The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  “I see. He abandoned her?”

  “He abandoned all of us. You might say, monsieur, that he jeopardized the whole plan. If the Egyptians had caught him—well, you can imagine. I suppose he did what he felt he had to do to save his own neck. We had an uncomfortable day of it, once we’d found him gone. We couldn’t be sure the Egyptians didn’t know we were coming.” He straightened up and took a breath.

  “But Meyer wasn’t caught by the Egyptians.”

  “No,” Millingen said slowly. “He wasn’t caught.”

  Yashim stood very still. His eyes traveled slowly over the figure of the man in a frock coat leaning against the fireplace, over the two chairs, then over the ornate rug on the wooden floor.

  “And Chronica Hellenica? Do you still subscribe?”

  “Chronica—?” Dr. Millingen frowned. “No one subscribes to the Chronica these days. It folded years ago.”

  Yashim tilted his head back. “I’ve been wondering if he taught you that trick with the coin? Was that how Dr. Meyer whiled away his time? Or was he too busy with the Hetira? Was that formed at Missilonghi, too?”

  The question hung in the air.

  “I thought—at first—that the Hetira was like a secret army,” Yashim continued when Millingen did not reply. “Taking control of the Greeks in the city—raising money from them, terrorizing them, punishing them for stepping out of line. Preparing, perhaps, for an uprising. These are delicate times. I thought that the Hetira were killers.”

  Millingen sighed. “I told you once what the Hetira was. A boys’ club. A learned society. Chronica Hellenica—edited by Meyer—was our society journal. Our aim has always been to preserve Greek culture. We raise money for the maintenance of churches, here and throughout the Ottoman Empire. We sponsor schools. It’s nothing so very sinister.”

  “Then why the secrecy?”

  “Partly for amusement. Partly because, when we founded the society, we thought of ourselves as rebels. And partly for the sake of prudence. You might call it a matter of tact. Not everyone in the Ottoman Empire takes kindly to the idea of Greek cultural unity. But perhaps we have pushed the secrecy too far.”

  Yashim looked doubtful. “But Dr. Stephanitzes’s book is inflammatory, isn’t it?”

  “Dr. Stephanitzes has a mystical turn of mind, Yashim efendi. And he is something of a scholar. You might take that book as a statement of intent, I don’t know. For Stephanitzes, it is simply an exercise in tracing the development of the restoration legend over the centuries. He’s a Greek, of course: he wants to show that the Greeks are different. It really matters to him that the Greeks developed a cultural resistance to Ottoman rule—otherwise, they would simply be Ottomans in Greek costume. And then what do you have left? Only politics. And politics, as I have no doubt said before, is the Greeks’ national vice.”

  Millingen paused to relight his pipe. “That,” he said, puffing, “is what Missilonghi taught us. And it’s why we established the Hetira. Secret, cultural—and essentially unpolitical.”

  “If that’s true,” Yashim said dejectedly, “you have wasted a great deal of my time.”

  A skein of blue smoke edged upward from Millingen’s pipe.

  “When you saw Lefèvre,” Yashim said slowly, “did he mention the possibility of other buyers?”

  Millingen shrugged. “A man like Lefèvre,” he began. “If you were trying to sell something, wouldn’t you try to create an auction?”

  “But no one could trust him.”

  “No. But don’t forget, I was instructed to buy on sight. We wanted Lefèvre to find his—” He paused, looking for the right words. “His Byzantine relics. But other people might have wanted them—not to be found. It’s only an idea.”

  Yashim was silent for a moment.

  “Do you think the Mavrogordatos had him killed?” he asked at length.

  “Why—what makes you say that?”

  “You know the answer to that, doctor. Madame Mavrogordato.”

  “What rubbish,” Millingen retorted, rising to his feet.

  “Lefèvre was married to Madame Mavrogordato. At Missilonghi—until he ran away.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Millingen said furiously. “Petros!” He got up quickly and bellowed at the door. “Petros!”

  There was a sound of rushing feet outside. To Yashim, it sounded as if someone were going up the stairs—and again, that curious swishing noise he’d heard before. But then Petros appeared, looking alarmed.

