George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’ll measure my dick against both you young ladies. I’ll put one of my balls on the ball scale and bet you double or nil it’s heavier than all four of yours put together.”

  “Big deal,” Bufesqueu said, “you got fat balls.” The second guard laughed and Bufesqueu put a finger to his lip to silence him and jumped down from the driver’s bench. “Sir!” Bufesqueu snapped suddenly. “Yes, sir!”

  Mills supposed his friend would be shot before his feet touched the ground, but all that happened was that the Balkanese ran about to the blind side of the carriage, opened the door and stuck his head in. Mills grinned sheepishly at the two guards but both stared quizzically at the drawn black shade on their side of the locked Overland. They appeared to be straining to overhear. Mills strained too and was just able to make out brisk guttural murmurs, and then, seconds later, Bufesqueu’s crisp, military “Sir! Yes, sir!” and the door slam smartly.

  When Bufesqueu reappeared the two guards had already lowered their rifles. The Balkanese climbed back beside Mills and turned to the first guard, the man who had challenged them. Bufesqueu glared at him. “Himself wants to know what’s causing the delay. Unlock the gate,” he said.

  “Where’s your authorization?”

  “Why don’t you stick your face in that carriage and find out yourself where’s my authorization? Then, if we can anybody find the stub of a prick or two whole entire balls between us, we can have that little weigh-in you were so anxious about. Open the gate!”

  The first guard glanced anxiously at the carriage’s drawn shade and turned to the second guard. “Go on,” he said. “Better unlock it.”

  Mills shook his head when they were safely inside the extensive grounds. “That was a close one. How’d you have the nerve to talk to those fellows like that?”

  “Not close.”

  “No? Even the horses were getting nervous.”

  “Service rivalry,” Bufesqueu said. “Not close.”

  “Oh,” Mills said.

  “Look, Snowman,” Bufesqueu said sharply, “how long am I going to have to carry you? We’ve been in this chickenshit outfit practically the same time but I’ve got all the answers and you’ve got all the questions. It’s simple. Soldiers and sailors are supposed to hate each other. Every branch of the services is supposed to hold the other branches in contempt. It’s sanctioned. It’s how the mother fuckers induce pride.”

  “I don’t hold sailors in contempt.”

  “No,” Bufesqueu said. “You don’t hold anyone in contempt. How you ever got to be the cruel Janissary is beyond me.”

  “I told you about that,” Mills said softly.

  “Yeah,” Bufesqueu said.

  He wanted to ask Bufesqueu where they were but he was ashamed. Instead he tried to concentrate on the directions the guard had given Bufesqueu at the gate when he’d asked him how to find the Kislar Agha.

  It was like fairyland. Where their own grounds had been barren—except for the tiny patches of cultivated forests and jungles and special terrains used for their training exercises—these were universally lush. Everywhere there were formal gardens with plashing fountains that made an almost sensible music as the water dropped from varying heights back into their basins. There were fabulous mosaic forms, intricate spires and minarets, round arches like giant keyholes, great domes that might have been dull and massive but refracted light in such a way that they seemed more like precious stones than bits of functioning architecture. Domes like crown jewels. Emerald domes, diamond domes, ruby.

  Here and there Persian rugs were spread about on the grass. They could have been flying carpets.

  Everywhere he looked there were Negro gardeners to tend the arranged landscapes, dark-colored technicians to adjust the fountains, men who might have seemed fat if they had not been so obviously powerful. He saw other blacks, dressed in strange colors, in rich, queer fabrics he’d never seen before. They hurried along pine needle pathways and carried fine silver trays covered with damask cloths toward low-roofed, beautifully tiled buildings. With their pitchy skins against the deep green background of the clipped, splendid lawns they looked almost like the exotic, carved and painted barks of some of the elaborate, topiary trees.

  I’ll say one thing, Mills thought, these sailors live well!

  “This is it,” Mills said with forced cheer. “Where they said that Kislar Agha is we’re looking for.” He pulled into a long, curved driveway, eased the horses to a gentle stop and brake-locked the Overland, hoping that Bufesqueu had noticed his skill. Bufesqueu said nothing, of course, and Mills leaped down from the bench first. He did not ask his friend what a Kislar Agha was, or where they were, or what they were doing there in the first place.

