Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

Yashim found stones on the floor and began to lob them upward.

The work kept him from feeling the cold.

When he had lobbed a dozen stones into the dark, he stopped and listened. There was a new sound, of gurgling water. He stepped forward and touched the wall. He couldn’t feel anything. He put his lips to the wall and felt the water trickling down.

It was cold as ice.

He went back to lobbing stones, in the dark.

It was only another way to die.

“You’re quite sure?”

“Quite sure, Dr. Millingen. Thank you.”

“At least you have some fine Turkish slippers now,” he said, smiling.

“Yes. You have been kind.” She turned to the little sunken door and knocked.

Widow Matalya answered the door. She did not know what to think, finding the Frankish woman on her doorstep, with a strange man. Dr. Millingen tipped his hat politely, and the old woman sniffed, transferring her distaste onto a solid target: hats, she thought, were very nasty things.

“Please, madame-do keep in touch.”

Amelie gave him a curious smile. “I shall have to, I suppose,” she said.

She went in. The old woman closed the door and turned with a very set expression on her face, her lips compressed.

“Monsieur Yashim-Yashim efendi-he’s upstairs?” Amelie pointed a finger.

The widow’s eyes bored into her.

“I think I’ll just go up and see,” Amelie said gaily. “Salut!”

Palewski put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look here,” he said, breathing hard. “Are we going far? A long way?”

The boy looked up and nodded.

“In that case,” the ambassador said firmly, “we’ll take a chair.”

He snapped his fingers at a couple of men squatting against a wall.

“My treat,” he said, smiling. “Just point these fellows in the right direction, there’s a good boy.”

Down on the shore they swapped the chair for a caique. The little boy pointed up the Golden Horn.

“Fener? Balat? Fener stage, boatman, please.” Perhaps Yashim had simply gone off home, he thought. But once they reached Fener, the little boy made some complicated signs and shook his head vigorously.

“All right,” Palewski said. “We’ll walk, I see. Not too far now, eh?”

He regretted taking the boy’s advice as he toiled up the hills, but they were in a shabby neighborhood that Palewski did not know, and there were no lounging chairmen here.

Finally the boy jumped up onto a low wall and sat there, kicking his heels and looking intently at a doorway across the street.

“He went in there?”

Palewski climbed the steps. There was a padlock on the door, so Palewski turned around and caught the boy’s eye. He pointed at the door. The little boy nodded.

Palewski glanced up and down the street. Apart from the little boy on the wall, it seemed perfectly empty.

Stanislaw Palewski, unlike Dr. Millingen, was not a man who placed much faith in the benefits of regular exercise. His arms were thin; his legs were long. But he was still capable of sudden, violent physical effort.

He stood back, leaned against the parapet, and doubled those long legs by bringing his knees up close to his chin.

Then with a splintering crash he brought both feet down hard on the door and burst it open.

The ambassador turned to the little boy, who was watching him with astonishment from across the street, and gave him a most unambassadorial wink.

Then he went into the icy gloom to find his friend.

Yashim was singing an old song from the Balkans, about a man who went down to the river and caught the soul of his dead lover in his nets.

He spun slowly in the darkness, sometimes kicking his legs, sometimes reaching for a better grip on the man who had become his new friend. They’d only just met, too, he thought. Dear Xani! Stinking, buoyant, and obliging. What very good luck it was they’d met, at last.

If only Xani were still warm, Yashim thought dreamily. The pit was slowly filling, deeper and deeper as the flow backed up against the cloak and stones overhead. He heard a tapping, unlike the sound of water gushing into the pit from the blocked conduit above. For some minutes he tried to imagine what it could be, before he discovered that it was the sound of his own chattering teeth.

He found that his whole body was shaking, convulsing in sudden spasms that shook his grip on the dead man and sometimes sent him spluttering and flailing beneath the surface of the ice-cold water. Sometimes he had a sense of being underwater altogether; sometimes he closed his eyes and felt a wave of great lassitude and peace wash through him, so that he wanted to let go and sink, gently and dreamily, into the depths. He had not touched the bottom of the pit in hours, it seemed. Now and again he found himself beneath the spout of water dropping from the blocked conduit.

He heard someone singing an old Turkish marching song, in a small, tired voice. He thought it must be Xani. Then he supposed it was him. Either way it no longer mattered. He could not feel his legs.

But he must have drifted off into another pit, because the spout had stopped dropping on him: he could no longer hear it splashing on the surface. He saw himself floating endlessly from pit to pit, but he was too tired to be anxious about that. Xani’s corpse began one of its gaseous rolls beneath him, and he felt himself sliding off again, back down into the deep murk, into the comfort of the cold and the dark. He’d fought it so hard before, but he could no longer remember why. He knew that this time he would let himself go.

It was then, and only slowly, that he began to sense that he was not floating anymore. He lay faceup, with a pain in his back, breathing air. His elbow stirred. It made a rough, rasping sound-the first noise that was not gaseous or liquid he had heard in hours. He turned himself over with difficulty and stretched out his hands. The movement seemed to take minutes, as if he were rolling a huge stone uphill. He could no longer feel his hands, and to make them obey him he tried hard to imagine them there, at the end of his unfolding arms, groping weakly on the bricks.

With a slowness that was immeasurable, in the dark, he began to squirm up the conduit. It was hours before he remembered that he had to keep to the right. It was the first moment of real terror he had experienced since his ordeal began. Perhaps he had already missed a turn? He might have gone a hundred yards already, he might have gone five. He could no longer judge.

He saw Xani crawling up the pipe beside him, with his guts trailing in the water.

A blaze of magnificent fireworks went off inside his head.

He heard his old friend Palewski calling his name.

He crawled for a minute, then for a year, and after a night and a day Palewski was there, but very, very small, like a mouse in his little hole.

Palewski was shouting, and then Yashim was in a litter and was jouncing, jouncing over the cobblestones, retching and trembling and wishing he could simply die.

Like happy Xani. Big and fat and soft, twirling forever and forever in a little eddy underground.

Bundled into shawls, Yashim slept for sixteen hours. He woke to find Amelie beside him, reading a book.

“What you need,” she said, “is the old lady’s soup. I’ll fetch you some.”

When she had gone, Yashim tested his limbs: his joints were sore, he had some chafing on his chin and chest, and all his muscles ached, as if he had run a long way. He sat up, feeling weary. The thought of soup made him feel sick; but strangely, when Amelie presented him with the bowl, he found that he was starving.

“There’s no bread,” she said apologetically.