“
O
H, for goodness’ sake,” the valide snapped; but she shifted a little uneasily on the divan.
The egg rolled across the surface of the oil.
The soothsayer drew a sharp breath. “I see … blood.”
“Your eggs are not fresh enough,” the valide sniffed.
“But it is not your blood, valide efendi,” the soothsayer replied, comfortably; then, in a rapid singsong voice, she began to recite:
“This is mine eye,
the eye of fate,
the eye of seeing.
See all, break our bread, show all, and the first shall be last.
Three of three is ninety-nine
And these are the names by which we ask our way.”
She passed a hand across the plate and settled back on her heels.
“Well?”
“I cannot see until it is over.” As if to prove her point, the egg yolk slipped to the edge of the plate. “Ah.” She studied the plate for a few moments. “There is change, but nothing for you to fear. Someone else arranges it. Not a woman. Nor a man?”
“A eunuch,
évidemment
. Everything around me is in the hands of such people.”
“You have not traveled recently, hanum?”
“
Tiens!
Your question is absurd.”
“What is done and what is to come can be very close—especially when I make a reading of a long life, like yours.”
“Tchah! So I am to start traveling, am I? At my age?”
“Perhaps
traveling
is the wrong word. A journey, yes.”
“I think I can believe that,” the valide replied, drily. “I am very old. You shake your head?”
“I do not see death, hanum efendi. But it is not clear. I see someone close to you, who needs you.”
The valide arched her eyebrows slightly. “My grandson?”
“Perhaps. That is all I can see.”
“Pouf! It is not much. I had expected—
eh bien.
Nothing more.” She plucked the shawl that lay around her shoulders. “Now I am a little tired.”
She closed her eyes. A greenish vein throbbed in one of her fingers.
An hour passed. When the valide awoke, she found Tülin sitting on a cushion at the foot of the divan.
“Have I slept long?”
Tülin smiled, and put aside her embroidery. “No, valide. But perhaps you are hungry?”
The valide shook her head, and mouthed a silent “No, no.” She took a deep breath. “Tülin, get rid of that disgusting plate of egg.”
“I have already done so, hanum.”
“Ridiculous, all that prognostication. What would a chicken know about the future of a queen? If it were the other way around, I could understand.”
Tülin laughed. “Nobody ventures to tell a chicken’s fortune.”
The valide champed her teeth. “Of course not. All chickens go the same way, into the pot. Who put such a silly idea into your head?”
I
BOU hoped that she, of all people, would have an answer.
He did not expect the answer she gave. He expected sympathy and advice, not fear.
She shrank back: “Did you touch it?”
“I rolled it into a handkerchief,” he said.
“I meant, did it touch your skin?”
He tried to think. He had not wanted to touch it; instinctively he had taken it up in his handkerchief, wadding the fine lawn cotton around the object so that he would not feel its ridges and bumps.
“I d-don’t think so. No, I am sure.”
She had been holding her breath; now she exhaled slowly. “And words? Did you use words?”
He shook his head. “I did not know what to say.”
She frowned. “Let me look at your eyes.”
She stared into them for a time, then slowly she raised her hands and outlined the form of his head and shoulders in the air.
“It is as I thought. You are cut off from God, Ibou.”
“I pray to God!”
She cupped her chin in her hand, and said musingly, “Yes, you pray. But can he hear you, as you are? Do you have problems, Ibou? Pains, worries, that keep you awake at night?”
He stared at her, frightened a little. “Yes.”
“I guessed it.”
She turned and began to rummage in a little silk bag.
“What are you doing?”
“What I can.” She took something from the bag and laid it beside her on the divan. Then she took his hands in hers. “Someone has put a spell on you, Ibou. That is why when you pray, he cannot hear you.”
The aga’s nostrils flared. “What can you do?”
“We must find you a guide, to take you back.”
“You? C-Can you guide me back?”
She looked at the frightened man levelly. “The choice does not lie with me. I cannot choose to be your guide to the light, Ibou. It is you who must choose.”
“Then—I choose you.”
She shook her head. “How do we know that this is the choice of your heart? You have to draw your guide to you, Ibou. Listen. This is what you must do.”
T
HE girl had shadows beneath her eyes, no doubt about it. Her face was drawn; at the rehearsal she had played so timidly that Donizetti had almost lost his patience.
“Violins! Violins!” He had tapped the lectern with his baton. “No, no. This is not what I want.” He mimed a violinist crouched over her instrument, hands feebly shaking. “No. Andante!
Forza!
Take the lead!” He swiped down with his invisible bow and glared at the violins.
