Y
ASHIM awoke to a pounding in his head and squinted at the sunlight. He rubbed his temples, swung his legs off the divan, and groaned.
The pounding did not stop.
“
Evet
. I’m coming, I’m coming,” he grumbled, picking his way past the empty dishes. A young soldier stood at the door.
The soldier saluted.
“Come in.”
As he stepped in he whipped off his kepi and tucked it under his arm, standing stiffly amid the remains of last night’s feast. The half-empty brandy bottle stood on a low table close to the soldier’s knee, but the soldier was too rigid to notice it.
Also, Yashim realized, probably too young to recognize it.
“I have come from the palace school, efendi. The principal requests that you attend on him immediately.”
The palace school—of course. In Yashim’s day, the young men had worn turbans and pantaloons.
Yashim sighed. “Very well. If you would be so kind as to run down to the café on Kara Davut and order coffee for me? One for yourself, too, if you like.”
The boy positively quivered with correctness. “We should not lose time, efendi.”
“Which is why you could order coffee while I dress.”
Half an hour later they arrived at the school gate, whose huge curling eaves projected over the street. Yashim turned to look back at the view, both novel and familiar: two sloping, crooked streets lined with low wooden houses, running down to a tiny open space. Not quite a square, nor even a piazza, it was simply a haphazard confluence of sloping lanes paved with huge, smooth cobbles. A thread of water spun from a brass spigot into a small ornamental fountain, fed from the aqueduct he could see in the distance, built by Emperor Trajan more than a thousand years ago.
Istanbul was a city that packed time like a spyglass in its case. It was a place where centuries passed in moments, and where a minute—like this one, standing on the school steps—could seem like an age. Yashim had not been back to the palace school, where the empire trained her best and brightest boys, for fifteen years.
“I lived here once,” Yashim said.
The boy’s eyes swiveled briefly toward him. “Yes, efendi.”
Yashim sensed the boy’s doubt and disappointment. “And you are—nineteen?” He smiled, a little sadly. “Almost ready to graduate, I suppose.”
“Seventeen, efendi.”
“You look older. Tell me, what talents do you have?”
The boy looked at him levelly. “Talents? Very few, efendi, from what I’m told.”
They crossed the courtyard. At the foot of the stairs Yashim hesitated, inhaling the familiar smell of sweat and roses. “It’s not Pirek
lala
still?”
The cadet looked blank. “Efendi?”
They came out onto a gallery overlooking an enclosed courtyard. For a moment Yashim was tempted to hang back: the man leaning over the rail was Pirek
lala
, the old eunuch with the iron-shod stick.
He blinked, and the old
lala
was gone.
“Bozu! I saw that! Keep your foot flat and try it again.” The man at the rail was much younger, though his beard was gray. He was dressed in naval uniform. “The wrestling, Yashim efendi. I am the tutor.”
Yashim salaamed. The hall was just as he remembered, with high rectangular windows on three walls and a floor of raked and watered sand. Below them a dozen or so youths grappled with one another, stripped to the waist, their bodies oiled and gleaming. Yashim watched them for a while, remembering another set of boys trying anxiously to perfect their moves, grunting with exertion as they shifted from hold to hold.
Yashim had been a good wrestler, agile and strong. He was out of practice now, but he’d never lost the technique. Twice, at least, it had saved his life.
“They look fit.”
“They should be,” the tutor replied, a little grimly. “I keep ’em busy, morning, noon, and night. I run a tight ship here, efendi. If they can’t take the pace, out they go. Army can take ’em.” He stroked his beard. “One I’ve had my eye on. Wrestles well. Not so much with the
gerit
—too young—but runs like a hare.”
“Which one?”
“Name’s Kadri,” the tutor said. “Penmanship, rhetoric, wrestling, whatever—the best I’ve seen in fifteen years. He’ll win his races every day for a week. He’ll memorize twenty sutras in a couple of hours.” He glared at Yashim.
“I see. Wonderful.”
The tutor’s beard quivered. “Half a dozen times I’ve been on the point of telling him to pack.”
“You mean, to leave the school?”
“It’s like this, Yashim efendi. Kadri just goes out, like a lamp in a draft. Finest student I’ve had, and then for a day, for a week: nothing. No results. Lights up again when he’s ready, but it upsets the others, you see? Sense they’re winning only because Kadri doesn’t care.”
Yashim nodded. The Ottomans had discovered esprit de corps long before the French gave it a name. It was the founding principle of the whole administration of the empire, and this school’s purpose was to engender it in the ranks of those who would go on to rule.
Of course, the Ottoman elite was riven by cabals and cliques, whose shifting alliances interfered with the frictionless running of the empire. But esprit de corps remained the ideal.
