Mehmet walked silently to the bed. He showered his lover’s feet with kisses. Kuchuk Hanem felt something wet her toes. His tears.

‘What is it, my love?’

He didn’t answer. His face sank between her thighs. She closed her eyes, ran her fingers through his grey hair. Sometimes she thought she truly loved Mehmet. She felt an enormous contentment in acting as a generous mistress who showed compassion towards her slave. His face was ugly and his mouth too big. Any comparison with her young admirers – such as handsome Monsieur Flaubert, before he went bald – would be cruel. Yet, she would never trade Mehmet’s tongue for the tongue of any of her white lovers. His was not a tongue that took possession of the earth, but a tongue so gentle as to thrill the bones. She moaned.

An Oriental woman is but a machine, wrote Gustave, to assuage the fury of Louise.

It never occurred to Kuchuk Hanem to ask Mehmet if he’d known jealousy. Sentimentality was his fate; it had no place on her stage.

Mehmet was so slight that the voluptuousness of her body overwhelmed him. He submitted to her orders, stroking here, nibbling there, faster, harder, all to worship the great Kuchuk Hanem. How she adored bearing witness to his wild desire for her, fierce and ravenous, and hearing his words of veneration in her ears, from the amorous to the obscene. Yet that day, towards the end of their violent lovemaking, his energy subsided gradually. His increasing lassitude was almost imperceptible. Faintly, she heard him making a desperate hiss, like a wounded animal.

The sun had almost set when Kuchuk Hanem awoke to find herself alone. Mehmet wasn’t by her side. She called out to her cherished slave but received no reply. As she rose to her elbows, something caught her eye. She screamed. Her soft skin was splattered with blood. Something cold and moist lay on her stomach.

—

Mehmet never returned. On Kuchuk Hanem’s small dining table was a letter and a knife stained with dried blood, pointing at her.

My love,

I see the future. So clear, just as when I saw you dancing last night, even though my eyes were shut. You will see it too, one day. I cut off my tongue with my own hands before another cuts it off for me. I could envision them silencing me slowly, muting me – those who travel far, those who peer through cameras.

Remember me always.

Kuchuk Hanem crumpled the letter, cursing her romantic, foolish lover, cursing his nonsensical prophecy. In anguish, she hurled her antique lamp against the wall.