An Evil eye
( Yashim the eunuch - 4 )
Jason Goodwin
Jason Goodwin
An Evil eye
Life is a comedy for those who think,
and a tragedy for those who feel
— HORACE WALPOLE
Istanbul, 1836
The yali is made of wood silvered by the sun, dry as tinder.
As evening falls, the timbers begin to cool. Beams settle; boards contract. Cracks ease around the window frames, whose latticed glass flames orange with the setting sun.
The pasha’s two-oared caique skims like a cormorant up the Bosphorus toward it, away from Istanbul.
He leans into the cushions, his back to the setting sun, and lets his mind rove idly across the water, over the surface of his ambitions and his desires.
He checks himself. He is not a superstitious man, but praise and pride attract the evil eye; certain thoughts are better left unframed.
Almost guiltily, he turns his head. The yali stands so beautifully at the water’s edge, looking out across the Bosphorus to the hills of Asia beyond. The evening meal has been taken, and he imagines the murmur of voices as his household prepares for sleep. He can almost hear the yali settling, its old bones composing themselves for the night, wooden joints creaking and crackling in the dusk.
He turns his head-and puts out a hand, as if it were in his power to stop what is about to happen. As if he could fit the house in his own palm, and keep it safe.
Between his outstretched fingers, the yali is ablaze.
It burns so beautifully, as if a wild spirit were dashing through the rooms. A window explodes, and against the evening sky the sparks fly up like shooting stars. Galaxies twist from the staircase; suns blaze in every room.
The pasha screams. The rowers glance back. They miss a stroke.
Over the crash of falling timber and the snapping of the flames, the pasha hears screams from the harem apartments, upstairs.
When the caique touches the marble stairs, the pasha flings himself onto shore. His mouth is open, sweat rolling down his face.
He races from one end of the burning house to the other, moaning. He feels the heat on his face. He can no longer hear the screams.
But he hears, instead, someone call his name.
“Fevzi Pasha! Pasha!”
Two arms thrust a bundle from a window. The pasha reaches up.
The roof sags, dropping a sudden flurry of flaming shingles, which spin to the ground. The pasha leaps back. The figure at the window is gone. The window is gone.
The flames are driving a firestorm: the pasha feels the wind snatch at his cloak, drawing him back toward the yali.
He cradles the bundle to his chest and stumbles away.
The gate bursts open, and a crowd of men surges in with buckets, hooks, ladders. But it is far too late. As the men run by, the pasha hears timbers break and the sky is lit up.
He does not turn back.
Summer 1839
1
Cannon boomed across the Bosphorus. White smoke, the color of mourning, billowed low over the water.
Sultan Mahmut II was dead. He had come to the throne of Osman as the turbaned ruler of a medieval empire, and had died in a frock coat and a fez. In his long reign he had given the Ottoman Empire French saddles, a constitution of sorts, modern drill and percussion rifles. He had destroyed the ferocious Janissaries, as an obstacle to progress, and he had lost Greece to the Greeks and Crimea to the Russians and Egypt to an Albanian adventurer called Mehmet Ali Pasha. He had built himself a modern palace, at Besiktas, where he maintained a harem like sultans of old.
The harem was in pandemonium.
“You are the Kislar aga, Ibou. You must help them to leave,” Yashim said quietly. “The sultan’s harem is your domain. The sultan has died, and the women must move on.”
The Kislar aga, the master of the girls, shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his smooth cheeks. “They-they do not want to go, Yashim.”
“Abdulmecid is sultan now. Any moment he may arrive here, at Besiktas, and he will bring his women.” Yashim gestured to the staircase.
The Kislar aga took a deep breath and started up the stairs. “You must come with me. We must get the women away.”
Yashim followed reluctantly as the Kislar aga bustled through the gallery, clapping his hands. “The carriages are come, ladies! To the carriages!”
Not one of the women paid him the slightest attention. They had spent years learning how to behave, how to speak, how to be beautiful, devoting their lives to the service of the sultan. Now the sultan was dead and carriages were to take them away.
They wanted to wail and scream, and to mourn.
To mourn the sultan, their youth, their hopes.
And grab what they could, while there was still time.
2
Above the gardens of the palace, in the smaller quarters reserved for the crown prince, Elif leaned at a window and watched the pigeons through the lattice. Each crump of the guns shook the heavy air and sent clouds of birds fluttering from the domes of Istanbul. From the leads of the Suleymaniye they rose high above the Golden Horn; clapping their wings from the low rotunda of Ayasofya, where the Horn bled into the waters of the Bosphorus; billowing from the domes of the Grand Bazaar, and from the single hemisphere of the Grand Mosque on Uskudar. Again and again the pigeons clattered into the sky, and then fell back.
“It will not be long, Elif.” Melda lay on the divan, twisting a lock of black hair between her hennaed fingers. “The aga will call for us very soon.”
Elif murmured a lazy assent. She had known that the old sultan had been about to die. Everyone knew. When he went, he went: a day and a night before they put him in the ground. You couldn’t wait longer; not in this heat. Dead, buried, and the cannons booming out to tell the world that Abdulmecid was sultan now.
