49
“THE two Frankish ladies? But they are gone, efendi, this hour or more.” The fat old lady glanced involuntarily at the till: they had been lavish with their tips, the Frankish girls.
“Gone? How did they go into the street?” Yashim asked, surprised.
The old lady raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Murad! Murad! There you are,” she added, as a man stepped into the little domed office by the hammam entrance. “The Frankish women. You saw them home?”
Yashim’s lips tightened. “Where to?”
Murad scratched his head. “Not far. Ghika’s place.”
“But they were supposed to meet me here.”
The old lady said: “Perhaps they got tired of waiting?”
“So—Ghika’s place. Where’s that?”
It took Yashim less than ten minutes to reach the house, but his anxiety dissolved in an instant when he saw Natasha on the stairs. She was descending slowly, one gloved hand trailing against the wall, the other clutching her skirt to keep her from tripping: the last rays of a dying sun suffused her hair with an almost unearthly light.
She raised a finger to her lips.
“Shhh! Birgit’s asleep—with Giancarlo!”
Yashim tried to give her a disapproving look, but failed. “The valide would have had my head if anything had happened to you,” he said.
“Are you scolding me? I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes. Then she glanced up again, and laughed.
“Are we going back to the palace?”
Yashim smiled. “I see you’ve grown accustomed to Ottoman life. Is it such a chore?”
Natasha blew out her cheeks. She looked radiant, Yashim noticed: as though the baths had sloughed away a layer of Siberian frost. Her skin shone.
“No, not a chore, exactly,” she said slowly, her eyes dancing with amusement. “But it is how the valide warned me it might be, a little. Talking to the ladies, well. They only want to discuss the latest fashion—and I’m not a very fashionable person. I think they’re disappointed in me.”
An idea seemed to strike her. “It’s rather like being at the baths, isn’t it? All those women, trying to be beautiful? At least there everyone goes naked—there’s nothing to pretend, and everyone is the better for it.” She told Yashim about an enormously fat woman who wasn’t obviously beautiful. “But she was magnificent, Yashim, jowls and all. I thought, when I’m old and fat, I want to be like her.”
“It doesn’t seem very likely,” Yashim murmured.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Natasha continued gaily, sliding her hand under his arm. “Fat or thin, or gray, or bent—I’d be myself, wouldn’t I? But at the palace it’s worse somehow. Sad. Not the valide—she does exactly as she pleases, and she’s magnificent, too. But the others live to please, I suppose—and there’s no one to please, except her.”
“And she’s not easily pleased,” Yashim pointed out.
They stepped out into the street.
“No. She doesn’t much care. But everyone else wants me to tell them how the ladies dress in Saint Petersburg these days.” She shrugged. “How many petticoats? Does a skirt spring from the waist—and is it true that sleeves are being worn long this year? They are always fingering my hair here”—she pulled at the dark strands that framed her cheeks, and grimaced—“and questioning my bonnets. The only thing they really approve of is my shawl—and not because they think it’s pretty. They have much lovelier ones. Just because they think it’s more à la mode these days.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “So that’s what I think when you ask if I want to go back to the palace. Not a chore, of course not. But not the Arabian nights.” She gave him a sly look from under her lashes. “You know, I feel astonishingly clean. My skin feels clean and bright after all that scrubbing and pounding. It gives me—energy.”
She said it with a fierce little twist, and Yashim had to laugh—partly to still the little hollow that had just flickered in his chest. Natasha looked beautiful—and he had thought her plain!—with those lively, intelligent dark eyes framed by the two perfect arcs of her eyebrows, her lips dark and full, and her high Russian cheekbones scattered merrily with the lightest of freckles. And she had spoken of her skin …
He had shown her the sights, in daylight—Ayasofya, the Blue Mosque, the Egyptian bazaar—and she had accepted them like a list of indisputable facts set out in a child’s copybook. The sky is blue. The church is old. Air is composed of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. But daylight was a ruthless pedagogue.