  He was determined to change his friend’s ideas about him and, though he had no notion yet of why they’d come, to beat Bufesqueu and get to the Kislar Agha guy first. He hadn’t a clue what he would tell him, could only imagine his poses, his folded arms and knowing smirk. Perhaps, while waiting for the lightning to strike, he would kibitz the black boys, let the Kislar Agha bloke, and Bufesqueu too, see who they were dealing with.

  (Because he’d already forgotten the danger, because this was an adventure, because it had been an adventure since he’d first started out for London to make his way in the world, before: since he’d accepted that letter of introduction which had been obsolete before it was written. Because it was all adventure: his meeting with King George, his—he understood this now—expulsion from England, his journey with the spy, Peterson, and his meeting with the Jew ambassador and the complicated betrayal at Mahmud’s Court; all, all of it adventure; being given over to the mullahs, to the Janissaries, killing Khoraghisinian and becoming a living legend, all of it——being sent down with Bufesqueu to take Constantinople with no more weapons between them than their two full-dress Janissary suits; the confiscation of the Overland and the grand ride they’d had, vulnerable and open-air’d as a Roman triumph; the business with the guards at the gates, even the peaceful drive through this voluptuary candyland. Because it was all adventure and he was an adventurer and an adventurer did not so much forget danger as acknowledge and then ignore it, that only then could he be vouchsafed immunity. Because it was all adventure and he lived now within some rhythm of action and respite which were as much the physical laws of adventure as ebb and flood tides were the governing physics of the seas. And because his feelings had been hurt, and there was no room or way to accommodate fear and sulk in the same place at the same time.)

  Mills entered the building.

  “The Kislar Agha,” George demanded of a huge fat black fellow in sheer, billowing trousers that tapered tightly at the ankles. He was shirtless and his full, hairless chest was barely covered by a light vest. He glanced at the man’s shoes, smooth and soft and slightly curling at the toes like a jester’s slippers. George lightly touched the Negro’s turban. “Hair not dry yet, darling?” And leaned toward him. “Let the air out of your pants, why don’t you?” he whispered. “Get your toes fixed. You look like some pansy-assed Nancy boy.”

  The black man lifted Mills off the floor by the neck and quietly choked him. “Is this the way you address the assistant Chief Eunuch in the Sultan’s harem?” he asked mildly.

  Mills’s frightened, high-pitched squeals brought another black man, even larger, into the room.

  “Let him go, Suliem. I said let him go!”

  Reluctantly the giant withdrew his strangler’s hands from Mills’s neck and George dropped a good half foot to the floor.

  “What’s this all about?” the Kislar Agha demanded.

  And before George Mills could say “Service rivalry,” Bufesqueu had come up behind him and flung him aside.

  “I’m Bufesqueu and he’s Mills,” he said, “and we’re deserters from the Janissaries seeking sanctuary.”

  4

  Which was how George Mills and Bufesqueu, his protector and benefactor, came to live as the only unimpaired males in the largest full-service harem
in the world.

  What he couldn’t get over were the scents.

  As if they lived in a basket of fruit or box of wondrous candy. As if they lived in a great garden or amongst the savory headwinds of the juiced seasons. As if they lived in a kitchen or spicery, in a bakery, or within some balmy climate of luxurious merchandise pliant as trousseau. He sniffed the cloves, civets and gums of carpentry, the jeweler’s musky metals, the pomander of gemstone. In the groves and greenery of the planet. All cosmetics’ pervasive attars.

  But there was more that he couldn’t get over:

  King, he thought. King and Courier, Ambassador, Soup Man and Sultan and Sultan-in-Waiting. Chief Eunuch too, he thought. It was getting to be quite a list.

