At parapet level there was a wooden door set in the masonry. It stood ajar, its hinges rusted, fastened to the jamb with a length of flaking iron chain which almost crumbled at Yashim’s touch. He pushed. The door trembled slightly. He put his shoulder to the planks and heaved, until the hinges screamed and the door swung inwards into the dark.
The floor was littered with dust, fallen mortar, and dried droppings. Lifting his sandalled feet with care, Yashim advanced by the slanting sunlight into the centre of the chamber, and looked around. The ceiling was lost in the shadows. The walls showed signs of having been plastered once, but now revealed layers of Roman brickwork interspersed with courses of stone, while in the farthest corner of the chamber a stone staircase spiralled up from the floor below and disappeared upwards.
He crossed to the staircase and peered down. A slight breeze seemed to be coming up towards him, suggesting that the room below had air and maybe light; it carried odours of damp masonry and straw. He felt for the step and began to descend into darkness, his left hand trailing cobwebs from the rough outer wall of the spiral.
For several steps he was in total darkness, and when he thought of the sun on the square, and the tradesmen sitting outside their shops only a few yards away, he knew that this was as lonely and silent a spot as anywhere in the whole of Istanbul.
Another winding turn of the spiral brought a slight change in the quality of the darkness, and as Yashim went on down, and down, it bled to a grey twilight, until he stepped off the lowest tread into a vaulted room, supplied by a shuttered window on either side; only the shutters were cracked, and set with glowing chips of sunlight.
The walls were dark with greenish damp, but they were still plastered, and peering close Yashim could make out shapes like the cloudy shapes he had seen under the whitewash in the Nasrin tekke that morning. He recognised trees, pavilions, and a river. A long oak table ran down the room, and there were benches pushed up against the walls.
He took a step forwards and ran a fingertip along the table top. It was clean.
Yet the chamber overhead was a mess of dust and rubbish.
He faced the window. The chinks of light made it too bright to see, so he raised a hand to block them out, and saw a door. It was locked from the outside.
He stood with his back to the door and surveyed the room. From here he could see beyond the table.
At the far end stood what looked like a wooden chest, with a flat lid.
Yashim crossed the room and stood beside it. The lid was at waist-height. He eased his fingers under the rim, and tried it gently.
The lid lifted smoothly, and he looked inside.
[ 88 ]
Stanislaw Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But the groan did not come.
“Ha!”
The events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.
He wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a brush.
He recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging top whack and confident that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks, who weren’t supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to make a fuss.
All the same, Palewski thought, he didn’t get champagne every day, and he could have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn’t been so clumsy.
He grinned.
Tossing his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted manoeuvre. But swabbing it down afterwards, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short of inspiration.
What did it matter if afterwards he got a dressing-down from the sultan himself? The Russian had almost certainly fared worse—it was he who laid down the challenge, after all, and broke the sultan’s injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a man of honour must.
He and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and friendly, and all because he had spilt his drink and wore a dastardly but inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant predecessors.
The sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days which neither of them had ever known, but which both of them imagined tinged with a glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that all the world was changing very fast.
“Even this one.”
“Your Edict?”
The sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to make changes in the running of his empire.
Military weakness. The growing spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European Powers.
“I believe we are taking the right steps,” he said. “I am very positive about the Edict. But I understand, also, that there will be enormous difficulties in persuading many people of the need for these changes. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I see opposition everywhere—even in my own home.”
Palewski was rather touched. The sultan’s home, as they both knew, contained about 20,000 other people.
“Some will think that I am going too fast. Just a few may think that I have gone too slowly. And sometimes even I am afraid that what I am trying to do will be so misunderstood, so mangled and abused, that in the long run it will be the end of…all this.” And he gestured sadly at the decorations. “But you see, Excellency, there is no other way. There is nothing else we can do.”
They had sat in silence together for some moments.
“I believe,” Palewski said slowly, “that we must not fear change. The weight of the battle shifts here and there, but the hearts of the men who fight in it are not, I suppose, any weaker for that. I also believe, and hope, that you have acted in time.”
“Inshallah. Let us hope together that the next round of changes will be the better for us—and for you.”
And he had thanked the ambassador again for listening to him, and they shook hands.
As the sultan left to visit the Russian prince, he had turned at the door.
“Forget the incident this evening. I have forgotten it already. But not our talk.”
