“And the Janissaries?”
“Sheikh Karagoz forged the link. Imagine: the early Janissaries were young men, uncertain in their faith, for they had been plucked from the ranks of unbelievers and had to forget many errors. Sheikh Karagoz made it easier for them. You know the story, of course. He was with the sultan Murad, who first created the Janissary corps from among the prisoners he took in his Balkan wars. When the Sheikh blessed them, with his hand outstretched in a long white sleeve, that sleeve became the mark of the Janissary, the headgear that they wore like an egret in their turbans.”
“So Sheikh Karagoz was a baba?”
“In a sense, yes. He lived somewhat later than the last babas of Turkish tradition, but the principles were the same. His teachings were Islamic, but they dwelt on mystery and sacred union.”
“Sacred union?”
The imam pursed his lips.
“I mean union of faiths, union with God. We say, for example, that there is only one path to truth, and that is written in the Koran. Sheikh Karagoz believed that there were other ways.”
“Like the dervish. Ecstatic states. Liberation of the soul from the prison of the body.”
“Exactly, but the means were different. You might say, more primitive.”
“How so?”
“A true adept considered himself to be above all earthly bonds and rules. So rule-breaking was a way of showing their allegiance to the brotherhood. They would drink alcohol and eat pork, for instance. Women were admitted under the same condi—tions as men. Much of the clear guidance of the Koran was simply brushed aside, as unimportant, or even irrelevant. Such transgressions helped to create a bond between them.”
“I see. Perhaps that made it easier for the Christian-born to approach Islam?”
“In the short term, I agree. They gave up fewer of their base pleasures. You know what soldiers can be like.”
Yashim nodded. Wine, women and song: the litany of the camp fire in every age.
“If they ignored the guidance of the Koran,” he said slowly, “what guidance did they receive?”
“A very good question.” The imam put his fingertips together. “In one sense, none at all. The true Karagozi believed in no one but himself: he believed that his was the soul that persisted in every state—creation, birth, death and beyond. The rules were irrelevant. But the ridiculous thing is, he had rules of his own, too. Magic numbers. Secrets. Superstitions. A Karagozi will not set his spoon on the table, or stand on a threshold, that sort of thing.
“Obeying the petty regulations of the order allowed him to break the laws of God. It is scarcely to be wondered at that all sorts of bad types were attracted to the Karagozi order. Let’s not exaggerate. The original impulse, if confused, was pure. The Karagozi followers thought of themselves as Muslims. That is, they attended prayers in the mosque, like everyone else. The Karagozi element was another layer in their spiritual allegiance, a secret layer. They were organised in lodges, what we call tekkes. Places of gathering and prayer. There were many of them, in Istanbul and elsewhere.”
“Were all the Karagozi Janissaries?”
“No. All the Janissaries were Karagozi, broadly speaking. Which is not the same thing. Perhaps, my friend, we have been too quick to speak of them and their doctrines in the past tense. The blow to the Janissaries? A setback. Maybe, in the end, a cre—ative one. You know, faith may sharpen itself in adversity. I would imagine that we have not heard the last of the Karagozi. Perhaps not under that name, but the currents of spirituality they tap are deep.”
“But proscribed, as you said. Forbidden.”
“Ah, well, here in Istanbul, yes. But they have made a long journey. Once they listened to a baba from the steppe. Since then they have passed through the heartlands of Islam, the Domain of Peace, and now they stand on its borders. As sentinel, perhaps.”
The imam smiled.
“Don’t look so surprised. The doctrine of the Karagozi won many frontiers for Islam. Perhaps it will do so again.”
“Which borders? Where do you mean?”
“They are strong where you’d expect them to be. In Albania. Where the Janissaries were always strong.”
Yashim nodded.
“There’s a poem. You seem to know a lot, so perhaps you know this, too.”
He recited the verses he had found nailed to the Janissary Tree.
Unknowing
And knowing nothing of unknowing,
They spread.
