Harriet’s great-grandparents had fled the Americas when the Revolution began. Like so many Tories, they took refuge in the Bahamas, where they profited, until they found their way to Key West, where they profited even more.
“She took care of me when I was very little. She used to give me medicines without telling my parents.”
“How can you remember that?” Arapian said with a laugh. “You were just a baby.”
“She was tremendously tall,” Harriet said.
“To a baby,” Arapian teased, but Harriet refused to respond in kind.
“She was taller than my father; I know that much.” Harriet paused. “She told me once how to kill a person.”
Arapian waited. Sometimes he misheard things.
“All you have to do is wish them dead,” Harriet said. “You can kill someone by wishing them dead.”
Arapian stayed quiet. He did not want the night to end this way. He wanted Harriet to be pleased with her success.
“I’m very tired,” Harriet said. “I’m ready, you know.”
How he wanted her to look at him then and smile. How he wanted, one more time, to feel desire pass between them—that unacknowledged friend of theirs which had gone missing in recent years.
“I want you to know that,” Harriet said, as she stood and turned to enter the house. “I’m okay with what you wish.”
But this last remark was so in line with how Harriet always was, her usual accommodations, that Arapian failed to notice what she was asking, and one more chance for generosity passed him by.
WHEN ARAPIAN DIED, two years later, he left half of his money to Near East Relief, a fact that gave his son very complicated feelings of bitterness, anger, and shame. His cause of death was lung cancer, though Arapian never knew it. A cancer probably brought on by the constant cigars he and his men smoked to cover up the terrible smell of the sponges, which, after all, were living creatures beaten to death with clubs before they were bleached.
Lucy never forgot Anahid, of course; but she did not stay on with her. Lucy went back to her family in New York, she found work in a factory, she married a boy who was too young for the first war but not too old for the second, which he did not survive. Lucy became a nurse then, after that.
When Anahid’s movie, An Armenian Girl, came out, just a year after the events in Key West, Lucy saw it with her parents and her sisters, who treated Lucy as if she herself were the star.
Lucy tried every chance she got to tell Anahid’s story. For years she raised money for the orphans from her friends and coworkers, who gave what they could, not because of the orphans but because they cared for Lucy.
As to Anahid—her strange story was not yet over. After the great success of An Armenian Girl, her benefactors decided the necessary sequel was for Anahid to save a child. So they adopted an Armenian orphan as a gift for her, for her to raise. But this, Anahid was sure, was not in any contract she had ever signed. On the day of the arrival of the orphan, Aram, Anahid could not be raised from the four-poster bed provided for her by her benefactors. Her eyes were open but her mind clearly closed. When Mrs. Brown lifted Anahid’s arm, it dropped. When Mrs. Brown lightly slapped Anahid’s cheeks—what choice did she have?—Anahid did not respond.
Many attempts were made to wake her, most regularly by placing the young Aram on her bed, but none succeeded until finally Anahid was moved to a hospital and the whole orphan endeavor was dropped. There was some discussion afterward if Aram could be placed elsewhere, but in the end Anahid’s benefactors were not so cruel; they took him in and spoiled him just as they had their other children.
Anahid was the only thing Aram remembered of those early years. Lucky him.
What sights he had seen by then. What sensations he had felt. Thirst, hunger, seasickness—but all he remembered was a fairy tale come to life: Sleeping Beauty in her bed waiting for the proper kiss.
Eventually Anahid moved on her own to Los Angeles, where she worked for a film studio, though it never suited her. In the end, she found work as a photographer—family portraits mostly. She died in 1980 in California.
Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she wasn’t. She married, she had children, she did not hide her story, nor did she tell it.
Indeed, for all of Anahid’s years in America—more than sixty—she thought the Turkish government might still track her down and kill her.
Silence was so important to the Turks, more so every year. But Anahid never understood why.
Even she, the one who lived her story, sought ways not to believe it.