At dusk, the muezzin’s call sounded the half-plaintive, half-triumphant note of man crying in the void, while all around his handiwork was blurring into insubstantial shadows. Then the Bosphorus, almost still, became a silver gleam; the bats swooped out from the archways and the domes; the minarets grew long enough to touch the stars. The hills of Asia, across the water, beetled closer for protection. The markets emptied out, the coins lay stacked, the merchandise slumbered in piles, and—
Somewhere out there, Yashim reflected, Prince Czartoryski lay hidden, or dead.
“We could go anywhere,” he ventured. “Are you hungry?”
“I thought you liked to cook,” she said, squeezing his arm.
“I do.”
She pushed and pulled his arm, like a child. “Then ask me home. Take me there slowly—but don’t make me walk. All that dust!” She crinkled her nose. “It would be too much like Siberia.”
“I thought Siberia was a land of endless snow?”
“Ah, white and very clean—like me? You are absolutely right, Yashim. But it has another face—a dirty one, in summer. Then nothing is hidden anymore.”
They were walking slowly down toward the Bosphorus, arm in arm. Below them lay the village of Galata. “Karaköy,” Yashim said. “That’s its Turkish name. Kara means ‘black,’ so people think it’s the Black Village, but it’s really Karaköy after the Karaites.”
“Who?”
“A Jewish sect. They build synagogues underground, I don’t know why. There have been Karaites here for centuries, but more came from the Crimea after you Russians took it from us.”
“I suppose many people feel like exiles,” Natasha said. “Not just us—my father and me, I mean. The Jews make a religion of it,” she added, as they passed a synagogue. “The Greeks are exiles in their own country. The Turks—do they yearn for a return to the steppe? The valide—born in Martinique. Your Polish friend, without a country to return to. Even those boys, Birgit’s Italians. Is Istanbul a city of exiles?”
“Mind the steps,” Yashim warned her. “We’ll take a caïque from here.”
Minutes later, they were rocking gently up the Golden Horn.
“A city of exiles?” Yashim came back to her theme. “Perhaps it was always like that, from the moment it was founded as the second Rome. A city of people who came from somewhere else.”
“Like the Turks?”
“Turks, Latins, even Greeks, many of them. Armenians, and Jews, and Laz from Georgia. The Genoese, who founded Pera and built the Galata Tower. After the conquest, Mehmet brought a whole new population into the city—Serbs and Greeks, and Muslims from Anatolia, and so on.”
A thin wind whipped at the water, and Natasha slid her arm beneath his.
“What’s making you smile?”
“I’ve been complaining,” Yashim said, “how Istanbul is overrun with foreigners these days. As if it was ever any different.”
At the Balat stage he helped her ashore. A lantern swung at the landing stage, but the streets were dark and he held her hand as he led her up the hill toward his home.
They climbed the stairs in darkness. Inside the flat, he lit lamps, settled her on the cushions, offered tea.
“What I said about exiles. Are you one, too?”
“An exile?” He looked around. “This is my home, Natasha.”
“Not like that. I mean—perhaps you are, in one way. In a kind of internal exile.”
She spoke haltingly, feeling for
the right words like someone searching for a hidden spring.
Yashim gazed up at her. He had never considered it this way. It was something he tried not to consider at all, working each day to its end so as not to have to think.
“From the world? Not really. It’s not—exile.”
“Not exiled from the whole world, but from a part of it. Perhaps you impose it on yourself? Inner exile, where you control the borders.” She bent forward and touched his arm, on the inside, where his sleeve lay open; he shivered. “Exile from—women,” she faltered. She looked earnestly into his warm gray eyes.
Yashim felt suddenly very tired. “It’s not—it’s just—” He shook his head.
Her arm went up and she took his head in her hand and pulled him closer. At the last moment she turned her head aside, and gave a little gasp. “Please. Please don’t kiss me.”
She glanced back sideways at him through lowered lids. “I—want”—she began, inching her words out in breath, not quite using her voice—“I want you—to do it. To do it—want it.” Her hand closed on the back of his head, her body twisted; it was as if she were speaking from some other place, deep inside her. Her mouth tensed, as though in pain.