  “This gentleman is leaving,” Millingen said crisply. “Show him the door, Petros.”

  106

  THE Sulëymaniye Mosque stands on the third hill of Istanbul, overlooking the Golden Horn. Built by Sinan, the master architect, for his patron, Suleyman the Magnificent, in 1557, it reflects all the piety and grandeur of its age. Some of the foremost scholars of Islam toiled in its medresse or consulted its well-stocked library; its kitchens fed over a thousand mouths a day, in charity; and its central fountain, in the Great Court, gladdened the hearts of the faithful and cooled the hands and faces of shoppers emerging from the Grand Bazaar nearby.

  When, in the course of the morning, the spurting jets of the fountain declined to a mere dribble, it aroused irritation—and some anxiety. Some of the faithful objected that the water could not be very fresh; some of the more superstitious wondered if the unspoken crisis was approaching, and asked for news of the sultan’s health.

  Fifty feet or so beneath the ground, in a spur off the main pipe that Sinan had himself constructed, water was backing up against an unusual obstruction, formed at a point where two pipes of a different gauge met. The obstruction at first was merely a tangled mass of wool and loose stones, but it became a nuisance only later, when it was compounded by the drifting corpse of a former waterman called Enver Xani. Xani filled the hole quite neatly; and as the water level rose, so the blockage of bloated flesh and wool and stones was jammed ever more firmly against the narrow lip of the smaller pipe. It became the perfect seal.

  The dribble of water from the fountain of the Sulëymaniye eventually stopped flowing altogether; but the sultan, according to reports, was still alive.

  107

  YASHIM sat in the sunshine, nursing his coffee. He ordered some baklava; the hours in Millingen’s sunless study had drained him of energy.

  An elderly Greek, bent at the waist, hands clasped behind his back, was coming down the side of the road. He wore a red fez, a long jacket, and white pantaloons. Every so often he stopped to look in a shop window or craned his neck to inspect some new building work; once he turned around completely to follow the swaying hips of a pretty Armenian woman with a basket and her hair in a plait. His blue eyes sparkled under a pair of bushy white eyebrows. When he caught sight of Yashim he stopped again, smiled, and raised those eyebrows slightly, as if they had shared a joke together, or a regret, before resuming his stately progress down the Grande Rue de Pera.

  A group of Franks, led by a man with a huge belly who mopped his brow repeatedly with a handkerchief, sauntered along the road. The men wore black coats and striped waistcoats; the ladies wore bonnets and turned their heads about, like blinkered horses. Yashim couldn’t catch what they were saying but guessed they were Italians, probably staying at one of the new lodging houses higher up the street; their dragoman carried a fly whisk and wore a mustache. Yashim wondered if he was Greek, but thought not: more likely an Italian-speaking native of Pera, descended from the city’s original Genoese inhabitants.

  It seemed to Yashim that he had once been able to glance at people’s feet to tell who they were, and where they belonged. In Fener or Sultanahmet, perhaps, but in Pera, no longer. The distinctions blurred; the categories no longer held. That lanky figure in a Frankish suit—was he Russian? Belgian? Or an Ottoman, indeed—a Bosnian schoolmaster, perhaps, or a Russified Moldavian shipping agent?

  The baklava was hard and sticky; it was made, he suspected, with sugar syrup as well as honey.

  And where
did he stand, among these people whose origins were so clouded and confused?

  Years ago, Yashim supposed, the distinctions had been simple. You were born to a faith, and there you lived and died. It was given to very few—Yashim among them—to change their state in life. But now people cast their skins, like snakes. Lefèvre was Meyer. Istanbul was Constantinople. A lecherous bully became a priest, and Millingen was the Hetira—a revolutionary organization that on close inspection turned out to be an antiquarian club. Sometimes the only evidence of their presence was the outer layer of their skin, shed as they moved from one incarnation to another. Perhaps the old prophecy was true: with the Serpent Column destroyed, Istanbul had become overrun.

