With his eyes closed, Khalil Bey could still see his paintings.
After he left Paris, apparently cured of his syphilis, Khalil Bey was again a servant to the sultan, a foreign minister at home and abroad. He lived both for Egypt and the empire, one contained inside the other, much as he lived both for pleasure and for work. And when his vision first dimmed, then narrowed, he filled in any absences with his memory.
In myth, blindness can be a reward, a gift of prophecy and wisdom, or a punishment, just as death can be a reward or a punishment. An entrance into the infinite. Or an end.
When Khalil Bey died in 1877, at only forty-six, he was indeed finally blind, though he was also, in that moment, happily married and, in many ways, a contented man.
THE GATHERING OF DESIRE
It was the age of automatons and already there was a fly made of brass, a mechanical tiger, an eight-foot elephant, and a duck that swallowed a piece of grain and excreted a small pellet. There was a dancing woman and a trumpet-playing man. A miniature Moscow that burned and collapsed and sprang up again.
And once there was, and once there wasn’t,
in the time when magic was mystery and science was fact,
in the time when God’s hand could arm man’s puppet,
when miracles were seen to be believed, and schemes were believed to be seen,
there was the Ottoman Turk, the chess-playing mechanical man.
Philadelphia, 1827
Outside the Turk’s cabinet is the stage, the audience, and an opponent coaxed out of the crowd by Maelzel the showman. Inside the Turk’s cabinet is the dim light of the candle, its smoke, which does not ventilate as quickly as it burns, the magnets and mechanics that allow S. to control the automaton’s movements, the small chessboard that allows him to control the larger game. Outside the cabinet is all of the mystery and wonder and suspicions that he alone should be free of, the one person who does not have to ponder how it works—inside is a man, him. He is the Turk’s beating heart, he is its brain. Its skill is his, its first move, its reactions, the many wins and few losses, all his. And yet.
Outside the cabinet, the Turk is a champion. Inside the cabinet, there are only endless moves, no trickier than the moves S. makes to slide his mechanized seat from left to right, from front to back as Maelzel the showman opens the various doors of the cabinet to prove to the audience that nobody is inside. Maelzel is a master of proving what is not true.
Still there are rumors. A boy, a dwarf, a man without legs. Some have even guessed the truth, mentioning S. by name. And yet the crowds arrive. They will not relinquish their amazement.
They have been performing in Philadelphia a month already when she comes to the stage, the last match of the night. “Never a woman before,” Maelzel announces to the crowd. “Finally a woman. Can she beat the Turk? Can she?”
In the café in Paris, S. sometimes played women; sometimes they flirted with him, but rarely. His appearance was not one to draw women in, nor was his manner. It is no matter: he will play whomever.
Gone are the days of playing masters.
“What is your name, madam?” Maelzel asks, but S. does not hear her answer.
SHE TAKES THE STAGE SURPRISED. She did not mean to volunteer. Her children willed her to, she believes. The power of them together, wishing, with the same force that caused her to take them to the performance in the first place, the first time any of them have gone out since the disappearance (death, she tells herself) of her husband, their father, Thomas, eight months ago.
There have been whispers: another family, a secret debt, a sudden madness. But she does not believe them. Given a mystery, people, she finds, force startling narratives on the unlikeliest characters. Thomas was a Quaker, a teacher and reformer, a person of family; and now people want to believe him less than he was. But she does not care what they want to believe. After all her time in the faith, after all her efforts to hold their community together—it astonishes her to realize it—she does not care if she sees any of them again. Instead all of her work goes to accepting the most logical truth: she will never know what happened, and Thomas will always be gone. Every day she must convince herself of this or else she will merely pass the time waiting for his return.
Her first look at the Turk is no more than a glance. But when she looks more steadily at him, she wants to laugh—at his height, his fur-lined robes, his ridiculous turban. There is an air of the absurd to the whole occasion, playing chess on stage against an oversized toy—but she finds she feels sorry for him. His dark downcast eyes, painted on of course, make her think of a serious man forced to attend a costume party. He’s sad, she thinks, before she can chase the idea away. He reminds her of Thomas on the occasions when he was forced into society and she was the one to comfort him with the thought of coming home again.
She settles in her seat, arranges her skirts, focuses on the ivory pieces in their familiar formation in front of her. She looks out into the audience, tries to see her children, but all is darkness and shadow.
Thomas Jr. is fourteen, while Margaret is eleven, but in recent months they have twinned themselves. During meals they stare across the table, one at the other, refusing any longer to eat meat and pretending—yes, pretending, she is certain—that they are able to communicate without speech. They take long walks by themselves, and force her to wait through long silences before they will answer any question. They all live now in her father’s house; she herself sleeps in the room she had as a child, a strange comfort, and the children have two small rooms adjacent to each other, with a door in between. At night she can hear them talking across the divide, though as much as she strains, she cannot make out what they say. During the days they frequently close themselves in one room or the other, and though she stands often outside the door, it is so quiet that she feels forbidden to enter or even knock.
