“Aga?”
“This!” He pointed to the offending mass. “A mouse nest”-he dropped his voice to a whisper-“under a skirt that hasn’t been moved for days. It is too much.”
Tulip peered apologetically at the little brown heap. Then his long black face turned green, and he looked up wide-eyed.
“No, aga, it is not a nest. I cannot touch it! Allah preserve us!”
“What is it?” Ibou felt the eunuch’s horror invading his scalp: it made his hair crawl. “What is it, then?”
He peered more closely, then started back as if he had been stung.
“Bezmialem-where is she?”
Tulip shrank back. “Sh-she is sewing, Aga. With the other girls.”
“Keep her there, and fetch the imam.”
It was not, after all, a mouse’s nest: not unless mice made up figurines of wax and hair, studded with little children’s teeth.
64
On the slab, in the steam room, Yashim shuddered as the heat attacked his limbs; sweat poured from his skin.
All around him, men were being soaped and sluiced, scrubbed and pummeled by the bath attendants. He could hear the clack of sandals on the stone and the gurgle of running water in the traps. He pressed his fingers to his eyes.
For most of his adult life, Yashim had struggled to put the past behind him.
What is done is done, people said. They gelded him, but he did not die. He revived to become useful: it was another way to be a man. Day by day he lived and breathed and slept to live another day, without bitterness, without remorse. That was the lesson he had learned at the palace school: not how to wrestle, or to memorize the Koran, but how to shed his regrets, how to master his memories, so that he could hold himself together as a man.
He pressed his feet against the side of the slab.
He had made himself… quiet.
Fevzi Pasha had detected that. Fevzi Pasha had used it.
Yashim remembered one long vigil, on a warm night, when he had begun to talk to punctuate the silence. When Fevzi wanted to know a thing he was like a fishmonger filleting his fish with a narrow blade, probing and slicing, moving from one muscle to the next. Yashim had told Fevzi everything: all the memories he’d buried.
“I’ll find out who did it, Yashim.”
“I–I don’t think I want to know.”
“Ignorance keeps you weak.” He sneers. “You don’t have a choice.”
He had told Husrev Pasha the truth. They had not parted as friends.
65
It was ten years since he and Fevzi Ahmet went to Russia. Fevzi Ahmet Pasha-for Sultan Mahmut had promoted him for the event, to negotiate a treaty with the tsar. Mahmut trusted him. Fevzi Ahmet took Yashim, his still and silent companion, as a matter of course. “Keep your eyes open,” he’d said.
The snow had been monstrous that winter, with ice in the Black Sea ports. He and Fevzi had traveled by sleigh, swaddled in furs like chicks in their nest. Yashim remembered the whip cracking in the icy air, the jangle of bells, hoarfrost splintered on the pines. Once a small black bird had dropped from the sky, frozen stiff. The driver had crossed himself, and Fevzi had laughed, shortly. “Omens are for Bulgars and old women.”
Yashim found the whiteness implacable. It allowed them no footholds, shattered their sense of scale. Mile after mile after mile: the same trees, the same wooden villages, rest stops in silent inns, and fresh horses that always looked the same. Fevzi was infected with a sort of snow blindness, drugged, slow, prey to fits of giddiness. In Istanbul he had made one careful step after another, always up, always pleasing. In Saint Petersburg-white river, white streets, the buildings white and interminable against a pale sky-his judgment was devoured. He blundered like a man who had lost his horizons. Yashim stood by aghast, unable to understand the change in his mentor. He remembered Fevzi sweating as he matched the Russians glass for glass in the colorless alcohol their hosts pretended to be drinking.
He remembered the girl, too.
“I heard something. I thought-I was afraid you were in trouble.”
“Trouble?” Fevzi is panting. He grins and brings his face close to Yashim’s, and Yashim can smell his breath.
He steps back, embarrassed. Fevzi catches him by the arm.
“A peasant. She is very beautiful. Come.”
Yashim sees only the suffering.
He stands, confused, and for a long moment Yashim cannot speak.
“Why?”
Fevzi’s mood changes. “What do you know? She’s mine.”
He brings up his hand and places it over Yashim’s face. “A man would understand,” he says, and pushes him back.
Among the Russians, Fevzi Ahmet expanded like a great balloon. He was grand-his gestures wider than they ought to have been, his contempt for detail exaggerated. When the Russians showed him on a map what he was about to sign away, he merely shrugged, as if to say that Batoumi, with its strategic position on the Black Sea, was a bagatelle for a sultan as powerful as his own. Fevzi Ahmet gave Batoumi away because he did not want to seem niggardly in such company; because he had compromised himself. Had it not been for Yashim he might have given away more-and the sultan’s affection would not have saved him from the silken bowstring.
They returned together, in the thaw: troika, droshky, and finally an imperial barge that knocked continuously against the broken ice. Whatever trust had existed between them, too, had broken up.
Yashim did not betray his mentor, who had given everything away. It was not the casual gift of Batoumi that broke his faith, but the proof of something he had suspected for a long time. Fevzi Ahmet employed cruelty without any end in view.
Yashim did not betray Fevzi Ahmet, because he was too proud-and too ashamed. Instead, he sought permission to leave the palace and live in the city: as he explained to the grand vizier of the day, his way was different from Fevzi Ahmet’s. He knocked his forehead on the steps of the sultan’s throne and said: “I have learned much, but I cannot be more than what I am. I can be a lala, my padishah, a guardian. I see things clearer from farther off.”
Surprisingly, the sultan had agreed. He must have made his own assessment of Fevzi’s diplomatic gifts, because he also moved Fevzi to military duties, which he carried out punctiliously, as far as Yashim heard. But Yashim never saw Fevzi again.
Yashim blinked. An attendant was standing in front of him with a jug and a sponge. He slid from the hot slab and followed the man to the sluice.
66
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” the valide snapped; but she shifted a little uneasily on the divan.
The egg rolled across the surface of the oil.
