It was odd. He had a sense of shortcut, a feeling not that he had been here before (though quite possibly he’d viewed the same buildings and grounds when he’d driven through the seraglio in the Overland; he and Bufesqueu had never felt comfortable enough in their surroundings to stroll through them freely and, except for the laundry and tiny apartment near it in the eunuchs’ dormitory where they ate and slept, they had not yet established landmarks), but that he’d had this experience. Then he remembered. It must have been the way George Mills and Guillalume had felt when, leaving it to the horses, they had ambled, drifting toward Poland. Mills had no more reserves. It wasn’t adventure anymore since adventure depended upon the adventurer’s sense of goals, some spunky checklist of arrangements and priorities——some “There, that’s done” notion of progress. Mills had nothing left. When the woman reminded him that he had no status there, he had acknowledged the truth of the statement and come along. He knew she was up to something. He didn’t much care. And the sense of shortcut he felt was as much a sense of falling downhill as it was of greasing distance. He had a fate and was rushing toward it. It was just that he was so indifferent to what it might be.
So indifferent that when the woman said, “In here will be fine. Watch yourself, there are steps. Oh good, wasn’t it clever of you not to trip,” he already knew where she had taken him—to the harem—and might almost have said what was about to happen. It made no difference anymore. When she said, “Oh, just leave those there. Llwanda will bring them up later,” he put the blanket and sheets and pillowcases down on the table she indicated and straightened up to listen to what she would say next.
“That was hard work,” she said, “you must be all overheated from carrying such a load. If you’ll just step through those doors, Mally will fetch you cold water.”
“Sure,” Mills said.
Though his eyes weren’t shut he felt like asking if he could open them when he entered the room. Except that he didn’t really feel anything. Then he did.
They were in a sort of lounge. Though he’d never seen any—he’d been excluded, Bufesqueu had told him, by the traffickers themselves—the room corresponded to some notion of pornography lining his head like bone. Behind the room’s appearance, governing its design and appurtenances, dictating its appointments and vaguely tiered arrangements, was the manifestation of some blue will, some peephole, parlor car resolution. If earlier he’d had a sense of shortcut, now he had a conviction of threshholds forever sealed behind him, of borders crossed and compromised. He was like an accidental traveler in dream and had just exactly that mixture of dread and joy the dreamer sometimes feels, fearful of discovery, but pleased he has been lured where he is.
The room was spacious, its size incremented by treillage and light, the openwork lattice of a wall through which he could see blue water lavished by swans and geese like a pond flower garden. There were gorgeous, opulent couches, their plush backs and arms curved as alphabet. There were frames of unfinished embroidery and fat pillows on the marble floor like a soft sausage of lion and leopard. Here and there folding screens were covered with starkly realistic paintings that made a sort of intimate, high-minded documentary——lone figures of women soaping themselves, pinning their hair, stepping tentatively into water, holding fans and examining themselves in mirrors. Mills had the feeling sperm might be boiling in the lamps that glittered in the wall sconces.
What added to his sense that he had stepped into a brothel, and contributed to his idea of some carefully controlled sexual climate, was the presence in the lounge of so many women of different races. Orientals were there and Negresses, white women and women pink as pork. And a feel of laze, of timeless tea party.
He was the only man there, and, though he was certain he was expected, no one spoke to him or even looked at him directly. Indeed, they seemed deliberately to ignore him and even the woman who had brought him dropped the pretext of getting him water. Briefly it occurred to him that he was as much on display as the women, and though he had not been with so many females (if ever) in more than a year, and though there were no eunuchs about, he knew these were the Sultan’s women and were as reluctant to stare at him as he was at them.
He knew Bufesqueu would chide him if he learned he’d entered the harem and never even looked at the girls, so despite his restraint he glanced at them nervously, quickly registering an impression of bulk, of clothing too tight, of arms dripping with weight.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat and making ready to leave, the word vaguely aimed at the Royal Princess.
“See?” a familiar voice said. “Did I lie? Did I exaggerate?” It was the slave woman, Fatima, and she stepped from behind a screen. “Now you must give Fatima what you promised, my mistresses.”
“Oh no, not yet,” one of the pork pink women said. “Eunuchs speak. Mine pipes like a magpie on all manner of subjects. Sometimes I have to kiss him on the lips just to get him to stop.” The rest of the women giggled and Mills flushed thickly.
