“My trouble, kyrie, is that I talk too much.”
39
As Dmitri predicted, the gate opened as the distant bells of the monastery rang for vespers.
“I’ve brought my mate again,” Dmitri said, jerking his thumb.
Yashim put a finger to the brim of his hat. The doorkeeper let them through the gate and closed it after them, shooting two bolts before he walked away.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said gruffly, over his shoulder.
Dmitri picked up a watering can from beside the gate. “You can take the mattock,” he said.
Yashim swung the mattock over his shoulder and followed the gardener to the well, set back behind a hedge of prickly pears and a drooping willow tree. He laid the mattock down, and glanced over the prickly pears.
Across a courtyard, neatly paved in a geometric pattern of small stone blocks, a tilted apple tree was laden with small fruit. Just beyond it stood a fine konak, with spreading eaves and whitewashed walls.
The shutters on the ground floor were closed.
Beyond the konak was another door, which belonged to a small lodge, or guardhouse, built up against the wall.
A dozy blackbird sang in the apple tree. Otherwise the courtyard was perfectly still. A huge fig drooped its man hands from the southern wall, and from it arose the hum of drowsy bees; the cobbles below were stained and spotted by dropped fruit.
A pair of swallows worked the intervening air.
As if to dispel a dream, Yashim brushed a hand through the air above his head, and approached the konak across the dry cobbles.
40
At this hour of the day when the sun slanted almost horizontally across the landscape, you could sometimes make out dark forms behind the latticework that protected the upper windows of every Ottoman house. Men spoke of glimpses of a pretty hand, or a pair of liquid eyes, to which imagination attached the figure of a houri from Paradise. Yashim ducked under the pears and walked quickly across the courtyard to the back door.
My name is Yashim: I am a lala from the palace, he could say. We have been concerned for your safety while the pasha is away.
Nobody answered his knock. He listened. No footsteps; no whispers.
Yashim tried the shutters. They were fastened from the inside, but overhead was a balcony facing away from the church and toward the hills. With a swift glance around, he shinned up from the shutter to the balustrade.
A lattice door pierced by a thousand little openings was shut fast by an inside hook. Yashim slipped a knife from his belt and slid the blade into the jamb. It clicked against the hook and the door swung free.
He stood, breathing heavily in the doorway.
Once before he had entered a harem like this, by stealth. He’d been looking for a man hiding among the petticoats-and Fevzi Ahmet had been waiting for him downstairs.
Now it was Fevzi’s house. Fevzi’s harem.
He stepped through the doorway.
“Ladies! Ladies! I am Yashim, a lala from the palace! Come out, and do not be afraid!”
41
Fevzi Ahmet, coming into the guardroom. Pulling off a pair of gloves.
He spits.
“Nothing. A time waster.”
“Perhaps I could talk to him? I’ve been wondering-perhaps he doesn’t realize what he knows?”
Fevzi pours himself a glass of tea. “No. There’s no point, Yashim.”
“Never give up-you say that yourself, Fevzi efendi.”
The bloodshot eyes. “There’s no point. He’s already dead.”
42
There was no reply to Yashim’s call; he knew he had not expected one. He slipped off his shoes and stood at the head of the stairs, gazing at the doors that led off the upper landing and wondering where to begin. There was a faint smell of starch and roses.
The house was an old country villa built by some Greek merchant, with wide, scrubbed oak boards, walls of planked and polished cedar, and a plaster ceiling decorated a long time ago with a painted motif of flowers. Here and there the ceiling needed repair.
Gingerly he tried a door. It swung back onto what might have been an apartment for one of Fevzi’s ladies, but when Yashim stepped cautiously inside he was reminded of a linen merchant’s warehouse. Even in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, the greatest emporium on earth, with its fourteen miles of covered alleys, its workshops and restaurants and cafes and hammams, Yashim would have been surprised to find such a collection of printed cotton quilts, hammam towels and sheets. In teetering piles on the divan, spilling onto the rugs on the floor, stacked against the walls, were pantaloons, with frills, and pretty striped chemises; handkerchiefs and pattens with cotton sides; yards of muslin of a fine grade, and bolts of cloth-blue, green, a deep indigo, patterned cotton, figured silks.
Out on the landing he stopped to listen. The silence rushed in his ears.
He pushed the door to the room that overlooked the entrance.
In the corner, a narrow pallet lay rolled up on the floor. Otherwise the room looked empty. The shutters were closed in the room beyond, and Yashim stood for a while on the threshold to let his eyes adjust to the slatted shade.
Two blue eyes were staring at him across the room.
He stumbled back, shocked: it was a child. He looked again. Its eyes were fixed on him, under a cascade of light brown hair.
His heart was thumping as he crossed the room. It was only a doll, a ferenghi doll nestling in shavings packed into a cardboard box. The lid of the box lay beside it, as if someone had lifted it to take a peek; on the lid were the words A. DAUMIER-JOUETS-COSTUMES-POUPEES and beneath, in smaller type, an address in Paris.
Around the box, heaped on the lid of a trunk pushed up against the wall, lay an array of children’s toys: a mechanical monkey beating a drum, with the key on the drum; a miniature dressing case; a hoop; a collection of little wooden animals. In spite of himself he reached into the box and picked up the doll. It was stiff, dressed in the French style, with a head and hands made of painted china.
Yashim touched his nose to the light brown hair. It felt real. He did not think he had ever seen such a horrible thing. Its dreadful blue eyes bored into him expressionlessly: Yashim was not overly superstitious, but blue eyes were always a sign of bad luck… the little painted smile, the tiny cold china hands raised in perpetual supplication, the mockery of fashion. Worst of all, perhaps, the hair, grown from a real woman’s scalp. Repelled, he put it gingerly back into the box.
As he did so something inside the doll made a muffled clunk. “Mamaaa…” the doll sighed, as a little bellows inside subsided.
Yashim jumped. “By Allah!”
He picked up the doll again, and tilted it back.
“Mamaaa…” it wheezed.
He put it back with a tremor, and turned, nudging something with his foot. He bent down and picked up a wooden duck. It had a stick coming out of its back, and wheels. As you pushed the duck along its leather webs went flip-flap along the floor. Much better than that horrid doll.
He put it on the chest, then he went into the other room and unrolled the pallet bed.
It had been slept in, often enough: Yashim could see the faint impress of a man’s form where the wadding had settled. He stood staring down at it for some time.
43
“ I suppose you want me to be grateful. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Yashim, the little lala everyone loves. Even Fevzi Ahmet.”
Yashim shakes his head. “I wouldn’t expect it.”
“I know what’s wrong, don’t I?” Fevzi Ahmet inclines his head. “What makes you think too much. What makes you soft.”
He leers. Yashim does not react.