25
“ The mother has discovered her infant,” the valide said.
Yashim had to bow to catch her words. Around them women, eunuchs, and slaves were talking and weeping. An elderly eunuch patted his face with his bony fingers. Yashim noticed one mother snatch up her little boy and squeeze him, struggling, while the little boy opened his fist and tried to show her a collection of silver coins. Bezmialem, the young valide, had her head back and was squeezing the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Some of the younger women were shaking their heads, muttering to one another.
“You should not have come, hanum efendi,” Yashim said. “A sad occasion.”
The valide glanced at him sharply. “For the lady, bien sur. At my age, Yashim, one is inured to grief. Perhaps one even seeks it out, a little. I have lived too long to pretend that my death will be a cause of it.” She closed her fan. “The child was born without-the orifice necessaire. I am sorry for the girl, of course. It will be a comfort to her to know that I was here.”
The valide began to cough. Her hand went up and somebody pressed a handkerchief into it. She put the handkerchief to her lips and shut her eyes. “I wish to go home.”
“Of course, hanum efendi.” It was a girl from the orchestra, carrying a flute. She smiled at Yashim and gestured to a eunuch.
“Valide hanum!” Talfa, wet-faced, picked up the hem of the valide’s shawl and pressed it to her lips and eyes. “Please do not go yet. Everyone is so sad. Won’t you help me make her stay, Yashim?”
“I am tired, Talfa,” the valide announced, crisply. “What was the mother’s name?”
“Pembe, hanum efendi. A Circassian.”
“You will please tell her, when it is appropriate, that I came tonight. And afterward, my child, I expect a visit.”
“Nothing could please me more, valide hanum.” Talfa tittered, wiping her tears away with jeweled fingers. “Shall I bring Necla also?”
The valide’s brow furrowed. “Necla? She is very young.”
“She is eleven, hanum efendi.”
“Bring her by all means,” the valide said, without obvious enthusiasm. “Next week, when I am recovered. Tulin?”
“I am here, valide.”
At the band girl’s signal, two slim black eunuchs bent forward to help the valide to her feet. She flinched impatiently, but at last she was upright between them.
“You, too, Yashim. I expect a visit, soon.”
The harem ladies stood respectfully as the valide walked away, supported on either hand by eunuchs. Tulin, the flautist, hovered around them. Yashim found himself face-to-face with Sultan Mahmut’s widowed sister.
“We miss you in the harem, Yashim.”
Yashim blinked: the resemblance to Mahmut was strong. Poor Talfa. She should have borne a son before her husband died. With only Necla, she had returned to the imperial harem.
She took a lock of her hair and curled it on a pudgy finger.
“I’ve been thinking about the way you live… outside,” she said, in the little high voice of the harem. “I often wonder why that is?”
“It was settled many years ago,” Yashim replied cautiously. “By your noble brother’s wish.”
“Peace be on him,”Talfa said, letting the curl of hair spring free. “Sultan Abdulmecid-I suppose he must have confirmed the arrangement.”
Yashim hesitated. The new sultan had not revoked Yashim’s permission to live outside the palace walls. Nor, on the other hand, had he confirmed it. Yashim guessed that Talfa knew as much.
“I am where I hope I can be most useful, hanum efendi,” he replied. “And in the Abode of Bliss, are you not under the gaze of the all-powerful sultan?”
Talfa turned her head slightly and a dimple appeared on her cheek.
“The sultan has so many cares, Yashim efendi.” She gave him a slanting gaze under her lashes. “It isn’t fair that you should leave it all to him. And you were very good the other day. You could be so useful here, efendi.”
She giggled lightly.
Yashim bowed, and felt his blood run cold.
26
As the caique turned up against the sluggish current, Palewski leaned back on the hard cushions and stared at the footings of the new bridge.
For centuries, people had talked about throwing a bridge across the Golden Horn. On the Stamboul side lay the bazaars, the palaces, and the temples of faith; on the Pera side lived the foreign community, now a mixed bag of Italians and Levantines, who operated so many of the commercial enterprises of the empire. The great Byzantine emperor Justinian, who gave his city the incomparable Ayasofya, was supposed, by some, to have strung a chain of boats across the waterway. If he had done so, only the idea of the chain had survived: medieval Constantinople had protected itself from attack on the seaward side by hauling a massive chain, whose links weighed fifty pounds apiece, across the mouth of the Horn. In 1453, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, Mehmet II had dragged his ships over land to get around it.
Fifty years later, the renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci had submitted a design for a bridge shaped like a curving bow, or a crescent; the sketch was put on file and forgotten. Three centuries passed. Then the late sultan- proponent of change everywhere in the empire-entrusted the project to his favorite, the Kapudan pasha Fevzi Ahmet, commander of the fleet. A man who had a reputation for getting things done.
Palewski sighed. Where the great plane tree that shaded the shoreline on the Pera side had stood, the ground looked dusty and hard-baked. The pasha’s bridge would be as ugly and practical as any of the new buildings that had disfigured the old city in the past twenty years-the commercial houses of Pera, the blank barracks of the New Troop on Uskudar, the sultan’s hideous new palace at Besiktas. Worst of all, he thought, it would dissolve the ancient distinction between Stamboul, with its palaces and domes and bazaars, and modern, commercial Pera across the Horn.
It was growing dark when the caique dropped him at the Balat stage. Palewski tipped the oarsman and made his way unhurriedly through the steep streets before stopping at a sunken doorway picked out in bands of red and white stone. The widow Matalya opened the door and Palewski removed his hat.
“Gone out, efendi,” the old lady remarked. “Messengers back and forth, and I don’t know what. Would you like to wait?”
Palewski agreed, and went on up to Yashim’s apartment carrying his old portmanteau, stuffed with a shawl. Wrapped in the shawl was an excellent brandy-1821-which the French ambassador had once given him, though Palewski had forgotten why. He sat on the divan while the familiar outlines of the flat bled into darkness; just before it became too dark to see, he stood up and fumbled with the lamp. In Yashim’s kitchen various plates and bowls were covered with muslins. The brazier was barely warm: he poked his finger into the coals, then wiped the soot off absently on his coattails. At last he found a piece of bread and a painted glass, and settled down to read Yashim’s latest Balzac.
At the beginning of chapter three he eased off his shoes and drew his feet up onto the divan.
27
