Jason Goodwin

by The Janissary Tree

"I see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It wasn't the original idea?"

  The tekke master looked thoughtful.

  "I do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not to commemorate."

  Yashim looked up at the coffered ceiling.

  "Interlude? I don't quite understand."

  "Forgive me," the tekke master said humbly. "I have not made myself clear, so perhaps you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more space, so we gave it over to them. Recent events," he added, with the usual circumspection, "allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were covered, as you see."

  Yashim turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.

  "You mean this tekke was built by your order? It wasn't originally a Karagozi foundation at all?"

  The man smiled and shook his head. "No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is open will be closed."

  Five minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.

  Palewski's map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke correctly---for the time it was drawn up. The Karagozi hadn't built it, though: it wasn't one of the original four tekkes.

  But the principle had to be right.

  Yashim thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.

  He pictured it in his mind's eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress against the weathered stonework of the walls.

  The tekke was there. It had to be there.

  85

  ***********

  HALF an hour later, Yashim approached the square up a long, straight alley from the south.

  Straight ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley, he had a clear view of the splendid cypress where earlier he'd stood talking with the old men.

  From where he stood, five hundred yards back, he could see what he hadn't been able to see before. He could see over the top of the tree.

  Just behind its slender tip, in solitary semi ruined splendor, a Byzantine tower rose from the massive city walls.

  The Kerkoporta. The little gate.

  Not many Stambouliots learned the story of the Conquest of 1453 in any detail. It was ancient history, almost four hundred years old. It had been the fulfillment of destiny, and the how, or why, of its successful capture from the defending Greeks was a matter of little interest or relevance to people living in Turkish Istanbul in the nineteenth century.

  Only two sorts of people had maintained their interest and told the story to whoever wanted to listen.

  The Janissaries, with pride.

  The Phanariots, with regret--though whether that regret was perfectly genuine, Yashim had never quite been able to decide. For the Greek merchant princes of the Phanar, when all was said and done, had made their fortunes under Ottoman rule.

  Yashim could remember exactly where he'd been when he first heard, in detail, the story of the Turkish Conquest. The Mavrocordato mansion, in the upper Phanar district, was the grandest, gloomiest palace on its street. Locked away behind high walls, and built in a style of high rococo, it was the headquarters of a sprawling family operation that extended to the principalities of the Danube and the godowns of Trabzon, taking in titles civil and ecclesiastical on the way. The Mavrocordatos had produced over the centuries scholars and emperors, boyar overlords and admirals of the fleet, rogues, saints, and beautiful daughters. They were fantastically rich, dazzlingly well connected, and dangerously well-informed.

  There had been seven of them around a table, and Yashim. Their faces expressed many different things--humor and bitterness, dread or jealousy, complacency and contempt: but there had been one lovely face, too, he still saw sometimes in his dreams, whose glance said more. Only the eyes were the same, blue and brooding; Yashim had understood then why the Turks feared the blue eye.

  The table had been covered in an Anatolian carpet that must have taken years to make, so tightly was it knotted. Coffee had been served, and when the heavy curtains were closed and the servants had withdrawn, George Mavrocordato, the heavy-jowled patriarch of the clan, had invited Yashim to make his report.

  Afterward, George had slowly crossed to the fireplace, and the rest of them drifted over to sit with him in total silence that was like a form of speech. Eventually, George's ancient mother had smoothed the belly of her black silk dress and beckoned Yashim across.

  And she had told him the story of the Conquest.

  86

  ***********

  Now, stock-still in the alley, he remembered it all.

  Above all he remembered her bitterness when she told him about the Kerkoporta. The little gate.

  The siege had already lasted ninety days, when young sultan Mehmed ordered a final assault on the walls. Exhausted and weak, the few thousand Byzantines who remained to defend their city heard the roll of the kettledrums and saw the hills beyond the walls move as tens of thousands of Mehmed's troops descended to the attack. Wave after wave broke on the thinly defended walls, raised a thousand years before: the Anatolian levies, the Bashi-Bazouks from the hills of Serbia and Bulgaria, renegades and adventurers from the whole Mediterranean world. With every assault that they repulsed, the defenders weakened, and still the attack came on, with Mehmed's police standing at the rear with thongs and maces to discourage their retreat, the ladders crashing on the walls, the wild skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden thundering crash of the Hungarian's gigantic cannon.