Unbelievable. Even Stratford Canning, the Great Elchi as the Turks liked to call him, who helped prop up the Porte against the pretensions of the Russians, would have swooned with pleasure if the sultan had spoken to him so sweetly.
Palewski—who normally took mornings one thing at a time -clasped his hands behind his head on the pillow, grinned, wriggled his toes, pulled the bell rope for tea, and decided that the first thing he would do today was pay a visit to the baths.
And later, it being a Thursday, he would dine with Yashim.
[ 89 ]
As the lid swung up on well-oiled hinges Yashim took a cautious peek inside.
The light was dim, and the interior of the chest in shadow, but even so Yashim could recognise something that was as prosaic as it was unexpected.
Instead of the dead cadet he dreaded, a stack of plates.
Beside the plates lay a tray of rather finicky little glasses, turned on their rims to keep out dust. Next to them, a metal goblet covered with what proved to be a folded strip of embroidered cloth. And a book.
Yashim picked it up. It was the Koran.
Otherwise the chest was empty, and smelled of polish.
Yashim smiled, a little grimly.
They’re getting the caterers in, he said to himself. For a feast.
A Karagozi bacchanal.
He closed the lid quickly and made for the stairs. Halfway up he found himself swallowed in darkness and began taking the stairs two at a time, surgin
g out of the spiral and across the chamber he had come in by, not caring that his flying feet raised a cloud of dust as he slewed over the floor. Out on the parapet he yanked the door closed, hooked the chain, and leaned back against the wall, breathing heavily. From where he stood he could look down into the branches of the elegant cypress tree.
How is it, he asked himself, that I can be frightened by a set of crockery?
Because, he thought, this time I’ve got it right. Three bodies turn up, close by three tekke. This would be the fourth. Established on the site of the Janissaries’ greatest triumph—the Conquest of Constantinople.
And the body was yet to come.
[ 90 ]
The first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for his breakfast was Yashim effendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.
Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.
“You’re well, inshallah? How’s the foot?”
Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.
“And I believe you, effendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose.”
Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome—as she had whispered to him—by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn’t slept a wink.
He hadn’t slept too much the night before, either, the night that he’d dropped Preen’s assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he’d been constantly on the move—that second time to the Russian embassy, sending Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a tekke which meant nothing to anyone but him and—who? All the time his mind had been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the past week, looking for something he could take a grip on.
All the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain, and the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.
He’d see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he’d go to the hammam to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching limbs, to dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had fought so long and so hard to control.
Murad Eslek looked up from his coffee to see the expression on Yashim’s face.
“You all right?”
Yashim smoothed it away.
“I need your help. Again,” he said.
[ 91 ]
An hour before dusk, Stanislaw Palewski joined a group of men spluttering with indignation at the doors of the Hammam Celebi, one of the better baths of the city on the Stamboul side. It stood at the bottom of a hill, below a network of crowded alleyways whose relatively generous width suggested that this was, all the same, a prosperous district, neither so crammed that its houses almost jettied into their neighbours across the street, nor so grand that they were hidden behind walls, but a district of well-to-do merchants and administrators who liked to saunter down the streets in the evening, and sit discussing the day’s news in the numerous cafes and eating houses. It was not far, in fact, from the Kara Davut, and it was with the idea of stopping for a bathe en route to Yashim’s Thursday dinner that Palewski had crossed the Galata bridge on foot, at peace with the world, with two bottles of the bison grass tucked very chill, and snug in their wrappings, into the bottom of his portmanteau.
The Hammam Celebi was unexpectedly closed for cleaning. Disappointed bathers clutched bags of clean linen and fulminated gloomily against the management.
“They are saying to come back in one hour, or even two!” A man with an Arab headcloth complained. “As if I should spend my evening running up and down hills carrying clothes like a pedlar!”
Another man added: “And as if this wasn’t Thursday!”
Palewski pondered this oracular argument. But of course: tomorrow was a holy day for rest and prayer, to be tackled unspotted, at least on the outer side. Thursday night was always busy at the baths.
“Forgive me interrupting,” he said politely. “I don’t quite understand what the matter is.”
The men turned to look him up and down. If they were surprised or displeased to find a foreigner—and a ferenghi, to boot—with a plain intention of entering their bath, they were certainly too well mannered to let it show. And when it came to bathing, the procedure was, by long tradition, a democratic one. The hours for men to use the hammam were hours when they could be used by all men, infidel or believer, foreigner or Stambouliot.
