She made a face, which meant “What can I say?”
Yashim passed his hand over his brow. “And you, madame—you have just arrived in Istanbul?”
“From Samnos, only. I was cataloging some of my husband’s finds.” She laid her finger on the tip of her nose and closed her eyes. “Imam bayildi! I smell the eggplants.”
Yashim blinked in astonishment. I must tell her, he thought to himself. I must tell her now, before it’s too late.
“Not imam bayildi,” he said, raising a finger. “Hünkar beyendi.”
“Hünkar beyendi,” she repeated. “Tell me again, what does it mean?”
“It means—the sultan approved.”
“And imam bayildi? The imam fainted?”
Yashim smiled. “Yes. He was so happy.”
“Ah, yes. And when you cook—Hünkar beyendi, are you not happy, too? Or do you merely approve?” She pulled a frown, like a sultan, then undid the clasp on her cloak and jumped lightly to her feet.
Yashim laughed. “No. I am—I am happy then.”
“Forgive me,” Madame Lefèvre said. She glanced around his little kitchen. “I have interrupted your happiness.” She saw the milk jug and peered into the pan. “You are making—it’s a roux, n’est-ce pas?”
“We call it miyane.”
“If we’re quick, it will not be too late!” Madame Lefèvre swept her hair off one shoulder and seized the pan. “You stir, monsieur—and I’ll add the milk.”
Stop her, Yashim thought. Tell her what she has to know.
He took the pan and laid it back onto the coals, stabbing the ball of flour and butter and milk with a spoon. It was still warm: Madame Lefèvre was right, he needed to carry on or it would spoil. Madame Lefèvre took up the jug and carefully allowed a drop into the pan, and then another, and another. They faced each other across the handle of the pan. Madame Lefèvre looked up and her eyes were smiling.
“Look, it’s working!”
The miyane began to spread across the bottom of the pan. A little milk slipped down the outside of the jug and dripped onto the table.
“There,” he said. “Stop.”
He reached for the pepper. “We always use white pepper,” he explained, “for the beauty of the dish. It should be very pale.”
He felt awkward as he said it: he was aware of her own pale skin.
“En effet, it’s a béchamel,” she said.
“It’s a very old recipe, in this part of the world. Butter, flour.”
Madame Lefèvre looked interested. “A nomadic dish? Why not? Perhaps we learned it from you?”
“Well,” Yashim hesitated, “I think so, yes. Maybe not directly.” This was one of his pet theories—how had they got onto that so soon? “The Italians were in Pera. Perhaps they brought the idea to France.”
“Catherine de’ Medici,” Madame Lefèvre said.
“I think so!” Yashim grinned with delight. “I read it in Carême—listen!” Then he remembered. “At least—I had it before.” He went to the shelves. “Carême, here we are!” He flicked the pages. “I was just reading this: ‘The cooks of the second half of the 1700’s came to know the taste of Italian cooking that Catherine de’ Medici introduced to the French court.’ Perhaps you are right, madame.”
It was her turn to laugh. “Mon Dieu! Carême!”
“It’s lucky I still have it,” Yashim admitted. “I lost a lot of my books recently. Yesterday.”
“You were robbed?”
Yashim smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing important lost. But I’m afraid the apartment is a little bare.”
“I didn’t think such things would happen in Istanbul,” Madame Lefèvre said. “Max always tells me how safe it is.”
Max? Yashim frowned: she must mean her husband.
“Madame Lefèvre,” he said, “Istanbul is not safe. Not safe at all.” He balled his fists. “I have some terrible news.”
Her eyes widened. “What are you saying, monsieur? Not safe? But what do you mean?” Her voice rose. “Where is Max? Where is my husband?”
“He’s dead,” Yashim said.
61
WIDOW Matalya went out into the yard with the big fan she used for beating her carpets, to shepherd her chickens into their run.
“Come along, pretty one,” she crooned. She put out a leathery hand. The hen crouched close to the ground, its feathered shoulders raised. The widow took it gently in two hands, lifted it under her arm, and snapped its neck.
“You were too old anyway,” she said admonishingly.
She carried the hen through the house, picking up a basket from behind the door, and sat down on a small stool in the alley. The sun had gone, but the wall was still warm against her back. She began to pluck the hen, dropping the feathers into the basket.
“Soup’s best,” she muttered to the hen. “And this one makes a good stock. A bit of rice. Nice, after a shock.”
She turned the bird on her lap and began to snatch the underfeathers from its breast.
“Not but what I’m in shock, too,” she went on. The hen’s head dangled over her knee. “It’s a disturbance, and not at all what I expect at my age. A foreign woman, too. An unbeliever—in my house!”
She gave an angry little twitch and tore the bird’s skin.
“Now look what I’ve gone and done.” She paused and made a shape with her fingers, against the Evil Eye. “She ought to go to her own people, poor thing. No husband now, and such a way from her own mother!”
She worked over the legs, and then the wings. She wondered how many chickens she’d plucked in her life. It must be hundreds. Not that she was greedy. She fed them and they fed her, and that was the way it was.
How she’d howled when Matalya died! A full day, a real clamor. She was that upset! Not the way it took those Frankish women, perhaps. Thin blood, it might be.
Widow Matalya made a mighty effort of imagination: perhaps you needed to be around your own people to properly let go, she concluded.
And there was no denying, it was good to have a bit of soup, for when you got a shock.
62
YASHIM dabbed vaguely at the skin that had formed on the miyane. The fire was almost cold; he felt no urge to start again. He wasn’t really very hungry.
He looked around for a bit of bread or a biscuit, but of course the place was bare.
He climbed onto the sofa and sat with his knees drawn up, looking out of the window across the rooftops.
Miyane! It was what you made when a guest showed up unexpectedly: a thicker mix, of course. You turned some pasta into it and ate it cut up into chunks.
Madame Lefèvre had been, of all things, wholly unexpected.
She had struck him as beautifuclass="underline" he who walked permitted and unaffected through the sultan’s harem, among dozens of women selected from every corner of the empire for their loveliness alone. Lefèvre had not been the man he would have imagined for her; he had seemed too cagy and underhanded in his manner. Whereas his wife—but there, he hardly knew what to think.
More than her beauty had affected him, of course. She had talked to him like a friend. They had even laughed together, as if they had known each other already a long time.
She had made him laugh.
He had been too intoxicated to say what he knew had to be said. Too cowardly to break the spell.
The widow had a kind heart. She would answer for the moment, but tomorrow he would have to see Madame Lefèvre to her own people—the embassy again. He winced at the idea.
Mavrogordato. What had he learned from Mavrogordato?
Only that a Frenchman, in a European suit, could raise the kind of loan from a respectable banker that an Albanian in the same city struggled to raise from a loan shark. Two hundred francs!
Yashim stopped dragging at his hair.
Two hundred francs, as far as Yashim knew, was about six hundred piastres.