The only journey of his life (part 2)
(Original translation of a novella by Georgios Vizyinos, written in 1884. This is part two. You can read part one here. You can find a link to the next part at the end of this installment.)
All these things my grandfather used to tell me, and he would tell them to me like they had happened just yesterday, like they could happen at any time around the world. I remember even today with what childish pride I entered into the city the first time as a new recruit of the “order” of the tailors, thinking that within a few days I would come out of the gate I was now walking under in triumph, accompanying the most beautiful princess to my village. That’s what my grandfather had given me to understand. And because my grandfather was the most well-traveled and most cosmopolitan person I knew, I believed his stories down to the letter.
Nevertheless, a few months had gone by since my arrival and nothing had yet been accomplished. It’s true that my boss was the head tailor of the Sultana Balide, and because I was the youngest of my classmates, he often sent me to her palace by the Bosporus, some times carrying a big cloth sack on my head, other times a silk and gold-embellished bag under my arm, with his wares inside. Many times, then, did I pass through the luxurious galleries, and through shady passages entered into the magical and myrrh-smelling quarters of the harem of Sultana Balide. But the beings with which I came into relations there were mostly the black eunuchs, with their very wide mouth, with their big teeth shining terribly white between their thick lips, and with some fierce looks that made me shake in horror. Sometimes they — the princesses undoubtedly — wanted to express their particular gratification towards their tailor boy. Then, the most frightening Black would take the most frightening whip, would nod towards me and walk in front of me. A second Black with a second whip would follow at my heels. In this way, between those two executioners, I would enter into the innermost recess of the harem, in which, however, I would see nothing except for the floor which although shiny, like the best of dance halls, it was, nevertheless, covered with heavy carpets.
But if I didn’t see, at least I heard. I heard the female voices and laughter and brutal jokes and indecent profanities directed at Kislar Agas (the chief eunuch) who was walking before me and who was yelling with all his might for the attendants and concubines of the Sultana to go away in hiding as I approached, hitting mercilessly with his whip those who dared to peek behind doors and windows to see a male person from so close. The Ethiopian walking after me was, on the one hand, guarding me against being secretly snatched from behind, following me impeccably, and on the other hand, watching out lest I dare raise my eyes from the ground and profane with my infidel look the holy victims that were destined to be sacrificed at the capricious whim of their great Lord.
In the midst of these emotions, I would finally reach the end. But there, in the last room, where the black eunuchs left me closing the door behind me, what do you think awaited me? Some rosy-cheeked, blond princess ready to jump with joy into my arms? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But inside the wall, through which this room communicated with another one, a wooden cylinder that had been constructed to revolve in place on a vertical axis without letting you see from the sides into the next room awaited me to caress it, to pat it as if it were my lover. As soon as I caressed it to the top a high-pitched, very high-pitched voice was heard inside:
“Have you come, my little lamb?”
“Yes, my Sultana.”
The wooden cylinder would revolve around itself, presenting before me a small door that made it seem like a cupboard. Patchouli, musk, amber, and all the perfumes of India gave off a sweet fragrance from behind that door. Of course, inside it would be my princess! I would open the door eagerly and inside this small revolving cupboard I would be greeted by a mahalepi, a boureki, or a baklava, or some other sweet thing of this sort that might have no tongue, yet as soon as you see it you feel that it tells you repeatedly “eat me.” Which I did, of course, without much ado.
One day, I had just finished this pleasant engagement of mine, when the high-pitched voice asks me if I want anything better.
“No my Sultana, I don’t want anything better than you.”
“Bravo, my little lamb! Are you big? Like, big?”
I was getting ready to tell her that I’m big enough to get into that little cupboard, close the door, spin the cylinder around, and arrive like a boureki before her eyes. But the black eunuch, who in the meantime had entered into the room without me noticing him, let out an obscene insult over my head, suffocating the voice in my throat.
My poor princess had to receive her answer from his wild, terrible mouth!
“Big? Ha ha ha!” Kislar agas (the chief eunuch) croaked laughing in sardonic laughter.
“He is so small still, that in order to hang him high, to your eye level, I ordered a stool for him to step on.”
Then he signed at me to follow him…
Now, should Balide-Sultana happened to have, like the kings of Asia used to have, a wise secretary at each gate of her palace, ordered to express in a smooth style of speech all that happened around him, I do not doubt that each of them independently would note in his journal that on that day I came out the harem, like always, with one eunuch in front of me, keeping the concubines from my sight, and the other eunuch behind me, guarding against those trying to pull me from the back of my clothes. But I assure you that since the moment that terrible “Arab” said that he ordered a “new stool” to hang me, at that moment, the floor of the room in which I was in suddenly gave way beneath my feet and I collapsed into vast, dark chaos with that vertigo of the head and that faintness of heart which we feel when we dream that we’re falling from a steep rock of immeasurable height to escape the danger of some monstrous pursuer that threatens our life.
How I got back to our workshop, it’s impossible to say. Some of my classmates were saying that I lost my way from my fright, that I lost my mind. I let them joke. Only when those who had taken sack to the palace before me started saying that they, too, supposedly ate sweets from the round, rotating cupboard and that the room with which it communicates when it revolves was not the hall or the bedroom of the princess, but the cellar of the harem, and that the sweet, that very sweet voice, was not on my love the princess, but of the oldest eunuch of the palace — only then did my good disposition disappear and I fought with everyone and dissociated myself so much from them that never spoke to them again since then.
That I never went back to the harem goes without saying. Because as sad as it made me, thinking that my princess was lying behind the round cupboard next to the banks of the Bosporus, it was also just as hard to understand why she didn’t send her father at the end of the day to ask me as her husband, as all the princesses that my grandfather met had done.
After that sad disappointment, the loathful and boring monotony of practical living and the difficulties a beginner faces with the elements of art seemed two and three times worse to me. Under their burden, I began to waste away and to wilt, sitting there inside the Market of Constantinopole, behind the iron gates of Kempetsi Inn towards the led domes of which I would direct, miserable as I was, no longer the charming sounds of love songs but the cries and wailings of childish, heart-pounding nostalgia!
(End of part two. Will our little tailor boy’s adventure to the big city end in disappointment or will some twist of fate offer him the chance to return to his village with head held high? Read part 3 here to find out.)
