F
OR Yashim, too, the interview provided an opportunity, for as his caïque returned him to Istanbul, it overhauled a fishing boat bringing in the morning’s catch. Back at his apartment, Yashim laid two mackerel on the board. He liked all fish, but mackerel was best: he always liked a mackerel sandwich off the boats that drew up along the Golden Horn in the evening, grilling their fish on shallow braziers along the shore.
Today, he had more elaborate plans.
Taking the sharp kitchen knife an Armenian friend had given him, he made a tiny incision below the gills of each fish. Through the narrow opening he drew out the guts, taking care not to widen the little cuts any further, then he rinsed the fish and laid them back on the board.
He dropped a handful of currants into a bowl and covered them with warm water from the kettle.
With a rolling pin he rolled and bashed the mackerel from the gills to the tail. He snapped the backbones two or three times along their length, pinching the fish between his fingers until the skin was loose. Carefully he began to empty the skin, squeezing the flesh and the bones through the tiny openings.
He picked up the two skins, each still attached to its head and tail, and rinsed them out.
He dried his hands, and peeled and chopped a few shallots. While they softened in the pan, he crushed peeled almonds and walnuts with the rolling pin, chopped them fine with the knife, and stirred them into the shallots with a handful of pine nuts. As they colored he added the currants and a handful of chopped dried apricots. He put cinnamon, allspice berries, and a pinch of cloves into his grinder and ground them over the nuts, adding a dash of
kirmizi biber
, or black charred chili flakes.
He scraped the flesh from the fish bones and tossed it into the pan with a pinch of sugar.
He chopped parsley and dill, split a lemon, and squeezed it over the stuffing.
It smelled good already. He took a nibble, sprinkled the mix with a pinch of salt and black pepper, then stirred it and took it off the heat.
When it was cool, he stuffed the mixture back into the mackerel skins, squeezing and patting them to restore their shape.
He laid a wire grill over the coals, scattered the fish with flour and oil from his fingers, and laid them on the wire, turning them as they spat and sizzled.
Meanwhile, he sharpened his knife on a stone.
When the mackerel skin was bubbling and lightly browned, he took the fish from the heat and sliced them thickly on the board. Very carefully, he slid the fish onto a plate.
I
N the palace Elif bowed her head and gently touched the strings of her violin, straining to hear their tiny hum. Her face was rapt; it was also very beautiful. All the orchestra girls were beautiful—it went without saying, for they played, and lived, for the pleasure and delight of God’s felicity on earth, Sultan Abdülmecid.
They were dressed almost jauntily à la Franca, their shining hair drawn back and pinned beneath exquisite bejeweled shakos, in green tunics and black trousers. They carried European instruments to match their costume, as was the fashion, though at a word they could have reassembled with traditional tanburs, ouds, and neys, for each of the girls was an adept in either form.
Elif glanced up to where Melda was tuning her mandolin, her ear cocked to the belly of the instrument.
The two girls exchanged smiles.
Smiles were the baksheesh of the harem, of course, like frowns and enthusiasm, frostiness and barbed remarks. A smile or a stamped foot—the harem girls passed them back and forth as minor articles of trade. Behind every gesture lay the desire to be noticed. Behind the desire to be noticed lay the hope of preferment: up the ranks of the harem girls, closer and closer to the body of the man whose life, in a way, these girls were destined to curate.
But the smile that passed between Elif and Melda was a smile of sheer complicity.
Four hundred sequins in silver money, from the room they had sequestered. Two necklaces, one of onyx, one of jasper. A gilded coffeepot, three silk shawls, and a jade mouthpiece that Elif thought was more valuable than she let on.
She turned a peg a fraction and laid a finger to the string, watching the Kislar aga advance steady-paced into the great chamber. Behind him came a crocodile file of elderly women, visiting from Eski Saray—the Ceremony of the Birth was an outing they would relish. The lady Talfa, with her personal black slave, let the older women settle, then plumped down among the cushions.
The orchestra had been instructed to play only when the last guest was seated, so the musicians watched in silence as the harem cavalcade poured in. After Talfa came a stream of young girls, recently adopted into the imperial family—the whites purchased in Circassia, or in the market at Istanbul. They fluttered to the divan, or stole humbly into its shadow. Behind them came the other girls, Abdülmecid’s girls—led by two matrons of honor, barely seventeen, who had borne him children in his days as prince—who all settled in order of precedence onto the low divan.
Elif suppressed a contemptuous little smile as she saw Bezmialem come in, at the tail of the younger women. She was pale, even for a Circassian, but still beautiful at thirty-two—she could easily pass for one of the girls, they all reckoned—with her blond curls and her small, white, oval face. Right now, she seemed to be just one of the girls, coming in without proper ceremony.
Elif’s attention wandered to the Kislar aga, standing with his hands folded across his belly at the door to the private apartments of the imperial consorts. The aga was good at ceremony himself. She wondered if the young sultan would attend, and whether he would look the way she remembered; for Elif, like most women in the harem, glimpsed the padishah but rarely.
