2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  “This morning,” the seraskier began, “I was informed that four of our officers had failed to report for morning drill.” He stopped, frowned. “You must understand that the New Guard are not like any other army the empire has seen. Discipline. Hard work, fair pay and obedience to a superior officer. We turn up for drill. I know what you are thinking, but these officers were particularly fine young gentlemen. I would say that they were the flower of our corps, as well as being our best gunnery officers. They spoke French,” he added, as if that concluded it. Perhaps it did.

  “So they had attended the engineering university?”

  “They passed out with top marks. They were the best.”

  “Were?”

  “Please, a moment.” The seraskier raised a hand to his forehead. “At first, in spite of everything, I thought like you. I supposed they had had some adventure and would reappear later, very shamefaced and sorry. I, of course, was ready to tear them into strips: the whole corps look up to those young men, do you see? They set, as the French say, the tone.”

  “You speak French?”

  “Oh, only a very little. Enough.”

  Most of the foreign instructors in the New Guard, Yashim knew, were Frenchmen, or others—Italians, Poles—who had been swept into the enormous armies the Emperor Napoleon had raised to carry out his dreams of universal conquest. Fifteen, ten years ago, with the Napoleonic Wars finally at an end, some of the more indigent remnants of the Grande Armee had found their way to Istanbul, to take the sultan’s sequin. But learning French was a business for the young, and the seraskier was pushing fifty.

  “Go on.”

  “Four good men vanished from their barracks last night. When they did not appear this morning, I asked one of the ban-jee, the cleaners, and found out that they had not slept in their dormitory.”

  “And they’re still missing?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “One of them was found tonight. About four hours ago.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He was found dead in an iron pot.”

  “An iron pot?”

  “Yes, yes. A cauldron.”

  Yashim blinked.

  “Do I understand,” he said slowly, “that the soldier was being cooked?”

  The seraskier’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Cooked?” He echoed weakly. It was a refinement he had not considered.

  “I think,” said the seraskier, “you should just come and take a look.”

  [ 4 ]

  Two hours later, Yashim had seen just about all that he wanted to see for one morning. For any number of mornings.

  Summoning a lantern bearer, the seraskier walked him eastwards through the empty streets, following the city’s spine towards the imperial stables. Outside the Beyazit Mosque torches flickered in the dark; they passed the Burnt Column close to the entrance to the Grand Bazaar, now shuttered and still, holding its breath as it guarded its treasures through the night. Further on, near the Sehzade Mosque above the Roman aqueduct, they ran across the night watch, who let them go when he saw who it was. Eventually they reached the stables. The stables, like the Guard itself, were new. They had been erected close below the ridge, on the southern side, on an area of ground which had been vacant since the suppression of the Janissaries ten years before, when their vast and rambling barracks had succumbed to bombardment and conflagration.

  They found the cauldron, just as the seraskier had described.

  It stood in a corner of one of the new stables, surrounded by bedding straw and lit by large, globular oil lamps suspended on heavy chains from the tie beam way overhead. The horses, the seraskier explained, had been removed.

  “It was the horses’ disturbance that brought the matter to light,” he added. “They do not like the smell of dead men.”

  Yashim had not realised when the seraskier described it that the cauldron was so very big. It had three short legs and two metal loops on either side for handles; even so Yashim could barely see over the top. The seraskier brought him a mounting stool, and Yashim climbed it to look inside.

  The dead soldier was still in his uniform. He was coiled in a foetal position at the bottom of the pot, just covering the base: his arms, which were tied at the wrist, were drawn up over his head making it impossible to see his face. Yashim stepped down and brushed his hands automatically, though the rim of the pot was perfectly clean.

  “Do you know who he is?”

  The seraskier nodded. “Osman Berek. I took his pocket book. You see…”

  He hesitated.

  “Well?”

  “I am sorry to say, the body has no face.”

  Yashim felt a chill of disgust.

  “No face?”

  “I…I climbed in. I turned him just a little. I thought I would recognise him, but—that’s all. His face has been hacked off. From below the chin to above the eyebrows. It was done, I think, at a single blow.”

