I had only time to bow my acquiescent thanks and to thrust the gems deep into a pocket before I was seized up by Frowsea, jostled back down the stairs, and turned out into the courtyard as though nothing had happened. Except that something had happened, which everyone within sight or hearing knew. People drifted in my direction, as though aimlessly. Questions were whispered from mouths hungry for happenings; eyes peered rapaciously. What? What was going on?
“The Great Sultan learned that my father had been falsely accused,” I said, surprised at the firmness of my own voice. “He wished me to know that no stain attached to my family, that my brother is safe, that I may join him if I wish.”
“Why did the sultana want to see you? Her. Winetongue? Why?”
“The sultana said a kind word. She gave me a gem for my years of service.” And I showed one cupped in my hand, a very small one, not enough to incite envy. In the harim, envy was as dangerous as a carpet snake; as readily hidden, it too could kill without warning.
Disappointed, they went away. No one cared about my years of service, or my father who had been falsely accused or my brother. Truth to tell, by this time I didn’t care about my brother. He was older than I by a good fifteen years, born to a different mother, and gone to the outskirts of the city to live in a house of his own by the time I was five. All that was long ago, but today was now, and tomorrow morning would come soon.
All of the day had been interesting, though some of it had been slightly scary and at least one thing had been annoying. Why did Sultana Winetongue assume that I would tell them stories about my adventures? Now that they were letting me out, did they really think I would return?
3
Dora Henry’s New House
Finding a place of her own had sounded simple when Dora had said it. At the end of two weeks, spending every evening looking at houses and condos, she was sick of the idea. Every place she’d been shown was either filthy, or dilapidated, or badly located, or too expensive. Each place was either the size of a phone booth or the size of a barn. Then on Friday, three weeks after Jared was hurt, Phil’s wife called saying she’d found the perfect place, she’d meet Dora there.
Dora told herself not to be hopeful. She’d been disappointed too many times. Still, when she found the address and parked out in front, just behind Charlene’s car, the surroundings gave her a tiny thrill of excitement. Something was right about this place! When she got out of the car, however, she shook her head slowly. The three-story stone house was huge!
“This isn’t it,” said Charlene, who’d driven in behind her. “Follow me.”
She stalked down the concrete driveway toward the gable end of a wide, two-storied garage. Its overhead doors were tightly shut; the two windows above were shuttered. The stone wall of the big house was on their left, and where it ended at the back corner, a high, wooden fence took its place, running from house to garage, with a gate at the garage end. Charlene unlocked the gate padlock to let them through into an area of scattered paving stones and cracked, hard-packed clay. The space was separated from the big house by a cross fence that ended at the neighbor’s garage wall and separated from the alley by a chain-link fence with a gate giving access to the garbage cans. Across the alley was…well, nothing much: a field of ragged grass with sprays of white flowers blooming in it. Queen Anne’s lace? Whatever, it was more attractive than the enclosed area.
“This little yard is a mess, but don’t get your mind set yet,” Charlene cautioned. “Come on.”
Beneath a dangling lantern, a door opened into the side of the garage. Charlene unlocked it and fumbled inside for a switch. The lantern came on as well as an inside light, disclosing a closet-sized laundry room on the right, an empty cavern of garage straight ahead, and on the left a narrow flight of stairs which led up to a peaked and skylighted space, airy and open, with one wide window looking westward across the alley toward miles of uninterrupted country. The stairs were separated from the big room by a long, low bookcase. In the back corner opposite the stairs, cupboards and appliances made a U-shaped kitchen, and beside it a tiny hallway opened into a roomy bedroom and a sizeable bath, each with windows facing the driveway they had walked along. Charlene went from window to window, opening them and thrusting the shutters wide, letting in the evening.
“What was this?” Dora asked as she wandered about, trying to stay cynical and practical despite her growing elation.
“Chauffeur’s quarters,” Charlene crowed. “This used to be a country estate, before the city swallowed it. The people who bought the big house are converting it into apartments. They want to sell this little piece outright to give them some remodeling capital. There’s enough ground set aside to comply with the zoning, and everything goes with: washer-drier, kitchen appliances, everything. The bedroom has a huge closet under the eaves. The fenced-off part gives you a yard or garden. You can either come in from the street, or, if you want more privacy, you can move the garage doors around to the alley side. It’s a three-car garage, so there’s lots of storage room.”
“Where did all this vacant ground come from?” Dora asked, staring out the west window.
“It’s part of the old air base. They closed it back in ninety-five, and it’s been zoned as greenbelt. You could have a dog and take him for walks over there.”
Charlene had three poodles that, according to Phil, ran Charlene’s life for her, but Dora wasn’t thinking about dogs. She moved slowly back to the kitchen. New built-in oven and stove top, compartment sink and dishwasher, decent-sized refrigerator-freezer, pine cabinets under a wide counter where she could put two or three stools. More than adequate. Not huge, but then, she’d only be cooking for one. The bathroom was nice, all newly tiled in white with bright Caribbean stripes of blue and pink and apricot. The place could have been designed with her furniture in mind. Everything she had would fit!