Flee.
Unknowing
And knowing nothing of unknowing,
They seek.
Teach them.
The imam frowned. “It is, I recall, an Karagozi verse. Yes, I know it. Highly esoteric, don’t you agree? Typically secretive. It goes on to suggest some form of mystical union with the divine, as far as I remember.”
“What do you mean, it goes on?”
“The poem you’ve quoted is incomplete.” The imam looked surprised. “I’m afraid I can’t recite it exactly.”
“But you could, perhaps, find out?”
“By the grace of God,” said the imam placidly. “If you’re interested, I can try.”
“I would be grateful,” Yashim said, rising.
They bowed to one another. Just as Yashim turned to go, the imam turned his face to the window.
“Sufic mysteries,” he said quietly. “Beautiful in their way, but ethereal. I don’t think they would mean much to the ordinary people. Or perhaps, I don’t know, too much. There’s a lot of passion, and even faith, in this kind of poetry, but in the end it doesn’t suit the believers. It’s too free, too dangerous.”
I don’t know about free, Yashim reflected.
But dangerous, yes.
Certainly dangerous.
Even murderous.
[ 30 ]
He saw her swinging down the street, tall and graceful and challenging the men to stare. A few yards from him she slowed and began to look around.
He put up a hand and waved her across.
She dragged back a stool and sat down abruptly. A group of old men playing backgammon at the next table rubbernecked with obvious stupefaction; but Preen didn’t notice, or care.
“Coffee,” she said.
Yashim ordered two, avoiding the tray boy’s curious stare. Not for the first time in his life he wanted to stand up and explain. She’s not, in fact, a woman, so everything is as it should be. She’s a man, dressed as a woman. But he admired her courage in coming to the cafe. He nodded grimly at the old men.
With scarcely a trace of make-up, the flush in Preen’s cheeks was real: she looked, Yashim thought, better for it.
“We can’t talk here,” he said. “I’ll cut along home, and you can join—”
“We’ll talk here,” she replied through gritted teeth. The boy served the coffees, and began to flick a duster over an adjoining table. Yashim caught his eye and jerked his head. The boy sloped off, disappointed.
“I’ve got reasons for discretion, Preen.”
She drew breath through her nose. Her chest heaved.
“Such as?”
He looked at her. “You’re looking good today,” he said.
“Cut it out.”
She sounded tough, but she kept her eyes on the table and moved her head slowly from side to side. A trace of pleasure.
“It’s better if we’re not seen together at the moment. It’s my job to blend in, to slip by unobserved. As for you, well, I’m not sure what we’re into here.”
“I’m a big girl,” said Preen. Her lip quivered. Yashim grinned. Preen covered her mouth with a hand and shot him a look. Then she giggled.
“Oh, I know I’m naughty, sweetie. I just couldn’t help it. I had to do something a bit wild, see someone I like. Shock them, too. To feel alive.” She let a shiver of pleasure run through her body. “’ve been talking to Istanbul’s most disgusting man.”
Yashim raised his eyebrows.
“I’m amazed you can be so sure.”
&
nbsp; “A hunchbacked pimp, from the docks? I’m sure. He says someone saw your friends the other night.”
Yashim leaned forwards.
“Where?”
“Somewhere reasonably salubrious. Is salubrious the word I want, Yashim?”
“Possibly. Your—informant—he wasn’t there himself?”
“Not that he told me. Don’t you want to know where?”
“Of course I want to know.”
“It’s some sort of gardens,” Preen explained. “Along the Bosphorus.”
“Ah.” Perhaps salubrious was the word Preen wanted: all things are relative, after all.
“There’s a kiosk there, apparently, perfectly clean. There are even little lanterns in the trees.” Preen sounded almost wistful. “You can sit there and talk, and watch the boats in the straits, and have a coffee or a pipe.”
