American Music

by Jane Mendelsohn

  But before she could speak he explained to her that he had come to escort her to the northern end of the pleasure grounds between the Topkapi Saray and the seawalls along the Golden Horn. It was here that the Sultan liked to take his recreation, and he had planned an elaborate festivity that would last for several days. Members of the harem never left the palace unaccompanied, and now that Parvin inhabited a position of importance to the Sultan, she required her own personal chaperone. For the first time, he introduced himself. His name was Hyacinth. Many of the eunuchs had flower names. She studied him now, his wide eyes, his black lashes, his intelligent mouth.

  “Why did you come forward to recite poetry that day?” she asked.

  “To make certain that you would perform for the Alchemist. You were endangering yourself by disobeying him, and you were in my care.”

  “I don’t think that’s the only reason.”

  She was a more important person now. Everyone in the palace knew that the Sultan was taken with her, and they attributed the upcoming festivities to his newfound happiness. Hyacinth was not as much her superior as he had been before. He felt that he had to answer her honestly.

  “I did it because I wanted to see you dance.”

  As soon as he said it, she worried that she had abused her new position and was afraid that she had humiliated him. But he didn’t seem embarrassed by his admission; on the contrary, he seemed relieved. And something in her expression must have revealed that she was happy to hear him say it—not just because her suspicions were confirmed, but because she had hoped he would say exactly this. She began to cry, and she realized that she had been thinking of nothing but him for the last seven days, that during the Sultan’s entertainments with her her own mind had traveled far away, to the man now known to her as Hyacinth. It struck her that her tears were tears of the joy of creation, that they were accompanied by the sweet, intense feeling that she had already imagined all of this, Hyacinth’s standing there, gazing at her, and that there was a deep, satisfying pleasure in its fruition. She wondered if this wasn’t always a part of falling in love, this feeling of living out a story that you have already secretly invented. She looked into his eyes and had the sense that the story she had written on her internal travels was about to continue in ways she could not have dreamt of, was about to leap out of her imagination and exist on its own. She felt as though she were the very story itself, the very letters and words dancing like shadows off the page. She had the feeling that she was entering the future.

  So this is where they come from.

  What?

  Cymbals.

  She had her head on his shoulder. He was stroking her hair.

  From unrequited love, she said.

  Then he kissed her. And she kissed him back.

  At the northern end of the pleasure grounds between the Topkapi Saray and the seawalls along the Golden Horn were extensive gardens dotted with numerous small kiosks. Each consisted of three or four rooms with chimneys whose mantel trees were fashioned of silver and whose windows were glazed and protected with a gilt iron grill. The whole building was set with opals, rubies, emeralds, painted with flowers, and graced with inlaid works of porphyry, marble, jet, and jasper. The kiosks had many uses and one of the larger ones was used by the Chief Confectioner of the palace to soak and distill rose petals into an essence used for making the sweetmeat known to the West as Turkish delight. The building was called the Rose Pavilion.

  This was where they came to meet each other during the celebration, and where they continued to meet for some time after. Hyacinth accompanied Parvin to the festivities hosted by the Sultan, and while her presence was required at night, there were many hours during the day when Murad took in games or theatricals or competitions and so she was free to travel about the gardens, accompanied by her chaperone, of course. Hyacinth had become friendly with the Chief Confectioner, who was also a eunuch captured in battle on the African shores, and he let the lovers in every afternoon, while he delivered his delicacies to the kitchen. The kiosk smelled so strongly of roses that they had to cover their faces at first, but eventually the odor became invisible to them, became the inevitable aroma of their time together. They brought blankets to spread on the floor and they swept aside the piles of discarded thorny stems. They had five afternoons in which to learn everything they could about each other—they didn’t know what chance they would have to meet again—and so they talked and touched incessantly, while the rose petals slowly soaked inside the pavilion and, outside, the sun inched dispassionately down toward the sea.

  The first afternoon they fell into each other hungrily, dangerously. They stared at each other with fascination and surprise, strangers but astonishingly familiar. They mouthed each other’s names; later, she would laugh at his, because it seemed so out of keeping with his strength and because it had been given to him when he had been captured and taken as a eunuch and therefore seemed not really his name at all, but now she said it over and over. He said hers too, in the same mellow voice he had used to recite poetry, only he spoke it more softly, and he did not try to hide his emotion when his face trembled or his lips shook. His hands held her face in his, and she felt like a bird’s egg: small and safe and about to be born. Her hands raced all over his body, taking him in through her fingertips. She explored daringly at first, and then, somewhat gingerly. She was unsure. But when she reached down, filled with trepidation, to where she had expected to find an absence, she was met with a presence that both overjoyed and shocked her. Here was the beginning of the future she had sensed. This was something she could not have invented.

