Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

“You must have an in with the builder,” Yashim remarked.

The man cocked his head. “I do, efendi. I do. I married his daughter.”

“And how old is she? I mean, the caique.”

They both laughed.

“Same age as my marriage, by God! Twenty-five years I’ve had them both.”

Yashim uttered a bismallah, in polite and indirect acknowledgment of the caiquejee’s good fortune.

“Please,” he added. “I’m interrupting your work.”

The caiquejee shrugged, and bent over the hull of his boat to lay off the brush. Without looking up he said:

“I know you, efendi. Forgive me, I don’t remember where-but I recognized your face.”

Another man might have been pleased, flattered even; but Yashim frowned. Perhaps it was only the man’s talk. Or perhaps as he slid into middle age, his face and bearing were settling into shape: they had become impressionant. Memorable.

“Forgive me, efendi. It’s just a hobby of mine, faces. I see ’em all the time, rowing people around. Sad or bad or having fun. Greek or Turk. Might as well take an interest. And I remember yours.”

Yashim nodded. “I understand. You’re Spyro, aren’t you? We met the day they took down the old plane tree.”

The caiquejee gave him an odd look. “Spyro.” He jabbed his thumb to his chest, then scrunched up his face and sought inspiration in the roof. “And I took you to the Balat stage.”

“The bridge has come on since then,” Yashim said.

Spyro leaned aside, and spat. “They’ll get their bridge, now.” He paused, ruminatively. “I miss the tree. Like an old face, it was.” He dipped his brush into the pot and wiped the drips carefully off around the rim. “But I’ll tell you something, efendi, about the bridge. People think we’re sorry, but it won’t be the ruin of us caiquejees, and you know why? A caiquejee built it.” He laid off the brush against the lacquered hull. “God’s truth.”

“A caiquejee?”

“The Kapudan pasha to you and me. Begging your pardon, efendi.”

“Fevzi Ahmet Pasha?”

Spyro bent his head and lifted the brush, leaning back to survey his work. “His father worked the boats. Little man. Kept the color in his hair right up to the day he died.”

“He took a wife on the Danube,” Yashim added.

“That’s right, he did.” He looked up. “You are better at this than me, efendi.”

“Go on.” It was like a melody heard across the water, fugitive and incomplete. Yashim had heard it before, but he wanted to hear it again.

“A girl from the Danube,” Spyro said. “Fevzi was her boy. Fevzi as he was, efendi.”

“That’s all right.”

“Nice-looking lad. Popular on the boats.” He paused. “After what happened, I suppose that’s what kept him together. His old father wouldn’t let him work, so he found a job with some army man. New Troop.”

Yashim almost missed it. “After-what? What happened?”

Spyro glanced apologetically at the brush in his hand. “Forgive me, efendi. I like to work fast-you need to lay off the paint quickly, or it dries and streaks the finish. It’s the only time I’m anxious in a year, when she’s out of the water, like this.”

“Please, go ahead.”

Spyro dipped the brush and added another streak to the strippeddown hull. Yashim could just see the top of his head. “There were two of them, efendi,” he muttered. “Fevzi, and the little girl. Gul, her name was. Fevzi’s little sister. Oh, she was a bright one! She and her dad, she’d make him laugh. Ride about in his caique and pretend she was the valide sultan, do this, do that. Fevzi was popular but Gul stole the whole village, believe me. Two long plaits down her back, and her only ten or so when… when…”

The top of his head disappeared.

“Ach, what a shame. Still chokes me up, efendi, after all those years. She doted on her dad, and on her big brother, too. That’s what did it. Fevzi’s practicing his strokes, you see? Every evening, when his father’s home, Fevzi takes the caique out and learns to pull. Little Gul, begging for a ride. But they wouldn’t let her go, see? She was only a little girl.”

He stood up and waved his brush. “So one evening, the lad lets her come. She wants to go up the strait-gives her orders like an empress. There’s a bit of a current above Rumeli Hisar, nasty rip. The boy knew about that, kept well out, he said, but-well. They bring the barges from Varna down, mostly timber, twenty tons, four on a line. You’ve got to steer clear of those because they can’t maneuver much. Maybe the poor lad took his eye off the water for a moment. Panicked, steered into the rip.

“I remember coming home that night, seeing the boats out on the water, all lit up. Must have been twenty, thirty, or more. Every boat in the village. They were looking for little Gul.”

“And did they find her?”

“The one that found her was her own father.” Spyro shook his head. “Terrible, it was. He jumped in and hauled her out. Kept saying she was all right, just had to get her warm. ‘She’s sleeping,’ he said. Over and over. ‘Just asleep.’” He looked at Yashim. “It broke us all up. I think it was the saddest night of my life, when the old man brought his daughter back. It took him ages to understand. He wouldn’t let go. Nobody wanted to be the one to say it.

“Fevzi Ahmet came in, white as a sheet. Wet, swollen-eyed. He’d been searching, too, hadn’t he? He looked at his little sister in his dad’s arms, and he said: ‘She’s dead.’” Spyro pinched his lips together, and shook his head. “Just straight. ‘She’s dead.’

“It was like the old man suddenly understood. He laid Gul’s body on the ground and he lifted both his arms. I don’t know what was in his head, but it was something terrible, to hear a man curse his own son. The lad just stood there and let him go on, in front of the whole village. Never said a word.”

The caiquejee shook his head. “People talk about tragedy, don’t they? Fevzi left. His mother died soon after that. They said it was a wasting disease, but it was what happened that night that killed her. Fevzi’s old man went a bit strange. I’m sorry to say it, but people avoided him. Everyone felt sorry for him, but there was something, I don’t know, just terrible about the way he’d cursed his son. And some people felt sorry for Fevzi Ahmet, too, though there were plenty of others who blamed him and said the old man had been right.”

“And you, Spyro? What did you believe?”

“I couldn’t say. The old man was out of his wits. And Fevzi had loved that little girl, so I suppose that drove him another way.” He shrugged. “But I believed in the curse, if that’s what you mean.”

Spyro dabbed at the paintwork, then dipped his brush again and wiped it carefully on the rim of the pot. “Like a fish, she is. Safe in the water, vulnerable in the open air. You know how it is, with all these sheds crammed up together. And not everyone, efendi, as careful as I like to be.” He began to paint.

“There was a fire at the yali along the way,” Yashim said. “It was the Kapudan pasha’s place, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right, efendi.” Spyro paused for a moment. Yashim wondered if he was thinking about the work Fevzi Pasha did then, before he became a naval man; the way he made people afraid. “I don’t know why he came back here. Perhaps-I don’t know, efendi. Perhaps even he couldn’t keep away, in the end. But it couldn’t be like the old times. He kept himself to himself, and the family, too.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the fire, of course. It was in the night, efendi-only the women in the house, too, and the little girl. And the old gentleman who was a lala. He used to do the shopping, so we’d seen him about. Dear old thing, my wife said.” He hunched his shoulders tight for a second. “It had got ahold, to be honest, while everyone was asleep. The noise woke us-me and the wife. We had to burst the gate down, to get in. By the time we got in, there wasn’t much left.”