He hadn't slept too much the night before, either, the night that he'd dropped Preens 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 that 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 get 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, 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 neighbors 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 bath en route to Yashim's Thursday dinner that Palewski had crossed the Golden Horn by caique, 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 peddler!"
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 outside. 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 gray 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 reopened, 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 as a favor. He'd had his favor 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 that created semicircular niches around the walls, where one could sit by a flowing spout of hot water that ebbed away downhill to the drain in the center, 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 smelled 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 of sharp points toward the Red City of Byzantium. Finally he gave his feet a thorough kneading with his thumbs, then stood up and crossed to the raised platform in the center 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, facedown, 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 that 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. " "S all right," he murmured to himself. A few minutes, then the masseur will tap him off the bench and wake him up. Sleep.
Slowly the room began to empty out.
The masseur kept on working on Yashim's body.
Slowly, and more slowly.
There was only one man left in the hammam, asleep on a bench. The masseur raised his fingers from Yashim's neck. Yashim didn't move.
The masseur went over to the sleeping bather and scooped him up in his powerful banded arms like a little baby. The man startled and opened his eyes, but when the masseur set him down again he was in the tepidarium, facing a cold plunge. The masseur gave him a friendly little shove, and he leaped into the cold tub, gasping and laughing. He'd been asleep!
The masseur shot the bolt of the hammam door and folded his huge arms across his chest.
Inside the hot room Yashim slept on, dreaming of melting snow.
93
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How do I look now, old man?"
Fizerly looked his friend up and down with a critical eye.
"Capital, Compston. Or should I say, Mehmet? If we are going out to explore the old city, you're Mehmet from here on, remember."
Compston chuckled and looked at himself in the embassy mirror. Fizerly had been awfully clever with the turban--in the end, they'd arranged it so that not a blond hair straggled out, even if the balance of the turban had suffered slightly in consequence. "Just keep moving your head about like a good chap," Fizerly had suggested helpfully. Not Fizerly, that is. Ali. Ali Baba, at your service.
Compston-Mehmet giggled and rubbed a little more soot into his eyebrows.
"Let's hope it doesn't rain," he said.
94
***********
PALEWSKI drank his coffee slowly, watching the sunset. Outside, the hubbub of traffic was subsiding, the porters going empty-handed uphill, a few small donkey carts returning to stables, while the number of people taking the evening air increased. Sometimes Palewski recognized them--a palace official he couldn't name, a Greek dragoman linked to one of the Phanariot merchant houses, an imam looking exactly as he had looked fifteen years before, when Palewski had had a discussion with him on the history of the idea of the transmigration of souls. Later he saw a couple of juniors from the British embassy--Fizerly, he recalled, with the straggling whiskers, now smoking a Turkish cheroot, sauntering along with a boy in a curious sort of hat, apparently made out of various pieces of his underwear, nodding and laughing at his side. Palewski wondered vaguely what they were doing, dressed like children out of a Nativity play. Nobody seemed to pay them much attention, and they strolled down the hill and disappeared around the corner of the baths.
How much Istanbul had changed in the thirty years he had known it! What was it that he had said to Yashim? He had said he mourned the passing of the Janissaries. Well, the past ten years had been particularly lively. Since the suppression of the Janissaries, there had been nothing to restrain the sultan except the fear of foreign intervention, and the sultan was a born modernizer. He'd taken to the European saddle faster than anyone. The change that had come over the city went beyond the gradual but continuous disappearance of turbans and slippers, and their replacement by the fez and leather shoes. That was a change that Palewski was romantic enough to regret, though he did not expect it to be complete in his lifetime--if only because the great city still drew people from every corner of the empire toward it, people who had never heard of sumptuary laws or shoelaces. But more people from outside the empire were coming in, too, and in the gradual rebuilding of Galata after the great fire there were oddities like the French glove maker, and the Belgian who sold bad champagne, ensconced in their little shops, with tinkling bells, just as if they were in Cracow.
The door opened and a gust of cold air entered the fug of the cafe. Palewski recognized the man who came in, too, though for a while he couldn't place him: a tall, bullish man in late middle age, distinguished by a white cloak. He was followed in by two European merchants Palewski had seen around but not spoken to. He thought they might be French.
The three men took a table slightly behind Palewski's line of sight, so it was a while before he glanced back and recognized the seraskier, who had shrugged back his cloak and now sat with booted legs tightly crossed, his blue-gray uniform jacket buttoned to the neck. He was toying with a coffee cup, listening with a slight smile to one of his companions, who was leaning forward and making a point, quietly, with the help of his hands. French, then. Or Italian?