  He was not what she expected a eunuch to be. At first, she did not ask questions. She merely enjoyed the results of her misapprehension, and left it at that. But later, as they lay side by side in the Rose Pavilion, flower petals strewn across their blankets and crushed underneath them, a thorny stem captured in her long hair, she wondered aloud why he had not been treated like the others. She knew what happened to eunuchs. She knew that some of them were castrated before puberty, and that others, those who were taken later, usually in battle or in the slave trade, those were mutilated completely. A doctor in the palace checked the men every year, to make sure that nothing had grown back. It was considered essential to the eunuchs’ purpose—the guarding and protecting of women—that they be uninterested in their charges, and therefore trustworthy. They also held many other positions of power within the palace, but the black eunuchs’ chief responsibility was to watch over the harem. How could he have escaped the fate of the others? How had he maintained his manhood?

  He smiled when she asked him, as if holding back a laugh. “Before I tell you,” he said, “I want to know if it would have made a difference.”

  She thought for a moment. Then she said, “I fell in love with you when you grabbed my arm in the carriage. I didn’t know it then, but I did. And I assumed you were like the others, so that answers your question. But am I happy I was wrong? Yes.”

  He explained that when he was captured they had brutalized his testicles, but he had run away before they could do anything more. They had found him, and brought him to the palace, but when they took him before the Kizlar Agha, the Chief of the Eunuchs, the man had been so taken with the new charge’s beauty that he had instantly given him the name Hyacinth and declared that he would be his personal attendant. As soon as Hyacinth was alone with him, he told the Kizlar Agha that if he castrated him completely he would kill himself, and the Agha, already half in love with the boy, had acquiesced.

  “Then why did he send you to take care of the women?”

  “Once he realized that I would never return his feelings, he only wanted to make sure that I wasn’t around the men. He was more jealous of them than of the women.”

  They both smiled when he said this, because the idea so completely contradicted their present state. Then they saw that the first pink lights of sunset were streaming into the kiosk and they knew that their time was ending.

  �
�What was your real name?” she asked.

  “Subbaharan,” he said.

  She had trouble pronouncing it, and it sounded to her like the name of someone unhappy, someone doomed. She touched his long eyelashes with her fingertips and said, “I like Hyacinth.”

  2005

  It was dim in the room but Milo’s eyes shone. They always seemed to reflect what little light there was. His face was close to hers and he was studying her, preparing to ask a question.

  What did you do before this?

  His tone of voice told her that this was the time when she could no longer avoid talking about herself. She pushed her hair behind her ear. She closed her eyes and opened them and took a breath.

  I was a dancer. And then I wasn’t.

  What happened?

  She tilted her head. She looked away and then back at him.

  I had an injury.

  What happened?

  I lost someone very close to me. I was upset. I threw myself into dancing and then I fell. From up high. Onstage. I can’t dance again.

  She thought she might start to cry but she didn’t.

  So you are a shaman, he said, holding her close.

  Your shaman, she said.

  1623

  The festivities ended and Hyacinth accompanied Parvin back to the palace. He brought her to the Sultan’s chambers where Kaya was waiting for her, and they had no privacy in which to say good-bye. They didn’t know when they would be able to see each other again. As he was leaving, he pressed a rose petal into her palm.

  When Parvin opened her hand and looked at the bruised petal, Kaya clucked and told her to forget him.

  “They say you are going to be a Haseki,” said Kaya, “the Sultan’s favorite. Then you will never go back to the Old Palace.”

  “How can I be a Haseki? The Sultan knows I don’t like him. I’m just the one he enjoys right now. As long as I don’t have his baby, I’ll be safe.”

  “Believe what you like,” said Kaya, brushing Parvin’s hair. “But the talk in the Valide Sultan’s suite is that you will be a Haseki. Cheer up. You’re going to be rich.”

  2005

  Now it was dark. You could hear the faraway sounds of cars and the heaving of trucks going by in the night if you listened, but Honor and Milo weren’t listening to anything but the story. They were working in the dark, following a moonlit trail, hunters in a green-black deepening forest, fishermen at sea.

  Do you think she and Hyacinth will be together? she asked.

  No, he said. This story is tragic. The Sultan will keep them apart.

  Will she end up with Avedis?

  Then his love won’t be unrequited, and I told you, this one is tragic.

  No, it would be. She loves Hyacinth.

  1623

  One day a eunuch arrived to take her to Avedis’s workshop. It was an important occasion. None other than the Sultan himself was going to be present. The eunuch, who was not Hyacinth, explained that, as he understood it, although Avedis had not entirely completed his project for the Sultan it was almost finished and the metalsmith had requested to have Parvin dance for him in order to make the final touches and that the Sultan had only agreed to such a meeting if he were in attendance, because of course no one could view her dance without the express permission of the Sovereign. Parvin only half listened to the eunuch as he babbled on and didn’t think to mention that she was in no mood to dance or that the thought of seeing that strange and unhelpful Alchemist again reminded her of the day that Hyacinth had stopped her from jumping out of the carriage. She missed him. She pulled her silk skirts tightly in her delicate hand and lifting her feet softly followed behind the eunuch as he skittered and wobbled across the palace grounds to Avedis’s workshop. At one point she turned around to look for her love because she thought that she could sense his presence, but she saw nothing except lonely gardens, and she had no idea that she had missed him by an instant. His dark shape was hidden in the shadow of a wall, not twenty feet away from her.

