The Winter Thief: A Kamil Pasha Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  “Well, you might be right there, Doctor. My wife, Allah protect her, is as tough as month-old bread.” Vali grinned.

  Kamil called in an orderly to help the doctor eat, then stood in the waning light of the courtyard and thought about what to do. They’d have to stay the night. He hoped the patients would be well enough to move back to the city tomorrow. Omar hadn’t arrived, so he had only Yakup and his boatman, Bedri, for security. That would have to be enough; he trusted no one else. He himself would stand guard over Elif and Feride.

  52

  THE NEW DAY DAWNED bright as a baby’s eye, with a cloudless pale blue sky and the promise of warmth. A week had passed in which Vera alternated between a kind of blank-eyed existence helping Father Zadian’s housekeeper, Marta, in the kitchen and a searing impatience to act. In frustration, Vera had stalked into the yard, taken an ax, and swung it over her head with all her might into the block. Her hands and shoulders still ached from the blow.

  The following day, Marta asked Vera to accompany her on her weekly shopping rounds. Marta’s figure was sturdy as an amphora, her graying hair braided and pinned in a circlet at the back of her head, but her red-cheeked face and eloquent brown eyes retained a youthful eagerness. Being Christian, she didn’t veil her face. Marta hired a small boy who followed behind them with a big, cone-shaped basket on his back. In the mild air, the greengrocer had spread his wares on the sidewalk outside the door of his shop. He beamed with pleasure at Marta’s approach.

  “Just give me the best, Gosdan,” Marta told him sternly. “We’ve been doing business for twenty years, and you always try to cheat me.”

  “Marta.” Gosdan crossed his arms and puffed himself up in mock offense. “Never, never have I cheated you. I would rather cut off my right hand. Take these leeks.” He held out one of the fat green stems. “Thick as a sausage and just as tasty.”

  Marta didn’t take the proffered vegetable. “You’ve obviously never cooked anything”—she leaned in and peered at him—“and sometimes I wonder whether you even eat. You’re getting as thin as that meager excuse for a leek you’re trying to sell me.”

  Gosdan slapped his stomach with both hands. “Hard as a rock,” he announced.

  “Well, give me two okka of sweet apples,” she relented. “Sweet, mind you.”

  “Like you.” Gosdan selected the apples and put them in a bag made of folded newsprint. He filled another bag with Jerusalem artichokes. Into the boy’s basket went three cabbages, a brilliant white cauliflower, and another two okka of onions. The greengrocer carefully placed the bags on top, then added a leek and an orange from the south.

  “So you remember me and come back,” he told Marta, who smiled and thanked him. “I’ll add the rest to the parish bill. Come by again soon. You could fatten me up with one of your apple cakes,” he suggested wistfully. He held the basket while the boy slipped his arms through the leather straps and balanced the load on his back.

  Marta gave Gosdan a flirtatious smile, then lowered her eyes and stepped into the lane. Amused, Vera followed, trailed by the boy, plodding slowly under the weight of their purchases.

  “Marta,” Vera asked, “did you ever meet my husband, Gabriel?”

  “No, but I’ve heard much about him.”

  Vera noted the caution in her voice and wondered what it was about Gabriel’s mission that kept everyone silent. She stopped and swung around to face Marta. “No one will tell me anything,” she burst out. “Why is that? He’s my husband. Don’t I have a right to know what he’s doing?”

  Marta wouldn’t meet her eye but signaled to the boy to take a rest. He slid the basket from his shoulders and settled himself under a tree. Marta guided Vera into a wooded clearing beside the lane. “It’s unseasonably warm today,” she complained, wiping her face with her apron.

  Vera turned her back. She didn’t want to talk about the weather.

  “Your husband and his friends have founded a socialist community in the Choruh Valley. It’s called New Concord,” Marta told her. “Didn’t you know?”

  Vera nodded. She had heard about the New Concord Project. Gabriel had collected money for it in Geneva and had encouraged people to emigrate there, but she had no idea that was the reason they had come to Istanbul.

