George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’ve got a class,” Mills said.

  He’d been taking lessons in Court protocol with the Sultan’s bastard children. For aristocrats they seemed surprisingly docile. At first, as he had on the day Lady Givnora had brought him to the harem, Mills stood at the window and listened, but when their teacher saw him she motioned him in and asked his business.

  “I have this interest in protocol,” Mills said.

  The children giggled. Even their teacher smiled.

  “Yes,” George said, “I suppose that’s funny.”

  “Well it is,” a young man said. “I mean I’m going to be twenty and I’ve been coming to the schoolhouse all my life. You know why? I keep getting these crushes on my teachers. But I’ve never even been to Court. I’ve never seen my father.”

  “I have,” Mills said quietly, “I’ve seen your father.”

  “What, you? You work in the laundry.”

  “I was even presented at Court once,” he said.

  “You never were,” the young man said.

  “Perhaps he’d like to tell us about it, class,” the slave girl said. “Would you? Would you like to tell us about it?”

  “So you see,” George said when he’d finished, “if I’d known more protocol I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in today.”

  They listened carefully to everything he said and, when he’d done, even asked questions. They wanted to know what the throne room looked like. They were curious about the furniture. They asked him to describe their half brother, Abdulmecid, and to suggest, if he could, what sort of voice their father had. Was it deep? Was it breathy? Could Mills list any mannerisms for them he might have noticed?

  At the end of the two hours—even their teacher was taking it all in—he was asked to return.

  “Well,” George said, agreeably conscious that he was giving stipulations to the highborn, “only if I get to listen next time.”

  He soaked up the protocol lessons.

  “Did you know,” he asked Bufesqueu, “that only someone who has been to France may inquire after the Sultan’s health?”

  “Oh,” Bufesqueu said, “why’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” George admitted, “it’s tradition and it goes back thirteen hundred years.”

  “You know more than any of them, Mills,” Bufesqueu told him once. “You’re the one who ought to teach that course.”

  George shrugged deprecatingly.

  “No, you should.”

  “It’s not my place,” he said shyly.

  Though it was probably true. The school he’d attended that first day was not the only one in the seraglio. He went to all of them. Some teachers were better than others but each had something to teach him. He absorbed it all.

  He learned other things too. About the Sultan’s strange, sluggish, unacknowledged children. Evrevour, the little boy he’d heard that first day he’d passed the schoolhouse, had become a sort of friend.

  “I have seventy-four half brothers,” Evrevour told him. “I have eighty-one half sisters. You think it’d be fun, so many children.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “We have to be very careful about the incest,” Evrevour said.

  “They’re burned out on birthday cake,” Mills told Bufesqueu.

  “You ought to hang out with me in the harem, George,” Bufesqueu said.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “That’s the thing. It really isn’t.”

  “He told us himself.”

  “The Kislar Agha? He’s a pussycat. You should get to know him. Sometimes he comes to the salons.”

  “The Kislar Agha does? Salons?”

  “Salons, teas, open house. I don’t know what you’d call them exactly, but sure, he’s there. Lots of the eunuchs are. And I’ll tell you something else, George. They’re not bad fellows. They’ve got some great stories to tell. There’s marvelous talk.”

  Mills thought his friend was under a spell, a kind of enchantment. He thought they all were. When he saw them in the harem—he agreed to go when a eunuch brought Ali Hakali’s invitation to him personally in the laundry—they, the men as well as the women, seemed immensely sociable, hugely cheerful, terribly gay. He did not see the Kislar Agha.

  “Oh, there you are, Mills,” Bufesqueu said, rising up off his cushion like a host when he spotted George. “Perhaps you can settle a little argument for us.”

  “It isn’t an argument, Tedor. We weren’t arguing,” a eunuch Mills didn’t recognize said.

  “It’s about the female slaves,” Bufesqueu said. “Qum el Asel contends they’re actually improved by servitude while I hold that whatever civilizing effects their condition provides, is motivated by the universal hope of getting on, being noticed by their mistresses, et cetera. It’s merely public relations, a sort of show business, a means to an end rather than the end itself.”

  “Oh please, Tedor,” Qum el Asel said. “Ends? Means? Mean you to end so meanly, man?” He looked at the harem women and George followed his glance. They batted their eyelashes, silently fluttering their gauzy veils with their tiny poutlike breaths. “I mean,” and he looked at them again before he continued, “toward what end should any discussion strive? Fact, I should say.

  “All right, what are the facts? You take a girl out of the jungle—I know, I know, many of these girls are as white as you are, Tedor—out of her village then, whatever tiny patch of cultivated wide spot in the road—all right, I know, some of these ladies are from no farther off than downtown Constantinople—she’s accustomed to distinguish by the name of ‘home,’ but anyway you take her, and, to this point, probably all she’s learned of the observable world is how to prepare a couscous or, if she is from that jungle, the local mean sanitation practices for—please forgive me—wiping her behind.

