Stanley Elkin - George Mills

What he didn’t know was that he was more a living legend than ever.

Alib Hakali asked to see them, and he and Bufesqueu left the laundry where for almost a month now their official assignment had been to fold sheets for the harem. “Maybe he wants to put us to work doing something else. After all we’re trained Janissaries. We’re wasted in that laundry. Maybe he wants to try us out guarding the ladies. Wouldn’t that be something?” Bufesqueu said, patting his pants and nudging him. “I mean there’s nothing wrong with the nig-nog slave broads, but those harem women must be wondrous. I tell you, George, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

Mills forbore to answer. He said nothing in response to Bufesqueu’s rhapsodies as his friend went on about their possible new duties.

A eunuch stepped stolidly in front of them, barring their way.

“Bufesqueu and Mills to see the Kislar Agha as ordered,” Bufesqueu told him and the man moved aside.

It was the first time either of them had seen the Chief Eunuch since Bufesqueu had asked for sanctuary. Even reclining, fat and sassy as some Sumo Santa Claus, his black bulk spilling over the pillows he pressed against on his heavily reinforced litter, he was as large as Mills remembered him. He sucked on a hookah and watched benignly as first Bufesqueu and then Mills offered their deferential salaams. Without bothering to remove his water pipe he absently returned their greeting, a huge hand briefly flickering from black to pink like flash cards turned in a stadium.

“If you’re worried about the guards,” he said, setting the hookah back on its stand and exhaling a thick steam of sweet smoke, “they’re gone. The Overland has been burned. I took care of the guards.”

“The guards, Kislar Agha?” Bufesqueu said.

“Chief Eunuch. We won’t mince words. Call me Chief Eunuch. At the gate, the guards at the gate. I pulled the tongues out of their necks personally. I broke their bones in my torture chambers. I tore their equipment off with my hands.”

Mills flinched.

“Why do you pale? They were bad guards. You’d never have gotten past good ones.”

“Torture chambers, Chief Eunuch?” Bufesqueu said.

“This is the best-equipped seraglio in the world,” he said. “We have fourteen mosques on the grounds. We have two hospitals and an arsenal with the latest weapons. We’ve kitchens and bakeries and the finest schools. We’ve sports fields and stables, conference rooms and hospitality suites. We’re centrally located and close to a major body of water. Why shouldn’t we have torture chambers too?” He sat up abruptly, effortlessly, showing none of the strain heavy people reveal when they move in furniture. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “The torture chambers bother you? Relax please. You think I’d send two incompetent guards to a torture chamber? Of course not. That’s for the big fish.” He held out his right hand. “ This, ” he said, and extended the left, “and this. These are my torture chambers.”

Bufesqueu nodded and Mills stared. The Chief Eunuch laughed merrily. “No,” he said, “you don’t understand. You think I’m trying to intimidate you, to threaten obliquely like some fat Mex bandit with silver teeth. I didn’t call you here to threaten you. I called you here to comfort you. That about the guards should have taken a load off. They’d have talked. Your whereabouts would have gotten back to the Sultan. Oh, Lawd, dis nigger be misunderstood sho ’nuff.

“Because I’ll tell you why you’re here and it’s got nothing to do with sanctuary.

“I was fourteen years old when the slavers captured me. Fourteen! Do you know what that means? Do you?”

Mills shook his head.

“You don’t? What were you like when you were fourteen? Did you have a girl? A crush on the teacher?”

Mills shook his head.

“No? Then I bet you wrung it out. What about it? Did you wring it out?”

Mills blushed.

“ Sure you did. You still wring it out.”

Mills shook his head fiercely.

“No? Why’d God give you hands? Why’d God give you hands you don’t wring it out?”

“I wring it out,” Mills said shyly.

“I never wrung it out,” the Chief Eunuch said. “I was fourteen. In my tribe, among my people — the beasts in the jungles, the parasites in the turds, the great apes and lions, the slavers and mortality tables — you were a man when you were eleven. I never wrung it out because I already had a wife. The real thing, you know? The genuine article. Absolute pussy.

“So I already had a wife when the slavers got me. Listen, am I breaking your heart? You think this is some love story I’m feeding you? That I pine for lost love, our burr-headed kid? Or maybe you think you’re way ahead of me. That they took her too, that she’s here now perhaps, the Sultan’s favorite with her jackknife fucks. Why would I tell you? Why would I tell white boys? You Christers! What, you’re going to deny your faith? Jesus, you Christers! It’s all a little barbaric, ain’t it? The idea of a harem. Or maybe you don’t think it’s barbaric, only wasteful. You Christers. To tell you the truth, if you want the opinion of one fatted, sufflated, darky gelding, it isn’t. It isn’t barbaric. If you’re the Sultan himself it ain’t even wasteful.

“I was fourteen years old. I’m talking about full-blown puberty. I’m talking about interest and appetite and lust and prurience, all the successive sexual steps like the diatonic scale. Because there ain’t any blade long enough or keen enough either to cut that out of a man. They buried me up to my chest in the sand for three days to let my wounds heal. But desire don’t flag. It swarms like the hair on the kopf of a corpse. And I still want to wave it around like an amputated hand, or lean my weight on it like a missing leg. So I walk around with this hard-on of the head. Alib Hakali,” Alib Hakali said. “Alib Hakali, the spayed spade.

“All right. You can go now. Watch your step.”

“What was that all about then?” Mills asked his reality master when they were alone.

“I’m not sure,” Bufesqueu said. “I think he was trying to tell us that he understands.”

“I don’t know.”

“Those guys at the gate,” Bufesqueu said, shuddering.

“I know.”

“I mean why’d he have to do that? He must want us around.”

“Why?”

Bufesqueu shrugged. “You know,” he said speculatively, “all the rest of those freemartins, they must be the same way he is.”

“Horny? You think?”

“Why not? If those slavers picked them after they was already ripe. Why not? If he’s telling the truth. If he ain’t one in a million like some bloke in a textbook. That’d be awful.”

“Hey,” George said, “I bet that was what he was trying to tell us.”

“There must be some way,” Bufesqueu said. “There must be some way Nature has of getting to a eunuch.”

“He was warning us,” Mills said.

“Warning us, hell. He was teasing us.”

This was the table of organization:

At the bottom of the chain were the female slaves, women like Fatima who served not only the harem women but their eunuch overseers as well. Above them were the novices, females new to the seraglio who may or may not have slept with the Sultan. Above these were the officially decreed favored ladies, and above the favored ladies were women who had already mothered one or more of the Sultan’s children, called royal prince or princess but of no more real rank than the female slaves. At the top of the chain was the Valide Sultan, the Sultan’s mother, a figurehead who maintained a residence in the seraglio, which she rarely visited except for those two or three times a year when she presided as hostess at teas. Officially she was also headmistress of the harem schools, but in actuality had even less to do with these — they were for the royal princes, and the curriculum dealt entirely with court protocol and was administered by women who had never been presented there: the female slaves, the novices — than she had with any of the other functions of the seraglio.