What he saw next made him a very sick workman indeed.
[ 12 ]
Yashim rolled out of bed, slipped on a djellabah and slippers, took his purse from a hook and went down into the street. Three turns brought him to Kara Davut Sokagi, where he drank two cups of thick, sweet coffee and ate a borek, layers of honeyed pastry fried in oil. Often in the night, at the time when people tend to lie awake and follow their plans out until they drift away into a happy sleep, Yashim thought of moving from his rooms in the tenement to somewhere bigger and lighter, with proper views. He’d designed a small library for himself, with a comfortable, well-lit alcove for reading, and a splendid kitchen, too, with a room off the side for a servant to sleep in—someone to riddle up the fire in the morning and fetch him his coffee. Sometimes it was the library which looked out over the blue Bosphorus, sometimes it was the kitchen. The water threw soothing patterns of light onto the ceiling. An open window caught a glimmer of the summer breeze.
And in the morning, coming down to the Kara Davut, he always decided to stay where he was. He’d leave his books to glower in the half-light, and his kitchen would fill the room with the scent of cardamom and mint and throw steam onto the windows. He’d labour up and down flights of steep stairs and crack his head, from time to time, on the lintel of the sunken doorway. Because the Kara Davut was his kind of street. Ever since he’d found this cafe, where the proprietor always remembered how he liked his coffee—no spice, a hint of sugar—he’d been happy in the Kara Davut. The people all knew him, but they weren’t prying, or gossipy. Not that he gave them anything to gossip about: Yashim led a quiet, blameless life. He went to mosque with them on Fridays. He paid his bills. In return he asked for nothing more than to be left in peace over his morning coffees, to watch the street show, to be waved over by the fishmonger with news of an important haul or to visit the Libyan baker for his excellent sprouted grain bread.
Was that quite true? Did he, really, want to be left in peace by these people—by any people? The seraskier’s note, the sultan’s summons, the fishmonger winking and the coffee done right for him each day: weren’t these exactly the links he craved? Yashim’s air of invisibility sometimes struck even him as a protective pose, a version of the stagey mannerisms of those little gelded boys who grew to become the eunuch guardians of a family, and slip-slopped after their charges, frowning and moue-ing and letting their hands nutter towards their hearts. Perhaps detachment was a mannerism he had adopted because the agony was too biting and too strong to bear without it. A very fragile kind of make-believe.
Yashim looked along the street. An imam in a tall white cap lifted his black robe a few inches to avoid soiling it in a puddle and stepped quietly past the cafe, not turning his head. A small boy with a letter trotted by, stopping at a neighbouring cafe to ask the way. From the opposite direction a shepherd kept his little flock in order with a hazel wand, continually talking to them, as oblivious to the street as if they were following an empty pathway among the hills of Thrace. Two veiled women were heading for the baths; behind them a black slave carried a bundle of clothes. A porter, bent double beneath his basket, was followed by a train of mules, with logs for firewood, and little Greek children darted in and out between their clattering hooves. Here came a cavass, a thickly-padded policeman with a red fez and pistols thrust into his belt, and two Armenian merchants, one swinging his beads, the other counting them with slender fingers while he spoke.
Once he had hated them all, for having things he could never have—not just the children who would never run and play catch with his; but also knowledge of women who’d speak the truth to their lovers in the quiet, and turn over the small business of the day with them; and the company of men who joked, jostled and held their common secret like ripe melons.
Yashim sipped his coffee, and ground his teeth. Even now, he found himself from time to time with a thwarted urge to leap up, waving his arms: to lacerate himself on barbs of scandal by rutting and roaring among these veiled women and their quiet, all-too-well satisfied men. But the hatred, at least, had passed. It had ebbed away slowly, like a receding flood, leaving only its shining imprint in his mind, the dangerous outline of bitterness and rage. These days he walked warily where the flood had been, trying to recognise old landmarks, to piece together the elements of an honourable life out of the jumble of everyday objects he encountered. If he could not be one of the people—if he could not suffer their hurts, and their joys, and their fears the way they did—then he told himself that he could hold to clarity all the faster; he could watch and intervene. For the people were too busy loving, and backsliding and cheating, and boasting and calculating to see, like him, the comedy complete. They trod on rakes which sprang up to hit them in the eye. They sat on stools which somebody whisked away at the last moment. And sometimes they carried vipers hidden in the folds of their cloaks.
Yashim squeezed his eyes shut tight, to focus on the order of the day. He had to visit the seraskier. Standing by that cauldron in the wee hours of yesterday morning, there were any number of questions he’d been too surprised to ask. What had the soldiers been doing on the night they disappeared? What did their relatives think of the affair? Who were their friends? Who were their enemies?
Then there was the cauldron to reckon with: the oddest and most sinister part of the whole affair. He needed to visit the Soup Sellers to see what they had to say.
As for the girl in the palace, and the valide’s jewels—that was, you might say, a more private affair. In every family home lay a region that was harem, forbidden to outsiders. In the Topkapi palace, this region was almost an acre in size, a warren of corridors and courtyards, of winding stairs and balconies so cunningly contrived that it was sealed from the world’s gaze as effectively as if it had been built in the great Sahara, instead of in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world.
With the rarest exceptions, no man but the sultan himself, or men of his family, could enter the harem.
Yashim was one of the exceptions. He could go where no ordinary man could go, on pain of death.
It did not do to make too much of the harem itself. It wasn’t the harem which made eunuchs, though many of them worked there, and the black eunuchs, led by the Kislar Agha, effectively controlled it. Unlike Yashim, unlike many of the white eunuchs, unlike the castrati of the Vatican, the black eunuchs of the palace were utterly clean-cropped: shaved to the quick in a single sweep of the sickle blade, wielded by a slaver in the desert. Each of them now carried a small and exquisite silver tube, tucked into a fold of their turban, for performing the most modest of bodily
