“There,” he said. “Stop.”
He reached for the pepper. “We always use white pepper,” he explained, “for the beauty of the dish. It should be very pale.”
He felt awkward as he said it: he was aware of her own pale skin.
“ En effet, it’s a bechamel,” she said.
“It’s a very old recipe, in this part of the world. Butter, flour.”
Madame Lefevre looked interested. “A nomadic dish? Why not? Perhaps we learned it from you?”
“Well,” Yashim hesitated, “I think so, yes. Maybe not directly.” This was one of his pet theories-how had they got onto that so soon? “The Italians were in Pera. Perhaps they brought the idea to France.”
“Catherine de’ Medici,” Madame Lefevre said.
“I think so!” Yashim grinned with delight. “I read it in Careme-listen!” Then he remembered. “At least-I had it before.” He went to the shelves. “Careme, here we are!” He flicked the pages. “I was just reading this: ‘The cooks of the second half of the 1700’s came to know the taste of Italian cooking that Catherine de’ Medici introduced to the French court.’ Perhaps you are right, madame.”
It was her turn to laugh. “Mon Dieu! Careme!”
“It’s lucky I still have it,” Yashim admitted. “I lost a lot of my books recently. Yesterday.”
“You were robbed?”
Yashim smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing important lost. But I’m afraid the apartment is a little bare.”
“I didn’t think such things would happen in Istanbul,” Madame Lefevre said. “Max always tells me how safe it is.”
Max? Yashim frowned: she must mean her husband.
“Madame Lefevre,” he said, “Istanbul is not safe. Not safe at all.” He balled his fists. “I have some terrible news.”
Her eyes widened. “What are you saying, monsieur? Not safe? But what do you mean?” Her voice rose. “Where is Max? Where is my husband?”
“He’s dead,” Yashim said.
61
Widow Matalya went out into the yard with the big fan she used for beating her carpets, to shepherd her chickens into their run.
“Come along, pretty one,” she crooned. She put out a leathery hand. The hen crouched close to the ground, its feathered shoulders raised. The widow took it gently in two hands, lifted it under her arm, and snapped its neck.
“You were too old anyway,” she said admonishingly.
She carried the hen through the house, picking up a basket from behind the door, and sat down on a small stool in the alley. The sun had gone, but the wall was still warm against her back. She began to pluck the hen, dropping the feathers into the basket.
“Soup’s best,” she muttered to the hen. “And this one makes a good stock. A bit of rice. Nice, after a shock.”
She turned the bird on her lap and began to snatch the underfeathers from its breast.
“Not but what I’m in shock, too,” she went on. The hen’s head dangled over her knee. “It’s a disturbance, and not at all what I expect at my age. A foreign woman, too. An unbeliever-in my house!”
She gave an angry little twitch and tore the bird’s skin.
“Now look what I’ve gone and done.” She paused and made a shape with her fingers, against the Evil Eye. “She ought to go to her own people, poor thing. No husband now, and such a way from her own mother!”
She worked over the legs, and then the wings. She wondered how many chickens she’d plucked in her life. It must be hundreds. Not that she was greedy. She fed them and they fed her, and that was the way it was.
How she’d howled when Matalya died! A full day, a real clamor. She was that upset! Not the way it took those Frankish women, perhaps. Thin blood, it might be.
Widow Matalya made a mighty effort of imagination: perhaps you needed to be around your own people to properly let go, she concluded.
And there was no denying, it was good to have a bit of soup, for when you got a shock.
62
Yashim dabbed vaguely at the skin that had formed on the miyane. The fire was almost cold; he felt no urge to start again. He wasn’t really very hungry.
He looked around for a bit of bread or a biscuit, but of course the place was bare.
He climbed onto the sofa and sat with his knees drawn up, looking out of the window across the rooftops.
Miyane! It was what you made when a guest showed up unexpectedly: a thicker mix, of course. You turned some pasta into it and ate it cut up into chunks.
Madame Lefevre had been, of all things, wholly unexpected.
She had struck him as beautiful: he who walked permitted and unaffected through the sultan’s harem, among dozens of women selected from every corner of the empire for their loveliness alone. Lefevre had not been the man he would have imagined for her; he had seemed too cagy and underhanded in his manner. Whereas his wife-but there, he hardly knew what to think.
More than her beauty had affected him, of course. She had talked to him like a friend. They had even laughed together, as if they had known each other already a long time.
She had made him laugh.
He had been too intoxicated to say what he knew had to be said. Too cowardly to break the spell.
The widow had a kind heart. She would answer for the moment, but tomorrow he would have to see Madame Lefevre to her own people-the embassy again. He winced at the idea.
Mavrogordato. What had he learned from Mavrogordato?
Only that a Frenchman, in a European suit, could raise the kind of loan from a respectable banker that an Albanian in the same city struggled to raise from a loan shark. Two hundred francs!
Yashim stopped dragging at his hair.
Two hundred francs, as far as Yashim knew, was about six hundred piastres.
63
It was not yet completely dark when Yashim reached Balat. Dim figures brushed past him in the alleys; doors banged; a little boy carrying what Yashim recognized to be a box of paper leaned his burden wearily against a wall, then hoisted it up again and pressed on. The Jews, he thought, are coming home.
The idea caught him by surprise. From across the city, the Jewish poor were streaming home with the fading light. The boy with the paper would be at his post tomorrow, soon after sunrise, crying “Carta! Carta!” all day long the way the paper sellers did on the Grande Rue. There were, now that he considered it, so many little trades in the city from which the Jews could draw a precarious living. They shined shoes, they sold flowers, they collected scrap paper and metal; they went out young-and they came home late, plodding through their broken alleyways and dirty streets with a few piastres for the family purse. The Jews were city dwellers: they worked the streets like furrows on the earth, stumbling back to Balat as if it were their village. Yashim had seen villages more filthy and decrepit than Balat, too.
