The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim nodded. He chopped a larger onion into shreds, and began to soften it in a pan with butter and garlic. He threw in a handful of pine nuts, and then a cup of rice, pushing the grains against the pan, feeling them stick and move reluctantly.

  He reached into the stockpot, tore off a piece of chicken breast, and laid it steaming on the board. He chopped it quite fine, stirred it into the rice, added currants, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and a pinch of salt, then poured in some stock. The pan hissed and steam rose into the air.

  “You like this—cooking?”

  The question surprised him. “Yes. Why not?”

  Natasha shrugged. “In Russia, it’s a job for old women.”

  Yashim let the stock liberate the rice, and settled the pan to a low simmer on the edge of the stove. “You know L’ Avare? The Molière play?”

  She smiled. “You should eat to live, not live to eat.”

  “I think the truth is somewhere between the two.”

  “In Russia we have bread, butter, and cheese. We eat a lot of soup.”

  “Soup’s good. I make soup in winter.”

  “I suppose you have many things to choose from in Istanbul.”

  Yashim chopped a clove of garlic with salt, and stirred it into a bowl of yogurt. “Try this, see if you like it.” He put a fritter on a plate, added a dollop of yogurt, and offered it to her.

  “What is it?”

  Yashim smiled, and explained.

  “Eggs. Of course, we have eggs, too,” she said hastily.

  Yashim was rolling the peppers on a board, shaking out the seeds. He lifted the lid of the rice, which was almost done, and squeezed some lemon juice over it, with a twist of pepper from the mill.

  “It’s delicious,” she said, handing him back the plate.

  “Would you like a job? It’s easy. Just spoon this rice into the peppers, like this.”

  She held one, green and waxy, between her fingers, and took a teaspoon. “Ow! It’s hot!”

  “Leave a little room at the top—the rice expands. Then, like this—put the lid on again, and lay it in the pan.”

  They stood side by side, working the rice into the peppers. When they were all done, Yashim poured some more stock over them and covered them with a plate.

  “Now they can lie quiet,” he said. “And we can go out again.”

  He led her downstairs, and out onto the street. At Kara Davut he shepherded her to the café. “I’ll show you how we drink coffee in Istanbul,” he said. “I think you should try it sweet.”

  When the coffee came, black and thick and small and strong enough almost to stand without a cup, she tried it gingerly.

  “Just sip it,” he warned her. “And then—like this.”

  He drank the coffee, set the saucer on top, flipped it, and laid it on the table.

  “Why?”

  “Because you can read your fortune in the shapes the grounds make in the cup. The bottom of the cup is the past, and the sides tell the future. What’s left on the saucer—that tells you about your home. Let me see.”

  A shadow fell across the table and a man clamped his hand over Natasha’s cup. She pulled back in alarm: he was a wild-looking fellow, with long mustaches and ill-kempt gray hair tied back with a dirty ribbon; the nails of his hand were chipped and rimmed with black.

  “I will read the cup for the Frankish lady,” he said.

  Yashim and Natasha exchanged glances. “Very well,” Yashim said. Sufi or beggar, it was polite to let him go on.

  The man squatted down by the table, and when he drew the coffee cup and saucer toward him Yashim noticed he put a coin on the cup—perhaps to encourage them to pay him afterward, perhaps to avert bad omens.

  He turned the cup over and peered into it silently. He looked so serious and intent that Natasha suppressed a smile. “What does it say?”

  “The lady has no family?”

  “She has a father.”

  “Hmm. But not here. She has come a long way by sea.”

  Yashim gave Natasha an amused glance.

  “There is something here she very much wants.” The fortune-teller shook his head slowly. “Different paths may lead to her goal, but it will not be easy for her to decide which one to take. The quickest route is not the best. It is unsafe. Dangerous. But the other route is slow and seems hard, so she will be tempted. I am afraid when she realizes, it will be too late.”

  Yashim frowned, but translated faithfully what the fortune-teller said. “How is she to recognize the path of danger?”