Or an assignation, Yashim thought. The Yeyleyi Gardens were once a favourite of the court: the sultan would take his women to picnic there, among the trees. That must have been almost a century ago. The sultans had stopped coming when the place became popular; in time it grew faintly notorious. Not entirely respectable, the Yeyleyi Gardens had been the sort of place where lovers used to arrange to meet by accident, communicating in the tender and semi-secret language of flowers. These days the encounters were more spontaneous, but even better arranged, and the language possibly mercenary. He could quite imagine it being visited—a little hopefully—by what the serask-ier called boys of good family.
“So—what? They arrived, had a pipe and a coffee, and left together?”
“So I’m told.”
“By boat?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about a boat. No, wait, I think they left in a cab.”
“All four of them together?”
“All five.”
Yashim looked up sharply. Preen tittered.
“Four came, but five left.”
“Yes, I see. And do you, Preen, know anything about this Number Five?”
“Oh, yes. He was a Russian.”
“A Russian? You’re sure?”
Yashim thought about this. Stambouliots had a tendency to mark down everyone vaguely foreign, and fair, as a Russian these days. It was a function of the late war; and of all the wars the Porte had fought with the czar’s men over the last hundred years; increasingly ending with the defeat of the sultan’s army, and further tough demands.
“I think it must have been true,” Preen said. “He was in a uniform.”
“What?!”
Preen laughed. “White, with gold braid. Very smart. Ve-ry big guy. And a sort of medal on his chest, like a star, with rays.”
“Preen, this is gold dust. How did you get it?”
She thought of the young Greek sailor.
“I made a few sacrifices,” she smiled. Then she thought of Yorg and her smile faded.
[ 31 ]
Istanbul was not a city which kept late hours. After ten, for the most part, when the sun had long since sunk beneath the Princes’ islands in the Sea of Marmara, the streets were quiet and deserted. Dogs sometimes snarled and snapped in the alleyways, or took to howling down on the shore, but those sounds, like the muezzin’s call to prayer at first light, were the night noises of Istanbul, and no one thought more about them.
Nowhere in the city was quieter than the Grand Bazaar, a labyrinth of covered streets which twisted and writhed like eels all the way down the hill from Beyazit to the shores of the Golden Horn. By day, the hum of the bazaar belonged to what was, even then, perhaps the most fantastic caravanserai in the world, an emporium of gold and spices, of rugs and linens, soaps and books and medicines and earthenware bowls. But it wasn’t just the place where the produce of the world was traded; within that square mile of alleyways and cubicles, some of the most delicate and useful products of the empire were manufactured daily. It was a concentration of the empire’s wealth and industry; it was served by its own cafes, restaurants, imams and hamams; and the strictest rules were laid down for its security.
The heights which commanded the bazaar—the so-called Third Hill of Istanbul—on which the Beyazit Mosque stood, had been chosen by the Conqueror, Sultan Mehmed, for his imperial palace; but the building was still incomplete when he began work on another palace, Topkapi on Seraglio Point, destined to be far greater and more magnificent than the first. The old palace, or Eski Serai, later served as a sort of annexe to Topkapi. It was a school where palace slaves were trained; a company of Janissaries were stationed in its walls; but its only royal inhabitants were women of previous sultans, despatched from Topkapi on the death of their lord and master to gloomy retirement in Eski Serai.
That dismal practice had lapsed many years before. Eventually, the Eski Serai sank into disrepair, and finally into ruin; its remains were cleared and from the rubble rose the fire-tower which still brooded watchfully over the Grand Bazaar.
The bag, which arrived in the night, was tied by its drawstrings to a heavy iron grille which protected the Grand Bazaar from prying eyes and enterprising thieves. By dawn more than a dozen people had commented on it, and within the hour, in front of a very squeezed-up crowd, it was finally brought to the ground.
No one was eager to be the one who opened it. Nobody thought it contained treasure. Everyone thought that whatever it contained, it would be horrible; and everyone wanted to know what it was.
In the end, it was decided to carry the bag, unopened, to the mosque, and ask the kadi for an opinion.