  Or the fact, though he had forgotten the danger, that they were alive at all. His throat was still sore from Suliem’s attempt to choke him. But at last he was beginning to get his voice back. For days he had been silent as a giraffe. So silent that when Fatima, one of the slaves who attended the harem women, came into the laundry where he and Bufesqueu had been assigned to work, he had been unable to answer the woman’s questions regarding a particular satin sheet her mistress had inquired after. Mills had seen the sheet in question and had gone to fetch it, handing it to her wordlessly.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “it’s been starched, hasn’t it? Lady Givnora specifically asked that it be laundered in rose water with no starch but only a touch of unscented olive balm to take the roughness off.” She held an edge of the sheet to her nostrils. “Why, this is lemon curd. Smell for yourself.” Mills pressed the sheet to his nose. “Well?” Fatima said. Mills shook his head. “Can you tell me why my mistress’s orders weren’t followed?” Mills shook his head. Fatima glowered at the new man and ordered the sheet to be re-washed. “Do you think you people can get it right this time?” Mills nodded and with a pen carefully noted her requirements as Fatima looked on, a gradual sympathy reflected on her thin face. “Oh my,” she said, “you can’t talk at all, can you?” Mills shook his head. “Poor guy,” Fatima said. “They really did a job on you, didn’t they?” Mills nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I know. It must have been one of the deepest bits of barbering in the entire history of this plantation.” Mills looked at the thin slave. “Clipped ballocks, jolly roger, bush, asshole and all, did they? They couldn’t have left you with enough strings, snails and puppy dog’s tails to make a noise when you fall downstairs.” Mills shook his head vigorously and tried to talk but his throat was still too raw. “Don’t go on about it, luv,” Fatima said. “I can’t hear you. I doubt anyone can, even your co-boy sopranos in these wildwoods. Maybe you sing your own song now, like those dogs whose screaks can’t be heard by other folks, only by a few fellow doggies who pick up the frequency on clear, cold nights when reception is good. See to the sheet, will you, luv?” Mills nodded.

  He salved his throat with honey and licorice, coated it with sweet oils and unguents. When the week was up he sought out Bufesqueu.

  “They think I’m a eunuch,” he rasped.

  “Lord bless you, boy, why wouldn’t they? What’s the good of plumbing if it’s always leaking? No sooner do I rise in the morning than I rise in the morning. I remember where I am and start spilling my seed like some hungover farmer. I come into the laundry here and see their frillies and unmentionables and my piece starts to melt like a burning candle. Jeez, George, will you just look at this trim? The bedgear and belly dance togs and all the sweet else? I tell you, kid, even their soiled veils give my glands something to think about. I’m losing weight. Pounds and inches. I was better off down on that prayer rug.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that,” Mills said hoarsely.

  “Because you can never get enough,” Bufesqueu said, not hearing him, not listening. “Because you can never get enough. Not if you lived till the end of the world. No one can. Not if you were Sultan Mahmud II himself and all his helpers. Not if you were not only irresistible to quiff but positively necessary to their welfare, like air or money. Because you can never get enough. Not if you were dying and the priest was already giving you last rites. Hell,” Bufesqueu said, “you’d already be in bed anyway, wouldn’t you? What would be the point of wasting perfectly wonderful machines like a bed and pillows, sheets and covers, on anything drab and ordinary as death? Maybe that’s why they administer last rites——because you’re in that damn bed all alone, and even if you know you can’t ever get enough it’s a sin not to try.”

  “It’d be worth your life to try in this place,” Mills scraped.

  Bufesqueu looked at him. “Listen to him,” he said. “His voice is cracking on him all over again. Well, why not? He’s in this harem a week and it’s a new puberty. I shouldn’t wonder if my own voice didn’t start to do duets with itself. Not to worry,” he said abruptly, heartily. “We’ll get it all straightened out. Weren’t we grand? Weren’t we grand though?”

  He meant their two-man invasion of Constantinople, the pair of them taking the city by storm. Mills smiled. They were grand. No Mills since the first George Mills had been grander, and even if his own had only been a sidekick’s grandeur—briefly he wondered if it were enough to lift the curse—a crony henchman’s auxiliary one, Bufesqueu couldn’t have done it by himself. It had been his name, the living legend’s, that had been passed in the street. George was satisfied. They had taken Constantinople together.

  They’d done more, and this was something else he couldn’t get over.