The violins had looked nervously at Elif. Her eyes were downcast: she had no intention of meeting Donizetti’s.
“Elif,” Tülin whispered. “Are you all right? You look—” She had been about to say the girl looked ill, but it was unmannerly to be too direct. Unwise, perhaps: people said it brought the eye. She bit her lip: the word hung in the air, unspoken.
Elif looked at her nervously. “What is it, Tülin? What can you see?”
“Are you eating well?”
“Eating?” Elif hesitated, as if she were thinking about this for the first time. “Yes—no. I’m frightened, Tülin.”
Tülin smiled and patted the girl on her knee. “What of? Some girl, is it? I can speak to her.” She said it with emphasis: she was older, the orchestra girls respected her.
Elif laced and unlaced her fingers on her lap. “It’s not what you think. Oh!” She put a hand to her lips, where it fluttered against her mouth. “Something bad,” she breathed at last.
Tülin glanced around. Donizetti, the Italian, had gone with a little bow and a wave, and now the girls of the orchestra were packing up their instruments. Bright-eyed, a little flushed, they chattered together in low voices. One girl was giggling with her hand over her mouth; another was prodding her neighbor with a fiddle bow. A blond Circassian bowed myopically over her score, holding her hair back above her ear with one hand, wondering where she had gone wrong before.
For the girls this was a moment of freedom, before the tall black eunuchs stepped in and respectfully shooed their pretty charges to their chores. Respectful but firm, especially with the younger girls of lower rank whose jobs kept them far away from the body of the sultan.
Tülin frowned at the frightened girl. Elif was a kalfa, but only to a little girl: a little girl of scant importance.
“If it’s something bad you must tell me, Elif,” she said quietly. “I think there are many things you don’t understand. You’re young.” She put out a hand and eased a lock of the girl’s jet-black hair over the tip of her ear. “When you talk about your troubles they always seem less. Don’t bottle things up.” She smiled brightly and held the girl’s chin. “Look! Maybe it’ll turn out to be nothing at all!”
She saw the struggle in Elif’s eyes, the warring doubt and hope. The girl blinked fiercely: doubt won. “This is
very
bad,” she said in a thin voice, close to tears.
Tülin considered. “Come, my little one. You can tell me, whatever it is. I am quite sure you have nothing to worry about.”
T
HE man with the knife had walked a long way.
He joined a camel train, and walked with it in silence for three days. When the camels halted at a town, the man walked on.
T
HE shores of the Bosphorus flushed red, then yellow as the trees turned. Small fires burned in the fields. The season expired in a blaze of heat, an Indian summer. The fishermen predicted a cold winter: the sudden blaze, and the fish running deep.
Yashim found the valide in her apartments at Topkapi. She was propped up on pillows on the divan and eating an iced sherbet.
“It’s cooler now, valide. You are comfortable?”
“I was raised in the Caribbean, Yashim. The heat does not affect me. I choose to sit in the Baghdad Kiosk because it’s quiet.”
Yashim cocked his ear, and heard nothing.
“Yes, yes, it’s quiet enough now. They’re all asleep, thank God,” the valide said. “Just like country girls. Which, of course, they all were once upon a time. I suppose it’s a sort of second childhood.”
Yashim was baffled. “Asleep, valide? Who do you mean?”
The valide gave a little gesture of impatience. “Tut-tut-tut. Really, Yashim, the ladies, I tell you. My son’s ladies. I do wish you would keep up.”
“The late sultan’s ladies came here?”
“From the old palace. The luckier ones got married off, of course. Our sultan sent all the hopeless cases on to me. I suppose it pleased the eunuchs. They lead lives of such
ennui
at Topkapi, with only me to talk about. But now they have a flock of women to fuss over, and they are happy. As for the ladies, well. It upsets me, I admit. They are so very ingratiating. And they are all so old! Perfect frights, some of them.”
“How many, hanum?”
The valide waved a jeweled hand. “I haven’t counted, Yashim. I’m not a housekeeper. Dozens, I should say. Terribly aged. Some of them”—she lowered her voice, while at the same time speaking more loudly than before—“quite feebleminded now, I’m sorry to say.”
“It must have come as a dreadful shock to them,” Yashim ventured.
“To them, Yashim? Why? Mahmut was my son.”
“Of course, valide. I only meant—”
“Marzipan, for instance. She was such a skinny, shy little thing—that’s why I gave her the name.” Yashim nodded: all the girls got new names when they came to the harem. Often they were mildly ironic. “Yesterday, I saw a fat, frumpy old woman sitting with her knees this far apart, smiling like an idiot. Marzipan. I couldn’t believe it. Why they think to surround me with these dreadful old people, Yashim, I just can’t imagine.”