  Yashim wondered what force was needed to sever a man’s face from his body at a blow. He turned around. “The cauldron is always here? It seems an odd place for it.”

  “No, no, the cauldron came with the body.”

  Yashim stared.

  “Please, effendi. Too many surprises. Unless you have more?”

  The seraskier considered. “No. The cauldron simply appeared overnight.”

  “And nobody heard or saw anything?”

  “The grooms heard nothing. They were asleep in the lofts.”

  “The doors are barred?”

  “Not usually. In the event of a fire…”

  “Quite.” According to an old saying, Istanbul suffered three evils—plague, fire, and Greek interpreters. There were so many old wooden buildings in the city, too closely packed: it only took a careless spark to reduce whole sections of the city to ashes. The unlamented Janissaries had been the city’s firemen, too: it was typical of their degeneration that they had combined their fire-duty with the more profitable occupation of fire-raising, demanding bribes to put out fires they themselves had started. Yashim vaguely remembered that the Janissaries had manned an important fire-tower on the edge of their old barracks here, which ironically collapsed in the conflagration of i8z6. Subsequently the sultan had ordered the construction of an extraordinary new fire-tower at Beyazit, a 2.6o-foot-high pillar of stone, topped with an overhanging gallery for the fire-watchers. Many people thought that the Beyazit Tower was the ugliest building in Istanbul; it was certainly the tallest, standing as it did on the Third Hill of the city. It was noticeable, all the same, that there were fewer fire-alarms these days.

  “And who found the body, then?”

  “I did. No, this is not a surprise. I was called because of the cauldron, and because the grooms were unhappy about the state of the horses. I was the first one to look inside. I am a military man, I’ve seen dead men before. And…” He hesitated. “I had already begun to suspect what I might see.”

  Yashim said nothing.

  “I gave nothing away. I ordered the horses out and had the doors barred. That’s all.”

  Yashim pinged the cauldron with his fingernail. It gave a tinny sound. He pinged again.

  The seraskier and he looked at each other.

  “It’s very light,” Yashim remarked. They were silent for a moment. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” said the seraskier, “that we do not have much time. Today is Thursday.”

  “The review?”

  “Ten days. To find out what is happening to my men.”

  [ 5 ]

  It had been a difficult morning. Yashim went to the baths, was soaped and pummelled, and lay for a long time in the hot room, before returning home in his freshly laundered clothes. Finally, having explored the matter in his mind in every way he could think of in an effort to draw a lead, he turned to what he always considered the next best thing.

  How do you find three men in a decaying, medieval, mist-benighted city of tw
o million people?

  You don’t even try.

  You cook.

  Getting up he moved slowly over to the other side of the room, which lay in darkness. He struck a Lucifer and lit the lamp, trimming the wick until the light burned steadily and bright. It fell on a neat arrangement of stove, high table and a row of very sharp-looking knives, suspended in mid-air by a splice of wood.

  There was a basket in the corner and from it Yashim selected several small, firm onions. He peeled and sliced them on the block, first one way and then the other, while he set a pot on the stove and slipped enough olive oil into it to brown the onions. When they were turning, he tossed in a couple of handfuls of rice which he drew from an earthenware crock.

  Long ago he’d discovered what it was to cook. It was at about the same time that he’d grown disgusted with his own efforts to achieve a cruder sensual gratification, and resigned himself to more stylised pleasures. It was not that, until then, he had always considered cooking as a woman’s work: for cooks in the empire could be of either sex. But he had thought of it, perhaps, as a task for the poor.

  The rice had gone clear, so he threw in a handful of currants and another of pine nuts, a lump of sugar and a big pinch of salt. He took down a jar from the shelf and helped himself to a spoonful of oily tomato paste which he mixed into a tea glass of water. He drained the glass into the rice, with a hiss and a plume of steam. He added a pinch of dried mint and ground some pepper into the pot and stirred the rice, then clamped on a lid and moved the pot to the back of the stove.

