Stanley Elkin - George Mills

It was the Chief Eunuch’s show. With his private army — the guards had been part of it — he ran the seraglio like a small country, supervising everything from deciding the menu to choosing which woman would be sent that night to the Sultan, and for all that they had a table of organization, for all that they were centrally located and had schools and riding stables — by tradition the Chief Eunuch was awarded three hundred or so horses for his personal use, one for each woman in the harem proper — there was little for any of them — the women, the eunuchs and slave girls — to do. Mills would learn this.

One day a woman came into the laundry where Mills was folding sheets. His arms raised, extended, he held a piece of sheet in his teeth, leveraging it with his upraised chin to fold down the middle. He was arched backward to keep the bottom of the sheet from touching the floor. He was watching the sheet’s edges, trying to align them, when she spoke.

“My,” she said, “it’s grand you’re so tall, that you’ve such long arms and strong jaws. It must be ever so sublime to have such balance.”

“It’s bloody marvelous,” Mills said, still not looking at her. “If I wasn’t so lovely endowed, the goddamn sheet could go all untidy from dragging along the ground and some bimbo might get bedsores from calf to ass. Bufesqueu’s on break. He’s in back watching the laundresses.”

“What a manly voice,” she said. “If I had such a voice I’d boom out work songs while I toiled. Would you know any sheet-folding work songs you could sing for me?”

Mills turned to look at her and thought she was smiling at him behind her veil. She was a large woman, older than the slaves he had seen, and it occurred to him that she might be one of the women from the harem. Not a novice certainly, since novices were usually in their teens and, to judge from her looks, what was visible to him above the veil that covered the lower half of her face, probably not one of the favored ladies. It was possible she was the mother of some royal prince or princess. “Was there something I could help you with, ma’am?” he asked, looking over her shoulder for the eunuch who would be sure to accompany her.

“And so gallant!” she exclaimed.

“There are some extra sheets and pillowcases in the back. If I asked someone I’m sure I could …”

“Blankets!” she said. “A dozen of those special thick woolly blankets.”

“A dozen,” George said. It was high summer.

“I’ll wait,” she said.

“I could only find one,” he said when he returned. “The rest are in storage.”

“Aren’t you kind to take all that trouble,” she said. “You know,” she said, “I could use some sheets. Eight might just do it. And some pillowslips too. Sometimes it gets so warm of an evening I’ll wake in my bed and it’s soaked so with perspiration it’s just impossible to fall back to sleep. If I had extra linens …”

“Oh sure,” George said. “Sheets is no problem.”

“Lovely,” she said.

“Eight sheets,” George said, taking them from a pile he’d already folded. “And eight pillowcases.”

“Super,” she said. “There is just one problem.”

“There is?”

“This pile. It’s so heavy. I don’t think I could carry it back by myself.” Mills had seen slave girls half the size of this woman lift baskets of wet wash that had to weigh over a hundred pounds. “Your eunuch?” he suggested.

“I’m a daughter of the harem,” she said.

“A daughter …”

“One of the Sultan’s daughters,” she said shyly.

A royal princess, Mills thought, adding to his list.

“I have no status,” she said. “Eunuchs don’t even bother to guard us.” She actually closed an eye and winked at him. Mills thought of Bufesqueu’s country of the blind.

“Well,” he said, “I have no status either. I can’t leave my post.”

“I meant with the others,” she said. “I’m certain I have status over you. ”

“Oh me,” Mills said, picking up the blanket and pillowslips, picking up the sheets. “Me,” he said, “sure.”

She led him across soft lawns, she led him across paths of crushed pine cones. Eunuchs saw her and waved familiarly. They went by a schoolhouse where the royal princes were learning their lessons in court protocol. The windows were open and Mills could hear one of the younger children reciting, “One may walk in the palace with his head covered if my father, the Sultan, is away on state business.” George glanced into the open windows over the stack of laundry he carried. Nine royal princes, he thought. “Evrevour?” the teacher said. Evrevour rose to stand beside his desk. “One has no right to chew his food after my father, the Sultan, has already swallowed,” Evrevour was saying as they walked on.

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.