IN THE END, nobody remembered much of Arapian’s party, not with the darker consequences of the war still to come, the terrible downturn in nearly everyone’s economic circumstances. People would remember the starving Armenians, but more as a chastisement to eat their own dinners than to sacrifice those dinners on the Armenians’ behalf. If any of the guests saw the movie made of Anahid’s life, which raised a million dollars for Near East Relief, they never noticed that the girl who was the star was not the girl who spoke at the party.
What people remembered was how thin Harriet was, how long she lingered in her illness, how difficult it became for her, and how grateful they felt not to be in her circumstances. That and the food.
AN OTTOMAN’S ARABESQUE
His eyes were frequently inflamed and he feared going blind.
Most of the time he wore blue glasses. The papers often mentioned them, in a joking sort of way. The papers found him comic, it seems.
He was born in Egypt to Turkish parents (very rich), studied in Paris (at an Egyptian school), and became an Ottoman ambassador: to Athens, to St. Petersburg, to Vienna. A servant to the sultan most of his life.
But from 1865 to 1868, he lived in a palatial Parisian apartment, and for three years, he bought paintings and he gambled, and at the end of those three years, he sold all of his paintings and paid all of his debts. He was thirty-seven years old.
History would declare many of the paintings masterpieces. There were more than a hundred by the likes of Courbet, Ingres, Rousseau, Meissonier, Corot, and Delacroix. But how would history remember him? Not as Khalil Bey, diplomat, a man who helped negotiate the treaty that ended the Crimean War and a liberal reformer of the empire, nor as Khalil Bey, patron, among the first to collect many of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated painters, but as Khalil Bey, the world’s most notorious collector of the world’s most notorious collection of erotic art.
The Odalisque
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
1814
OIL ON CANVAS
35" × 64"
Like so many great beauties, she is something of a freak, painted with extra vertebrae in her back, so many that should she have tried to step out of her frame, she would have bent to the ground, where she could only have slid along the floor, serpentlike, unable to stand.
Also, her left arm is shorter than her right.
When French critics condemned the painting, Ingres, who was temporarily in Rome, swore never to return to Paris, where, inconveniently, his fiancée was a resident. The engagement was broken, and Ingres, on the strength of a written correspondence and the recommendation of his friends, proposed to Madeleine Chapelle, a woman he had never seen, also a resident of Paris, though, conveniently, willing to relocate.
Ingres modeled the Odalisque on Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished Portrait of Madame Récamier, who, dressed as a vestal virgin, reclines casually on a sofa. Vestal virgins had been Rome’s priestesses, responsible for maintaining the city’s eternal fire. They could free slaves by touching them and pardon criminals sentenced to death by looking at them. And they got front-row seats at sporting competitions. Each vestal virgin took a thirty-year vow of celibacy, after which she had the option to marry. Some men believed marrying a vestal virgin would cure them of disease or pardon their sins or grant them eternal life. But after their thirty years, most vestal virgins opted not to marry at all.
At age fifteen, Madame R�
�camier, the subject of Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished portrait, had been married to a man nearly thirty years her senior, generally believed to have been her biological father. It is rumored he married her not out of some perverse sexual desire, but to ensure she would become his heir. Unfortunately, before his death, he lost the bulk of his once considerable fortune.
In Turkish, odalik means “chambermaid,” and though many think odalisques were the women among whom sultans romped, in reality, they served those who served the sultan. They were slaves who tended the other women of the harem: the concubines, who were under the wives, and the wives, who were under the sultana valide, the sultan’s mother. The sultana valide was often the most powerful person in the seraglio, the living quarters of the harem. Sometimes she was more powerful than the sultan himself, who, after all, was sometimes just a child.
The sultana valide was frequently the largest landowner in the empire; often she would own entire villages. Throughout history the sultanas constructed mosques, hospitals, public baths, eateries for the poor, schools, libraries, fountains, and other monuments, paying not only for the construction of each of these sites but creating endowments to maintain and manage them.
