In the Turkish Bath, grossly modeled after the infamous Ingres image, ladies and gentlemen are witness to voluptuous women lounging, dining, wading, and ultimately having their decadent ablutions tended to by maids.
Most all of the audience respond in wonder at the scene, some a little abashed to be witnessing it in mixed company, but there is one—there is always one—who mutters: “But that maid there with the perfume. She isn’t Moorish like the other maids in the scene.” And before their eyes, the blonde maiden who had been powdering another’s hair darkens. Other comments follow: “That eunuch’s hair is too auburn and her skin still pale.”
“Why don’t they look us in the eye?”
“They seem too thin. Not voluptuous like the Venus.”
And with every comment and observation, the image shifts, hair and skin brightens or fades, and the turbaned lute-player who faced away from the tourists now boldly strums while staring them all in the eye.
These effects are so subtle and undisruptive that the tourists who speak out are unsettled at first that the machine seems to hear them, while simultaneously pleased that the machine obeys them. A group jester exclaims: “Perhaps there is a human brain tucked away in her bronze-casted skull of hers, hey, von Froeschner?”
“If that were true,” von Froeschner retorts, “she’d still have human thoughts. Were that so, of what do you think they'd be?” The rhetorical question sinks into the merry group who are quieted by awe as the projection exits the Bath and enters onto a bustling marketplace, crosses the street, and enters a café filled with dozens of young bearded men in turbans and fezzes huddled to discuss news of the day in a great vaulted marble establishment with the walls decorated with Iznik tiles in the tulip fashion.
The shift is so seamless that the tourists are enthralled once again, and forget that with each critical utterance the projection changes into a more ideal vision—it is so imperceptible they forget they had even thought it, much less muttered it out loud. None of them consider that the image they see may be more romanticized now than it was before, and that the experience they are having is a false one. No, they came here to be comfortable. They especially disregard von Froeschner’s retort and have no more notions of the dark rumors that were broached in jest.
Had von Froeschner equipped the Şehrazat with a voice box, she could have addressed the jester herself. She—he—may no longer be able to see or speak, but he can hear and think. He dreams what he can no longer experience. Sometimes, when he hears the tourists ask von Froeschner whether he—she—is “quite the storyteller like her mother, Scheherazade?” an allusion much encouraged by the scientist, he thinks his retort: my mother died of consumption in Girit and told Christian stories to her older children while bedridden, and she named me Nikos Antonakis, not Bora Fahir Çağlar, not Şehrazat.
But he cannot tell the tourists that Bora Fahir Çağlar was a deceit, and instead continues to project the falsehoods that most interest them.
The Sultan was interested in lies as well. They were a grand distraction from rumors, and the Ottoman Empire was becoming full of vile and horrid ones.
But behind every rumor is a semblance of truth. Nikos Antonakis learned this when he went to work as one of the myriad photographers called upon by the Sultan to document the Ottoman Empire with their lenses. Many of these photos became official tourist propaganda and souvenirs, but none of Nikos’ images would be found in foreign scrapbooks, even less likely upon the gallery wall.
He began taking images that showed the classical grandeur and status of the Empire, but rumors of an uprising in his home village in Girit made him aim his lens beyond empirical glory and towards some unacknowledged Ottoman truths. He heard of other incidents and revolts in Armenia, and took his lens there.
The Photography Project had little tolerance for journalism, so Nikos sent his tintype testimonies to certain liberal reform newspapers under the Turkish name Bora Fahir Çağlar, thinking a proper Turkish name would give his work more credit. Even with the pseudonym, he knew he’d be found out and arrested.
So it was no surprise that, a fortnight after the photographs were published, police stormed his home, beat him unconscious, and burned down his hut along with his darkroom, and carted him off to Constantinople to a dirty jail cell.
But he did not awaken in a jail. He found himself on a straw mattress shoved in the corner of a stonewall laboratory, his right foot chained to a ball. Standing over him was von Froeschner, with a reassuring smile and a lab coat splattered in oil. He spoke to Nikos in Turkish:
“You don’t know me, my friend, but I know you. While it has earned you the Sultan’s disfavor, I admire your work and have heard much about your methods. In fact, it is my admiration that has kept you alive; it can keep you alive if you will help me.”
Nikos spat at his shoes. Von Froeschner nodded and gestured for the guards to unchain him.
“See, already you are freer than before. Please, let me show you something; it may change your mind.” He held his hand up to the guards to give Nikos over and he led the photographer-prisoner over to a slab where lay the Şehrazat.
She was undressed, with her skull and cabinet-torso open. Nikos could see how her appendages were attached to her torso-cabinet via bronze-wired knitting. The inner workings that would confound the tourists when she was displayed were pulled away, and Nikos could see deep inside her guts were three tiny gas lights sputtering cobalt flame, a slanted mirror that optimized and directed the lightening, and a spool on a rotating mechanism. Von Froeschner rummaged in the cabinet, connecting and attaching various things, and pointed to what Nikos would later learn was Bey’s tableau scroll on an adjacent table.
“I think you know how to install that here.” He watched Nikos place the scroll on the spool and came up behind him to ensure it was aligned. He closed her up, and walked to her skull. He gestured for Nikos to stand next to him. Nikos glimpsed the inside and saw that the skull housed a small brain connected to various internal prongs. The sight startled him, and von Froeschner placed a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, yes. It is disconcerting at first. It was generously donated to us from the Sultan, whose pet capuchin was ravaged by a tiger last week.”
Where matter and metal met, blue sparks exploded when von Froeschner pulled a lever beside the slab. A soft hum emanated from her, and a bright light projected from her eyes to the ceiling, creating the pale yellow and Prussian blue of Cappadocia.
“There. You see?” Nikos marveled with mouth agape as the diorama became animated on the ceiling. The image was as clear and sharp as a photograph, but rendered in the palette of the Orientalists, making it the most realistic image he had ever seen. The image itself moved, not by rotation, but zoomed in and out of the scenery like binoculars. As amazing as that was, Nikos couldn’t help but think: it is inaccurate, like most paintings. It isn’t real; it isn’t truth.
“What…what is this? A diorama?” he asked.
“Yes, for now she is a diorama, but she has the potential to become much more. The Sultan terms her a truth machine. People will believe what they see—it will be real to them. It will become memory—like a visceral dream.”
“But it isn’t true,” Nikos muttered.
“The Truth is not real unless it can be seen—as you well know, a picture never lies.”
Nikos stared up at the projection as it entered the Turkish Baths. “It depends on the picture. Many pictures lie.”