The Sultan's Daughter, стр. 97

I was not alone in the mosque. I joined a man, a tinsmith by trade, who with his two young sons, bundled in blankets and trying to sleep, was also waiting for a woman to deliver—his wife of their sixth. He came and spoke to me quite merrily of children, begetting and bearing. There was nothing to it, he assured me.

Had his wife never had any difficulties at all? I asked.

“The first was not so easy,” he admitted, tousling the head of the eldest son. “Before it was over, I was called into the room and she relinquished all claims she had on me if only my seed would stop hurting her and come forth. After that bit of magic, the child came readily enough, Allah be praised. Since then, I could divorce her at my heart’s desire without having to return the bride price to her father or anything. But why should I bother? She is a good wife, Allah bless her, and now produces with the ease and fecundity of a rabbit.”

I grew angry at the man for such careless talk, and for latching onto me when I would have rather been alone. But he did know how to make time pass. And when his daughter came to announce the successful birth of vet another son and he left me with wishes for equal joy, I was pleased to discover it was already after midnight.

But nobody came with glad tidings for me.

I considered taking a description of the little ritual that had delivered the tinsmith’s wife of her first child to Esmikhan’s midwife. But this, I decided, was madness. First of all, the Quince was the best money could buy. If there was any good in this practice, no doubt she would have already tried it. Secondly, what man should be called in to acquit her? Even if Sokolli Pasha were in town, I knew, Esmikhan knew, perhaps even the midwife knew, that it was not his seed. Whether Ferhad was among the thousands dead in Astrakhan was not yet known. Assuming that he was, my mind played with the scenario that he was in Paradise, still had control over his seed, and was attempting to bring his true love to the other world to join him. Martyrs for the faith on the battlefield go straight to Paradise, they say, whatever their sins. So do women who die bringing forth Muslim children.

This thought caused me such sorrow that I startled the silent mosque with a sob. What about myself? I thought. On no account was I guaranteed to be in Paradise with her. In this confusion of paternity, where did I fit? Neither legally nor physically had I any claim upon this child struggling to be born. Both were so impossible as to be laughable.

But the memory came to me as I sat in that great empty mosque, of a night some few weeks ago as Esmikhan and I had sat by the fire playing chess. I reminded her of just such a night three years previous when she had first laid eyes on Ferhad. I mentioned it laconically, for there were others in the room, and at first her silence made me suppose she, too, had missed my meaning. But at length she smiled slightly and said, with equal cryptics, “You know, Abdullah, my first thought when I saw him was how much he looked like you.”

“If I were a man.”

“Yes.”

Esmikhan made a move then, a very astute play which I had totally overlooked. But before I could condemn my stupidity or she could gloat, she cried out, “Oh, Abdullah! it moved! The baby moved! Come and feel. There it goes again! It’s always lively in the evening. Come on, Abdullah, don’t be shy.”

And I went around the table and let her place my hand on that great mound—like bread set to rise. By kneeling, my face had been brought very close to hers. I remember staring at the round, pink curve of her cheek and being more amazed at the life I saw there than at that I felt beneath my hand. She was so pleased to feel life within her that she was blushing. But even as I stooped there, waiting for the next infant kick, there passed through my mind the image of the hollow bones beneath that cheek as if I were being given a vision of what the future held and how my same, blushing lady would someday rot in the grave.

I had since, perhaps in self-defense, extracted a different meaning from this moment of vision than that of a morbid prophecy it seemed at first to warrant. Life at its most intense is often found in contrast to death, for it’s by opposition that opposites take on meaning. And when the light and angle between two poles is so perfectly set, as they seemed to be on that evening, then, like two mirrors, they reflect one another and whatever is caught between them is thrown likewise into the depths of eternity.

The real, enduring Esmikhan, I decided, was neither the physical, living body who had bloomed and caught Ferhad’s young eyes, nor the thing that hung like a dead weight from Sokolli Pasha’s marriage contract. Her essence was something else again, no easier to describe than the nature of a reflection. I remembered the first evening I’d met her, dressed as a bride, and that secret, invisible thing that had passed between us on the road from Kutahiya which has made me say on occasion that we were married, she and I. Being neither male nor female, but having in me the attributes of both, it was I who was most qualified to love the eternal reflection of my lady that was neither living nor dead. Indeed, I believe, when there is true love between mortals of any sex or between man and God, that is the part that is loved. If so, then I was,