Empire of Lies

14 PARIS

As she and the playwright’s wife stood in the stifling heat outside the central tram station of the Hôtel de Ville, Nisreen was still shaking, her mind trapped in a feedback loop of the confrontation with Kamal.

How had he become like that?

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, trying to compose herself. “I shouldn’t have lost my calm.”

The woman looked as distraught as she was. “What do we do now? Where does this leave us?”

“I’ll go see one of the judges I know well. I’m hoping he can help.” She reached out and placed a hand on the woman’s forearm supportively. “Please stay positive, and be strong. I’m going to do everything I can to get him out of there as soon as possible.”

The woman nodded uncertainly. She hesitated, then asked, “That man. The one you had the… He’s your brother-in-law, isn’t he?”

Nisreen looked at her, then nodded, her expression drowning somewhere between apology, regret, and embarrassment. Kamal was currently a shining star of the Hafiye, and in the gossipy circles of Ottoman society, such things got noticed. Nisreen was never sure if that drove people who needed help to seek her out or caused them to steer clear of her.

“He looked like he wanted to help,” the woman added. “But you didn’t give him a chance.”

Nisreen shook her head ruefully. “I’m sorry,” she told her. “It’s just…”

“He wanted to help,” the woman insisted, her voice catching with desperation. “Perhaps you could talk to him, apologize…?”

Nisreen looked at her and nodded slowly, consciously calming herself down. Nowadays, the mere mention of his name was enough to ignite a blaze of anger inside her.

The woman sensed Nisreen’s unease and added, “Or maybe your husband could talk to him?”

“I wish he could,” Nisreen told her. “They’re not exactly on best terms these days.”

The feedback loop in her mind took on a second track: how could two brothers end up being so different from one another?

She’d known Kamal and Ramazan since they were kids. They’d all played together. Kamal was Tarek’s and Noor’s uncle, for God’s sake. But he and his brother had always been different.

Perhaps that was the wrong question. Perhaps the right question was, How could Kamal not see what he had become? How could he face himself in the mirror every day, knowing what he was part of?

She hated the feeling. But beyond the revulsion at seeing him in there, in that uniform, among those people, she hated something else. An old, unspoken emotion that was still there, a remnant from her youth. Despite everything, there was something about him she could never fully extinguish.

She hated that it had to be this way.

Nisreen was born in a poor household on the outskirts of Greater Paris. She wasn’t there for too long. When she was eight, her parents had no choice but to sell her to an affluent family.

Although that technically made her a slave, the reality in Ottoman society was far different. The slave trade, a major feature of the empire’s military and society for centuries, had been suppressed decades earlier. One of its few surviving forms was the private sale of children by their parents, and the strict rules that governed it were still in place. Nisreen would be treated as a fostered family member, with all the protection and support that entailed. She would be one of the family’s servants and would carry out her duties in their household, but she would also share the same food and clothing as the family she was living with. They would bring her up and support her, giving her the same education and training as a “free” Ottoman girl—or their daughter, if they had one. The term of her servitude was also limited; she would receive a pension for life, and when she was of age to get married, her employers would provide her dowry and, depending on what had been originally agreed on with her parents, select her husband. Courts were available to her if she needed to redress any wrongdoing by her owners.

She had been blessed with a particularly noble and generous master, a legal counsel who belonged to a learned circle of scholars and lawyers and who, after having three sons, had never stopped yearning for a daughter. He was well rewarded with Nisreen. It didn’t take long for him to recognize her intelligence, her inquisitive mind, and her strength of character. He encouraged her desire to broaden her mind, despite widespread and deeply ingrained attitudes that frowned on such pursuits. In most Ottoman households, despite the progress from Murad’s reforms, education of girls was still limited to matters of religion. Traditionally, women had not been allowed to study subjects that could undermine the patriarchal dominance, particularly law. Even literature hadn’t been considered an appropriate avenue of study for women. The focus was on forming them into good Muslim wives and mothers armed with the appropriately refined social graces rather than on achieving a career; those who did work were paid significantly less than men. Many girls still had to fight their families—particularly their fathers and brothers—to venture beyond these norms.

In Nisreen’s case, listening to endless recitations of religious texts wasn’t enough to quell her thirst for knowledge. Her master had embraced Murad’s reforms and allowed her to put his library to good use. She roamed through the classics of Near Eastern literature and lyric poetry and taught herself French and Persian before eventually exploring his legal texts. When she began to put her thoughts on paper, his support didn’t waver, particularly when she pushed back against the conservative denigration of women while promoting girls’ education and women’s rights. He later helped her obtain a law degree and establish her own legal firm, a small, progressive practice where men and women worked alongside each other, and one that didn’t shy away from handling sensitive matters, of which there were plenty, particularly for a woman with Nisreen’s beliefs.

The thrust of her work had concerned women’s rights, which were still limited, even if they were more progressive than in many other parts of the world, especially when compared with the Christian Republic of America and its Puritan ways or with Russia, which was staunchly Orthodox. Ottoman women could own property; they could inherit and bequeath wealth; they could establish and run endowments; they could take men to court—even their husbands or male relatives—to defend their interests and plead their cases in front of the judges; they retained their own individual legal status, in accordance with Islamic law, and could retain their own surnames after marriage. Most of this was still unheard of in Christian lands.

