WHEN HANNAH arrived home in the Imperial carriage, Isaac was standing at the gate, wearing the same look of greeting he wore when she returned from the mikvah once a month, cleansed and ready for him.
He helped her down the steps of the carriage, unfastened her veil, and kissed her. The red carnations growing in a clay jardinière at the entrance to their home gave off a spicy fragrance. “You are tired, my ketzele. Come inside. Tell me what was so important at the palace.”
Once inside, Hannah kicked off her shoes and thrust her feet into felt slippers. Isaac led her upstairs. It was late, and Matteo was sound asleep. She threw a cloth over the parrot cage to keep the night draft away, then shrugged off her tunic and trousers and let her nightgown drift over her head. The silk was cool and smooth on her body. Isaac had ordered the nightdress from Venice. It was an absurd garment, impractical and feminine, a frothy confection trimmed with seed pearls. Hannah wore it on those twelve nights of the month—after the completion of her courses, after she had been to the mikvah—when the law permitted them to couple. Other nights, when it was forbidden, she donned a plain muslin gown worn thin from many washings.
Isaac took her hairbrush off the cassone and began to brush Hannah’s hair with long, even strokes. Her muscles loosened and her eyes closed. How like Isaac to know what would relax her. They had been married fourteen years now, and still he petted and fussed over her like a bridegroom. Isaac, like the Sultan, would be incapable of performing with another woman. Hannah was certain of it. Why would he desire another woman when their lovemaking was such an exquisite exchange of pleasure?
“Matteo went to sleep without difficulty?” Hannah asked. She spoke casually, hoping to forestall his questions about her visit to the palace, which she knew would come soon.
“He refused to go to bed, so I lulled him to sleep by telling him for the thousandth time the story of my enslavement on Malta—the suffering and deprivation, how I had to eat unkosher food. He loved that part and wrinkled up his nose in the most adorable way. Then I told him how I sat in the square and wrote letters for illiterate farmers and how I rescued the cabin boy from the rigging of a ship.”
This was Isaac’s way of reassuring her that he was capable of looking after Matteo when she was out working as a midwife. “And then how I rescued you?” Hannah added.
“That is the part he enjoys best.” Isaac put down the hairbrush, took some almond oil from Hannah’s linen bag, and rubbed his ankles with it. It had been more than two years since his enslavement and Isaac still found his skin tender where the shackles had carved angry red bracelets into his flesh. He could not wrap the straps of sandals around the tender skin because the lightest pressure was painful. When he walked on the rough cobblestones of the street in the felt slippers she had made for him, Hannah noticed a slight … not a limp, but a tentativeness, as though he were walking on hot coals. But he never complained.
“Maybe Matteo is too young for such violent tales, Isaac. He has an overheated imagination, which you do nothing to discourage.” She often wondered whether it was Isaac’s stories that excited the child’s nightmares. Would it not be better to tell the folktales of Nasreddin, the gentle old teacher who dispensed commonsense advice from the back of his little donkey? Or let the child tire himself out pretending to be a tightrope walker on the low rope Isaac had strung for him in the garden between two mulberry trees?
“The stories had the desired effect. He fell asleep with his blanket under his cheek.” There was no need to ask Isaac which blanket. It was the one from Venice with his birth father’s crest embroidered in gold thread. It was made of wool finer than anything attainable in Constantinople. She should have destroyed the blanket, which had grown worn and frayed, but Matteo loved it. Besides, it was never out of his grasp long enough for Hannah to fling it into the fire. Though Matteo was too young to understand this, the blanket was the only thing he had in his possession from the family he was born into.
“He has a desire to know about the past—his own and mine,” Isaac said, picking up her hairbrush again. “And someday when he is older, we must tell him the truth about his family.”
It was a discussion they had had many times.
Hannah said, “As far as Matteo is concerned, you are his father and I am his mother.” Her worst fear was that someday, someone would arrive on their doorstep, a long-forgotten relative perhaps. This person would knock and announce, I will take the boy now.
Isaac took the teapot off the brazier in the corner. He poured two cups of steaming black liquid into glasses and handed her one. Tea was costly but they were not yet so short of money that they could not afford their nightly glass together.
“So tell me. What happened at the palace tonight?”
He wanted a full account of the events. Her stomach filled with dread. What would she say?
