Slowly the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.
The rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour of the morning star the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the carpets. They hitched their woollen cloaks over their heads with their elbows against the rain, and started up the steps.
About two hundred yards uphill they found a section of road which had turned into a pond, and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.
Eventually they located the drain, and started work trying to unblock it: first with the rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping foot-first into the icy murk for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last, shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and the wall of the drain, and lever it away far enough to let the water escape with a gurgle.
The workman who leaned in up to his chest and gripped the obstruction finally saw what looked at first like a gigantic turkey, trussed for roasting.
What he saw next made him a very sick workman indeed.
[ 12 ]
Yashim rolled out of bed, slipped on a djellabah and slippers, took his purse from a hook and went down into the street. Three turns brought him to Kara Davut Sokagi, where he drank two cups of thick, sweet coffee and ate a borek, layers of honeyed pastry fried in oil. Often in the night, at the time when people tend to lie awake and follow their plans out until they drift away into a happy sleep, Yashim thought of moving from his rooms in the tenement to somewhere bigger and lighter, with proper views. He’d designed a small library for himself, with a comfortable, well-lit alcove for reading, and a splendid kitchen, too, with a room off the side for a servant to sleep in—someone to riddle up the fire in the morning and fetch him his coffee. Sometimes it was the library which looked out over the blue Bosphorus, sometimes it was the kitchen. The water threw soothing patterns of light onto the ceiling. An open window caught a glimmer of the summer breeze.
And in the morning, coming down to the Kara Davut, he always decided to stay where he was. He’d leave his books to glower in the half-light, and his kitchen would fill the room with the scent of cardamom and mint and throw steam onto the windows. He’d labour up and down flights of steep stairs and crack his head, from time to time, on the lintel of the sunken doorway. Because the Kara Davut was his kind of street. Ever since he’d found this cafe, where the proprietor always remembered how he liked his coffee—no spice, a hint of sugar—he’d been happy in the Kara Davut. The people all knew him, but they weren’t prying, or gossipy. Not that he gave them anything to gossip about: Yashim led a quiet, blameless life. He went to mosque with them on Fridays. He paid his bills. In return he asked for nothing more than to be left in peace over his morning coffees, to watch the street show, to be waved over by the fishmonger with news of an important haul or to visit the Libyan baker for his excellent sprouted grain bread.
Was that quite true? Did he, really, want to be left in peace by these people—by any people? The seraskier’s note, the sultan’s summons, the fishmonger winking and the coffee done right for him each day: weren’t these exactly the links he craved? Yashim’s air of invisibility sometimes struck even him as a protective pose, a version of the stagey mannerisms of those little gelded boys who grew to become the eunuch guardians of a family, and slip-slopped after their charges, frowning and moue-ing and letting their hands nutter towards their hearts. Perhaps detachment was a mannerism he had adopted because the agony was too biting and too strong to bear without it. A very fragile kind of make-believe.
Yashim looked along the street. An imam in a tall white cap lifted his black robe a few inches to avoid soiling it in a puddle and stepped quietly past the cafe, not turning his head. A small boy with a letter trotted by, stopping at a neighbouring cafe to ask the way. From the opposite direction a shepherd kept his little flock in order with a hazel wand, continually talking to them, as oblivious to the street as if they were following an empty pathway among the hills of Thrace. Two veiled women were heading for the baths; behind them a black slave carried a bundle of clothes. A porter, bent double beneath his basket, was followed by a train of mules, with logs for firewood, and little Greek children darted in and out between their clattering hooves. Here came a cavass, a thickly-padded policeman with a red fez and pistols thrust into his belt, and two Armenian merchants, one swinging his beads, the other counting them with slender fingers while he spoke.
Once he had hated them all, for having things he could never have—not just the children who would never run and play catch with his; but also knowledge of women who’d speak the truth to their lovers in the quiet, and turn over the small business of the day with them; and the company of men who joked, jostled and held their common secret like ripe melons.
Yashim sipped his coffee, and ground his teeth. Even now, he found himself from time to time with a thwarted urge to leap up, waving his arms: to lacerate himself on barbs of scandal by rutting and roaring among these veiled women and their quiet, all-too-well satisfied men. But the hatred, at least, had passed. It had ebbed away slowly, like a receding flood, leaving only its shining imprint in his mind, the dangerous outline of bitterness and rage. These days he walked warily where the flood had been, trying to recognise old landmarks, to piece together the elements of an honourable life out of the jumble of everyday objects he encountered. If he could not be one of the people—if he could not suffer their hurts, and their joys, and their fears the way they did—then he told himself that he could hold to clarity all the faster; he could watch and intervene. For the people were too busy loving, and backsliding and cheating, and boasting and calculating to see, like him, the comedy complete. They trod on rakes which sprang up to hit them in the eye. They sat on stools which somebody whisked away at the last moment. And sometimes they carried vipers hidden in the folds of their cloaks.
