The Harem Midwife

by Roberta Rich

  “Another moment and we will have your baby out, cara.” Hannah should not have addressed the Sultana with such familiarity, but the endearment came involuntarily to her lips.

  She rotated the head and compressed the infant’s shoulders to draw it out. Newborns were always malleable, their little bodies as soft as warm wax. A moment later, she felt rather than heard the burst of noise, like the small explosion of a cork withdrawn from a wine jug. The child had been so compressed that its shoulder had come loose of its moorings. The small bone of the upper arm had slipped from its socket. The baby slithered out, screaming. Hannah held it tucked under one arm and studied its angry red face. Poor mite. The shoulder joint was an angry red knob. No wonder the infant wailed so.

  Perhaps a shoulder dislocation was not an unusual problem, but it was Hannah’s first experience with it. There must be something she could quickly do to persuade the shoulder back into place. She searched her memory for advice from other midwives.

  Safiye clenched so hard at the folds of Hannah’s skirts that her knuckles were white. “Please help my baby,” she whispered.

  The musicians played more loudly, shaking their tambourines and beating their drums to camouflage the child’s screams. If they would only cease their terrible racket, maybe a solution would occur to her. The baby was in agony, the tiny red face a mask of pain. To do anything would be better than to do nothing. She must act.

  Hannah set the baby down on a cushion. The child was slippery with blood and mucus and the white waxy substance that covers all newborns. Covering her hand with a cloth, Hannah grasped the baby’s upper arm and rotated it until she heard a soft popping noise. This noise, coupled with the child’s screams, made Hannah’s ears ring and her body grow hot and then cold. She swallowed, wishing for a breeze off the Bosporus to penetrate this pavilion, which had grown stuffy with the aloes burning in a gold censer and the breathing of too many people and the crackling and spitting of hymeneal torches. So much pain, so much blood. But the child was no longer crying.

  Safiye lay with her eyes closed, sweat dripping down her face. “A healthy child?” she asked.

  “A happy outcome. You are blessed.” Hannah held the baby up to face the crowd, clutching its slippery body firmly under the arms. All eyes were fixed on the newborn.

  The band fell silent, tambourines on the floor, drums abandoned. The fiddlers stood with their horsehair bows hanging at their sides. A number of the women of the harem withdrew handkerchiefs from the long folds of their tunic sleeves and began to cry quietly. Everyone was exhausted and relieved. No one dared to praise the beauty or vigour of the child for fear of attracting the Evil Eye.

  Hannah laid the baby down on a cushion and rubbed it with a cloth, watching the little chest rise and fall. Finally, the diviner murmured, “Ugly little thing.” There were a few grunts of assent, then a silence so profound that Hannah could hear the gibbering of the monkeys from the menagerie far away in the Third Courtyard.

  The only other sound was the infant, breathing noisily, its tiny pink body still filled with birth fluids. Hannah withdrew her iron knife from her linen bag, preparing to cut the birth cord. Then she realized her error and put the knife down. The Sultan must perform this ritual. He would name the boy. He would face Mecca, his son raised in his arms, and he would recite the Call to Prayer and the Declaration of Faith. Hannah signalled to Mustafa, the Chief Black Eunuch, who had just entered the pavilion and now approached the Sultana’s divan.

  “Would you advise the Sultan of the birth of his s—”

  Hannah’s request was cut short by Mustafa’s hand on her arm. He pursed his lips and shook his head, glancing at the infant. Hannah followed his gaze. For the first time she saw what she had been too busy to notice before but what had been appallingly obvious to everyone else in the room—the swollen lips of female genitalia.

  There was no need for the Sultan’s attendance. No need to announce the royal birth by firing off the cannons outside the Walls of Justinian. No need to do anything, except to bathe the little princess and nurture her until she was of an age to make a good marriage. Raising a girl, as the old proverb went, was “like planting a fig tree in the neighbours’ garden.”