She has thought sometimes of sending Thomas Jr. away to school.
Perhaps she is jealous. They have each other.
But she is their mother; it is grounded in love, her concern.
She herself has stopped going to meetings, no longer calls on anyone, rarely receives calls from anyone; she has refused all invitations for missions and canceled those that were already scheduled. Perhaps her children’s strangeness is merely a reflection of her own. She cannot seem to move forward in her old life, nor determine how to begin anew.
“Madam will have the first move,” Maelzel says, though she knows that is not the Turk’s custom. It is because she is a woman, she assumes, but she does not argue.
It was Thomas who taught the children chess, and after his disappearance (death, she tells herself) it was her father who taught her, when she and the children moved into his house, when it became clear that Thomas was not returning and that she needed both shelter and a job, and her father had, so gently, offered both. Now the four of them play long tournaments, the only thing to reliably keep the children in her presence.
She had thought she was a good mother. Before.
She studies the pieces, imagines the game ahead. She wants very much to win. For them, she thinks, so they will be proud of her. She should find it wrong, she knows, to want so much, to be on this stage even, but it is hard to believe now that God would concern himself with such things.
She is embarrassed to see her hand quiver as she raises it over the board, but thankfully only Maelzel is close enough to notice. She glances up at him, and he smiles.
“Do not worry, madam, he has not leapt at anyone yet,” he announces loudly, and the crowd laughs.
How angry people make her lately. She constantly wishes for more grace, but finds herself failing daily at the task of merely being kind. Only her father is still patient with her.
It has been a surprise to her, how grief has changed her.
She takes a breath. Makes her first move. Waits for the Turk to make his.
THERE WAS ONCE an Ottoman city of seven hills, of three seas, of four hundred fountains, and within that cit
y was another city of fulfilled desires. Within that second city was a pleasure house encircled by a garden of wild tulips where shot into the earth was an army of arrows that had arced over the wall in flight from the bows of a tribe of men driven mad by love. To the east, there was a river valley, once a desert, flooded by their tears.
The Turk knows there is a kind of desire that causes roses to bloom.
At least, once there was.
EACH NIGHT, BY THIS HOUR, S. is curved in on himself, shoulders bent forward, legs bent upward. His fingers claw over the pieces, his eyes track the magnets and the moves, and his mind is nearly curled in on itself.
He had thought he would travel. Instead he is in a space barely larger than himself, forbidden to talk of his work, left with only Maelzel and the mechanical man as his companions. When all options were open to him, he desired only chess, but now that only chess is open to him, he desires everything else. This loss pains him more than any other. Each night he thinks he will quit.
It is the heat, the smoke, the endless games; they are inside of him just as he is inside of the Turk, and they press to be released just as he does.
He makes his move, and above him the Turk responds.
THERE IS A WIND, the Lodos, that rises from the south and reverses the currents of the three seas. There are citizens so consumed by the Lodos that they believe they have been driven mad. Using the excuse of their madness, they speak plainly to those they love, but because they are believed to be mad, their words are not believed.
The Turk knows that the language of madness is not far from other languages, including the language of love.
He knows there were once Ottomans so versed in love they spoke only in poetry.
SHE IS A FAST PLAYER. Early in her lessons she memorized whole games, delighting even the children with her quick mind. More than one new side to her has been discovered, not all bad, since Thomas’s disappearance (death, she tells herself). She knows she should not have pride, that she should not put stock in games. But she knows, too, that this, now, is what she has, and if she does not take pleasure from somewhere, if she does not find ways to stay close to her children, she will have nothing.
She and the Turk exchange piece after piece, motion after motion. Finally she is focused, and does not think of the children or her husband or even the magical mechanics of the figure opposite her.
AT FIRST THERE IS a rhythm and S. is relieved to realize he will last the night. He had expected she would be slow and her concentration would lead to his own distraction. But then she is quick and he finds himself responding even more quickly, as if it is a race and he is pushing her forward faster and faster, and then maybe she is pushing him or it is some other force altogether, because finally, he makes a mistake.
S. is a master; he cannot believe what he has done. Has he done it? He lifts his hand and looks at it in the light of the candle. His breathing first stops, then comes quicker.
Outside S. is the next move, the lifting of the magnets, the shifting of gears that give S.’s motion to the Turk’s hand; but inside S. is the growing sense that inside of his self is some other self. S. turns his hand over, palm up, and imagines above him the Turk, too, turning his hand over, palm up. S. holds his hand still and feels an overwhelming desire to move it. He feels the Turk’s desire. I am possessed, he thinks. God help me, I am possessed. The feeling grows inside of him, an invading conqueror, the Turk the Turk the Turk.
SHE SEES IT IMMEDIATELY. Automatically she looks up at the Turk’s painted eyes, but of course they reveal nothing. She looks out at the audience, but they cannot see, do not understand what has happened. Even Maelzel, who sometimes paces the stage and sometimes stands behind her and sometimes fusses with a crank at the side of the cabinet, as if he is adjusting the machinery, does not seem to notice.