  All the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the walls where the invading troops lay dying, as the defenders rushed to reconstitute the rubble, as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the Janissaries. They advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night, but in the hour before dawn he led them to the moat.

  "They fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more," the old lady said. "Believing the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It--it wasn't so."

  Yashim had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry-eyed, she continued: "There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that gate. I don't think two men could pass through it abreast, but there--God's will is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for sallies. A party had just returned from a sortie, and--would you believe it--the last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him."

  It was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges--a tiny gap in the whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of attention in a story that had run for a thousand years--that turned the course of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the heroes of the defense, a Genoese sea captain, not been seriously wounded by a close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them and gave a shout of despair. The Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.

  In ten minutes, the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the Kerkoporta.

  All this was four hundred years ago.

  But now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.

  The exact spot where two thousand years of Roman history reached their bloody climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and, sword in hand,
vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.

  The exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.

  In spite of old Palmuk, there was a fourth tower.

  The fourth tekke.

  Shaking his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter sunlight.

  87

  ***********

  THE flight of stone steps that led up to the inner parapet of the first wall was invisible from the alley. To reach it, Yashim groped his way down an unmarked passage between two wooden houses built against the base of the wall. Reaching the top, he turned back and followed the parapet walk to the Kerkoporta Tower.

  At parapet level there was a wooden door set in the masonry. It stood ajar, its hinges rusted, fastened to the jamb with a length of flaking iron chain that almost crumbled at Yashim's touch. He pushed. The door trembled slightly. He put his shoulder to the planks and heaved, until the hinges screamed and the door swung inward into the dark.

  The floor was Uttered with dust, fallen mortar, and dried droppings. Lifting his sandaled feet with care, Yashim advanced by the slanting sunlight into the center of the chamber and looked around. The ceiling was lost in the shadows. The walls showed signs of having been plastered once, but now revealed layers of Roman brickwork interspersed with courses of stone, while in the farthest corner of the chamber a stone staircase spiraled up from the floor below and disappeared upward.

  He crossed to the staircase and peered down. A slight breeze seemed to be coming up toward him, suggesting that the room below had air and maybe light; it carried odors of damp masonry and straw. He felt for the step and began to descend into darkness, his left hand trailing cobwebs from the rough outer wall of the spiral.

  For several steps he was in total darkness, and when he thought of the sun on the square, and the tradesmen sitting outside their shops only a few yards away, he knew that this was as lonely and silent a spot as anywhere in the whole of Istanbul.

  Another winding turn of the spiral brought a slight change in the quality of the darkness, and as Yashim went on down, and down, it bled to a gray twilight, until he stepped off the lowest tread into a vaulted room, supplied by a shuttered window on either side; only the shutters were cracked and set with glowing chips of sunlight.

  The walls were dark with greenish damp, but they were still plastered, and peering close Yashim could make out shapes like the cloudy shapes he had seen under the whitewash in the Nasrani tekke that morning. He recognized trees, pavilions, and a river. A long oak table ran down the room, and there were benches pushed up against the walls.

  He took a step forward and ran a fingertip along the tabletop. It was clean.

  Yet the chamber overhead was a mess of dust and rubbish.

  He faced the window. The chinks of light made it too bright to see, so he raised a hand to block them out and saw a door. It was locked from the outside.

  He stood with his back to the door and surveyed the room. From here he could see beyond the table.

  At the far end stood what looked like a wooden chest with a flat lid.

  Yashim crossed the room and stood beside it. The lid was at waist height. He eased his fingers under the rim and tried it gently.

  The lid lifted smoothly, and he looked inside.

  88

  ***********

  STANISLAW Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But the groan did not come.

  "Ha!"

  The events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.

  He wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a brush.