  The Janissaries no longer existed. When Mills and Bufesqueu had been ordered to town, when Bufesqueu’s defiant war cries had first rung in the streets and panicked the Ottomans, there’d been a fire storm of alarm. Rumors had flashed from street to street like signal fires. Before Mills and Bufesqueu even spotted the abandoned Overland, the Sultan had heard of the incursion at Yildiz Palace. Malamud’s information had been no sounder than anyone else’s of course, and when he’d been informed that the Janissaries had overturned their soup kettles the Sultan convened the chiefs of staff of the entire military. What he was thinking was how best to save Yildiz. But by this time the story had taken on additional detail, an oblique verisimilitude. It was rumored that the soup had actually been at the boil, that most of an entire phalanx of Janissaries had been scalded along their shins and calves in the effort. In the hasty consultation that followed, the outraged Sultan advised his advisers he now concluded that because the soup had been still hot when it had been spilled, the action had to have been a precipitate one, an angry gesture of the moment. He was heartened, too, by news of the scaldings, and was supposed to have said: “They haven’t thought this one out. Some incendiary must have roused them. We must counterattack now. While their passion prevails over their strategy. Before their third-degree burns heal. Send in the cannon. Reduce the fort to rubble!”

  So they were feeling pretty good, Mills and Bufesqueu. Splendid, in fact. Two reluctant recruits who not only had conquered a major world capital but in the act of conquering it had turned round and conquered by way of ricochet the very force in whose name they had done it. And if five thousand men had died in the Sultan’s surprise bombardment—if, indeed, a week after the event, perhaps a couple of hundred of their former comrades were still smoldering—it was nothing either of the condemned men cared to take on his conscience. Bufesqueu because he genuinely believed the other Janissaries had repudiated women, Mills because he had not once chosen in all the time he had lived.

  Fatima came in for towels and looked, in passing, in the direction of Mills’s crotch. She shook her head sadly. “Please stop that,” Mills said, and Fatima stared at him, clapping her hands to her mouth in astonishment.

  “It’s grown back?” asked the superstitious woman.

  “Sure,” George said, “you think they can keep a good man down?”

  So, though he didn’t know it, among certain of the staff at least, he continued to be a living legend.

  Bufesqueu, of course, was in seventh heaven. “In the country of the blind,
” he liked to say, patting his pants and winking, “the one-eyed man is king.”

  But so far neither Bufesqueu nor George had come within even hailing distance of the Sultan’s harem girls, let alone seen one. If this was a torment to the former, to the latter it was something of a comfort. George had not so far forgotten his danger as to lose respect for it entirely. He complimented himself on his Millsian ability to appreciate and honor a taboo. If he had swallowed whole whatever guidelines his Janissary superiors had laid down for him, if his credulity had kept him down range of the black marketeers who Bufesqueu said visited their fort almost daily to take orders for the cold comforts they dispensed for bribegold and a portion of a Janissary’s small pay, he had at least managed, if innocently, if ignorantly, to abide by the rules, to live within the letter, to the last crossed t, to the last dotted i, of the laws of appearance. This, Mills thought, was what preserved them. To view things otherwise was subversive not only to those who held power over them, and not only to their own sort, but more importantly to themselves, to one another, to every Mills who’d ever lived under the curse of kind. He understood what was permitted and behaved himself.

  Now a sultan’s harem, Mills thought, a sultan’s harem was just the last place on earth one should think about running amok. And if that sultan also happens to be one of your emperor sultans, as this one is, with sway not only over entire countries and populations but over entire climates as well, from deserty Africa to the frozen Kush, then that sultan is one hell of an important man; and if, without batting an eyelash, he can cannonade a complete elite corps off the face of the world simply because it was rumored that they might have spilled some soup, and if he’s gone to the trouble of becoming a sultan emperor in the first place with all the expense of men and materiel that takes just so he can have dibs on two or three hundred of the prettiest girls in all those respective countries, populations and climates, and if he’s taken the additional pains to house them all in one place where he can keep his eye on them, and in a style like this where the girls themselves don’t do a thing, not wash a bowl, dry a dish, make a bed, fix a meal, rinse something out in the sink of an evening or even just pick out their own clothes, what they think suits them best, shows off their color or makes them less hippy; and if he’s gone to the further bother of training up specialist surgeons who have nothing better to do than cut the nuts off fellows who themselves have nothing better to do than see to it that the two or three hundred girls don’t either, then that sultan is not only one hell of an important man but one hell of a jealous one, too. And I for one, Mills thought, who changed my life and sealed the fates of maybe five thousand others because I happened to throw him a salute with the wrong hand, I for one, who already have, don’t want any part of him. I already took those vows to stay on the wagon. What harm will it do me to keep them? No sir. It don’t bother me that I may be losing Bufesqueu’s respect, or that old Fatima used to think of me as just one more steer around this place. I don’t want no part of him, and I don’t want no part of them.