  Marta pulled Vera close. “Then you should know everything.” She continued in a low voice, “The authorities captured a shipment of illegal guns and the Ottoman Imperial Bank was robbed. Someone blew it up. They think Gabriel was responsible.”

  Vera’s shock was apparent on her face, and Marta tightened her grip on the girl’s shoulder.

  “There’s more. Father Zadian says the palace sees these as signs of a revolt. The sultan might send troops to wipe out New Concord.”

  “That’s terrible. Does Gabriel know this?”

  “Probably not. Listen to me. Gabriel wasn’t responsible for the explosion. Abel set it without his knowledge.”

  “What?” Vera took a step backward, tripping over a root and almost losing her balance. Sosi’s brother, Abel, she had learned, had been Gabriel’s driver before being murdered by Vahid’s men.

  Marta’s voice was taut with urgency. “Some people think that if the sultan cracks down on Armenians, it will get Britain and Russia involved on our side. Your husband’s commune is expendable. They’re outsiders. Whatever happens, the socialists will be blamed for it.”

  “What people? What are you saying?” Vera shouted. “How could anyone want that?” A woman passed by in the lane, pulling a child by the hand. She peered at them curiously.

  Marta looked after the woman with an anxious face. “I shouldn’t have told you.” She grasped Vera by the shoulders and shook her. “You mustn’t tell anyone that I told you.”

  “Who is doing this? Who?”

  Marta released Vera and walked away, shaking her head. The porter watched them from the lane.

  Vera ran after her. “Is it Father Zadian?”

  Marta made sure the boy was out of earshot. “People think we won’t get an Armenian state without outside help,” she answered in a low, hoarse voice. “But they’re terrible, terrible fools.”

  “How far away is the Choruh Valley?”

  “Several days by ship and then through the mountains. It’s on the Russian border. You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” Marta asked her in a concerned voice.

  “Of course I am. Someone has to warn Gabriel.”

  Marta’s face sagged. “Yes, you must go to your husband.” There was resignation and a deep sadness in her voice. “Not knowing can destroy a person. I am married still, although I haven’t seen my husband in fifteen years.”

  “But…” Vera stopped herself from saying that he must be dead.

  “He might have been killed in the war, but he might also be in captivity. I dare not be fully alive until I know he is dead. Can you understand that?”

  “You must love him very much.”

  Marta cocked her head and smiled quizzically. “That wasn’t our way. I barely knew him until we were wed, and he left for the war ten days later.”

  “So, why?”

  “Because loyalty is more important than love.”

  “Even if he’s alive, your sacrifice is meaningless if he doesn’t know about it.”

  “His relatives know. The Lord knows.”

  “But you’re unhappy,” Vera pointed out, wiping a tear from Marta’s cheek. “What about Gosdan?” she asked. “He seems like a good man. After fifteen years, no one would blink an eye if you decided your husband wasn’t coming back and wanted to marry again.”

  Marta blushed. “You don’t know this community.”

  “There are worse things than some neighbors’ unkind words,” Vera told her. “Fifteen years is more than should be asked of anybody.”

  Marta looked up at the light filtering through the trees. Their dry leaves rattled in the breeze that had sprung up. “There’s a lodos coming. I can feel it.”

  “What’s a lodos?”

  �
��When it gets suddenly hot like this in the winter, it means a wind will blow in from the southwest. It brings wind demons that dance on the water, kicking up their heels. They drill aches into people’s heads and sit on their lungs. They can even make your eyes bleed. That’s the lodos. We’d better get home. We still have to stop at the butcher.”

  By the time they got back to the road, the wind had picked up, a strange, airless breeze that felt suffocating. The boy was asleep under the tree, his legs sprawled in the wild sage.

  AFTER THEY had walked along the lane for a while in silence, Marta said, “Your husband is a brave man. I don’t know anything about socialism, but he’s working for our people, and I respect him for that. Armenians have problems here, discrimination, unfair taxes. Sometimes the Muslims turn on us. We hear about it,” she whispered. “Who can know why? Perhaps someone wanted his Armenian neighbor’s land. It won’t happen here. We get on well with our neighbors. But I sense a difference in the air, as if a lodos were coming. Sometimes your breath gets stuck in your throat.” She looked around. The boy, with his heavy load, had fallen behind.