[ 32 ]
Several hours later the bag was opened for the second time that morning.
“It is a terrible thing,” the kadi said again, wringing his hands. He was an old man, and the shock had been great. “Nothing like this…ever…” His hands fluttered in the air. “It has nothing to do with us. Peaceful people…good neighbours…”
The seraskier nodded, but he was not listening. He was watching Yashim drag at the cords. Yashim stood up, and tipped the bag over onto the floor.
The kadi gripped a doorway for support. The seraskier skipped to one side. Yashim himself stood breathing heavily, staring at the pile of white bones and wooden spoons. Wedged in the pile, unmistakably dark, was a human head.
Yashim hung his head and said nothing. The violence is terrible, he thought. And what have I done to stop it? Cooked a meal. Gone looking for a toy cauldron.
Cooked a meal.
The seraskier put out a booted foot and stirred the heap with his toe. The head settled in its grisly nest. Its skin looked drawn and yellow, and its eyes glittered faintly beneath half-lowered lids. Neither of them noticed the kadi leave the room.
“No blood,” said the seraskier.
Yashim squatted down beside the bones and spoons.
“But one of yours?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“You think so?”
“No, I’m sure. The moustache.” He gestured faintly to the severed head.
But Yashim was more interested in the bones. He was laying them out, bone by bone, paying particular attention to the shin, the femur, the ribs.
“It’s very odd,” he murmured.
The seraskier looked down. “What’s odd?”
“There’s not a mark on them. Clean and whole.”
He picked up the pelvis and began turning it this way and that between his hands. The seraskier pulled a face. He’d dealt with corpses often enough—but fondling bones. Euch.
“It was a man, anyway,” Yashim remarked.
“Of course it was a fucking man. He was one of my soldiers.”
“It was just a thought,” Yashim replied pacifically, setting the pelvis in position. From overhead it looked almost obscenely large, thrusting out from the skeletal remains spread on the marble floor. “Maybe they’d used another body. I wouldn’t know.”
“Another body? What for?”
Yashim stood up and wiped his hands with the hem of his cloak. He stared at the seraskier, seeing nothing.
“I can’t imagine,” he said.
The seraskier gestured to the door, and heaved a sigh.
“Like it or not,” he said, “we’re going to have to tell the people something.”
Yashim blinked.
“How about the truth?” He suggested.
The seraskier looked at him levelly.
“Something like that,” he said abruptly. “Why not?”
[ 33 ]
Fine cities whose contented citizens support an intelligent administration do exist, containing not a single dilapidated public building, a solitary weed-strewn building lot, or even a crumbling palazzo; but a great city must have them all, for decay, too, is a sign of life. In the right ear, dereliction whispers of opportunity. In another ear, of delinquency and corruption. Istanbul in the 18305 was no exception.
The ragged bell-pull that now lay, inert, in Yashim’s hand as he stood at the top of the steps by the front door of a building in Pera, Istanbul’s so-called ‘European’ quarter across the Golden Horn, inspired a similar reflection. He sensed that in some way the broken bell claimed kinship with much that was already ragged and mouldering in the ancient metropolis, from cracked basilicas to sagging wooden houses, from the office of the Patriarch to waterlogged pilings in the port.
At the last, mortal wrench of the cord, a bell had pealed somewhere inside the old mansion. For the first time in weeks, and the last time in years, a bell announced to the Polish ambassador that he had a visitor.
Palewski manoeuvred himself off the divan with an oath and a tinkle of broken glass.
At the head of the stairs he gripped the balustrade and began to descend, quite slowly, towards the front door. He stared for a moment or two at the bolts, then stretched, flexed the muscles in his back, ran a hand across his hair and around his collar, and wrenched it open. He blinked involuntarily in the sudden rush of winter light.
Yashim shoved the remains of the bell pull into his hands and stepped inside. Palewski closed the door, grumbling.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 9
