“It’s a bit of fun, Yashim.”
Yashim had seen many girls fresh off the hills enter the palace for the first time. He remembered a little black girl bought by one of the late sultan’s khadins, who came into the harem with her eyes and mouth like O s. She had gone about stroking everything and muttering, “Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it lovely!” over and over again. In the evening she had thought she would be sent away; when they explained she would live there forever, she burst into tears.
He’d seen others, though, halting and shy, bemused by the form of speech they heard, dazzled by the bearing of the harem women, stupefied by the luxury. Some physically shook with fear at the prospect of being introduced. Yashim thought of Hyacinth, frightened by the first snow.
“The engine doesn’t exist,” Ibou snapped.
“Not here. But at Topkapi? Maybe there is an engine. Maybe, Ibou, your predecessors found it useful to have one.”
The Kislar aga shrugged lightly. “At Topkapi, Yashim, I worked in the library. Nobody pushed books into the Bosphorus. How would I know? The lady Talfa is the one to ask. She showed it to the girls.”
“I see.” He thought of Melda, frozen with misery. “Who would Elif have confided in, when she had her trouble? Apart from Melda. Would she have spoken to Talfa? Asked her for help, maybe?”
“Talfa?” The Kislar aga looked incredulous. “They hated each other.”
It was Yashim’s turn to look surprised. “Why?”
Ibou groaned. “That dreadful day, when the new girls came across, Elif was very rude to the lady Talfa. She treated her like one of Sultan Mahmut’s concubines.”
“Not a good start.”
“No. The lady Talfa gave her-and Melda-the job of escorting a little girl.”
“Which they didn’t like?”
“They thought it was b-b-beneath them. Elif was very, very angry. She made remarks-and did some foolish things, I believe.”
“Foolish things?”
The aga rolled his eyes. “She put a rat’s tail in the lady Talfa’s makeup pot.”
“Who told you that?”
“I didn’t need to be told. You could hear Talfa all over the palace.”
“And you knew it was Elif?”
“Who else? She denied it, naturally.” Ibou blew out his cheeks. “You cannot believe the spite and fury of these women, Yashim.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Ibou.”
He got up. Yashim knew that all sorts of children lived in the harem-princes and princesses, slave girls, children adopted into the imperial family for political or diplomatic reasons. “Who was the girl?”
Ibou shrugged. “We call her Roxelana. The lady Talfa took a shine to her. Very quiet little thing.”
“Why Roxelana? She’s Russian?”
“Either that, or it’s just because she has red hair.”
“And that’s all you can tell me?”
“She has red hair. She didn’t like her kalfas wearing their orchestra uniform. She didn’t like their hats.” Ibou flung up his hands in exasperation. “She’s about five. Just a little girl, Yashim. Hyacinth would have been the person to ask, if you wanted.”
Yashim saw the tears welling up in the aga’s eyes.
“Hyacinth? Why Hyacinth?”
“Because Hyacinth was responsible for taking her into the harem. It was Hyacinth who gave her the name.”
111
Snow was falling in scattered flurries as Yashim strode away from Besiktas. His head throbbed. He tore off his turban and walked on bareheaded, grateful for the cold and the thin wind and the darkness that all but hid the buildings around him.
He swung his arms, sucked at the cold air. He knew now precisely why he had chosen to live outside, away from the palace; precisely why Talfa’s insinuations had made his flesh creep and his ancient fears rise up. Preen was right: he could not bear to be trapped. He beat his arms over his chest and thought of Ibou’s subterranean rooms, of the women who dragged out their lives within the confines of a harem, of Kadri bursting his constraints and vaulting the walls of his palace school.
Shadowed, muffled figures slipped past him in the gloom. Now and then he shivered, like an animal discovering its limbs after a long sleep: ever since that ceremony of the birth he had been laboring under a burden of dread. And dreadful things had happened. At Besiktas, a girl had become possessed by a demon: a demon of the mind that created the demon in her belly. Hyacinth’s fear of abandonment was a demon, too, which plagued him remorselessly until he died falling from the balustrade. Yashim was oppressed by thoughts of Fevzi Ahmet, the mentor whose example he had rejected, whose memory he had thought buried and contained.
Yashim stepped almost automatically into a caique. Later he could remember reaching the landing stage, but not how he had crossed the Horn, nor how he had come home.
Images floated unbidden into his mind: a little boy standing frightened in the snow; Pembe, the mother of the sultan’s ruined child; a bloodstained sheet; Hyacinth’s frail body in the pool. He shuddered: for a few moments he had felt that he was seeing with another eye. An evil eye, which roamed from Besiktas to Topkapi, picking out its victims, sapping their will to live.
Back in his apartment he riddled the stove, angrily, and added a scoop of charcoal. He stood for a moment warming his hands above the glow, then he wiped them and stripped the skin from a pair of onions, which he split on the board. He sliced the halves in both directions, and let the tears well in his eyes. One day, Ibou had said once, you will mourn the valide yourself.
He put a shallow pan on the coals and added a slick of oil. He smashed the garlic with the flat of a blade and swept it from the board with the onions into the pan. They began to sizzle on the heat, and he wiped his eyes. He peeled a few carrots, potatoes, and a knob of celeriac, then pulled the chopping block toward him and began to slice the vegetables, first into strips, then into little dice.
He shook the pan.
The valide had once told him that a long life inside the harem depended on intelligence, not good health. But the valide was not well.
The onions were soft; he stirred in the vegetables, turning them in the oil.
It took a man or a woman to cast the eye. And there was one woman in the harem whose bitterness was active-and corrosive. Talfa was the senior lady in the sultan’s harem. Talfa had intuitively divined Yashim’s own fear of being pinned down in the palace, and played upon it. Talfa was bitter, and ambitious.
Perhaps she had frightened others? Pembe claimed that Talfa put the evil eye on her. Bezmialem had become a cipher. Elif had died at Besiktas, Hyacinth at Topkapi-but thanks to Tulin, the valide’s handmaiden, he knew that Talfa had gone to Topkapi only days before, and talked of nothing while the valide dozed. Talfa had insisted on meeting all the sultan’s ladies, so that they might meet her daughter, and then she had spoken to Melda. Taken her apart. Taken her aside for a little chat.
He sprinkled some sugar over the pan and threw in a couple of bay leaves. He covered the vegetables with water, and left them to come to the boil while he cleaned the mussels.
Talfa knew Topkapi very well, from top to bottom. She had been born there, after all. Talfa would know all about the engine. It didn’t matter whether the engine really existed or not. He might spend hours in the palace, searching for a contraption that whirled people to their doom-and all he might find would be a dusty table in a neglected room.
Ibou said that Talfa and Elif hated each other.
But Talfa had a knack for divining people’s fears, and playing on them. Elif ’s stare-baby-where had that come
