Robert Irwin - Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh

The women lay heaped like pack-ice round the walls of the Cage. As Orkhan sat shivering in the courtyard, he imagined the ladies of the Harem at ease beyond the Cage’s walls. The women were braiding each others’ hair; they practised embroidery; they strummed at dulcimers; they smoked narghiles; they studied books on the pleasuring of men; they scratched themselves and waited for their master. The Harem was nothing other than a series of waiting-rooms before sex. He could picture the women at their idle amusements only in his mind’s eye. But sometimes — rarely — the breeze did carry the actual voices of the women, singing or laughing, over the high walls of the Cage — the Kafes . The rare sound of women, like the gurgling of a fountain was cooling and soothing.

He spent most of his days imagining the Harem beyond the walls. His every third thought was woman-shaped. If he had studied mathematics or astrology for a quarter of the time that he had spent thinking about women, then, young though he was, he would already have become a venerated sage. But his thoughts about women did not progress in the same way that puzzling over astrological theorems might have done. He had concluded that there was something about the smoothness of their forms which defeated logic. It seemed to Orkhan that he would have done better to have spent the last fifteen years meditating on a tiny pebble. For an inhabitant of the Cage, thinking about women was a branch of speculative philosophy, since no woman had ever set foot in the accursed place. Orkhan had last seen his mother at the age of five. He had a dim memory of being in one of the smaller pavilions in the gardens of the Palace and of vainly clinging to a vast skirt embroidered with tulips and then the black hands coming from behind to pull him away. It was all but certain that Orkhan would die before he ever saw a woman again.

The Cage was located in the heart of the warren of buildings, courtyards and covered alleys that comprised the Imperial Harem. The princes it imprisoned lived in a complex of rooms built around a flagged courtyard with a tiny garden at its centre. An arched colonnade running round two sides of the courtyard allowed the princes shelter from the sun and rain as they exercised or lazed about. A dormitory and two low-domed reception rooms led off from the colonnaded walkway and smaller cells were reached from the reception rooms. A handful of elderly deaf-mute eunuch servants shared the princes’ confinement. These slept where they could in the storerooms and the kitchen on the other two sides of the courtyard. The Cage’s windows all looked inwards on the dismal garden and supplies were delivered through a hole in the kitchen wall. The solitary, iron-studded door of the Cage was only opened to permit the entry of a doctor or the departure of a corpse. On the rare occasions when the door did open Orkhan and his companions strained to catch a glimpse of the corridor beyond, which was known inauspiciously as the Passage Where the Jinns Consult.

Beyond the dangerous Passage was the Harem and, beyond the Harem, the rest of the Palace and beyond the Palace was Istanbul, but Orkhan could not expand his imagination half so wide. Until a week ago there had been nine princes in the Cage. But one day last week, while the princes were lunching, picnicking in the courtyard, the door of the Cage had swung open and a pair of black eunuchs filled the opening. They did not enter the courtyard but stood at the door and beckoned to Barak, the oldest of the princes. Barak had bowed his head and passed between the eunuchs through the door and down the Passage Where the Jinns Consult. He had never looked back. Barak and Orkhan (the second oldest of the princes) had had a pact, that whichever of them should be released first, would, if he was able, send for the other. But there had been no summons from Barak nor any word of his fate. Indeed, no news of the world outside had ever entered the Cage.

The Cage was, like the Harem, a waiting room, but, whereas the Harem’s odalisques waited for the delights of the bedchamber, the occupants of the Cage waited and prepared themselves for sovereignty or death. Their fates were dependent on the health and humour of the Sultan Selim and his Harem. One day it must happen that Selim would die and on that day courtiers and soldiers would come hurrying to the Cage and, having plucked out one of the princes, they would proclaim him Sultan. On the other hand, it was really more probable that, before that longed-for day arrived, Selim acting under the influence of an ominous dream or the whispered words of a jealous concubine, would suddenly and capriciously issue instructions for the execution of one or more of his sons. On that day then muscular deaf-mutes would be lining the Passage Where the Jinns Consult and one of them would be holding the silken bowstring, for it was the honourable tradition of the Ottoman house to execute its princes by strangulation.

It was possible, Orkhan thought, that Selim was dead and that Barak, who had forgotten his promise to Orkhan, was the new Sultan. It was alternatively possible that the old Sultan was still alive and had made Barak governor of Erzerum or Amasya. It was, however, all but certain that Barak was dead by strangulation. Orkhan had read that the victim of such a fate invariably experienced an erection and ejaculation, the little death of orgasm serving to mask the greater death which followed so close behind. It was one of the forms of dying classified in the books, for a reason he had not yet fathomed, as ‘the Death of the Just Man’. Orkhan was as diligent in his study of death as he was in his thinking about women.

There were still hours to go before the sun would have risen above the walls of the Cage, but it had been hot all night and Orkhan was not shivering from cold. Suddenly he realised that it was not — or not just — the probable fate of Barak, which filled him with foreboding and fear. He had had a dream that night. He now remembered it, but it was not for him to interpret it, for everyone knew that, whereas the dream belonged to the person who had it, its meaning belonged to the first person it was given to for interpretation.

In search of an interpreter, Orkhan re-entered the room used by the princes as their dormitory. The seven princes lay sleeping on the stone floor. Once they had slept here on mattresses and, moreover, the reception rooms had been liberally strewn with carpets and cushions. But then Barak, their leader, had called them round him and spoken to them about the meaning of their lives. Each of them was, he said, preparing himself so as to rule as a Sultan or die like a man. So, whatever their destiny, effeminate softness had to be shunned. They should cultivate Ottoman virtues and practice to make themselves fit, hard and strong. ‘Are we not men?’ The princes had followed Barak’s lead and from that day on they had exercised and practised at weightlifting, archery and wrestling. They bathed only in cold water. They cut their garments of silk into pieces. The princes had also gone about the Cage collecting cushions, carpets and mattresses for a bonfire. For the last two years they had slept on stone.

In the dormitory, Orkhan’s half-brother, Hamid, lay staring expressionlessly up at the ceiling. He was the only one of the princes who was awake and it was he who followed Orkhan out into the courtyard. Hamid had been born to a Hungarian concubine. He was red-haired and pale-skinned. His chest was remarkably hairy for one so young.

Without preamble, Orkhan began to relate his dream:

‘I was in a desert in which the sand was so compact, so smooth that it was like walking on brass. The night came on and I found myself confronted and my way barred by a dark shape. It rose against me, rearing high above me, but I thrust my sword into it and it fell. Then I lay upon it using it as my pillow and waited for the dawn to come. The stars rolled swiftly over the desert and a little before the sunrise I could make out what it was that I lay upon. In shape it somewhat resembled a foetus. The smoothness of its pinkish-white bulges and curves was here and there broken up by little tufts of hair. The thing had no head, no arms and no legs, but there were fleshy flaps which might have been mouths and which seemed to pucker and breathe open as I prodded at it with my sword. Then, not knowing what to do, I left my dream.