Sofia (17 page)

So Husayn has found a buyer. That is well,
I thought as I drifted back toward oblivion. Just at the edge, however, I suddenly burst into wakefulness.

This was not just any wealthy buyer. This was a man who had a certain technical skill, a certain vested interest. This was a man who could turn a little knowledge into a going concern. He would not just buy a vase, and he would pay much, much better than vase price. He would buy an industry— and undermine the wealth-producing monopoly of another.

Somehow, somewhere, Husayn in the guise of a Venetian merchant must have learned the secret of
vetro a filigrana
and was about to sell it. Venice was ruined.

I was up off the stupefying rugs in a moment, finding that without pattens the marble under my feet shot cold up into the cocoon of my swaddling along my staggering legs. Towels dropped from me like puddles of water as I groped for at least the dignity of my chemise. My skin that had been scrubbed down to the shine shrank from the dirty linen and my own smell crinkled my nose as it had never offended before. The shirt was stiff and rank with sweat and salt. I gritted my teeth and ignored the sensation. Indeed, I felt that with the shirt, I was reclaiming the birthright that had been scrubbed from me.

Still struggling with the points of my hose, I burst into the neighboring cubicle.

I knew I was not mistaken in my appraisal of the situation when I saw Husayn look up at my arrival. His hands were frozen in the act of describing the glassblowers’ mold and showing how the opaque canes alternated with the clear ones in lining that mold—more than even I knew of the secret process before that moment. I didn’t need Turkish to understand.

And neither did the tilemaker.

The tilemaker had risen out of his cocoon of towels with the excitement of what he was learning. In his hands he held the archetype of all his future profits: an exquisite
tazza
spun with sugar-like decoration from the heart of the deep-petaled lobes around its bowl to the foot of its finger-thin pedestal.

I said something. I’m not certain what it was—doubtless the blackest curse I could bring to my lips—but the roar of anger in my head made me deaf to the rationality of any language. In one moment, I whipped the doublet off my shoulder and through the tilemaker’s hands, bringing the
tazza
with it. The glass shattered into a million slivers on the mottled marble of the floor, likewise rifled from another empire.

And with the glass shattered the world.

Pushing Turks aside, I made my way alone to the open chaos of Bayazid Square and its hopelessly unsatisfied pigeons.

I fled down the street I’d climbed in Husayn’s company earlier that day, hoping the late afternoon surge of traffic would cover me.

He would come after me, of that I was certain. I was so certain that even an hour later, with the setting sun melting Ay a Sofia into pure gold, I was still taking my steps at a lope, trying to look all ways at once like a hunted rabbit. I actually thought I caught a glimpse of the bounce of his turban, there in the square before the greatest of all Constantinople’s holy places. Husayn was answering yet another call to prayer.

At this sight, real or imagined, my exhausted feet found one more burst of strength which carried me around the huge heap of the mosque to the left. There, off in a corner, I saw a dark doorway that seemed deserted enough. I claimed it.

A single torch left by workmen and reaching the end of its life illuminated thirty or so well-worn stone steps that sank downward. I followed them cautiously. The earth closed over me, shutting out all sound, all threat of the strange city in which I was alone and a foreigner.

As I descended, I began to hear water, lots of water, below and, off, beyond sight, a metallic drip, drip, drip. Frail but precise notes sounded as if the strings of a lute were being methodically touched. The failing torchlight revealed a great underground cistern in yellowed highlights, with enough water to provide an imperial city for the duration of the longest siege—or to keep the gardens of an extravagant palace green for several peaceful stints from May until October. I could not, in fact, see the end of either water nor the columns that held the arched roof over it. The columns, too, were rifled Byzantine, I noticed bitterly.

I bent and, with a cupped hand, tasted my discovery. It was dullingly cold but sweet. With quick scoops I replaced all that the baths had sweated from me.

Thus refreshed, I discovered that the notion of siege held my mind. Here, in this underground fountain, was water, safety, a deserted and secure hiding place.