“In a voice deep as this one’s?” Fatima challenged. “Why there’s no comparison.”
“He was singing work songs when I found him in the laundry,” the Royal Princess said. “I heard his deep bass voice. Go on, Mills, show them.” They were playing him, George knew. He was going to be seduced. Seduced and killed. When the eunuchs found his body he would already be dead. The Royal Princess would testify against him as blithely as she had lied about his singing. She would say that he had charged into the harem and attacked them. They’d never dare not to accept her version of the proceedings and, despite himself, a part of Mills was outraged on behalf of the deceived Sultan.
But then he thought how to save himself. The eunuchs! he thought. They would have to be about. And began, even as they coaxed and teased him, to sing in a voice loud and deep as he could muster, crazed, desperately improvising:
“
Fold the sheet, fold the sheet.
See how neat I fold the sheet!
”
He looked about to see which of the eunuchs would respond to his cries. Perhaps he’d be familiar, one of the fellows from his dorm. The women stared at him.
“
Fold the sheet, fold the sheet.
I want to eat, I fold the sheet!
”
“What did I tell you,” Fatima asked triumphantly, “would you find a voice like
that
on a eunuch?”
“Can’t find nothin’ on no eunuch,” a hefty black woman said.
“What a lovely low voice,” Fatima marveled.
“All right,” a large Oriental woman said listlessly, “he’s no countertenor, but all I’m hearing is volume.”
“Sure,” someone else said, “nobody ever put no one in trouble with just noise.”
The women seemed skeptical, ready to leave, when Fatima thrust herself forward again. “Ladies, ladies,” she said. “And aren’t I as far from home as any of you? And don’t I know from experience the difference between coiled rope and taut? Just because I’m a slave and not some fine lady-in-waiting like the rest, do you think I’ve lost memory, senses and all the kit and caboodle of my normal nature and ain’t able to distinguish between capons and roosters? And haven’t I been around these castratos long enough to know what I’m talking about? Ain’t they just about all I got to look at on this damn desert island? Can’t I recognize from one sight-see of their crotch when they sit, no more shape down there than a cloudless sky, that nobody’s home, that their wounds, if they even
are
wounds anymore, are all sealed like empty envelopes, shiny and slippery as scars, hairless as gemstone, smooth as fat? And ain’t I even been flashed by a few of these sports, their limp machinery dangling like busted thumb and no more flexed than buds in snow, just all broke, shriveled retrograde flesh like old folks’ skin?
“Didn’t I
tell
you? Didn’t you
hear
him? When has a eunuch commanded such growl? Or are your ears accommodate only to the higher registers, the piggy squeals and sharp shrills of all noise’s unbailed din? But didn’t you feel these very marble floors vibrate? And if your ears don’t tell you, what about your eyes? Look, just look.” She stepped beside Mills and touched the planes of his face, raised his shirt and pointed out his ribs. “See? See how sleek? Look at his sharpish elbows, feel his pointy knees. There are angles to this one, some hard geometry of maleness.” She touched the front of his pants and, pinching an imaginary inch between her fingers, made as if to trace the length of his cock. Terrified, Mills was not unstirred as she drew her hand slowly up the inside of his thigh. “There’s lust and longitude to him,” she said, and, cupping his testicles, started to squeeze. “Bags and bones.”
Mills winced and tried to pull away. The women, impressed, watching closely, gasped at his pain. They spoke aloud, shocked by his distress into their original tongues. (Because he knew two languages now. No, three. English, Janissary, and Harem.) Fatima released him and stood by his side, showing him off like an accomplishment, flourishing for him like a lesser acrobat. Suddenly she went into a sort of incantation, sounding nothing at all like the clownish woman who had spoken to him in the laundry. “Because there are some men like paradigms,” she intoned, “their manhood burned into them like brands in cattle. Concupiscent, prurient, bawdy boys with heated hearts never cooled to room temperature.” And was speaking to him now, her voice low, almost a whisper. “Flirts,” she said, “philanderers, rakes and rips. Randy as pirates, ruttish as goats. Skittish as scarlet and wicked as wanton, filthy as folly and scabrous as smut. Lawless libidos, loose and licentious. Gross and coarse. Dissolute. Dirt. Salacious seducers, carnal as meat. Naughty as nasty and vulgar as vile.” She reached out to touch him and shook her head, signaling him not to cry out or back away.