  “But what happens? You steal the girl or perhaps buy her from her parents or a surviving brother (and I’ve known of cases, girls right here at Yildiz incidentally, where the seller has actually been a bona fide husband), and introduce her into a totally alien milieu, say the Yildiz seraglio, though it could be anywhere really, the British Empire, suburban San Francisco, the Argentinian pampas, and all of a sudden, if she’s assigned to the kitchen say, she’s learning new recipes, preparing alien dishes in alien pots and pans and eating the alien leftovers with an alien cutlery. She’s learned, you see, her experience broadened perforce by force itself.

  “Multiply this. Compound it by all the techniques indigenous to whatever culture she’s been entrusted to and you have a girl—enslaved she may be—who is indisputably more cultured and knowledgeable than her unsold sister in the sticks. You have more. You have a girl who’s probably more knowledgeable than the woman in whose charge she finds herself if only because she knows—please, you must forgive me, Tedor, but it was you who introduced this business of ends—two ways of wiping her behind while the mistress knows only one.”

  Several of the women applauded, their left hands making a delicate brushing motion against their right. Others blew against the veils which covered their mouths, briefly exposing bits of naked jaw, chin, flashes of mouth, the mysterious flesh paler than the skin which covered their cheeks and the thin strand of brow just visible beneath their chadors.

  “Qum gets that round, Tedor,” a woman said. Bufesqueu nodded in pleasant agreement. “Have you anything to add, Mr. Mills?”

  George shook his head.

  “I can lift five of you at once,” a big eunuch said.

  “Five of us? At once? Oh, I don’t think so. Your arms aren’t long enough to fit around five,” said the Oriental woman whom Mills had seen there the last time.

  “Yes,” he said, “five.” A dozen women volunteered and the eunuch who would be doing the lifting began to choose among them.

  “Sodiri Sardo’s picking only the lightest,” a fat Negress whose name was Amhara objected.

  “Oh no,” the eunuch said and chose Amhara too. He led her to a chair and directed the others to sit on her lap, arranging them i
n the order of their size.

  “See? He doesn’t have to get his arms around all five of us,” said the woman on top.

  “I didn’t know there was a trick to it,” the Oriental said.

  “It isn’t a trick, it’s strength,” the eunuch said. “Is everyone ready? Don’t squirm now.”

  The women, clumsily balanced, were stacked in a heap of diminishing laps. They couldn’t stop giggling. The other eunuchs moved around them, professionally estimating Sodiri Sardo’s task as they might a golf ball along a difficult lie.

  The big eunuch squatted, one arm under the black woman’s thighs, the other behind her back. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to pick everyone up now. Stay still as possible.”

  He lifted them easily and crossed the room with them. He set them down carefully.

  There were more brush strokes of applause, more veil blowing.

  “Sodiri’s strong,” a eunuch admitted, “but let him try that stunt with me underneath and the girls in my lap.”

  “Are you saying I can’t?” Sodiri challenged. “Go on then, sit in the chair.”

  They started to arrange themselves again, the eunuch on the bottom this time. “Amhara got to hold all of us last time,” a woman said. “She’s not that much heavier than I am. You rest, Amhara. The girls can sit on my lap.”

  “Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

  Amhara sat on top of the woman who had displaced her and the others piled on top of her.

  “You ready now?” Sodiri asked. “They ready, En Nahud?”

  “Not quite,” the eunuch said. “They’ve got the giggles. Let them calm down first.”

  “Go on,” Amhara said, “see can you pick us up.”

  He picked them up.

  “See can you carry us cross the room and back,” Amhara said in the air.

  He carried them across the room and back.

  “See can you climb the stairs,” En Nahud said.

  Sodiri climbed a few stairs at the rear of the lounge. He set everyone down. The women who had been carried professed astonishment. They shook their heads vehemently, their veils flaring like the ballooning skirts of dancers.

  “Did you think he could do it?” they asked each other.

  “No,” they answered, shaking their heads wildly, raising the edges of their veils, “did you?”

  “No! Did you ever see someone so strong?”

  “No! Never! Not!” they answered, doing that thing with their heads again. “How about you?”

  “Negative! No! Not me! Not one time! Eunuchs are the strongest!”

  Which gave Bufesqueu his opening.

  He discoursed on the proposition of whether it was possible for eunuchs to rupture.

  Bufesqueu was brilliant, locating his argument scientifically but saving his great point till the end of his speech when he announced in a low, husky voice that if eunuchs couldn’t rupture it had to be because they were without testicles. He drew the word out and mentioned it repeatedly. He need hardly point out, he said, the women, too, were without tesssticles but had love holes where tesssticles would go if they were men, and everyone knew that women with love holes—he called them love holes—could rupture. He said “love holes” repeatedly also.

  There was additional applause, tunes genteelly whistled into veils, astonishment registered by a forceful constriction of the brows, a general female giggling and swooning, heads vigorously thrown back till veils were hiked midnose.

  They loved, they said, metaphysical discourse.

  Someone raised the metaphysical question of whether or not eunuchs could expose themselves. Debate raged angrily on both sides of the question. Mills thought the eunuchs might come to blows.