  He recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging for something better and confident that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks, who weren't supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to make a fuss.

  All the same, Palewski thought, he didn't get champagne every day, and he could have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn't been so clumsy.

  He grinned.

  Tossing his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted maneuver. But swabbing it down afterward, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short of inspiration.

  What did it matter if afterward he got a dressing down from the sultan himself? The Russian had almost certainly fared worse--it was he who laid down the challenge, after all. He broke the sultan's injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a man of honor must.

  He and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and friendly, and all because he had spilled his drink and wore a dastardly but inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant predecessors.

  The sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days that neither of them had ever known but that both of them imagined tinged with a glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that all the world was changing very fast.

  "Even this one."

  "Your edict?"

  The sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to make changes in the running of his empire. Military weakness. The growing spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European powers.

  "I believe we are taking the right steps," he said. "I am very positive about the edict. But I understand, also, that there will be enormous difficulties in persuading many people of the need for these changes. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I see opposition everywhere--even in my own home."

  Palewski was rather touched. The sultan's home, as they both knew, contained about twenty thousand other people.

  "Some will think that I am going too fast. Just a few may think that I have gone too slowly. And sometimes even I am afraid that what I am trying to do will be so misunderstood, so mangled and abused, that in the long run it will be the end of--all this." And he gestured sadly at the decorations. "But you see, Excellency, there is no other way. There is nothing else we can do."

  They had sat in silence together for some moments.

  "I believe," Palewski said slowly, "that we must not fear change. The weight of the battle shifts here and there, but the hearts of the men who fight in it are not, I suppose, any weaker for that. I also believe, and hope, that you have acted in time."

  "Inshallah. Let us hope together that the next round of changes will be the better for us--and for you."

  And he had thanked the ambassador again for listening to him, and they shook hands.

  As the sultan left to visit the Russian prince, he turned at the door, and with a wave of his hand, he said, "Forget the incident this evening. I have forgotten it already. But not our talk."

  Unbelievable. Even Stratford Canning, the Great Elchi as the Turks liked to call him, who helped prop up the Porte against the pretensions of the Russians, would have swooned with pleasure if the sultan had spoken to him so sweetly.

  Palewski--who normally took mornings one thing at a time--clasped his hands behind his head on the pillow, grinned, wriggled his toes, pulled the bell rope for tea, and decided that the first thing he would do today was pay a visit to the baths.

  And later, it being a Thursday, he would dine with Yashim.

  89

  ***********

  As the lid swung up on well-oiled hinges, Yashim took a cautious peek inside.

  The light was dim, and the interior of the chest in shadow, but even so Yashim could recognize something that was as prosaic as it w
as unexpected.

  Instead of the dead cadet he dreaded, a stack of plates.

  Beside the plates lay a tray of rather finicky little glasses, turned on their rims to keep out dust. Next to them, a metal goblet covered with what proved to be a folded strip of embroidered cloth. And a book.

  Yashim picked it up. It was the Koran.

  Otherwise the chest was empty and smelled of polish.

  Yashim smiled, a little grimly.

  They're getting the caterers in, he said to himself. For a feast.

  A Karagozi bacchanal.

  He closed the lid and made for the stairs. Halfway up he found himself swallowed in darkness and began taking the stairs two at a time, surging out of the spiral and across the chamber he had come in by, not caring that his flying feet raised a cloud of dust as he slewed over the floor. Out on the parapet he yanked the door closed, hooked the chain, and leaned back against the wall, breathing heavily. From where he stood he could look down into the branches of the elegant cypress tree.

  How is it, he asked himself, that I can be frightened by a set of crockery?

  Because, he thought, this time I've got it right. Three bodies turn up, close by three tekkes. This would be the fourth. Established on the site of the Janissaries' greatest triumph--the Conquest of Constantinople.

  And the body was yet to come.

  90

  ***********

  THE first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for breakfast was Yashim efendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.

  Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.

  "You're well, inshallah? How's the foot?"

  Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.

  "And I believe you, efendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose."

  Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head, and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome^--as she had whispered to him--by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn't slept a wink.