High in the sky, something moved: the whirling speck caught Elif’s attention. She raised her chin a fraction.
She heard the distant thump of the cannon, and watched the hawk drop. She saw its talons extend, and the spurt of blood and feathers as it struck.
As the hawk sailed to the ground, clutching its prey, Elif saw the imperial caique approaching from the Golden Horn. Under its fluttering canopy sat the new ruler of the empire, Abdulmecid, sixteen years old, fresh from his investiture at Eyup, at the tomb of the Companion of the Prophet.
She turned from the window.
“Abdulmecid has been girded with the sword of Osman,” she said. She ran her hand across her stomach. “It’s time we joined him, don’t you think?”
3
Abdulmecid’s girls ran as a herd, sweeping past a black eunuch on the steps, across the polished marble floors, streaming up the wide shallow staircase to the harem.
At the top of the stairs, the girls paused.
The wailing and keening for the departed sultan had given way to tantrums and the gnashing of teeth. Doors flew open, and slammed. Women dashed in all directions. Children were running aimlessly from room to room. The black eunuchs stood about wringing their hands. Matrons bawled, while slender Circassians squealed, their blond ringlets all askew; somebody was dragging at the curtains in a little room. Bags and boxes were piled pell-mell in the hallways. A girl sat on a box, crying into a broken mirror.
Abdulmecid’s girls paused, pretending astonishment: eyebrows arched, fingers to horrified lips.
“It’s disgusting,” Elif said.
“Suyutsuz,” Melda corrected her: undignified.
Elif nodded. Undignified was better. It was a proper harem word. The harem had a language that was all its own: words and phrases that you had to learn unless you wanted to look like a novice. It went with a way of speak
ing that was softer and more sibilant than the street language of the ordinary Turks, grander, more easygoing. That harem lisp was like having soft hands: it showed your rank. The voice of a harem girl was like a caress.
But not today.
Elif stuck with Melda, who seemed to know where she was going.
4
The lady Talfa stepped out of the room, hand across her mouth, the sound of cannon and the screaming in her ears.
She saw women sweep down the corridor, hammering at the doors, dragging at each other’s clothes, and baring their teeth, like wolves.
A vase wobbled on its stand, between two windows. As the lady Talfa watched, a skirt brushed against the stand. A woman flung back her hand and caught the rim of the vase as it circled. It swung wide and went over with a smack, shivering to pieces on the wooden floor.
Slippered feet trampled over the fragments.
Two girls ran past, hand in hand, laughing. The lady Talfa saw the color in their cheeks, the sparkle in their eyes.
She stepped forward.
“Who are you? Where do you think you’re going?” she hissed.
Elif’s head whipped around. She saw a woman in the doorway. “It’s our turn now, auntie,” Elif spat. She laughed at the shock on the older woman’s face and her pretty blue eyes narrowed. The woman was jowly and pallid and she had lost her waist.
Elif cupped her hands beneath her breasts. “We’re the pretty girls.”
She saw the look of hesitation on Talfa’s face, and her glance shifted over Talfa’s shoulder. “What’s this room, Melda? What’s in here?” she said, tugging at her friend’s hand.
But the other girl drew back impatiently. “I know where to go, Elif. Don’t waste time.”
Elif shrugged. “All right, you lead.” As she sped off she half turned her head: “Better get packing, auntie!”
Talfa blinked. She had seen the carriages drawn up in the courtyard, and the women stuffing the sultan’s treasures into little bags. It was all they had, whatever they could carry off.
But they could have been allowed to leave the harem in peace, with dignity.
It was a serious blunder for which Ibou, the chief black eunuch, should be made to pay.
The lady Talfa gripped the door frame as another burst of wild laughter rang down the corridor, followed by an anguished scream.
5
Elif and Melda reached the stairs at the end of the corridor and scampered up them, giggling and breathless.
At the top they had a corridor to themselves. They chose a door and burst into a room that overlooked the Bosphorus.
A woman was shoveling the contents of a small table into a bag.
They all stared at one another. Then the woman screamed and Melda sprang at the woman and slapped her on the cheek.
“Stop that! Stop it! What are you doing with that bag?”
The woman tightened her grip on the bag. “This is mine! Get out!”
Melda made a grab for the bag. The woman yanked it back and the table went over.
“Now look!”
Elif snatched at the woman’s scarf. Melda kept her eyes on the bag. “What’s in there? What are you stealing?”
They heard running footsteps in the corridor and one of their girls put her head around the door, then withdrew it again.
The woman with the bag seemed to have trouble breathing. Her eyes bulged and her face went red. Elif gave the scarf a last savage tug and Melda went for the bag. The woman staggered and let it go. “It’s mine,” she choked.
“Drop it, auntie. If it was yours you’d have packed it by now. Go on, get out!”
They shoved the woman into the corridor. She was wringing her hands, but there were two of them and there wasn’t much she could do. Melda and Elif put their backs to the door and watched the handle rattle.
After a while they heard more people running in the corridor. The handle went still.
