An Evil Eye: A Novel Read online

  On the bench he lined up his jars, all French, with tight-fitting lids, imported by English merchants and sold in the Egyptian bazaar; Yashim used earthenware crocks, too, which were cheaper—but pickles winking behind glass were irresistible, like a warm fire on a cold night.

  He sluiced the jars with boiling water and began to pack them, laying the peppers and the other vegetables on a carpet of cabbage leaves, alternating the layers as he filled the jars. When they were full, he used a wooden spoon to press the layers down, satisfied by the sound of crisp vegetables creaking and snapping.

  “Now, Kadri, the vinegar.”

  Kadri poured carefully, his tongue between his teeth, until the vegetables in each jar were completely submerged. To make sure, Yashim dropped a small ceramic disc on top, to weight everything down; then he screwed on the lids.

  “It’ll be good,” he said. “But not for a few weeks yet. We’ll make something quicker, too. Can you shell those peas?”

  Yashim laid a colander on a cloth and began to chop vegetables—a cauliflower broken into florets, some carrots. He tossed in a bunch of tiny green beans topped and tailed, and sprinkled each layer with a handful of rough salt.

  “Drop the peas straight in,” he said. “We’ll leave it to sweat while we go to eat.”

  Yashim took Kadri to the Kara Davut, where the air was tinged with the scent of hot charcoal and roasting meat. They sat on tiny wicker stools outside a kebab shop that the porters used, opposite the bakery, and within minutes their kebabs were spitting over coals while the baker made up pide by ripping a chunk of dough from a bowl, working it on a marble slab, then shaping it and slapping it onto the side of his oven.

  “Ayran, efendim? It’s iced, very cool.”

  Ayran was a drink of yogurt, whipped with water and a pinch of salt, and they accepted it gratefully, smiling at each other over the rims of their glasses. “I see you’re growing a mustache at last,” Yashim said. Kadri grinned, and wiped his upper lip.

  “You know, Kadri, it’s at times like this that I pity sultans in palaces.”

  It could have been him, of course. If Talfa had her way, the luxury of eating on the street would be all but lost to him.

  Kadri nodded. “I don’t want to go back to school,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.” Yashim sighed. “They may not have you back if you leave it too long. If that matters,” he added, after a pause.

  He glanced at his new young friend. Kadri looked better than he had looked just a few days before: the pimples on his forehead had cleared up and his eyes were brighter than ever.

  “What do you think, Yashim efendi?”

  “About the school?” Yashim looked up at the sky. “I’m not sure I can advise you, Kadri. The school exists to produce a special caste of men, who go on to run this empire. You can become one of them.”

  “You didn’t,” Kadri said.

  “Efendim!” The waiter set a tray before them, with the little cubes of roasted lamb, bread, and a gypsy salad of cheese with red onion and peppers.

  Yashim laughed. “I like to believe I have my uses, Kadri. The school also, perhaps incidentally, gives you training. Persian, Arabic, the classics. Things that a man should know. Rhetoric and logic. You study ethics, and the wisdom and poetry of the holy Koran. Those are things that can give you happiness; a consolation, at least.”

  “It sounds—gloomy.”

  “Not at all.” Yashim smiled. “It’s learning how to live. But it’s not the only way,” he added. He popped a morsel of tender lamb into his mouth and glanced at his young friend. “The medreses will teach you a great deal, if you prefer that route. Or books. Books teach you a number of things, including how to distinguish truth from fiction; and how to govern yourself.”

  Kadri nodded. “I can’t decide.”

  “No matter. I’ll have coffee, and then we must finish our work.”

  Back in his kitchen, Yashim inspected the vegetables: the cloth under the colander was soaked. He squeezed four lemons into a bowl and beat them into a pint of olive oil.

  “We’ll pot this up,” he said, “and then—I have an idea.”

  Yashim tossed the vegetables in the colander, and then raked them into two glass jars, finishing with the dressing.

  “This is for me—and this is for a friend,” he added, screwing down the lids. “I think, Kadri, you should stay with the ambassador—you seem to get along well. But in the mornings you could do something else.”

  Kadri looked doubtful. “What could I do, Yashim efendi?”

  “Come with me. And bring the pickle, too.”

  At the Balat stage they took a caïque to Pera, from where they made their way uphill, toward the Galata Tower, and then higher, to the fringes of the Frankish town that was constantly growing and rebuilding itself across the hill.

  Yashim crossed into a side street and stopped at a shabby-looking door.

  “Ready?”

  Kadri looked anxious, but he forced a smile. “Ready, Yashim. What is this place?”

  Yashim rapped on the door. “A den of iniquity. Riffraff. Dancers and actors. It’s run by an old friend of mine, who used to be a köçek dancer. It’s a theater.”

  Kadri giggled. “It’s not something they teach us about at school.”

  “That, Kadri, is the whole point.”

  The door opened a crack. A pair of dark eyes examined them for a moment, and then the door opened wide.

  “Preen’s upstairs, Yashim.” It was Mina, who attended to the accounts. “Come in—and bring those pickles. And your little friend, of course.”

  59

  “CAN you sing? Dance?”

  Kadri shook his head. “I can run—and jump.”