A third frustrated bather, a man with a small paunch and a few grey curls peeping from his turban, politely offered Palewski an explanation.
“For some reason none of us can fathom, the bath people have taken it into their heads to clean out the hammam in the middle of a busy evening, instead of at night.”
A fourth man spoke up, quietly.
“It may be some sickness. It has never happened before. Perhaps we should be praising the bath manager, instead of being so angry. We should take their advice and return in a short while. As for carrying our linen about, there are many decent cafes in the district, where one could easily while away the time. Is it not so?”
The group slowly dispersed. Palewski couldn’t tell if they still meant to return, after the last man had raised the possibility of disease. He thought, probably, yes. The Turks, after all, are fatalists. Like me.
That the baths could be closed down because of sickness surprised him more than the probability that everyone would come back in spite of it.
He wondered what to do. On the one hand, he had been looking forward to rubbing the blacking off his feet. On the other, though the delay might not make him late for Yashim, he was not yet quite as fatalistic as the Turks in the matter of disease.
He decided to sit and have a coffee somewhere, keeping an eye on the hammam. If it re-opened, and the signs were good, he could choose whether to go in. If not, he would simply go on to see his friend at the appointed time, and save his feet for the pump later. Or tomorrow morning, more likely, he remembered, thinking of all the vodka in his bag.
He turned, walked a short way up the hill, and chose a coffee shop from where he could watch the door of the hammam without moving his head. He could even look across the dome of the baths, and over the roofs behind, to watch the sun set into the Sea of Marmara, gilding the rooftops and the minarets, the domes and the cypress trees.
[ 92 ]
Eslek had picked up fast, Yashim thought. He had not refused payment, to his relief: the task was crucial, too important to be carried out purely as a favour. He’d had his favour already, anyway. It was time to make returns.
He slipped off his clothes and handed them to the attendant, shuffling into a pair of wooden clogs to protect the soles of his feet from the hot stone. Inside the hot rooms of the hammam the floors were always dangerously slippery. Naked except for a clout around his hips he clip-clopped through the door into a large domed chamber filled with steam. The dome was supported on squinches which created semi-circular niches around the walls, where one could sit by a flowing spout of hot water that ebbed away downhill to the drain in the centre, scooping up the water to clean one’s body to the very depths of one’s pores.
Yashim stepped gratefully into the steamy room. He set his feet apart, arched his back, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. Then he ran his fingers through his black curls and looked around for somewhere to sit. He took possession of a niche, and sat on a small low bench with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him. For several minutes he did not move, allowing himself to absorb the heat, feeling his sweat begin to run. At last he bent forward and picked up a tin scoop at his feet.
He stretched out an arm to fill the scoop, and very slowly tipped the water over his head. His eyes were closed. He loved the way the water sought out runnels through his hair and trickled, like soothing fingers, down his neck. He did it again. He heard a man laugh. He smelt the animal scent of clean skin. After a few more minutes he picked up a bar of soap and began to lather himself completely, beginning with his feet, working his way up his body to his face and hair.
He continued to pour the water over his head and shoulders. Eventually he began to wash the soap away, from top to toe, working at his skin with his fingers, watching the way the hairs on his legs followed the course of the water. It always reminded him of Osman’s dream, the dream in which the founder of the Ottoman dynasty had seen a great tree, whose leaves suddenly trembled and then aligned, as if in a wind, pointing a myriad sharp points towards the Red City of Byzantium. Finally he gave his feet a thorough kneading with his thumbs, and stood up and crossed to find room on the raised platform in the centre of the room.
He climbed up languidly onto the hot platform, the so-called belly of the hammam, spread out his towel, and lay on it, face down, his head turned to the left and his eyes closed. The huge masseur, bald as an egg, every ripple of his flesh hairless and shining, closed in, and began to work Yashim’s feet with great force and dexterity, rhythmically smoothing and digging at Yashim’s flesh until Yashim felt his whole body rocking up and down. Up and down. Head to toe on the burning marble.
Invisible shivers ran up his legs. He thought of the pile of plates. He saw Eugenia’s white breasts, a tangle of sheets, her lips swollen with the heat. This was another kind of heat, a heat which sucked at his will, sapped him of all his strength. Once or twice he kicked out, involuntarily, as he rose from the sleep he so desperately craved. “Salright,” he murmured to himself. A few minutes, then the masseur will tap him off the bench and wake him up. Sleep.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 22