Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

“I’ll find out who did it, Yashim.”

“I–I don’t think I want to know.”

“Ignorance keeps you weak.” He sneers. “You don’t have a choice.”

He had told Husrev Pasha the truth. They had not parted as friends.

It was ten years since he and Fevzi Ahmet went to Russia. Fevzi Ahmet Pasha-for Sultan Mahmut had promoted him for the event, to negotiate a treaty with the tsar. Mahmut trusted him. Fevzi Ahmet took Yashim, his still and silent companion, as a matter of course. “Keep your eyes open,” he’d said.

The snow had been monstrous that winter, with ice in the Black Sea ports. He and Fevzi had traveled by sleigh, swaddled in furs like chicks in their nest. Yashim remembered the whip cracking in the icy air, the jangle of bells, hoarfrost splintered on the pines. Once a small black bird had dropped from the sky, frozen stiff. The driver had crossed himself, and Fevzi had laughed, shortly. “Omens are for Bulgars and old women.”

Yashim found the whiteness implacable. It allowed them no footholds, shattered their sense of scale. Mile after mile after mile: the same trees, the same wooden villages, rest stops in silent inns, and fresh horses that always looked the same. Fevzi was infected with a sort of snow blindness, drugged, slow, prey to fits of giddiness. In Istanbul he had made one careful step after another, always up, always pleasing. In Saint Petersburg-white river, white streets, the buildings white and interminable against a pale sky-his judgment was devoured. He blundered like a man who had lost his horizons. Yashim stood by aghast, unable to understand the change in his mentor. He remembered Fevzi sweating as he matched the Russians glass for glass in the colorless alcohol their hosts pretended to be drinking.

He remembered the girl, too.

“I heard something. I thought-I was afraid you were in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Fevzi is panting. He grins and brings his face close to Yashim’s, and Yashim can smell his breath.

He steps back, embarrassed. Fevzi catches him by the arm.

“A peasant. She is very beautiful. Come.”

Yashim sees only the suffering.

He stands, confused, and for a long moment Yashim cannot speak.

“Why?”

Fevzi’s mood changes. “What do you know? She’s mine.”

He brings up his hand and places it over Yashim’s face. “A man would understand,” he says, and pushes him back.

Among the Russians, Fevzi Ahmet expanded like a great balloon. He was grand-his gestures wider than they ought to have been, his contempt for detail exaggerated. When the Russians showed him on a map what he was about to sign away, he merely shrugged, as if to say that Batoumi, with its strategic position on the Black Sea, was a bagatelle for a sultan as powerful as his own. Fevzi Ahmet gave Batoumi away because he did not want to seem niggardly in such company; because he had compromised himself. Had it not been for Yashim he might have given away more-and the sultan’s affection would not have saved him from the silken bowstring.

They returned together, in the thaw: troika, droshky, and finally an imperial barge that knocked continuously against the broken ice. Whatever trust had existed between them, too, had broken up.

Yashim did not betray his mentor, who had given everything away. It was not the casual gift of Batoumi that broke his faith, but the proof of something he had suspected for a long time. Fevzi Ahmet employed cruelty without any end in view.

Yashim did not betray Fevzi Ahmet, because he was too proud-and too ashamed. Instead, he sought permission to leave the palace and live in the city: as he explained to the grand vizier of the day, his way was different from Fevzi Ahmet’s. He knocked his forehead on the steps of the sultan’s throne and said: “I have learned much, but I cannot be more than what I am. I can be a lala, my padishah, a guardian. I see things clearer from farther off.”

Surprisingly, the sultan had agreed. He must have made his own assessment of Fevzi’s diplomatic gifts, because he also moved Fevzi to military duties, which he carried out punctiliously, as far as Yashim heard. But Yashim never saw Fevzi again.

Yashim blinked. An attendant was standing in front of him with a jug and a sponge. He slid from the hot slab and followed the man to the sluice.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” the valide snapped; but she shifted a little uneasily on the divan.

The egg rolled across the surface of the oil.

The soothsayer drew a sharp breath. “I see… blood.”

“Your eggs are not fresh enough,” the valide sniffed.

“But it is not your blood, valide efendi,” the soothsayer replied, comfortably; then, in a rapid singsong voice, she began to recite:

“This is mine eye, the eye of fate, the eye of seeing.

See all, break our bread, show all, and the first shall be last.

Three of three is ninety-nine

And these are the names by which we ask our way.”

She passed a hand across the plate and settled back on her heels.

“Well?”

“I cannot see until it is over.” As if to prove her point, the egg yolk slipped to the edge of the plate. “Ah.” She studied the plate for a few moments. “There is change, but nothing for you to fear. Someone else arranges it. Not a woman. Nor a man?”

“A eunuch, evidemment. Everything around me is in the hands of such people.”

“You have not traveled recently, hanum?”

“ Tiens! Your question is absurd.”

“What is done and what is to come can be very close-especially when I make a reading of a long life, like yours.”

“Tchah! So I am to start traveling, am I? At my age?”

“Perhaps traveling is the wrong word. A journey, yes.”

“I think I can believe that,” the valide replied, drily. “I am very old. You shake your head?”

“I do not see death, hanum efendi. But it is not clear. I see someone close to you, who needs you.”

The valide arched her eyebrows slightly. “My grandson?”

“Perhaps. That is all I can see.”

“Pouf! It is not much. I had expected- eh bien. Nothing more.” She plucked the shawl that lay around her shoulders. “Now I am a little tired.”

She closed her eyes. A greenish vein throbbed in one of her fingers.

An hour passed. When the valide awoke, she found Tulin sitting on a cushion at the foot of the divan.

“Have I slept long?”

Tulin smiled, and put aside her embroidery. “No, valide. But perhaps you are hungry?”

The valide shook her head, and mouthed a silent “No, no.” She took a deep breath. “Tulin, get rid of that disgusting plate of egg.”

“I have already done so, hanum.”

“Ridiculous, all that prognostication. What would a chicken know about the future of a queen? If it were the other way around, I could understand.”

Tulin laughed. “Nobody ventures to tell a chicken’s fortune.”

The valide champed her teeth. “Of course not. All chickens go the same way, into the pot. Who put such a silly idea into your head?”

Ibou hoped that she, of all people, would have an answer.

He did not expect the answer she gave. He expected sympathy and advice, not fear.

She shrank back: “Did you touch it?”

“I rolled it into a handkerchief,” he said.

“I meant, did it touch your skin?”

He tried to think. He had not wanted to touch it; instinctively he had taken it up in his handkerchief, wadding the fine lawn cotton around the object so that he would not feel its ridges and bumps.

“I d-don’t think so. No, I am sure.”

She had been holding her breath; now she exhaled slowly. “And words? Did you use words?”