“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 outside 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.”