  Hannah cut the cord and then handed the child to the young wet-nurse. The girl carried the child to a golden basin filled with warm, fragrant water and gently washed her. Then the wet-nurse placed three sesame seeds on the infant’s navel for good luck. She swaddled the child and wrapped her in a blanket. She tied a blue-beaded amulet to the baby’s shoulder over the spot that had caused such anguish. Someone placed a bottle of sherbet with a piece of red gauze tied over the top next to Safiye. Had it been wound around the bottle’s neck, it would have signified the birth of a boy. A braid of garlic was hung over the golden cradle to keep away the Evil Eye.

  One more thing had to be done. Hannah turned to the exhausted mother on her divan. “Try to stand up so the birth cake will come free.”

  Two slave girls helped the Sultana to rise. An attendant handed Hannah a bowl, which she placed between Safiye’s legs, and the birth cake fell into it with a gratifying plop. How messy this part was and yet how necessary. The cake must be complete. If it was torn or disintegrated, it meant segments left behind in the womb. Hannah flipped over the contents of the basin with a pair of ivory tongs an attendant handed her, feeling ridiculously like a soothsayer studying entrails for omens.

  “Good. We have it all out.”

  The slave girls lowered Safiye back onto the divan.

  When she was comfortably settled, Safiye reached for the baby and clasped her to her breast. Hannah smiled at the sight of the two of them, Safiye tearful and happy, oblivious to everyone’s disappointment that the child was female. The baby was pink as rose-water sherbet and breathing strongly now. A slave girl removed the soiled linen from the divan and brought in fresh towels scented with sandalwood with which to bathe Safiye.

  The Sultana was exhausted, every movement an effort, and barely able to cradle her tiny infant.

  Hannah said, “Shall I bind you now or would you prefer to wait?” In accordance with custom, the wet-nurse would suckle the child for two or three years. To prevent the Sultana’s milk from coming in, Hannah must wrap strips of linen tightly around Safiye’s breasts. It would be painful for a few days, but then her milk would cease.

  “I prefer to wait. You have earned my mother-in-law’s gratitude as well as mine,” Safiye murmured, her eyes never leaving the baby’s face.

  So she had heard Kübra’s whispered thanks from the Valide. Even in the midst of her travail, Safiye was attuned to the actions of the woman who held the power of life and death over every woman in the harem.

  Hannah knelt next to Safiye and whispered in her ear, “You have a lovely princess. Next year I will deliver you a little prince. I am certain of it.”

  “I am happy with my daughter. I shall name her Ayşe. I shall have the pleasure of her company all of my life. Whereas a son? Who knows what might happen?”

  Hannah said, “It is a wise woman who is content to receive what God has bestowed upon her.” The Sultana was referring to the cruel custom of fratricide, which had been the practice of the Imperial House of Osman for a hundred and fifty years. When her son, Mehmet, if he survived, took the throne from his father, he would be obliged to have any younger brothers and half-brothers strangled to prevent a war of succession. It was a custom that appalled Hannah.

  She replaced her birthing spoons, her cloths, her herbs and potions and salves in her linen bag and rinsed Safiye’s blood from her hands. The baby was dozing in her wetnurse’s arm. In a short time, little Ayşe would be nursing contentedly.

  In forty days there would be a celebration in the hamam. Hannah would be invited to attend because she had delivered Ayşe. A duck’s egg would be broken into a bowl and rubbed onto the baby’s skin to accustom her to water and keep her safe from drowning.

  And yet, far more serious dangers than drowning faced the princess
and, indeed, everyone in the realm as Hannah and every subject in the realm knew. The great Ottoman Empire was in as much peril as if an enemy army were camped outside the walls of the city. The Empire, the mightiest the world had ever seen, stretched from Budapest on the Danube River to Aswan on the Nile and from the Euphrates almost to Gibraltar. It included the Balkan Peninsula, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia. It encompassed the Black Sea to the east and the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf to the south. Fifty million souls, freeborn and slave—Muslim, Jews, and Christians—lived within its realm, but without a healthy male heir, there would be civil war. The enemies of the Empire—most of Christendom, including Habsburg Naples and Sicily, and even the Muslim neighbour to the south, Persia—would tear it from gullet to groin like wolves bringing down a stag.