  He had bought the mussels cleaned, the big three-inch mussels from Therapia, up the Bosphorus. He opened them one by one with a twist of a flat blade and dropped them into a basin of water. The rice was half-cooked. He chopped dill, very fine, and stirred it into the mixture, then tipped it out onto a dish to cool. He drained the mussels and stuffed them, using a spoon, closing the shells before he laid them head to toe in layers in a pan. He weighted them down with a plate, added some hot water from the kettle, put on a lid and slid the pan over the coals.

  He took a chicken, jointed it, crushed walnuts on the flat of the cleaver and prepared Acen Yahnisi, with pomegranite juice.

  When everything was done he picked up a swan-necked ewer and very carefully washed first his hands, then his mouth, his face, his neck and, lastly, his private parts.

  He took out his mat and prayed. When he had finished he rolled up the mat once more and put it away in a niche. Soon, he knew, he would have a visitor.

  [ 6 ]

  Stanislaw Palewski was about fifty-five years old, with a circle of tight grey curls around his balding pate and a pair of watery blue eyes whose expression of beseeching sadness was belied by the strength of his chin, the size of his Roman nose and the set determination of his mouth, which at this moment was compressed into a narrow slit by the rain and wind backing off the Marmara shore.

  He walked, as he did every Thursday night, along the road which ran from the New Mosque up the Golden Horn, a conspicuous figure in a top hat and frock coat. The coat, like the hat, had seen better days; once black, it had been transmuted by wear and the damp airs of Istanbul into something more nearly approaching sea-green; the velvet nap of the topper had worn smooth in many places, particularly around the crown and on the rim. Approaching a pair of ladies swathed in their chadors, accompanied by their escort, he stepped politely into the road and automatically touched the brim of his hat in salute. The ladies did not directly acknowledge his salutation, but they bobbed about a little and Palewski heard a muffled whisper, and a giggle. He smiled to himself, and stepped back onto the pavement to resume his walk.

  As he did so, something chinked in his bag, and he stopped to check. Nothing explicitly forbade the diplomatically accredited representative of a foreign power from walking through the city carrying two bottles of 52% proof bison grass vodka, but Palewski wasn’t eager to put the case to the test. For one thing, he was not absolutely sure that there hadn’t ever been, in the whole tumultuous history of the city, an edict which made carrying liquor a flogging offence. For another, his diplomatic immunity was at best a fragile kind of favour. He had no gunboats at his disposal to ride up the Bosphorus and bombard the sultan into a more amenable frame of mind if things went wrong, as Admiral Duckworth had done for the English in 1807. He had no means of exerting government pressure as the Russians had done in 1712., when their ambassador was clapped up in the old prison of the Seven Towers. Forty years ago, the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria sent their armies into Poland to wipe the country from the map. Palewski, in truth, had no government at all.

  The Polish Imperial Ambassador to the Sublime Porte rearranged the damp cloth which protected his bottles, drew the strings of his bag tight again, and walked on through a dwindling series of streets and alleyways until he came to a very small porte cochere in one of the back alleys of the old town down by the Golden Horn. The door was small because it was sunken: only the upper three-fifths showed above the level of the muddy ground. A scattering of small boys tore past him, no doubt rubbing yet another layer of shine into the back of his old coat. A snapping bell, clapped between the fingers, announced the approach of a man in a tiny donkey cart, weaving his way with miraculous precision through the narrow interstices of the close medieval streets. Hurriedly, Palewski knocked on the door. It was opened by an old woman in a blue wimple who silently stood back to let him enter. Palewski, stooping, stepped in just as the cart swept by with a pattering of tiny hooves and a shout from the man at the reins.

  Outside, the light, such as it was, was fading; inside, it had never, apparently, risen. Palewski wondered briefly whether sunlight had penetrated to this spot at all in the past fifteen hundred years: the sunken doorcase, he had long suspected, was early Byzantine work, and he had no reason to imagine that the dark wooden handrail, to which he was now clinging as he swung blindly but unfalteringly upstairs, was anything but Byzantine itself, like the stone of the house, and the window embrasures, and the very probably Roman vaulting overhead.

