The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  But while he was grateful for the long hours that kept his mind sharp, still the old torment, all the worse for being fresh, had flourished in the heavy atmosphere of trade and politics, a secret agony among secrets: to be a eunuch was, for Yashim at that time, the grammar of a language he could not understand. And so he had felt himself isolated in the most cosmopolitan society in Europe.

  He had met Preen at a party that Mavrocordato threw for a pasha he wanted to impress, hiring dancers for the evening. Yashim had been sent, afterward, to pay them off, and he had found himself talking to Preen.

  Of all the traditions that bound Istanbul together, the long history of the kdfek dancers was probably the least celebrated and possibly the oldest. Some said that they were descended—in a spiritual sense—from Alexander’s dancing boys. The foundation of Constantinople would have occurred almost a thousand years after the kdfek tradition had migrated from its homelands in northern India and Afghanistan to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The kdfek were creatures of the city, and the rise of a city on the banks of the Bosphorus would have sucked them in like dust to a raging fire. What was certain was that the Greeks had entertained these dancers, selecting them from the ranks of boys who had been castrated before puberty and subjecting them to rigorous training in the stylized arts and mysteries of the kdfek dance. They danced for both men and women; under the Ottomans, it was usually for men. They performed in troupes of five or six, accompanied by a musician who plucked at a zither while they whirled and stamped and curved their wrists. Each troupe was responsible for engaging new “girls” and training them. Many of them, of course, slept with their clients, but they were adamantly not prostitutes, whom they regarded as utterly wanton—and unskilled. “Any girl can open her legs,” Preen had once reminded him. “The kdfek are dancers.”

  But it was undoubtedly true that the kdfek were not too picky about their friends. They stood on the very lowest rung of Ottoman society, above beggars but with the jugglers, actors, conjurers, and others who made up thedespised—and well-patronized—classof professionalentertainers.

  They had their snobberies—who doesn’t?—but they lived in the world and knew the way it turned.

  Yashim had at first been amused by Preen and her “girlfriends.” He liked the open way they spoke, the roguishness and candor, and in Preen he came to admire the chirpy cynicism that concealed a heart plunged in romantic dreams. Compared to the heavy secrecy and dark glances of the Phanariot aristocracy, Preen’s world was rough but full of laughter and surprises. And when at the outbreak of the rebellion on the Peloponnese ominous shadows had gathered over the Greeks in Istanbul, Preen had reacted to his proposals without a thought, either of her own danger or of the prejudice flaring in the streets. For two days, she had sheltered Mavrocordato’s mother and his sisters, while Yashim arranged the ruse that would carry them to the island of Aegina, and safety.

  Sometimes he wondered what she saw in him.

  “Come on in.” She twirled from the door and returned to her face in the mirror. “Can’t stop, sweetie. The other girls’ll be here in a moment.”

  “A wedding?” Yashim knew the form. Many times since that year of drama he’d helped Preen prepare for the weddings, the circumcision celebrations, the birthdays for which people required the presence of the kocek dancers. And Preen, in return, perhaps without quite knowing it, had prepared him for his days: those new, flat days when agonies of lust and anger gnawed at him from the inside, and all the better days that were to come.

  “Boys’ night,” she said, without looking around. “You’re lucky to find me.

  “Business is good?”

  “Never better. There. How do I look?”

  “Eye-catching.”

  She turned her head this way and that, following her reflection in the mirror.

  “Not old?”

  “Certainly not,” said Yashim quickly.

  Preen put her fingers to her cheek and gently pushed the skin up. She let it drop, and Yashim saw her look at him in the mirror. Then she smiled brightly and turned to face him.

  “Fixing a party?”

  Yashim grinned and shook his head. “Looking for information.”

  She raised a finger and wagged it at him. An enormous ring studded with cut glass winked in the light: one of the brash confections of the bazaar called “burst neighbors” for the envy they were supposed to inspire. “Darling, you know I never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?”

  “I need a quick line on the gossip.”

  “Gossip? Why on earth would you come to me?”

