What Casanova Told Me (30 page)
Read What Casanova Told Me Online
Authors: Susan Swan
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Psychological
She stretched out on her bed and turned to the newly translated pages.
The gun Miss Adams used to shoot her attacker gave her a painful powder burn. Indeed, that evening, she still had a tiny piece of pistol wad embedded in her right palm. I was able to extract it with my penknife. As Your Majesty might expect, the way she defended herself greatly increased Mahmud’s respect. And since his own mother, the Most Illustrious Nakshidil Sultan, is of the French race, and with Your own interest in the wider world as an example, perhaps it is natural that the prince is curious about foreign women.
When she explained that she had kept a faithful account of her travels but that her wounded hand made writing in her journal impossible for a few months, Mahmud suggested that I do this task for Miss Adams, to record her travels in our own country. She declined his offer, but kindly asked if I would demonstrate my skill in calligraphy. And so, of course, I obliged my prince, as I am wont to do. Crouching on the floor, I allowed my hand to fly across the notepad on my knee. I had not used my pens for two days because we had been travelling home by coach from Belgrade, and it is difficult to write under such conditions. If I may humbly say, Your Majesty, Miss Adams and the old gentleman were delighted by my brush strokes.
The Chevalier de Seingalt considered my sketch of the dervish with a human face (Your Majesty’s favourite), and said he thought that the Qur’an forbids the representation of images. So I pointed out to my companions that they will not find unfavourable references in the Qur’an to the making of figures. And furthermore, I argued that the Prophet’s wife was allowed to make “a cushion or two” out of a curtain decorated with images. The old gentleman
muttered a dismissive phrase about “Mussulmani nonsense.” As I will explain in my final recommendation, the Chevalier de Seingalt does not look upon our ways with the same interest as Miss Adams.
Not one to be defeated, I drew the four letters of God and showed him how cleverly the vertical strokes evoke the fingers of the human hand. And if I may humbly say, the old gentleman lost his tongue when I said it was his Western vanity that led him to think the Qur’an forbids image-making. Giaours believe the making of animate images is more natural than other forms of art, and so ignorantly conclude that there must be a decree against image-making if the people of Islam prefer composing abstractions.
Greatly excited, I went on to describe the learning of Islam, and how our mosques and libraries made manuscripts available to the people long before the Giaours invented their printing press.
She awoke an hour later to hear the wails of the muezzins calling out the evening prayer from the minarets of Sultanahmet. The pages of Ender’s translation were still in her hand. Sitting up sleepily, it struck her that Asked For Adams and Jacob Casanova would have heard these same sounds if they had managed to finish their journey and find Aimée Dubucq de Rivery. Her guidebook noted that contemporary muezzins used electronic megaphones, but the piercing voices she heard in the darkness must have sounded much the same to her ancestor. Soon the modern sound-and-light show would be starting at the Blue Mosque, and the neighbourhood dogs would begin to bark at the loud, disembodied
male voices. She was becoming accustomed to the evening sounds of the old world, she thought as she turned back to Ender’s translation.
The winds were very high that week in Salonica, and not expected to abate since this is the season of the
meltem.
The northerly wind meant a rough voyage so travelling overland was the best plan for us. Before we set out, Miss Adams accepted my help with her disguise—it was clear from what I saw in Salonica that she had not the slightest idea how to keep a turban on her head, so obeying my instructions, she wrapped her hair around the headpiece that serves as the turban’s anchor. Then she fashioned a moustache out of her own curls and pasted it on with gum arabic. The neat appearance of her turban along with the false moustache gave her the look of a tall youth smirking at his elders.
God the Almighty gave me the wisdom to tell our innkeepers and other travellers that she had been born dumb. And if I may humbly say, she was grateful for my ingenuity, Your Majesty, although she at first found the turban warm.
We were riding across the plain of Filibe when the bandits struck. The alluvial plain is so pleasant with its fields of tobacco and cherry orchards that we had been lulled into forgetting all prospect of danger. The thieves came at daybreak while we slept, and disarmed us swiftly.
Alas, we were travelling without bodyguards. As Your Majesty knows, the young prince often goes about as a commoner, so he can learn the ways of the people who will one day be his subjects. It is a practice his mother taught
him. The thieves were too ignorant to see through Miss Adams’ disguise although they found the pistol in her travelling chest, and took the scimitar belonging to myself. The old gentleman had no weapons on him. And it was easy for them to ascertain that Mahmud had been born into a good family in Constantinople, although, Praise God the Almighty, they failed to guess how truly exalted is his rank. Their plan was to hold him ransom and extract a handsome sum from his family, and for this nefarious purpose they kept him separate from us. It was all I could do not to lose heart. Still, if I may humbly add, there have been enough brigands in Your Majesty’s Court to keep my wits sharp. To that end, I told the thieves Mahmud was my nephew, and that his family would send them the ransom monies in Constantinople if I went to his father with their request.
Some days after our capture, janissaries were sighted in the distance, and the thieves hurried us out of the foothills up into the mountains. It was a hard march. The thieves rode horses and made us go on foot. Meanwhile, the weather had changed, bringing high winds and rain, and at night the ground by our fire was wet and infested with ticks. Mahmud was still kept apart from us, taking his yogurt and broth on the other side of the fire, and unhappily the thieves stopped me from giving him my ration.