  Avedis had prepared an elaborate presentation, during which he said, as he told them what he was going to say, that he would reveal to them how he had discovered the secret formula for the making of cymbals. Not just any cymbals, but the ideal cymbals, the gleaming discs from which would ring the celestial music of the spheres. He stood up in his workshop, the dim light filtering through glass jars filled with jewel-colored liquids and flickering off the bronze cups lining the shelves reflecting onto him in a deep coppery color that made him appear like a bronze statue come to life. He was a tall, thin, wizardish-looking man with the unconsciously haughty and slightly silly air of an aspiring academic. He wore a long beard that lengthened his already long face and made his kind, sincere, searching eyes appear to be floating even higher in the lofty realm of the mystical than they actually were. He possessed a ridiculous hopefulness and his heart was visible on his face and Parvin, after getting over her disgust at having to sit beside the Sultan with her hand on his broad knee, was carried along by the rapturous recounting of Avedis’s discovery. She was pulled into his narrative as if she were a drowned body being carried along underwater by a fast current, the details and turns of his story embedding themselves in her mind like twigs and leaves and pebbles catching in the twisting scarf of her long hair.

  In the drama of his recounting his first vision of her dance (again that fateful day), which he couched in quasi-religious terms so as not to threaten or offend the Sultan, Avedis became swept up in his own story. He told his rapt audience about his own past, his apprenticeship as a metalsmith, his developing interest in alchemy, his promotion within the court, his devotion to the Sultan, and he worked his way onto the subject of the great city of Constantinople. A melting pot of cultures! he cried. He spoke now with deep, affecting emotion about the cosmopolitanism of his beloved home, how the Turks, Jews, Armenians, Persians, and so many others lived in harmony together and he paused to look gratefully at Murad. In this incredible melting pot, he said, made possible by the broad-mindedness of our noble leaders—and here the Sultan smiled, because he enjoyed flattery of any flavor and also because he was intelligent enough to appreciate that it was the brilliance of the Ottoman Empire, among many other insights, to recognize the value of many cultures living together in peace, in no small part because different kinds of people were good at and willing to engage in different kinds of work, which when administered wisely hugely benefited the economy. He may himself not have been a peace-loving or intellectual man, but he was not stupid. In this incredible melting pot, Avedis continued, I myself have been moved and softened and changed, like a piece of stone turning to gold in one of my own cauldrons, by so many disparate influences that I have been transformed! Transformed by a vision of beauty! And in the transformation of my own awareness of beauty I have been given the gift of inspiration. I have been inspired and enabled to create a vehicle for reproducing, in all its wondrous complexity, a wild, delicate, mysterious, and utterly simple sound: the sound of love.

  And what are the components of this sound? First: Beauty, he said. And he picked up a piece of metal and a silver stick and struck it so that a clear and lovely note rang forth. Next, Desire: and he replaced the first piece of metal he had chosen for a shinier yet darker alloy, which he again struck with the stick. A lower, more deeply reverberating sound was released. And he did the same with the next three attributes: compassion, gentleness, selflessness, each had its own corresponding metal alloy. And then, he said: Freedom. I could go on and on, but let us stop at freedom. Freedom, I realized in my philosophical wanderings toward this sound, freedom is an essential component of love, perhaps the most important. Because in trying to keep, or hold, your beloved, one is acting not of love but possessiveness, need, selfishness. The sound of freedom was the most important sound for love, but where to find it? I pondered the object of my mission, the glorious Parvin, and I watched her dance. Here his eyes misted, and a muscle near his mouth twitched. I studied her spontaneous passionate dancing,
and now the Sultan himself shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and I realized that for her freedom only existed in dance, in movement, in the abstract, because, of course, my dear Parvin was not free. A tear slid down his cheek. Parvin felt a chill. She desired to curl up into a tiny ball, but she stayed frozen. She stared at the hem of Avedis’s left sleeve. The Sultan spoke up: Play the damn things! You boring fool!! He laughed, menacingly. Avedis nodded to a young apprentice, who brought over what appeared to be a plate covered by a shawl. Avedis pulled off the silk with a flourish. The Sultan’s four bodyguards put their hands on the ends of their swords. There were two cymbals. He held one in each hand, and, unable to control himself, boldly went on: She has captured the wild elegance of freedom in her dance, but tragically, yes, tragically, she is not free. Here he stared at Parvin and let the cymbals collide. A sweet, soaring, light-dark sound, the color of sunlight striking a bloodred wine, engulfed the room.

  My love, he said.

  The Sultan looked at one of the guards and a rush of bodies pushed from the sides of the room inward toward Avedis. Suddenly, chaos. The Alchemist remained calm as the storm rushed toward him. He stood reveling in the reverberations of his love. Parvin sensed the Sultan’s glare upon her and turned to glance back into his fury. He looked on her as he might look at a smear of shit underfoot. Then his face contorted into a different level of disgust, and under his eyes appeared half-moons bred from fear. Then again, his mouth opened and from the back of his dark throat he said: Another whore. Clutching his sword he strode forward into the crowd of bodies.

  Parvin stared at Avedis as he was dragged out of his workshop, the cymbals dropping to the floor and clanging, before circling on their rims in a final, spiraling dance.