He got up, leaving his cloak on the divan. The room felt warm, the stove was lit: his landlady must have crept up to light it while he was asleep. He picked up the kettle and settled it onto the coals. He took three pinches of black tea and dropped them into the pot. He found a pan by the stove with a few manti inside: Preen seemed to have cooked his supper and eaten it with her friend; and the mute, too, maybe. They'd saved something for him.
He set it on the stove and watched the butter melt, then stirred the manti with a wooden spoon. He thought of making a tomato sauce with the jar of puree, then decided that the manti were ready and he was too hungry, so he simply tipped them onto a plate and ground a few rounds of black pepper over them.
They were not excellent, he had to admit; slightly hard around the edges, in fact, but wonderfully good. He poured the tea and drank it with sugar and a cigarette leaning back on the divan and watching the raindrops sparkling on the lattice: the rain had stopped, and a weak wintry sunlight was making a last appearance before it faded for the night.
Palewski had been almost right, he thought. A dangerous party: always a guest, never a player. Only obliged to stand by, confused and helpless, as the old, grand battle raged, a battle that would never be won between the old and the new, reaction and renovation, memory and hope. Coming in too late, when last night's manti were already curling at the edges. Until he spoke to the bombardier, who swung the guns in time.
After a time he began to look around the room, not stirring but glancing from one object to the next before he saw what he wanted. He reached out and took it in his hand, half smiling: a little cloisonne dagger with no pommel, only its beautifully enameled hilt and scabbard making a single crescent, tapering to a fine point. He slid the dagger halfway out and admired the gleam of its perfect steel, then pushed it back, hearing the tiny click as it settled into the scabbard again.
Damascus steel, cold drawn, the product of a thousand years' experience--and the finer it was worked, the less it showed the labor. It was not as they crafted such things now. He wondered if she'd know the difference, not that it mattered. It was a beautiful and satisfying thing. Dangerous, but protective, too. Perhaps she'd look at it now and then, and in her white northern world of ice it would bring back some memory to make her smile.
For several minutes he weighed the dagger in his palm, thinking of it, and then he frowned and set it gently aside and got up and washed in the basin as best he could.
130
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"We have orders to admit no one until the disturbance has subsided," the butler intoned, placing his large body in the doorway of the embassy.
"There is no disturbance," Yashim said. The butler merely pursed his lips.
Yashim sighed and held out a small package. "Would you see to it that this reaches Her Excellency the Princess?"
The butler glanced down and sniffed. "And from whom shall I say it comes?"
"Oh--just say a Turk."
"Yashim!"
Eugenia was coming slowly down the stairs, one hand floating by the rail and the other at her cheek.
"Come in!"
The butler stepped back and Eugenia took Yashim's hands in hers and led him to the sofa. The butler hovered over her.
"That's all right," she said. "We're friends."
"From the gentleman, Your Highness."
The butler handed her Yashim's packet and stood back.
"Tea for our visitor, please," Eugenia said. When the butler had gone she dropped the packet on her lap, took hold of Yashim's hands again, and looked him steadily in the eye.
"I think--we are going home." She flashed a sudden smile and squeezed his hands. "Derentsov--my husband--is furious. And frightened. He thinks he's been betrayed."
Yashim nodded slowly.
"You know who it was, don't you?" Eugenia tilted her head back and appraised him with a slow smile. "They all think that you don't matter. But you are clever."
Yashim glanced away. "Do you want to know?" he asked her quietly.
She shook her head. "It would spoil everything. I have a duty to my husband, and there are some secrets I can't keep. He was raving this morning, saying he'd been compromised. No choice but to resign. Determined to return us to St. Petersburg and face the czar."
"And the balls, and the dinners, and the ladies with their fans. I know."
"It will be hard."
"But you have a duty to your husband."
They laughed softly together.
"What is this?" she said, hefting the packet in her hand.
"Open it and see."
She did, and he showed her the tiny catch that slipped the dagger from its scabbard.
"It reminds me of something," she said mischievously. "And someone."
Their eyes met, and the mischievous look disappeared.
"I don't think--"
"That we'll meet again? No. But--I will always dream. Of you."
"If I told the ladies of St. Petersburg--"
"Don't say a word."
Eugenia shook her lovely head. "I won't," she said. "I never would."
She leaned forward, tilting her head slightly to one side so that a lock of her black hair swung free.
"Kiss me," she said.
They kissed.
Russian or otherwise, a butler is a butler. He is unflappable. He is discreet.
Yashim had gone before he served the tea.
131
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"So it seems that the seraskier was right," said Mahmut II. "It's good that we had him in the city. But what a terrible accident, just when everything was going so well."
"Yes, Sultan."
"They say he fell. I suppose he'd climbed up somewhere for a better view. Fires to fight, and all that, eh?"
"Yes, Sultan."
"We'll give him a splendid funeral, don't worry about that. You two got along pretty well, didn't you?"
Yashim inclined his head.
"Something new, he'd have liked that. Gun carriages, maybe, and a few platoons of Guards firing volleys over his grave. Show that the sultan doesn't forget his friends. We might even name the fire tower at Beyazit after him. Ugly object. Seraskiers Tower. Hmm. The empire honors its heroes, you know."
The sultan picked at his nose.
"I never liked him much. That's the worst I can say of him. At least he knew his duty."
Yashim kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
The sultan looked at him with narrowed eyes.