  They both laughed.

  “Men in uniform,” Yashim suggested.

  Preen wrinkled her nose and made a moue.

  “The New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks.”

  “I’m sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little color. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a funeral.”

  Yashim smiled. “Actually, I want to know where they do hop. Not the men so much as the officers, Preen. Boys from very good families, I’m told.”

  He left it hanging.

  Preen raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.

  “I can hear the girls now. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  22

  ***********************

  The room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a sagging rope bed, and a row of wooden hooks from which hung several large bags, bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelled fetid and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent and sweat and the oil that smoked blackly from the lamp.

  The person whose room it was moved swiftly toward the bags and fumbled at the neck of the smallest, fingers groping around inside before closing on another, smaller bag, that they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.

  A pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels that glittered back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch, a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet—a smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to a silver roundel—and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol, Z or N, zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.

  That was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn’t easy to follow the exact steps—those Franks were cunning as foxes—but Napoleon had been the author of it all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality, and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No matter, it was all lies.

  That flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching, scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of the pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water, and died like flies in the deserts of Palestine.

  But that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to be more like them. They’d seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they were dropping like flies.

  New ways. New stuff that came out of little books. People always scribbling and scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.

  Napoleon. He’d killed the French king, hadn’t he? Invaded the
Domain of Peace. Thrown sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see what was going on? And these jewels—were we to sell ourselves for baubles?

  Valuable as they are.

  It was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty—and dangerous. Perhaps an overreaction. She might have seen nothing, understood nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands that had taken the jewels.

  Ali, well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.

  A ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of the letter N.

  23

  ****************

  PREEN felt the ouzo scorch the back of her throat and then plummet like something alive into the pit of her empty stomach. She set the glass back on the low table and selected another.

  “To the sisters!”

  A round of little glasses swayed in the air, chinked, and were tossed back by five raven-haired, slightly raddled-looking girls. One of them hiccuped, then yawned and stretched like a cat.

  “Time’s up,” she said. “Beauty sleep.”

  The others cackled. It had been a good evening. The men, silent while the kdfek danced, had showed their appreciation in time-honored fashion by slipping coins beneath the seams of their costumes as they danced close. You couldn’t always tell, but the house had looked clean and the gentlemen sober. Some reunion, she never found out exactly what.

  She liked her gentlemen sober, but after a performance she didn’t mind getting a little drunk herself. They’d asked the carriage to drop them off at the top of the street that led down to the waterfront, and teetered away into the dark until they reached the door of a tavern they knew. It was Greek, of course, and full of sailors. That in itself was no bad thing, Preen thought with a ghost of a smile, for as it happened there were two of them throwing surreptitious glances at them now and then, two young, rather handsome boys she didn’t know. Only fishermen from the islands, but still…

  Two other girls decided to leave, but Preen thought she’d prefer to stay. Just her and Mina, together. Another drink, maybe.

  She was having her second when the sailors made their move. They were from Lemnos, as she’d guessed, and they had shifted a big catch at the morning market, a little tight themselves on their last night in town and with money to spend. After a few minutes, Preen noticed the man’s sunburned hand moving toward her leg. Go on! she smiled.

  But out of the corner of her eye she saw a small, slightly hunchbacked man with a pockmarked face enter the tavern. Yorg was one of the port pimps, one of the weaselly crowd who accosted newly arrived seamen and offered them cheap lodgings, a visit to their sister or, if it seemed safe, a free drink at their place. Yorg’s place, of course, was a brothel where haggard girls from the countryside turned trick after trick, night after night, until they were either let loose on the streets or bumped off and dumped into the Bosphorus. They were part of the human detritus that floated around the docks and the men who sailed from them; either way, their life expectancy was not long.

  Preen shuddered. Very gently she brushed away the hand that had just settled on her thigh, put a finger to the sailor’s lips, and slipped past him, with a flash of an elegant waist. He’d hold, she thought. Right now, she had a little job to do.