In the mountains, the Chevalier de Seingalt came down with fever. Every day he grew weaker, until we had to carry the old gentleman in a hammock held together by long poles, his dog running alongside him. It was touching to see the care Miss Adams lavished on him, feeding him herself and wiping his brow when his fever was high. I
believe her friendship with the old gentleman is dear to her, although such a friendship cannot last long.
I made a habit of sitting with the thieves when they took
keyif.
They had never met a Muslim like myself, and they delighted in my freckles and red beard, never losing an opportunity to call me “the Fair-Haired One.” I did my best to accommodate their questions. As a boy, I was deeply impressed by my father’s flexible nature, and if I may humbly say, the acorn does not fall far from the tree. Soon the thieves began to share their opium with me around their evening bonfires, which I made a pretence of smoking, while Miss Adams and the old gentleman sat at a distance.
Praise God, they were simple farmers who had taken to robbing travellers because a drought had ruined their poppy crop. They blamed their luck on Bendis the Destroyer, an ancestral goddess who plays cruelly with the fates of men. I asked polite questions about this deity whose cult is known in the back hills of Thrace, and once they had fallen into a trancelike state by the evening campfire, the thieves would talk willingly about her.
It seems Bendis has been worshipped by the people in that region long before Mohammed, and this faith is practised secretly so as not to arouse the ire of the mullahs. They described Bendis as dual in nature: she is the mistress of stones, forests, springs and healing waters, and the crone of the waning moon, whose savage powers can bring a man to his knees. They told me strange tales of Roman times when men cut off their genitals in order to appease Bendis, and their faces broke into relieved smiles when they said such sacrifice was no longer demanded.
Soon after, we descended into a magnificent pine valley and made camp at the foot of a cliff. Above us, in the rocky edifice, was a large cave from which flowed a mountain spring. The thieves believed the cliff was haunted by the goddess Bendis, and pointed out the ledge, where in times of trouble Bendis was said to appear and offer help to mortals in need. The thieves were greatly excited and said that if I dug in the earth at the foot of the cliff below the cave I would find strange pagan idols left by her worshippers.
To prove it, the chief amongst the thieves, by the name of Kemal, showed me a clay figure he had found in the ground. An embellished triangle on the antiquity signified its female nature.
That night, Kemal built a huge bonfire and scattered its ashes over the small figure. Soon everyone fell asleep, but I was unable to close my eyes because, Praise God Almighty, an idea had been born that would lead to the deliverance of Mahmud, along with myself and my two Frankish friends.
Luce was helping Ender prepare lunch. His apartment was in the old district of Sultanahmet in one of the wooden houses she had noticed from her hotel. He had set a table for two on the balcony. It was cleaner than the cluttered verandas she had seen from the terrace of the hotel but simply decorated with a picnic table and a few old plastic lawn chairs. Ender explained that the apartment belonged to his uncle who had gone to his summer house in the Princes’ Islands and given him the run of the place so Ender could research the history of art under the Ottomans. Part of his research touched on the practice of calligraphy.
“Casanova’s opinions about the scribe’s ‘Mussulmani nonsense’ is typical of Orientalist stereotypes,” Ender said, frowning. “You know, the barbaric Turk, that sort of attitude? Or else Western travellers exoticize the Ottomans just as they do the rest of the East. And yes, it’s a pet peeve of mine, so ignore me at your peril.”
Luce laughed as she sliced up tomatoes. “I promise not to act like an ignorant Westerner. I’d be too terrified!”
He gave her a bemused look from behind his oversized glasses and it struck her that his glasses sat on the bridge of his nose like an afterthought, or perhaps an apology. She wondered if he wore glasses defensively the way men who wore beards often wanted to be perceived as more manly. Perhaps he needed or wanted those large, strange-looking spectacles to defuse the impact of his attractive appearance.
“But why would Asked For Adams be accused of treason? An American woman wouldn’t pose much of a threat to the Ottoman court, would she?”
“Foreigners like Baron de Tott helped to train a new corps of engineers and artillery for Selim’s father and the work continued under Selim III. That’s probably why he rescued the Scotsman from death or imprisonment after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion and brought him to Turkey. De Tott reorganized the gun foundry and taught new European mathematics. But there was fierce resistance from the janissaries to learning new techniques.”
“Did Selim welcome Western influence?”
“On some parts of Ottoman life, yes. In
1808
, Selim was murdered at Topkapi Palace. Mahmud—the scribe’s young prince—continued the reforms.”
“And how does Asked For figure in this?”
“Who knows what talk there would have been about a man like Casanova in Istanbul? His subtlety and intelligence would
have been appreciated but his liberal way of thinking would have raised eyebrows in the Sultan’s court, perhaps providing the enemies of Western reform with another reason to cause trouble. But we don’t know that yet, do we? I’ve only just started translating the scribe’s letter.”
Ender motioned to the table set with a wooden basket overflowing with the stuffed flatbread called
gozleme
, a hunk of
beyaz peynin
, the white cheese that looked like feta to Luce, and a platter of dry meatballs,
kuru k’ofte
, nestled next to slices of fat red
domates.
“Shall we eat?” They sat down to the modest lunch they had prepared together.