by Elif Shafak
It was easier than he had thought. Jahan knew that a well-fortified house had in general but one flaw: an owner’s hubris. Confident that no thief would ever breach its defences, such a place was not checked regularly. In time, even the highest wall crumbled, the sharpest spike lost its edge. Through a wooden hatch that turned out to be fortuitously loose on its hinges, he crept in and found himself in what seemed to be – or what smelled like – the pantry. As his eyes got used to the gloom, he was able to move about in slow, steady strides. Surrounded by crocks of honey and molasses, kegs of goat’s cheese and butter, strings of dried vegetables and fruit, pots of grain and nuts, he could not help but smile at what Chota might have done with such food. He remembered the night when he had sneaked into the royal observatory, his heart thumping. Everything was different back then. His master was alive and thriving; Chota was alive; and he was a man in love.
Down the corridor, ensconced in a niche, a lamp glowed faintly. Jahan took it and made his way upstairs. The room he and Davud had dined in the other day looked larger, as if it expanded after dusk. He approached the bookshelves, not knowing what he was searching for but trusting that he would recognize it once he found it. He hadn’t had a chance to inspect the scrolls, and this was what he set about doing now. Unrolling one of them, he studied it. Nothing unusual. He spent less time with the next two drawings: one of a bazaar; the other of a lazaretto. Deep from the bowels of the house came a rustle as light as the wing beat of a moth. His back stiffened. He grew still, listening. Not a sound. Only the dark and its numbing calmness.
He opened a roll of paper, recognizing his master’s handwriting.
My faithful apprentice Jahan,
I came to see you today, was not allowed. It is the second time they have blocked my way. The Grand Vizier’s orders, so I am told. I shall try to reach our Sultan and get special permission. Until then I shall send you this letter so that you know I pray for your well-being, my son, and that while you spend your days inside those walls, I have no joy outside.
Jahan gasped. He had come, after all. His master had visited him in the dungeon. He had tried to reach him and failed. Instantly another thought followed. Why had he not received this letter? What – or who – had kept the letter away from him all this time?
His hands trembled as he inspected the next scroll – the design of the Kırkcesme aqueducts. The site of their third major accident: the one that had killed eight workers, among them Salahaddin. Once again he saw his master’s handwriting, the gentle strokes of his gold-nibbed pen. Upon his penmanship, in a slightly different shade, was a second imprint. Similar to the lines he had found on the scroll of the Suleimaniye Mosque. He examined the scratch marks, all of which happened to be the spots where the injuries had occurred.
In the third design – that of Molla Celebi Mosque – Jahan caught a detail that almost choked him. Till then he had focused on the areas around the scaffolding. Yet here there were markings on the half-dome over the mihrab. A memory floated into his head. He remembered how Sancha, her face ashen, her accent lilting and her shadow long in the grass, had told him the story of her capture as they sat in that location. He recalled the men – one of them Salahaddin’s brother – prowling about while she was talking and his feeling that something about them was not quite right. At the time he and Sancha had taken them for petty thieves stealing materials from construction sites. It happened often. There was no end to the things people ran off with, mostly out of poverty, sometimes for the sheer pleasure of it.
Now he understood those men had been there to sabotage the building as part of another plot; they had been waiting for him and Sancha to leave. But since they stayed, they had unknowingly prevented them from doing what they had been ordered to do. Instead the accident had occurred on the other side of the prayer hall. Somebody had been taking notes on Master Sinan’s designs not after the incidents, in order to study where things had gone wrong, but before. In his dismay, Jahan dropped the scroll, cursing his clumsiness. He got on his knees to pick it up and was still hunched over when three pairs of feet entered the room.
Davud, wearing a nightgown, a servant on each side, stood opposite him. ‘Look what the night has brought us! Thought it was a burglar, but it’s a friend!’
Slowly, Jahan stood up. He would make no attempts at denial.
‘What were you looking at?’