When at last I emerged from the reservoir—when both torch and sun had finally burned out and all the world was dissolving down to a uniform sludge of twilight—the inkling of a new plan had formed in my mind. The top of the cistern’s stairs stank of cats, wiping the fresh, clean smell of the water below from my nostrils but not from my mind.

The thing to do now was to try to find the slave market. The slave market and Sofia Baffo.

***

The streets of Constantinople were silent and grave, cold with the disappearance of the sun. The public world of men, I saw, was but the vain, garish illusion of the day. It was the private life of the harems that was real, and to that reality all mortals retreated at night.

Like the blooms of some gigantic morning glory, the shops and houses had folded in upon themselves. But everywhere, I could feel the tight tendrils of the plant that remained after the blooms had faded. At first I feared my feet might become entangled in this unseen growth as I made my way through the streets alone. Then I assured myself that they were but the invisible connections between houses made by the women, women invisible themselves in veils or closed sedans. Yet by exchanging gossip, comfort, lore, and measures of flour, they made bonds that were strong enough to be sensed even in the dark.

I myself felt attached to such a tendril. It led me unfailingly to the great wooden gate of the slave market, but of course that gate was heavily bolted. It had been so since noon, for it was unmeet to expose either merchandise or buyers, all of the highest quality, to the heat of the day even in March.

Finding the rear of the establishment was not quite as instinctive. I had to calculate footsteps and try to work them through the domestic solids with a complicated sort of geometry. At last a strong tug on my invisible tendril assured me that I had the right alleyway. I climbed up a wall, over a roof of crumbling tile, and finally dropped into what, if one can recognize by sight what one hears by sound, was the very courtyard I had heard through Sofia’s windows that morning.

Yes, there were the windows, high up in one wall, still large enough for a man to crawl through. The only trouble was that they were shuttered. The shutters were flimsy with lattice so that the cool of a summer night’s air would not be lost. But now they were adjusted for the winter weather and might effectively keep out any thief such as myself. Determination must supply where inexperience failed.

The slave shop and its courtyard had been designed with security in mind, but long, uneventful years must have made the occupants careless. The produce and shade of a grape arbor had come to outweigh the danger of placing it right against the wall. It was a fragile ladder and it swayed ominously as I went at the shutter with an adze I had found leaning against an outbuilding. Between silence, security, and haste, no straight line could be drawn, but in spurts and starts I pursued my task.

The hinges began to give.

I am no theologian, yet I am persuaded that God has a special place in His heart for the insurgency of youth. Often He does no more than wink at what, if dared by an older man, would immediately bring down wrathful punishment. Up to this point, fantastic as it may seem, I am certain I had His approval—or, at least, not His strong disapproval.

Or perhaps it was not God but something more magical— perhaps a kiss planted on my infant forehead by my mother as a talisman when she knew she would soon die and leave me without her kind protection. I do not remember such a kiss, but I did feel some power watching over me that night and I am certain that, had I backed down any time before those hinges came loose, I could have made it back to the guest room in Husayn’s house with no punishment at all.

Indeed, my immunity may have extended beyond that point. I have rehearsed these events over in my mind a thousand times every day since that night, searching for the precise step I took that was one step too far. At one exact moment, I believe, I gave up the freedom to act of my own will, to retreat, to retrace my steps, to have my life tumble on in a different, happier vein. Where was that moment when my will abandoned me, when a fate was kicked loose to tumble down upon me in a landslide that cannot be stopped and still dumps its debris on me even now? I have been unable to answer this satisfactorily. Husayn, I know, thinks it was the very moment I left his care. But I am convinced I could have gone even further than the removal of that shutter with no permanent damage done.

Madonna Baffo, as it happened, slept alone in that great room that night. She had heard me scrambling about in the dry grapevines and was awake and aware of who I was even before moonlight poured through the open window into her room. She did not, therefore, scream to betray me. She stood waiting, looking in the brazier-smoked moonlight like a costly icon in a wash of exotic incense. She gave me a hand as I let myself down through the window and smiled with pleasure as she greeted me in a whisper.

