the day Lady Givnora had brought him to the harem, Mills stood at the window and listened, but when their teacher saw him she motioned him in and asked his business.
“I have this interest in protocol,” Mills said.
The children giggled. Even their teacher smiled.
“Yes,” George said, “I suppose that’s funny.”
“Well it is,” a young man said. “I mean I’m going to be twenty and I’ve been coming to the schoolhouse all my life. You know why? I keep getting these crushes on my teachers. But I’ve never even been to Court. I’ve never seen my father.”
“I have,” Mills said quietly, “I’ve seen your father.”
“What, you? You work in the laundry.”
“I was even presented at Court once,” he said.
“You never were,” the young man said.
“Perhaps he’d like to tell us about it, class,” the slave girl said. “Would you? Would you like to tell us about it?”
“So you see,” George said when he’d finished, “if I’d known more protocol I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in today.”
They listened carefully to everything he said and, when he’d done, even asked questions. They wanted to know what the throne room looked like. They were curious about the furniture. They asked him to describe their half brother, Abdulmecid, and to suggest, if he could, what sort of voice their father had. Was it deep? Was it breathy? Could Mills list any mannerisms for them he might have noticed?
At the end of the two hours — even their teacher was taking it all in — he was asked to return.
“Well,” George said, agreeably conscious that he was giving stipulations to the highborn, “only if I get to listen next time.”
He soaked up the protocol lessons.
“Did you know,” he asked Bufesqueu, “that only someone who has been to France may inquire after the Sultan’s health?”
“Oh,” Bufesqueu said, “why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” George admitted, “it’s tradition and it goes back thirteen hundred years.”
“You know more than any of them, Mills,” Bufesqueu told him once. “You’re the one who ought to teach that course.”
George shrugged deprecatingly.
“No, you should.”
“It’s not my place,” he said shyly.
Though it was probably true. The school he’d attended that first day was not the only one in the seraglio. He went to all of them. Some teachers were better than others but each had something to teach him. He absorbed it all.
He learned other things too. About the Sultan’s strange, sluggish, unacknowledged children. Evrevour, the little boy he’d heard that first day he’d passed the schoolhouse, had become a sort of friend.
“I have seventy-four half brothers,” Evrevour told him. “I have eighty-one half sisters. You think it’d be fun, so many children.”
“It isn’t?”
“We have to be very careful about the incest,” Evrevour said.
“They’re burned out on birthday cake,” Mills told Bufesqueu.
“You ought to hang out with me in the harem, George,” Bufesqueu said.
“Too dangerous.”
“That’s the thing. It really isn’t.”
“He told us himself.”
“The Kislar Agha? He’s a pussycat. You should get to know him. Sometimes he comes to the salons.”
“The Kislar Agha does? Salons?”
“Salons, teas, open house. I don’t know what you’d call them exactly, but sure, he’s there. Lots of the eunuchs are. And I’ll tell you something else, George. They’re not bad fellows. They’ve got some great stories to tell. There’s marvelous talk.”
Mills thought his friend was under a spell, a kind of enchantment. He thought they all were. When he saw them in the harem — he agreed to go when a eunuch brought Ali Hakali’s invitation to him personally in the laundry — they, the men as well as the women, seemed immensely sociable, hugely cheerful, terribly gay. He did not see the Kislar Agha.
“Oh, there you are, Mills,” Bufesqueu said, rising up off his cushion like a host when he spotted George. “Perhaps you can settle a little argument for us.”
“It isn’t an argument, Tedor. We weren’t arguing,” a eunuch Mills didn’t recognize said.
“It’s about the female slaves,” Bufesqueu said. “Qum el Asel contends they’re actually improved by servitude while I hold that whatever civilizing effects their condition provides, is motivated by the universal hope of getting on, being noticed by their mistresses, et cetera. It’s merely public relations, a sort of show business, a means to an end rather than the end itself.”
“Oh please, Tedor,” Qum el Asel said. “Ends? Means? Mean you to end so meanly, man?” He looked at the harem women and George followed his glance. They batted their eyelashes, silently fluttering their gauzy veils with their tiny poutlike breaths. “I mean,” and he looked at them again before he continued, “toward what end should any discussion strive? Fact, I should say.