He banged his stick once or twice, and when Yashim got away he continued to stand there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him with his thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.
From the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of the old wall, discussed the matter between themselves, but their conversation soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story about a Mevlevi dervish he’d once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.
By late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested by Eugenia’s map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.
Yashim wandered around, defining a kind of circuit which he spent more than an hour exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted a ferrety man with a waxed moustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere, carrying a string bag.
The man jumped when Yashim spoke.
“Who do you want?” he snapped.
“It’s a tekke,” Yashim began—and as he said it he was struck by an idea. “I’m looking for a Sufi tekke, I’m not sure whose.”
The man looked him up and down.
“Doesn’t it make a difference?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “They aren’t all the same, you know.”
“Of course, I understand,” Yashim said peaceably. “In this case, I’m looking for a particular old tekke…I’m an architect,” he added wildly.
He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tea-room. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone else’s.
“An old tekke.” The man swung his nose left and right. “There’s a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They’ve only been there ten years or so, but the building’s very old, if that’s what you mean.”
The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.
“That,” said Yashim, smiling, “is exactly what I mean.”
The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said: “What do you make of all these murders, then?”
It was Yashim’s turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.
“Murders?”
“The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone’s talking about them.”
“Oh, yes. What do you think?”
“I only think…what everyone says. It’s something big, isn’t it? Something about to happen.” He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. “I keep rats.”
“Rats.”
“Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they’re clever, and they don’t mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.
“I’ve got three. They’ve been acting strangely these last few days. Don’t want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don’t want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too.”
Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked: “What is it? What do they feel?”
The man shook his head.
