Devshirmeh
Story Excerpt
AND SO THIS STORY, TOO, begins with blood. And with blood it ends. Blood
binds those in it and blood divides them. Many have told it before and many
have sung about it, but I didn’t learn it from them. I was born and I knew it.
It was in the earth and in the water. It was in the air and in the milk of my
mother.
Dark smoke plasters the skies above the Greensleeve valley,
snakes up slowly and like a funeral cloth, covers the scorching sun. Blazing
tongues of fire eat the flimsy houses and the only thing that outshouts the
cries of the children is the weeping of their mothers. Ali Ibrahim is
converting slaves to the true faith.
“Who else will refuse to put a fez on his head?” Ali Ibrahim
asks, and his deep voice cuts through the air like a Damascene sword. He sits
on his black stallion not too far away from a chopping log, in the middle of a
house yard filled with soldiers and villagers. Dark blood has soaked in the
log, and only five more heads must be cut for the blood will finally reach the
feet of Ali Ibrahim.
“Whose head will roll next?” Ali asks. Weeping rises above
the crowd and for a while, the smell of tears chases away the stench of death.
A young girl steps forward. She moves slowly. She swims above the ground. Her
hair is long, so long that it trails in the dirt behind and winds out of the
yard like a river. White daisies wreath her head, and a white gown envelopes
her in a ghostly cocoon. Her blue eyes cut through the darkness around Ali and
try to reach his face.
He watches her as she walks and a vivid memory begins to haunt his mind.
“Why, my poor brother,” the girl asks him, “have you
forgotten your own? It is your blood you shed as you slay them, my brother. It
is your blood you spill.”
Ali takes out his yataghan and jumps to cut the girl. The frightened eyes of
the villagers – Christians he had sworn before the Sultan to convert to Islam
- follow him as he swings the sword through the air, desperately trying to
butcher this apparition. But as usual, the girl is gone. She has sunk back in
his mind only to return again on some other occasion and in some other form.
But this story does not begin with Ali Ibrahim, although it ends with him. It
begins eighteen years earlier with the birth of my great-grandmother – the
prettiest woman who ever lived.
It was well known, even before her birth, that my
great-grandmother would be the most beautiful woman in the world. So on the
day she draws her first breath men from all over come to pay her tribute. The
line in front of the house is so long that it takes the last man twelve years
before he finally falls at my great-grandmother’s feet and presents his gifts
of honor.
Because of my great grandmother’s supreme beauty, the laws of
cause and effect in the village break down for a while. An event is no longer
followed by its usual consequence, but instead leads to something completely
unexpected. This is first noticed when a few of the men waiting to see the
newborn get so anxious that they start throwing stones at the house. Contrary
to all expectations, the windows do not break, but the leaves on the nearby
trees momentarily turn red and begin falling as if autumn has come months
before its time. Five houses down, a girl desperately falls in love with her
uncle because two kids try to drown a bag of black kittens in the river, and
an old woman is run over by a bull, because on the other end of the village a
housewife forgets to put potatoes in the stew.
Word that the child destined to be the most beautiful woman
has been born spreads quickly. It travels from the steep banks of the Danube
through the snowcapped peaks of the Balkan range to the vast rose valleys of
Kazanluk and the strait of Bosporus until it finally reaches the ears of the
great sultan in Istanbul. His Greatness immediately starts losing sleep over
the beauty of my great-grandmother by simply listening to others talk about
her. For days, as if a wretched shadow, he sits under the fig trees dreaming
of her, longing for her and nothing seems to bring him pleasure anymore. The
songs of the most exotic canaries of Singapore are but a dreadful noise to his
ears. The caresses of the prettiest of his wives chill him to his bones and
make him want to weep in solitude. Eating is his only way out of the misery.
With every sunrise the Sultan devours a dozen dishes of baklava, each made
with a hundred eggs and fifty ounces of sugar. With every noon he feasts on
three roasted lambs garnished with trout liver and woodpecker hearts and when
the sun sets behind the palace he seeks comfort in the meat of twenty ducks
and two baby calves. All this food makes him so obese that nothing, within a
hundred steps can escape his shadow.
For eighteen long years the sultan prays to Allah to give him good health so
he can live long enough to hold the most beautiful of all women in his arms.
On one misty, spring morning after almost two decades of suffering, the Sultan
disbands his harem and sends his servants to call for the great vizier.
“It is obvious that I have lost my mind over this woman,” the
sultan tells him. “I have waited long enough for her to grow up and now I
should finally hold her in my arms. Tell the best silk-weaver to make the
finest black feredje. Then send our most merciless Janissary along with one
hundred soldiers to take her from her house. Tell them to veil her with the
feredje and to never look at her face, because whoever lays his eyes upon my
bird I will punish with death.”
The vizier signs a firman and puts the sultan’s red seal on it, then gives it
to the best rider with the swiftest Arabian steed and tells him: “Run all day
and all night until you reach the Greensleeve valley, where Ali Ibrahim is
converting by the sword slaves to our right faith. Find him and give him this
firman. Tell him to obey every word in it lest he lose his head. Be back in
one moon and the sultan will give you your weight in gold. Come a day later
and your head will roll in the dirt..."
Miroslav Penkov
First publishing rights belong to The Southern Review Summer 2005
Chief Editor: Bret Lott
Associate Editor: Donna Perreault