My father pointed to me. “This is the why,” and in a few words he related the incident of the previous evening.
“I will not go!” My mother stamped her foot. “I have never crossed a Turk’s threshold, and I hope to die without doing so.”
My father walked up and down the room twice. At length he said slowly:
“There is the choice of crossing this Turkish threshold—because you are bidden to—or all of us may have to cross the frontier, leaving home and comfort behind us. Saad Pasha is a powerful man—at the present moment the favourite in the palace—and our child has insulted his.”
Both my parents remained silent for a minute, and my childish heart burned with hatred for these Turks, who were our masters. It seemed as if I could never live a month without having to hate them anew.
“I cannot speak their dreadful language,” my mother protested, half yielding.
“Take this child with you,” my father said, pointing again at me. It was dreadful to be called “this child.”
Half an hour later I was driving by my mother’s side to the koniak of the powerful pasha.
My mother had said the truth. She had never crossed the threshold of a haremlik; and to her all Turks, be they men, women or children, were pestiferous beings. She hated them as loyally and as fervently as she worshipped her Christian God, and adored her own flag. She was a Greek of the old blood, who could believe nothing good of those who, four hundred years before, had conquered her people, and beheaded her patriarch.
And now, because of her daughter’s misbehaviour, she was forced to obey the summons of a Turkish woman. It was cruel and humiliating, and, child though I was, I felt this.