  “Because a man will offer it to her, but—” The man frowned, and cocked his head. “He is a man and not a man. I don’t understand it.” He leaned sideways and laid a hand on Yashim’s arm. “I see death, efendi. Death and punishment,” he added, looking at him with yellow eyes.

  “A woman’s death. I do not like this reading,” the fortune-teller said, replacing the cup. “I had not expected such a fortune.” He made a gesture with the flat of his hand, and stood up.

  Natasha looked anxious. “But what’s he saying?”

  The man had left the table.

  “He rambled, Natasha—many of these men are charlatans, beggars really. I am sorry.”

  “You think so? Why did he leave us with a coin?”

  Yashim followed her pointing finger, and there, on the table between them, was a copper asper.

  “Hey!” Yashim was half on his feet but the man was already gone.

  Natasha looked pale. “He said something, didn’t he? About my father?”

  Yashim shook some money from his purse. “Come on, we’ll get the other things we need, and then go back. I’ll show you how we make an Ottoman picnic, without the elephants.”

  At the cheesemonger’s stall they stopped for a block of salty white beyaz peynir, made of pure sheep’s milk, and a block of stringy dil peyniri.

  They crossed the street to an old man with curved mustaches, whose wife’s pickles were widely considered to be the best in the market.

  “Dil peyniri is good to eat with your fingers. It’s mild, and you pull it into strings and wrap the strings around a green pickled tomato and pop it into your mouth.”

  They hesitated over the jars of pickles, eventually choosing three of Yashim’s favorites: patlican tursusu, made of stuffed eggplant; a jar of turnips, pickled in grape juice, with a sliver of beetroot thrown in, for the prettiness of its color; and some long green chilies.

  The basket was almost full, and very heavy.

  “We used to picnic on the Black Sea,” Yashim remembered. “They made me carry a basket, and I always grumbled.”

  He smiled: he could see now that his parents had given him a little basket of his own to help him appreciate the coming feast. Of course, the real picnic was carried by porters and slaves. Hampers and hampers!

  “Let’s get pastirmi.”

  At the meat stall he bought a pound of the best from Kayseri, made from beef filet. He explained to Natasha how the meat was pressed, rubbed with çemen paste made of fenugreek, garlic, and chili, and then sun-dried.

  “Fenugreek?”

  “Smell it.”

  She did, and pulled a face. They bought a couple of horseshoe-shaped sucuk, a dried sausage made of lamb with garlic and cumin, and moved on to buy pistachios and fresh green chilies.

  “Do you like caviar?”

  “Yashim, you’re joking…”

  So he bought half a pound of Persian sturgeon’s eggs, the black kind, lightly salted in their own purse. “Try it from the other side of the Caspian,” he remarked. On their way out of the market, Yashim stopped a simit seller, and bought a dozen coils of the spiced dry bread from the tray the man carried on his head.

  “I think the valide must be coming after all,” she whispered.

  He selected a tray of baklava: “I think you’ll like this,” he said, thinking of Palewski’s joke. “The Italians love it.” They watched the man lay his selection carefully between thin wooden boards. The man’s young son bound th
e boards together with raffia ribbons, which he tied off and curled with a zip of his fingernail.

  Finally, at the apothecary, he bought four ounces of China tea, wrapped in paper.

  The basket was so heavy he engaged one of the porters who carried bales and boxes uphill on their backs, secured by a band across their foreheads. He was a stocky man with delicate hands, and he grunted with amusement when he saw Yashim’s load.

  21

  YASHIM was surprised to find Father Doherty sitting on the stairs on the half landing, reading a book.

  “Ah, Yashim efendi! I was afraid you’d never come.” His blue eyes flickered over Yashim’s shoulder and fastened on Natasha. “The boys tell me you’re having a picnic—and invited me along as spiritual adviser. I came straight on.”

  “The door wasn’t locked.”

  “Well, I saw that, of course, but I’d no wish to invade, sir.”

  “Not at all,” Yashim said. “You’re very welcome to join our picnic. Mademoiselle Borisova. Father Doherty.”

  Once the cooked dishes were packed, the sturdy hamal took the picnic baskets down the street to the Balat stage, where Yashim had to engage a second caïque for the priest. Father Doherty sat nervously erect and let out a muttered invocation whenever the delicate craft rocked too far for his taste.