Palewski wondered if he might order another coffee himself. He looked down the hill: the doors of the baths were still shut, but another knot of men with bags of linen had gathered outside, presumably rehearsing the complaints he had listened to half an hour before. Cleaning the baths! On a Thursday night, too. Sacrilege! Scandal! Palewski grinned and waved at the waiter.
Well, he could see that they were cleaning the baths--and thoroughly, too. The little air vent at the top of the dome was releasing a corona of white steam that rose, eddied, and then trailed away in the dusk. Caught by the dying rays of the sun, the steam sometimes refracted a rainbow of color. Very pretty, Palewski thought. Next came a stick, bound with a trailing white cloth, to clean out the vent. Very thorough, Palewski thought. If they finish in time, I will certainly try my luck.
The waiter brought him a fresh coffee. Palewski leaned back to overhear the conversation going on behind him, but it was being muttered at a distance, over the bubble of pipes, the hiss of boiling water, and the murmur of low conversation around the room. Disappointed, he looked out the window again.
How odd, he thought. The stick was still going up and down in the hole, and the scrap of cloth was fluttering with it, like a tiny flag.
There's cleaning, Palewski thought curiously, and obsession.
And as he watched, the stick suddenly wavered and keeled over to one side. Stuck at an angle, the little white cloth waved and flapped in the evening breeze like a signal of surrender.
95
***********
YASHIM had been dreaming. He dreamed that he and Eugenia were standing naked, side by side in the snow, watching a forest fire crackle in the treetops. It wasn't cold. As the fire advanced, the warmth increased, and the snow began to melt. He shouted, "Jump!" and they both leaped over the edge of the melted snow. He had no recollection of hitting the ground below, but he had started to run across the square toward the huge cypress. Eugenia was nowhere, but the soup master reached out with his enormous hands and lit the cypress with a match. It burned like a rocket as Yashim held on to it, pressing his face against the smooth bark, but when he tried to pull away he couldn't, because his skin had melted and stuck to the tree.
He coughed and tried to raise his head. His eyes opened. They seemed to be filmed over: his vision was foggy. He made another effort to raise his head, and this time his cheek sucked against the hard top of the massage bench, where he lay in a pool of his own sweat. He rolled over, his whole body slithering on the bench, and swung his legs to the floor.
A dull pain throbbed through his feet, and it took him some moments to realize that the soles of his feet were burning against the stone floor. He sat back on the bench, legs raised, and looked around. There was nobody else there.
The steam was peeling away from the floor in angry ribbons, which blended into a fog that thickened as it approached the dome. Yashim found that he was breathing hard: the air was so hot and humid that every breath stuffed his throat like a rag. With a heavy hand he dashed the sweat from his eyes.
The fog felt curiously intimate, as if it were really a problem with his eyes, and this seemed to disorient him: he jerked his head about, searching for the doors. He saw his wooden clogs beside the massage bench. With his feet in the clogs he stood swaying for a moment, holding on to the bench, and then, like a man struggling through the snow, he staggered forward toward the door.
He fell against it, groping for a handle, but the door was as smooth as the walls.
No handle.
Yashim drummed with his fists, unable to shout, his breath sobbing through his teeth. No one came. Again and again he crashed against the door, throwing his whole weight behind his shoulder, but it didn't budge, and the sound itself was flattened against the iron-bound oak. He sank into a squat, one hand against the door for support.
The heat rolling off the floor made it impossible to hold that position for very long. He slowly stood up; bent double, he pushed himself along the wall. The spigot in the first niche had stopped flowing. There was a scoop on the floor, but it contained only an inch of water and the metal was hot.
He could not guess how long he crouched there, gazing down between his arms at the water in the scoop. But when the water started to steam he thought, I'm being braised.
But I am thinking.
I must get out.
Gingerly he raised his head, for it felt as though it must burst at any minute: he needed to keep the water out of his eyes.
A faint pattern of light penetrated the fog above. It came from the pattern of holes let into the roof of the dome, and for a second Yashim wondered if he could somehow climb up and reach it, thrust his hands, maybe, and his lips against the holes.
You can't climb the inside of a dome, he said to himself.
His eye followed the base of the walls, searching for anything that he could use.
He almost missed it: the long bamboo cane attached to the head of a mop, tucked up into the angle between the floor and the wall.
He could hardly pick it up: his fingers were puffy and hard to bend.
Yashim raised the flimsy cane with an effort. Too short.
Once more he started around the room. Twice he almost blacked out and fell to his hands and knees: but the burning stone tortured him back to life, and he tottered on until he found the second cane.
Jason Goodwin Page 22