Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

Yashim bowed his head.

“They came from Erzurum, the girl and her family. I heard that she drowned there two weeks later, in the pool.”

She shuddered.

Yashim bit his lip. He knew what Preen had told him would be true.

“Fevzi Ahmet was my mentor for three years,” he said.

He saw her shrink back. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere farther off.

“Mentor? Like-a teacher?”

His own voice sounded harsh. “I worked for him years ago. I was at the palace school, Preen. You knew that. I ran away, like Kadri. My training was almost over, and I didn’t know what they had planned for me. I didn’t know what I was good for. I was afraid of being… inactive. I thought they might make me carry shawls for odalisques, or library books, you know. I was afraid of being trapped in the palace.”

“You don’t like to be trapped, do you?” She nodded. “Go on.”

“I went back a few days later. My tutor thought I had been to Eyup, to visit the tomb of the Companion of the Prophet. I don’t know why. He thought it was meritorious. That’s when Fevzi Ahmet talked to me, the first time. He’d been watching me, he said.”

Preen hoicked her shoulders, in a little shudder. “He would.”

“He offered me a job, doing something I didn’t even know people could do.” He cracked his knuckles anxiously. “He was the sultan’s tebdil khasseky- his confidential agent.”

Preen drew up her chin. “Like you.”

Yashim ducked his head and looked uncomfortable. “I try to do things differently.”

“Of course.”

“I worked for others for a few years at first, to gain experience. That was Fevzi Ahmet’s idea. To develop talents, skills, which he could use. Languages, for instance. He knew only Turkish and some Greek.”

“Limiting.”

Yashim blew out his cheeks. “I thought it sounded like a fine thing-to be the sultan’s arrow, carrying his messages and his private orders. Watching over his safety. I was young and-well, Fevzi Ahmet seemed very energetic, and very sure of himself.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“He was obviously a tough bastard-even I could tell that much. But I thought that was how it had to be. Hard, but loyal. People were afraid of him because he had the sultan’s special commission.”

“Are you sure?” Preen leaned forward. “I thought people were afraid of him because he did frightening things, Yashim.”

“Sultan Mahmut needed loyal men back then, when Fevzi Ahmet began,” Yashim said. “He needed men like that. He was trying to reestablish control. The Janissary time. You remember.”

“And you became his boy.”

Yashim nodded. Fevzi the Hunter.

“That was our understanding. I had gained experience of the outside world. Or so I thought.”

He put his hands on his knees, remembering Russia.

The bitterness of Fevzi’s debt.

“It seemed like a way into the world outside.”

“And was it?”

“We operated in different ways,” Yashim said finally. “It took me a while to understand that. I think there is always a little gap somewhere, however hard you try to fit everything together. A small space, for something like grace, or mercy.”

“Or error.”

“Or error,” Yashim nodded. “After that, when we both knew-we couldn’t trust each other anymore.”

Preen was silent. Yashim heard the coffee cup chink against the saucer as she put it down on the divan.

“He fixed it so that I could live here, like this, and for that I am grateful. But I think he did it to save his own skin, too.”

On the divan Preen was sitting with her elbows in, holding her hands palms up. Preen was a dancer and her gestures were expressive and precise. Yashim recognized her pose immediately. It was a gesture as old as Istanbul itself. The Greeks had captured it here, in light, fastened to the domes of their churches; but it was common to all the city’s faiths, and to the people of the city in the centuries to come.

The gesture of acceptance.

It lasted only a moment before Preen rolled off the divan and sprang to her feet.

“You owe him something,” she said emphatically. “Getting you away from Topkapi.”

“I don’t owe him anything, Preen.” Yashim gave a curious half-smile. “I think I saved his life.”

She paused on the tips of her toes and whirled a finger at him.

“For that, Yashim, I think he will never forgive you.”

“ You will do this, Yashim, because I order it done. I do not wish to repeat myself.”

“I can talk to them. I think they are only afraid, Fevzi efendi.”

“Give me the torch.”

“Wait, efendi. They spoke Georgian.”

But Fevzi efendi does not wait.

Later, when the fire is dying down, he seems to have forgotten all about Yashim’s protest. He slaps him on the back.

“This is how it must be done,” he says quietly. “Permanent.”

In the palace, in Bezmialem’s room, Ibou gave a small cry of disgust.

Ibou had always hated mice. Topkapi had been patrolled by a small army of cats, who came and went from the harem quarters at will, padding along ledges, creeping from rooftops and the branches of trees, invading the sanctuary night after night. They were tolerated as long as they kept quiet; only recalcitrant toms were dropped into sacks and drowned. The girls were amused by their feline affairs; some of them even put out milk.

But there were no cats at Besiktas. No cats, and now-mice.

With a moue of distaste, Ibou dropped the skirt onto the floor.

“Tulip!”

He heard the eunuch padding along the corridor.

“Aga?”

“This!” He pointed to the offending mass. “A mouse nest”-he dropped his voice to a whisper-“under a skirt that hasn’t been moved for days. It is too much.”

Tulip peered apologetically at the little brown heap. Then his long black face turned green, and he looked up wide-eyed.

“No, aga, it is not a nest. I cannot touch it! Allah preserve us!”

“What is it?” Ibou felt the eunuch’s horror invading his scalp: it made his hair crawl. “What is it, then?”

He peered more closely, then started back as if he had been stung.

“Bezmialem-where is she?”

Tulip shrank back. “Sh-she is sewing, Aga. With the other girls.”

“Keep her there, and fetch the imam.”

It was not, after all, a mouse’s nest: not unless mice made up figurines of wax and hair, studded with little children’s teeth.

On the slab, in the steam room, Yashim shuddered as the heat attacked his limbs; sweat poured from his skin.

All around him, men were being soaped and sluiced, scrubbed and pummeled by the bath attendants. He could hear the clack of sandals on the stone and the gurgle of running water in the traps. He pressed his fingers to his eyes.

For most of his adult life, Yashim had struggled to put the past behind him.

What is done is done, people said. They gelded him, but he did not die. He revived to become useful: it was another way to be a man. Day by day he lived and breathed and slept to live another day, without bitterness, without remorse. That was the lesson he had learned at the palace school: not how to wrestle, or to memorize the Koran, but how to shed his regrets, how to master his memories, so that he could hold himself together as a man.

He pressed his feet against the side of the slab.

He had made himself… quiet.

Fevzi Pasha had detected that. Fevzi Pasha had used it.

Yashim remembered one long vigil, on a warm night, when he had begun to talk to punctuate the silence. When Fevzi wanted to know a thing he was like a fishmonger filleting his fish with a narrow blade, probing and slicing, moving from one muscle to the next. Yashim had told Fevzi everything: all the memories he’d buried.