The tutor was working his fingers together, one hand clasped above the other.
“He has no talent.”
“You said he could run.”
The tutor squinted at him. “Meant the talent of an Ottoman. If he has it, I can’t find it. Excels at everything, but focuses on nothing.”
Yashim bowed his head. “And you want me to talk to him?”
“Talk to him?” The tutor gave a shaky laugh. “No, Yashim efendi. I want you to find him.”
To Yashim’s surprise the tutor stuffed his beard into his mouth and chewed. “Forgive me, I did not make myself clear. Kadri himself is not the problem. The problem is that Kadri has disappeared.”
T
HE lady Talfa waddled to the divan.
“Let me get comfortable,” she said. She dropped her slippers and settled against the cushions. “There. You may begin.”
She raised her chin and closed her eyes.
Her dresser knelt at the edge of the divan. She opened her leather bag and took out some little jars, a few pots, a sable brush, and a pair of silver tweezers, which she laid out on the carpet.
It was widely acknowledged within the harem that Talfa, the late sultan’s sister, possessed less than flawless skin. One of the older women had suggested that Talfa resembled her late brother in a number of ways. “She has the same air of command. The same eyes. Only, the blessed sultan lacked such a fine mustache.”
The dresser kept her face lowered as she opened the pot of wax and took up the spatula.
She frowned as she looked into the pot, and turned it slightly toward the light. Then she gave a little gasp.
Talfa opened her eyes.
“What’s the matter now?”
The dresser let the pot slip from her fingers and brought her hand to her mouth.
Talfa’s hand flew to her chin. “What is it?”
“I—I don’t know, hanum efendi. There was something in the pot.”
“In the pot?” A look of annoyance clouded the princess’s face. “Well, pick it up.”
The girl gingerly picked up the pot, and turned it so that Talfa could look inside.
She peered in, then dabbed at it with a finger.
Something black and long sprang out, and they both started. The dresser let the pot fall.
On the carpet between them lay the thick, ribbed tail of a rat.
Talfa’s face slowly crumpled as she squeezed her eyes shut and opened her mouth. Then she screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
T
HE boys’ dormitory in a long, narrow room high up under the eaves contained twelve cots and a table with a washbasin. On a stand lay a copy of the Koran, transcribed by gifted boys over the years; Yashim thought he recognized his own hand in the pages, but he could not be sure. It was a long time ago.
The fire in the grate was cold.
A barred window at the end of the room looked out over the many-domed roof of the refectory. Beyond it, across a narrow lane, he could see the leaded dome of a small mosque.
“Took him from Anatolia,” the tutor said. “He’d been living wild.”
“Wild?”
“In a cave, apparently. One of the clansmen found him. Sent him on.”
Yashim nodded. It wasn’t unusual for boys to be sponsored to the school. No doubt one of the clan chiefs of Anatolia had recognized Kadri’s talents and sent him to Istanbul in the hope that one day he would be in a position to repay the favor.
The tutor shrugged. “Long time ago, Yashim efendi. For Kadri, I mean. He was only seven or eight—half a lifetime ago, in fact. Been in training ever since.”
“He left from here?”
The tutor made a gesture of bewilderment. “Must be so. We do a roll call every night. Kadri was marked in.”
Yashim squatted in the fireplace and looked up the chimney. “Maybe another boy answered for him?”
The tutor shook his head. “Kadri took the roll himself. I could show you the register. The boys agree that Kadri was there when they turned in.”
“After the register, the doors are locked?” Yashim stood up, rubbing his hands. The chimney was narrow and capped with a cowl. “And in the morning, someone beats the gong.”
The tutor nodded. “Older boys bring tapers to the dormitories. That’s when they found Kadri missing.”
“But he’d slept in his bed.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“The boys looked around, then came down to the mosque and told me what had happened. I came up and searched, too.”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Yashim said.
It was a stone staircase, with a landing between the floors. Yashim stopped to contemplate the landing window, high in the wall. Then he moved on downstairs and into the courtyard, to study the dormitory block from the outside. It was just as he remembered, built in the spare classical Ottoman style, with deeply inset windows and dressed stone walls.
Beyond these walls so much had changed in the years since Yashim was there. Laws had been changed, the Janissaries suppressed. Egypt, the ancient grain store of the empire, had slipped from the sultan’s grasp under its charismatic Albanian overlord, Mehmet Ali Pasha; Russia had moved closer.
“Fazil!”
One of the boys coming out of the gymnasium broke away from his companions and salaamed.
“Fazil shares the dormitory with Kadri. Tell the efendi what happened this morning.”
Fazil gave his account. Kadri hadn’t been in his bed when the gong went.