  24

  ****************

  There’s a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so close to the palace of the Caesars. So it had lingered on into the beginning of the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and scrubby trees.

  If you knew where to look, you could find men living there—and sometimes women, too—but it was unwise to poke about too diligently. Some of the denizens of this patch were more often abroad by night than by day, and at any hour an air of resigned criminality hung about the tired trees and the little caves and crannies where some of the city’s rubbish had been carefully drawn up to form a dismal kind of shelter. Huts, shacks, and bus-tees artfully constructed by a shadowy people who had somehow slipped through the net of charity—or the hangman’s noose.

  Now and again the city authorities would order a sweep-out of the hillside, but invariably most of its inhabitants would appear to have crept away, unseen. The sweeps turned up a lot of rubbish, which was burned at the foot of the ravine, sometimes a corpse, a starving feral dog or someone too far removed from the world to do more than stare, with unseeing eyes, at this emanation of men from a city they had long since lost and forgotten. The noisy men, armed with long sticks, would finally depart; the hill dwellers would silently sift back, and the creation of shelters would begin again.

  Someone was now fumbling very slowly down the ravine, moving patiently and carefully from rock to rock. There was a little moon, but a heavy rolling bank of cloud blotted it out entirely for minutes at a stretch, and in one of those dark interludes the figure stopped, waiting, listening. “All quiet?”

  The answer came in a whisper. “All quiet.”

  Two men groped past one another in the dark. The newcomer dropped feetfirst into a shallow cave, squatted on his haunches, and leaned his back against the wall.

  Minutes later the cloud parted. The moonlight showed the man all he needed to see. A little opium box, propped against the wall. A dark pile of what he knew to be the uniforms. And at the back of the cave two men, trussed and gagged. The head of one was tilted back, as if he was asleep. But the eyes of the other man were flaring like the eyes of a terrified animal.

  The newcomer glanced instinctively at the little box, grateful at least that the choice was made.

  25

  ****************

  YASHIM threw back his head as the moonlight came streaming through a break in the clouds. It seemed to him, as he stood with both hands touching its bark, that the tree was taller than he remembered: the black and twisted limbs corkscrewed upward overhead, a nest of branches so thick and so high that even the moonlight struggled to break through between them.

  The Janissaries had chosen this tree as their own. Some happy instinct had led them to adopt a living thing, in a part of the city that was stiff with monuments to human grandeur. Compared to this massive plane tree, Topkapi seemed cold and dead. To his left, Yashim could make out the black silhouette of the palace erected long ago by a vizier who thought himself to be all-powerful, before he was strangled with the silken bowstring. To the north lay Aya Sofia, the great church of the Byzantines, now a mosque. Behind him stood the Blue Mosque, built by a sultan who beggared his empire to have it done. And here was this tree, quietly growing on the ancient Hippodrome, generous with its shade in the heat of the day.

  Nobody had tried to blame it for what it had come to represent: the jeering power of the Janissary Corps. That, Yashim reflected, was never the Turkish way. The same instinct that prompted the Janissaries to adopt the tree made the people reluctant to do away with it now that the very name of the Janissaries was consigned to oblivion. People liked trees, and they disliked change: the Hippodrome itself was proof of that. A few steps away stood an obelisk with incised hieroglyphs, which a Byzantine emperor had brought from Egypt. Farther on, a massive column erected by some Roman emperor long ago. There was also the celebrated Serpent Column, a bronze statue of three green twining serpents that once stood at the Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi. The serpents’ heads were missing now, it was true: but Yashim knew that the Turks could hardly be blamed for that.

  He smiled to himself, remembering the night in the Polish residency when Palewski, drunk and whispering, had revealed to him the astounding truth. Together they had peered by candlelight into the depths of a vast and elderly armoire, w
here two of the three heads that had been a wonder of the ancient world lay on a pile of dusty linen, practically untouched since they were snapped off the column by some reveling youths in the Polish ambassador’s suite a century ago. “Too dreadful,” Palewski had murmured, shuddering at the sight of the brazen heads. “But too late now. What’s broken is better not mended.”