“How much?” she asked.
Charlene mentioned a price and Dora said a silent prayer of thanks. She could handle it. She would even have enough left over to do something with that messy bit of yard down below. When Charlene left to go type up a contract, Dora stayed there, hugging the place to herself, as though it were a child. She could have a little garden, and the garage beneath the living space was perfect for her car, and for storage. And a place to paint! Before she married Jared, she used to get a kick out of painting, but he’d said it was too messy to do anywhere at his place. All her painting stuff was…Damn! It was still at Jared’s place. In the garage! She hadn’t remembered to clean out the garage!
Never mind. She’d do it right away. And she’d plant a tree and some evergreen shrubs in the little yard. And the lavender she’d wanted. And the pansies. And this fall she’d put in some bulbs. She was amazed to find herself a little weepy at the idea. A place of her own. It would be the first time she’d had a real, honest-to-God place of her own.
Closing was set for ten days away, but the people told her she could move in before closing if she wanted to. On Tuesday she moved. Her furniture came out of storage: her own bright rugs and comfortable rocker, Grandma’s pine bedstead and dresser. A new sleeper sofa for when one of the younger kids came visiting, Grandma’s honey pine table and chairs, the coffee table she’d had made from a fancy old door she’d found at a flea market, the two leather chairs she’d bought on time payments while she was still at the farm.
She found some ready-made curtains at Sears, ones that would blow in the wind, and at the nursery a big terra cotta pot for planting lavender in. She found pansies at the Wal-Mart to put by the stoop downstairs. The final step was to drive to the post office nearest Jared’s place and turn in a change of address form. Then, on her way home, she went down the alley at Jared’s place and used her spare key to get into the garage. Jared had been out of the hospital for a week now, but Jared’s mother had called Dora at work to say he was staying at the boardinghouse, with her.
“Jared doesn’t want you to leave,” she had said in her firm, unemotional voice, a
s though her saying so might change Dora’s mind.
“Jared doesn’t need a wife,” Dora had told her. “He needs a cook-housekeeper. And he’s making enough to hire one.” Still, she hadn’t filed for divorce. Not yet. She had a feeling it would be like poking a snake that was coiled to strike. She could let the legal part wait while Jared got used to the idea.
All her painting things were in the garage, dusty but undisturbed, not even dried out. She stumbled on her way in, for the floor was as badly cracked as Jared had said, and she stumbled again coming out, but she didn’t forget to relock the door. She drove down the alley and came back to park at the curb. She used the key in the front door so she could pick up the mail that had arrived in the past few weeks. No more would be delivered to her at this address.
The weed had evidently won the war with Jared, for it was still there, ten feet tall now, anchored to the front wall with tiny sucker tendrils, its lacy foliage completely covering half the front wall of the house.
“Good-bye, weed,” she said, as she relocked the door.
All the leaflets turned in her direction.
“I’m moving over to Madera Street,” she said. “Ten thirty-two and a half Madera.” The leaflets trembled. Or maybe she only thought they did.
Crossing the bridge on the way back to her new home, she started to toss the spare key into the river, but then stopped. She wouldn’t be needing it again, but still…she hadn’t remembered the painting stuff. Maybe she’d forgotten something else as well. When she parked the car, she put the key to Jared’s place in the little magnetic box where she kept her spare car key, up behind the steering column. No one was likely to find it who didn’t know it was there.
That evening she served herself supper at her own table, laid with her own china. Later she sat in her own leather chair, looking out the window toward the sunset, watching the sun sink past all that lovely emptiness, no buildings in the way at all, the feathery clouds flushing pink and fading to violet. Then she went to bed in her own bed, with the windows open so the night air could come in.
The next morning she went out to get the paper, and when she came back through the gate, she saw the weed thrusting up between the brick of the stoop and the wall of her house, tiny and green and indomitable.
“Hello, weed,” she whispered.
4
Opalears: Beginning the Journey
My father, Halfnose Nazir (so called because the sultan’s nose was the proper length for a nose, and anything less could be called only a half nose) owned our house near the palace. It stood on Peacock Alley, a twisting line of cobble too narrow for more than slender persons and very small beasts, a corridor that wound its way among houses and shops to the intersection with the wider avenue. The only part of our house that was visible was the grilled balcony that hung over the alley and the high wall set with a gate, its tiny window covered by a grill. Inside was a flowery courtyard, with a fountain and chicken coops and the kitchen and a flight of stairs leading up to the grilled balcony and the living rooms and then on up to the roof, which was hidden from other rooftops by vine-covered trellises. I was born there, and I lived there in considerable freedom, often accompanying my father to the marketplace when he went to procure produce for the sultan, or for the regent, Great-tooth the Mighty.
