Congratulating myself that I could joke with him about his own culture, I said, “I believe that would be called a harem.”
“Yes, in the old days that would have been a small harem,” he winked. “Attended by eunuchs. But in spite of all precautions, occasionally one of the concubines would go astray, create dissension among the others, get pregnant by someone other than the sultan, or by the sultan himself and be somehow unacceptable as a wife, or otherwise make trouble with the others. The sultan would have the troublemaker spirited away in the middle of the night and thrown into the Bosphorus in a sack weighted with rocks.” He paused for effect, then added, “I am a respectable man, a man who in fact respects women, the living kind. I do not pretend to understand them, but as you can see, I
