The Stone Woman Read Free

children one day, when I am dead and gone?’
    Orhan smiled and nodded. I maintained an expressionless face. I knew my father had spoken half-truths. I had heard other stories about Yusuf Pasha from aunts and uncles belonging to another branch of our family, children of a great-uncle whom my father loathed and whose children were never encouraged to visit us here or in Istanbul.
    They had told tales that were far more exciting, much more real and infinitely more convincing. They spoke of how Yusuf Pasha had fallen in love with the Sultan’s favourite white slave, and of how they had been caught while copulating. The slave had been executed on the spot and his genitals fed to the dogs outside the royal kitchen. Yusuf Pasha, according to this version, had been whipped in public and sent away to live out the rest of his life in disgrace. Perhaps my father’s version was also true. Perhaps no single narrative could explain our ancestor’s fall from grace. Or perhaps nobody knew the real reason and all the existing versions were false.
    Perhaps.
    I had no desire to offend my father after such a long estrangement and so I refrained from questioning him further. I had upset him a great deal all those years ago by falling in love with a visiting school inspector, running away with him, becoming his wife, carrying his children and appreciating his poetry, which I now realise was very bad, but which at the time had sounded beautiful. Poetry, alas, had always been Dmitri’s true profession, but he had to earn a living. That is why he had started teaching. In this way he could earn some money and look after his mother. His father had died in Bosnia, fighting for our Empire. It was the soft voice in which he recited his poems that had first touched my heart.
    All this had happened in Konya, where I had been staying with the family of my best friend. She had shown me the delights of Konya. We had seen the tombs of the old Seljuk kings and peeped inside the Sufi houses. It was here that I had first met Dmitri. I was seventeen years old at the time and he was almost thirty.
    I wanted to escape from the stifling atmosphere of my house. Dmitri and his poetry appeared as the road to happiness. For a while I was happy, but it had never been enough to obscure the pain I felt at being banished from my family home. I missed my mother and soon I began to ache for the comfort of our home. More than everything else, I missed the summers here, in this house overlooking the sea.
    I had wanted to leave home, but on my own terms. My father’s edict declaring me an outlaw had come as a real blow. I hated him then. I hated his narrow-mindedness. I hated the way he treated my brothers and especially Halil, who, like the spirited stallion he was, refused to be disciplined. My father would whip him sometimes in front of the whole family. That was when I hated my father the most. But Halil’s spirit remained unbroken. My father regarded Halil as a lazy, disrespectful anarchist and was, as a result, astounded when Halil enlisted in the army and because of his family history was rapidly promoted and assigned to duties in the palace.
    Iskander Pasha doubted his younger son’s motives and in this he was not so far wrong. Father could be ever so refined and elegant in the Parisian salons where he served as ambassador from the Sublime Porte to the French Republic for many years. That is what we were told by my older brother, Salman, who had been permitted to accompany him and had received his higher education at the Academy in Paris, which made him a lover of all things French, except its men.
    Whenever Father returned to Istanbul with new pieces of furniture and fabrics and paintings of naked women for the western portion of the house, and perfumes for his wives, our spirits would lift. Halil would whisper, “Perhaps, this time, he has become a modern.” We would all giggle in great anticipation. Perhaps there would be a New Year’s Eve Ball in our house.