My mother, so my father said, liked to think of herself as highly bred. In Tavor, this meant that females did not risk encounters with lesser peoples by leaving their homes. My father was amused by it, I was usually irritated, because people had to do all the shopping for her and no matter what father and I bought at the market, she complained. Except for an occasional trip to grandfather’s farm, mother stayed in the house, in the courtyard beside the fountain, or in the grilled balcony that overlooked the modest traffic of the alley, or on the roof sometimes, with the caged birds and the vines, where she had a view of the more crowded avenue. She slept a lot. Sometimes I thought she was just lazy.
I was not always angry with Mother, however, for she was very pretty and she told lovely stories. It was she who taught me to read, with me curled on her bed holding the book and she at her dressing table, taking the jewels from her ears and fingers, dropping them into a china dish with a soft clinking sound before beginning to brush her hair. The sound of that clinking and the soft wisp of the hairbrush brings her back to me, even now.
I remember her stories. I remember her voice. She told me once that words were mysteries, that each time she spoke they flew from her mouth like butterflies that had hatched beneath her tongue, leaving her with no idea how they came there. “Do you ever feel that, Nassifeh?” she asked me. “That our words are not our own, that they were given to us by someone…someone else?”
I told her of course they had, by our parents and they by their parents, but this was not what she meant. “Why should this be hairbrush?” she asked. “Why should it not be amthrup? It could as well be. Who decided upon hairbrush?”
I thought about it, then told her that if each of us decided on our own words for things, we would not be able to speak together.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant that some words feel very strange in my mouth, as though they were not born there. As though my word would have been a different one.”
I never figured out what she meant.
My father enjoyed working for Sultan Tummyfat, so he always told us, but when the sultan went away for a while and Great-tooth took the regency, my father quit talking about his work. He said nothing either good or bad about the regent, except once I heard him muttering to himself, a growl in which he uttered the regent’s name like a curse.
The worst day of my life was my tenth birthday. Mother gave me a new mantle, and father gave me a treasure box and invited me to go to the market with him. I put on the mantle, put the treasure box deep into the pocket, and off we went to the fruiterers lane, stopping at the booths run by various peoples from various lands, armakfatidi and pheledas and kasturi. The fruiterers market smelled of ocris and oranges, dawara and dates, mangoes and marvellos, and the vendors always gave me bits to taste while Father haggled over prices and qualities and arranged for baskets, sacks, and boxes to be delivered to the kitchens of the sultan. Father was chewing a dried apricot with an expression of concentration on his face when the pheled guards came out of nowhere, seized him up, then seized me up as well when I shouted and ran after Father. The guards took us to the palace. Great-tooth was seated beneath the canopy of justice, like a toad under a leaf, the crier beside him trumpeting words of accusation—so I learned later. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. The executioner was waiting beside the block, all his teeth showing in a ferocious grin, and Father had not even time to claim innocence before his head was off. I started to run to him, only to scramble frantically away again at the smell of the blood, the horror of the severed head, while all the time Great-tooth merely stared at me as though I had been a bug of some kind.
The guards caught me and took me to the harimlek, the female part of the palace, where they turned me over to old Bluethumb.
“Where do you live, child?” she asked me.
Between sobs and screams, I told the old one where I lived, and Bluethumb, after some conversation with this one and that one, sent me home with a guard. When we got there, the house was torn all apart and Mama’s body was lying in the courtyard, all broken from falling off the roof.
Later I was told that the news of Father’s execution had come quickly, and Mama had feared death less than she’d feared the torturers. Great-tooth had been known to kill one member of a family and then torture the others to death to amuse himself. Guards had come to search the house, as well, but that had been after Mama was dead.
The guard who took me home was bored, but kind.
“Gather up what you want to take with you,” he said. “You can’t stay here alone. I’ll take you back to Bluethumb.”
What was there to take? What I had on my back; what I could find among the clutter of
the looted house. My other clothing. My books. There had been other, more valuable things in the house, but someone had already stolen them, and it wasn’t much of a bundle that I carried back to the harim.
“What did my father do?” I begged, the tears coursing down my cheeks.
“Great-tooth said something was stolen,” said Bluethumb. “We don’t know what. Something important, something secret.”
“My house was all messed up,” I cried. “Did they find whatever was taken?”
“Not that I know of, child. And that’s all anyone knows.”
And that was the only answer I ever got. They looked for my half brother in the neighborhood where he lived, but he had fled, with his wife and child. After a few days, Bluethumb told me I’d been purchased as a slave, by the harim-masters, the eunuchs Soaz and Barfor.
“Who sold me?” I asked. “I belonged to Mother and Father. They were dead, they couldn’t sell me!”
Bluethumb didn’t know who’d sold me, though she’d seen the paper right enough, in the eunuch’s office. “Don’t worry over it, child. If you are the property of the sultan, no one will fool with you. It’ll keep you safe.”
Which was more or less true. They put me to work in the kitchen at first, scrubbing vegetables—which were never clean enough for the armakfatidi. Furthermore, the armakfatidi bothered me, even after I got to the point I didn’t tremble and squeak every time one of them grummeled at me. Eventually, I even learned to understand them, which, though I didn’t know it, was a rare talent, indeed.
The Family Tree Page 6
