W
HEN the man from the mountains first saw the sea, he knelt and wept, wondering how any man could command such an immensity.
But as the day wore on, he grew more used to it; he swallowed his doubts. The pasha was a man, like any other. He would die, as a man did.
The man with the knife did not stop to look at the swollen welt across his chest. It was changing color, weeping; and darker tentacles were spreading across his skin.
He stumbled on, to the sound of the gulls mocking him over the little waves.
A
T Besiktas Yashim asked to see the Kislar aga and was led downstairs to a Frenchified waiting room that was stuffy and windowless, furnished with two European sofas, an Italian clock, and a number of high-backed chairs that had lost some of their gilt, or a molded foot. Timid black faces he did not recognize looked in on him once or twice, before Ibou himself appeared.
He looked gray, Yashim thought; and one of his eyes was bloodshot.
The aga waited until the door had closed, and then subsided into one of the great sofas. He rubbed his hands across his face.
“The bridge,” he groaned. “I wish it had never been built.”
“You, too?” Yashim said in surprise.
“The opening ceremony,” the aga muttered. “Tomorrow, all the ladies, in caïques. In public! The sultan on horseback. Precedence, Yashim. You can’t believe.”
“The opening ceremony?”
The aga’s hand snaked out over the arm of the sofa. “Please, Yashim. Help yourself.” He popped a sugared lozenge into his mouth. “The public ceremony is tomorrow. The real ceremony began here, today—and worse than the changeover, if that’s possible. Who gets into the first caïque? What shall they wear? Do they land this side of the bridge, or is it proper to go under it? I don’t know,” he added, in a tone to suggest he didn’t much care, either. “And now what new worries do you bring me, Yashim?”
Yashim frowned. His eye fell on an ormolu clock, standing on a shelf. It told ferenghi time, the hours spaced out impersonally between night and light. It was not how time seemed to Yashim: his hours had been as long as days. He could see its cogs and springs behind beveled glass.
He said: “What is the engine, Ibou? What does it mean?”
Ibou turned his head slowly and looked at Yashim slyly, out of the corner of his eye. “The engine?”
Yashim gazed at the clock. “Something Melda said.”
“A bit of foolishness. The housekeeper ladies make it a joke among them, when new girls are brought in.”
Yashim opened his hands and shrugged, nonplussed. “The engine?”
“Well, there’s an old table, down in the basement. The housekeepers fool about with it.” Ibou waved his hand as if it didn’t matter and was beneath his dignity to comment.
“Fool about?” But Melda hadn’t suggested fooling about.
I have seen the engine
, she’d said.
The aga heaved a sigh. “I should deal with it, I suppose.” He wiped his hands across his eyes. “They take the novices down to look at the table. The new girls.”
“Yes?”
Ibou blew out his cheeks. “The table stands on a stone flagged floor, which looks like a trapdoor. They—frighten the girls, a bit. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“The novices,” Yashim repeated. “And where does the engine come in?”
Ibou pulled a face. “Pouf. I don’t know. If a girl misbehaves, they tell them, she’ll be strapped to this table.” He stuck a finger in the air and rotated it. “They tell them never to reveal anything they’ve heard or seen.”
“Or what?”
The aga rolled his eyes. “Or they’ll strap her down, and the table will start to spin, around and around, and sink down through the floor into the Bosphorus.” He let his hand drop to his lap.
“I see.” Yashim was not smiling.
“It’s a bit of fun, Yashim.”
Yashim had seen many girls fresh off the hills enter the palace for the first time. He remembered a little black girl bought by one of the late sultan’s khadins, who came into the harem with her eyes and mouth like
O
s. She had gone about stroking everything and muttering, “Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it lovely!” over and over again. In the evening she had thought she would be sent away; when they explained she would live there forever, she burst into tears.
He’d seen others, though, halting and shy, bemused by the form of speech they heard, dazzled by the bearing of the harem women, stupefied by the luxury. Some physically shook with fear at the prospect of being introduced. Yashim thought of Hyacinth, frightened by the first snow.
