Жюльетта Бенцони: Marianne and the Lords of the East

"Your Highness!" Marianne said, stammering a little. "I beg you will not judge me too harshly—"

Nakshidil sighed again; then suddenly she laughed.

"Judge you? My poor child! Say rather that I envy you."

"Envy me?"

"Why, yes! You have beauty, nobility, a famous name, you have wits and courage and you have that most precious and fragile of all gifts: youth. And more than that, you have love. I know, you are going to tell me that love has brought you little joy and that just at this moment you could well do without it, but even so it is there, driving you on and filling your life, coursing with the youth in your veins. And then you are free, you have the right to do what you will with your own life, even to destroy yourself if you like, in pursuit of this love of yours. The whole world is open to you. Yes, I envy you. You can never know how much I envy you."

"Your Highness!" Marianne said, startled by the depth of sadness and regret in the soft voice, schooled to years of whispers.

But Nakshidil did not hear her. The story told her by her visitor had carved a breach in the wall in which her spirit was imprisoned, and all her regrets, her aching desires, came pouring through it like the pounding seas through a broken dike.

"Do you know what it means," she went on, more softly still, "do you know what it means to be twenty years old and to learn about love in an old man's arms? To dream of wide open spaces, of sailing the seas and galloping with the morning breeze on your face, of nights under huge, free skies, listening to the singing of the blacks and breathing in the scents of the islands—only to wake and find yourself in a cage among scheming eunuchs and an army of stupid, vindictive women with the souls of slaves? Do you know what it is to be always longing for a young man's love, for a young man's arms about you, strong and eager, as you lie on your silken cushions in the lonely room whence they take you from time to time to the bed of a man too old to make the contrast anything but bitter… And all this, year after mortal year—the years that might have been the richest and warmest of your life?"

"Do you—do you mean that you have never known—love?" Marianne murmured, at once stricken and incredulous.

The fair head stirred and the movement, slight as it was, drew a flash from the huge rose diamond that adorned it.

"I have known the love of Selim. He was the son of my husband, old Abdul Hamid. He was young, certainly—and he loved me with such passion that he chose to die to save me, me and my son, when the usurper Mustapha and the janissaries swept through the palace. There was much warmth in his love and I was very fond of him, but as for the burning passion I might have known with—with another who filled my dreams when I was fifteen, the fever of love, the need to give and to take, no—those are things I have never known. So, little girl, forget your sufferings, forget all that you have endured because you still have the chance and the right to fight for your happiness. I will help you."

"Your Highness is very good, but it is not right for me to think only of the man I love. You forget that I am to bear a child, a child who would raise an impassable barrier between us, even if I could ever find him again."

"That is true. I was forgetting that terrible experience of yours and its consequences. We must find a remedy for those as well. You don't want to keep the child, do you? If I understood you rightly—"

"I hate it, Your Highness, just as I hated the man who fathered it. It is like a monstrous, loathsome thing inside me, feeding on my flesh and blood."

"I understand. But at this late stage abortion would be dangerous. Your best course would be to retire to one of my houses and live there in seclusion until the child is born. I will take charge of it after that, and I promise you that you will never hear of it again. I will have it brought up by people of my own."

But Marianne shook her head. She was not prepared to spend the next few months in waiting for an event which both frightened and disgusted her. As for the dangers the sultana had mentioned, she was well aware of them but feared them much less than the thought of living for five months cut off from all possibility of finding Jason again.

"I will have them begin the search for this American privateer of yours first thing in the morning," Nakshidil said after a moment, reading her young kinswoman's thoughts like an open book. "It is bound to take some time in any case. Are you still set on risking your life?"

"Yes. I'm only sorry to have waited so long, simply because I did not know of anyone who could help me. But now I must take the risk. If this child lives, even if I never see it, even if the whole world lies between us, there will still be an invisible tie, a living witness to all that I suffered at the hands of that abominable creature."

There was a note of strain and fierce denial in the younger woman's voice and her companion recognized it. Remembering how she herself had felt on learning that the seed of the aged sultan was germinating in the mysterious depths of her own body, and the kind of revulsion which not even the triumphant prospect before her could altogether extinguish, she could guess at Marianne's frantic urge to tear out of her womb the thing that had been planted there in a fashion so horrible that she could not even bear to think of it as a child but only as a kind of monstrous growth, a cancer devouring her life and all her hopes of happiness. Once again she put out her hand and pressed Marianne's, but without speaking, and her silence added to the girl's unhappiness.

"I—I disgust you, don't I?" she murmured.

"Disgust me? My poor child! You don't know what you're saying. The truth is that I am afraid for you. In the passion of your love and your longing for your lover, you are prepared to embark on a perilous course—and I fear you have not properly estimated the dangers and difficulties of it. Abortion is rare here, because our country can never have too many men. Only—forgive me, but I must speak plainly—only prostitutes regularly resort to it, and I will spare you the details of how they go about it. Why can't you bring yourself to accept my offer? I should never forgive myself if any harm should come to you. And you must see that it would be foolish to lose your life over this, for then you could never be with your lover again in this world. Is that what you want?"

"Of course not! I want to live; but if, with God's help, I were ever to meet him again, he would turn from me in disgust—indeed, he has already done so. He would not believe a word of what I tried to tell him. And so rather than endure his scorn, I would face death, yes, a thousand times over! I feel as though once I'm rid of it, I shall be somehow cleansed, as if I'll have recovered from an infectious illness. But if the child were living—anywhere in the world—I could not feel that. It must never be anything more than a disease, faceless and formless, of which I have been cured, and then I shall feel clean and whole again."

"Or else you will be dead." The Sultan Valideh sighed. "Very well, since you are so set on it there is nothing I can do except—"

"The thing I ask?"

"Yes. But there is only one person here capable of carrying out this… operation with less than a fifty percent chance of killing you."

"I'll take that chance. Fifty percent is pretty good."

"No. It's very bad, but there's no other way. Listen. There is a woman living in the district of Kassim Pasha on the other side of the Golden Horn, between the old synagogue and the Nightingale River. She is a Jewess called Rebecca, the daughter of a skilled physician, Judah ben Nathan. She plies the trade of midwife, and with some skill by all accounts. No dockside whores or street harlots from the arsenal are admitted to her house, but I know that she has lent her services from time to time, at a price, to the adulterous wife of some man in high position, thereby saving her from certain death. She is known also to the rich Europeans of Pera and to the Phanariot Greek nobility, but her secret is well kept and Rebecca knows that silence is the key to her continued prosperity. She will not take you without a strong recommendation."