  At the head of the stairs he paused to catch his breath and analyse the peculiar mixture of fragrances seeping through the lighted crack at the foot of the door in front of him.

  Yashim the eunuch and Ambassador Palewski were unlikely friends, but they were firm ones. “We are two halves, who together become whole, you and I,” Palewski had once declared, after soaking up more vodka than would have been good for him were it not for the fact, which he sternly upheld, that only the bitter herb it contained could keep him sane and alive. “I am an ambassador without a country and you—a man without testicles.” Yashim had considered this remark, before pointing out that Palewski might, at a pinch, get his country back; but the Polish ambassador had waved him away with a loud outbreak of sobs. “About as likely as you growing balls, I’m afraid. Never. Never. The bastards!” Soon after that he had fallen asleep, and Yashim had employed a porter to carry him home on his back.

  The impoverished diplomat sniffed the air and adopted a look of cunning sweetness which was entirely for his own benefit. The first of the smells was onion; also chicken, that he could tell. He recognised the dark aroma of cinnamon, but there was something else he found it hard to identify, pungent and fruity. He sniffed again, screwing his eyes shut.

  Without further hesitation or ceremony he wrenched open the door and bounded into the room: “Yashim! Yashim! You raise our souls from the gates of hell! Acem Yahnisi, if I’m not mistaken—so like the Persian fesinjan. Chicken, walnuts—and the juice of the pomegranate!” he declared.

  Yashim, who had not heard him come up, turned in astonishment. Palewski saw his face fall.

  “Come, come, young man, I ate this dish before you were weaned. Tonight let us give it in all sincerity a new and appropriate name: The ambassador was out of humour, and now is delighted! How’s that?”

  He presented the bottles to his host. “Still cold, you feel! Marvellous! One day I shall take a light and go down into that cella
r and find out where the icy water comes from. It may be a Roman cistern. I shouldn’t be surprised. What a find!”

  He rubbed his hands together while Yashim, smiling, handed him a glass of vodka. They stood for a moment looking at one another, then tossed back their heads simultaneously, and drank. Palewski dived on the mussels.

  It was going to be a long evening. It was a long evening. By the hour of the dawn prayer, Yashim was aware he had just nine days left.

  [ 7 ]

  The Street of the Tinsmiths ran slightly above and to the west of the Mosque of Rustem Pasha, itself half-buried in the alleys and back-doubles which surround the southern entrances of the Grand Bazaar. Like most of the artisans’ quarters, it consisted of a narrow funnel of open workshops, each no bigger than a very big wardrobe, where the smiths worked with forge, bellows and hammers over the standard articles of their trade: tin pots, little kettles, weakly hinged or plainly lidded boxes of every size and shape, from the tiny round tins used for storing kohl and tiger balm to banded trunks for sailors and the linen trade. They made knives and forks; they made badges and insignia; spectacle frames and ferrules for walking sticks. Every one of them worked at a specialism, rarely if ever straying from, say, the remorseless production of amulets designed to contain a paper inscribed with the ninety-nine names of God to, for example, the perpetual manufacture of pin boxes. These were guild rules, laid down hundreds of years before by the market judges and the sultan himself, and they were broken only under very special circumstances.

  Would the manufacture of an enormous cauldron, Yashim wondered, constitute a special circumstance?

  The tin market was not a place for the crowds who infested some of the other industrious highways of Istanbul: the food markets, the spice bazaars, the makers of shoes. Even the Street of the Goldsmiths was more busy. So Yashim walked along easily in the middle of the street, and attracted few glances. Once the smiths had satisfied themselves that he was a stranger, they thought no more about him: they hardly cared to notice if he was rich, poor, fat or thin, for no man alive was likely to bring them any greater profit than the modest profit they enjoyed by the terms of their guild membership. No one was going to stop by and offer to buy—at a wild price—any of their humdrum manufactures. The regulations of the guild were fixed: there was a quality, and a price, neither more nor less.