Next: Inconstant in Constantinople | Previous: Criminy Crimea or, Meet me in Sevestapol, Louis
Odalisque
Chapter 3
Trippingly to Gallipoli
March 13, 1854, Athens, Greece.
It has been six months since the Turks declared war on Russia and, although we have heard reports of fighting all along the border and around the Black Sea, there seems to be little of moment to record. Papa has recalled the household from Venetia and things are becoming settled once more. I take ship tomorrow, aboard the Bella Donna, my beloved sloop, to Gallipoli and through the Dardanelles to Constantinople, the Queen of the Bosphorus. There I must again undertake business on behalf of the firm ...
#
... Strange. To my schoolgirl friends back in England, Constantinople is the heart of the Mysterious East. Storied Byzantium! But to me, although she is still magical and mysterious, she seems far more familiar. And yet, still quite deadly for all of that. It does not seem possible that a thousand lifetimes of intimacy with her myriad ways and byways could begin to strip away the layer upon layer of intrigue and dissimulation--the taqiya that is second--no, first--nature to the people of the East ...
#
... How can I feel this--this skin-closeness to the mysterious city of the Golden Horn? Every time I travel there, I feel an excitement in me that is nearly indecent in its intensity. I feel more alive there than I have anywhere else in my life! The risks of being a woman in a Mohammedan nation, engaged in business. And, oh! If they only knew whose business I was about! They so much want to pretend that the Gods of Olympus never existed. What would it do to their precious weltanschauung to know that the Gods not only existed then, but that they still walk among men today? It is so delicious I sometimes want to laugh! But I can school my face to careful neutrality and reveal nothing ...
#
... It is strange that the Muslims are sometimes more tolerant of my sex--so long as I behave chastely in their eyes--than are my own countrymen. If I do not address them directly, but conduct all negotiations through male intermediaries, I suppose they can tell themselves they are not doing business with a woman. The foolish Europeans, of course, are not so easily gulled by such posturing and thus refuse to "countenance my behavior". As if they had the right to any say in my affairs or that their giving it face or not mattered one whit to me! But by being so direct, so forward, so graceless and crass, they deprive themselves of so much that is strange and wondrous and fantastical about the Orient. Oh, well. As Felicity says about rhubarb pie when someone pulls a face at being served it: all the more for me! ...
...So once again tomorrow, Felicity and I take ship to Constantinople. This time, the Bella Donna carries a cargo of English cotton goods to be traded for spices and teas. It is a slight thing, nothing compared to our ventures in the Indies, but of such small transactions has our mighty empire been built.
Next: Inconstant in Constantinople | Previous: Criminy Crimea or, Meet me in Sevestapol, Louis