American Music (8 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Milo and Honor

M
ilo saw a white clapboard house on the ceiling. A raw damp smell of ocean air flew through the room. Suddenly lights arrived in the windows of the floating house and out came big-band music as if heard from a distant radio, Count Basie playing from Kansas City. When he opened his eyes Honor was holding his hand.

You were saying something to me, calling me.

There was a house on the ceiling and it was swinging.

I see, she said.

Then: What was I saying?

Something about the Bosphorus, a tipping boat, a pavilion carved out of jewels. I’ve just been sitting here holding your hand. Then you pulled away and I put my hand on your arm. That’s when you started talking. When I touched your arm the story changed.

He was back now, sitting up. He shook the hair from his eyes. His face had been filling out again. He looked healthier, stronger.

There was something about cymbals coming from Turkey, wasn’t there? The beginning of everything, the origin of all this music and mess. If we understand how all of this got started, even if it’s just a myth, a story that isn’t true, maybe we can make some sense out of what went on with Vivian and Joe, what’s going on with us. That older guy from Constantinople, the cymbal maker, was I talking about him?

I don’t think so. It seemed like you were talking about a woman, a girl really. It seemed like you were the girl, talking through her.

Where was it that you put your hand?

She pointed to a spot on his arm below his shoulder where the muscle twisted, and he grabbed her wrist.

Keep it there, he said.

1623

In the orchard, on her way to the New Palace, the girl tried to jump out of the carriage, but the eunuch stopped her with his hand on her arm. It was a touch that did not so much hurt her as communicate a desire to keep her alive.

Later, she had a bruise, which the Sultan found charming. Turning back to sit solemnly in the midst of four escorts, she found herself frightened by the sight of sunlight licking the small tough leaves on the fruit trees. She didn’t know what to expect—the stories of what lay ahead for her were so strange they seemed impossible to believe—but she knew that without the force of that hand on her arm her fear would have made her run straight to her death.

They had bathed her and rubbed rose oil on her body before swathing her in layers of colored silk. Her veil panted above her mouth. She could smell the sea. At one point on the ride they crossed a garden and looking out of the carriage she saw hundreds of flowers, vivid yellows and pinks and reds that smeared across her vision and made her want to vomit. The carriage itself was festooned with roses and tulips and carnations. The perfume was overpowering, poisonous. The carriage stopped at the Gate of Felicity.

Flanked by two escorts on either side, she entered the Third Court. She was not taken to the White Eunuchs’ Quarters or to the Throne Room or to the Library, but instead accompanied directly to the Royal Chamber. In her confusion, she thought the grapes depicted in the shimmering mosaic that confronted her when she entered were real, and she sensed her mouth watering, instinctively. The luxury and almost disgusting beauty of the room were familiar to her from having seen the Valide Sultan’s suite, but what she witnessed here was of another magnitude. It was a terrifying sumptuousness, and she felt an ache of pleasure in the midst of her fear. When the eunuchs left her, she tried to meet the eyes of the one who had stopped her from jumping, but he held his gaze steadily in front of him, his lips firmly set, his long black lashes only slightly darker than his skin, and seemed as unreachable as the grapes in the mosaic.

She was waiting, for many hours, on heaps of pillows and embroidered sheets. Women had come to attend to her, but she had not been fed, and as her hunger and anxiety escalated, she passed her hands nervously over the fabrics surrounding her, and felt every gold thread like a needle in her skin. An old woman named Kaya was mainly responsible for her, and had brought her water. In a moment of desperation she had blurted out, “My name is Parvin.” “Farvin,” Kaya repeated, because she had no front teeth.

She was waiting to be raped. She knew it and Kaya knew it. But it was not called rape and it was not thought of that way. It would have been considered treasonous, or demented, to have such a thought.

In her state of increasing panic, she imagined hundreds of birds were screeching and trying to enter the room through the space under the door. But as the sound grew more distinct she realized that it was the sound of swords scraping in their sheaths. She thought it must be the Sultan. The door opened, and in walked two of the eunuchs and a third man. They introduced him as the Royal Alchemist. He was a tall man, not Turkish but Armenian, and he had a mustache and long, compassionate eyebrows. He came toward her, slowly, and he could tell by her voice that she was Persian. She was talking now, feverishly, asking him to help her escape. His face was so gentle that she assumed he could rescue her. Which direction should I run? she asked, and he said, There are guards everywhere. Hide me, then, she said, and his eyebrows angled more steeply, giving her hope. She was not aware, in her delirium, that he was as much a servant as she, and that although he would have loved to lift her up and run off with her in a cloud of colored silk, he had a job to perform. He was here to work.