  He thought again about Lefèvre. He had spoken of his passion for Istanbul, for the layers of history that had built up on the shores of the Bosphorus, at the point where Asia and Europe met, and the Black Sea flowed into the Mediterranean. A man and a city whose identities had been reshaped. Constantinople, or Istanbul. Meyer, or Lefèvre.

  Yashim sighed, drawn in spite of himself to acknowledge an affinity with the dead man. Yashim the boy, expecting to become a man—the man he did not, in the end, quite become—was the memory of a self that clung to him the way the serpents coiled together on the Hippodrome. The snakes had had their three heads and their three coils, but they occupied the same space, in a single column.

  Meyer. Lefèvre. Could it be that there was, perhaps, a third aspect to the man? He had a fleeting vision of the dreadful corpse, as fanged and terrible as a serpent’s head itself.

  What was it that Grigor had said? That a city doesn’t change because you change its name. A city is not a name: it’s a sequence of lives, gestures, memories, all entwined. Lefèvre found stories in its rubble; for Yashim, these stories were found in the voices you heard on the street, in the murmur that surrounded mosques and markets, in a tired boy leaning his burden against a dirty wall, a cat jumping after bats in the dark, the curve of a caïque rower’s back.

  A city endures which also grows, forever adding new identities to the old. To a Parisian, Istanbul was the East. To an Indian, it was the West. What of the Jews, clustered in Balat—did they live in a Jewish city? Did Preen see a city of entertainers? Or the valide a city of palaces and concubines?

  One day, if men like Dr. Stephanitzes had their way, Istanbul could revert to being the capital of Greece. They could tear down the minarets, exchange the crescent for the cross, but Suleyman’s Muslim city would still survive, nestled into the very fabric of the place, submerged like the cisterns of Byzantine Istanbul.

  This city, Yashim reflected, was very resilient. A survivor.

  Like Lefèvre himself.

  108

  “I didn’t think we’d see each other again,” Grigor said.

  “We still share this city.”

  Grigor sighed. “In space, Yashim, and time. But here?” He jabbed his thumb to his chest. “Or here?” And he placed his index finger to his temple.

  Yashim bowed his head. “We share—certain responsibilities, at least.”

  “To whom?”

  Yashim heard the sneer in Grigor’s voice.

  “To the dead, Grigor.”

  Grigor put up a hand and ran his fingers through his beard.

  “Experience has taught me that we should keep to our own spheres. Our own circuits. There are boundaries in Constantinople: beyond them we trespass at our peril.”

  “You told me before that the church is concerned with the things of the spirit,” Yashim answered carefully. “Caesar wants obedience. But God wants Truth, isn’t that so?”

  Grigor made a dismissive motion with his hand. “I don’t think God is very interested in your sort of truth, Yashim. It’s very small. Who did what to whom—who talked, who was silent, the year 1839. God is the Eternal.”

  “We have long memories, though. Ideas outlive us.”

  “What are you saying?” Grigor growled.

  “Byzantine treasure, Grigor. The relics. I know where they are.”

  The archimandrite glanced out of the window. “You, too?”

  “Would you pay me for them?”

  Grigor was silent for a while. “What I would or would not pay is beyond discussion,” he said at last. “It would be for the Patriarch to decide.”

  “What did the Patriarch decide—the last time?”

  “The last time?”

  “Lefèvre.”

  “Ah. Monsieur Lefèvre,” Grigor echoed, placing his hands flat on the table. “Doesn’t that answer your question?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I think,” Grigor said, rising, “that I will forget we ever spoke. Do you really know where the relics are?”

  “I’m not even sure that they exist.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m glad you said that, Yashim. For old times’ sake.”

  109

  YASHIM walked slowly back to his apartment, mulling over Grigor’s words. If Grigor believed the relics did exist himself…But that was not what Grigor had said.

  He turned at the market, to start uphill.

  “Yashim efendi!”

  Yashim stooped to the gradient.

  “Yashim efendi! I knows what they takes from you—and this is not ears! What for you’s deaf today?”

  He raised his head and turned around. George was standing in front of his stall, hands on his hips.

