Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

the battle of Famagusta in 1570, the great Mustafa captured his Venetian opponent, cut off his right ear and nose, flayed and dismembered him alive, and then cured the empty skin, stuffed it with straw, and carried it about the city. Pain is timeless. Perhaps the Moslem mujahed recognized in his Russian adversary the face of the crusader Richard the Lionhearted, who put to death the entire population of Acre—2,700 men, women and children—after the town surrendered in 1191.

There had been times, reading her history books, when Anna had suspected that torture was the very essence of power in the Near East and Central Asia. The ability to inflict pain was what made a sultan a strong leader, and failure to do so marked him as a weak man. That was the tragedy of Ottoman history, that this noble and civilized people could also be so cruel. It was the same wretched story, from sultan to sultan, as if the heirs of Osman were all reliving the same bloody nightmare. The fourteenth-century sultan Murad I became so angry at his rebellious son Gunduz that he put out his eyes and cut off his head; then, as a test of loyalty, he ordered his lieutenants to blind and behead their own sons. Nearly all of them obeyed. A century later Mehmed II took a fancy to the handsome fourteen-year-old son of one of his ministers and demanded that the boy be brought to him; when the minister refused, Mehmed decapitated both father and son and had their heads carried to his dinner table. When Selim I took power in 1512, his first act was to have his two brothers strangled—an ordinary enough act by Ottoman standards—and also their five sons, some as young as five, while he listened to their screams from the next room. His successor, the peerless Suleyman the Magnificent, recorded in his diary that he routinely ordered his own troops beheaded for such offenses as “pasturing horses in unharvested fields.” Calculated cruelty was the very essence of leadership. Murad IV, for example, was generally reckoned a strong and successful sultan. When he was bothered one day by a party of women dancing near the water, he had them all drowned; when his chief musician made the mistake of playing a Persian song, he was beheaded. And so history continued in the Near East and Central Asia, from massacre to massacre, from flaying to flaying. Periodically the “enlightened” forces of the West weighed in—from the Crusaders to the Red Army. They generally preferred to do their killing at a distance, with a longbow, or a rifle, or from an airplane. But they, too, were caught in the bloody chain.

29

Anna Barnes returned to her motel room in Bethesda to find two messages waiting for her at the front desk. Both said the same thing: “Please call ASAP.” One was from Alan Taylor. The other was from Margaret Houghton. Anna wondered how Margaret could possibly have discovered where she was staying, or even the fact that she was in Washington on temporary assignment. But her curiosity about Margaret was overcome by a longing to see Taylor, so it was his message that she answered first. She reached him at the office in Rockville and thirty minutes later he was in bed beside her.

“I missed you too much,” said Anna after they had finished making love. She stroked the hair on his chest as she spoke.

“Impossible,” said Taylor. “You can’t miss someone too much.”

“Yes, you can. A woman can.”

“Not me. I missed you just enough.”

“Just enough that you didn’t sleep with someone else while I was gone?”

“Exactly.”

Anna looked at his body, naked on the bed. “Did you know that the Arabs had thirty-seven names for it?”

“For what?”

“For the penis.”

“Typical. The Eskimos have fifty words for snow. The Arabs have thirty-seven words for penis.”

“Seriously. I read it once in a book written in the sixteenth century by Sheikh Nefzawi of Tunis.”

“Christ! Where did you find all these bizarre books?”

“In the X cage.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“Not so exciting. It’s the section of the Widener stacks where they hid all the dirty books. You needed a key, and permission from the Director of Library Services.”

“Typical Harvard. So what were some of the fifty-seven varieties? Do you remember any?”

“Thirty-seven. And yes, I remember some of them. But they’re pretty ridiculous.”

“C’mon. Let’s hear some.”

“Okay. The bellows, because it inflates and deflates. The one-eyed man, for obvious reasons. The bald-headed man, also for obvious reasons. The sleeper. The knocker. The breaker. The weeper. The deceiver. The names go on and on.”

“Which one am I?”

“I’m not sure yet. As we say in the library, it needs more research.”

“What would Sheikh Nefzawi suggest?”

“He would say that a woman is like a flower that gives up its fragrance only when it is touched by gentle hands. He said that women are particularly like basil leaves in that respect, but that doesn’t sound as sexy.”

“I’m a willing pupil,” said Taylor. Anna smiled and took his hand.

And so they gave it more research, spending most of the night making love, or drifting off to sleep after it, or waking up and wanting to do it again. It was a long night of love, in which these two strange bodies gradually became intimate. They would brush naked against each other, half asleep, until one or the other would reach out and caress the not quite familiar person sharing the bed, or blow a kiss in the ear, or tell a silly joke. They both woke up bleary-eyed, with the special feeling of exhaustion and bliss that is part of falling in love. They ordered breakfast from room service, ate heartily, and promptly fell asleep again.

Toward noon, Anna awoke and wondered aloud, “Should we go to work?”

“Fuck it,” said Taylor.

That sounded exactly right to Anna. She slept for another two hours and was awakened by the sound of Taylor turning the crinkly pages of The New York