He thought of the halberdiers he had just met, wearing their long hair like blinkers.
He thought of the chambers and apartments that lay beyond, as old and narrow as Istanbul itself, with their crooked turns, and sudden doorways, and tiny jewel-like chambers crafted out of odd corners and partitioned spaces. Like the city they had grown up over the centuries, rooms polished into place by the grit of expediency, rooms hollowed out of the main complex on a whim, even doorways opened up by what must have felt like the pressure of a thousand glances and a million sighs. None of it planned. And in this space, scarcely two hundred feet square, baths and bedrooms, sitting rooms and corridors, lavatories and dormitories, crooked staircases, forgotten balconies: even Yashim, who knew them, could get lost in there, or find himself looking unexpectedly from one window into a court he had thought far away. There were rooms in there no better than cells, Yashim knew.
How many people trod the labyrinth every day, unravelling the hours of their existence within the walls, treading a few well-worn paths which led from one task to the next: sleeping, eating, bathing, serving? Hundreds, certainly; perhaps thousands, mingling with the ghosts of the thousands who had gone before: the women who had lied, and died, and the eunuchs who pitter-pat-tered around them, and the gossip that rose like steam in the women’s baths, and the looks of jealousy and love and desperation he had seen himself.
His eye travelled around the courtyard. It was only about fifty-foot square, but it was the biggest open place in the harem: the only place where a woman could raise her face to the sky, feel the rain on her cheeks, see the clouds scudding across the sun. And there were—he counted them—seven doors opening into this court; seven doors; fifteen windows.
Twenty-two ways to not be alone.
Twenty-two ways in which you could be watched.
As he stood below the colonnade, staring at the rain, he heard women laugh. And immediately he said to himself: the danger is that nothing you ever do is a secret in this place.
Everything can be watched, or overheard.
A theft can be observed.
A ring can be found.
Unless—
He glanced at the open door to the valide’s suite.
But the valide wouldn’t steal her own jewels.
He heard the door behind him open, and turned round. There, puffing with the exertion and filling the doorway with his enormous bulk, stood the Kislar Agha.
He looked at Yashim with his yellow eyes.
“You’re back,” he piped, in his curiously tiny voice.
Yashim bowed.
“The sultan thinks I haven’t been working hard enough.”
“The sultan,” the black man echoed. His face was expressionless.
He waddled slowly forwards, and the door to the guard room closed behind him. He stood by a pillar and stuck out a hand, to feel the rain.
“The sultan,” he repeated softly. “I knew him when he was just a little boy. Imagine!”
He suddenly bared his teeth, and Yashim—who had never seen the kislar smile—wondered if it was a grin, or a grimace.
“I saw Selim die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that?”
As the rain continued to patter onto the courtyard, seeping through the flagstones, staining the walls, Yashim thought: he, too, feels the weight of history here.
He shook his head.
The Kislar Agha put up two fingers and pulled at his pendulous earlobe. Then he turned to look at the rain.
“Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It’s the same now, isn’t it?”
The Kislar Agha continued to stare out at the rain, tugging on his earlobe. Like a child, Yashim thought vaguely.
“They want us,” he said in a voice of contempt, “to be modern. How can I be modern? I’m a fucking eunuch.”
Yashim inclined his head. “Even eunuchs can learn how to sit in a chair. Eat with a knife and fork.”
The black eunuch flashed him a haughty look.
“I can’t. Anyway, modern people are supposed to know stuff. They all read, don’t they? Eating up the little ants on the paper with their eyes and later on spraying the whole mess back in people’s faces when they don’t expect it. What do they call it? Tanzimat— the reform era. Well, you’re all right. You know a lot.”
The Kislar Agha raised his head and looked hard at Yashim.
“It may not be now, maybe not this year or the next,” he said slowly, in his mincing little falsetto voice, “but the time will come when they’ll just turn us out into the street to die.”
He made a flapping gesture with his fingers, as if he were batting Yashim away. Then he stepped out ponderously into the courtyard, and walked slowly across to a door on the other side, in the rain.
Yashim stared after him for a few moments, then he went to the door of the valide’s suite, and knocked gently on the wood.
One of the valide’s slave-girls, who had been sitting on an embroidered cushion in the tiny hall, snipping at her toenails with a pair of scissors, looked up and smiled brightly.
“I’d like to see the valide, if I may,” said Yashim.
[ 112 ]
By the time Yashim left the palace that Friday afternoon it was almost dark, and at the market by the Kara Davut the stallholders were beginning to pack up by torch light.
For a moment Yashim wondered if he should have gone to eat lunch with Ibou, the willowy archivist, for he had had nothing to eat all day and felt almost light-headed with hunger. Almost automatically he brushed the idea aside. Regrets and second thoughts seldom occupied him for long: they were futile emotions he had trained himself to resist, for fear of opening the floodgates. He had known too many men in his condition eaten up by bitterness; too many men—and women, too—paralysed by their second thoughts, brooding over changes they were powerless to reverse.
George the Greek came swarming out from behind his stall as Yashim stood picking over the remains of a basket of salad leaves. The sight seemed to drive him into a frenzy.
“What for yous comes so late in the day, eh? Buying this old shit! Yous an old lady? Yous keeping rabbits now? I puts everything away.”
He set his hands on his hips.
“What you wants, anyways?”
Yashim tried to think. If Palewski came to dinner, as promised, he’d want something reasonably substantial. Soup, then, and manti—the manti woman would have some left, he was sure. He could make a sauce with olives and peppers from the jar. Garlic he had.
“I’ll take that,” he said, pointing out an orange pumpkin. “Some leeks, if you have them. Small is better.”
“Some very small leeks, good. Yous making balkabagi? Yous needs a couple of onions, then. Good. For stock: one carrot, onion, parsley, bay. Is twenty-five piastres.”
“Plus what I owe you from the other day.”
“I forgets the other days. This is today.”
He found Yashim a string bag for his vegetables.
The manti woman was still at work, as Yashim had hoped. He bought a pound of meat and pumpkin manti, half a pint of sour cream in the dairy next door and two rounds of borek, still warm from the oven. And then, for what felt like the first time in days, he went home.
In his room he lit the lamps, kicked off his street shoes and hung his cloak on a peg. He trimmed the wicks and opened the window a fraction of an inch to clear the accumulated air. With an oil-soaked scrap of rag and a handful of dry twigs he started a fire in the grate and scattered a few lumps of charcoal on top. Then he started to cook.
He dropped the stock vegetables into a pot, added water from the jug, and settled it on the back of the stove to reach a simmer. He slid a ripple of olive oil over the base of a heavy pan and chopped onions, most of the leeks, and some garlic cloves, putting them on to sweat. Meanwhile with a sharp knife he scalped the pumpkin, scooped out the seeds and put them aside. Careful not to break the shell he scraped out the orange flesh with a spoon and turned it with the onions. He threw in a generous pinch of allspice and cinnamon, and a spoonful of clear honey. After a few minutes he set the pan aside and dragged the stock-pot over the coals.