Hannah slipped off her nightdress and lay on the bed. “Not a confinement. Just some business with Mustafa,” she said. Before he could question her further, she tried to change the subject. “Have I ever mentioned I often have dreams about babies? I find them in the wall niches of our house where the old owner used to store his turbans. I open a drawer and there is a baby staring up at me. Babies appear in the garden roosting in the mulberries, flattening their branches. I trip over babies on the floor when I get up in the night to check on Matteo. I find them swimming happily in the water in the stifling pots. Babies emerge from our silk cocoons like pupae. I swaddle and wrap and wash them all. I no sooner put one to breast than ten more appear.”
Isaac laughed. “How fruitful you are in your dreams.”
It was a jest, meant kindly, but in the most important aspect of her life, Hannah had not been fruitful. Her failure to conceive was a subject they trod around like a boulder in the middle of a road. After so many years of marriage, it seemed unlikely she would ever be pregnant.
“What do you dream of, Isaac?” Hannah asked.
“You,” he said, and kissed the small of her back.
Hannah burrowed her face into the goose-feather pillow.
Isaac retrieved the bahnkes from the cupboard near the window. He heated the cups with a candle, inserting the flame and waiting until the cup began to smoke and turn sooty from the flame. Cradling each glass with a towel, Isaac applied them, one by one, to her back, waiting for her response—a grunt of pain if too hot or a sigh of contentment if just right. He always did this when she returned from the palace. It was as though he wanted to dispel all of the accumulated tension from her body. When he finished, there were seven glass globes spreading warmth and drawing out the pain from her back. She must look like one of those strange animals from New Spain that carried their young on their backs. The glasses tinkled against each other in rhythm to her breathing.
Their heat drew out her exhaustion. She wanted to savour the moment, to feel the tension seep out of her and luxuriate in her husband’s attention. But she knew that at any moment, she would have to fend off Isaac’s questions.
“Something must have happened tonight to make you so on edge.”
Because she could not hide anything from him, Hannah said nothing.
“I worry about you, Hannah. Your work at the harem is all well and good, but if something goes wrong …? A difficult travail, a baby born with a club foot or born blind. When tragedy strikes, people always blame the one closest to hand.”
Bending her leg and taking her foot in his hands, Isaac began to rub, using his thumbs to press into her arch and between her toes. “Why did Mustafa send for you?”
Isaac was not one to let a subject rest. She was going to have to tell him.
“I’ve done something you will not approve of,” Hannah said.
“I was afraid of that.” He let go of her foot.
“Mustafa asked me to verify the virginity of a young Circassian slave. She is to be a gift from the Valide to the Sultan to tempt her royal son away from Safiye. The palace needs heirs.” Hannah fell silent remembering the sight of Leah, her sheared head and narrow green eyes, and her animal posture on the window ledge. Then, after Mustafa’s departure, her tears and the rush of words.
“And? Did the girl pass the test?” Isaac walked his fingers up and down the backs of her thighs.
If she could not trust Isaac, there was no one in the world she could trust. “I lied,” Hannah said. She lifted her head from the pillow, turned to meet her husband’s gaze.
His hands stopped abruptly. “You lied to the Valide?”
“She’s a Jewish girl, Isaac. One of us. The nomads slaughtered her mother and father before her eyes and then took her captive.” The bahnkes cups pulled at her flesh. “I … I told the Valide the girl was intact.”
“But she was not?”
“She was not,” Hannah said.
Isaac’s dark eyes looked at her, first puzzled, then angry. “How could you do this? Do you realize what the Valide will do when she discovers the truth? You’ve put the whole family in jeopardy.” As though to busy himself, Isaac rose from the bed and tended to a candle that had gone out near the brazier. He relit it from a fire ember, but a breeze from the window extinguished it again, leaving a gamey stink in the room.
“If I had not lied, Mustafa would have sold her to one of the brothel-keepers down by the port.”
“Which would have been none of your concern. The world is full of helpless creatures you cannot save,” Isaac said. “Hannah, tell me this is one of your jests.”
“I had no choice.” She could see his face, drained of all its lightness and good humour. “Because I cannot save everyone, does that mean I should save no one?” Hannah asked. “Does the Talmud not say, ‘If not me, then who? If not now, then when?’ ”
“For the love of God, did you even consider the consequences? You have taken a terrible risk, and for what? A slave girl.”
“A Jewish slave girl.”
“All you had to do was tell the truth and your family—your son and your husband—would remain safe.”