"My mother says that you did a great deal to prepare her for the ordeal she passed through last night. It seems to me you did very little."
He snuffed. Yashim looked up and caught his eye.
The sultan blinked and looked away.
"Hrrmph. I suppose it was enough in the end. And frankly, the eunuchs are perfectly quiet now. Takes one to catch one, I imagine."
He picked up a little whisk and began to twirl it between his fingers.
"The point is, I need someone in here, since the kislar's gone. Someone who knows the ropes, but a bit younger."
Yashim froze. It was the second job he'd been offered in the last twenty-four hours. The eyes and ears of the new republic? Now it was power and the promise of riches. The second job he didn't want.
He began to say that he wasn't young. He was white. Whiteish, anyway--but the sultan wasn't listening.
"There's an archivist," he said. "New man. Keen, good-looking, it'd frighten some of the old men, wouldn't it? I can't replace them all. And I could keep an eye on him, too. Reminds me of the kislar when he was young, before he started spooning up this tradition stuff and murdering the girls. He wasn't in on the whole charade, either. That's what I like. Give him a frock coat and a baton. That's it. My man."
Yashim felt a flood of relief. He had no doubt that Ibou would prove to be a perfect kislar agha; a little young, perhaps, but time would offer its inevitable solution. At least he would vault straight over all the terrible compromises and feuds that had dr
iven the former incumbent to the verge of madness as he clambered his way to the top. And he would be quick to learn his duty. Maybe even genuinely grateful.
"The sultan is most wise," he said. It was better not to say more.
"Well, well." The sultan rose from his chair. "This has been a most interesting discussion. To be honest, Yashim, I sometimes think you know more than you say. Which may be wise in its way, too. It is for God to know everything, and for us to learn only what we need."
He scrabbled shortsightedly at the little table and picked up a leather purse.
"Take this. The seraskier would no doubt have rewarded you, and in the circumstances the task is left to me."
Yashim caught the purse in midair.
He bowed. The sultan nodded shortly.
"The valide wants a gossip, I understand. There was an edict," he added, "but it will have to wait after all. We'll see the household settled before that. And the city, too."
He waved a hand, and Yashim bowed as he withdrew.
132
***********
"Was there a twist?" The valide smiled. "I like a twist."
"Yes," Yashim said. He thought of telling the unvarnished truth but knew that it would never make a proper story. "The seraskier was rotten to the core. He planned the whole thing."
The valide clapped her hands. "I knew it!" she cried. "How did you guess?
"It was a number of little things." Yashim told her how eager the seraskier had been to spread panic at the murders, at which the valide nodded vigorously and said that he was obviously being used. How, exactly, had the men been murdered, she wanted to know.
And Yashim told her.
He explained that his friend Palewski had spoken with the seraskier in French at a cafe one evening.
"When he denied all knowledge of it! Ha ha!" The valide wagged a finger.
He told her then about the Russian, Potemkin.
"What a villain!" The valide snorted. "Ruined by his scar, no doubt. He must have been charming, in his way, to lure the fellows into his carriage. But all the same," she added, putting the image of the wounded charmer to one side and considering the practicalities, "what did the Russians have to gain by getting involved?"
And Yashim told her.
"They're poised for a takeover of Istanbul," he said. "Ever since the days of the Byzantines they've dreamed of the city. It was the second Rome-- and Moscow is the third. They wanted anarchy in Istanbul. They didn't care how it happened--a Janissary coup, the seraskier going mad and proclaiming himself ruler, anything. If the House of Osman was extinguished, imagine the consequences! They're camped a week or so away. They'd claim to be restoring order, or to be protecting the Orthodox, or to being sucked into the vortex one way or another, it wouldn't matter how. Just so long as they could occupy the city and provide themselves with a reasonable excuse afterward, when the European powers started kicking up a fuss. The French, the English, they're terrified of letting the Russians in--but once they're in, they'd be here to stay. Look at the Crimea."
"What brutes!" the valide breathed. The Crimea had been taken by the Russians, by a combination of threats and stealth and bloody war. "They backed the Greeks, as well!"
"Everyone backed the Greeks," Yashim reminded her soberly, "but certainly the Russians lit the spark there, too."
The valide was silent.
"To think that all this was hovering over our heads while I dealt with the kislar in the palace," she said after a pause. "I thought that was a drama, but it was a sideshow."
"Not really," Yashim suggested. "If the seraskier's plans hadn't come off--and they didn't, did they--there would still have been a revolution, but for you. A counterrevolution, as they call it, going back to the old ways."
"We should thank the girl, of course. Asul," the valide pointed out. "I've seen plays, you know. When I was young, I saw them in Dominique. I suppose you might say I set the scene; but she performed the final act. Thanks to you, Yashim."
Yashim bowed his head.
The valide reached for a bag by her divan and pulled the string at its mouth.
"I've got just the thing for you," she said.
She fished inside the bag and brought out a book with a paper cover. She held it up between her two hands and let Yashim read the title, emblazoned in red.
"Le Pere Goriot," he read. "By Honore de Balzac."
"There." She held it out. "Quite disgusting, I'm afraid."
"What makes you give it to me?"
"They say it's all the rage in Paris. I've read it now, and it's about corruption, deceit, greed, lies."
She patted the cover of the book and held it out to Yashim.
"Sometimes, you know, I am so glad I never got to see France."
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