Chapter 3: The Father

The voyage across the sea, on one of my father’s merchant ships, took three days, or three weeks, or three months — three moments, three eternities, three times to learn. The cabin I shared with my father — his cabin, on his ship — was small, simply furnished, and fitted the austere personality that my father had made himself to be, or had made himself up to be. Ten by twelve feet, a bed, a bench, a table, two chairs, a cupboard, a chest of drawers, a washstand, a door, a small porthole near the ceiling, an oil lamp, two chamber pots, a flap next to the door for putting them out when they were filled, blankets, a few pillows, some plates, cups and cutlery, a jar with water, a bottle with wine, a huge trunk with our baggage. The furniture, the floor, the walls and the ceiling were from the same wood, nondescript, dark, sturdy, stained. This was our room. For the whole voyage, except for one occasion, one that I would have preferred to avoid, this was where I stayed, to where I was confined.

“Three lessons you will have to learn,” my father told me, after we had come aboard and settled into our cabin — three lessons, three skills I needed to possess, before becoming the wife, if only temporarily, of the most powerful man in the Empire. I took off my clothes, and my father locked them into the trunk.

The first skill I had to learn was how to please a man. So far, my father had often enough pleased himself with me, and in various ways, but on these occasions all I had to do was to allow him the unimpeded use of my body, and not to interfere with his seeking of pleasures. This was, I think, what he preferred, not only from me but from any woman he sexually employed, but more than silently indulging passivity would be expected from the Khan’s wife, and, whatever his personal preferences were, my father was competent enough as a teacher. The sea was calm, I hardly felt the movements of the ship, I ate, I slept, I learned. I hardly felt the passing of time. What I learned was to use each single part of my body for a man’s sexual benefit — my fingers, finger tips, finger nails, toes, toe nails, hands and feet, arms, ankles and thighs, my hair, my forehead, my eyelids, eyelashes, cheeks, nose, lips, teeth, tongue, my throat, my shoulders, my armpits, my nipples, my breasts, my belly, my back, my ass, my vulva, my vagina — I learned to use them tenderly and with force, to do the expected and the unexpected, to grip and to release, to give and to withhold, to arouse, to tease, to satisfy, and to arouse again, while never, never, ever seeking gratification for myself, or allowing it to happen. This, sometimes, seemed the hardest part, though at other times it was easy enough. The only male body, the only penis to practice with, was my father’s. The sailors and the captain could not contribute to my education, because I had to remain pure, for my future husband. My father had brought a small blue flacon from which, unless it was time for us to rest, he poured a few drops of a colorless liquid into the palm of his left hand and licked it up after he had ejaculated, which allowed him to continue my lessons with little interruptions. He told me, but only once, that this potion put a great strain on his body, that it drained his life from him, that it could cost him years of his life, that he was doing it for me. Not feeling grateful to him would have been unkind.

The second skill that I had to learn, to make me a worthy wife for the Khan, after I had sufficiently mastered the first one, was to bear pain without flinching. After I had mastered the first part of my education to my teacher’s sufficient satisfaction, this second part seemed to demand very little from me. My father would not do any damage to my body that might still be visible when I would be handed over to the Khan, so the pain I had to bear was mostly that of needles, even if my father knew how to use them with good effect, upon my nipples, my clitoris, or underneath my toe- and fingernails. I had to learn, he told me, to stay still, without movement, without a sound, when the pain threatened, when it approached, when it set in, when it grew and lasted and did not stop growing, but staying still was what I had already learned, what had filled a major part of my life, all those years since he had first taken me to see the Bey. And pain, I shrugged it off, it was just pain, an opinion held by a part of my mind, which I simply disagreed with, disengaged from, as I had learned to do, over the years, in my fighting lessons, of which my father had never known. But then, just before I felt complacency to set in at how easily I mastered this task, just before I began to wonder if by not showing a need to learn I might be upsetting my father’s educational program and if, for his benefit, I should let him hear a suppressed moan every now and then or let him see an involuntary ever so tiny twitch of my face or my hands or whatever part of my body his needles were about to go in, just then I learned that I had to learn, after all. “It’s no good if you block out the pain,” he said, “you have to admit it, allow it, feel it, and still not flinch.” And then, when he held the tip of an awl against my exposed clit, when he slowly but steadily increased the pressure, when his arm strained, when the awl’s slightly bent tip carved a deepening dent into me where it hurt most, when it finally broke through the skin and entered me and twisted and entered deeper and kept twisting, then I allowed the pain, and it washed over me in a sea of flaming agony, engulfed my whole body, overwhelmed me with its unexpectedness, turned me inside out, washed me away, threw me against a rock of splintered glass and let me lie with broken bones and a broken mind, and I welcomed it, and embraced it, and invited it in, and clung to it, and refused to let it go, and when, after a far too long eternity, the flames had subsided and my mind and body had again composed themselves, and I found myself where I had been before it had started, my father said, “You closed your eyes for a moment, but otherwise you have done well.”

“Let me try again,” I said, and he let me.

If I could have chosen one of the three lessons to avoid, it would have been the third one. Not because my father said it would be the hardest — I knew it wouldn’t be that hard for me, but it was a lesson I didn’t feel I needed, and this made it seem so pointless, such a waste. From the cargo of twenty-four slave girls I had to choose one who would die — slowly and painfully, while the others had to watch, and while I would watch, too. Now that I had learned to bear my own pain, according to my father, I had to learn to bear that of others. “But they are your merchandise,” I said to him, in a pointless attempt at dissuasion, “they are valuable, aren’t they?” “Less than you are,” my father replied. “You are worth the expenditure. Education comes at a price. What do you think Al-Magest has cost me?” For a short moment I thought he meant he had bought him, but he was talking about my tutor’s fee, all those years. But, I suddenly understood at this moment, the Khan had bought me. My price certainly covered my upbringing, my education — the part my father had ordered, and the part he didn’t know about — and a hefty surcharge. I had been an investment, which had paid off, or would pay off if the Khan was satisfied with the deal. A dead slave girl was a negligible quantity in this business. When he asked me if I was ready, I said yes, and we went. It was the first time that I left our cabin since we had come aboard. My father did not want me to be naked in front of the crew. I put on a simple white linen dress. I hadn’t taken much clothing with me, or much of anything.