The snake stone yte-2

by Jason Goodwin

  One of the Eminonu boatmen, resting his athletic body on the upright oar of his fragile caique, recognized George from Yashim’s description. He took him up the Bosphorus most evenings, he said. Two nights ago a party of Greeks had spilled out onto the wharf and asked to be rowed up the Horn toward Eyup; he had dithered for a while because he had not wanted to miss his regular fare. He remembered, too, that it must have been after dark because the lamps were lit and he had noticed the braziers firing on the Pera shore, where the mussel-sellers were preparing their evening snacks.

  Yashim offered him a tip, a pinch of silver, which the boatman palmed without a glance, politely suppressing a reflex that was second nature to most tradesmen in the city. Then Yashim retraced his steps toward the market, wondering if it was in one of these narrow streets that George had met with his accident.

  The sound of falling water drew his attention. Through a doorway, higher than the level of the street, he caught a glimpse of a courtyard with squares of dazzling linen laid out to dry on a rosemary bush. He noticed the scalloped edge of a fountain. The door swung shut. But then Yashim knew where George might most likely be found.

  Almost ten years after the sultan had told his people to dress alike, George stuck to the traditional blue, brimless cap and black slippers that defined him as a Greek. Once, when Yashim had asked him if he was going to adopt the fez, George had drawn himself up quite stiffly:

  “What? You thinks I dresses for sultans and pashas all of my life? Pah! Like these zucchini flowers, I wears what I wears because I ams what I ams!”

  Yashim had not asked him about it again; nor did George ever remark on Yashim’s turban. It had become like a secret sign between them, a source of silent satisfaction and mutual recognition, as between them and the others who ignored the fez and went on dressing as before.

  The door on the street gave Yashim an idea. A church stood on the street parallel with the one he was strenuously climbing toward the market. A group of discreet buildings formed a complex around the church, where nuns lived in dormitories, ate in a refectory, and also ran a charitable dispensary and hospital for the incurably sick of their community. If his friend had been found on the street after his accident, it was to this door, without a shadow of doubt, that he would have been brought, thanks to his blue cap and his black Greek shoes.

  But the door remained closed, in spite of his knocking; and in the church, when he finally reached it, he had to overcome the suspicions of a young Papa who was doubtless bred up in undying hatred for everything Yashim might represent: the conqueror’s turban, the ascendancy of the crescent in the Holy City of Orthodox Christianity, and the right of interference. But when at last he passed beyond the reredos and through the vestry door, he met an old nun who nodded and said that a Greek had been delivered to their door just two nights past.

  “He is alive, by the will of God,” the nun said. “But he is very sick.”

  The wardroom was bathed in a cool green light and smelled of olive oil soap. There were four wooden cots for invalids and a wide divan; all the cots were occupied. Yashim instinctively put his sleeve to his mouth, but the nun touched his arm and told him not to worry, there was no contagion in the ward.

  George’s black slippers lay on the floor at the foot of his cot. His jaw and half his face were swathed in bandages, which continued down across his shoulders and around his barrel-shaped chest. One arm-his left-stuck out stiffly from the bedside, splinted and bound. His breathing sounded sticky. What Yashim could see of his face was nothing more than a swollen bruise, black and purple, and several dark clots where blood had dried around his wounds.

  “He has taken a little soup,” the nun whispered. “That is good. He will not speak for many days.”

  Yashim could hardly argue with her. Whoever had attacked his friend had done a thorough job. Their identity would remain a mystery, he thought, until George recovered enough to speak. The Hetira. What did it mean?

  While the nun led him out through the tiny courtyard, Yashim told her what he knew about his friend. He left her with a purse of silver and the address of the cafe on Kara Davut where he could be found when George regained consciousness.

  Only after the door had closed behind him did he think to warn her of the need for discretion, if not secrecy. But it was too late, and probably didn’t matter. For George, after all, the damage was already done.

