He picked up the two skins, each still attached to its head and tail, and rinsed them out.
He dried his hands, and peeled and chopped a few shallots. While they softened in the pan, he crushed peeled almonds and walnuts with the rolling pin, chopped them fine with the knife, and stirred them into the shallots with a handful of pine nuts. As they colored he added the currants and a handful of chopped dried apricots. He put cinnamon, allspice berries, and a pinch of cloves into his grinder and ground them over the nuts, adding a dash of kirmizi biber, or black charred chili flakes.
He scraped the flesh from the fish bones and tossed it into the pan with a pinch of sugar.
He chopped parsley and dill, split a lemon, and squeezed it over the stuffing.
It smelled good already. He took a nibble, sprinkled the mix with a pinch of salt and black pepper, then stirred it and took it off the heat.
When it was cool, he stuffed the mixture back into the mackerel skins, squeezing and patting them to restore their shape.
He laid a wire grill over the coals, scattered the fish with flour and oil from his fingers, and laid them on the wire, turning them as they spat and sizzled.
Meanwhile, he sharpened his knife on a stone.
When the mackerel skin was bubbling and lightly browned, he took the fish from the heat and sliced them thickly on the board. Very carefully, he slid the fish onto a plate.
23
In the palace Elif bowed her head and gently touched the strings of her violin, straining to hear their tiny hum. Her face was rapt; it was also very beautiful. All the orchestra girls were beautiful-it went without saying, for they played, and lived, for the pleasure and delight of God’s felicity on earth, Sultan Abdulmecid.
They were dressed almost jauntily a la Franca, their shining hair drawn back and pinned beneath exquisite bejeweled shakos, in green tunics and black trousers. They carried European instruments to match their costume, as was the fashion, though at a word they could have reassembled with traditional tanburs, ouds, and neys, for each of the girls was an adept in either form.
Elif glanced up to where Melda was tuning her mandolin, her ear cocked to the belly of the instrument.
The two girls exchanged smiles.
Smiles were the baksheesh of the harem, of course, like frowns and enthusiasm, frostiness and barbed remarks. A smile or a stamped foot-the harem girls passed them back and forth as minor articles of trade. Behind every gesture lay the desire to be noticed. Behind the desire to be noticed lay the hope of preferment: up the ranks of the harem girls, closer and closer to the body of the man whose life, in a way, these girls were destined to curate.
But the smile that passed between Elif and Melda was a smile of sheer complicity.
Four hundred sequins in silver money, from the room they had sequestered. Two necklaces, one of onyx, one of jasper. A gilded coffeepot, three silk shawls, and a jade mouthpiece that Elif thought was more valuable than she let on.
She turned a peg a fraction and laid a finger to the string, watching the Kislar aga advance steady-paced into the great chamber. Behind him came a crocodile file of elderly women, visiting from Eski Saray-the Ceremony of the Birth was an outing they would relish. The lady Talfa, with her personal black slave, let the older women settle, then plumped down among the cushions.
The orchestra had been instructed to play only when the last guest was seated, so the musicians watched in silence as the harem cavalcade poured in. After Talfa came a stream of young girls, recently adopted into the imperial family-the whites purchased in Circassia, or in the market at Istanbul. They fluttered to the divan, or stole humbly into its shadow. Behind them came the other girls, Abdulmecid’s girls-led by two matrons of honor, barely seventeen, who had borne him children in his days as prince-who all settled in order of precedence onto the low divan.
Elif suppressed a contemptuous little smile as she saw Bezmialem come in, at the tail of the younger women. She was pale, even for a Circassian, but still beautiful at thirty-two-she could easily pass for one of the girls, they all reckoned-with her blond curls and her small, white, oval face. Right now, she seemed to be just one of the girls, coming in without proper ceremony.
Elif’s attention wandered to the Kislar aga, standing with his hands folded across his belly at the door to the private apartments of the imperial consorts. The aga was good at ceremony himself. She wondered if the young sultan would attend, and whether he would look the way she remembered; for Elif, like most women in the harem, glimpsed the padishah but rarely.
A squabble broke out among the women settling on the divan as Bezmialem sought out a place. They whispered angrily, hissing and fluttering their jeweled hands. The black eunuchs stepped forward, reminding the girls to put their jealousies away behind bland smiles and flashing eyes. The women whispered and rustled; the eunuchs piped and squeaked; Bezmialem stood twisting her thin white fingers; and a cloud of little children-those of the late sultan and those of the present sultan, mingling with perfect familiarity with the children of slaves, for they were, after all, one family-fidgeted and giggled, or looked around with interest and hauteur as they sat at the edge of the divan, jeweled slippers sliding on the rich carpet.
Elif saw the Kislar aga raise his chin and beckon to someone she had not yet noticed in the crowd: a man in a brown cloak who stood quietly at the far corner. Later, had she been asked, she could have described in minute detail all the people in the room, their jewels, their positions, their choice of colors and fabrics; but she could not have recalled Yashim. For that was his special gift, to be invisible. Elif saw him-and her eye moved back to the Kislar aga.
The aga drew himself up and bowed minutely to the orchestra. Elif laid her bow on the strings and felt the scarcely perceptible tug of rosin on the hairs.
24
The four kalfas held the cradle high. It was the cradle in which all babies of the imperial line were placed, tightly swaddled, for their first outing into the world.
For boys, it was the world of women, girls, and their neutered attendants that would move around them for seven years.
For girls born behind the lattice, raised in its fretted shadow, it was the only world they would ever know, and on their marriage they would exchange one shadow for another.
Yashim looked again at the cradle. The red tassel meant another girclass="underline" disappointment for some, but an opening for the others who shared the sultan’s bed. The tassel swung out as the kalfas moved and for an instant it seemed to Yashim that they were out of step, that the cradle was not securely held. But then a hand went up; the women checked their step and began again to walk slowly around the room. Starting from the right, as tradition demanded.
The khadin, then, was delivered of a girl. She would not be joining the ranks of the most favored consorts of Sultan Abdulmecid. That chance might fall to others, also intimate with their young sovereign. Much would depend on how quickly the mother could recover from the birth; and on how much interest she could coax from the young sultan in his daughter. She was not his first; his third, if Yashim’s memory served. But there: he was out of touch. The sultan was not the same sultan who had superintended his own beginnings in the palace service. This was not the harem he had known.
The tassel dropped back, to rest against the talisman of beaten gold, surrounded by blue glass beads that provided the newborn with protection. Still the kalfas held the cradle at the level of their shoulders. It was a heavy thing, ebony, inlaid with mother of pearl, with a slender rising prow: a tiny ship in which a frail new life embarked for a noble destiny, praise God.