when they made it, they meant it.
“Students came pouring into the great court at Topkapi. They were given arms, and they carried the Holy Standard to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque—all that end of the city was ours, around the Hippodrome, Aya Sofia and the palace. The rebels were at the end of the street closer to their barracks, around the Beyazit Mosque and down by the old clothes bazaar. Old Byzantine street, and Janissary stronghold, too. That’s where the sultan’s troops attacked first. Grapeshot. Like Napoleon at the Tuileries. A whiff of grapeshot.
“Just two cannons—but under a fellow they called Ibrahim. Infernal Ibrahim. The Janissaries ran back to the barracks and started to barricade the doors with stones—not a thought for their companions left out in the streets. Even when the artillery had surrounded them, they refused to talk about surrender. Just crowded together inside the Great Gate, apparently. The first cannonade which blew it open killed dozens of them, there and then.
“We saw the flames, Yash. They burned the Janissaries out -some of them, anyway. It was like dismantling a straw-rick, killing the rats as they scamper out. The prisoners were sent to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, but those who were strangled on the spot were dumped under the Janissary Tree—there were half a dozen corpses there by nightfall. The next day, the Hippodrome was a heap of bodies.
“It’s always made me feel sick, that tree. Thinking of the men hanged in the branches, like fruit. And the Janissary corpses piled around its trunk. It must have blood in it, Yash. Blood in its roots.
“But that’s what I saw, and I’m saying this. I’ve known pogroms and massacres. I’ve seen worse, to be frank, than what the Janissaries got in the end. Women and children—I’ve seen that. The Janissaries were men, and they deserved it in a way, poor fools, for what they’d done, and what men before them had done and been doing, time out of mind. They knew the racket they’d joined. It was killing the empire slowly, and they must have known that one day there’d be a reckoning.
“Perhaps they didn’t expect it, coming quite like that, so utter and complete. It wasn’t ‘party’s over and leave your sabres on the counter as you file out’, was it? It was annihilation, Yash. Ten thousand dead? Burning them out of the Belgrade Forest. Winkling them out of the provincial cities. Tartar horsemen, flying across the empire to spread the news. The Auspicious Event, that’s the phrase, isn’t it? The Janissaries don’t even get a mention on their own death certificate. They’re gone, and beyond trace, too.
“You know, a few weeks afterwards, I saw the sultan with an executioner, in a cemetery among the cypress trees. Their ancient dead. The loyal and the brave, as well as the venal and corrupt. The executioner beheaded every gravestone with a heavy sword.”
Yashim raised a finger.
“There’s one left. Over in Uskudar, with the sleeve carved into the stone.”
Palewski waved him away.
“There’s always one left. And maybe dozens. It doesn’t mean anything. The Ottoman empire endures. It endures because everything has changed. And everything has changed because the Janissaries are gone. They were the bedrock of the empire, don’t you see? They were all that stood in the way of—what? The sultan riding on a European saddle. The army drilling like Napoleonic soldiers. Christians opening liquor shops in Pera, men in fezzes instead of turbans, all that. And more: the Janissaries were thieving, overweening, narrow-minded bastards, but they were poets, and artisans of skill, too, some of them. And all of them had culture of a kind. Something that was bigger than them, bigger than their greed and faults.
“Do I regret them? No. But I mourn them, Yashim. Alone in this city I mourn them, because they were the soul of this empire, for good and ill. With them, the Ottomans were unique. Proud, strange and—in a way—free. The Janissaries reminded them of who they were, and what they wished to be. Without them? Very normal now, I’m afraid. Too normal: even the memory of the Janissaries is blotted out. And the empire can’t jig along with this normality, I think, for very long. It’s too thin, too brittle, without memory. Being able to remember—that’s what makes a people. It’s the case for us Poles, too,” he added, suddenly morose.
He swept into an armchair and was silent, brooding with a hand across his eyes. Yashim took a sip of his tea, found it cool and drained the cup.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
Palewski slowly raised his head.
“Bother me, Yashim. Bother as much as you want. I’m only the ambassador, what do I know about anything?”
Yashim felt himself humbled. He had a boyish urge to get up and go away. “I wondered about the bones,” he said, “because they were so clean. How many days have they had—six? How do you strip the bones of a man clean in such a short time?”
“Well,” Palewski murmured, feeling rather queasy. “You boil him.”
“Mmm. And whole, too—in a huge pot. There isn’t a mark of a knife on the bones.”
Palewski poured more tea. He noticed that his hand was trembling.
“Think of the smell,” Yashim was saying. “Someone would be sure to have noticed.”