Yashim squeezed his eyes shut tight, to focus on the order of the day. He had to visit the seraskier. Standing by that cauldron in the wee hours of yesterday morning, there were any number of questions he’d been too surprised to ask. What had the soldiers been doing on the night they disappeared? What did their relatives think of the affair? Who were their friends? Who were their enemies?
Then there was the cauldron to reckon with: the oddest and most sinister part of the whole affair. He needed to visit the Soup Sellers to see what they had to say.
As for the girl in the palace, and the valide’s jewels—that was, you might say, a more private affair. In every family home lay a region that was harem, forbidden to outsiders. In the Topkapi palace, this region was almost an acre in size, a warren of corridors and courtyards, of winding stairs and balconies so cunningly contrived that it was sealed from the world’s gaze as effectively as if it had been built in the great Sahara, instead of in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world.
With the rarest exceptions, no man but the sultan himself, or men of his family, could enter the harem.
Yashim was one of the exceptions. He could go where no ordinary man could go, on pain of death.
It did not do to make too much of the harem itself. It wasn’t the harem which made eunuchs, though many of them worked there, and the black eunuchs, led by the Kislar Agha, effectively controlled it. Unlike Yashim, unlike many of the white eunuchs, unlike the castrati of the Vatica
n, the black eunuchs of the palace were utterly clean-cropped: shaved to the quick in a single sweep of the sickle blade, wielded by a slaver in the desert. Each of them now carried a small and exquisite silver tube, tucked into a fold of their turban, for performing the most modest of bodily functions.
Yet men had been gelded for service in the time of Darius and Alexander, too. Ever since the idea of dynasties arose, there had been eunuchs who commanded fleets, who generalled armies, who subtly set out the policies of states. Sometimes Yashim dimly saw himself enrolled into a strange fraternity, the shadow-world of the guardians: men who since time immemorial had held themselves apart, the better to watch and serve. It included the eunuchs of the ancient world, and of the Chinese emperor in Beijing, and the whole Catholic hierarchy in Europe, too, which had supplied the celibate priests who served the kings of Christendom. Didn’t the Pope in Rome himself serve man and God? The service of barren men, like their desires, began and ended with their death; but in life they watched over the churning anthills of humankind, inured from its preoccupation with lust, longevity and descent. Prey, at worst, to a fondness for trinkets and trivia, to a fascination with their own decline, a tendency to hysteria and petty jealousies. Yashim knew them well.
As for the harem, none of the women there could come or go at will, of course. So Yashim’s current business in there was, in that sense, a more private affair. Even time, Yashim reflected, ran differently on the inside: the harem could wait. Outside, as the Seraskier had warned, he had just nine ordinary days.
Brushing the crumbs of the borek from his lips, Yashim decided that he would visit first the Guild, and then pay his call on the Seraskier. Afterwards, depending on what he learned, he would go and question various people in the harem.
[ 13 ]
Mustafa the Albanian sniffed suspiciously at the bowl of tripe. There were, he knew, certain parties in the city who had embraced heretical doctrines. Daily, he was certain, they were extending their dangerous influence over the weaker, more impressionable members of society: young men, people from out of town, even students at the medreses who surely should know better, found it all to easy to succumb to the subtle blandishments of these rogues. Some of them, he was well aware, simply abused the authorities’ trust. Others—and who could say they were not encouraged by that baleful example?—recognised no authority at all. Well, he thought grimly, he was there to root them out.
He sniffed again. The colour of the soup was good: no obvious sign of innovation there. Mustafa was of the school that followed the saying of the Prophet, peace be on him: in change there is innovation, innovation leads to blasphemy, blasphemy leads to hell fire. The notion that a good tripe soup needed the addition of a pinch of pounded coriander was the kind of innovation which, if left unchecked, would gradually undermine the whole guild and destroy its ability to serve the city as it should. It made no difference whether the heretics charged extra for the spice, or not: the confusion would have entered men’s minds. Where there was a weakness to be exploited, there would greed find its encouragement.
Mustafa sniffed again. Lifting the horn spoon that hung around his neck as a symbol of his office, he dipped it into the bowl and turned the contents over. Tripe. Onions. Regularly shaped, faintly caramelised. He dug down to the bottom of the bowl and examined the spoon carefully in the light for any specks or impurities. Satisfied, he lifted the spoon to his lips and sucked noisily. Tripe soup. He smacked his lips, his immediate fears allayed. Whatever secrets this young apprentice held in the recesses of his heart he could definitely make the proper article on demand.
Two anxious pairs of eyes followed the spoon to the guild master’s lips. They saw the soup go in. They heard the soup flow about Mustafa’s palate. They watched anxiously as he held his hand close to his ear. And then they watched, delighted, as he nodded curtly. An apprenticeship redeemed. A new master soupier born.
“It is good. Keep an eye on the onions: never use them too large. The size of your fist is good, or smaller.” He brought up his own massive paw and curled the fingers. “Too big!” He shook the fist and laughed. The apprentice tittered.