When Ingres painted his Odalisque, it was rumored that the sultana valide, Nakşidil Sultan, was actually Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, Josephine Bonaparte’s cousin, who as a girl had been traveling from Martinique to a convent school in France when her ship was boarded by pirates, who sold her into slavery. But, in fact, this was not the case. It is, however, true that Nakşidil Sultan had a great love of France and did her best to bring the harem into a more modern age, taking the harem women on picnics and boating trips. Before each such excursion, colorful silk tunnels were extended from the doorways of the seraglio to allow the women to board their carriages unseen. The mere sight of these silk tunnels caused some men to faint.
Many scenes from the seraglio would be immortalized by a Turkish painter with Greek origins, Osman Hamdi Bey, who was also an esteemed archaeologist. During the three years of Khalil Bey’s collecting, Osman Hamdi Bey was a student in Paris, and so it is possible that he visited Khalil Bey’s remarkable apartment with one of his teachers, the artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose work Khalil Bey also owned. Osman Hamdi Bey’s most famous painting, The Tortoise Trainer, depicted the eighteenth-century Ottoman practice of affixing candles to tortoises’ backs so that during nighttime parties they could wander the seraglio gardens, lighting them. Long after Osman Hamdi Bey’s death, The Tortoise Trainer would sell for more than three million dollars. Most of Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings are considered a rebuttal to Western orientalism, as they include scenes of Islamic scholars arguing interpretations of the Koran and women standing up doing their housework, as opposed to lying down in a drug-induced haze.
Though Ingres’s Odalisque lies on her sofa in much the same position as Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Récamier, the Odalisque has been undressed. Her back is to us, though she’s turned her neck so as to look us in the eye, and she is naked except for the gold scarf wound about her head. All around her are sumptuous fabrics: blue satin, fur, peacock feathers gathered into a fan. At her feet is an opium pipe.
This, too, is how history has painted Khalil Bey: rounded and soft, with an opium pipe at his feet.
Sometimes, in the midst of a card game, Khalil Bey would close his eyes to ease their inflammation. The other players often mistook this for some sign and would decrease or increase their bidding accordingly.
Ingres’s Odalisque was commissioned by Caroline Murat, Emperor Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples and, perhaps not incidentally, a friend to Madame Récamier. Unfortunately, on account of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and Caroline Murat’s husband’s subsequent execution, and her own desperate flight from Naples to Austria in order to avoid the same fate, she never paid for the work.
For a while afterward, Ingres made his living in Rome drawing pencil portraits of tourists, a lucrative practice that filled him with despair.
Sometimes Khalil Bey stood across the room from his Odalisque and stared at her. Sometimes he walked casually past her and then with a sudden leap turned to catch her in a new position, which, of course, he never did. Whenever he looked at the Odalisque, he felt an impulse to turn, like her, and glance over his shoulder. Sometimes he would. Sometimes, instead, he took pleasure in his ownership and ran his finger down the long curving lines of her painted body, imagining that, with his touch, he was the one to create her. Once he pressed the tip of his tongue against the small strokes of her eyelashes.
There is much the Odalisque leaves to the viewer’s imagination. Who is she, what has she been up to, and, most significantly, what is she looking at? Has she cast her eyes over her shoulder to watch the artist in the act of creation? Or is this an invitation to something riskier? Hasn’t myth taught us it is a danger to look? Is she the danger, or is she courting it? Is the Odalisque looking at us, here in the future, or is she looking backward into some moment of her own history?
There is only one story of a slave girl escaping the harem. (Had she waited nine years she would have been released, but probably she had her reasons for not.) She escaped, in the night, as far as the Janissary Court, where, panicking at the guarded gates, she climbed an enormous tree that stood above two small columns on which decapitations were carried out.