  Two years had elapsed since that memorable night, the birth of the Sultana’s princess. Mehmet had recovered from typhus but he remained sickly. His circumcision had been postponed many times because of frequent bouts of ill health. The Sultan continued to rule, though he rarely left the palace and seemed content to leave the affairs of state in the capable hands of his mother. And worst of all, the Empire remained in a perilous state.

  For two long years, there had been no births, no pregnancies, no stillbirths, not even a royal miscarriage. Safiye had failed to bear a son. The Sultan had failed to sire another heir, whether by Safiye or any of the harem girls. The Grand Vizier Mehmet Sokollu, was not happy. Mustafa, the Chief Black Eunuch, was not happy. The Valide was not happy.

  Only Safiye with her precious two-year-old daughter Ayşe, whom she petted and spoiled like a doll, was happy.

  Hannah’s beloved husband, Isaac, came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. Together they looked from the window of their home into the street below where the little mare snorted and stirred restlessly in her traces outside the front door. Theirs was a district of twisting streets, a neighbourhood of foreigners—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians—any number of people from remote corners of the Empire.

  Isaac rested his chin on her shoulder. “Do you have to go out so late?” he asked, knowing she had no choice when the Imperial Palace called.

  “Whatever tonight’s crisis, it is not a birth,” Hannah said.

  “I will stay up until you arrive home safely.”

  “Please, go to bed. You need to rise early tomorrow.”

  Hannah’s friend Ezster had confided behind a cupped hand one afternoon in the mikvah why there had been no more harem pregnancies and why it was unlikely that there would be any in future. The Sultan could not perform with anyone other than Safiye. It was believed the Sultana had placed so powerful a curse on his genitals that he was useless with other girls. If Ezster was correct, then God Himself was powerless to set matters right.

  But if Hannah was not being summoned for a birth, then what was she summoned for? An odalisque, a royal concubine, suffering from a difficult menses that Hannah could treat with hot compresses and a tisane of camomile? Or perhaps Safiye required an elixir to aid in conception? No, something more serious. Was it a repetition of the Valide’s embarrassing difficulty?

  Prepared for any eventuality, Hannah tucked into her linen bag an assortment of herbs, and, just in case, her birthing spoons. Almost as an afterthought, she packed a fresh peach, newly picked from her garden. From a few streets away, she heard the thud of the watchman’s metal-tipped staff on cobblestones as he made his rounds, admonishing those without serious business to return to their homes before he locked the city gates.

  Isaac watched his wife packing. “I am so proud of you, Hannah. I know life in Constantinople is difficult for you and yet you make the best of it, even earning the trust of the palace. Imagine! You are so valued that the Valide herself calls you out in the middle of the night … although I wish she would restrict herself to daylight hours.”

  “The Valide does not value me half so much as I value you, Isaac. Without you, this transition in our lives would have been impossible,” she said. Although Hannah spoke calmly so as not to alarm Isaac, she was worried. No one, especially women, travelled the streets at night if they could help it. It must be a dire emergency to justify the appearance of the carriage at her gate.

  He smiled and kissed her.

  Hannah and Isaac went downstairs and stood in the street, waiting for Suat to dismount and open the carriage door. The stars hung so low it seemed as though they had been hurled into the heavens by an unseen hand.

  Hannah looked back at their house and spacious grounds. They had bought the property from a prosperous arrow-smith whose workshop had handily converted into a workspace for looms, trays for mating moths, drying cocoons, and all the paraphernalia of silk-making, including an orchard of mulberry trees in the back. The purchase came with a parrot, Güzel, which Hannah could hear screeching even from a block away. Soon after they took possession of the house, it became apparent why the arrowsmith’s wife had left the creature behind. This beautiful bird from Afrika, with lustrous grey plumage and a tail of vivid red, knew no greater pleasure than to lure an unsuspecting person to its perch. Then it would stretch out its scrawny neck waiting for a caress. As soon as a finger appeared, the bird would slash with its black beak, leaving behind a bleeding cuticle or punctured thumbnail. The creature would then fill the house with shrill, human-like cackling while it squatted on its perch, shifting its weight from one scaly leg to the other.

