The man pushed his coffee away and stood up.
“A little piece of everything, that’s all.” He bent down to pick something off the ground and Yashim heard him whisper: “The Hetira. I’d leave it, efendi.”
He walked back to his stall, leaving Yashim staring at the shiny thick dregs in his coffee cup, wondering where he had heard that name before.
5
Istanbul was a city in which everyone, from sultan to beggar, belonged somewhere-to a guild, a district, a family, a church or a mosque. Where they lived, the work they did, how they were paid, married, born, or buried, the friends they kept, the place they worshiped-all these things were arranged for them, so to speak, long before they ever balled their tiny fists and sucked in their first blast of Istanbul air, an air freighted with muezzins, the smell of the sea, the scent of cypresses, spices, and drains.
Newcomers-foreigners, especially-often complained that Istanbul life was a sequence of divisions: they noticed the harem arrangement of the houses, the blank street walls, the way tradesmen clung together in one street or a section of the bazaar. They frequently gave way to feelings of claustrophobia. Stambouliots, on the other hand, were used to the hugger-mugger atmosphere of warmth and gossip that surrounded them from the cradle and followed them to the grave. In the city of belonging, Yashim well knew, even the dead belonged somewhere.
He ran his thumb along the table’s edge. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that of all Istanbul he might be the exception which proved the rule. Sometimes he felt more like a ghost than a man; his invisibility hurt him. Even beggars had a guild that promised to provide their burial at the end. The ordinary eunuchs of the empire, who served as chaperones, escorts, guardians-they were all, in that sense, members of a family: many belonged to the greatest family of all, and lived and died in the sultan’s service. Yashim, for a spell, had served in the sultan’s palace, too; but his gifts were too broad to be comfortably contained there, between the women of the harem and the secrets of the sultan’s inner sanctum. So Yashim had chosen between freedom and belonging; and a grateful sultan had bestowed that freedom on him.
With freedom had come responsibilities, which Yashim worked hard to fulfill, but also loneliness. Neither his condition, nor his profession, such as it was, gave him the right to expect to see his own reflection in a pair of eyes. All he had were his friends.
George was a friend. But what did he know about George? He didn’t know where he lived. He didn’t know where he’d met his accident. But wherever he was, alive or dead, someone in the city knew. Even the dead belong somewhere.
“George? I never asked,” the Armenian stallholder said, scratching his head. “Yildiz? Dolmabahce? Lives somewhere up the Bosphorus, I’m pretty sure-he walks up from the Eminonu wharf.”
One of the Eminonu boatmen, resting his athletic body on the upright oar of his fragile caique, recognized George from Yashim’s description. He took him up the Bosphorus most evenings, he said. Two nights ago a party of Greeks had spilled out onto the wharf and asked to be rowed up the Horn toward Eyup; he had dithered for a while because he had not wanted to miss his regular fare. He remembered, too, that it must have been after dark because the lamps were lit and he had noticed the braziers firing on the Pera shore, where the mussel-sellers were preparing their evening snacks.
Yashim offered him a tip, a pinch of silver, which the boatman palmed without a glance, politely suppressing a reflex that was second nature to most tradesmen in the city. Then Yashim retraced his steps toward the market, wondering if it was in one of these narrow streets that George had met with his accident.
The sound of falling water drew his attention. Through a doorway, higher than the level of the street, he caught a glimpse of a courtyard with squares of dazzling linen laid out to dry on a rosemary bush. He noticed the scalloped edge of a fountain. The door swung shut. But then Yashim knew where George might most likely be found.
Almost ten years after the sultan had told his people to dress alike, George stuck to the traditional blue, brimless cap and black slippers that defined him as a Greek. Once, when Yashim had asked him if he was going to adopt the fez, George had drawn himself up quite stiffly:
“What? You thinks I dresses for sultans and pashas all of my life? Pah! Like these zucchini flowers, I wears what I wears because I ams what I ams!”
Yashim had not asked him about it again; nor did George ever remark on Yashim’s turban. It had become like a secret sign between them, a source of silent satisfaction and mutual recognition, as between them and the others who ignored the fez and went on dressing as before.
The door on the street gave Yashim an idea. A church stood on the street parallel with the one he was strenuously climbing toward the market. A group of discreet buildings formed a complex around the church, where nuns lived in dormitories, ate in a refectory, and also ran a charitable dispensary and hospital for the incurably sick of their community. If his friend had been found on the street after his accident, it was to this door, without a shadow of doubt, that he would have been brought, thanks to his blue cap and his black Greek shoes.
But the door remained closed, in spite of his knocking; and in the church, when he finally reached it, he had to overcome the suspicions of a young Papa who was doubtless bred up in undying hatred for everything Yashim might represent: the conqueror’s turban, the ascendancy of the crescent in the Holy City of Orthodox Christianity, and the right of interference. But when at last he passed beyond the reredos and through the vestry door, he met an old nun who nodded and said that a Greek had been delivered to their door just two nights past.
“He is alive, by the will of God,” the nun said. “But he is very sick.”
The wardroom was bathed in a cool green light and smelled of olive oil soap. There were four wooden cots for invalids and a wide divan; all the cots were occupied. Yashim instinctively put his sleeve to his mouth, but the nun touched his arm and told him not to worry, there was no contagion in the ward.
George’s black slippers lay on the floor at the foot of his cot. His jaw and half his face were swathed in bandages, which continued down across his shoulders and around his barrel-shaped chest. One arm-his left-stuck out stiffly from the bedside, splinted and bound. His breathing sounded sticky. What Yashim could see of his face was nothing more than a swollen bruise, black and purple, and several dark clots where blood had dried around his wounds.
“He has taken a little soup,” the nun whispered. “That is good. He will not speak for many days.”
Yashim could hardly argue with her. Whoever had attacked his friend had done a thorough job. Their identity would remain a mystery, he thought, until George recovered enough to speak. The Hetira. What did it mean?
While the nun led him out through the tiny courtyard, Yashim told her what he knew about his friend. He left her with a purse of silver and the address of the cafe on Kara Davut where he could be found when George regained consciousness.
Only after the door had closed behind him did he think to warn her of the need for discretion, if not secrecy. But it was too late, and probably didn’t matter. For George, after all, the damage was already done.
6
Maximilien Lefevre stepped lightly from the caique and made his way up the narrow cobbled street, carefully avoiding the open gutter, which ran crookedly downhill in the middle of the road. Here and there his path was barred by a tangle of nets and creels, set out to mend; then he would vault over the gutter and carry on up the other side, sometimes stooping to pass beneath the jettied upper floors of the wooden houses, which tilted at crazy angles, as if they were being slowly dragged down by the weight of the washing lines strung between them. Old women dressed from head to toe in black sat out on their steps, their laps full of broken nets; they regarded him curiously as he passed by.
Ortakoy was one of a dozen or so Greek villages strung out along the Bosphorus between Pera and the summer houses of the European diplomats. They had been there two thousand years ago, and more-when
