Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

As he did so something inside the doll made a muffled clunk. “Mamaaa…” the doll sighed, as a little bellows inside subsided.

Yashim jumped. “By Allah!”

He picked up the doll again, and tilted it back.

“Mamaaa…” it wheezed.

He put it back with a tremor, and turned, nudging something with his foot. He bent down and picked up a wooden duck. It had a stick coming out of its back, and wheels. As you pushed the duck along its leather webs went flip-flap along the floor. Much better than that horrid doll.

He put it on the chest, then he went into the other room and unrolled the pallet bed.

It had been slept in, often enough: Yashim could see the faint impress of a man’s form where the wadding had settled. He stood staring down at it for some time.

“ I suppose you want me to be grateful. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Yashim, the little lala everyone loves. Even Fevzi Ahmet.”

Yashim shakes his head. “I wouldn’t expect it.”

“I know what’s wrong, don’t I?” Fevzi Ahmet inclines his head. “What makes you think too much. What makes you soft.”

He leers. Yashim does not react.

“And you can’t change, can you? I can teach craft, but there are some things that even I can never give.”

And he makes a little bow, of pure contempt.

Yashim thinks: I’m not like you. Out of all this bloody mess, this ruin of hopes, I have this small satisfaction. I know now, and forever, that I could never wish to be like you.

Downstairs a door opened into a salon paneled in polished walnut, furnished on two sides with a low divan. On one side stood a tall, narrow fireplace with a scalloped lintel of stone; on the other the paneling was fretted and carved into a series of elegant cupboards and shelved alcoves.

Yashim knelt in front of the fireplace. A little white ash, mixed with fragments of charred wood. He stirred it with a poker.

He leaned the poker against the wall and stood up, brushing the ash from his thighs.

Everything seemed laced with expectancy. New toys, still in their boxes of shavings. Bolts of cloth, awaiting a woman’s shears. Towels, slippers, quilts, and divans, unused.

Not a house that had been abandoned by its women and its children.

A house that was waiting for them, instead.

He turned his head suddenly, as if someone had entered the room. There was nobody there.

He crossed the hall. The room beyond was the mirror image of the one he had just left, but it, too, contained no paperwork.

He returned to the hall and followed it to the kitchens at the back, poking his head into the understairs cupboard. He was about to close the door when he noticed something sparkling-a bright copper nail, driven up into one of the treads. He looked more closely. There was a small piece of stained linen fixed to the nail, which was wound with colored threads. He reached out; the nail came away easily in his hand.

In the kitchen a thick mortar, like his own, was mounted in a cradle. Against a wall stood a narrow table, heaped with jars and bowls-spices, saffron, dried mint, sumac, salt. He tried the jars, stirring their contents with his finger.

He touched the ashes in the stove: they were brittle under his fingers. Damped, perhaps, by summer rain. Then in the heat, they’d dried again. They had not been warmed for many weeks.

He looked at the copper pans that hung on the wall above the stove, twelve of them-but only two were blackened on the base.

For coffee, he thought. A pan for coffee and a pan for rice.

He ran his fingers along the rough oak boards. A kitchen furnished an account, like the impress of a man on a pallet bed.

When he imagined his own kitchen, he saw the jars and the mortar, the pans and the little stove. The kitchen of a man who lived alone, like this.

He pursed his lips, and reached into the crock of rice. The rice slithered between his fingers.

At the bottom he felt something else.

He gripped the packet and drew it out carefully, spilling rice across the board.

“ Take this!” Dmitri shoved the mattock into his hands. “You never said-Shhh! Here he comes.”

Yashim swung the mattock over his shoulder again and stooped slightly, shielding his face.

“All done?”

“Well enough.”

The gatekeeper shot the bolts and drew the door open. “Leave the tools,” he said shortly.

Yashim laid the mattock against the wall.

“I don’t know you,” the gatekeeper said.

“Petros couldn’t come this evening. His wife’s sick.”

“Oh? What with?”

Dmitri shrugged, and made a gesture. “Women’s things,” he said vaguely.

The gatekeeper gave a vulgar laugh. “Only one reason a man marries, I can think of. You married?”

He peered at Yashim, who shook his head and grinned stupidly.

“Simple, is he?” The gatekeeper, who had been so taciturn and uninterested, seemed to be in a mood to talk.

“It’s past his bedtime.” Dmitri took Yashim’s arm. “We’d best be off. He doesn’t like the dark.”

The gatekeeper scratched his head, disappointed. They heard him scrape the bolts behind them.

“You were good,” Yashim said. “For a moment I thought-”

Dmitri hissed angrily: “You never said you’d go inside.”

They walked on in silence until they reached the track.

“I’m going this way.” Dmitri held out a handful of tomatoes. “If you like…?”

Yashim shook his head. He watched Dmitri walk away, until he was lost in the dusk that gathered beneath the trees. Then he turned and walked in the direction of the quay.

He didn’t hear the sound of running feet until it was too late. A man, running barefoot toward him. The man was a shadow between the trees, and the last light had begun to fade.

Yashim stopped where he was: the man approaching flung back his head to look behind. Yashim heard his panting breath, and at the last moment he swiveled to one side.

He might have got clear had he jumped from one rut in the track to the other. Instead, the runner crashed blindly into Yashim, whose legs gave way: the runner pitched forward over him, hands outstretched, and the two of them rolled on the ground.

Yashim was winded. He threw up a hand to grab the man’s wrist but his fingers closed instead on something round and hard. The runner was already somersaulting over him, and he broke free with a tug that seemed to drag Yashim’s fingers out of their sockets. Before Yashim could stagger to his feet the man was up and off, pelting down the track.

“Hey! Hey!”

Someone else was lumbering heavily up the track. Yashim held his side: the collision had bruised him, and he needed to suck the air into his lungs. His hand hurt.

“You there! Hey! Stop, thief!”

Yashim shook his head and straightened up.

“Not your thief,” he gasped. And then it struck him: the word was kleftis. The man lumbering up the track had shouted “ klepta,” which was Greek, but ancient Greek.

“What the devil-?”

The last remark was made, not in ancient Greek, but in a language Yashim, who had every language he was likely to meet on the islands, and four more, knew most imperfectly. The tone, and the voice, seemed unmistakable.

“Compston!”

The dark bulk of George Compston, second secretary at the British embassy to the Sublime Porte, coalesced at Yashim’s elbow.

“The deuce! Jer voo connais, monsieur. Ce klepta — I mean, ce voleur, monsieur — ” He panted, and wiped his brow: “My God! Yashim efendi! I mean to say!”

“Mais oui-c’est moi,” Yashim replied, half smiling in the dark. He took the Englishman’s arm and felt for his hand. “Your watch, I think.”