“Did you look under all the beds?” Yashim asked the boy again.
Fazil scratched one leg against the other and admitted that he couldn’t be sure.
“How about your own bed?”
“I—I think so, efendi. Or one of the boys would have looked.”
“And the chimney?”
“I can’t remember, efendi. Later, I looked for sure. I am sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Yashim assured him. “Thank you for telling me.” He was surprised how little seemed to have changed since his day. The boys, it was true, were dressed differently, in Frankish uniforms—but they were the same boys as before, lanky, handsome, darting from one classroom to the next holding their books.
He half smiled to himself as he caught sight of an imam in his white cap and long brown robes, treading solemnly along the cobbled path. That element of the curriculum, at least, was unchanged.
“Either Kadri is still here, tutor, or—” Yashim squinted up at the side of the building. “Is the catch on that landing window fastened?”
The tutor heaved a sigh of impatience. “Anyone who jumped from that window, Yashim efendi, would be dead at the foot of the wall.”
Yashim nodded. “Let’s find someone with a ladder.”
D
ONIZETTI Pasha, the instructor general, cracked his white baton down on the lectern.
“Ladies, ladies, please.” He leaned forward on his toes and blew out his cheeks so that his mustaches tickled his nose. “I hope you are not too stiff?”
He placed the baton down and laced his fingers together, arching them over his little bald head, leaning this way and that. “You must do the same. Stretch your fingers!”
The orchestra obeyed. There was the sound of instruments being laid aside, and a few suppressed giggles, because Donizetti Pasha was a man and his talk sounded intimate: stiff, fingers. To have these parts, these feelings, referred to by a strange man—well!
Elif, smiling, caught Donizetti’s glance and blushed.
The maestro was no stranger to the palace himself. In his twelve years at the Porte he had written marches for the new army bands, airs for sultans, and innumerable studies and scherzos for the more musical members of the imperial family, including the rousing march unofficially considered the Ottoman imperial anthem, with its swelling brass and occasional daring swoops into a minor, Oriental key.
Donizetti Pasha nodded. “Good, good. Now, like this.”
He waggled his fingers beside his cheeks. The ladies of the harem orchestra followed suit.
“Ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao!”
Donizetti hunched his shoulders and his eyes twinkled.
“Ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao!”
trilled the harem ladies. They looked about them and laughed.
“Va bene!”
the maestro cried jovially. “Now your fingers are relaxed, and you can play like angels! Violins, especially.”
He cast a meaningful glance toward the violins, and picked up the baton. “When you are ready. One, two, three. And—” He flicked the tip of his baton through the air, and the violins picked up the beat.
Giuseppe Donizetti smiled, and gave the violins a deep nod. Really, they were not too bad. Not bad at all! What a sensation they would make in Milan—the loveliest orchestra in the world,
belli di Bosforo
! Each a flower, plucked from the waysides of the Caucasus—
Ah, Giuseppe, Giuseppe! Lower your eyes, man! Concentrate on the score. For your own good health.
He had tutored the young prince Abdülmecid, now the sultan, on pianoforte and violin—the youth lacked attack, perhaps, but he was competent and some of his compositions showed promise—but when the young sultan had first suggested that Donizetti Pasha should lead the ladies’ orchestra every week, the Paduan maestro had found his heart beating like a drum.
“No man other than the sultan has ever stepped into his harem,”
he had confided in a letter to his little brother.
“I am to make history! Not only shall I meet the sultan’s ladies, but I am to direct them with my baton, every week!”
To which his brother had replied with a dry warning.
“I advise you, my dear brother, to read the contract carefully before you commit yourself. As I understand the harem rules, your baton may be the first thing to go if you accept such a position.”
Donizetti Pasha had chuckled a little uneasily at the gibe. His brother, of course, took his own baton to the ladies of Paris and Naples without stint: it had been that way ever since his
Lucia di Lammermoor
had made him the darling of Italian opera. Giuseppe did not begrudge his younger brother his good fortune, either with the ladies or the stage: they had been born poor, and Giuseppe remained grateful for the attainments that had led him to a position of trust and honor within the Ottoman Empire. It was a snug billet, as a soldier might say; and he was a married man.
In the event, his anxiety—and his brother’s warning—had proved unfounded. The sultan was as good as his word. Every Thursday, the girls of the orchestra assembled in the Grand Salon under the direction of the amiable Italian. They played minuets for him; they galloped into rondos; they beat the drum and scraped the string and blew the reed and fingered the stops for him; and if some of them believed themselves in love, why, Donizetti Pasha was far too short, and round, and twinkling on his toes to suspect such a thing.
He was the only man, beyond family, that many of them had ever seen before. Portly and innocent; but a man.