A squabble broke out among the women settling on the divan as Bezmialem sought out a place. They whispered angrily, hissing and fluttering their jeweled hands. The black eunuchs stepped forward, reminding the girls to put their jealousies away behind bland smiles and flashing eyes. The women whispered and rustled; the eunuchs piped and squeaked; Bezmialem stood twisting her thin white fingers; and a cloud of little children—those of the late sultan and those of the present sultan, mingling with perfect familiarity with the children of slaves, for they were, after all, one family—fidgeted and giggled, or looked around with interest and hauteur as they sat at the edge of the divan, jeweled slippers sliding on the rich carpet.
Elif saw the Kislar aga raise his chin and beckon to someone she had not yet noticed in the crowd: a man in a brown cloak who stood quietly at the far corner. Later, had she been asked, she could have described in minute detail all the people in the room, their jewels, their positions, their choice of colors and fabrics; but she could not have recalled Yashim. For that was his special gift, to be invisible. Elif saw him—and her eye moved back to the Kislar aga.
The aga drew himself up and bowed minutely to the orchestra. Elif laid her bow on the strings and felt the scarcely perceptible tug of rosin on the hairs.
T
HE four kalfas held the cradle high. It was the cradle in which all babies of the imperial line were placed, tightly swaddled, for their first outing into the world.
For boys, it was the world of women, girls, and their neutered attendants that would move around them for seven years.
For girls born behind the lattice, raised in its fretted shadow, it was the only world they would ever know, and on their marriage they would exchange one shadow for another.
Yashim looked again at the cradle. The red tassel meant another girl: disappointment for some, but an opening for the others who shared the sultan’s bed. The tassel swung out as the kalfas moved and for an instant it seemed to Yashim that they were out of step, that the cradle was not securely held. But then a hand went up; the women checked their step and began again to walk slowly around the room. Starting from the right, as tradition demanded.
The khadin, then, was delivered of a girl. She would not be joining the ranks of the most favored consorts of Sultan Abdülmecid. That chance might fall to others, also intimate with their young sovereign. Much would depend on how quickly the mother could recover from the birth; and on how much interest she could coax from the young sultan in his daughter. She was not his first; his third, if Yashim’s memory served. But there: he was out of touch. The sultan was not the same sultan who had superintended his own beginnings in the palace service. This was not the harem he had known.
The tassel dropped back, to rest against the talisman of beaten gold, surrounded by blue glass beads that provided the newborn with protection. Still the kalfas held the cradle at the level of their shoulders. It was a heavy thing, ebony, inlaid with mother of pearl, with a slender rising prow: a tiny ship in which a frail new life embarked for a noble destiny, praise God.
The baby already had a secret umbilical name, whispered by a midwife or the mother at the moment of its birth. Yashim could not remember the mother’s name. Ayesha? Was she the tall Circassian with ankles so fine that some of the other women had predicted they might break with the weight of her child? Always such solicitude for the welfare of their harem sisters! Voices trilling with concern—and spite, no doubt. Pembe, was it? He could not remember. She was not here among the family, nor did she follow the cradle. Perhaps she was not well. It was not a good sign.
He glanced at the divan. The valide was leaning back against cushions, one knee elegantly upraised and a slender wrist poised upon it. The younger women—Bezmialem, the sultan’s mother, among them—sat at a distance; between them, many aunts. There was Talfa, the old sultan’s younger sister, who had married a pasha and returned to the sultan’s harem on his death; and her daughter, Necla; Yusel, her huge slave, on her knees beside her, her black face glistening with—what? Tears?
Yashim sighed. Of course he was not immune. A birth touched him, like a death: this lesser contact with the mysteries, when the curtain moved between this world and eternity; the ordinary miracle that the rich and imperial strove for, as much as the poor did, in fulfillment of their plans and dreams.
Perhaps, in the miracle of creation, they fulfilled themselves. Perhaps birth staved off a final encounter with the mystery. If so, that was a comfort Yashim could not share. He had been born, and he would die.
One of the women gave a sort of sob, and reached into a jeweled bag. As the kalfas with the cradle passed her, she flung her hand into the air—and over the music Yashim heard the tinkling of little silver coins as they scattered across the floor. A cloud of children darted forward to retrieve them. Across the bowed backs of the children milling on the floor, Yashim caught sight of the Kislar aga. His black face was stony.
Yashim blinked. The music—there was something wrong about the music. Even now, as he half turned his head, the violin seemed to whine; the flute sounded shrill and out of tempo. But as soon as he had noticed it, the music reassembled itself.
He saw Talfa, close to the elderly valide. She was scowling while her great black slave kneaded her arm and wept. To his surprise, Talfa dashed a knuckle to her eye, too. The valide’s fingers clenched and unclenched, a sign of impatience. Uncertainly, Yashim allowed his gaze to travel around the divan again. Yes, people were actually crying.