“The engine doesn’t exist,” Ibou snapped.
“Not here. But at Topkapi? Maybe there is an engine. Maybe, Ibou, your predecessors found it useful to have one.”
The Kislar aga shrugged lightly. “At Topkapi, Yashim, I worked in the library. Nobody pushed books into the Bosphorus. How would I know? The lady Talfa is the one to ask. She showed it to the girls.”
“I see.” He thought of Melda, frozen with misery. “Who would Elif have confided in, when she had her trouble? Apart from Melda. Would she have spoken to Talfa? Asked her for help, maybe?”
“Talfa?” The Kislar aga looked incredulous. “They hated each other.”
It was Yashim’s turn to look surprised. “Why?”
Ibou groaned. “That dreadful day, when the new girls came across, Elif was very rude to the lady Talfa. She treated her like one of Sultan Mahmut’s concubines.”
“Not a good start.”
“No. The lady Talfa gave her—and Melda—the job of escorting a little girl.”
“Which they didn’t like?”
“They thought it was b-b-beneath them. Elif was very, very angry. She made remarks—and did some foolish things, I believe.”
“Foolish things?”
The aga rolled his eyes. “She put a rat’s tail in the lady Talfa’s makeup pot.”
“Who told you that?”
“I didn’t need to be told. You could hear Talfa all over the palace.”
“And you knew it was Elif?”
“Who else? She denied it, naturally.” Ibou blew out his cheeks. “You cannot believe the spite and fury of these women, Yashim.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Ibou.”
He got up. Yashim knew that all sorts of children lived in the harem—princes and princesses, slave girls, children adopted into the imperial family for political or diplomatic reasons. “Who was the girl?”
Ibou shrugged. “We call her Roxelana. The lady Talfa took a shine to her. Very quiet little thing.”
“Why Roxelana? She’s Russian?”
“Either that, or it’s just because she has red hair.”
“And that’s all you can tell me?”
“She has red hair. She didn’t like her kalfas wearing their orchestra uniform. She didn’t like their hats.” Ibou flung up his hands in exasperation. “She’s about five. Just a little girl, Yashim. Hyacinth would have been the person to ask, if you wanted.”
Yashim saw the tears welling up in the aga’s eyes.
“Hyacinth? Why Hyacinth?”
“Because Hyacinth was responsible for taking her into the harem. It was Hyacinth who gave her the name.”
S
NOW was falling in scattered flurries as Yashim strode away from Besiktas. His head throbbed. He tore off his turban and walked on bareheaded, grateful for the cold and the thin wind and the darkness that all but hid the buildings around him.
He swung his arms, sucked at the cold air. He knew now precisely why he had chosen to live outside, away from the palace; precisely why Talfa’s insinuations had made his flesh creep and his ancient fears rise up. Preen was right: he could not bear to be trapped. He beat his arms over his chest and thought of Ibou’s subterranean rooms, of the women who dragged out their lives within the confines of a harem, of Kadri bursting his constraints and vaulting the walls of his palace school.
Shadowed, muffled figures slipped past him in the gloom. Now and then he shivered, like an animal discovering its limbs after a long sleep: ever since that ceremony of the birth he had been laboring under a burden of dread. And dreadful things had happened. At Besiktas, a girl had become possessed by a demon: a demon of the mind that created the demon in her belly. Hyacinth’s fear of abandonment was a demon, too, which plagued him remorselessly until he died falling from the balustrade. Yashim was oppressed by thoughts of Fevzi Ahmet, the mentor whose example he had rejected, whose memory he had thought buried and contained.
Yashim stepped almost automatically into a caïque. Later he could remember reaching the landing stage, but not how he had crossed the Horn, nor how he had come home.
Images floated unbidden into his mind: a little boy standing frightened in the snow; Pembe, the mother of the sultan’s ruined child; a bloodstained sheet; Hyacinth’s frail body in the pool. He shuddered: for a few moments he had felt that he was seeing with another eye. An evil eye, which roamed from Besiktas to Topkapi, picking out its victims, sapping their will to live.
