The Snake Stone: A Novel

“The valide, it will be, efendi. She’s expecting you?”

Yashim nodded. Only a few years ago—it seemed a lifetime—he would have been challenged instantly and whisked through with the certainty that a hundred pairs of eyes were watching him enviously from behind! The old man fished up a bunch of keys and led Yashim across the Second Court, fiddling with them in his hand.

“I have ’em all now, efendi,” he said cheerfully. He payed them out as they walked: the key to the kitchens, the key to the stable block. “This one,” he said, holding a huge iron key up to the light, “you’d never guess.”

“The grain bins,” Yashim said.

“That’s right, efendi. That’s the one. The grain bins. Heavier than the grain now, I expect. This little one?”

“I’ve no idea,” Yashim admitted.

The old man chuckled. “I’ll show you something, efendi. Just you watch.”

They stopped at a small door set into the farther wall of the Second Court. To their left stood the divan room, with its vast jutting eaves, where the great pashas had discussed the business of an empire that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Pyramids. Kingdoms had been broken in that hall; armies raised for glory, and for defeat; the fate of whole races settled; men had been honored or destroyed by a word, a sign, a stroke of the pen. Now it was empty.

The halberdier fitted the key into a tiny lock. With a single twist the door swung open.

“Surprised, efendi? That’s right, that little key.”

There was no need to say any more.

Yashim went inside. The entrance to the harem was like a street in miniature, open to the sky for the next few yards, with the windows of the Black Eunuchs’ apartments projecting over the paving stones. Only it was a street of perfectly polished marble, with fountains that flowed from niches in the walls; and it was utterly silent.

The door closed behind him. He heard the slap-slap of slippers on the flags, and an old black man in a beautifully embroidered kaftan and a vast white turban came around a corner, fanning himself with a fan made of reeds.

“Hello, Hyacinth.”

“Oy, oy, Yashim. It’s getting late.”

“I’m sorry.” Only two or three years earlier, this would have been the most important time in the life of the harem: the hour of gossip and intimacy over food, when thousands of succulent dishes would stream from the palace kitchens to the sultan’s apartments; the hour, above all, of the gozde’s final preparations, bedecking, perfuming, calming the nerves of the girl fortunate enough to have been selected to share the sultan’s bed that night. The whole harem would have fluttered and twittered like a forest of little birds.

The stillness was audible now.

“Ask the valide, Hyacinth, if she will receive me.”

40

“C’EST bizarre, Yashim. As he gets older, my son grows more and more infatuated by the European style—yet I, who was born to it, find that I prefer the comforts of oriental tradition. He hardly comes here anymore, only to see me. His new palace delights him. I find it looks like a manufactory.”

Yashim inclined his head. The Queen Mother was propped up on her sofa against a cloud of cushions, with the light as ever artfully arranged behind her head, a blind drawn across the little side window, and a shawl across her legs. She walked rarely now, if at all; yet her figure was still graceful and the shadows on her face revealed the beauty she had once been and still, in a sense, remained. Beneath a kaftan of silk velvet she wore a fine chiffon robe whose collar and sleeves were embellished with the most delicate Transylvanian lace; the lace, Yashim recalled, was made by nuns. The swirl of her turban was fixed in place by a diamond and emerald aigrette. Her hands were white and delicate. Did the valide not know that her son was dying at Besiktas?

“I am very old, Yashim, as you well know. Topkapi has been my home—some would say my prison—for sixty years. It, too, is old. Well, the world has moved on from us both. By now, I like to think, we understand each other. We share memories. I intend to die here, Yashim, fully dressed. At the sultan’s palace at Besiktas I’d be popped into a nightgown and tucked up in a French bed, and that would be an end of it.”

Yashim nodded. She was perfectly right. So many years had passed since a young woman, the captive of Algerian corsairs, had been delivered here, to the harem quarters of the aged sultan Abdul Hamit, that it was easy to forget how well the valide knew the European style. Aimee Dubucq du Riviery, a planter’s daughter on the French island of Martinique: she was a Frenchwoman. The same inscrutable law of destiny that had taken her to the sultan’s seraglio, where she had finally emerged as valide, had led her childhood friend, little Rose, to the throne of France, as Josephine, Napoleon’s own empress.

A nightgown. A tight French bed. Yashim knew how the Europeans lived, with their mania for divisions. They parceled up their homes the way they segregated their actions. The Franks had special rooms for sleeping in, with fussy contraptions created for performing the act itself, and all day long these bedrooms sat vacant and desolate, consoled by the dust rising in the sunlight—unless they belonged to an invalid. In which case the invalid herself shared the loneliness and desolation, far away from the household activity.

The Franks had dining rooms for dining in, and sitting rooms for sitting in, and drawing rooms for withdrawing into—as if their whole lives were not a series of withdrawals anyway, tiptoeing from one room and one function to the next, changing and dressing all over again, forever on the run from engagement with real life. Whereas in an Ottoman home—even here, in the harem—everyone was allowed to float on the currents of life as they sped by. People divided their lives between what was public and what was reserved for the family, between selamlik, the men’s quarters, and haremlik: in the poorest homes, they were divided only by a curtain. If you were hungry, food was brought in. If you wished to sleep, you unfolded your legs, reclined, and twitched a shawl over yourself. If you were moody, someone was sure to drop in to cheer you up; ill, and someone noticed; tired, and nobody minded if you dozed.

The valide took the book and raised an eyebrow.