“She was nice. She had friends.”
“Enemies?” Yashim turned around. The two girls were sitting side by side, staring at him.
“Ow!” The girl suddenly put a hand between her legs. “It’s stinging!”
She jumped off the bed, her pale breasts swinging, one hand clamped between her slender legs.
“Come on, Nilu. I’ve got to wash.”
Nilu reached for a towel on a peg.
“She had friends,” she said. She scampered to the doorway. “Lots of friends,” she added, over her shoulder.
[ 21 ]
Well, hello precious.”
The speaker was a raw-boned girl of about forty in a glossy black wig, a sequinned bustier with padded breasts, a long diaphanous skirt and a pair of large beaded slippers. She was also wearing half a pound of make-up. It made her look older, Yashim realised with a slight pang.
But it was what—eighteen years? They were both of them older than when he first came to the city in the retinue of the great Phanariot merchant-prince, George Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato had been quick to see where Yashim’s talent lay, setting him to work at the ledgers for the sake of his cultivated hand, sending him down to the port to pick up useful information, asking him to con over the manifests, and identify new articles of trade. Yashim had learned a great deal, and with his gift for languages—a gift greater, if possible, even than his employer’s, who spoke Ottoman Turkish, Greek ecclesiastical and demotic, Romanian, Armenian and French, but Russian badly, and Georgian not at all—he had made himself indispensable to the Mavrocordato clan. He’d discovered a talent for being invisible, a knack of holding himself quiet and saying little, so that people tended to overlook his presence.
But while he was grateful for the long hours which kept his mind sharp, still the old torment, all the worse for being fresh, had flourished in the heavy atmosphere of trade and politics, a secret agony among secrets: to be a eunuch was, for Yashim at that time, the grammar of a language he could not understand.
And so he had felt himself isolated in the most cosmopolitan society in Europe.
He had met Preen at a party which Mavrocordato threw for a pasha he wanted to impress, hiring dancers for the evening. Yashim had been sent to pay them off afterwards, and he had found himself talking to Preen.
Of all the traditions that bound Istanbul together, the long history of the koc.ek dancers was probably the least celebrated, and possibly the oldest. Some said that they were descended—in a spiritual sense—from Alexander’s dancing boys. The foundation of Constantinople would have occurred almost a thousand years after the koc.ek tradition had migrated from its homelands in northern India and Afghanistan to the frontiers of the Roman empire. The kocek were creatures of the city, and the rise of a city on the banks of the Bosphorus would have sucked them in like dust to a raging fire. What was certain was that the Greeks had entertained these dancers, selecting them from the ranks of boys who had been castrated before puberty and subjecting them to rigorous training in the stylised arts and mysteries of the kocek dance. They danced for both men and women; under the Ottomans, it was usually for men. They performed in troupes of five or six, accompanied by a musician who plucked at a zither while they whirled and stamped and curved their wrists. Each troupe was responsible for engaging new ‘girls’ and training them. Many of them, of course, slept with their clients; but they were adamantly not prostitutes, whom they regarded as utterly wanton—and unskilled. “Any girl can open her legs,” Preen had once reminded him. “The kogek are dancers.”
But it was undoubtedly true that the koc.ek were not too picky about their friends. They stood on the very lowest rung of Ottoman society, above beggars, but with the jugglers, actors, conjurers and others who made up the despised—and well-patronised—class of professional entertainers. They had their snobberies—who doesn’t?—but they lived in the world and knew the way it turned.
Yashim had been amused by Preen and her ‘girlfriends’, at first. He liked the open way they spoke, their roguishness and candour, and in Preen he came to admire the chirpy cynicism which concealed a heart plunged in romantic dreams. Compared to the heavy secrecy and dark glances of the Phanariot aristocracy, Preen’s world was rough but full of laughter and surprises. And when the Peloponnesian rebellion cast ominous shadows over the Greeks in Istanbul, Preen had reacted to his proposals without thought of her own danger or of the prejudice flaring in the streets. For two days, she had sheltered Mavrocordato’s mother and his sisters, while Yashim arranged the ruse that would carry them to the island of Aegina, and safety.
Sometimes he wondered what she saw in him.
“Come on in.” She twirled from the door and returned to her face in the mirror. “Can’t stop, sweetie. The other girls’ll be here in a moment.”
“A wedding?” Yashim knew the form. Many times since that year of drama he’d helped Preen prepare for the weddings, circumcision celebrations and birthdays for which people required the presence of the ko?ek dancers. In return, perhaps without quite knowing it, Preen had prepared him for his days: those new, flat days when agonies of lust and anger gnawed at him from the inside, and all the better days that were to come.
