One girl was giggling with her hand over her mouth; another was prodding her neighbor with a fiddle bow. A blond Circassian bowed myopically over her score, holding her hair back above her ear with one hand, wondering where she had gone wrong before.
For the girls this was a moment of freedom, before the tall black eunuchs stepped in and respectfully shooed their pretty charges to their chores. Respectful but firm, especially with the younger girls of lower rank whose jobs kept them far away from the body of the sultan.
Tulin frowned at the frightened girl. Elif was a kalfa, but only to a little girl: a little girl of scant importance.
“If it’s something bad you must tell me, Elif,” she said quietly. “I think there are many things you don’t understand. You’re young.” She put out a hand and eased a lock of the girl’s jet-black hair over the tip of her ear. “When you talk about your troubles they always seem less. Don’t bottle things up.” She smiled brightly and held the girl’s chin. “Look! Maybe it’ll turn out to be nothing at all!”
She saw the struggle in Elif’s eyes, the warring doubt and hope. The girl blinked fiercely: doubt won. “This is very bad,” she said in a thin voice, close to tears.
Tulin considered. “Come, my little one. You can tell me, whatever it is. I am quite sure you have nothing to worry about.”
69
The man with the knife had walked a long way.
He joined a camel train, and walked with it in silence for three days. When the camels halted at a town, the man walked on.
70
The shores of the Bosphorus flushed red, then yellow as the trees turned. Small fires burned in the fields. The season expired in a blaze of heat, an Indian summer. The fishermen predicted a cold winter: the sudden blaze, and the fish running deep.
Yashim found the valide in her apartments at Topkapi. She was propped up on pillows on the divan and eating an iced sherbet.
“It’s cooler now, valide. You are comfortable?”
“I was raised in the Caribbean, Yashim. The heat does not affect me. I choose to sit in the Baghdad Kiosk because it’s quiet.”
Yashim cocked his ear, and heard nothing.
“Yes, yes, it’s quiet enough now. They’re all asleep, thank God,” the valide said. “Just like country girls. Which, of course, they all were once upon a time. I suppose it’s a sort of second childhood.”
Yashim was baffled. “Asleep, valide? Who do you mean?”
The valide gave a little gesture of impatience. “Tut-tut-tut. Really, Yashim, the ladies, I tell you. My son’s ladies. I do wish you would keep up.”
“The late sultan’s ladies came here?”
“From the old palace. The luckier ones got married off, of course. Our sultan sent all the hopeless cases on to me. I suppose it pleased the eunuchs. They lead lives of such ennui at Topkapi, with only me to talk about. But now they have a flock of women to fuss over, and they are happy. As for the ladies, well. It upsets me, I admit. They are so very ingratiating. And they are all so old! Perfect frights, some of them.”
“How many, hanum?”
The valide waved a jeweled hand. “I haven’t counted, Yashim. I’m not a housekeeper. Dozens, I should say. Terribly aged. Some of them”-she lowered her voice, while at the same time speaking more loudly than before-“quite feebleminded now, I’m sorry to say.”
“It must have come as a dreadful shock to them,” Yashim ventured.
“To them, Yashim? Why? Mahmut was my son.”
“Of course, valide. I only meant-”
“Marzipan, for instance. She was such a skinny, shy little thing-that’s why I gave her the name.” Yashim nodded: all the girls got new names when they came to the harem. Often they were mildly ironic. “Yesterday, I saw a fat, frumpy old woman sitting with her knees this far apart, smiling like an idiot. Marzipan. I couldn’t believe it. Why they think to surround me with these dreadful old people, Yashim, I just can’t imagine.”
She glanced at him, a little slyly, he thought. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. The valide had not aged like other women. She was still slender, and her face preserved in outline the beauty that had carried her into a sultan’s arms. But the valide was difficult about flattery: you had to be careful.
“Age is a terrible thing, Yashim,” she added, a little sadly.
He took her hand. He should have spoken, after all. Somehow the arrival of these women had disturbed the valide more than she let on; more, perhaps, than the death of her son. For years now she had been alone in the palace with her memories and dreams; and there was a certain hauteur in her loneliness, in the knowledge that Topkapi was hers. Now that she shared it with the superannuated baggage of the harem, that grandeur had dissipated a little.
He glanced about the room. The mirror that had always hung at the side of the divan had been replaced by a framed inscription.
“You, valide, are as beautiful as you ever were.”
“I don’t enjoy a mirror anymore,” she said unnervingly. Yashim felt his cheeks redden. “I’d rather look at young people now. That’s why I have my Tulin.”
Tulin: it meant “poppy.” “Tulin?”
“My handmaiden, Yashim. I found her the name. I think it’s rather sweet.”
“I hope she’s as sweet as her name, valide.”
“I think I may say that I am something of a judge of character. Tulin appears to me… almost perfect.”
“Almost, hanum?”
“ Tiens, Yashim. Only God can pronounce any woman perfect, absolument. And then only at the hour of her death.”
Yashim gave a sigh, and smiled. The valide was always something of a coquette.
“A book for you, Yashim. Perhaps it will amuse you-I found it ridiculous. It is written by”-she glanced at the cover-“Theophile Gautier.”
71
Yashim clapped his book shut with an exclamation of surprise. “ Everything that is useful,” Gautier had written, “ is ugly.”
Yashim contemplated the nutcracker in his hand, with its chased brass handles and polished iron jaws. He let his eyes wander around the apartment, from the shelf beside the divan, with its collection of porcelain and books, to the stack of crocks and pans in the far corner where he cooked. What sad world did this Gautier inhabit, that everything useful could be described as ugly? It was a fault of the Franks to make their slightest opinions sound like revealed laws, of course.
At his thigh were a marble mortar and the knife with Ammar made me inscribed on the Damascus blade. These useful things, Yashim felt, were also beautiful. With half-closed eyes he thought about Istanbul-its lovely minarets for calling the people to prayer, the scalloped and fluted fountains, which relieved the people’s thirst. He considered the slender caiques, which bustled people across the water in all directions, and cracked another