  Yoyu, the Oriental woman, interceded shyly.

  Theory, she said, was all well and good when one had recourse only to theory, but might she point out that here they were with an entire roomful of eunuchs. It was rather like arguing whether rain were falling outside when all one had to do was look out the window, she said.

  The eunuchs ceased their quarrel and looked from one to the other.

  “Yoyu is right,” En Nahud said. “The only thing left to decide is which of …”

  “Let Mills!” said Bani Suwayf, the young woman who had exchanged places with Amhara.

  He could almost do it, Mills thought. He was so terrified by the strange goings on in the lounge that his testicles were completely retracted, his penis no more surfaced than the scab on the peel of an orange.

  But Sodiri Sardo had already dropped his trousers.

  “Aaaiieee,” said the girls, and Sodiri adjusted his pants.

  “He is built like a soccer ball,” Yoyu said, modestly averting her eyes.

  The women laughed.

  “He’s seamed like one too.”

  “He sure wasn’t flashing.”

  “More like mooning.”

  Mills could see the big eunuch was getting angry. Even muscles seemed to flush.

  The women laughed so hard their veils were askew again, dangling from one ear, or hanging beneath their chins like bibs.

  “Hsst,” Mills said, poking Sodiri Sardo’s hard belly with his elbow. The strongman turned to him fiercely. “No no, look,” he whispered. The eunuch glared impatiently in the direction Mills pointed. “Nostrils,” George whispered. “And look there. Those are lips, man! Male lips! Huh? Huh?” The big fellow nodded. “Huh?” George said. “Huh?” Sodiri squinted. “How about those teeth? Would you look at the gums on that one? Is she built? Huh? Huh?”

  “Were you staring at our mouths?” one of the women asked. They had arranged their masks again. “I asked if you were staring at our mouths,” she repeated coolly.

  “Nothing human is alien to me,” Mills mumbled lamely.

  It was time to go, George knew, but Bufesqueu was in no hurry. And neither, evidently, were the eunuchs. Nor, for that matter, the ladies themselves.

  So the salon continued its philosophic investigations, what Bufesqueu had called their “marvelous talk.” The men and the women. The men and the women and the eunuchs.

  They discussed whether what a sultan felt toward his favored ladies might not actually be a form of love.

  They discussed whether what the concubines felt toward their round-the-clock, day-cared-for children was.

  Bufesqueu laid down a premise: that a woman in a harem necessarily entered a sultan’s bed, particularly a sultan who was also the head of a vast empire, with a certain amount of fear. In such circumstances, he speculated, was it possible to achieve orgasm?

  “Define your terms,” Bani Suwayf said.

  Was fate a question of bone structure, an individual geometry that made one woman a concubine and the other a slave?

  Were all human skills acrobatic, Sodiri Sardo’s strength acrobatic and the girls’ jackknife fucks too?

  “Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Mills told Bufesqueu. They were back in their dorm.

  “You worry too much, George. It’s very simpatico.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No way, pal. That private army the Kislar’s always talking about? They’re deployed outside the walls. They’re over them like graffiti.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Look here, Mills. Look here, George. Don’t you think I know what you’re up to? Your problem’s written all over your face. You want a kid so bad, knock up one of the harem girls. Take her aside and rape the cunt. They catch you, they take your balls off. Big deal, it makes you strong.”

  “A son. It’s got to be a son.”

  “Yeah,” Bufesqueu said, “I see what you mean. You get one shot. If it’s a girl or it don’t take, then——pffftt.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Maybe you could adopt.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Bufesqueu.”

  “Yeah, well, I know it. Don’t you think it’s all I think about morning, no
on and night? In the laundry or out? Don’t you think it’s all I think about?”

  He didn’t, no. Because he understood now what the Chief Eunuch had warned them of on the occasion of their interview.

  Complacency, lassitude, getting used to things. The piecemeal slide of the heart. All submissive will’s evolutionary easement. Seventh heaven was seven heavens too high. They were having, Mills knew, the time of their lives. (Even the smells, he thought. Balmed, luxurious as jungle, sweet and fruity as tropic, as florid, shrubby produce. He’d had a cold a week——fever, runny eyes, headache, stuffy nose. The pampered, lovely smells had still insinuated themselves onto his very breath, caught on his tongue, snagged on his teeth, so that what he tasted, its flavors overriding the very food he chewed or liquids he drank, was like some perfumed, sexual manna, the gynecological liqueurs. A sort of climate raged in him, headwinds, the fragrance in his head, mingling sweetly with the ache in his bones, swooning his soupy sleep like delicious ether. And he’d experienced, as he experienced now, as he’d experienced that first time in the harem—why did he have the impression that he had come not among women but into some vast and sensual female wardrobe?—a useless and cozy semitumescence, idle and abstracted.) And they could live there comfortably, whatever the mysterious authority for their dispensation, in their strange sanctuary forever, for as long as their lives, immune as diplomats, tenured in tease and tea party, servicing some ideal of fairy tale pornography, as, when they’d been Janissaries, they serviced some ideal of epic viciousness.