  At Eyüp, at the top of the Golden Horn, they found Birgit and the Italians taking coffee at a small café and admiring the distant view of the city from an unfamiliar angle. The sun shone, the water sparkled; it was an excellent day, they all agreed, for a trip into the countryside.

  “Count Palewski will be joining us, I hope?”

  “I’m afraid he has other engagements, Miss Lund. He sends his regrets.”

  Yashim engaged another porter to carry the baskets. Coffee taken, they set off through the village and past the shrine to the Companion of the Prophet, and up into the low wooded hills that surrounded them.

  The porter proved quite incapable of giving directions; born and raised in the village, he had never left it, either.

  “He’s been to Istanbul, surely?” Giancarlo exclaimed. “Why, it’s the view from his own bedroom window!”

  The porter, it seemed, had always been happy to keep it there, too. “What do I want with all that trampin’ up and down, efendi? Too many people, beggin’ your pardon, and nowhere to sit.”

  They reached a hilltop, but there was no view through the trees.

  “This is the way!” Birgit said gaily, pointing out a path that followed the hilltops; so they followed her, and came out above a shallow valley where the woods had been cleared, and a farmhouse nestled at the foot of the slope.

  Everyone cast admiring glances at the view, attracted by the sight of a glittering pond just beyond the house. The walk had made everyone quite hot.

  “This will be perfect,” Yashim declared, and when Rafael looked dubious he pointed to the sagging roof. “There’s no one here—look.”

  The farm had been recently abandoned. The grassy slope was dotted with juniper and thin beech saplings, as the woods encroached on the cleared land, and the farmhouse itself was enlaced in wild figs and thistles that grew luxuriantly in the rich soil of the yard.

  The porter laid down the baskets, and they agreed to meet before sundown. He stumped off up the slope and disappeared into the woods.

  Giancarlo produced wine from his haversack and buried it in the pool, while Yashim unrolled a rug and set up the picnic. Father Doherty sat on the rug, and ran a handkerchief over his face. Natasha and Birgit laid their bonnets aside and wandered off to pick flowers while the boys explored the ruined house, forcing open a door and rummaging inside for bits of broken pottery and an old tin jug with no bottom, little offerings which they brought back with the excitement of savants opening an Egyptian tomb.

  Giancarlo made a fire.

  “More sticks! Fabrizio, Rafael—go and look under the trees.”

  Father Doherty watched the boys go up the hill. “Leadership,” he murmured, and winked at Yashim. “A regular platoon.”

  Natasha had found a long stick and was prodding the pool with it, chatting to Birgit. Yashim watched them together for a moment, the dark head and the blond bending together, and smiled.

  Fabrizio returned with an armful of kindling and dropped it on the ground. “Ouf!” He brushed twigs and lichen off his shirtfront. Rafael came down the hill dragging a branch; Fabrizio laughed.

  “Much too big, Rafael!”

  “We can feed it into the fire,” Rafael said.

  “Natasha’s peppers, stuffed with rice and chicken,” Yashim announced, setting the glazed dish on the rug. He laid out the salad, and dishes piled high with fresh mint, arugula, and parsley, with the bread from the Libyan baker on Kara Davut, unwrapped from its linen coverings, still warm.

  “Please, eat,” he urged, dropping a spoon into the dish of artichokes.

  There were sighs and exclamations of delight: the long walk had given them all an appetite. They drank the Italians’ cold wine and ate à l’Ottomane, with their fingers, reclining like emperors and empresses on the grass.

  “It’s like home,” Giancarlo said. “The grass, and the woods. It could be Tuscany.”

  “Really?” Birgit looked around. “It’s like your home? Perhaps, one day—”

  “Well, with the hills, too, and the figs. I don’t know—it has a Tuscan feel. Italian, I should say. It’s good to be out of the city.”

  Rafael said quietly, “I’ve always lived in Rome.”

  “And does Istanbul remind you of Rome, at all?” Yashim wondered. “They call it the second Rome, with its seven hills.”