  “All right, darling.” Preen pursed her lips. “Let’s work with that. For the time being, I’ll get you to help Mustafa with the props and scenery. Learn some of the ropes.”

  “I’ll pay for his board,” Yashim said, fishing out his purse. He shook the money into his hand.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Preen said, with a wave. “Another mouth makes no difference.” She frowned, and pointed at something glinting in Yashim’s palm. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, something … a nail,” he said carelessly. “I found it—in someone’s house.”

  Preen peered at it for a moment, then her head snapped back. “Get rid of it, Yashim. Throw it out.” She gestured toward the window, but then her expression changed. “No, don’t throw it. You shouldn’t have touched it.”

  Yashim picked up the nail and spun it between his fingers.

  Preen winced. “Stop! You don’t know what it does!”

  “I’ll throw it away,” Yashim said reluctantly.

  “No, no.” She bit at her finger. “I know a woman, not far away. It’s better that we go to see her. Believe me, Yashim, don’t be stupid.”

  Yashim shrugged and put the nail in his pocket.

  “We can go there now,” Preen continued. “Kadri, come and meet Erkan, the Strongest Man in the World.”

  The Grande Rue was lined with European shops, behind whose bright windows people came with money and left with packages wrapped in paper. Preen led Yashim across, and plunged into the network of alleys that lay in a tangled skein above the Bosphorus. Here, by a dimmer light, matters were decided by superstitious gestures, by almanacs and eggs broken into a bowl of oil, by imprecations and talismans. Here people sought out propitious days, avoided dark corners, waggled their fingers behind their backs, resorted to nostrums, prayers, and the prognostications of wise women. These were the ordinary calculations of the everyday world, in which every moment held its weight, every movement was a portent, each word and gesture held a meaning.

  Yashim put a hand to his pocket and felt the nail, with its little ridge of thread, and hastily withdrew it again.

  Preen knocked at a door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Preen, Mrs. Satzos. With a friend.”

  �
�Please come in. The door is not locked.”

  The light seemed to bend and flutter toward them. The whole room was lit by dozens of tiny candles, burning and flickering in glass jars all around the walls.

  A little table held a jug and a bowl, and several plain glasses. The walls were lined with shelves. On the shelves stood the flickering lights, and over each of them loomed an indistinct shape. Some were crosses, of tin or bronze, occasionally inset with small beads of colored glass that twinkled in the candlelight, but there were also books, set flat against the wall, and on one shelf—a more disagreeable surprise—a row of stuffed dolls with beady eyes and silk faces, their arms fixed in a gesture of benediction. Behind one candle he noticed a hand of Fatima, made of punched tin. Several small icons, almost black with age or soot, defied analysis.

  “I brought him straight to you, Mrs. Satzos,” Preen was saying. “He wanted to throw it out the window. Yashim?”

  Yashim laid the nail on the cover of a brassbound book he supposed to be a Bible.

  Mrs. Satzos leaned forward. She was a small, birdlike woman with ice-white hair braided into a bun and dark patches around her eyes.

  “You did right to bring it to me. You found this in your house? Your room?”

  “In the house of—a friend. He’s away.”

  Mrs. Satzos frowned.

  “Away—gone to sea,” Yashim explained.

  The old lady cocked her head, as if she found something puzzling. “And the women in the house … ?”

  “There were none.”

  Mrs. Satzos looked at him kindly. “As you wish. The little threads—what do they suggest to you, efendi?”

  “I don’t know. I thought there was something deliberate.”

  “Whoever twisted this thread around the nail was thinking of the past.” She peered more closely at the nail. “The knot tied here, you see? I think it represents an event. Perhaps a decision. Whoever tied it wanted your friend to remember something.”

  Yashim glanced at Preen. “So it is not a curse?”

  The old lady clicked her teeth impatiently. “Curses. Charms. Kismet!” She dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “That is for the bazaar, where people go like children to Sufis and gypsies. Do you not think that memory can also be a curse?”

  Yashim felt the blood rise in his cheeks. “Memory?”

  Mrs. Satzos folded her hands on her lap and regarded him with her panda eyes. “The curse is not what is to be, efendi. The curse belongs to what has been.”

  “And this”—he gestured to the nail without looking at it—“revives a memory?”

  “There are things that people wish to forget, efendi.” She was staring at him in surprise, as if she had seen something she didn’t expect. “Some disgrace. A loss. A source of pain.”

  She stood up and turned to one of the shelves. She selected one of the curious dolls that Yashim had disliked on sight, and opened the drawer of the little sideboard to take out a roll of lint. She cut a length off the roll and returned to the table. Pressing the nail flat against the doll’s back, she began to bind it on with the lint, murmuring what sounded like a prayer.

  “There!” She nodded to them brightly. “We will guard the charm, and draw its sting. If you wish to make an offering to the saint it will not be refused.”

  She put the doll back on the shelf. Yashim and Preen got to their feet, and Yashim dipped in his wallet for a silver kurus, which he placed in the woman’s hand.

  She touched his arm. “You have troubles yourself, efendi. You will come to visit me again.”