  Isaac turned Hannah toward him and straightened her veil. As a Jewess, she was not required by law to wear a veil, but at certain times it suited her to pass for Muslim. Now, she wanted to avoid the attention of roving gangs of Gypsies only too happy to gawk at the Imperial landau and the woman inside. She wore a silk dress and pearl earrings. The silk was from their workshop, of course, spun from their own worms, woven by Isaac on their loom. The cloth had been dyed in a vat of madder and oak kermes and turmeric to give it a reddish hue.

  Suat held open the carriage door. Hannah gathered her skirts, and Isaac handed her into the compartment and closed the door behind her. He leaned up through the carriage window to kiss her goodbye, patting the velvet pouch around her neck, adjusting it so it nestled next to her skin. Isaac wore a matching pouch. Even Matteo, their son, wore such a pouch. Without the constant warmth of their bodies, the silk eggs would fail to hatch and provide a new crop of pupae for the next mothing season.

  Isaac smelled of lemons. He regularly rubbed lemon juice on his hands to remove dye used for the silk. In the light from the pine-pitch torch, his eyes shone.

  “Good night, my darling,” he said. “All will be well. Administer a poultice, mix up an herbal decoction, place your cool hand on an anxious forehead, and soon you will be back.”

  Isaac’s optimism usually steadied her, but now, when all the signs pointed to an urgent situation—the time of night, the closed carriage, the impatient way Suat was glancing from the mare to their house and back again—it made her nervous.

  Constantinople had been the start of a new life for her and Isaac. They had used the ducats Hannah had brought from Venice to purchase their ample house. Jews were permitted to buy property in the city. Even more startling, Ottoman law permitted married women to own their own property. Hannah had not imagined such a thing was possible.

  “Give Matteo a kiss for me,” she said.

  A feeling of peace came over her as she thought of Matteo, her three-year-old son. Early this morning through half-closed eyes, she had seen him at the doorway of their bedroom, trailing his blanket. She pretended to be asleep. He folded himself over on all fours, head down, knees pressed together. Then he rabbit-hopped to their bed. Without saying a word, he squeezed himself between her and Isaac and pulled the covers over all of them. She hated to leave knowing that he would likely wake in the morning calling for her, but what was she to do? Hannah could not possibly refuse a summons from the Imperial Harem.

  Before she had a chance to blow Isaac a kiss, as was their custom on parting, Suat clucked to
the mare and they were off. Hannah was flung back, hitting her head on the roof of the carriage as they lurched into the narrow cobblestone street.

  Later that night, when she returned from the palace, she would recall the look on Isaac’s handsome face as she was leaving. She would wonder if they ever again would enjoy the intimate conviviality and the gentle jesting that had always typified their marriage before that night. The events at the palace were about to change everything.

  CHAPTER 3

  Constantinople

  HANNAH SETTLED BACK on the cushioned seat for the long, jarring ride to the palace, the residence of the Sultan and his family, as well as the administrative centre of the entire Empire. Once they were out of her neighbourhood, she ripped off her veil, which always made her feel like a baby born with a caul over its face. They rumbled past the Misir Çarşisi, the Egyptian spice market, a low structure shaped like the letter T. During the day, the smell of garlic, peppercorns, frankincense, and saffron emanated from the building. It was here that Hannah purchased remedies for every malady, even gunpowder to cure haemorrhoids.

  Such a still night would be populated by djinns—those fiery, evil creatures whose chief delights were dumping slop buckets on people’s heads from upper-storey windows, snatching turbans off dignified pashas during public ceremonies, and stealing babies out of their mothers’ arms and hurling them onto hard tiled floors.

  The district of Eminönü was silent now—no familiar wheeze of the blacksmith’s bellows, no raucous clanging of hammers on metal, no insistent cries from fishwives and butchers, no calls from the porters at the dock loading and unloading the ships. The only sounds were the squeaks of the mare’s harness and her hooves clattering on the cobblestones.

  When they reached the street of the felt-makers, the throb of a drum interrupted the silence. The guards were locking the old Roman Gate of Septimius Severus at the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosporus. Among the refuse heaps lining the alleys, Hannah could just make out the scurrying feral cats. From roofs and treetops came the caterwauling of the felines that prowled the city chasing rats at night. Hannah hated the scrawny, diseased creatures, but she hated the alternative of a city swarming with vermin even more.