The only way in, or out, of the harem was through a door of iron and a door of brass. Inside the harem, the door of iron was guarded by the eunuchs; outside the harem, the door of brass was guarded by the woodcutters. The eunuchs kept the women in; the woodcutters kept all others out. One responsibility of the woodcutters was cutting wood, but they also made up one of the fiercest detachments of the Ottoman army. From her tree, the girl could see the dormitories of the woodcutters; the private stables of the sultan, where his favorite horses were kept; the Gate of the Departed, where the dead exited; and the Gate of Felicity, where the living entered. She could also see the woodcutter guards who when she passed had been asleep on their feet, or so it seemed.
She stayed in her tree for three days. She could see so much from there, without being seen—or so it seemed.
In fact, the woodcutters had watched her from the beginning. They did not wish to admit, one to the other, that they had seen her; they all knew what the consequence would be. What they wished for was to each slip looks up into the tree, to glance repeatedly at the forbidden harem girl.
But eventually hunger overtook the girl, or maybe fear, and she jumped, or maybe fell, striking her head on one of the marble columns on her way down. And so she died. One of the woodcutters covered her face, and another smuggled her out, though not through the Gate of the Departed, where he would be seen and all discovered. As a result, the girl is said to have never truly left the harem; it is said that she is there still.
The Turkish Bath
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
1862
OIL ON CANVAS ON WOOD PANEL
43" × 43"
Ingres first painted The Turkish Bath in 1859 as a rectangle but a year later revised it to a circle. This was, it is said, to cut out the body of the woman in the bottom right-hand quadrant, who was “too clearly in ecstasy.” Even without her, The Turkish Bath was considered so indecent that it wasn’t shown in public until 1905, more than forty years after it was painted. It was then that Picasso became a fan. Degas championed it as well, though the writer Paul Claudel called it a “cake full of maggots” and the Louvre turned it down twice, until the Germans expressed interest.
In the Bath, women are layered on women, naked and lounging, arms over their heads, hands on each other’s breasts, limbs splayed out, their faces expressing desire, languor, and, in at least one case, an irritated boredom.
The painting is generally considered an arabesque, in which the repetition of a geometric form suggests the infinite repetition of that form. In Islamic art, that repetition is meant to remind us of the infinite extension of God. In The Turkish B
ath, it suggests an infinity of women and a peephole through which to view them.
Harem women would often sit at latticed windows and look out; there they could see without being seen.
Critics like to call Ingres’s lines serpentine. In one study for The Turkish Bath there is a woman with three arms. It is not such a difficult mistake to imagine when you view the painting, woman blurring into woman as they sit, entwined, blank-minded and blissed out, after the steam of the bath.
When he learned the roman alphabet, there was no letter Khalil Bey loved more than the letter S.
The heated portion of the bath is known as the tepidarium. There women could rest and drink coffee or eat sherbet. Talk. Sing. Listen. Sleep. This most likely is what The Turkish Bath depicts.
In the 1850s, an Englishman opened what he called a Turkish bath attached to his house and began claiming the bath could cure toothache, rheumatism, gout, and syphilis.
It was rumored Khalil Bey moved to Paris to undergo treatment for syphilis, which he was said to have caught in St. Petersburg. At the time, some men considered syphilis a rite that marked their passage from boyhood to manhood; some men boasted of it.
Khalil Bey kept his condition to himself, as he kept much of himself to himself, though this particular discretion was not to the advantage of his lovers. It was rumored he caught the disease because his bad eyesight prevented him from noticing the symptoms in a past lover. Perhaps, but probably not, given his eye for the female form.
Syphilis wasn’t actually called syphilis until the sixteenth century, when an Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, wrote an epic poem about a shepherd boy named Syphilus who defied the sun god Apollo, then became ill. Before Fracastoro’s poem, syphilis was often called “the French disease,” though the French called it “the Italian disease,” the Dutch called it “the Spanish disease,” the Russians called it “the Polish disease,” and Tahitians called it “the British disease.” Turks called it “the Christian disease.”
The Trojan War Museum Page 13