He stiffened. There it was again. The violin was on edge, a little flat. The whole ensemble was slipping out of time. Yashim shifted his weight: only a few bars, murky and discordant, yet for a moment he had felt as though he were on a lurching ship.
The room righted itself. The music flowed on once more. The four kalfas moved gravely toward the aunts, sisters, and cousins of the old sultan. Talfa scattered her coins with a shaky hand. The old valide’s mouth twitched.
It was a scene Yashim would not easily forget: the silent cradle, women crying, the band losing its way again, the children giggling and calling from the floor. Yashim shuddered, and muttered an involuntary blessing.
At last the kalfas turned to go back through the doorway. The Kislar aga stepped aside, and the cortege passed through. Nobody spoke. Some of the women looked afraid. Hands were held to lips. Apart from the gabbling of the children, the room was silent. Even the music had slowly petered out: in their neat little Frankish hats, instruments in their hands, the girls of the orchestra were looking about at one another, wide-eyed and bewildered.
From beyond the door came the sound of a woman’s scream.
In the silence that fell before the scream came again, Yashim sensed a relaxation of the mood, like an escaping sigh.
“
T
HE mother has discovered her infant,” the valide said.
Yashim had to bow to catch her words. Around them women, eunuchs, and slaves were talking and weeping. An elderly eunuch patted his face with his bony fingers. Yashim noticed one mother snatch up her little boy and squeeze him, struggling, while the little boy opened his fist and tried to show her a collection of silver coins. Bezmialem, the young valide, had her head back and was squeezing the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Some of the younger women were shaking their heads, muttering to one another.
“You should not have come, hanum efendi,” Yashim said. “A sad occasion.”
The valide glanced at him sharply. “For the lady,
bien sûr
. At my age, Yashim, one is inured to grief. Perhaps one even seeks it out, a little. I have lived too long to pretend that my death will be a cause of it.” She closed her fan. “The child was born without—the
orifice nécessaire
. I am sorry for the girl, of course. It will be a comfort to her to know that I was here.”
The valide began to cough. Her hand went up and somebody pressed a handkerchief into it. She put the handkerchief to her lips and shut her eyes. “I wish to go home.”
“Of course, hanum efendi.” It was a girl from the orchestra, carrying a flute. She smiled at Yashim and gestured to a eunuch.
“Valide hanum!” Talfa, wet-faced, picked up the hem of the valide’s shawl and pressed it to her lips and eyes. “Please do not go yet. Everyone is so sad. Won’t you help me make her stay, Yashim?”
“I am tired, Talfa,” the valide announced, crisply. “What was the mother’s name?”
“Pembe, hanum efendi. A Circassian.”
“You will please tell her, when it is appropriate, that I came tonight. And afterward, my child, I expect a visit.”
“Nothing could please me more, valide hanum.” Talfa tittered, wiping her tears away with jeweled fingers. “Shall I bring Necla also?”
The valide’s brow furrowed. “Necla? She is very young.”
“She is eleven, hanum efendi.”
“Bring her by all means,” the valide said, without obvious enthusiasm. “Next week, when I am recovered. Tülin?”
“I am here, valide.”
At the band girl’s signal, two slim black eunuchs bent forward to help the valide to her feet. She flinched impatiently, but at last she was upright between them.
“You, too, Yashim. I expect a visit, soon.”
The harem ladies stood respectfully as the valide walked away, supported on either hand by eunuchs. Tülin, the flautist, hovered around them. Yashim found himself face-to-face with Sultan Mahmut’s widowed sister.
“We miss you in the harem, Yashim.”
Yashim blinked: the resemblance to Mahmut was strong. Poor Talfa. She should have borne a son before her husband died. With only Necla, she had returned to the imperial harem.
She took a lock of her hair and curled it on a pudgy finger.
“I’ve been thinking about the way you live … outside,” she said, in the little high voice of the harem. “I often wonder why that is?”
“It was settled many years ago,” Yashim replied cautiously. “By your noble brother’s wish.”
“Peace be on him,”Talfa said, letting the curl of hair spring free. “Sultan Abdülmecid—I suppose he must have confirmed the arrangement.”
Yashim hesitated. The new sultan had not revoked Yashim’s permission to live outside the palace walls. Nor, on the other hand, had he confirmed it. Yashim guessed that Talfa knew as much.
“I am where I hope I can be most useful, hanum efendi,” he replied. “And in the Abode of Bliss, are you not under the gaze of the all-powerful sultan?”
Talfa turned her head slightly and a dimple appeared on her cheek.
“The sultan has
so
many cares, Yashim efendi.” She gave him a slanting gaze under her lashes. “It isn’t fair that you should leave it all to him. And you were very good the other day. You could be so useful here, efendi.”
She giggled lightly.
Yashim bowed, and felt his blood run cold.