Furthermore, Ottoman women could end unwanted marriages in ways women in those countries could only dream of. Divorces among Ottoman couples were frequent and as easily initiated by a woman as by a man. Non-Muslim women living in the empire were even known to convert to Islam in order to be liberated from an unhappy marriage.

The CRA’s women, however, did fare better on another front: they could vote. Toward the end of the last century, suffrage had been granted to propertied widows and unmarried women over thirty.

For Nisreen, it all boiled down to two simple principles: rights shouldn’t be based on tradition but should be conferred because they were just and reasonable, regardless of their basis in tradition; and women, as human beings, deserved the same fundamental rights as men. She had successfully fought against a proposed law that would have overturned the conviction of men who raped a minor if the aggressor married his victim. She had led the appeal for the release of a female surgeon who had been convicted of sewing up the hymens of young girls. She had defended a trader who had been smuggling in virginity kits from the Far East. But since Abdülhamid had taken the throne, Nisreen’s work had brought her into more frequent public conflict with religious leaders as well as with conservative pillars of society, and it wasn’t just women whose rights now needed vigorous defending.

A comedian was lashed for defaming the beylerbey after a meme he posted, which showed a popular cartoon hippo juxtaposed with a picture of the beylerbey in which they looked strikingly similar, went viral. The editor of one of the eyalet’s most respected newspapers, the outspoken Tasvir-i efkâr—its name meant “imagining ideas”—was jailed for publishing what the state called “fabricated news,” a term they were using with alarming frequency.

It was now far more serious than a matter of principles.

Lives were at stake.

“Try,” the playwright’s wife pleaded as a tram pulled in, its bell clanging to alert a couple of careless pedestrians to get out of its way. “He’s on the inside. And he’s your family. We need all the help we can get.”

“I will. I promise,” Nisreen reassured her. “I’d better get back to the office and make those calls.”

“You’ll let me know as soon as you hear something?”

“Of course.”

The woman studied her for a moment, great worry radiating out of her eyes. Then she nodded and climbed onto the women’s carriage of the tram.

Nisreen stood there with a heavy heart and watched the tram pull away before it disappeared into the late-morning chaos.

She walked away, still reeling from the emotional hurricane she’d whipped up. She needed to calm down and get back to the office, where she would call the judges, starting with one who had been a close friend of her master.

As for Kamal… she’d need to talk to Ramazan about that.

She decided to walk to her office, to give her mind a chance to settle. She crossed the crowded street and took the embankment, by the water’s edge, where the air was marginally cooler. She liked walking along the river. The water—murky and dark, but flowing by with unbothered continuity—was like a sedative to her rattled senses.

As she stared ahead, she thought back fondly to her master, lamenting that he was not around, wistfully wishing he were still alive to support and guide her through these troubled times. At the same time, however, a small part of her was glad he wasn’t around to see what the empire had become, although, even then, she wondered if he wouldn’t have relished the idea of diving into the fight for its soul. He had never shied away from a battle. And that part of him still animated her and gave her the strength to continue, despite the fear and the threats. In a way, she felt she owed it to his memory. Without her master’s support, she would never have become a respected advocate of women’s rights or such a distinctive voice in the Paris press, well regarded and widely read by an expanding audience of literate women. He had made it possible, and she had stepped up and embraced the opportunity. She loved him and came to consider him her true father, even after she had left his household—that is, when his wife and her coterie of women had deemed that it was time for Nisreen to get married.

Nisreen’s foster parents were friends with Kamal and Ramazan’s parents, which was how she’d met the two brothers. Along with her brothers, they’d all been childhood friends. They were allowed to play and go on outings together until Nisreen reached puberty—which was around the time that she had felt the first stirrings of desire for Kamal, ones that she strongly suspected were reciprocated. But that was when custom dictated that she don the veil and drop out of the brothers’ lives, only to reappear when her marriage to Ramazan was arranged by their parents. Of the two, Ramazan had been the obvious choice: older than Kamal, if only by two years, more grounded, a solid earner with respectable prospects for a lifelong career in medicine. Neither she nor Kamal had got a chance to put a word in before it was a fait accompli, and out of respect for her master and his wife and all they had done for her, she never challenged their decision, even though she could see the same unspoken dejection that she felt reflected in Kamal’s eyes. But that was all in the distant past, and perhaps her parents had been right all along. Ramazan had become a reliable husband and father for their two children and was a respectful, kind man and a generous provider, even if the flame of passion between them had never really grown into the bonfire she’d heard about in whispered conversation or read about in contraband literature. Kamal, on the other hand, had followed through on the promise of his rambunctious youth and turned into… that.

And yet…

She fought to push all thought of him away and tried to focus instead on what really mattered: getting the playwright back to his family.

Family was everything, after all.

She firmly believed it, even if it came at a price.