American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [41]
“I did it because I wanted to see you dance.”
As soon as he said it, she worried that she had abused her new position and was afraid that she had humiliated him. But he didn’t seem embarrassed by his admission; on the contrary, he seemed relieved. And something in her expression must have revealed that she was happy to hear him say it—not just because her suspicions were confirmed, but because she had hoped he would say exactly this. She began to cry, and she realized that she had been thinking of nothing but him for the last seven days, that during the Sultan’s entertainments with her her own mind had traveled far away, to the man now known to her as Hyacinth. It struck her that her tears were tears of the joy of creation, that they were accompanied by the sweet, intense feeling that she had already imagined all of this, Hyacinth’s standing there, gazing at her, and that there was a deep, satisfying pleasure in its fruition. She wondered if this wasn’t always a part of falling in love, this feeling of living out a story that you have already secretly invented. She looked into his eyes and had the sense that the story she had written on her internal travels was about to continue in ways she could not have dreamt of, was about to leap out of her imagination and exist on its own. She felt as though she were the very story itself, the very letters and words dancing like shadows off the page. She had the feeling that she was entering the future.
So this is where they come from.
What?
Cymbals.
She had her head on his shoulder. He was stroking her hair.
From unrequited love, she said.
Then he kissed her. And she kissed him back.
At the northern end of the pleasure grounds between the Topkapi Saray and the seawalls along the Golden Horn were extensive gardens dotted with numerous small kiosks. Each consisted of three or four rooms with chimneys whose mantel trees were fashioned of silver and whose windows were glazed and protected with a gilt iron grill. The whole building was set with opals, rubies, emeralds, painted with flowers, and graced with inlaid works of porphyry, marble, jet, and jasper. The kiosks had many uses and one of the larger ones was used by the Chief Confectioner of the palace to soak and distill rose petals into an essence used for making the sweetmeat known to the West as Turkish delight. The building was called the Rose Pavilion.
This was where they came to meet each other during the celebration, and where they continued to meet for some time after. Hyacinth accompanied Parvin to the festivities hosted by the Sultan, and while her presence was required at night, there were many hours during the day when Murad took in games or theatricals or competitions and so she was free to travel about the gardens, accompanied by her chaperone, of course. Hyacinth had become friendly with the Chief Confectioner, who was also a eunuch captured in battle on the African shores, and he let the lovers in every afternoon, while he delivered his delicacies to the kitchen. The kiosk smelled so strongly of roses that they had to cover their faces at first, but eventually the odor became invisible to them, became the inevitable aroma of their time together. They brought blankets to spread on the floor and they swept aside the piles of discarded thorny stems. They had five afternoons in which to learn everything they could about each other—they didn’t know what chance they would have to meet again—and so they talked and touched incessantly, while the rose petals slowly soaked inside the pavilion and, outside, the sun inched dispassionately down toward the sea.
The first afternoon they fell into each other hungrily, dangerously. They stared at each other with fascination and surprise, strangers but astonishingly familiar. They mouthed each other’s names; later, she would laugh at his, because it seemed so out of keeping with his strength and because it had been given to him when he had been captured and taken as a eunuch and therefore seemed not really his name at all, but now she said it over and over. He said hers too,