They discussed arrangements for the apprentice’s formal induction into the guild, his prospects, the extent of his savings and the likelihood of his finding an opening within the next few years. Mustafa knew that this was the most dangerous moment. Newly fledged soupiers always wanted to start right away, whatever the circumstances. It took patience and humility to carry on working for an old master while you waited for a shop to come free.
Patience, yes. Impatience led to coriander and hell fire. Mustafa tugged at his moustache and squinted at the young man. Did he have patience? As for himself, he thought, patience was his second skin. How could he have lived his life, and not acquired patience in positively redemptive quantities?
[ 14 ]
It was a singular request, for what use could a man have for a play cauldron at this time of the year? Mustafa the Albanian seemed to hear a dangerous word whispered in his ear. Was it not an innovation, to let a stranger examine the store-rooms of the guild of soup-makers? It certainly seemed an insidious precedent.
Yashim blinked, smiled and opened his eyes wide. He thought he could guess exactly what was going through the old soup master’s mind.
“I’m known at the palace: the gate-keepers there could vouch for me, if that’s a help.”
The guild master’s frown remained firmly in place. His massive hands lay quietly folded over his paunch. Perhaps, Yashim thought, the palace card was the wrong one to try: every institution in the city had its pride. He decided on another throw.
“We live in strange times. I’m not so young that I can’t remember when things were…better ordered, in general, than they are today. Every day, right here in Istanbul, I see things I’d never have dreamed of seeing in my young days. Foreigners on horseback. Dogs literally starving to death on the streets. Beggars in from the countryside. Buildings removed to make way for strange mosques. Prankish uniforms.” He shook his head. The soup master gave a little grunt.
“The other day I had to return a pair of slippers that had cost me forty piastres: the stitching was coming away. And I’d only had them a month!” That was quite true: Yashim had bought the slippers from a guildsman. For forty piastres they were meant to last a year. “Sometimes, I’m sorry to say, I think that even our food doesn’t taste quite the way it used to.”
Yashim noticed the soup master’s fingers clench and wondered if he’d gone a bit far. The soup master put a hand up to his moustache and rubbed it between his finger and thumb.
“I’m a eunuch,” Yashim said.
“Aha,” the soup master said complacently. Well, he thought, that bit about the palace was probably true.
“Tell me,” he rumbled. “Do you like coriander seed? In soup?”
It was Yashim’s turn to frown.
“What a peculiar idea,” he said.
Mustafa the Albanian got to his feet with surprising agility.
“Come,” he said simply.
Yashim followed the big man onto the balcony around the courtyard. Below the balustrade, under the arcade, men were busy frying tripe. Apprentices staggered to and fro with buckets they’d filled from the well in the centre of the court. A cat slunk through the shadows, weaving between the legs of enormous chopping blocks. Yashim thought: even the cat has its position here.
They descended a flight of stairs and came out into the arcade. A man wielding a shiny cleaver looked up as they appeared, his eyes streaming with tears. His cleaver fell and rose automatically on a peeled onion: the onion stayed whole until the man swept it aside with a stroke of the blade, and selected another from the basket hanging at the side of the block. Mechanically he began to chop and peel it. Not once did he so much as glance down at his fingers.
Now that, Yashim thought with admiration, is a real skill. The onion man sniffed and nodded a greeting.
The master entered a corridor and began fumbling at h
is belt for keys. At length he felt what he was looking for and drew it out on a chain. He stopped in front of a thick oak door, banded with iron, and placed the key into the lock.
“That’s a very old key,” Yashim remarked.
“It’s a very old door,” the master replied sensibly. Yashim almost added: “And none the worse for that,” but decided against it. The lock was stiff; the master winced and the key slid sideways in the slot, depressing the necessary pins. The door opened lightly.
They were in a large, low-ceilinged room, lit by an iron grating so high up in the opposite wall that a portion of the ceiling had been sloped upwards to meet it. A few dusty rays of the winter sun fell on a curious collection of objects, ranged in shelves along the side walls. There were wooden boxes, a stack of scrolls, and a line of metal cones of varying sizes whose points seemed to rise and fall like the outline of a decorative frieze. And there, at the back of the hall, stood three enormous cauldrons.
“All our old weights,” said the master. He was looking lovingly at the metal cones. Yashim repressed his impatience.
“Old weights?”
“Every new master sees to it that the guild weights and measures are renewed and re-confirmed on his appointment. The old ones then are stored here.”
“What for?”
“What for?” The master sounded surprised. “For comparison. How else can any of us be sure that the proper standards are being kept? I can place my weights in the balance and see that they accord to a hair’s breadth with the weights we used at the time of the Conquest.”
“That’s almost four centuries ago.”
“Exactly, yes. If the measures are the same, the ingredients must also be the same. Our soups, you understand, are not merely in conformability with the standards. They are -1 do not say the standard itself, but a part of it. An unbroken line which comes down to us from the days of the Conquest. Like the line of the house of Osman itself,” he added, piously.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 4
