Now he needed a strip of cloth to bind them together. He tore at a towel with his fingers and his teeth, whimpering now.
At last he managed to create a nick in the hem. Even tearing the cloth he was like a puny child, nearly too weak to raise his arms, but at last he had a bandage of cotton which he secured around the two bamboos. The remaining scrap he tied to the top of the pole, and then he began to raise it up. The bare end struck on the side of the dome. He scraped it upwards.
It was too short.
Through the vapour, against the dome, Yashim could hardly tell how short. His face was set in a rictus now, his teeth bared. He staggered across to the massage bench and clambered onto it. Every movement was an agony. As he raised his arms he noticed that they were almost purple, as if blood was starting to ooze from his pores.
He started to pump the stick up and down, up and down. At every stroke he felt that he was pumping the blood, too, through the pores in his skin. He faintly remembered that he needed to make the stick move, but he could no longer remember why this had seemed important, only that it was all the instruction he possessed. It was all he had left.
[ 96 ]
“Avec permission
The seraskier glanced upwards with a look of surprise. Then he smiled politely.
“Enchante, Excellence.”
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Palewski continued, “but I have just seen something rather strange and I wanted your opinion.”
“Mais bien stir.” The seraskier did not sound impressed. What he and the Polish ambassador found strange could be entirely different things. “What have you seen, Your Excellency?”
It occurred to Palewski that any explanation he could give would sound thin, even laughable. He turned to the seraskier’s companions.
“Would you excuse me? I’d like to borrow the seraskier for just one minute. Indulge me, effendi.”
The men made noncommittal gestures, but said nothing. The seraskier looked from them to Palewski with an impatient half-smile.
“Very well, Excellency.” He was on his feet. “My apologies, gentlemen.”
Palewski took him by the arm and steered him into the street.
“Something funny just happened at the baths,” he began. “First they closed them, quite suddenly, on a Thursday night.” He had seized on this detail, which had so baffled him at first, as being the oddest from a Turkish point of view. “They are supposed to be cleaning them out, but a minute ago I watched someone waving a flag out through a hole in the roof. I say a flag, because there is simply no other explanation I can think of. It looked like, well, a signal. And now it has stopped. D’you see, effendi? It may sound odd to you, but it really did look like that—as if someone had been signalling, and then was stopped for some reason. I wanted to go down there myself, but seeing you—well, I thought you could make an enquiry with greater weight.”
The seraskier frowned. It sounded like rubbish, of course, and whatever went on in a hammam was really no concern of his…and yet, the Pole was clearly agitated.
“For your sake, Excellency, we will go and ask,” he said, with as much gallantry as he could muster.
[ 97 ]
Yashim could hear voices. A tiny sliver of light cut into the darkness as he raised his eyelids a fraction of an inch. Something that soothed him pressed for a moment against his body, and was gone. Dim shapes moved in the light.
“Yash? Yashim? Can you hear me?”
He tried to nod.
Palewski put a hand under his head and tilted him forwards.