Fatima begins to stroke him. “Filth and defilement, lickerish lust. Whoremonger, wencher, womaner, wolf. Satyr and ravisher, fucker and lech. Steam and steam the stews of the heart. Who keeps the knock shop and flaws the flesh. You rapist. You ruiner. You wrecker, you lewd. They pulled off your balls, but they grew back like hair. Like nails they grew back, healed as young skin or second-growth teeth.” His trousers swell where she strokes him and the superstitious concubines look on in awe, silenced. Abruptly Fatima withdraws her hand, and Mills whines helplessly.
“Well,” she said, “there you are, my mistresses. What do you say to old Fatima now?”
They said nothing and continued to stare at George, not so much fearful as fascinated, almost, he thinks, devout.
“Because some men,” Fatima explained, “have itch and need so powerful they can’t be scratched, even by the Sultan or the Sultan’s surgeons, the Sultan’s men. Cutting don’t do no good. You’d have to kill them to drop their erection. They spoke of this back home but until Mills came I didn’t believe it, had never seen it. I still don’t understand how it works, but maybe the erection is
inside,
starting at the bellybutton, say, or the high erogenous zones, the skin at his nipples, the roof of his mouth. You can’t burn it out or cut it out, because all that happens when you try is that the need grows downward, falling toward earth, closing on the very dirt and filth you tried to keep it from when you trimmed the hedge by clipping it in the first place.
“Anyhow, that’s how some account for it, though maybe it’s just pride and will and determination, and Mills here ain’t no more manly than those other eunuchs, only more set in his ways. I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know. But I don’t have to, do I? I told you about him and even worked out with Lady Givnora how best to get him here and prove my claims, and I think it’s just mean and shameful if you don’t give me my treat like you promised.”
All the odd power Mills had sensed in the woman seemed suddenly to have deserted her and she was only Fatima again, a woman too old to have to do any of this, too old to have to hold his balls in her hand.
The Royal Princess who had brought him put a heavy arm around Fatima’s shoulder. “Now, Fatima,” she said, “of course you’ll get your treat.” And she put a hand inside her robe and brought something out which Mills thought he recognized. She instructed the other women to do the same.
“Oh,
thank
you, my lady!” Fatima said and hurriedly pressed pieces of the
halvah
they had given her into her mouth. “Oh
thank
you,” she said again, her lips flecked with flaking candy. “Mnn,” she said, “it’s delicious.” The overweight women seemed indifferent to her enjoyment.
The seraglio was overstaffed. There was little to do. When he finished his work in the laundry, usually in the early afternoon, he was through for the day. He could return to the dormitory, talk to the eunuchs or, like Bufesqueu, chat up the slave girls.
By his own admission Bufesqueu wasn’t getting anything off them. They seemed, he said, frightened to have sex with him.
“They’re scared of the eunuchs,” he explained. “Listen,” he said, “could I borrow some of your bribegold?”
“Why not,” George said, “what’s there to spend it on?”
“I’ll be damned,” Bufesqueu said when he returned it a few days later. “I never saw anything like it. The sons of bitches are incorruptible.”
“Which sons of bitches?”
“The eunuch sons of bitches. I tried to pay them off, maybe they could get lost for an hour or two, but they weren’t having it. Listen,” he said, “could I have some of that back again? I ain’t ever paid for it yet, but there’s just so much a man can take.”
He’s the one, George thought, not me. He’s the one whose hard-on starts up around his ears.
“Here,” Bufesqueu said, returning the bribegold a second time. “I added this to my own but the sons of bitches are
absolutely
incorruptible.”
“The eunuchs,” George said.
“No, man, the slave girls.”
“Hey,” Bufesqueu said another time, “can I hit you up once more? I think I found a live one.”
“Sure,” George said, “why not? You always pay your debts.”
Bufesqueu had a broad smile on his face when he returned that night to the dormitory. “It was terrific,” Bufesqueu said. “I won’t say it didn’t hurt to put out the dough, but after all this time it was worth it.”