“Natasha,” Yashim murmured.
She let go of him, sat back, and picked up the hem of her long skirts, allowing them to ruffle upward, over her knees. “Like this. Please, Yashim.” She flung one hand back across her eyes, while the other bunched her skirt up between her thighs. “Do it. I want you to.”
She raised a knee; the skirt fell back along her thigh, its hem drifting among the petticoats and frills. “Come.” She lifted her hand from her skirts to reach out to him, looking at him from beneath her wrist. “Come here.”
He heard the catch in her voice, a little sob, a gasp almost, as her raised knee dropped to one side, making the frills bounce and stretch against her naked thigh. “Quickly, please. Yashim, I want you to do it. Ah!”
It was a tiny cry, like a bird, and Yashim was there, while her hand slid down the muscles of his back, dragging at his shirt, snatching at it, catching the hem. She opened her thighs, and as he pressed forward she squeezed her thighs together for a fraction—a fraction of resistance that seemed to be also a wince of pleasure, and then both of them thrust, she from the bed, he from his knees between her knees. Natasha groaned, bit her lip, and her chin was rising, the smooth skin of her neck tightening into hollows and cords, taut, abandoned, oblivious.
She spoke only to cajole him, to ask him to go harder, to go faster, to go slower: to hold her there, to touch her thighs and buttocks, while she dug her fingers into his back.
Yashim let go: he who was always measured, always in control, was allowed this once to let his mind go free. “Do it,” she gasped: and she freed him from the pain; “Now! More!” and his memory was dissolved into a sweet now, a ravenous more, so that his whole body seemed to echo with her commands, her rising gasps, seemed to ache with the ache of her arms, now taut against his back, now flung akimbo over her head, driven by a need and a longing that was her longing, and her need, too.
She came with the same startled cry with which she had called him to her; with a flush that rose in her cheeks, the color coming and going over her neck like the shudders and the stillnesses of her hips. Sleepily she turned her head and gave him the flicker of a smile.
He smiled back, and felt her fingers running through his damp hair.
50
THE blood gathered in dark clots, coagulating gradually against the severed skin, hardening the dull surface of the drop that would never fall now that the blood was growing cool and had stopped flowing. Beneath it, on the floorboards, the flies had clustered already in the pool.
It was red in the bowl, too, where La Piuma had so carefully rinsed one hand with the other, paring the little moons of cloying blood from every fingernail, one by one. Not so much blood, there: yet it was enough to stain the water, so red and dark it had seemed that the basin was sloppy with pure blood.
Blood and water. Water and blood. It was a kind of transubstantiation.
51
“IS this how exiles make love, Yashim? Fiercely? Forgetfully?”
She touched his eyelids, twice. Yashim blinked and smiled. “Am I such an exile?”
“No,” she admitted gravely. “No, you’re not.” She leaned back, propping her cheek on her palm, looking at him.
She shifted her leg and scratched his bare calf with the heel of her buttoned boot.
“Ouch.”
A mischief came into her eyes, and she laughed softly.
“Very Arabian Nights, after all. I’m glad you didn’t take me to the palace.”
“Me, too.” He meant it. He felt giddy and full of joy, daring to hope that in an instant of forgetting he had forever escaped something he had always been unable to forget. And yet he did not want to think. “Are you hungry?”
“As a horse.”
Yashim got up, dancing into his pantaloons. Natasha’s slim bare legs scissored on the divan: she had never even removed her bodice. The thought of her utterly and gloriously naked made him hop as he dragged the pantaloons to his waist. Natasha saw, and laughed.
“I see I was wrong about exile.”
Yashim drew the strings tight, and padded over to the kitchen. He struck a light and lit two lamps.
He made her a simple omelet. There was fresh bread from the Libyan baker, and cheese and pickles from the picnic.
“I should go,” she said finally, when they had eaten. “They get cross at the palace if I’m late.”
He began to dress. “Do you need another shawl? It can be cold on the water.”
“Perhaps you’ll sit close beside me, Yashim, and keep me from it.”
