“Apollo! He’s my very good friend. He was supposed to join us for the trip to Istanbul, but he didn’t show up at the train station, and we didn’t know what happened to him. I’m so glad he’s all right.” Vera brushed past Marta, heading for the door, then stopped to take off her apron and smooth her dress and hair. “Where is he?” she asked, feeling suddenly shy. What would Apollo think of her, chopping cabbage while Gabriel was building his commune?
“He’s in Father Zadian’s study.”
Vera hurried out, leaving Marta smiling after her.
55
Vahid sat in his father’s armchair and watched his mother’s hands dance in her lap over the tatting for a tablecloth that he knew she would give to one of the neighbors. She would then begin a new one. His mother sat beneath a window, a square of sunlight illuminating her head and hands as if she were an idol from some unknown tribe. He tapped his finger on the armrest. Since Rhea’s death and Yorg Pasha’s disturbing revelations about his father, he had been unable to find peace in the usual ways, despite ever more frequent and painful attempts. He must do something to calm himself, he realized, before he made a fatal mistake. His middle finger drummed on the upholstery.
“Why are you fidgeting?” his mother asked suddenly, her hands paused in midair.
“I’m not fidgeting, Mama. I’m thinking.”
“Well, think quietly.” She returned to her tatting.
Vahid rose and went down the hall to his bedroom. After locking the door, he opened the wardrobe and pulled a large box from the top shelf. It was a presentation box of the kind that held expensive pieces of china. He sat down at a table and passed his hand across the moth-eaten nap of blue velvet before opening the clasp. At the center of the frayed satin lining was a depression where a serving dish had once nestled. That dish, hand-painted with carnations picked out in gold, rested on a shelf in a glassed-in cabinet in the sitting room. It was his mother’s prized possession, a wedding gift from her mother-in-law, never used and dusted only by his mother’s hand.
Within the depression lay three fist-sized switches of different-colored hair, the curls neatly tied with a twist of ribbon. Beneath them lay a sheet of parchment, torn in half. Vahid picked out the pieces and laid them side by side on the desk. Together they formed a charcoal sketch of a mother and her baby. In the image, the woman’s hair tumbled in black waves around a delicate face, with wide-set eyes and a generous mouth that curled in the beginning of a smile. Her expression was one of utter solicitude as she looked down at the baby wrapped in a shawl in her arms.
Vahid adjusted the pieces so that the tear was less noticeable. The edges were stained with finger marks. The night he had followed his father to the bridge, Vahid had come home in tears and his mother had insisted on knowing why. When he told her his father had called him Iskender, she had marched into their bedroom and returned with the sketch. She held it under her husband’s nose and said in an angry voice, “You think I don’t know about this? This icon you pray to. She’s gone, dead.” Her voice rose. “They’re both dead, do you hear me?”
Vahid’s father reached for the drawing. “You have no right…”
At this, Vahid’s mother tore the sketch in half, threw it at her husband, shouting, “We are what you have. We are all that you have, or ever will have.”
Enraged, Vahid’s father grabbed her by the hair. He beat her with his fists and, when she collapsed to the floor, kicked her savagely in the ribs.
Vahid had watched in horrified fascination, every nerve alive with feeling. He didn’t try to help his mother, and for this he had felt enormous guilt. She had been bedridden for weeks and thereafter was plagued with pains and illnesses that often made her take to her bed. His father was absent from home after that, returning only to sleep and sometimes not even then. It made little impact when one day he did not come home at all. They learned that he had been found dead, a drunk who in the early-morning hours had plummeted from the Galata Bridge into the oily water below. He had disappeared little by little over the years, and this was simply the final vanishing.
56
The cane seat in Kamil’s winter garden was low, and Yorg Pasha needed Simon’s help to lower himself into it. Yakup brought in a tray of savories and a samovar of tea.
“This was the oasis of my youth,” the pasha said, slightly out of breath and waving his hand at the leaves of the potted palm that arched above him. “In your mother’s day, this was a terrace. We used to drink tea in these very chairs. But I like your glass house.” He looked appreciatively at the ranks of colorful orchids on gravel-filled trays. “It looks like a kaleidoscope in here. A Swiss clockmaker sent me one of those last year. Have you seen them?”
Kamil, seated opposite him, said he hadn’t. “What is it?”
Yorg Pasha explained. “Lovely, like watching women in colorful gowns dancing about a room.” His voice betrayed his enthusiasm. Kamil knew the pasha loved calibrated mechanisms of every kind. “I’ll show you the next time you come to Bebek.” Yorg Pasha folded his hands in his capacious lap. “Now, my son, let’s talk.”
Kamil told him about his meeting with Vahid and what Omar’s men had seen in the basement of Akrep. He handed him the torn paper with Russian writing. Yorg Pasha glanced at it, then handed it over his shoulder to Simon. The secretary took a magnifying glass from a small bag and began to examine it.
Kamil then told Yorg Pasha what he had learned from his meeting with Sultan Abdulhamid. “Through Vizier Köraslan, Vahid has convinced the sultan that the commune is a threat to the empire and that the Armenians are scheming with the Russians to take the Choruh Valley.”
“It’s plausible,” Yorg Pasha commented.
“But not true in this case,” Kamil asserted somewhat uncertainly.
“As far as we know.”
“The sultan wants me to go find out the true nature of the settlement. If I fail, he’ll wipe out the commune and, if Vahid has his way, the entire population of the valley.”
At that, Yorg Pasha raised his eyebrows. “He’s sending you, so that means he doesn’t entirely trust Vahid.”
“The vizier suggested it.”
Yorg Pasha looked concerned. “It might be some kind of trap.”
“I’ll be all right. The sultan is sending troops along.”
“When are you going?”
“He wants a report by the end of March.”
“It’ll be heavy going even then. Spring doesn’t arrive in the Kachkar Mountains until at least May.”
Kamil shrugged. The sultan’s deadline was not negotiable.
“That fool Gabriel should be holed up in Trabzon by now,” Yorg Pasha commented. “I hope he’s not trying to get supplies through to his commune. I told him to wait, but he’s a Russian. They’re like large stones Allah has thrown down in the road. You can’t go over them. All you can do is go around them.”
Simon handed Yorg Pasha a glass of tea.
“Have you deciphered that scrap of paper yet?” the pasha asked him.
“It’s part of a Russian travel document. There are letters, possibly of a name-e, r, a.”
“Vera. What else could it be?”
Kamil thought about the room in which the paper had been found, the room with restraints and peepholes, but said only, “If it was Vera Arti who escaped, where would she go?”
“To other Armenians, no doubt. Simon, spread the word.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of doing that, my pasha.”
“Well, let’s talk about your trip, Kamil. Who will take care of your orchids?”
Kamil assured him that his servants were well trained in the needs of his eccentric garden. “But to tell you the truth, I haven’t fully decided if I will go.” He told Yorg Pasha about Huseyin’s disappearance and the attack on Feride. “I can’t leave if she’s in danger.”