“I shall work all my life for nothing, doing everything to help others, in the hope that when I die, I shall be made very young and very beautiful and shall be given to the lord, my lover. And maybe, yavroum,” she added, almost in a whisper, “I may have a baby like you—for you are a Greek baby, and he was a Greek.”
I cuddled very close to her and kissed her, my arms wound around her neck, and went to sleep.
After that I no longer minded her being a halaïc, and even at times being the donkey. For wherever I saw her, and in whatever occupation, her background was always the Elysian fields. There she walked in the glory of her beauty, and in company with her Greek lover.
CHAPTER XI
MISDEEDS
I DID miss Djimlah and Chakendé and Nashan, yet the halaïc made up for a great deal, and what is more, knowing now that some day she would go to heaven and meet her Greek lover, I was telling her the Greek history, or rather that part of the Greek history where the Greeks were intermarrying with the gods.
It is a pity that the world should be so large, and that we should have to go from place to place, leaving behind those we have learned to love. When the time arrived for me to go back to the island, I wept copiously. I did so mind leaving behind Sitanthy and especially the halaïc. She, however, in spite of the sorrow she felt at bidding me good-bye, kept on saying: “Think, yavroum, you might never have come, and that would have been far worse. Besides we must submit to Allah’s will gladly, and not weep and show him our unwillingness to obey.”
It is three hours from the Bosphorus to the islands, by going from the Bosphorus to Constantinople, and from Constantinople to the islands. Tears kept on coming to my eyes from time to time, while the boat was steaming on; yet no sooner did I get a glimpse of our own island and our own pine trees than I forgot the halaïc and Sitanthy and my sorrow, and in spite of the people on the boat I burst forth into a loud song of joy. I was never any good at tune, and there was little difference between my singing and the miauling of a cat; yet whenever I was particularly happy I had to express it by song, and only a peremptory order would stop me. And while I sang, looking at the island, I was only thinking of the three playmates I was to see, and the halaïc and Sitanthy were forgotten, as if they had never existed. My thoughts were on the three, and on the pleasure they would experience when they saw me returning to them—as indeed they did.
That year was a memorable one in our lives, because it was the last in which my three playmates would be permitted to go uncovered, and play with children of both sexes. They were now nearing the age at which little Turkish girls become women, must don the tchir-chaff and yashmak, hide themselves from the world and prepare for their womanhood. I was, of course, always to continue seeing them and visiting them, but they could no longer enjoy the freedom they had enjoyed up to now—now that they were to become women.
I found all three deep in the study of foreign languages. In the spring of that year Djimlah’s grandmother decided that it would be very good for the three Turkish girls to go twice a week and spend the morning at Nizam, where all the European children congregated. She wanted Djimlah to see as much of the European world as possible before she was secluded. It was thus that we all four, accompanied by our French teacher, went to the pine forest of Nizam. We did not like this as much as staying at home and playing by ourselves; but the old hanoum was quite insistent, and for the first time made us do what she thought best.