  Just then a gust of wind sent the boy and his basket sprawling. Onions, apples, and cabbages rolled in every direction. The women ran over and helped him up. They gathered the produce and mounted the basket again gently on the boy’s back. Vera hadn’t realized how heavy it was until she held it while the boy inserted his arms into the shoulder straps. This too should end, she thought with a pang of pity for the skinny lad. They hurried, one on either side of him, back to the rectory.

  53

  “HAVE SOME MORE, my dear.” Feride reached across the table and dabbed a spoonful of cream on Elif’s plate.

  “Stop fussing over me as if I were an invalid.”

  Feride raised herself to her full, not very considerable height and feigned offense. “Well, you were an invalid.” Elif had been in bed since their return from Üsküdar, sleeping or staring silently at the ceiling.

  Elif tried to smile but winced instead, and Feride felt sorry for having brought it up. Elif had been away from her body, for lack of any other description, for two days, and then this morning, when Feride came down to breakfast, she had found Elif sitting at the table.

  Feride sent a message to Kamil to tell him. The day before she and Kamil had attended Nissim’s funeral at the Ahrida Synagogue. Surprised at the large crowd of mourners, they learned that Nissim had been a famous wrestler and respected for his wisdom. Feride sat with the women in the balcony and watched Nissim’s wife shudder with grief. Her friends held her, while others cared for her children. Nissim’s three girls sat frozen in place, unsure how to cry for something so big.

  WHEN KAMIL arrived at Feride’s, he found Elif in her suite, staring at a blank sheet of drawing paper. When she saw him, the pencil dropped from her hand. They moved together and stood entwined, Elif almost disappearing within Kamil’s embrace.

  “Stay with me,” she said, and slipped her delicate fingers between the buttons of his jacket. She pulled at the woolen cloth, forcing Kamil to bend over, then pressed her lips against his.

  Her abrupt embrace startled him. Kamil stepped back so he could look at her face. The strange light burning in her eyes made him uneasy. He caught hold of her hands, which had renewed their onslaught on the buttons of his jacket. “Elif,” he said softly, “come and sit with me.”

  “No,” she wailed, pulling her hands free. “No.” She pounded his chest with her fists, her knees buckling.

  Kamil caught her up in his arms and carried her to the bed in the adjoining room. She weighed little more than a child, sobbing in his arms. He threw back the covers, laid her gently down, and covered her. He sat holding her hand until she quieted, then walked to the door of her suite and flung it open. As he suspected, a group of servants had gathered there, alerted by Elif’s cries. They stepped back, on their faces curiosity and disapproval mingled with shame at being caught eavesdropping. Kamil didn’t care. “Where’s Feride?” he demanded. “Fetch the doctor.”

  54

  “VERA,” MARTA CALLED as she came into the kitchen, where Vera was chopping cabbage.

  “What is it?” Vera asked, suddenly anxious. Was there news about Gabriel or Sosi?

  “Do you know someone named Apollo Grigorian? An Armenian Russian who claims to be from Geneva. He’s been walking around the Armenian quarter, asking after Gabriel, so they sent him here to Father Zadian. He claims to know you. Can you vouch for him?”

  “Apollo! He’s my very good friend. He was supposed to join us for the trip to Istanbul, but he didn’t show up at the train station, and we didn’t know what happened to him. I’m so glad he’s all right.” Vera brushed past Marta, heading for the door, then stopped to take off her apron and smooth her dress and hair. “Where is he?” she asked, feeling suddenly shy. What would Apollo think of her, chopping cabbage while Gabriel was building his commune?

  “He’s in Father Zadian’s study.”

  Vera hurried out, leaving Marta smiling after her.

  55

  VAHID SAT IN HIS FATHER’S armchair and watched his mother’s hands dance in her lap over the tatting for a tablecloth that he knew she would give to one of the neighbors. She would then begin a new one. His mother sat beneath a window, a square of sunlight illuminating her head and hands as if she were an idol from some unknown tribe. He tapped his finger on the armrest. Since Rhea’s death and Yorg Pasha’s disturbing revelations about his father, he had been unable to find peace in the usual ways, despite ever more frequent and painful attempts. He must do something to calm himself, he realized, before he made a fatal mistake. His middle finger drummed on the upholstery.

