“Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It’s the same now, isn’t it?”
The Kislar Agha continued to stare out at the rain, tugging on his earlobe. Like a child, Yashim thought vaguely.
“They want us,” he said in a voice of contempt, “to be modern. How can I be modern? I’m a fucking eunuch.”
Yashim inclined his head. “Even eunuchs can learn how to sit in a chair. Eat with a knife and fork.”
The black eunuch flashed him a haughty look.
“I can’t. Anyway, modern people are supposed to know stuff. They all read, don’t they? Eating up the little ants on the paper with their eyes and later on spraying the whole mess back in people’s faces when they don’t expect it. What do they call it?
The Kislar Agha raised his head and looked hard at Yashim.
“It may not be now, maybe not this year or the next,” he said slowly, in his mincing little falsetto voice, “but the time will come when they’ll just turn us out into the street to die.”
He made a flapping gesture with his fingers, as if he were batting Yashim away. Then he stepped out ponderously into the courtyard, and walked slowly across to a door on the other side, in the rain.
Yashim stared after him for a few moments, then he went to the door of the valide’s suite, and knocked gently on the wood.
One of the valide’s slave-girls, who had been sitting on an embroidered cushion in the tiny hall, snipping at her toenails with a pair of scissors, looked up and smiled brightly.
“I’d like to see the valide, if I may,” said Yashim.
[ 112 ]
By the time Yashim left the palace that Friday afternoon it was almost dark, and at the market by the Kara Davut the stallholders were beginning to pack up by torch light.
For a moment Yashim wondered if he should have gone to eat lunch with Ibou, the willowy archivist, for he had had nothing to eat all day and felt almost light-headed with hunger. Almost automatically he brushed the idea aside. Regrets and second thoughts seldom occupied him for long: they were futile emotions he had trained himself to resist, for fear of opening the floodgates. He had known too many men in his condition eaten up by bitterness; too many men—and women, too—paralysed by their second thoughts, brooding over changes they were powerless to reverse.
George the Greek came swarming out from behind his stall as Yashim stood picking over the remains of a basket of salad leaves. The sight seemed to drive him into a frenzy.
“What for yous comes so late in the day, eh? Buying this old shit! Yous an old lady? Yous keeping rabbits now? I puts everything away.”
He set his hands on his hips.
“What you wants, anyways?”
Yashim tried to think. If Palewski came to dinner, as promised, he’d want something reasonably substantial. Soup, then, and manti—the manti woman would have some left, he was sure. He could make a sauce with olives and peppers from the jar. Garlic he had.
“I’ll take that,” he said, pointing out an orange pumpkin. “Some leeks, if you have them. Small is better.”
“Some very small leeks, good. Yous making balkabagi? Yous needs a couple of onions, then. Good. For stock: one carrot, onion, parsley, bay. Is twenty-five piastres.”
“Plus what I owe you from the other day.”
“I forgets the other days. This is today.”
He found Yashim a string bag for his vegetables.
The manti woman was still at work, as Yashim had hoped. He bought a pound of meat and pumpkin manti, half a pint of sour cream in the dairy next door and two rounds of borek, still warm from the oven. And then, for what felt like the first time in days, he went home.