Yashim blew out the lamps, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the moonlight. She stood beside him, and he heard her soft breath.
He had only to turn his head, and he could kiss her. But she stopped him first, with her fingers on his lips.
“No kisses,” she whispered. “All the rest.”
He took her hand and led her down the dark stairs.
52
AND what of the boys, those ardent revolutionaries, all this while? Still dreaming of a new dawn, as the real one broke over the ruined farmhouse where they had spent yet another uncomfortable, frightened night? The autumn dew lay heavy on the grass, bent and dark where animals had slipped past in the night: the tiny, broken track of a stoat, the stripe of a low-slung fox, the dark, dewy pools where a deer had jumped across the clearing.
As the sun rose, it revealed a world festooned with gossamer threads that shivered and sparkled in the light. They laced the grasses, spun from the grass to the trees, ran almost invisible from the window ledges and lintel of the old, half-broken door. They enclosed the revolutionaries, and their prisoner, in a fine-meshed net, all but invisible to those who were caught up in it. And another net was drawing closer around them every moment.
It was Czartoryski who drew it to their attention. He had woken up at that moment when the sky, from being true black night, begins to lean toward the dawn. Far off, too far away for his old ears to perfectly hear, a muezzin was calling the morning prayer; or perhaps it was a cock on a distant farm. He had, until that moment, slept well. The fact surprised him, for in Paris he was a notoriously light and difficult sleeper, prone to bouts of indigestion—and irritation, if anyone in his household made the slightest noise. He went to bed each night, safe and sound, and fell into uneasy sleep; but here, on a blanket pulled across the straw, in imminent danger of execution …
He reached out and slapped the nearest man. “I sleep here,” he roared out cheerfully, “like a Lithuanian corn merchant!”
He chuckled to see Giancarlo’s red face emerge snarling from the blanket, his fair hair stuck with wisps of straw.
His appetite! That was what had woken him, no doubt: a litany of deep, satisfactory grumblings in his belly. They had turned in as soon as it grew dark: the bandits were too afraid to hav
e a light, or even keep a fire, at night. He had slept a whole ten hours, and had the hunger of—who? Gargantua?
He rolled to one side and poked a shrouded figure in the straw.
“My hunger is Rabelaisian,” he growled. Fabrizio responded by snuggling deeper into his cocoon, pulling the blanket up around his ears. “Hear me? Breakfast?”
He laughed and wondered if he was going mad. Not he. The truth was, for years Czartoryski had led a life of intrigue, diplomacy, incessant work, incessant worry. He suspected everyone he came into contact with. He had pots of money, as the English would say: a staff of fourteen at the Hôtel Lambert, another twenty-five in the country. “Bonjour, mon prince. Bonsoir, mon prince. Voulez-vous prendre une tisane? Une bière? Château Lafite ’02?” The valet brought his correspondence to him on a silver tray, each morning sharp, at nine o’clock. Voluminous letters, begging letters, letters of support, letters from Poland, from Germany, from socialists, from liberals, from log cabins on the Ohio, from an Englishwoman who sought advice on her Pomeranians, coded letters from his agents, terse communications from his bankers—“O Prince, mon prince, vous souvenez-vous de moi? Répondez-moi. Un seul mot…”
Answers, decisions, ulcers.
And now all he had to fear was death, which comes to everyone. All he had to do was wait. No calls, no salvers, no letters. Not a care in the world.
He lay back and rubbed his stomach. For the next hour he amused and tortured himself by making an inventory of the finest breakfasts he had ever eaten. He set to thinking about the food he had left untouched. White butter subsiding into the heart of a warm roll, condemned by a crumpled napkin. A dish of eggs en cocotte that he had once petulantly mashed and sent back, cold, to the kitchen. Silver dishes of deviled kidneys, of crepes so buttery they glistened over the tiny spirit lamp that chafed the dish; mounds of fresh croissants, baskets overflowing with brioches, baguettes whiter inside than the snow in Warsaw, or the inside of a redhead’s thigh!
The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) Page 18