Back in his apartment he riddled the stove, angrily, and added a scoop of charcoal. He stood for a moment warming his hands above the glow, then he wiped them and stripped the skin from a pair of onions, which he split on the board. He sliced the halves in both directions, and let the tears well in his eyes. One day, Ibou had said once, you will mourn the valide yourself.
He put a shallow pan on the coals and added a slick of oil. He smashed the garlic with the flat of a blade and swept it from the board with the onions into the pan. They began to sizzle on the heat, and he wiped his eyes. He peeled a few carrots, potatoes, and a knob of celeriac, then pulled the chopping block toward him and began to slice the vegetables, first into strips, then into little dice.
He shook the pan.
The valide had once told him that a long life inside the harem depended on intelligence, not good health. But the valide was not well.
The onions were soft; he stirred in the vegetables, turning them in the oil.
It took a man or a woman to cast the eye. And there was one woman in the harem whose bitterness was active—and corrosive. Talfa was the senior lady in the sultan’s harem. Talfa had intuitively divined Yashim’s own fear of being pinned down in the palace, and played upon it. Talfa was bitter, and ambitious.
Perhaps she had frightened others? Pembe claimed that Talfa put the evil eye on her. Bezmialem had become a cipher. Elif had died at Besiktas, Hyacinth at Topkapi—but thanks to Tülin, the valide’s handmaiden, he knew that Talfa had gone to Topkapi only days before, and talked of nothing while the valide dozed. Talfa had insisted on meeting all the sultan’s ladies, so that they might meet her daughter, and then she had spoken to Melda. Taken her apart. Taken her aside for a little chat.
He sprinkled some sugar over the pan and threw in a couple of bay leaves. He covered the vegetables with water, and left them to come to the boil while he cleaned the mussels.
Talfa knew Topkapi very well, from top to bottom. She had been born there, after all. Talfa would know all about the engine. It didn’t matter whether the engine really existed or not. He might spend hours in the palace, searching for a contraption that whirled people to their doom—and all he might find would be a dusty table in a neglected room.
Ibou said that Talfa and Elif hated each other.
But Talfa had a knack for divining people’s fears, and playing on them. Elif ’s stare-baby—where had that come from? Perhaps Talfa had suggested a desperate remedy.
It made her bleed.
By taking Melda to Topkapi, Yashim had thought he was protecting her.
Instead, he had isolated her. What was it the valide had said?
To be truly alone—in here, at least—it’s a kind of death.
Yashim tapped a mussel on the board. The mussel closed, and he tossed it into the bowl. Eventually he tipped the bowl and drained the juice into the pan. After a few minutes he stirred in the mussels.
Had Melda confided in Hyacinth? Talfa had something on Hyacinth that would make his heart sink, too.
Yashim took a bunch of parsley and chopped it on the board. He imagined Talfa dripping with feigned concern: “Poor Hyacinth. With the valide gone, there’ll be just you, won’t there? You and the old women at Topkapi?”
Yashim raised his head, with a jolt.
It had happened so slowly, so inexorably, that he hadn’t really noticed how Talfa had made herself queen of the harem. It was she rather than Bezmialem or Ibou who created and enforced the rules.
But if the valide moved to Besiktas, Talfa’s influence as the senior lady of the harem would be eclipsed.
Yashim picked up the
pilaki
and moved it off the heat, to the table. He scattered the parsley over the mussels.
Then he washed his hands and wound the turban around his head, and went out into the night.
T
HE valide looked at Yashim with her bright eyes.
“Am I going to Besiktas, Yashim? I can’t remember.”
Yashim took her pale hand in his. He found the question difficult to answer.
“Perhaps, valide hanum. When you are feeling stronger.”
She closed her eyes, and smiled faintly. “I wonder. I wonder what Dr. Sevi would suggest.” Her eyelids flickered, and he felt the pressure of her hand relax.