She cannot be contained.
I will beat him, she thinks.
OPPOSITE HER, for long minutes the Turk sits motionless, as if in thought. Finally Maelzel declares the game suspended until the next night. “The machine must get its rest,” he says with a flourish that draws, from the audience, a loud laugh. Nobody asks her if she can return the next night, but of course she will.
Maelzel, with barely a look at her, escorts her down the stairs, and she joins the crowd exiting the theater. People congratulate her as she walks among them. Some smile, some stare, some do not seem to realize she has been their entertainment and stare instead at those who greet her. “Thank you,” she says over and over, but all she can think is, Tomorrow, I will beat him tomorrow.
The children await her at the front of the theater, and immediately they, too, come undone.
“We saw Father,” they say in unison and she, already excited, feels a flush come over her.
“Here?” she says.
“Of course,” Thomas Jr. says. “Couldn’t you see him?”
She looks first at him, then his sister. There are people and carriages and horses crowding the streets and sidewalk, but they do not notice any of it. They are euphoric. “What do you mean?” she says.
“He was standing behind you. On the stage. Couldn’t you tell?”
“There was no one there,” she says. “Except that man, Maelzel.”
“Father was there,” Margaret says. “We saw him.”
“It’s what we’ve been hoping for,” Thomas Jr. says. “What we’ve been working toward. A manifestation.”
“Come,” she says, grabbing each of them by the hand so quickly that they are too surprised to avoid her grasp. “We are going home.”
“Where you’ll be punished,” she says as she pulls them down the street. “That is not what we believe,” she says, though even as she says it she hears Thomas’s voice: “We cannot tell them what to think. We can only teach them how.”
It is as if the children have conjured him after all.
“HE IS MAKING ME LOSE,” S. insists, and Maelzel looks at him with bemused concern.
“Perhaps we should cancel the next evening’s entertainment,” Maelzel says. “You do not seem well.”
“He is controlling the game. I cannot do what I want.”
“Rest now. You will feel differently in the morning. Or perhaps Georges can play in your stead.”
S. points a trembling finger at Maelzel. “Do not replace me,” he shouts.
And then, more calmly: “I will not let her win just because she is a woman. No matter how beautiful.”
“She is perfectly ordinary,” Maelzel says. “And nobody has suggested that you let her win. Play the game!” he says in a burst of anger.
S. lowers his gaze.
“She’s quite good, isn’t she?” Maelzel says. “That’s what has got you so disturbed, isn’t it?”
“He is in love with her,” S. says, turning away, though not quickly enough to avoid hearing Maelzel’s sharp laugh.
“Perhaps you have begun to confuse yourself with the machine,” Maelzel calls out, but S. turns again and says crisply, “I have not,” before walking away.
“THERE IS SURELY a man inside,” her father says, when she mentions the Turk’s mistake. They are downstairs, by the fire, the children upstairs. She has abandoned them while she ponders what to do.
“What makes you think so?” she asks.
“Because mistakes are human. They are not godly and they are not mechanical.”
“Machines make mistakes.”
“Machines break. They do not make mistakes.”
He is right, she realizes. It is the only logical explanation. Her father and the children often puzzled over the mystery of the automaton, her father arguing for mechanical genius and the children arguing for God’s creation. She herself, when pressed to choose a side, would only say, “It is a mystery.” It had been a mystery she was willing to live with.
“Are you disappointed?” she asks.
“Maybe a little,” her father admits. “But still, to imagine how man could invent such a thing . . . it’s remarkable.”
“Should I tell the children?” she asks, but her father shrugs.
“Maybe they do not need to know,” he says.
“They think they saw Thomas. At the theater.”
Her father flinches, then tries quickly not to show that he has.
There had been a time when she thought she would not marry; her mother had died so young, and her father, she’d assumed, would need looking after in his old age. But it was her father who had encouraged her to marry Thomas, who’d hired him as a clerk at his bookshop; and it was her father who had helped Thomas with the children when she traveled on missions, often for weeks at a time. The two of them must have shared so many moments that she did not even know of. And yet for months, her father had let her sadness take precedence over his own.
“Perhaps they saw someone who looked like him?” her father says. “Even I have been struck, many times, by people with a resemblance.”
“They believe they saw him onstage. A manifestation, they called it. They think they summoned him.” “I cannot tell them what to believe,” she continues. “But they should not be allowed to lie.”
“They are grieving.”
“As am I,” she says angrily. And then more quietly: “As are you.”
Her father leans forward as if about to speak, but then he leans back again and says nothing.
“What?” she asks.
“I do not know if I should tell you this. I had decided not to, but now I think I was wrong.”
She waits.
“There was a body. Many months ago. It was disfigured and I couldn’t be certain, so I didn’t mention it.”
“That was kind of you,” she says without moving. “You have borne so much of my burden.”
“He wore Thomas’s watch and his rings.” Her father pauses. “But I could not bear to identify him by his belongings rather than his face.”
The Trojan War Museum Page 15
