Or perhaps this is just another lie? Perhaps there was something about the Sultana’s strength that wasn’t all together unpleasant? Is she indeed what the Turks call a cibukli, well equipped to play the role of both sexes? Are the women in the hammam at the Seraglio really not allowed to touch one another?
But most of all he wants the stories of punishment. Of whips and satin belts. Of deep dungeons from which only groans are heard. Of purple bruises on milky white skin. Stories that grow as she tells them, twist in new directions, each measured by the intensity of his attention. Stories that astonish even her.
‘These,’ she whispers to him, ‘are the secrets of the Palace for which I was to pay with my life, had I not managed to escape. You may be the only Frank to know them.’
The girl from Galata, her predecessor, has sent words of venom. You viper, you dirty whore, she had scribbled on a piece of paper. I’ll scratch your eyes out. I’ll make you lick the floor of the room that used to be mine.
‘I didn’t even know the frumpy creature could write,’ the internuncio says, reading it, crumpling the paper into a ball and tossing it into the fire. ‘Now, I know what to do if you do not please me the way I want it.’
She doesn’t like it when he says things like that. The girl from Galata is younger than she is and was sent back to her mother without warning, just because Carlo brought her round, a new toy, a new distraction.
There are days when her internuncio does not come at all. The walls of the apartment he has rented for her seem to close on her. She dresses herself in her new clothes; pins up her hair; forces the maid to clean her room once again; arranges fresh flowers beside the mirror, so that the blooms are reflected in it. Fusses with the throw on the bed, the pillows, until everything is pleasing to the eye. Then she waits and waits, watching through the window how other people, free, walk in the streets. She envies them sometimes. Even the servants carrying big baskets of fish, or leading donkeys. She envies the dogs that roam the streets in packs, or lie basking in the sun knowing no one will disturb them.
His life at the Polish mission is busy, the internuncio tells her. He has important duties to attend to. A delicate position to maintain. ‘The art of observation, my little Dou-Dou,’ he tells her. ‘Of knowing what you are not supposed to know.’
A very useful art. Indispensable in politics, for politics is the art of knowing. Of predicting. Of turning your enemies against each other and making sure your friends stay loyal out of self-interest. An art Charles Boscamp, Esquire, excels at.
As soon as he comes in, she helps him remove his coat and his shoes. In her company, he is emptying himself, clearing his mind, softening himself for pleasure. She should be like the sound of a waterfall, the soothing distraction. Like a garden where he can find respite.
‘I would like politics,’ she says.
‘I’m sure you would.’ He laughs when he says that, pinching her cheeks. He likes when he senses the want in her, the desire for his world. Sometimes she thinks that he doesn’t really want anything any more, that in his mouth sweetness is not as vivid as in hers. That his pleasure is not real until he sees it in her first.
‘Divide et impera,’ he says, wiping his hands on a towel she is holding for him. ‘The Sultan’s counsels are vying for power. There is no consistency in the Porte.’
His caresses are short and fleeting; his hands touch her as if she were a pillow or a thick blanket meant for comfort. He likes when she kneels in front of him. He never stops talking when he pushes her head down between his legs. ‘My jewel,’ he has taught her to say. She has learnt that release comes quickly, and she is grateful for it. Sometimes she thinks he prefers a massage to the act itself, for then he can close his eyes and forget about her altogether. His presence leaves her hungry, filled with longings. She has taken to touching herself when he leaves, imagining that it is his hand that slowly rubs the sweet spot between her legs.
The internuncio likes to talk. He has met the Emperor of Prussia and the King of Poland. He tells her that the Polish King became king only because the Russian Empress wanted it. She has sent her troops to Warsaw, to the election field. Some people say that she ordered her own husband murdered. Suffocated with his pillow.
Men tremble at the sight of her, he says. Handsome Russian boys are groomed to catch the eye of the Empress, coached by their mothers in ways to please a woman, the whole family making plans for its illustrious future. His wise friend, Count Vronsky, always bows to all handsome valets de chambre and calls them brother. He knows that a day may come when one of them would be elevated above him by the whim of his Empress.
‘This is not natural,’ the internuncio says. ‘Not right. It is against the order of things.’
She closes her eyes and imagines the Russian Empress pointing at a young handsome man. She imagines sending her troops to Poland to make her lover a king. Bending over her gilded desk and signing important papers. Stamping her foot to make her courtiers hurry.
‘The Ottoman Porte,’ the internuncio says, ‘is crucial for the Russian Empress, and therefore, my position here is of a delicate nature. The Russians do not like that the Poles are courting the Sultan’s support.’
He has been warned a few times; questioned at the Russian mission. He smiles in a way that tells her he is not concerned.
She pours oil onto her hands and warms them with her breath. Slowly she begins pressing his shoulders, kneading away the tension. She loves when he talks of such important matters. Of people rich and powerful and yet how very much similar to the signoras and signores of Phanar.
Once she tells him that. Tells him how people seem to be the same everywhere, how the powerful are not as different from those who are beneath them. How men are really not that different from women, either.
‘Phanar,’ the internuncio says, ‘is the kingdom of busy-bodies, of chatterboxes feeding on any hint of scandal—the kingdom of calumny and hypocrisy.’
There is anger in his voice, impatience.
‘The world,’ he says, ‘is not what you imagine.’
Rosalia
She was born in exile, her father always said. Better than born in chains, for 1796, the year of her birth, was the first year there was no Poland on the map of Europe.
‘You saved your father’s life,’ her mother said. ‘Before you were born he spoke of nothing but death.’
In her father’s study, there was an engraving of Poland led to her grave. Polonia was a young woman in white, her hands chained. The grave was a square hole in the ground, and three men, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, were already holding the stone lid that would intern her. ‘But not forever,’ her father always said.
In 1795, at Maciejowice, defeated by the Russians in the last battle of the Insurrection, Tadeusz Ko?ciuszko, thinking himself dying, said: ‘Finis Poloniae.’
‘This is what we all feared then, Rosalia,’ her father continued. ‘But we were wrong.’ The soldiers in Napoleon’s Polish Legion had a reply to these words spoken in that black hour of defeat:
Jeszcze Polska nie umarla póki my Żyjemy