She glanced at him, a little slyly, he thought. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. The valide had not aged like other women. She was still slender, and her face preserved in outline the beauty that had carried her into a sultan’s arms. But the valide was difficult about flattery: you had to be careful.
“Age is a terrible thing, Yashim,” she added, a little sadly.
He took her hand. He should have spoken, after all. Somehow the arrival of these women had disturbed the valide more than she let on; more, perhaps, than the death of her son. For years now she had been alone in the palace with her memories and dreams; and there was a certain hauteur in her loneliness, in the knowledge that Topkapi was hers. Now that she shared it with the superannuated baggage of the harem, that grandeur had dissipated a little.
He glanced about the room. The mirror that had always hung at the side of the divan had been replaced by a framed inscription.
“You, valide, are as beautiful as you ever were.”
“I don’t enjoy a mirror anymore,” she said unnervingly. Yashim felt his cheeks redden. “I’d rather look at young people now. That’s why I have my Tülin.”
Tülin: it meant “poppy.” “Tülin?”
“My handmaiden, Yashim. I found her the name. I think it’s rather sweet.”
“I hope she’s as sweet as her name, valide.”
“I think I may say that I am something of a judge of character. Tülin appears to me … almost perfect.”
“Almost, hanum?”
“
Tiens
, Yashim. Only God can pronounce any woman perfect,
absolument
. And then only at the hour of her death.”
Yashim gave a sigh, and smiled. The valide was always something of a coquette.
“A book for you, Yashim. Perhaps it will amuse you—I found it ridiculous. It is written by”—she glanced at the cover—“Théophile Gautier.”
Y
ASHIM clapped his book shut with an exclamation of surprise. “
Everything that is useful
,” Gautier had written, “
is ugly
.”
Yashim contemplated the nutcracker in his hand, with its chased brass handles and polished iron jaws. He let his eyes wander around the apartment, from the shelf beside the divan, with its collection of porcelain and books, to the stack of crocks and pans in the far corner where he cooked. What sad world did this Gautier inhabit, that everything useful could be described as ugly? It was a fault of the Franks to make their slightest opinions sound like revealed laws, of course.
At his thigh were a marble mortar and the knife with
Ammar made me
inscribed on the Damascus blade. These useful things, Yashim felt, were also beautiful. With half-closed eyes he thought about Istanbul—its lovely minarets for calling the people to prayer, the scalloped and fluted fountains, which relieved the people’s thirst. He considered the slender caïques, which bustled people across the water in all directions, and cracked another walnut, smiling as his thoughts turned to the sultan’s palace.
The loveliest women that the empire could provide—would Gautier call them useless, then? Yashim knew the harem as a school, an arena for ambition, a human factory geared to the production of royal heirs. Many a pasha had blessed the Circassian girls for drawing a headstrong sultan away from delicate affairs of state and into their beds. The mere effort of observing the intricate etiquette of the harem quarters was enough to keep a sultan busy.
Gautier, he felt, had got it the wrong way around.
He laid the book on the divan, careful not to let his oily fingers stain the green leather binding with walnut juice.
Yashim took the mortar to his kitchen, set it on the bench, and put a small open pan on the coals. He began to pound the walnuts with a stone pestle. When the pan was hot he threw in a scattering of cumin seeds. He rattled the pan on the coals and poured the seeds into a black iron grinder. He turned the handle and ground the cumin over the walnuts. He added a pinch of
kirmizi biber
, which he had made in the autumn. He sprinkled the end of a dry loaf with water, then carried on pounding the walnuts. Eventually he squeezed the bread dry and crumbled it into the mortar between his fingers, along with a generous dollop of pomegranate molasses.
When the
muhammara
was finely pounded, he stirred a thread of olive oil into the mix. He tasted the puree, added a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper, and poured it into a bowl, which he covered with a plate and set to one side.
For the next hour he worked at his remaining meze: a light salad of beans and anchovies mixed with slices of red onion and black olives, and another made with grated beetroot and yogurt. Finally, he made soup with leeks and dill.
He was almost done when there was a knock on the door. A
chaush
in palace uniform stood at the top of the stairs, carrying an invitation on vermilion paper.
The chief black eunuch requested Yashim’s presence at the Besiktas palace that afternoon.
Yashim bowed, placed a hand to his chest, and murmured: “I shall attend, inshallah.”