An Evil Eye: A Novel

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim nodded. “When I ran away I met a caïquejee, who gave me breakfast. Some kind people. A big Greek, who threw me a melon.”

  Kadri looked dubious. “A mackerel sandwich is better.”

  Yashim smiled. “He sold fruit and vegetables, not fish.”

  “And then you went back to school again?”

  “I went back to the school,” Yashim agreed. “After that, they found me a job.”

  Yashim meant to say something else: that he met Fevzi Ahmet, and the direction of his life was changed.

  Absently, he put a hand to his pocket.

  Palewski cocked his head. “That old Greek at the market? Whatsisname, George?” He turned to Kadri. “He did better than that, my young friend. Yashim saved his life.”

  “How was that, Yashim efendi?”

  Yashim did not reply.

  “George got attacked,” Palewski answered for him, settling back into his chair. But Yashim was not listening anymore.

  The packet he had discovered in the crock of rice was gone.

  54

  “YOU think your conscience feeds you? You think the sultan commands you to avoid blood?”

  The walls of the prison run with damp, like the sweat on a man’s back. Black mold mottles the stones, and the straw underfoot is wet. The air is clammy, and it stinks.

  Yashim and the turnkey hurry after Fevzi Ahmet, who strides down the tunnel breathing heavily through his nostrils. At each gate the turnkey stoops almost apologetically, fumbling with the lock, and they wait for the lock to be turned behind them.

  Under a torch, two guards are playing dice.

  They straighten up immediately, flinging the dice against the wall.

  When the man is brought in, chained by his neck and his wrists, he turns his head from the light.

  The guards shackle him to the wall, hands above his head, his back to Fevzi Ahmet.

  His hands have no fingernails.

  Yashim keeps his mouth shut, but he can hardly breathe.

  Fevzi Ahmet produces a knife. He gathers the man’s long matted hair in his fist and saws at it with the knife.

  He drops the hank of hair to the floor. He takes hold of the man’s ear.

  The muscles along the man’s back begin to move.

  “Your brother, the bishop.”

  “I don’t understand,” the man whimpers in Greek. “My brother? I have not seen him.”

  “I can’t understand,” Fevzi Ahmet says.

  Yashim says: “He says he hasn’t seen his brother.”

  Fevzi Ahmet frowns and jerks his head.

  “I don’t understand Greek.”

  Yashim sees Fevzi Ahmet’s arm rise. Hears the man scream.

  “Your brother, the bishop,” Fevzi Ahmet repeats, through gritted teeth.

  Later, when the man is dragged away, Fevzi Ahmet wipes the knife on the warden’s sleeve.

  55

  FAR up the Bosphorus, the pages who watched the tapers in the sultan’s chamber nodded drowsily. The young sultan, almost stifled by the weight of the great brocade across his bed, dreamed about women and ships.

  On the floors above, some seventy women lay asleep. Talfa sprawled hugely across a divan, her black slave flat on her back on the floor at her feet, snoring. Overhead, Bezmialem’s pretty eyelids flickered as she dreamed, not for the first time, of the moment she had turned back the quilt and started creeping up between the old sultan’s mottled thighs. On divans in other rooms, girls slept in a tangle of beautiful limbs, like puppies; lips parted, fingers unfurled, unguarded. What were their dreams, as they stirred and whimpered in the dark? They dreamed of the Circassian hills, no doubt; and of sheep bells and gunshots in the ravines; they dreamed of jewels and soap; of jealousies and love: galleries of dreamers, every one of them following the moving images that flitted innocently behind their eyelids.

  Not quite everyone, perhaps. Here and there, a sigh, a moving hand, a caress: for love, too, has its place in the gallery, in the darkness. And what of fear? Of eyes that stare in the dark, of rigid limbs, cold hands, and the icy clutch on the heart among those unfortunates who hardly dare to sleep? They must be counted among the seventy.

  Ibou, the chief black eunuch, tries to lift that obscurity with a burning lamp: he, too, is not asleep. He wakes, rises, and lights the lamp to sit with his head bowed, wearily padding in his mind from floor to floor, from room to room, trying to remember everything he has seen, trying to forecast everything that may occur. Now and then his hand drops to the little plate beside him, and he pops another sweetmeat into his mouth, and chews.

