The snake stone yte-2

by Jason Goodwin

  “Five years.” She pushed back her curls; her ear looked small and delicate, like a tender white fern. “I wanted to be an archaeologist, too.”

  Yashim saw it clearly: a clever young woman, a reader, a scholar-why not? Men of her own age would shrink from her, she wouldn’t encourage them. And then Lefevre arrived: older, established, and talking of archaeology and Troy and the things she read; believing them, too. Believing what he read in books.

  For her-the life she wanted. For him, a loyal assistant. With an inheritance, even. Perhaps, Yashim thought, Amelie knew how to read a book better than a man’s character.

  “I’d always been fascinated by the ancient world. Max brought the Greeks back to life.”

  “The ancient Greeks, yes.” He thought of the Serpent Column, the three snakes intertwined in what-victory? “And he was interested in the later Greeks, too-the Byzantine Greeks.”

  Amelie pulled a face. “We used to argue about that. He said the Byzantines were degenerates. He called them-Asiatics.”

  Yashim smiled. “A word can’t hurt. What did you think?”

  “I said they were a spiritual people. You only have to study their mosaics, their icons, to appreciate that. Max wouldn’t agree, though. He said he’d had too many Greek friends to have any illusions about the Byzantines. The same people, he said. It made him sick to hear them talk, sometimes.”

  “He understood Greek, did he? Modern Greek?”

  “Oh yes. He spent years in Greece, in the twenties. That’s what turned him into an archaeologist.”

  Greece in the twenties: the revolutionary years. It was extraordinary, Yashim reflected, how many Franks had been drawn to that country. Millingen-and that English poet Palewski had mentioned, and now Lefevre. Dreaming of the ancient Greeks, Millingen had said. Were all of them disillusioned, then? Discovering instead a race of-what, childish Asiatics?

  What did these people expect? A race of Socratics? The ancient Greeks had killed Socrates themselves, hadn’t they? Why should the modern Greeks be any better, or any worse? Or better or worse than other men? Everyone was new: every man, every woman, came innocent into this world.

  Yashim was an Ottoman. The Ottomans had always understood that men acted for good or ill not because they were Greek, or Serb, or peasants from Anatolia, but because they chose a path for themselves, selected the tools they wanted on their journey through life. Sometimes the choice was limited. But many a great pasha-many a grand vizier-stroking his beard in the Divan as he formulated some great policy of the state, had sprung from the humblest origins. Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs-you gave the right man good tools and he would make them work for him.

  To love Greece-and hate the Greeks: only a Frank, Yashim thought, could make such a ridiculous blunder.

  He thought of the man with the knife.

  “What will you do now?” he had to ask.

  “I will help you find the men who killed my husband,” she said. Exactly as he had expected.

  Just as he’d feared.

  “I have to go to the palace,” he explained. “Don’t go out.”

  69

  A girl came in, bearing mint tea and baklava on a tray. “It’s these girls I am sorry for,” the valide remarked. “They have so little to do with everyone gone to Besiktas. But they know that I can’t go on forever, so. Eat these pastries, and tell me about the big city.”

  Yashim told her, sparing none of the details he knew she would enjoy. He told her about the gruesome murder near the Grande Rue, about Goulandris and his adventure in the caique and the two men who had come to destroy his flat. The killing and the attempted assassination interested her; but she was transfixed by the details of the men’s bestial behavior in his apartment.

  “Quel sacrilege!” she murmured, quite horrified. “To think that there are men capable of such acts! It must make you proud.”

  “Proud, Valide?”

  “ Mais, bien sur. Only a milksop has no enemies. To be hated-that is a mark of character. Hold by your friends, take risks, and- ecraser les autres a la merde! ” She raised a delicate eyebrow. “I did not become valide as a reward for politesse, Yashim. But these days people are far too timid and polite. It’s good to hear you talk, even if the details are inappropriate for an old lady’s ears. Go on, have another pastry. I have no appetite.”