He knelt down to look into her face and took her hand, almost as if he were a physician taking her pulse. He explained that he was a metalsmith, and that in addition to his practice of alchemy, he was a craftsman, that he made objects, including musical instruments.

“I understand you are a wonderful dancer,” he said.

“Oh, no, not at all,” she said. “I’m clumsy, and my arms are too long.”

He told her that the Sultan had asked for her because he had seen her dance. He had seen her in his mother’s, the Valide Sultan’s, suite, where Parvin had been selected as a favorite and often performed for the head of the harem’s entertainment. One of the girls would recite poetry and Parvin would move, using traditional steps but often inventing gestures of her own, and it was during one of these graceful exercises that the Sultan had spotted her through a curtain. He came often, to pay tribute to his mother and to enjoy the company of his consorts, but the time he had witnessed her dancing she had not been aware of his presence.

“The Sultan has requested that I make a special set of cymbals to be played while you perform for him. I am here to watch you dance, so that I can be inspired to create the perfect instruments.”

She said that she usually performed to poetry, and that in any case she was not moved at the moment to dance. Her delirium had transmuted into fearlessness, and now she said whatever she felt.

Then one of the two eunuchs stepped forward. He had been standing in the shadows and she hadn’t realized until now that he was the one who had stopped her from jumping. He stepped forward and began to recite a passage from the great poet Firdusi. His shoulders were very broad and as he spoke his white tunic swelled with the energy from his lungs and chest. He looked straight ahead, and still would not meet her eyes, but his gaze was less stern now than before. For a moment, she thought she could sense him shaking slightly, but his words betrayed nothing; they were strong and clear and mellow. The quality of his voice reminded her of the wind pushing little waves far out on the ocean. For the first time in days she felt a lightness in her body. She stood up from the pillows and began to dance.

2005

Some nights after she left Milo, Honor would turn up the music until it thundered in her ears. She hoped that she would blow out an eardrum. She liked the crash of the cymbals in her head. The music was the music Sam had left her. Sam had played drums as a kid. He loved the sound of cymbals. Listen to them, he would say to her, they can shimmer or they can crack. Now, either way, they broke her heart. He’d taught her about how, in his humble opinion—he would say that, his humble opinion, ironically of course because he knew that there was nothing humble about him—he had taught her that so much of jazz was all about cymbals. Symbols? Like symbols on a sign or in a poem, she had asked, looking out the car window, because she hadn’t really been paying attention. That’s cute, he’d said. No, cymbals with a
c
, he went on, they really changed the music in this country because it was when they started using the cymbals for the beat that jazz really began to swing. Swing music, he said, it really all started with cymbals.

And where did cymbals start? she asked playfully, only somewhat curious. A pathetic attempt at flirting, she thought. She was unable to distract him.

That’s a good question, he said thoughtfully. Always the teacher, always the journalist. Always honest:

I have no idea.

The Cymbal Maker

Avedis had a workshop far from the Sultan’s chambers, on the other side of the palace grounds. Here he and his assistants made cups to be used in the baths, kitchens, and harems of the palace, and poured bronze for the enormous vessels in which the cooks prepared feasts for the Sultan. He was a metalsmith because his father, who had immigrated to Constantinople in 1598, had been a metalsmith. Avedis had done well in the family trade. Recently, he had been given authorization to make cymbals and bells for the Sultan’s court. But his passion, his intellectual lust, was for alchemy. The Sultan, Murad IV, was indulgent of Avedis’s interest not only because it promised riches, but because he had a taste for gold jewelry. A savage warrior who had had seventeen of his eighteen brothers murdered when he ascended to the throne, Murad evidently also saved a place in his heart for beauty. He was a drunk who loved the poets. He adored women and soulful music. And he dreamt of marrying his passions, as he had explained to Avedis while posing for a miniature portrait in jeweled chain mail armor, in a vision of Parvin, the Persian girl with the long limbs, dancing to the rhythm of heavenly cymbals. He wanted Avedis to create the perfect accompaniment to her movement, a sound that would capture her grace.