  “Both littered with ruins,” Rafael agreed. “And domes, too, and sunken roads. A little. But Istanbul looks grandest from the water. You can’t compare the Tiber to the Bosphorus.”

  “Istanbul’s more like Palermo, anyway,” Fabrizio said.

  They waited for him to go on. He shrugged. “Blank walls. Alleyways. Palermo was Arabic, but they’re Islamic cities, aren’t they? Right on the water. Plenty of hills, and lots of steps. Up and down—and hot.”

  Yashim nodded. It was the longest speech he’d heard Fabrizio make.

  “And all of them crumbling,” Giancarlo pointed out. “Flaking stone and peeling paint. Rome is just the same.”

  “For the present,” Rafael said. “When Rome is the capital of a united Italy—”

  “Boys, boys.” Doherty rolled his eyes. “Must you always be spoiling a good view with your politics? I appeal to you, Miss Lund—and to you, too, my dear! Just look about you. For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills!” he declaimed, grabbing a tuft of grass and holding it aloft. “Deuteronomy, my friends. The good land!”

  He raised his glass. “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates,” he recited. “A land of olive oil and honey, wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it! Ay, it’s the Irish lament, to be sure.

  “When thou hast eaten and are full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.”

  “Amen,” said Birgit.

  The priest declared his intention of having a snooze. Rafael ate two pieces of baklava, and Birgit laughed at him affectionately.

  One by one, slightly flushed, the boys stripped off and splashed about in the pond, slinging mud and shouting happily in Italian. They pretended to want to throw the girls in, but Birgit only smiled and waved them away. Giancarlo reached out for Natasha, who was gathering more flowers. He grabbed her arm.

  “No!” She wheeled on him, her hand raised. “Let go!”

  “A nice swim!” He swung on her arm, teasing.

  “Let me go.”

  He began backing toward the pool, tugging Natasha along.

  She struggled. Giancarlo laughed.

  “Oh!” He sprang back, his hand to his cheek. “I—I am s
orry, mademoiselle. I didn’t mean…” He glanced around, guiltily, and Yashim quickly looked away.

  “I am sorry,” Giancarlo repeated. “Your flowers—let me pick them up.”

  “I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter.”

  Giancarlo backed away, embarrassed, and joined the boys in the pool. Natasha crouched in the grass, collecting her flowers: Yashim thought he should go and help, but just as he decided to get up, she stood and walked away toward the farmhouse, her head bent.

  He found her leaning on a wall behind the ruined farmhouse, where a spray of nettles had attracted a thousand blue butterflies. She looked around.

  “Like the colors of the tiling in the mosque,” she said. “I’ve never seen such butterflies. My father would love them.”

  “They are beautiful. Perhaps you should paint them for him?”

  “I don’t paint the way he can,” she said. “I wonder why they don’t get stung? I suppose they tread very lightly on the nettle leaves.”

  They watched the blue cloud lifting and falling.

  “I’m sorry if I behaved badly,” Natasha said at last. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. Giancarlo. I just don’t like being grabbed, like that.”

  “He won’t mind. He shouldn’t have panicked you.”

  “Panic—that’s what it is.” She smiled at him. “Shall we go back to the fire? I picked you some flowers.”

  Later, Birgit drifted down to the water wearing only her shift, and swam with her lover while the other boys picked over the remains of Yashim’s feast. She emerged unself-consciously transparent, voluptuous in wet undergarments that clung to her pale nipples and revealed the contours of her body. Yashim spotted Doherty rearranging his hat over his eyes, and poked another stick into the fire. Birgit came and sat beside them, now and then holding out the hem of her skirt to catch its warmth.

  She talked about the Danish summer, short but so warm that everyone went to the countryside if they could afford it, and swam, if they knew how. “We have picnics, too—but not so good. Herring and black bread. And you, Natasha? In Siberia?”

  “In summer it’s a bit the same—cheese and bread, with pickles. And smoked meat. Too many mosquitoes. I like the winter picnics best. Then someone digs a hole in the ice and catches fish—pike, and perch, and salmon, too. They make a good soup, and it’s hot. But we start with stroganina.”