  “I hope I haven’t spoiled it,” Yashim said.

  The valide cast him a mischievous look. “Not at all. Perhaps you have restored it. What are you reading? But of course, your collection is destroyed, and you have come to me for a book.”

  “No. It’s something else I want, Valide.” He saw the corners of her mouth harden. “For the sake of the archaeologist, your compatriot,” he began, sweetening the story with a little lie, “I’d like to consult with the master of the watermen’s guild.”

  That “consult,” he thought, was a good touch.

  “Et alors?” The valide gave a little shrug. “I am so out of touch, my friend.”

  It was Yashim’s turn to use the mischievous look. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  The valide suppressed the beginning of a smile. “ Enfin, I may be able to write a note. The sultan’s bostanci could help, I think; he deals with the watermen all the time. He’s an old friend, though he goes by some other title these days. Commissioner of Works, or nonsense of that sort.”

  She knows his new title perfectly well, Yashim thought. She sits here, in a palace half deserted, and not a thing that goes on here or in Besiktas escapes her notice.

  The valide rang a little silver bell. “Notepaper, and a pen,” she told the girl who answered. “In the meantime, Yashim, you may read to me a little from this book. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I like it. But it also makes me laugh. So don’t be afraid-I shan’t be laughing at your accent.”

  And with this whisper of a challenge, the faintest tinkling of her spurs beneath the raillery, she held out a copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noire.

  70

  “Tell me,” Yashim said. “Tell me about the ancient Greeks.”

  Amelie was lying facedown on the divan, her head in the sunlight, resting her chin on her hands. Yashim heard her giggle.

  “I could talk for days,” she said. She moved her head so that her cheek was resting on her fingers, and she looked at him. “Let’s do a swap,” she suggested. “I’ll tell you about the finest hour of ancient Greece, and you tell me about your people. The Ottomans. Their greatest moment.”

  Yashim cocked his head. “Agreed,” he said. He crossed his legs and sat by her in the window. “A time of war? Or a time of peace?”

  Amelie smiled. “War first,” she said.

  “Ah, war.” Yashim straightened his back. “The sultan Suleyman, then. Suleyman, the Giver of Laws. In French-the Magnificent. He is twenty-two when he leads our armies to Belgrade. The White City-impregnable, lying between two rivers, the Sava and the Danube, defended by the hosts of Christendom. It is a long and a weary march…”

  He told of Suleyman’s victory at Belgrade, and his conquest of Rhodes two years later, of his prowling the borders of Austria, and humbling Buda.

  “You look different when you talk like that.”

  “Different?”

  “Fierce. Like Suleyman.” She nestled her cheek against her palm, and her hips moved against the carpeted divan. “Tell me about peace.”

  “I’ll tell you about a poet,” Yashim said. “In time of poetry-with a sultan who surrounds himself with poets. Every night they hold a Divan of poetry, each man trying to outdo the other with the beauty of his words. Rhyme, meter the highest expressions of love and sadness and remorse. But the sultan is better than them all.”

  He heard Amelie give a little snort. He glanced down. Her eyes were closed, and a light skein of her brown hair had fallen across her cheek. She was smiling.

  “Ah, but he was,” Yashim insisted. “He was a poet of love-because of all our sultans, he was the one who loved one woman most. He had hundre
ds of women-the most beautiful girls from Circassia and the Balkans-but one he loved beyond all the rest. She had red hair and pale white skin, and dark, dark soulful eyes. She was-they say she was a Russian. Roxelana. He married her.”

  He bent forward and softly recited the lines he knew by heart.

  Amelie lay still for a few moments. “What was his name? The poet-sultan?”

  “Suleyman. Suleyman the Magnificent.”

  She opened her eyes and sought him out. He was very close.

  “The same sultan,” she murmured. She arched her back and raised her head, until she was looking at Yashim.