Yashim stooped and put his ear close to her lips. A silver carafe, fluted like a swan, stood on a small inlay table. Yashim grabbed at its neck and went to slosh some water into a glass. But the carafe was empty.
He thrust it into Tülin’s hands. “Fetch water. Fill it.”
She took the carafe and ran with it to the outer door.
Yashim turned back to the valide. He smoothed a skimpy lock of hair from her forehead. She was papery to the touch; papery and thin. At his touch her eyes flickered, and moved slowly toward him.
“Papa.” Her word was scarcely a breath, just a shape on her lips. “Papa.” Her eyes fixed on him now, watery and old and very deep.
“Je me suis perdue,”
she murmured. I am lost.
“Mais—ça va bien.”
He read the question in her eyes: the old question that always lay in the eyes of the dying. Her look was full of tenderness, as if the answer were already known, like a secret between them—the secret by which all men and women were bound, as long as men lived and died.
He could not betray that look by moving his own eyes until the girl came back and Yashim heard the sound of water in the glass.
He bent forward carefully, and brought the glass to the valide’s lips. The water ran across her tongue and he heard her throat catch. He brought the glass to her lips again. She swallowed slowly, closing and opening her mouth.
He let her breathe, then tried again.
After a while her eyes closed. The glass was almost empty.
He looked into the valide’s face, noting the veins in her eyelids and the translucency of her skin. Bending very close, he caught a faint sigh from her lips.
“I am going to fetch the doctor.” He went out into the courtyard. In the eunuch’s room he scribbled a note for the doctor, advising him to come with all possible speed, and handed it to a halberdier.
“Not Inalcik,” he added. Inalcik was young, courteous, and French-trained ; he was always consulted by the ladies of Besiktas. “You must ask for Sabbatai Sevi. Do you understand? The old Jew.”
“Sevi the Jew.” The halberdier bowed.
But it was young Inalcik who came, smooth and serious in a black frock coat, stepping very precisely over the old stones of the courtyard with his bag in his hand.
He went into the valide’s chamber and remained there for twenty minutes, listening to her chest through a stethoscope, examining her eyelids, writing notes in a yellow book with a fountain pen.
When he emerged he looked solemn. They met Sevi at the gate to the harem. He wore a long coat, edged with velvet, and a blue skullcap. Dr. Inalcik looked surprised, and amused.
“A second opinion, Dr. Sevi. I approve, heartily.” His eyes twinkled as he outlined his own diagnosis to the Jew, who stooped to listen. “I hope you will be able to do more than I have achieved,” he added.
Sevi opened his hands. “I am very old, doctor. So is the lady.”
As Yashim led him to the valide’s room, Sevi stayed him with his hand. “The mind?”
“Wandering,” Yashim explained. “It has been like this for—” He screwed up his eyes, casting back. “A month, maybe more. Now, I think, she spends more time at home—her childhood home.”
Sevi nodded. “Perhaps she had a very happy childhood. Can she walk?”
“I haven’t seen her walk in weeks.”
“Then why not a visit to her childhood home? It’s easier on the feet.”
He came without a bag, or instruments of any kind. He knelt by the divan and took the valide’s hand in his own. After a while he peered more closely at her fingers.
Yashim felt a twinge of doubt. In Sevi’s day, the doctor often examined a woman through a curtain. Childbirth, disease, all manner of conditions had to be treated by the doctor without actually touching, or even inspecting, the woman’s body; it was the tradition, it maintained propriety.
“Modern medicine,” Inalcik had remarked, as he clipped open his bag and retrieved his stethoscope, “goes rather deeper to the sources and the causes of discomfort and illness.”
The old Jew remained on his knees for some time, watching the valide’s face, absently rubbing her hand in his.
He seemed to have gone into some sort of dream. Yashim gave a discreet cough and the old man sighed.
He unfolded slowly, and stood up.
“Poison?” Yashim asked.
Sabbatai Sevi looked at him sadly. “Poison? No. The valide sultan,” he added gravely, “is extremely thirsty.”