A pleasant thought suddenly strikes her. They could all live on adjoining properties as Turkish families do. When Turks marry, they move into houses next to those of their parents and siblings. Their children grow up slipping through hedges that divide one garden from the next.
As she thinks of children, Sybil blushes. She pulls the veil across her face and sits heavily on the bed. Kamil’s physical presence, the memory of his lips heavy and demanding on her own, overwhelms her senses like a tidal wave. The timbre of his voice thrums in her a desire to submit that, in her capable persona, she would never reveal. Beneath the veil, within that narrow, lush chamber of solitude, she feels unfettered. Nana would say, running with sap.
29
Kamil sits on a cushioned bench under a trellis of jasmine in the garden of his mother’s house, reading Reese’s Manual of Toxicology, which he has borrowed from Michel with the excuse that it would help him with his investigations. Kamil has always taken satisfaction from knowing exactly how things work. But his reading today is in the service of a more uncertain project, his father. Opium poisoning, he reads, leaves few consistent clues in the body after death. The pupils are often contracted, but may also be dilated. Death may be sudden, or staved off altogether, depending on whether the stomach was full or empty, how many grains of opium were administered, and whether the poison was in liquid form or solid, as tincture of laudanum or crystals of morphia. But a drop of starch diluted by iodic acid will identify a residue of only one ten-thousandth of a grain of morphia by turning blue. There is nothing in the book about weaning a man from the habit of opium.
Sparks of light from the strait give the garden an air of motion and exuberance that intensifies its tranquillity. One of Kamil’s most vivid childhood memories is of the delicate, colorful crocheted butterflies edging the cotton scarf draped loosely over his mother’s hair. When she leaned over his father to serve him tea, the butterflies vibrated in the breeze and seemed to be trying to lift the scarf away from her face.
Why had his mother chosen to live here on her own? he wonders again. Her presence in the garden is strong. He can almost believe he sees her, stitching her tapestry on the bench beside the roses. Maybe he is seeing visions like Baba, he muses. He supposes his mother tired of the immense staff, the constant surveillance, the wives and families of officials and other visitors she was required to entertain at the official residence. During this time, Kamil remembers watching his parents carefully when they were together. One day, from behind a door, Kamil saw his father embrace his mother, swiftly, almost furtively, in a passageway. This embrace, though brief, relieved Kamil’s fear that his parents would part from one another, that he would lose them. At that moment he became aware of this possibility, lodged like a splinter in his heart.
After this, the family moved permanently to his mother’s house. Kamil’s father came twice a week, bringing his documents and a small retinue of assistants. He settled himself to work at a table under the short, sturdy pine tree overlooking the roses and, beyond them, the strait. Kamil’s mother refused to let the servants pour her husband’s tea, but took the empty glass herself to the samovar steaming on a nearby table. She spilled the remnants in a copper bowl, washed the glass with hot water from the spigot at the samovar’s base, emptying this water too into the bowl. Then she carefully poured two fingers of the rust-black concentrate from a small china pot atop the steaming brass urn, topping it up with hot water. Holding the glass against the light, she carefully inspected the color of the tea, adjusting it with more tea concentrate or more water until the color was just right-a brilliant brownish red that she called rabbit’s blood. She brought the glass to her husband balanced on her smooth palm and bent to place it on the table before him.
Enraptured by this peaceful memory, Kamil drowses. His grasp on the book weakens and it slips from his hand. He is awakened by the clink of glass against glass. For a brief moment, in the late afternoon shadows on the patio, he thinks he sees his mother standing by the door. Her face hidden behind a wing of cloth, she is wearing Sybil’s dress. When she moves into the slanted sunlight, he sees it is Karanfil, the cook, bringing him tea.
30
“I’m like the cook on a Black Sea grain ship. The cook is set afloat in a small dinghy attached to the ship by a long rope, so that when he cooks over a fire, he doesn’t endanger the ship with its combustible cargo.”
Violet and I were walking in the garden. Over my shoulder, the sky smoldered orange behind the hill. Our leather slippers made delicate scuffing sounds on the paving stones as we approached the pavilion. The sky over the strait had been leached to ash.
“How do they get the food from him?”
“They wait until he has put out the fire, then pull him back in. But it’s dangerous. If there’s a storm or a fire, he is lost.”
“How do you know this?”
“Hamza told me.”
Violet said nothing, but I sensed her disapproval. She never liked Hamza and spied on us when he visited until I scolded her for it.
I had not heard from Hamza since the dinner at our house in Nishantashou, even in the weeks since Amin Efendi’s attack. This weighed on me. If he had sent a message, Aunt Hüsnü might not have bothered to pass it on to me here. Nevertheless, I was hurt by his silence. He must have heard what Amin Efendi had done. The city vibrated with the news.
My feelings had not been steady since the attack. Self-pity overtook me during sleepless nights. I disowned it and wished to cut it from me like a useless limb. The bitter rage I relished, as it made the pain recede. But my anger flooded over. I snapped at Violet, and raged silently at mother, Ismail Dayi, and Hamza for not protecting me, even though I knew they could have done nothing. Most of all, I was angry at myself for having gone along with the charade of visits. But beneath the anger was a calm lucidity, a new confidence that I was closer now to understanding death. That it was really rather simple, after all.
THE GARDEN PATH wound around the base of the small hill on which perched the glass-walled pavilion. Violet wandered a few steps ahead of me, but my eyes were drawn to a motion inside. At first I reached out to alert Violet, but then withdrew my hand at the thought it might be Hamza. Her dark profile turned back toward me. Behind her, the sky was ash gray.
“Go inside,” I told her. She looked surprised, then displeased. Without a word, she swung around and marched toward the house, the tail of her head scarf swinging hard with every step.
I waited, gazing toward the water, until she had closed the door. My ears strained for Hamza’s nightingale call, but found only the commotion of common birds. The ashes in the sky bled and infected the air, now dense with dusk. An owl mourned in the forest.
I turned and climbed the path to the pavilion. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and slipped inside. No one was there. I sat heavily on a cushion. Most of the shutters were closed and the room was dark and chilly, but I no longer cared enough to rise. I heard a moan and realized it had come from my own chest.
I remember clearly the small, cool hand that settled on my arm out of the darkness. I looked around at a bright shimmer suspended in the dark, like a white veil. Startled, I said nothing.
The apparition settled beside me. Its hand moved to my cheeks and stroked them dry, first one, then the other. A small kindling.