  “So! You eats in lokanta this days? You forgets what is food? Little kebab, little dolma makes like shit!”

  George had made a remarkable recovery, Yashim noticed.

  “You sees a ghost, Yashim efendi?” George bellowed, thumping his chest. “Yes, I am a thin man now. But this stall—she is like womans! Happy womans, to see George again. So she—she is veeerrrry fat!”

  Yashim strode up to George’s stall. “What happened?” he asked, gesturing to the great piles of eggplants, the cucumbers and tomatoes spilling out of baskets, a pyramid of lemons.

  “Eh,” George sighed, absently scratching an armpit as he surveyed his stock. “Is mostly shit, efendi. My garden,” he added apologetically, cocking his head at a basket of outsize cucumbers curved like thin green sickles. “Today, I gives away everything for nothing.”

  Yashim nodded. In the week George had been in hospital the vegetables on his plot would have run riot.

  “But”—and George’s voice became hoarse with conspiracy—“I finds one beautiful thing.”

  He dug around in the back of his stall and came out bearing two small white eggplants in the palm of one massive hand, a thread of miniature tomatoes in the other.

  “Is very little, you see? No water.”

  Yashim nodded. “These are so pretty I could eat them raw.”

  George looked at him with a flash of concern. “You eats these raw,” he said, jiggling the eggplants in his hand, “you is sick at the stomach.” He shoved the vegetables into Yashim’s hands. “No lokanta, efendi. Slowly, slowly, we gets better again. You. My garden. And me, too.”

  Yashim took the gift. On his way up the hill he thought: George left his garden for a week, and now he is back.

  The sound of the muezzins caught him halfway up the hill. The sun was fading in the west behind him; ahead, darkness had already fallen.

  Across the Horn, Yashim considered, the French ambassador would soon be writing his report.

  At his door, at the top of the stairs, he paused and listened.

  There was no sound: no rustle of pages being turned, no sigh. No Amélie.

  Yashim pushed the door cautiously, gently, and peered into the gloom. Everything was in its place.

  He went in slowly and fumbled for the lamp; and when it was lit he sat for a long time on the edge of the sofa with only his shadow for company.

  Amélie had gone, leaving nothing behind. Only a sense of her absence.

  After a while Yashim leaned forward, his eye drawn to his shelves.

  Something else, he noticed, had changed. The Gyllius
, too, was gone.

  110

  AUGUSTE Boyer, chargé d’affaires to the ambassador, had not been sleeping well. Drifting off to sleep, he would remember with a start of shame his own appearance at the courtyard window, drooling onto the cobbles: the ambassador could easily have seen him. Asleep, he dreamed of faceless men and wild dogs.

  Yashim’s arrival shortly after Boyer had dressed, and before he had drunk his bowl of coffee, collided unhappily in the attaché’s mind with the memory of Lefèvre’s bloodless corpse.

  “The ambassador cannot possibly be disturbed,” he said vehemently.

  “He’s asleep?”

  “Certainly not,” Boyer retorted. “Already he is settling various affairs, in discussion with embassy staff.” Like the chef, he thought: there was a luncheon planned. Provided, of course, the ambassador was awake. Boyer’s tummy began to rumble; he pulled out a small handkerchief and coughed.

  “Do you happen to know if the ambassador has completed his report into the death of the unfortunate Monsieur Lefèvre?”

  Boyer regarded the eunuch with some distaste. “I have no idea,” he said.

  Yashim still entertained a small hope of delay. “And the testimony of Madame Lefèvre? Did that prove useful?”

  Boyer looked at him blankly. “Madame Lefèvre?”

  “Amélie Lefèvre. His wife,” Yashim explained. “She came here the evening before last.”

  Auguste Boyer thought of his bowl of coffee, growing cold.

  “Of Monsieur Lefèvre,” he said, drawing himself up, “the embassy is aware. But as for Madame—no, monsieur, I am afraid that you are utterly mistaken.”

  Yashim rocked slowly on his heels.

  “Madame Lefèvre came here to the embassy. She had been in Samnos, and she needed help to get home. To France.”