The Book of V.: A Novel(23)

Jostling for space in the dressing room now, she slips on her aunt’s prized muslin. Other girls laugh, prompting eunuchs—none of them Baraz—to rush over and strip the cloth off her. Esther waits, naked, for whatever robe or dress they’ll bring, trying to ignore the battles around her over powders and combs and who will walk first and who last. The smell of balms and oils and cinnabar mixes with the frenzy and heat to produce an overpowering stench. She breathes through her mouth and looks for Lara. And Baraz—where is he? Other eunuchs return to wrap her in a white silk robe; they tie the robe with a gold sash and push a brush into Esther’s hand. Her hair is grown out past her shoulders now, a thick, ink-colored curtain that months ago overcame her chop job. She ties it back with a leather string and abandons the brush on a nearby table. Every surface is covered in brushes and paints and pots and somewhere, probably, the pomegranate paste she carried with her that first day. There is enough kohl and cinnabar in the room to paint the girls inside and out, every day, for the rest of their lives. But thankfully Mona and the eunuchs are overwhelmed now, too busy to notice Esther and force her, so she will go before the king as she hoped to go, in her bare face.



* * *



A new room. She’ll remember it as gilded, and cold, even when she enters it frequently in the years to come and learns that it is neither. The girls walk single file. Esther still hasn’t spotted Lara and worries. Has she been punished in some way? Did her eunuch betray her furtive tea drinking? Or maybe Mona, at last facing the day of judgment, has locked her away, not wanting to offend the king with Lara’s hairiness, which he would discover if not now then within hours. Esther turns to look, but she is walking somewhere in the middle of the line—the positions deemed least advantageous by the girls’ collective logic—and can only see the girl immediately behind her, a Syrian so thickly painted her skin gives off a grayish hue. Esther feels a stab in her thigh, Mona snapping her with her famous forked nails. She faces forward. The hall appears empty but for a stage, the stage empty but for two chairs. The chairs are strange, elaborately adorned with gold tassels and brown leather and tapered legs carved into cat’s feet, yet oddly small, as if built for children. When the girls are lined up facing the stage, Mona moves the leader to the rear and the rear girl to the middle, and then she taps and directs the rest of the girls so that soon they’re all lined up again in a new order. Esther steals glances left and right, knowing Lara would appreciate the joke, but she sees only girl after girl like the one who walked behind her. They are so shellacked in paints they would be visible from a great distance, maybe even in the dark, but soon they’re close enough to the stage that they could spit on it, close enough that when a man mounts it, they can see two parallel creases between his eyebrows, a hint of silver in his beard. He is notably short, with a waddlish style of walking, and for a moment, as he sashays toward them, Esther wonders who he is. A servant, maybe, or an entertainer? But then Mother Mona gives a sharp clap and goes down on her knees, and Esther drops with the rest of the line, understanding. She studies the floor’s mosaic. When she hears Mona clap again and looks up, she sees why the chairs are so short: the king, now seated, appears to be a man of significant stature. This trick of perspective is so effective as to be frightening, for Esther saw him standing not two minutes before, saw that he was shorter than the tallest girls, yet already she doubts. She inspects him more carefully: his troubled brow, his pointed slippers, his thickly layered robes, black and purple and blue and finally red, to puff his chest and shoulders. His fingers, curled like sleeping lizards atop the armrests: how very small. On either side of him, a wall of men has formed.

Mother Mona walks the line, prodding the girls from behind. Each is given her moment: she steps forward, turns before the king in a wide, almost laughably slow circle, until, her moment squeezed dry, she steps back. The king wears a mild, steady grimace, impossible to read. His walls of men move only their eyes, raking the girls from top to bottom. As her turn nears, Esther lets her shoulders sag. She rehearses in her mind ungainly steps, dull eyes. At the prodding of Mother Mona’s stick she hunches out, her gaze resolutely stuck on the king’s tassel-toed slippers. She begins to turn her circle. She moves faster than the others, trying with all her might to erase herself, leave behind no impression. Her circle is almost complete when, facing the line, she sees Lara—or rather, she sees the girl Lara was, now buried beneath a costume. Pounds of hair have been added to her head, heavy earrings have been pushed through her earlobes, oil has been slathered across her face so thickly that the pores from which her moustache grows, opened wide in their freshly shaven state, stipple the smooth facade from beneath. For an instant Lara looks at Esther, her black, kohl-rimmed eyes seemingly depthless, then Esther hears sk!—Mother Mona’s nearly silent snarl, like a dog whistle for girls—and steps back into line. Her temperature rises as if she’s been set on fire, then rises further as she watches Lara turn her turn, a languorous, graceful sweep, as if she might be any of the girls. She might be, Esther understands. Her friend is gone, a stranger. Esther scolds herself for the salt rising in her throat, but her grief is as sharp as when she was ten, being told that her mother was gone. She longs to be knocked out.

Esther is closing her eyes against her tears when she becomes aware of a scratching at her arm and Mother Mona standing beside her. Mother Mona, tall as a man, with her painted jowls and her forked fingernails—the source of the scratching—and her silver eyes that travel Esther now, everywhere but her eyes. “You,” she murmurs, in a voice Esther hasn’t heard before. “He’s calling for you.”