Ollie's Cloud Read Online Free PDF

fair-skinned angel with sandy hair and blue eyes. The kelauntar had been immediately mesmerized by her spotless beauty. She had been thirteen when he bought her and returned to his father’s house in Mashhad, the holy city near the Bokhara frontier. She then became his first wife.
    The Turkoman had claimed that Anisa was English, that her missionary parents were killed in a Turkoman attack when she was seven. They’d said she was greatly prized for her beauty but was considered stupid because she could not speak any of the languages or dialects of the region. She had been bought and sold, worked hard, used often by the men for their pleasures; and then she’d developed a maddening streak of independence. She had grown less submissive, more aggressive. This wisp of a girl had begun acting like one of the men, making demands and giving orders. Her owner, a shaggy one-eyed Afghani, had wanted to kill her but his brother suggested that the girl’s beauty might fetch a fine price. Within a month she had become the property of Hasan Qasim and the Turkoman had acquired a handsome profit.
    Besides having given the kelauntar a son, Anisa provides a target for his anger and frustration. Fueled by wine, his fury often erupts in violence. He pummels the poor woman with his fists, calling her vile names and accusing her of unspeakable things, often with his slaves and other wives looking on. He blames Anisa for his wretched existence, his father’s sins, his own jealousy. He tries to defile her incandescent beauty, so often the cause of his suspicions. He threatens to kill her, maim her, sell her back to the slave traders. But always he falls asleep in tears before carrying out these threats, awakening in his own vomit. And then he leaves, never with an apology, sometimes for a week or more.
    The kelauntar fears that someday his fiscal infidelity will be discovered; many other embezzling princes and officials had been found out and punished. But what could they do to him? Assign him to a lower hell? Here, in a dark corner of this rancid-smelling café, seated on a wooden platform opposite the vizier, he is about to settle his account in a most painful manner.
    An enormous striped turban like a monstrous weight seems to drive the vizier’s head down into a pudding of jowls, plumping them out into exaggerated pouches bristling with beard. “I presume the details are taken care of,” he whispers. “And that I can take possession tomorrow morning.”
    A server pours more hot tea.
    “Of course. Just as we agreed,” the kelauntar replies sadly. “And I presume you are prepared to fulfill your end of the bargain.”
    “Naturally. I am an honorable man,” the vizier lies. “May I see the marriage contract?”
    The kelauntar passes a document to the vizier, who quickly scans it.
    “You are clever,” the vizier says. “In the event of divorce, her dowry is almost nothing.”
    “She was my legal slave when I married her.”
    “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
    “She is a scorpion—with a fierce sting in her tail.”
    “Tomorrow morning, after you divorce her, you will sell her to me for the amount of her dowry. No money will change hands. She will become my slave. And then I will marry her so you have no further claim on her.”
    Persia is truly and gloriously a man’s world. The kelauntar’s mind races through the simple process of divorce. Three times he will repeat to his wife the words “you are divorced” and it will be done. And yet, as the vizier knows, the kelauntar can recall her twice without further ceremony. But if he divorces her three times, or if she remarries, he cannot take her back. So by marrying Ali’s mother immediately, the vizier severs all claims of recall by the kelauntar. The vizier possesses her as slave and wife. It is complete ownership.
    “But the boy stays with me,” the kelauntar emphasizes.
    “It is the woman I want, not her pup.”
    A year earlier, the vizier had