  6

  Maximilien Lefevre stepped lightly from the caique and made his way up the narrow cobbled street, carefully avoiding the open gutter, which ran crookedly downhill in the middle of the road. Here and there his path was barred by a tangle of nets and creels, set out to mend; then he would vault over the gutter and carry on up the other side, sometimes stooping to pass beneath the jettied upper floors of the wooden houses, which tilted at crazy angles, as if they were being slowly dragged down by the weight of the washing lines strung between them. Old women dressed from head to toe in black sat out on their steps, their laps full of broken nets; they regarded him curiously as he passed by.

  Ortakoy was one of a dozen or so Greek villages strung out along the Bosphorus between Pera and the summer houses of the European diplomats. They had been there two thousand years ago, and more-when Agamemnon had assembled fleets, as Homer sang. Greeks from the Bosphorus had manned the ships that sailed against Xerxes, four centuries before Christ; they had ferried Alexander the Great across to Asia, when he took his helots on their legendary campaigns in the East. An Ottoman pasha, Lefevre recalled, had explained that God gave the land to the Turks-and to the Greeks He left the sea. How could it have been otherwise? Four hundred years after the Turkish Conquest, the Greeks still drew a living from the sea and the straits. They had been sailing these waters while the Turks were still shepherding flocks across the deserts of Asia.

  The thought made Lefevre frown.

  Foreigners seldom visited the Greek villages, in spite of their reputation for good fish; before long, Lefevre found himself with a tail of curious small boys, who shouted after him and pushed and shoved one another while their grandmothers looked on. Some of the smaller boys imagined that Lefevre was a Turk, and all of them guessed that he was rich, so when Lefevre stopped and turned around they drew together, half curious and half afraid. They saw him pull a coin from his pocket and offer it with a smile to the smallest boy among them. The boy hung back, somebody bolder snatched the coin, and pandemonium erupted as the whole pack of children turned as one to chase after him down the street.

  Lefevre took a turn onto an unpaved lane. Swarms of tiny flies rose from stagnant puddles as he approached; he swept them from his face and kept his mouth shut.

  The cafe door stood open. Lefevre made his way rapidly to the back and took a seat on a small veranda that overlooked the pantiled roofs and the Bosphorus below. After a while another man joined him from the interior of the cafe.

  Lefevre stared down at his hands. “I don’t like meeting here,” he said quietly in Greek.

  The other man passed his hand across his mustache. “This is a good place, signor. We are not likely to be disturbed.”

  Lefevre was silent for a few moments. “Greeks,” he growled, “are nosy bastards.”

  The man chuckled. “But you, signor-you are a Frenchman, no?”

  Lefevre raised his head and gave his companion a look of intense dislike. “Let’s talk,” he said.

  7

  In the palace at Besiktas, with its seventy-three bedrooms and forty-seven flights of stairs, the Shadow of God on Earth, Sultan Mahmut II, lay dying of tuberculosis-and cirrhosis of the liver, brought about by a lifetime’s devotion to reforming his empire along more Western, modern lines, and bad champagne chased down with spirits.

  The sultan lay back on the pillows of an enormous tester bed hung with tasseled curtains, and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the Bosphorus below his window, and the hills of Asia across the straits. He had, he dimly knew, a world at his command. The fleets of the Ottoman sultan cruised in the Medit
erranean and the Black Sea; the prayers were read in his name at the Mosque in Jerusalem, in Mecca and Medina; his soldiers stood watch on the Danube by the Iron Gates, and in the mountains of Lebanon; he was lord of Egypt. He had wives, he had concubines, he had slaves at his beck and call, not to mention the pashas, the admirals, the seraskiers, voivodes, and hospodars who governed his far-flung empire in trembling or, at least, respectful obedience to his will.

  In his thirty years as sultan, Mahmut had presided over many changes to the Ottoman state. He had destroyed the power of the Janissaries, the overmighty regiment that opposed all change. He had adopted riding boots and French saddles. He had told his subjects to stop wearing the turban, if they were Muslims, and blue slippers, if they were Jews, and blue caps, if they were Greeks: he had meant all men to receive equal treatment, and to wear red fezzes, and the stambouline, a cutaway coat.

  The results were mixed. Many of his Muslim subjects now reviled him as the Infidel Sultan-and many of his Christian subjects had developed unrealistic expectations. Those Greeks in Athens-they had actually rebelled against him. After seven years of fighting, with European help, they had created their own, independent kingdom on the Aegean. The kingdom of Greece!