  “Why are you fidgeting?” his mother asked suddenly, her hands paused in midair.

  “I’m not fidgeting, Mama. I’m thinking.”

  “Well, think quietly.” She returned to her tatting.

  Vahid rose and went down the hall to his bedroom. After locking the door, he opened the wardrobe and pulled a large box from the top shelf. It was a presentation box of the kind that held expensive pieces of china. He sat down at a table and passed his hand across the moth-eaten nap of blue velvet before opening the clasp. At the center of the frayed satin lining was a depression where a serving dish had once nestled. That dish, hand-painted with carnations picked out in gold, rested on a shelf in a glassed-in cabinet in the sitting room. It was his mother’s prized possession, a wedding gift from her mother-in-law, never used and dusted only by his mother’s hand.

  Within the depression lay three fist-sized switches of different-colored hair, the curls neatly tied with a twist of ribbon. Beneath them lay a sheet of parchment, torn in half. Vahid picked out the pieces and laid them side by side on the desk. Together they formed a charcoal sketch of a mother and her baby. In the image, the woman’s hair tumbled in black waves around a delicate face, with wide-set eyes and a generous mouth that curled in the beginning of a smile. Her expression was one of utter solicitude as she looked down at the baby wrapped in a shawl in her arms.

  Vahid adjusted the pieces so that the tear was less noticeable. The edges were stained with finger marks. The night he had followed his father to the bridge, Vahid had come home in tears and his mother had insisted on knowing why. When he told her his father had called him Iskender, she had marched into their bedroom and returned with the sketch. She held it under her husband’s nose and said in an angry voice, “You think I don’t know about this? This icon you pray to. She’s gone, dead.” Her voice rose. “They’re both dead, do you hear me?”

  Vahid’s father reached for the drawing. “You have no right…”

  At this, Vahid’s mother tore the sketch in half, threw it at her husband, shouting, “We are what you have. We are all that you have, or ever will have.”

  Enraged, Vahid’s father grabbed her by the hair. He beat her with his fists and, when she collapsed to the floor, kicked her savagely in the ribs.

  Vahid had watched in horrified fascination, every
nerve alive with feeling. He didn’t try to help his mother, and for this he had felt enormous guilt. She had been bedridden for weeks and thereafter was plagued with pains and illnesses that often made her take to her bed. His father was absent from home after that, returning only to sleep and sometimes not even then. It made little impact when one day he did not come home at all. They learned that he had been found dead, a drunk who in the early-morning hours had plummeted from the Galata Bridge into the oily water below. He had disappeared little by little over the years, and this was simply the final vanishing.

  56

  THE CANE SEAT IN Kamil’s winter garden was low, and Yorg Pasha needed Simon’s help to lower himself into it. Yakup brought in a tray of savories and a samovar of tea.

  “This was the oasis of my youth,” the pasha said, slightly out of breath and waving his hand at the leaves of the potted palm that arched above him. “In your mother’s day, this was a terrace. We used to drink tea in these very chairs. But I like your glass house.” He looked appreciatively at the ranks of colorful orchids on gravel-filled trays. “It looks like a kaleidoscope in here. A Swiss clockmaker sent me one of those last year. Have you seen them?”

  Kamil, seated opposite him, said he hadn’t. “What is it?”

  Yorg Pasha explained. “Lovely, like watching women in colorful gowns dancing about a room.” His voice betrayed his enthusiasm. Kamil knew the pasha loved calibrated mechanisms of every kind. “I’ll show you the next time you come to Bebek.” Yorg Pasha folded his hands in his capacious lap. “Now, my son, let’s talk.”

  Kamil told him about his meeting with Vahid and what Omar’s men had seen in the basement of Akrep. He handed him the torn paper with Russian writing. Yorg Pasha glanced at it, then handed it over his shoulder to Simon. The secretary took a magnifying glass from a small bag and began to examine it.