YASHIM rolled out of bed, slipped on a djellaba and slippers, took his purse from a hook, and went down into the street. Three turns brought him to the Kara Davut Sokaği, where he drank two cups of thick, sweet coffee and ate a borek, layers of honeyed pastry fried in oil. Often in the night, at the time when people tend to lie awake and follow their plans out until they drift away into a happy sleep, Yashim thought of moving from his rooms in the tenement to somewhere bigger and lighter, with proper views. He’d designed a small library for himself, with a comfortable, well-lit alcove for reading, and a splendid kitchen, too, with a room off the side for a servant to sleep in—someone to riddle up the fire in the morning and fetch him his coffee. Sometimes it was the library that looked out over the blue Bosphorus, sometimes it was the kitchen. The water threw soothing patterns of light onto the ceiling. An open window caught a glimmer of the summer breeze.
And in the morning, coming down to the Kara Davut, he always decided to stay where he was. He’d leave his books to glower in the half-light, and his kitchen would fill the room with the scent of cardamom and mint and throw steam onto the windows. He’d labor up and down flights of steep stairs and crack his head, from time to time, on the lintel of the sunken doorway. Because the Kara Davut was his kind of street. Ever since he’d found this café, where the proprietor always remembered how he liked his coffee—straight, no spice, a hint of sugar—he’d been happy in the Kara Davut. The people all knew him, but they weren’t prying or gossipy. Not that he gave them anything to gossip about: Yashim led a quiet, blameless life. He went to mosque with them on Fridays. He paid his bills. In return he asked for nothing more than to be left in peace over his morning coffees, to watch the street show, to be waved over by the fishmonger with news of an important haul or to visit the Libyan baker for his excellent sprouted-grain bread.
Was that quite true? Did he really want to be left in peace? The seraskier’s note, the sultan’s summons, the fishmonger winking, and the coffee done right for him each day: weren’t these exactly the links he craved? Yashim’s air of invisibility sometimes struck even him as a protective pose, his own version of the stagy mannerisms of those little gelded boys who grew to become the eunuch guardians of a family and slipslopped after their charges, frowning and moueing and letting their hands flutter toward their hearts. Perhaps detachment was a mannerism he had adopted because the agony was too biting and too strong to bear without it. A very fragile kind of make-believe.
Yashim looked along the street. An imam in a tall white cap lifted his black robe a few inches to avoid soiling it in a puddle and stepped quietly past the café, not turning his head. A small boy with a letter trotted by, stopping at a neighboring café to ask the way. From the opposite direction a shepherd kept his little flock in order with a hazel wand, continually talking to them, as oblivious to the street as if they were following an empty pathway among the hills of Thrace. Two veiled women were heading for the baths; behind them a black slave carried a bundle of clothes. A porter, bent double beneath his basket, was followed by a train of mules with logs for firewood, and little Greek children darted in and out between their clattering hooves. Here came a cavass: a thickly swaddled policeman with a red fez and pistols thrust into his belt, and two Armenian merchants, one swinging his beads, the other counting them with fingers while he spoke.
Yashim sipped his coffee and ground his teeth. There had once been hatred in him; it had passed. It had ebbed away slowly, like a receding flood, leaving only its shining imprint in his mind, the dangerous outline of bitterness and rage. These days he walked warily where the flood had been, trying to recognize old landmarks, to piece together the elements of an honorable life out of the jumble of everyday objects he encountered.
Yashim squeezed his eyes shut tight, to focus on the order of the day. He had to visit the seraskier. Standing by that cauldron in the wee hours of yesterday morning, there were any number of questions he’d been too surprised to ask. What had the soldiers been doing on the night they disappeared? What did their relatives think of the affair? Who were their friends? Who were their enemies?
Then there was the cauldron to reckon with: the oddest and most sinister part of the whole affair. He needed to visit the soup makers to see what they had to say.
As for the girl in the palace and the valide’s jewels—that was, you might say, a more private affair. In every family home, there lay a region that was harem, forbidden to outsiders. In the Topkapi palace, this region was almost an acre in size, a warren of corridors and courtyards, of winding stairs and balconies so cunningly contrived that it was sealed from the world’s gaze as effectively as if it had been built in the great Sahara, instead of in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world.
With the rarest exceptions, no man but the sultan himself, or men of his family, could enter the harem.
Yashim was one of the exceptions. He could go where no ordinary man could go, on pain of death.
It did not do to make too much of the palace harem itself. It wasn’t the harem that made eunuchs, though many of them worked there, and the Black Eunuchs, led by the kislar agha, effectively controlled it. Unlike Yashim, unlike many of the White Eunuchs, unlike the castrati of the Vatican, the Black Eunuchs of the palace were utterly clean-cropped: shaved to the quick in a single sweep of the sickle blade wielded by a slaver in the desert. Each of them now carried a small and exquisite silver tube, tucked into a fold of their turban, for performing the most modest of bodily functions.
Yet men had been gelded for service in the time of Darius and Alexander, too. Ever since the idea of dynasties arose, there had been eunuchs who commanded fleets, who generaled armies, who subtly set out the policies of states. Sometimes Yashim dimly saw himself enrolled in a strange fraternity, the shadow-world of the guardians: men who since time immemorial had held themselves apart, the better to watch and serve. It included the eunuchs of the ancient world, and of the Chinese emperor in Beijing. What of the Catholic hierarchy in Europe, which had supplied the celibate priests who served the kings of Christendom? The service of barren men, like their desires, began and ended with their death; but in life they watched over the churning anthills of humankind, inured from its preoccupation with lust, longevity, and descent. Prey, at worst, to a fondness for trinkets and trivia, to a fascination with their own decline, a tendency to hysteria and petty jealousies. Yashim knew them well.
As for the harem, none of the women there could come or go at will, of course. So Yashim’s current business in there was, in that sense, a more private affair. Even time, Yashim reflected, ran differently on the inside: the harem could wait. Outside, as the seraskier had warned, he had just nine ordinary days.
Brushing the crumbs of the borek from his lips, Yashim decided that he would visit first the guild, and then pay his call on the seraskier. Afterward, depending on what he learned, he would go and question various people in the harem.
Which is why when a little boy darted into the café a few minutes later, red faced and puffing and bearing an urgent note for Yashim from the seraskier, the café owner shook his head and gestured helplessly up the street.