Hannah opened her mouth to respond, but Isaac went on, his voice rising. “We are not living in your beloved, civilized Venice. Constantinople was conquered by nomadic tribesmen who swept in on horseback out of the plains of Anatolia. A hundred years ago they burned, sacked, and defeated Christian Byzantium. They were merciless then. Do you think they have changed? If you are found out, your head will be on a spike, with mine and Matteo’s right next to it.”
Hannah tried to quell his fears. “The Valide was kind to me. I drank sherbet with her and we talked of Venice and how we both longed for the city.”
“The Valide is kind to her dogs until they shit on the floor,” Isaac said impatiently. “Do you not see that your lie is a reflection on all Jews? In Venice, we were confined to the ghetto, cramped into a tiny loghetto. Jews were not permitted to work except as dealers in second-hand goods or as moneylenders. But here, it is different. Jews have been treated well by the Ottomans. Sultan Beyazit welcomed us after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled us from Spain. Do you remember Beyazit’s words? He said, ‘You call Ferdinand a wise king and yet he impoverishes his own country while he enriches ours.’ ”
“Isaac, do not lecture me.”
“Here in Constantinople, no one thinks your birthing spoons are any more sinister than a pair of scissors.” He glanced at her and then looked away as though he could not bear the sight of her face. “This tolerance for Jews could vanish faster than blood sinks into the ground after battle.”
When she tried to speak, he held up a hand. “Think, Hannah. Is there a way you can set this right?” He stood towering by her bedside, looking down at her. “Can you say the girl begged you so piteously you agreed to lie for her but that you now have come to your senses?”
His tone was so harsh that she hardly recognized it as the voice that moments earlier had been speaking so lovingly. Her back was growing cold.
“Please, Isaac. Take off the cups.”
Isaac went to the window and closed it, then came back to bed and pulled the cups off her back, lining them up on the floor. When he was done, he lay next to her, his back propped against the headboard.
“You know as well as I do that it is not wise to say how happy we have been. To do so attracts the attention of the Evil Eye. But I will say it aloud. We have been happy here. We have a son, a house—”
“—each other.”
“A business. Now, with one lie, you have jeopardized everything.”
“If I had not intervened, this girl—”
“—would have killed herself? Is that what you are going to say?”
Hannah felt dizzy with fatigue.
“You put the interest of a stranger before the interests of your family.”
“It is called pity, Isaac.”
“This is not pity, Hannah. This is idiocy. I know the difference even if you do not.”
Hannah’s feet were bare, her slippers on the other side of the room. She would not ask Isaac to fetch them for her.
“I do not lack compassion,” said Isaac. “And I have done a number of foolish things in my life, but I would never do anything to endanger you or Matteo. You know what the palace is like—a viper’s nest of intrigue. This slave girl and this lie will be found out.”
“Her name is Leah.”
They were silent a moment.
“Isaac, do you remember in Venice the neighbour’s little brown-and-white spaniel that got out of the house and was wandering the streets when she was in heat? Every male dog from the district away came sniffing around. Remember the pack of them snarling at each other and yipping in the alley? They broke her back with their weight.”
Isaac had turned away from her and gave no sign he was listening.
“Because it was too late to save the dog, the neighbour asked you to drown the poor creature in our washtub. To put her out of her misery.”
Isaac said nothing.
“When you came back into the house with the dog’s limp carcass in a sack on your back, your eyes were wet with tears. So it would have been tonight, Isaac, if I had revealed the truth about this girl. This child who has barely started her courses would be sold as a whore.”
Finally, he turned to face her. “Your analogy is a poor one. I risked nothing in drowning the spaniel. I did a favour for the widow next door.” He shook his head. “What are you going to do?”
She refused to think about Leah’s future. Instead, she said, with all the conviction she could muster, “There is nothing to worry about. If the couching goes ahead, the Valide has promised me a great deal of money. I know ways to hide the truth about the girl. With that money, Isaac, we can enlarge the workshop.” She spoke with a tone of finality, settling herself with her back to him.
Just as she was falling into sleep, she felt Isaac move closer to her. Their horsehair mattress squeaked as he pulled the covers over them.
“Good night, Hannah.” He patted her shoulder, but did not kiss her as he usually did. “If the Sultan discovers this girl is not a virgin, it will be you who is stuffed in a sack and drowned like the neighbour’s spaniel.”