Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

She nods. Her posture suggests grief, but there is no grief in her face, only excitement, and exhaustion. Everyone of noble birth was executed, she says. So Gabriel would have died anyway.

Yes. I sometimes comfort myself with that thought. The cannonball spared him agony and indignity alike.

She’s silent now, rubbing her hands in her lap as if to warm them, although it is not cold in this room. Or is it? It’s hard for him to say. He stares openly at her, sorting her into pieces to memorize every detail — her lips, her feet, her brow — but everything his stare gathers slides swiftly toward oblivion, warm rain striking bare rock. It’s rarely the eye, he knows, that best serves the recollecting mind. He fights the urge to press his nose to her scalp, to take hold of her soft palms, to see what he can untangle from the webwork of lined skin there. After tonight he does not plan to see this girl again.

What happened to you? she says. After the Turks captured you?

Crivano shrugs. I was fortunate, he says. I was not put to the oars, as many of my shipmates were. Owing to my youth, I was given to the janissaries, and with them I encountered hardship and adventure in strange lands I had never dreamed of. I learned their language, and the language of the Arabs, and in time I became an interpreter.

And then you escaped.

Yes. I betrayed the trust that I had earned, and I fled. I wish I could declare my choice to have been an easy one, but it was not. Almost half my life had been spent among the Turks. My boyhood home was lost, my family gone. The lands where I was to seek my freedom were alien to me. The world into which I had been born no longer had any means of recognizing me, nor I it.

With no family, Perina says, you are no one here. Worse than no one. You are a corpse. An effigy. A ghost.

Her expression remains placid, her voice reserved, but Crivano senses a whisper of rage in her, so pure as to be invisible, like a very hot flame. Yes, he says. I’m sure you understand.

Why did you come back?

Crivano looks at his lap, at the floor. His drunkenness is abandoning him, leaving him sluggish and stupid, in peril of forgetting that his lies are lies. As we grow older, he says, we sometimes find that our most momentous decisions are unseen by us as we make them. We perceive only a confusion of paltry choices, like the tesserae of a mosaic. Only with distance do prevailing images become clear. A man came to me in the night and said he had stolen the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin, the hero of Famagusta. He asked me to help him, and I said I would. All else has issued from that.

They sit in silence for a while. The sound of voices singing the Magnificat echoes from the corridor. Across the parlor, the nun pulls and winds her thread. Her impatience settles over them like a fog.

I must make a momentous decision soon, Perina says.

To take your vows?

She nods. I am twenty years old, she says. I have been an educant here since I was eight. Most of us are married or clothed as nuns prior to our sixteenth year. I fear I am becoming a source of anxiety to the abbess. She informs me that she has already selected my new name, and looks forward to bestowing it upon me soon. She has been informing me of this on a regular basis for more than a year now, and her considerable patience is on the wane. I have no words to tell you, dottore, how fervently I seek to quit this barren harem of Christ. There is nothing—

Her eyes are riveted now to his own, glinting like obsidian under her veil.

— nothing that I would not do to leave this place. Nothing.

Crivano casts a nervous glance at the nun, but her beleaguered expression remains unaltered.

Don’t be overly concerned about Sister Perpetua, dottore, Perina says. She’s very devout, but also somewhat deaf. We prisoners of Santa Caterina are fortunate to have her as our gatekeeper.

I gather, Crivano says, that you sense no vocation toward the veil.

If you search this edifice brick by brick, dottore, you will find herein perhaps a dozen genuine vocations. Mostly we are the surplus daughters of the Republic’s great families, married off to Christ without indignity or excessive expense, and we spend that portion of our day unallocated to prayer enacting doll-game renditions of the rivalries that engage our families in the outside world — only with no real consequence, of course. The few among us with any brains avoid those of our own rank and consort instead with the repentant harlots, who know something of life’s complexities, who know the best songs and the best stories, who offer explicit instruction on how we can best entertain our husbands and lovers as we seek our ultimate stations in the world.

Crivano realizes that his jaw is agape, and shuts it.

I, naturally, have little stake in such talk, she continues. I spend my days with whatever books come to me, and in shameful reveries. Would you like to hear the most shameful, dottore? The daydream which has most preoccupied me in recent days, which I would confess to no one but you, is this: I imagine that the ship that carried my mother and my sister from Cyprus never did find the lagoon safely, but instead was set upon by Ottoman corsairs. I imagine that I was born not in the comfortable lair of the Contarini, but in Constantinople, where I became an odalisque in the seraglio. And then of course I imagine a young sultan who values the small wit I do possess over the great beauty I do not, and takes me for his favorite. You blush to hear these things, dottore, and yet I do not blush to speak them. Would it be somehow less shameful for me to make one small addition to my fantasy, and wish that I had been born into the seraglio a boy? To wish, in short, for a life like the one you yourself have led? Odd as it may be, I cannot.

Crivano holds her gaze as best he can. His arms are wet-wool heavy; he’s not sure his legs will carry him when the time comes to rise. We can hardly choose our dreams, lady, he says.

Can you help me escape this place? Only escape. Nothing more.

He shakes his head slowly. A mistake: when he stops, the room spins on. You don’t understand what you ask, he says. Where would you go?

There are places, she says. And people. Please, dottore.

The revolving walls make him nauseous, so he closes his eyes. Breathing deeply. Laughing under his breath. It is very easy, at this moment, for him to imagine himself as dreamed into being by this girl. As a shadow cast by her childish hands before an as-yet-unseen light.

Dottore? she says. Are you again unwell?

Your new name, Crivano says. Do you know yet what it is to be?

No. I could guess, I suppose.

He opens his eyes. It thrills the blood, doesn’t it? he says. The thought of casting aside an old name. But it is not a thing to do casually. Lest you find yourself with no name at all.

Perina, the nun says. It’s time. Show your guest to the door.

Perina rises, tugs gently on his wrist; he’s grateful for her help. I want to tell you more about your brother, he says.

I have many questions. You’ll come again soon, won’t you?

He was greatly loved by everyone who knew him, Crivano says. He gave all of us courage until the moment he died. To this day he remains for me a paragon of grace and boldness.

A shadow passes across Perina’s face; her gaze drops to the floor. Then she folds her arm into his and eases him toward the exit. I have been told, she says, that in his boyhood my brother was greatly inclined to solitude and melancholy. And that you were much to thank for lightening his disposition.

There’s a note of uncertainty in her voice: a concern she’s eager to dismiss. It sobers him like packed snow against his neck. I must confess, he says, that the years of struggle and sorrow have added weight to my own temperament. I can scarcely recall the playful youth you describe. But if I did anything to ease your brother’s brief bright path through the world, then I am honored to have done so.