“How nice to see you, Signor Veniero.”

I did not take time to plead with her that she call me Giorgio. I had greater demands of her. “I have come to rescue you,” I said.

To my surprise, she turned and walked a few steps away, toying with me.

“But...but this is impossible,” she said.

“It’s not. I’ve found the perfect place for us to hide. An old cistern quite near here where you can wait.”

“I’ve no desire to be damp and cold in a cistern.”

“It’ll be just for a short while, just until I manage to get across to Pera and get one of our countrymen to bring a boat and—”

“But Signor Veniero, I can’t. I can’t climb walls like you can—like a fly. Like you have been doing, so it seems, since the very first day I met you.”

To be likened to a fly was not what praise I had expected for my feat, but I ignored it.

“You can,” I insisted. I was offering her what she had most

coveted of me at our first meeting, after all. “I will help you. You can do it. You must do it.”

“I don’t know.” she said. Not that she was afraid, not that she mistrusted me—simply that she did not know.

I did know. I grabbed her quickly and firmly about the waist—(that waist, my God! the touch of it made my arms fall into weak spasms)—and carried her to the window.

Sofia gave a little squeal—of delight? of fear? of protest?— and fought against my arms until I was forced to set her down lest someone overhear us.

“Signor Veniero,” she said, having come, it seemed, to a sudden decision. “First sit down and let me tell you something. Let me tell you what happened to me today.”

“Tell me later.” I was pleading, not ordering. “When you are safe and there is time.”

“Oh, no, please.” Her decision gained momentum and insistence in response to my weakness. “I simply must tell you. I’ve been bursting with it all day and I’ve had no one to tell. I wanted to tell my maid Maria, but it seems they’ve already sold her.”

“They’ve sold Maria?” I asked, and a curious premonition passed over me.
You should have bought that woman Maria while you had the chance, it seemed to say. Such a chance will never come again.
Perhaps this was a warning that the point of no return was rapidly approaching, but I refused to understand it. “Where have they sold her?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sofia said. “To some old man who wanted kitchen help. I don’t know. I can’t understand a word of what they say. I do think it was rather inconsiderate of them to leave me without a confidante on this, of all days. When I have seen—oh, such wonders! Please, please sit down and let me tell you before I burst.”

There. This is the point where my fate was decided. I think I even felt it. As Baffo’s daughter spoke her last request, her beauty and her presence got the better of me. I felt the energy that had spurred me forth all night drain and leave me weak, clumsy, and stupid. Perhaps it was indeed the departure of God’s pleasure or the charm of a mother’s kiss. My knees gave way and I had to sit, lulled by the spell of her voice and the wonders she described with it as if it were a powerful Anatolian leach.

“This morning, just shortly after you left, they put me in a closed sedan chair and carried me off—nay, I know not where. All I can say is, there is no place like it in all the earth. I am almost constrained to say that it was not earth at all, but that those porters were angels and I was carried for some few hours into heaven itself.

“At first I felt and heard the crowds pressing all about and I did not dare to peek out, for I knew that would displease the master. Besides, I was somewhat afraid, for the crowds seemed loud and rough. But soon I was aware that they were thinning and those people whom I heard seemed ever more sober and respectful, as if it were some great shrine we were approaching. Now I dared to pull back the curtain just a bit and to have a look around me.

“I saw that we were passing through a great and wonderful garden. Tall cypress tress stood as sentinels in perfect straight lines along the numerous and delightful pathways. Beneath each tree, in rows as regimented as if they had been planted there, a gardener in a red headdress was at work.

“And, oh, what exotics grew beneath their hands! The lawn was as plush and uniform as a rug, as if every blade were hand-knotted into place. And as if deep borders on every side were set in out beds of flowers. Is it not still Lent? Have we not still a week or two till Easter? And yet I saw them: rank upon rank of brilliant pink, red, and white blooms like an infinite army mustered for review. The flowers resembled the Turkish army, I vow, for they were just like so many turbaned soldiers standing up oh so straight! I have never seen anything of the kind before.”