  Slowly, hesitantly, she moved closer to him. Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his lips.

  Yashim felt himself weightless, like a feather in the wind.

  Their lips touched.

  Her arm slipped around his neck. He put out a hand and touched the curve of her hip.

  It was a long time before either of them could speak.

  “You were going to tell me about the Greeks,” Yashim said.

  Amelie smiled and touched a finger to the tip of his nose.

  “Right now,” she said, “I’m more interested in Ottomans.”

  71

  Sunlight slid across the divan as the afternoon wore on.

  He broke away from her once: from her interest. She had understood. She soothed him back to her with little cries, like a bird. She had put her fingers to his lips.

  “Max never kissed me like that,” she said finally.

  He left her reading the Gyllius; it was the least he could do.

  “Remember, Gyllius is writing about a vanished world. Perhaps something in this will spark a memory.”

  He caught a last glimpse of her on the divan: her hair in the sun, a finger on her chin, and the curve of her hip like a wave that could drown him.

  72

  Palewski was not at home; Marta said he’d gone for a walk and invited Yashim inside to wait.

  “I’ll sit out here,” Yashim said.

  He wanted the light-he needed air. He had walked all the way, hoping to drive the agonizing tedium from his limbs, breath into his constricted lungs. It was no good: Amelie that afternoon had invaded him, opening the space in his mind that he always kept closed.

  He sat at the top of the steps with his back to the wall, in the sun, watching the little boy playing in the yard. He was kneeling by the front wall and digging in the earth with a stick.

  The little boy didn’t look up when Yashim came and squatted down beside him.

  He carved the stick into the dirt again, then laid it flat and began to polish the sides of the trench he had dug, a short, shallow trench that sloped gently from one end to the other.

  At the lower end the boy had dug a small hole in the ground. He laid the stick aside and began to smooth the sides of the hole.

  When it was done to his satisfaction he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. Yashim gave him a smile but he did not receive it.

  The little boy stood up and walked away.

  Yashim stared at the figure on the ground, puzzled.

  The little boy was gone a few minutes. He came back carrying a jar and a ball. The ball was made of tin and had a big dent in it. The boy placed the ball in the trench, with the dent uppermost. Very carefully he stood the jar on its base and began to tip water from the jar into the trench. The ball floated a short way, then rolled over slowly and came to rest on its dented side.

  The boy sighed. He looked up at Yashim for the first time and there were tears in his eyes.

  “It’s only because the ball’s got a dent in it,” Yashim said quietly.

  The boy looked down, but made no effort to touch the ball.

  “I can get you another one, just like it,” Yashim said.

  The boy didn’t move.

  “Where did you get this one? From your daddy?”

  The boy looked up, and his head seemed to shrink into his shoulders. He doesn’t speak, Yashim thought: his words are soundless shapes inside his head.

  Yashim stood up and held out his hand. “Show me,” he said.

  73

  Amelie lay on the divan, fiddling with a lock of her hair, her attention focused on the old book her husband had left behind in Yashim’s flat.

  She read quickly, sometimes skipping whole pages, sometimes turning the book in her hands the better to read the tiny brown scrawls that decorated the lines and margins of the text. Yashim was right: hers was an expressive face, and so as she read her expression changed. She frowned and bit her lip; she smiled; and once, holding the book with one finger between the pages to mark her place, she got up and walked around the little apartment with an anxious glance at the window.

  When she had finished examining the book she sat up, quite still, with her hands in her lap and a deep, faraway expression in her clear brown eyes.

  74

  The boy walked fast, without turning his head. When they struck the crowds, Yashim stumbled against a porter too tired and overburdened to complain as the boy darted through a cloud of women in charshafs ambling, ample-hipped, along the waterfront.

  Yashim dodged around them instead, craning his neck to keep his eyes on the boy’s shaved head. A willowy girl with a shawl across her head and face stepped between them, and for a moment he lost sight of him. But no, there he was again, his shoulders stooped against the sea of people coming down the Horn, stubbornly making his way through without a backward glance as if he were afraid a spell would break.