  As for the champagne and brandy, they had eased some of the anxiety that the sultan experienced in his efforts to update, and preserve, the empire of his forefathers.

  And now, at the age of fifty-four, he was dying of them.

  His hand moved slowly toward a silken cord whose tassels brushed against his pillows, then it fell again. He was dying, and he did not know whom he could ring for.

  The sun pulled slowly around, now slanting from the west. There were others he remembered, not just names, but the faces of men and women he had known. He saw the old general Bayraktar, with his furious mustaches, and the astonishment on his face when he burst into the old palace all those years ago and hoisted Mahmut out of a laundry basket to make him sultan. He saw his uncle Selim dead, in a kaftan stained with the blood of the House of Osman, and his favorite concubine, Fatima, alive: fat, cheerful, the one who rubbed his feet the way he liked and expected nothing. He remembered another general who had fallen to his death, and the faces of men he had seen in crowds: a sufi with a gentle smile, a student in the grip of loyalty, clutching the Banner of the Prophet; a Black Eunuch, down on his knees; a Janissary who had cocked his fingers at him, like a pistol, and winked; the pale whiskers of Calosso, the Piedmontese riding master, and the downcast eyes of Abdul Mecid, his son, who had a chest like a girl’s waist; and the beard of the Patriarch-what was his name? — who took the cross of office from his hands, and died twirling at the end of a rope in the hot sun.

  There was another face, too…His hand moved out, his fingers groped for the tassel.

  But when the slave arrived, bowing, not looking up, Sultan Mahmut could not remember who it was he had wanted to see.

  “A glass…the medicine…there, that’s it,” he said.

  “Dr. Millingen-” the slave began.

  “-is my doctor. But I am sultan. Pour!”

  8

  “Take care on these stairs, monsieur. They are very worn-I’ve slipped on them myself.”

  “But only on the way down, Excellency! I’m sure of that.”

  Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, frowned and carried on up the stairs to Yashim’s apartment. Was the Frenchman implying that he got drunk?

  He put a hand to his cravat, as if the touch would reassure him: impeccably starched and properly tied, the cravat was not, he was vaguely aware, in the latest fashion; like his coat, like his boots, like his own diplomatic position, it belonged to another age, before Poland had been wiped from the map by the hostile maneuverings of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Palewski had arrived in Istanbul twenty-five years before, as the representative of a vanished country. Elsewhere, in other capitals of Europe, the Polish ambassador was only a diplomatic memory; but the Turks, the old enemy, had received him with good grace.

  Which was, he thought with a frown, in the days before Istanbul became positively overrun with mountebanks, schemers, and dealers of every nationality, and none. Before visiting Frenchmen buttonholed you and invited themselves along to dinner.

  But also before he had come to know Yashim.

  How they had become friends was still a matter of debate, for Yashim’s memory of the event differed in emphasis from Palewski’s; it involved more broken glass, and less enunciated French. But they had been firm friends ever since. “Together,” Palewski had once declared, weeping over a blade of pickled bison grass, “we make a man, you and I. For you are a man without balls, and I am a man without a country.”

  It was an appeal of friendship that Palewski now threw Yashim as Lefevre advanced past him into the room, flinging out his hand.

  “ Enchante, m’sieur,” he said. “It’s most kind of you to have us! Something smells good.”

  It was not Yashim’s habit to shake hands, but he took Lefevre’s and squeezed it politely. Palewski opened his mouth to speak when the Frenchman added:

  “I was quite unprepared for such a generous invitation.”

  He was a small, stoop-shouldered man, delicately built, with a few days’ growth of white stubble and a voice that was soft and sibilant, close to lisping.

  “But I am delighted, monsieur-”

  “Lefevre,” Palewski cut in finally. “Dr. Lefevre is an archaeologist, Yashim. He’s French. I–I felt sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But no, of course not. It’s an honor.” Yashim’s eyes lit up. A Frenchman for dinner! Now that was a decent challenge.

  Palewski set his portmanteau on the table and clicked it open. “Champagne,” he announced, drawing out two green bottles. “It comes from the Belgian at Pera. He assures me that it belongs to a consignment originally destined for Sultan Mahmut’s table, so it’s probably filth.”