  56

  “YOU will have coffee?”

  “As you wish, my pasha.”

  The grand vizier clapped his fingers together. “Bring coffee, Jehan.” He leaned back against the cushions and passed his hand over his eyes. “You have something you wish to report?”

  “Yes, my pasha. The Russian who died—”

  “Look, Yashim. Accounts.” Husrev lifted a hand and patted a heap of papers at his side. “Petitions. New appointments.” He leafed through the heap. “A report from Syria. News about the Russians. Some news from the Russians, too—they wish to complain. Here—an ambassador presents his credentials. Sometimes I think we love reports too much,” he added, letting the pile fall.

  The servant entered with a tray suspended on three chains, and presented Yashim with a little cup.

  “It is strange, Yashim. People believe this empire grew great because we Ottomans knew how to fight. Our gazi warriors, burning with zeal to subjugate the infidels. The horizons boundless under the hoofs of our steeds. Bright steel. Janissaries in formation.”

  His lids drooped, his finger tapped the pile of papers. “But what made the empire work was this. And this,” he added, touching his forehead. “We were a shepherd race, Yashim. Nomads. Planning a route. Sorting the flocks. Pitching and striking camp, never forgetting a single cord or a scrap of news. We made an empire because we were fast, and fought well: but we held it because we were organizers, Yashim. Because of this.”

  He hefted the pile again. “I observe the arrival of some paper or another. Then I pass it on. I am a shepherd of infinite documents.”

  He looked sadly at Yashim. “You have been back to Chalki.”

  “Yes, my pasha. I have been back.”

  “To the monastery?”

  “Not the monastery. Neither the abbot nor his monks appear to have been involved in the man’s death. The impure water made them ill, and they readily told us what they had found. The tattoo, the brand, frightened them, that’s all. If they had killed him, they would have concealed his body somewhere else.”

  “And we would never have known?”

  “Possibly. Probably. There isn’t much else on Chalki. A small brigade of guards, the governor, Greek fishermen.” Yashim paused, half hoping the vizier might interject. “The Russian had been dead for several weeks,” he added.

  Husrev Pasha shook his head. “So?”

  “Three weeks ago,” Yashim said slowly, “the fleet set out to patrol the Cyclades.”

  Husrev grunted. “The Cyclades was a blind, as it happens. The Kapudan pasha was given secret orders to cruise off Alexandria. The sultan decided this before he died.”

  “A show of force?”

  “My predecessor believed it could be useful.” He shifted his weight on the divan. “However—the fleet sailed. And Chalki? I fail to see the connection, Yashim.”

  “There is nothing on the island for a Russian agent, except—”Yashim swallowed. “The Kapudan pasha left with the fleet. Fevzi Ahmet Pasha lives on Chalki.”

  The grand vizier did not blink. “The Kapudan pasha,” he repeated.

  Yashim bit his lip. “This afternoon, Husrev Pasha, I went back to speak to his people.”

  “His women? About the Russian?” Husrev’s tone was a mixture of disapproval and surprise.

  “Women notice everything, Husrev Pasha.”

  “That was not my point.” />
  Yashim understood what Husrev meant: a man’s harem was sacrosanct. “I can talk to women,” he said softly.

  Husrev flicked his fingers in a gesture of disdain. He would believe that a woman’s testimony was worth half that of a man, as sharia law dictated; but Yashim had dealt too often with women to think like the grand vizier.

  “In the end, it was not necessary. His harem was empty. Fevzi Pasha has no women.”

  Husrev Pasha’s eyebrows rose. “His household?”

  Yashim had considered this. “Apart from a couple of gardeners, who are paid for their time, he seems to maintain no household. He eats from naval stores. I imagine he gets his people from the same place—the navy.”

  Husrev Pasha thrust out his jaw. It was almost unthinkable for a man of rank, with all his largesse, not to seek to bestow it upon the women and the menials who formed his household; maintaining a large retinue was itself a sign of rank. It was, in a more subtle sense, a moral expectation.