  Yashim wondered if the boy remembered he was following him. They crossed the bazaar quarter. In front of the Patriarchate at Fener the crowd thinned. The little boy flung himself uphill, following a maze of alleys where Fener gave way to the Jewish settlement at Balat to reach the summit. There, not half a mile from Yashim’s home, and about fifty yards shy of the hilltop on the farther side, he stopped and looked around for the first time.

  Yashim caught up with him, panting from the effort.

  “You move fast,” he said. “I had no idea we were going so far.”

  The little boy’s eyes slid from Yashim’s face to a low, whitewashed building across the street, and back again. Yashim turned his head to look. There were no windows, only an outside staircase made of stone, with a rendered balustrade, climbing from the street to a small wooden door.

  The boy heaved himself up onto a low wall and sat, kicking his legs, with his chin in his hands, looking at the door. Something easy and practiced about the movement made Yashim think he had done it many times before. Finding a place to sit, swinging his legs, watching. Waiting.

  Yashim glanced back at the little door, high up in the blank wall across the street.

  “It’s through there, is it?”

  The taut little face didn’t move.

  “Stay here, then. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The boy’s glance dropped to the ground. Stay here. Is that what Xani used to say? Were those the words his father used?

  Yashim glanced about. The street was empty. He crossed to the stairs and climbed up. At the top he looked around. The boy was gone.

  Beyond, over the roofs, he could see where the hillside dropped to the ancient walls of the city, those great brick-banded walls that had been built by the emperors a thousand years before, and beyond them the hills of the Belgrade Forest.

  The door was bolted, the hasp secured by an iron padlock.

  Yashim hesitated. He glanced back to the wall where the boy had sat, and reached into his shirt.

  Long ago, in another life, Grigor the archimandrite had shown him how to pick a lock. Yashim slid the bolts and the door swung open without a sound.

  75

  The crowd absorbed her, as Amelie had known it would. She stayed close to a group of women in charshafs, holding the shawl up close to her face, her hand touching her nose, as they walked lumpily down the Golden Horn. Porters came past, bowed beneath terrific parcels, sacks of grain, chests.

  In front of the Spice Baza
ar she changed direction and began to make her way up the street that led from the New Mosque to the ancient Han of Rustem Pasha. The crowds were thinning now; around the han, where merchants sat cross-legged in front of their shops, she attracted the odd glance. It was hard for her to walk like a Stambouliot woman, and now she was walking on her own.

  At the han she turned into the cobbled lane that ran beneath the walls of the Topkapi Palace. Glancing up, she recognized the enclosed balcony from which the sultan had always inspected marches and processions; ahead, she could make out the swooping eaves of the fountain of Ahmed III, its marble paneling chased with Koranic verses. The sight made her feel thirsty.

  76

  It took Yashim a moment to focus his senses as he stepped through the doorway. Outside he had been hot, breathless, caught in the dust and the heat of sloping alleyways where the ground balled in broken rubble beneath your feet and the sounds of the city were never far away.

  But as his eyes adjusted to the faint light from overhead, his ears were tuned to a new and gentler sound, the bubbling of water and its liquid echo from the walls and roof. The sweat cooled on his skin, and he raised his arms to embrace the air. When he breathed deeply, it felt as if the air were cleansing him from the inside. He felt an urge to laugh, to step forward through the dim light and plunge himself into the glistening black pool that was spread out at his feet.

  Yashim brought his arms across his chest, rubbing his hands up and down.

  The big tank was fed, as far as he could see, by a spigot set in the wall, and at various points around its edge the water shimmered over into smaller tanks, like basins. In the great tank the water seemed black until it spilled across the lip: this is how the water is divided, he thought, observing the way the basins were set against the walls, each basin higher than the next, each one letting the water gurgle across its lip to the basin below.