‘Molla Celebi Mosque,’ Jahan said, his forehead breaking out in a sweat.
‘Not one of our best, but surely the prettiest we made,’ Davud said with a smile that quickly vanished. When he spoke again his voice sounded husky and hard. ‘I should have destroyed those drawings long ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They reminded me of our old days, our golden times. It was a mistake, I now see. Look what my softness cost me.’
Involuntarily, Jahan glanced at the men behind him, their eyes gleaming in the light of the candles they carried. A barb of fear entered his stomach as he recognized one of them: the deaf-mute who had ushered him into the Chief White Eunuch’s carriage only a few days before. It now felt like another life.
‘Why did you come back? Have I not provided you with a fast horse and a safe place?’ Davud asked.
Jahan responded tartly, ‘You did. To get me out of your way, I suppose.’
‘Be grateful. Only Sheitan lacks gratitude.’
‘What I don’t understand is why you said you wanted me to be your foreman. Why the charade?’
‘Because I did, Allah is my witness. At first I thought we could work together. You ruined everything; you were asking too many questions about the master’s will. Why don’t you ever accept things as they are?’ Davud stared past Jahan, towards the window; rain was beating against it relentlessly. ‘You were always like this,’ he muttered, sounding weary, disappointed almost. ‘Too curious for your own good.’
‘The Chief White Eunuch and you are accomplices.’
‘Accomplices,’ Davud echoed. ‘Such a harsh thing to say.’
‘What would you call it?’
Ignoring the question, Davud went on, ‘I told him it was not a good idea to take you to that house of sin. He didn’t listen. He thought he could buy you off with harlots and hashish.’ He stared at Jahan as if for solace. ‘If he had let me handle it, none of this would have happened.’
‘Master was always worried he was losing his designs. But he wasn’t. You were stealing them,’ Jahan said. ‘And the accidents … You planned them. Salahaddin’s brother. That lad worked for you. He never understood it was you who had killed his brother. How many others have you deceived? How could you?’
There was a brief silence until Davud turned towards his servants and said, ‘Go, wait outside.’
If both men were deaf and mute, which Jahan knew they were, they must have been trained to read lips, for they left immediately. It was just the two of them now. The room felt colder and darker, too, as the servants had taken their candles with them. The shy, small lamp Jahan had brought from downstairs was their only light.
‘It was you, all along,’ Jahan said, his mouth parched. ‘When we were repairing the Hagia Sophia, you talked with the locals and things got worse. What did you tell them?’
‘The truth,’ Davud said, spitting the words from his lips like a fire spitting embers. ‘Told them they were being kicked out of their houses so that the Sultan and his puppets could enjoy the sight of an infidel shrine.’ Davud paused, as if washed by memories. ‘You and Nikola were so gullible. I bribed those children. Told them they should drag you two into their shed, show you their sick father, the kittens … I knew you would be touched.’
‘You knew we would be angry at the master,’ Jahan said. ‘You betrayed him.’
Davud gave a look that was nigh on painful. ‘I did no such thing.’
‘You have done everything you could to harm him – is this not treachery?’
‘No,’ Davud said calmly. ‘It is not.’
Trying to suppress the quiver in his voice Jahan sa
id, ‘When we were in Rome, we saw a painting. A disciple who had turned traitor. Didn’t you find yourself in him?’
‘I remember the painting. But I was no disciple and our master was no Jesus.’
‘That man, Tommaso … The Italians … Were they after master’s designs or was it just a ruse of yours?’
‘Tommaso, yes. Greedy man, but too small, insignificant. I used him for a while. Afterwards there was no need.’
Until that moment Jahan had seen a mix of emotions on Davud’s face – rage, sorrow, resentment. The one thing he had not observed was regret. ‘Do you feel any remorse at all?’