  The Ottomans were not a nation. Turkish, Greek, Bosnian, Serb—they formed a caste; almost a family. Just as the sultan, as head of the family, maintained his pashas and his odalisques, so the Ottomans maintained their retinues in turn. It was the weave that held the fabric of Ottoman society together, and it was observed to the letter—even when a great man found himself displaced, out of favor, unemployed, his largesse flowed; perhaps all the more so, then.

  Husrev Pasha laid his fingertips on the pile of papers and peered at them, tapping them slowly.

  “A shepherd of documents,” he muttered.

  “My pasha?”

  “When I was a boy, Yashim,” he growled in his deep, slow voice, “I tended sheep. Now I watch the reports come in. I worry about the reports, sometimes, but there is so little that I can do. Revenues down? Trouble between peoples?” He pulled a face. “What of it? Every year the same thing. Like sheep into the fold.” He raised a finger. “Only the missing one makes all the trouble.”

  He cast a thoughtful glance at Yashim.

  “The Kapudan pasha has missed a report.”

  Yashim said nothing. He sensed that the old vizier was really thinking aloud. His lips barely moved above the low, disarming rumble of his voice.

  “What of that? Eh?” Husrev turned his thumbs outward. “What do I know of winds, and storms, and the sea? I am an old Bosniac, Yashim.”

  The papers, Yashim thought. I must tell him about the packet that was lost.

  The grand vizier pulled at his lip and considered Yashim.

  “You knew Fevzi Pasha well?”

  “I knew Fevzi Ahmet Pasha before he became a commander. Before he received horsetails.”

  “Three horsetails.” Horsetails, carried on a lance, were the mark of rank in the Ottoman Empire, and it was a sign of the old Ottoman respect for the sea that the Kapudan pasha had as many horsetails as the grand vizier. Land commanders had only two. “He receives many honors. The late sultan, God’s mercy on his soul, was pleased to advance him very high.”

  “He is the Kapudan pasha,”Yashim said, more evenly. “I have not seen him for … ten years.”

  There was so much more he could say. But it was too late: the time to speak had long since passed, and he had made a promise, to himself.

  Out of loyalty? Or shame.

  “We didn’t part as friends,” he said at last.

  Husrev Pasha leaned back against the cushions. “I wonder, Yashim efendi. There is something dark in this. You tell me strange things. I wonder what I should believe.”

  Yashim felt the flush rising to his cheeks.

  “Let us not forget, we start with a dead man,” the vizier continued. “A Russian. Perhaps he came to meet the Kapudan pasha on Chalki.” Husrev held up a heavy hand. “A man in Fevzi Pasha’s position makes many contacts. He draws from many sources.”

  “Of course.”

  The vizier let his eyelids droop. “We wait.” He made a little gesture of dismissal. “Sometimes, Yashim efendi, all we can do is wait.”

  57

  AT night distant thunder rolled over the city, and lightning flickered behind the mountains of Asia; but the weather did not break. Beyond the city walls the crops had to be watered by hand, the more tender leaves protected by rattan screens. Tempers frayed in the bazaar.

  At the sultan’s palace, Ibou, the chief black eunuch, laid his hand on the balustrade and squinted up the staircase. Two dozen shallow stone steps; a landing; another twenty steps. He must have climbed them twenty times a day, up and down, up and down, for these past three years; his hand fluttered to his heart. It was no doubt they that induced the strain.

  These steps, and the girls, of course. They were young and impudent.

  He began to climb: Besiktas seemed all stairs. At the old palace at Topkapi, one pavilion opened into the next, a stone encampment tumbling magnificently over acres of Seraglio Point. Now, in this great box of a palace at Besiktas, people were forever tramping up and down, peering out at windows, running into each other at awkward moments, and arguing over precedence. How could you tell which room was the greater, which apartment the more covetable? The girls talked of views these days, peeping and gazing out quite shamelessly, as if a little patch of sky was not enough!

  “Ibou! I’ve been looking for you.”

  The eunuch bowed. “I am at your service, Talfa hanum efendi.”