The two girls turned to each other and burst out laughing.
Later they looked into the bag. It was pathetic what those women tried to carry off-right down to their kohl, and half-used bottles of rosewater, and little paper talismans. The woman they’d surprised had obviously thought she could get away with the coffeepot! Even if she’d been the coffee kalfa, it didn’t belong to her. The rest of the stuff in the bag was almost certainly stolen, too. All that money-and she wasn’t even pretty.
Elif shrugged. Those women were old and their sultan was dead. She thought of the woman they’d frightened on the floor below. Perhaps they should have seized her room.
It is our turn now, she thought, as she examined the scarf. It wasn’t even torn.
But Elif had made a serious mistake.
The woman on the floor below was the lady Talfa. She was neither particularly young nor particularly pretty. But she had no plans to leave. She took no orders from the chief black eunuch.
The lady Talfa was not one of the late Sultan Mahmut’s slaves.
She was his sister.
New girls could come in. Her nephew Abdulmecid could move into his new palace chambers. But for now, and always, this harem was her home.
She stamped her foot. Where was Bezmialem? The sultan’s mother should have been here, taking control of her son’s girls. The young valide.
Talfa glared down the corridor and saw a familiar figure in a brown cloak.
“Yashim!” she cried. “Can’t you do anything? Can’t you stop all this-this noise?”
6
Yashim ordered the halberdiers to move the baggage to the carriages: the new girls were already beginning to paw at it themselves. The soldiers moved slowly, with infinite gentleness, eyes down: the women lunged and clung to their arms.
The women who served the late sultan were to leave for Eski Saray, the old Palace of Tears, for centuries a home for the harem beauties whose sultan had died. Some-the lucky ones, maybe-would marry, entering the harem of some Ottoman officer of the guard, or a pasha of the civil bureaucracy. The rest could hope for little more than to drag out their existence behind the walls of the Palace of Tears, forgotten and ignored.
Getting the luggage away made things easier: the women followed their belongings. Others-dragging their fingernails down their cheeks, or cramming their things into little sacks-felt suddenly resigned to do what Yashim suggested. They were drawn to him, just as the lady Talfa had been; they relied on him, as Ibou the chief black eunuch relied on him, instinctively. Against the bright plumage of the harem women, Yashim’s brown cloak was modest almost to invisibility. He spoke quietly, in a room that rang with shrieks and tears; his gestures were restrained. There was a stillness in Yashim that made the women pause and listen. His low voice wearied and fascinated them, as if it carried an echo of the burdens of life. It was the voice of a man, perhaps: yet Yashim was not, quite, a man himself. Yashim was a eunuch. By evening the women had taken to the carriages, and gone.
Upstairs, in her new room, Elif picked up her oud and began to play.
Farther along the corridor, a pale woman reclined on her divan, shading her eyes with the back of her hand.
Bezmialem had heard the pandemonium and locked her door. She sought only peace and seclusion.
At her moment of triumph, when her son returned to the palace as sultan, Bezmialem had a headache.
7
“Yashim efendi?”
The halberdier swung back the door of the gatehouse. Outside Yashim saw a small closed carriage, with another soldier holding the door.
“Please, efendi.”
“Where are we going?”
“We must be quick, efendi.”
Yashim climbed into the cab and the halberdier slammed the door. Yashim heard him shout something to the driver and then, with a lurch that shot him back into the buttoned leather seat, they were off. The carriage squeaked and swayed; Yashim wound his fingers around a leather strap in the dark. The windows of the cab were tightly curtained, but he could feel the drumming of the wheels on the cobbles an
d the slick lurch when they left hard ground for muddier, unpaved streets.
Yashim peeled a curtain aside and peered out. At first he could make nothing of the high, blank walls, until the carriage veered to the right, flinging him back again, and they rolled under the High Gate, which gave its name-Sublime Porte-to the Ottoman government.
The driver pulled on the reins; the cab’s pace lessened; the door was flung open and a young man in a Frankish uniform and cap saluted Yashim. As they bustled up the steps the young man’s sword clinked on the marble; then they were through the front door, scurrying down corridors where anxious faces peered at them in the candlelight, where doors opened noiselessly at their approach.
Yashim knew exactly where they were going. He’d been there before, to the private chamber of the grand vizier, the man who held the reins of the empire for his sultan’s sake.
The cadet threw open a door and ushered him in with a sweep of the hand.
8
A lamp was burning on a great mahogany desk.
“Come.”
The rumble of the vizier’s voice came from the divan, placed in an alcove at the far side of the room. Yashim half turned, in puzzlement.
“Husrev? Mehmet Husrev Pasha?”
As he approached the divan, he could make out a heavy figure sitting cross-legged in the half-light, wearing a Circassian shawl and a tasseled, brimless cap.
As the pasha gestured to the edge of the divan, his ring caught the light. It was a sign of office, but until now Yashim had seen the ring of the grand vizier on someone else’s hand.
“Changes, Yashim efendi,” the old pasha growled, as if he had read Yashim’s mind. “A time of change.”
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