After seeing her dance himself, Avedis understood his Sovereign’s obsession. His insides bled a little when he thought of her. Sitting in his workshop, hunched over a stained and ancient copy of Paracelsus’
The Tincture of the Philosophers
, he could not keep himself from picturing the curve of her elbow as it swept before her face, and the bend of her knee, seen behind folds of silk, as it dipped and allowed her ankles to soften and then push her delicate feet off the ground. He tried to concentrate on the words in front of him, which were explaining that all that was necessary to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone was to mix and coagulate the “rose-colored blood of the Lion” and the “gluten of the Eagle,” but it was hopeless. He heard over and over her pleas to him to help her escape, and he was ashamed at himself for having paid so little attention. But what could he have done? Risk execution for the sake of a girl he didn’t know? He had worked long and hard to acquire his status within the palace, and his dream was to start his own factory in Constantinople. Besides, when she’d asked him, he hadn’t yet seen her dance.

As soon as that thought bubbled in his brain, the rationalization disgusted him. He was a gentle man, but severe with himself. He seemed to seek out the same kind of magical perfection in his own behavior that he sought in his laboratory. But it was too late for nobility in action. Now he was left to wonder about her. What made her so headstrong and unhappy? Most of the girls in the harem would have been pleased to be picked by the Sultan. It was an opportunity to better their circumstances, perhaps even give birth to a princess and be taken care of for life, or to a prince and possibly become the Valide Sultan, the head of the harem and the true power behind the throne. Or, if the Sultan fell deeply for a consort, he might make her a Haseki, one of his favorites, and she could live in the New Palace, and receive a higher allowance than his own daughters. To be a Haseki was in many ways the most powerful position of all, and most girls in the harem would not even dream of such good fortune. But obviously the Sultan’s latest infatuation had no craving for power or security. She appeared to live through her feelings alone: fear, need, dancing, abandon. Maybe she was too young to appreciate her situation; she looked to him to be about sixteen, although something in her eyes told him she was older. Or maybe she was just a fool. It didn’t matter. His heart bent like one of his molten metals when he pictured her. He would have turned her to gold to save her, if he’d known how, but in spite of his years of study and experimentation, he did not. All he could hope to give her at this point was a set of cymbals that would do justice to her art, an instrument whose purity might equal hers, and, if he was lucky, whose vibrations might also contain a hint of the longing he felt for her—his, and this was how he had already begun to think of her, as
his
—his lovely and unobtainable, his mysterious and imprisoned Parvin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1936

W
hen will you tell her?

She already knows, Joe said.

How can you tell?

She suggested we go to see Basie, at Roseland. It wasn’t like her. She doesn’t like the music that much, and it’s too expensive. She never thinks of that kind of thing.

She loves you very much.

She used to. Not anymore.

People don’t really stop loving other people, Vivian said.

She had her head on his shoulder. Her hair in twisted ribbons down his back.

She’s frightened, she said.

I’m frightened, he said.

He touched her face with his hand.

But you’ll never stop loving me? he said.

I don’t see how that’s possible.

1623

In the mornings when she awoke, the Sultan was already gone. He left the bed sequined with silver coins, a sign that he was pleased, and every morning she collected the coins and threw them in the base of the ceramic pot where a leafy flowering plant grew in the corner. One day, as she was covering the coins with dirt, Kaya walked in wearing a tense expression on her face, and behind her was the eunuch. He nodded his head for Kaya to leave, which she did, but not before going over to the flowerpot and pretending to clean it, while quickly hiding the last of the coins. When she left and Parvin was alone with the eunuch, they stood facing each other for several long seconds before he spoke.

It was unexpected that there would be so much tension; the black eunuchs were in charge of the harem women and Parvin had spent almost her entire life in the harem. She had been followed by, tended to, practically siblings with these men. They had seen her unveiled, unclothed, unwashed. But she had never seen this man before the day he had stopped her from jumping out of the carriage, and she felt a deep and inevitable bond to him. She did not blame him for taking her to the Sultan because he had saved her life and he had done so even though—and this was absolutely clear to her—he had done it even though he had no illusions that her life included any more joy or hope or liberty than his. It was simply hers. He recognized that, and she wanted to thank him for it.

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.