Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

Palewski was not at home; Marta said he’d gone for a walk and invited Yashim inside to wait.

“I’ll sit out here,” Yashim said.

He wanted the light-he needed air. He had walked all the way, hoping to drive the agonizing tedium from his limbs, breath into his constricted lungs. It was no good: Amelie that afternoon had invaded him, opening the space in his mind that he always kept closed.

He sat at the top of the steps with his back to the wall, in the sun, watching the little boy playing in the yard. He was kneeling by the front wall and digging in the earth with a stick.

The little boy didn’t look up when Yashim came and squatted down beside him.

He carved the stick into the dirt again, then laid it flat and began to polish the sides of the trench he had dug, a short, shallow trench that sloped gently from one end to the other.

At the lower end the boy had dug a small hole in the ground. He laid the stick aside and began to smooth the sides of the hole.

When it was done to his satisfaction he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. Yashim gave him a smile but he did not receive it.

The little boy stood up and walked away.

Yashim stared at the figure on the ground, puzzled.

The little boy was gone a few minutes. He came back carrying a jar and a ball. The ball was made of tin and had a big dent in it. The boy placed the ball in the trench, with the dent uppermost. Very carefully he stood the jar on its base and began to tip water from the jar into the trench. The ball floated a short way, then rolled over slowly and came to rest on its dented side.

The boy sighed. He looked up at Yashim for the first time and there were tears in his eyes.

“It’s only because the ball’s got a dent in it,” Yashim said quietly.

The boy looked down, but made no effort to touch the ball.

“I can get you another one, just like it,” Yashim said.

The boy didn’t move.

“Where did you get this one? From your daddy?”

The boy looked up, and his head seemed to shrink into his shoulders. He doesn’t speak, Yashim thought: his words are soundless shapes inside his head.

Yashim stood up and held out his hand. “Show me,” he said.

Amelie lay on the divan, fiddling with a lock of her hair, her attention focused on the old book her husband had left behind in Yashim’s flat.

She read quickly, sometimes skipping whole pages, sometimes turning the book in her hands the better to read the tiny brown scrawls that decorated the lines and margins of the text. Yashim was right: hers was an expressive face, and so as she read her expression changed. She frowned and bit her lip; she smiled; and once, holding the book with one finger between the pages to mark her place, she got up and walked around the little apartment with an anxious glance at the window.

When she had finished examining the book she sat up, quite still, with her hands in her lap and a deep, faraway expression in her clear brown eyes.

The boy walked fast, without turning his head. When they struck the crowds, Yashim stumbled against a porter too tired and overburdened to complain as the boy darted through a cloud of women in charshafs ambling, ample-hipped, along the waterfront.

Yashim dodged around them instead, craning his neck to keep his eyes on the boy’s shaved head. A willowy girl with a shawl across her head and face stepped between them, and for a moment he lost sight of him. But no, there he was again, his shoulders stooped against the sea of people coming down the Horn, stubbornly making his way through without a backward glance as if he were afraid a spell would break.

Yashim wondered if the boy remembered he was following him. They crossed the bazaar quarter. In front of the Patriarchate at Fener the crowd thinned. The little boy flung himself uphill, following a maze of alleys where Fener gave way to the Jewish settlement at Balat to reach the summit. There, not half a mile from Yashim’s home, and about fifty yards shy of the hilltop on the farther side, he stopped and looked around for the first time.

Yashim caught up with him, panting from the effort.

“You move fast,” he said. “I had no idea we were going so far.”

The little boy’s eyes slid from Yashim’s face to a low, whitewashed building across the street, and back again. Yashim turned his head to look. There were no windows, only an outside staircase made of stone, with a rendered balustrade, climbing from the street to a small wooden door.

The boy heaved himself up onto a low wall and sat, kicking his legs, with his chin in his hands, looking at the door. Something easy and practiced about the movement made Yashim think he had done it many times before. Finding a place to sit, swinging his legs, watching. Waiting.

Yashim glanced back at the little door, high up in the blank wall across the street.

“It’s through there, is it?”

The taut little face didn’t move.

“Stay here, then. I’ll be back in a minute.”

The boy’s glance dropped to the ground. Stay here. Is that what Xani used to say? Were those the words his father used?

Yashim glanced about. The street was empty. He crossed to the stairs and climbed up. At the top he looked around. The boy was gone.

Beyond, over the roofs, he could see where the hillside dropped to the ancient walls of the city, those great brick-banded walls that had been built by the emperors a thousand years before, and beyond them the hills of the Belgrade Forest.

The door was bolted, the hasp secured by an iron padlock.

Yashim hesitated. He glanced back to the wall where the boy had sat, and reached into his shirt.

Long ago, in another life, Grigor the archimandrite had shown him how to pick a lock. Yashim slid the bolts and the door swung open without a sound.

The crowd absorbed her, as Amelie had known it would. She stayed close to a group of women in charshafs, holding the shawl up close to her face, her hand touching her nose, as they walked lumpily down the Golden Horn. Porters came past, bowed beneath terrific parcels, sacks of grain, chests.

In front of the Spice Bazaar she changed direction and began to make her way up the street that led from the New Mosque to the ancient Han of Rustem Pasha. The crowds were thinning now; around the han, where merchants sat cross-legged in front of their shops, she attracted the odd glance. It was hard for her to walk like a Stambouliot woman, and now she was walking on her own.

At the han she turned into the cobbled lane that ran beneath the walls of the Topkapi Palace. Glancing up, she recognized the enclosed balcony from which the sultan had always inspected marches and processions; ahead, she could make out the swooping eaves of the fountain of Ahmed III, its marble paneling chased with Koranic verses. The sight made her feel thirsty.

It took Yashim a moment to focus his senses as he stepped through the doorway. Outside he had been hot, breathless, caught in the dust and the heat of sloping alleyways where the ground balled in broken rubble beneath your feet and the sounds of the city were never far away.

But as his eyes adjusted to the faint light from overhead, his ears were tuned to a new and gentler sound, the bubbling of water and its liquid echo from the walls and roof. The sweat cooled on his skin, and he raised his arms to embrace the air. When he breathed deeply, it felt as if the air were cleansing him from the inside. He felt an urge to laugh, to step forward through the dim light and plunge himself into the glistening black pool that was spread out at his feet.

Yashim brought his arms across his chest, rubbing his hands up and down.