‘Remorse, for what? You want to believe I’m dishonourable. Sheitan’s henchman …’ Davud’s voice waned, then rose again. ‘True, I lied to our master. I pretended I had a family back in the village. I wrote them letters, sent them gifts. It was a sham.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Davud laughed an unhappy laugh. ‘I have no kin back in the village. All slaughtered. By your great Sultan.’
‘Which one?’
‘Does it matter?’ Davud said with an impatient gesture. ‘Are they not the same? Suleiman? Selim? Murad? The father, the son, the grandson. Don’t they keep repeating what their ancestors did?’
‘I feel sad about what happened to your family,’ Jahan said.
‘It was Sultan Suleiman. We’d had a poor harvest, another one, could not pay the levy. We were not Shias, but many said that come the winter we should pack up and go to the Shah of Iran. Better over there than here. Our poets recited, our women sang. Your Sultan wanted to teach us a lesson. He did. I was ten years old.’
Outside the rain slackened to a drizzle. Jahan could hear a fishing boat splashing nearby.
‘They beheaded a few. Left them on pikes for three days. More people rebelled. Their bodies dangled in the wind for a week. Still see them in my dreams. Everyone rebelled. They came back. This time they razed the village.’
‘How did you survive?’
‘My mother pushed me into the larder, closed the door on me. I waited. I was more hungry than afraid. Stupid boy. When I walked out it was night-time. I saw the moon shine on corpses. My brothers, my uncles, my mother …’
It was a while before Jahan spoke again. ‘Why didn’t you tell Master Sinan? He would have helped you.’
‘Really?’ Davud gave him a disdainful look. ‘Did master resurrect the dead? Is he like Jesus in that way?’
‘Master loved you like a son.’
‘I loved him like a father. A father in the wrong. A great architect. But a coward. Never uttered a word against cruelty. Or injustice. Even when you were rotting in the dungeon he did not move a finger!’
‘Have mercy. What could he have done? It was not in his power.’
‘He could have said to the Sultan, let go of my apprentice, my Lord, or else I’m not building for you.’
‘Have you lost your mind? He’d have been put to death.’
‘It’d have been a decent end,’ Davud countered. ‘Instead he wrote you miserable letters.’
‘You knew about it?’ Jahan’s face fell as he took this in. ‘He trusted you with the letters. You told him you had found a way to send them to me in the dungeon, but you never did. You wanted me to be cross with my master.’
Davud shrugged as if the remark had no relevance. ‘All he wanted to do was build. One project after another. But who will pray in those mosques? Will they be unwell or hungry? Didn’t matter. Every year, work, work. Where do the resources came from? Another war. Another slaughter. Did he mind? He didn’t care for anything else.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Every colossal mosque we built was raised thanks to the revenues from another conquest. On their way to the battleground the army would raze villages to the ground, kill more of my people. Our master never cared for these sorrows. He refused to see that, without bloodshed elsewhere, there would be no money, and without money there would be no building in the capital.’
‘Enough!’
Davud dropped his voice, speaking gingerly, as if addressing a petulant boy. ‘You come from another land. You can’t understand this.’
Jahan’s shoulders slumped. ‘You were not the only one making up stories. I’m an orphan. I’ve never seen Hindustan. Never kissed a Shah’s hand. It was a lie.’
Davud studied him. ‘The master knew it?’
‘I believe so. He protected me.’
‘The elephant?’
‘Destiny,’ Jahan said. ‘God brought us together.’
‘So we had one thing in common. Still, you are not me.’ Davud broke off. ‘There are two kinds of men, this I have learned. Those who covet happiness. Those who seek justice. You long for a happy life, whereas I long for adalet. We shan’t agree.’
Jahan strode to the door. Davud shouted, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Don’t want to be near you.’
‘Fool! I cannot let you go.’
Until then, it had not occurred to Jahan that Davud could harm him. As if to help him comprehend this, Davud said, ‘You know too much now.’
Jahan opened the door. The two servants were there, blocking his way. They pushed him back into the room.