  “I am sure it will be excellent.” Lefevre smirked at Yashim.

  The ambassador looked at him coolly. “I rather think the sultan’s illness speaks for itself, Lefevre. It defeats all the best doctors.”

  “Ah, yes. The Englishman, Dr. Millingen.” Lefevre’s hands fluttered toward his head. “Whom I consulted recently. Headache.”

  “Cured?”

  Lefevre raised his eyebrows. “One lives in hope,” he said sadly.

  Palewski nodded. “Millingen’s not too bad for a doctor. Though he killed Byron, of course.”

  Yashim said: “Byron?”

  “Lord Byron, Yash. A celebrated English poet.” He reached into his bag. “If the champagne’s no good, I have this,” he added, drawing out a slimmer and paler bottle, which Yashim immediately recognized. “Byron was an enthusiast for Greek independence,” he went on. “Never lived to fire a gun in anger, as far as I know. He died trying to organize the Greek rebels in ’24, at the siege of Missilonghi. Caught a fever. Millingen was his doctor.”

  They drank the champagne from Yashim’s sherbet flutes.

  “It sparkles,” said Lefevre.

  “Not for very long,” Yashim added, peering into the glass. “Dr. Lefevre, I welcome you to Istanbul.”

  “The city ordained by Nature to be the capital of the world.” Lefevre fixed his dark eyes on Yashim. “She calls me like a siren, monsieur. I cannot resist her lure.” He drained his glass and set it down silently in the palm of his other hand. “Je suis archeologue.”

  Yashim brought out a tray on which he had set a selection of meze-the crisped skin of a mackerel rolled loose from its flesh, then stuffed with nuts and spices; uskumru dolmasi; some tiny boreks stuffed with white cheese and chopped dill; mussel shells folded over a mixture of pine nuts; karniyarik, tiny eggplants filled with spiced lamb; and a little dish of kabak cicegi dolmasi, or stuffed zucchini flowers. They were all dolma-that is, their outsides gave no hint as to the treasures that lay within, and all made to recipes perfected in the sultan’s kitchens.

  Palewski was brooding over his champagne
. Lefevre picked up a zucchini flower and popped it into his mouth.

  “How shall I explain?” Lefevre began. “To me, this city is like a woman. In the morning she is Byzantium. You know, I am sure, what is Byzantium? It is nothing, a Greek village. Byzance is young, artless, very simple. Does she know who she is? That she stands between Asia and Europe? Scarcely. Alexander came and went. But Byzance: she remembers nothing.”

  His hand hovered above the tray.

  “One man appreciates her beauty, nonetheless. Master of Jerusalem and Rome.”

  Palewski buried his face in his glass.

  “Constantine, the Caesar, falls in love. What is it-375 A.D.? Byzance is his-she suits him well. And he raises her to the imperial purple, gives her his name-Constantinople, the city of Constantine. The new heart of the Roman Empire. Nothing is too good for her. Constantine plunders the ancient world like a man who showers his mistress with jewels. He brings her the four bronze horses of Lysippos, which now stand above the Piazza San Marco in Venice. He brings her the Serpent Column from Delphi. He brings her the tribute of the known world, from the Pillars of Hercules to the deserts of Arabia.”

  “And his mother, too. Don’t forget her,” Palewski added.

  Lefevre turned to the ambassador. “Saint Helena, of course. She came to the city, and unearthed a portion of the True Cross.”

  “They should make her patron saint of archaeologists, Lefevre.”

  The Frenchman blinked. “All the holy relics of the Christian faith were brought to the city,” he added. “Relics of the earliest saints. The nails that fixed Jesus to the cross. The goblet and plate that Jesus used at the Last Supper. The holy of holies, gentlemen.”

  He held up his hand, fingers outspread.

  “Two centuries later, Emperor Justinian builds the church of churches. Aya Sofia, the eighth wonder of the world. She has come a long way from the fishergirl, Byzance.” He paused. “What to say? The centuries of wealth, monsieur. The perfection of Byzantine art. Ceremony, bloodshed, the emperor as the regent of God Almighty.”