wooden box carried by a man dodging down the alley close to the wall.
A printer who ran into the street was carried away by a tide of people racing for the next corner.
A little boy in a nightshirt, who would one day sit as a deputy in the Kemalist National Assembly and spend an evening drinking raki with an air ace called Baron von Richthofen, had his little hand popped out of his mother’s grip and was scooped up and passed overhead by total strangers for several minutes before he found himself being pressed to her bosom again, an experience he could later recall perfectly from other people’s memories.
Alexandra Stanopolis, a Greek girl of marriageable age, had her bottom pinched sixteen times and hoarded the secret to her death in Trabzon fifty-three years later, when she finally revealed it to her daughter-in-law, who herself died in New York City.
A notorious miser known as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt, lost a wooden chest he was carrying to a cheerful thief who later found it contained nothing but a silk scarf with a very tight knot in it; the miser died later in an asylum and the thief in Sevastopol, of dysentery, still wearing the knotted scarf.
Several hundred worshippers at the great mosque, formerly the church of Hagia Sophia, found themselves trapped inside the building and had to be escorted in batches by armed troops who led them to an alleyway beneath the seraglio and told them to find their own way home. Two of the worshippers, swathed in their ostlers’ cloaks and hiding their frightened faces underneath their hoods, quailed at the soldiers’ appearance and in the melee around the great door followed instead a notorious army deserter into a former side-chapel of the cathedral, where they sank down behind a column and communicated in nervous glances. Their names, unusual for Muslims, were Ben Fizerly and Frank Compston.
And all the while, west of the city, the fires raged and raced towards each other like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the obstacles which lay between them. So that Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, with a kitchen knife in one hand and an eye on the window, retrieved the golden threaded cord to his dressing gown and without a word to the man stirring on the carpet beat a hasty retreat to Pera, across the Golden Horn.
In times of crisis, he told himself, foreign representatives needed to make themselves available at their embassies.
[ 120 ]
As Yashim ran across the first court of the seraglio he noticed that it was almost completely deserted: with the New Guard installed in the square and preventing anyone from crossing it was something he might have expected. The few men who remained seemed to have gathered beneath the great plane tree. The Janissary Tree. Yashim shot them a nervous glance as he scuttled over the cobbled walk, his brown cloak billowing behind him.
At the Ortokapi Gate five halberdiers of the selamlik, not wearing curls, stood forward in a body to challenge him. Two of them held pikes in their hands; the others were armed only with the dagger, but their cloaks were pinned back and they stood legs akimbo with their right hands cradling the hilts stuffed into their pantaloons.
“Bear up, men!” Yashim cried as he stepped into the light. “Yashim Togalu, on the sultan’s service!”
They stepped warily aside to let him pass.
The wind which had been whipping his cloak against his legs was still: for a moment he marvelled at the great space that opened up in front of him before he plunged down an alley of cypress, struck by the still blackness of the trees, by the darkness that enveloped him almost at the centre of Ottoman power. Only the thin spark of a lamp at the far end of the tunnel prevented him from succumbing to the frightening atmosphere of a wood at night.
He burst out of the alley and crossed swiftly to the portico of the last, most numinous gate of all the gates that defined the power of the Sublime Porte: the Porte del’ Felicita, the Gateway of Happiness, which led from the workaday second court where viziers, scribes, archivists, ambassadors kicked their heels or rapped out the orders which controlled the lives of men from the Red Sea to the Danube. Beyond it lay the sacred precincts of the third court, where one enormous family led an existence made precious by the presence of the sultan, the Shah-in-Shah, God’s very representative on earth.
The representative’s doors, however, were firmly closed.
His fist made no echo on the iron-studded gates: he might have been beating stone. Exasperated, he took a few steps back and looked upwards. The huge eaves jutted forwards ten feet or more, in classical Ottoman style. He ran his eyes along the walls. The outer walls were built up with the imperial kitchens, a long series of domes, like bowls stacked on a shelf: there was no way through there. He turned to the left and began to walk quickly towards the Archives.
No one challenged him as he placed his hand on the inlaid doors and pushed. The door creaked back, and he stepped into the vestibule. The door ahead stood slightly ajar, and in a minute Yashim was back in the familiar dark archive room.
He called softly.
“Ibou?”