‘Tell your dogs to leave me alone,’ Jahan yelled.
‘Pity it had to be this way,’ said Davud as he left the room. ‘Farewell, Indian.’
Jahan was so perplexed it took him a moment to act. He began to shout at the top of his voice. Surely there were people in the house who would hear and come to see what was happening. His children, his wives, his concubines.
‘Help! Somebody help!’
One of the men shoved him with such force that he fell down. Jahan tried to pray, but the words would not come. He took deep breaths, ready for the strangling that was sure to follow. It did not. Outside a bird warbled a song. The dawn was breaking.
They hit him on the back of his head with something hard, heavy. The floor tilted beneath his feet. The bird’s chirping was the last sound he heard before everything went dark.
There was a mantle – stiff and heavy as brocade – wrapped around his head, choking his breath, blocking his view. He wanted to take it off but his hands were tied, as were his feet. Through a slit in the fabric he glimpsed his surroundings, blurred as they were, slowly realizing there was nothing on his face. It was his eyes that were not seeing. The right one was swollen, unblinking, shut. The left one, half open, fluttered in a lonely panic to make sense of where he was.
Jahan tasted blood in his mouth. He must have bitten his tongue during the fight. For there was a fight, he remembered. His body remembered – the soreness in his limbs, the ache in his knuckles, the throb that still drilled a hole in his skull and, worst of all, the pain that shot through his right foot. His cheek stung, though he would not discover the reason until later. He recalled how Davud had walked out of the room, leaving him at the mercy of his guards, and how everything had stopped. The next thing he knew he was in a carriage that was riding hell for leather. The deaf-mutes, one on each side, had not expected him to recover consciousness so soon. They began to hit him again. Jahan fought back. In a frenzy, he opened the door and jumped out of the carriage with its horses still galloping at full speed. He tumbled into a ditch, twisting his foot. Such was the state the deaf-mutes found him in. Then it went pitch-black again.
His chest hurt now as he drew in a gulp of stale, sour air. His fingertips touched the hard surface, confirming what he suspected: he was lying on an earthen floor, bundled up in a hut somewhere. There was a persistent susurration in the distance, which he found oddly calming. He must have passed out; he couldn’t tell for how long. When he came around it was so cold his teeth were chattering. Either his other eye had also closed or the night had descended.
The first time he soiled his shalwar the shame was worse than the stench. None of that mattered afterwards. The hunger he could deal with for a while. The thirst was dreadful. Thirst hewed his flesh, bit by
bit, the way an axe would eat into a log, hacking its way into his veins. He kept smacking his lips as if he had been served a delicacy. That made him laugh. He feared he was losing his mind.
The incessant swish in the background he later recognized to be the sea – a discovery that was soothing and frightening in equal measure. Soothing, for he had always loved the ocean. Besides, he was probably not far from Istanbul. Frightening, because it brought to mind stories of concubines being fed to the fish. He shouted for help, over and over again. No one came. If Chota were here, he would tell him how peculiar it was to die alone and unheard in a city this crammed and clamorous.
As he drifted in and out of a stupor, time dragged on. In between bouts of pain, he nodded off, waking with a start, as though his soul refused to admit defeat. An anger he knew not from whence got hold of his soul. He, the apprentice to the great Sinan, had not climbed all that way to end so low. Sundered as they were, he could not for a moment believe Davud would abandon him to death. And yet Davud did not arrive. Nor did his underlings. Jahan could not guess whether it was dawn or dusk. Or how much time had gone by since he had been dragged here. How many days could a human being survive without water, he wondered. Elephants could make it up to four, he had read. He had no clue whether he would fare better.
He dreamed of Mihrimah, laughing under a honeysuckle vine, thirteen years old again. Her body untouched by hands other than her own, her face unmarred by spleen, her soul unspoiled by ambition. The way she had been when they first met, a happy, happy girl.