  Talfa sniffed. “Why have you not listened to what I have told you? The dormitories are not clean. Yesterday I found Amalya and Perin wearing linen that would have disgraced a street gypsy. I go into their room and find clothing all over the floor. They tread upon it with their slippers.”

  “It is a disgrace, hanum. I have made them pick everything up. They are much better today.”

  “Are they in the laundry, then?”

  Ibou’s eyes flickered. “Today, not. They say they are tired, Talfa hanum.’

  “Tired, aga? How should they be tired, when they do so little?” She looked at him sharply. “You know how it is said, that a fish stinks from the head.”

  Ibou’s eyes drooped. “I understand, hanum.” He gestured weakly to the stairs, the corridors. Of course he felt tired. In Topkapi, the harem apartments had been swept and scrubbed by the girls themselves. They shook out rugs in the courtyards; they polished the tiled floors until they glittered; they took brooms and swept out the cobwebs from the corners. When they opened a door they stepped out into the open air, and kept themselves as clean as cats.

  At Besiktas the girls could barely go outside, unchaperoned; they could not open the windows, for fear of being seen. They swept the dirt into the corridors, where it blew back in again; and half the carpets were nailed down. It all looked very grand from the outside, no doubt, but Ibou knew better. Just the other day, he had reprimanded a girl for wearing a shift so grubby that she looked like a beggar—and she had the cheek to answer him back!

  Sometimes he yearned for the old days in the library, where everything was still and in its place. Books were cleaner than women.

  “I have been to the laundry, also,” Talfa continued. “Two of the other girls are washing in there. My girls.”

  The chief black eunuch bit his lip. Talfa was royal by blood; she could take care of herself. It was these other girls who fell into slovenly ways. It all came of living in this box.

  “Explain to these girls, Ibou aga, that you will inspect their rooms yourself every week from now on. They are not gözde. They are not favored by the sultan’s attention—nor ever will be, unless they learn to take their responsibilities seriously.” She bent forward. “Amalya is the worst. Let us see how she feels about slopping out for a month. Tell her this.”

  “Yes, hanum. She will be very unhappy.”

  “That is the point, Ibou. We cannot have these girls making the rules.”

  “No, hanum. I shall tell her that this is your decision.”

  She eyed the eunuch narrowly. “Your decision, aga. I may advise—but the girls are your responsibility. And Bezm
ialem’s, of course,” she added. “But the young valide seems to have a headache. Poor thing.”

  The lady Talfa waddled off along the corridor.

  Ibou put a hand to the lattice and peered out. He could see ships on the Bosphorus, and he sighed. Lately he had felt so tired. Wondering about the girls. Sleepless nights. Climbing these stairs.

  He knew that he was afraid of Amalya. Of what she might do to him, in revenge.

  He needed advice. But Ibou, the Kislar aga, did not know who to ask. He did not know who he could really trust.

  58

  HIGH summer vegetables glutted the market. Every stall was piled with pyramids of glossy eggplants, both the purple and the white; sacks of spinach, green onions, fresh beans of every shape and color, popped from their skins. Everyone sold tomatoes, even George—who made a pyramid of fruit that resembled purplish turbans.

  “So sweet, Yashim efendi!” He kissed his fingertips. “Truly, these tomatoes are a gift to us all—and the poors, especially.”

  Yashim met Kadri in the market, where he had gone to buy the ingredients for the pickles he always made at this time of the year. The boy helped him carry the baskets home.

  Yashim tipped a basket of peppers onto the bench where he worked, the long peppers shaped like slippers, pale green and subtly aromatic.

  “If your hands are clean, Kadri, you might wash the peppers,” he suggested. He set the kettle to boil, and poured a pint of white wine vinegar into a bowl, in which he dissolved a couple of spoonfuls of salt, and let it stand.

  He sliced a few carrots and broke out the cloves from two heads of garlic, brushing away the dry skin but leaving the cloves intact. In deference to George’s unexpected enthusiasm, he had bought tomatoes; they had discussed the question, and George had agreed to supply him the tomatoes green and still hard, as unripe as the apricots he always used. Ripe tomatoes, Yashim insisted, would spoil the crunchiness of the pickle. Finally, he took a pointed cabbage and tore it into pale shards.