  “My troubles—” He was not sure what he meant to say. He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  60

  HYACINTH heard the call to prayer and automatically swung his legs off the bed onto the floor. He sat up and rubbed his hand across his face.

  With a crack of his shoulders he stretched his arms, and yawned. Through the latticed window he could make out the glimmer of early dawn. He bent down and with a practiced switch of his fingers flicked out the rug that lay rolled up beneath his bed. He settled onto the rug rather awkwardly, first one knee and then the other, and began to pray.

  Five minutes later he rolled up the rug, stowed it under the bed, and shuffled into a pair of slippers. His toes were long and thin and they gripped the slippers as he waddled from his cell to the hammam.

  For many years, Hyacinth had recognized his hammam hour each morning as the highlight of his day.

  Now, turning his long, elegant feet under the hot water of the spigot, he almost wanted to hug himself. He had not one, but two delicious pleasures to rouse him from his sleep—not to mention prayers, he mentally added, uncertain whether prayers strictly constituted a pleasure or not.

  After the bath—a little further treat, why not? The valide’s new slave, the woman Tülin, had introduced it to the court. The eunuchs at Topkapi were suffering a little from neglect when Tülin came to help the valide, for the luminaries of Hyacinth’s restricted world clustered around the sultan in his new palace at Besiktas. Gone were the armies of cooks who worked from dawn till dusk to serve the choicest tidbits to the happy few. Gone, too, the young women, their laughter, their idle chatter, and all the gossip that their activities and moods created. Hyacinth loved his mistress, but the valide could be demanding—and there were no distractions anymore. The division of the family had brought him the only sorrow he had ever really known. He had loved the soft women. He had loved their babies.

  But Tülin was like a breath from the other world! Returning from her orchestra at Besiktas, she brought gossip from the harem—why, when she talked about those women, it was almost as if one knew them intimately oneself! Poor Pembe’s grief—that was just too sad. And Maral’s face, when she heard the news! Pouf! What a cow—but so lovely, of course. It was the Circassian blood. He, Hyacinth, knew all about Circassians.

  And Tülin was young. She made the valide happy. Sometimes, when the valide wasn’t listening, Tülin would tell Hyacinth about the babies in the sultan’s harem, the little ones who ran about at their mothers’ knees, all their little jokes and funny names. The valide wasn’t interested in them, really, but Hyacinth couldn’t get enough. He used to be a favorite with the little ones, who pulled his lobey ears and ordered him about, sometimes, like sultans themselves. Quite innocent! Their sudden tempers and equally sudden smiles reminded him of—well, people like himself.

  He dried himself and dressed with care. He shuffled quickly down the corridor and out into the valide’s courtyard.

  Tülin’s door, he saw with rising expectation, was ajar. And now he could smell it, too.

  “Hello, my dove!” He peered around the door, smiling, and waggled his fingers. “Am I too early for you?”

  She looked up and smiled. “I saw you going to the hammam, Hyacinth efendi. And I thought—he’ll be an hour! At least an hour.”

  She raised her eyebrows, and Hyacinth chuckled.

  “So you are in perfect time.”

  With a bow, and the same radiant smile, she offered him a steaming bowl of chocolate.

  61

  “THERE.” Preen flashed him a look of triumph. “I told you Mrs. Satzos was good.”

  Yashim nodded in sardonic agreement. “All my worries are over now, Preen. Thanks.” He raised a finger and the coffee boy darted forward. “Two, medium sweet.”

  “She goes to the palace every week. The harem ladies can’t get enough of her.”

  Yashim smiled. “You are a snob, Preen.”

  She tossed her head. “We’re all snobs, one way or another.” When Yashim didn’t reply, she added: “It’s you, isn’t it? The friend—that’s just what we say.”

  Yashim looked surprised. He shook his head. “It’s not me, Preen. Not me at all.”

  “Oh?” She raised a painted eyebrow.

  “Forget what you think. I lied, yes—but I lied in saying that he was a friend.”

  “An enemy.”

  Yashim took a breath. “I don’t know, exa
ctly.”

  “Rich?”

  Yashim smiled wanly.

  “But you told Mrs. Satzos there were no women in the house.”

  “Preen—you remember things too well.”

  The boy arrived with coffee. When he had gone Preen leaned forward. “You told Mrs. Satzos that he’d gone to sea.”

  “It’s better you don’t know,” Yashim said quickly.

  “The Kapudan pasha. Fevzi Pasha, right?”

  Yashim ran his finger around the rim of his cup.

  “Fevzi Ahmet,” she said slowly. “I remember him. At a wedding, where we came to dance. It was a long time ago. One of the bridesmaids went for a walk in the garden. I saw her just as we were setting up, a country girl. I didn’t know her. But something happened between her and Fevzi Ahmet, Yashim. Her brother went berserk. He said he’d kill Fevzi Ahmet, wedding or no wedding.”

  Angry spots had appeared on her cheeks. “Fevzi Ahmet took him for a little talk, instead, strolling about the cypress trees, and us beginning to dance.” Preen caressed her neck. “When I saw him walking with the brother, at the wedding, I knew it was all arranged. Fevzi was—I don’t know, sneering. He knew that no one could touch him.”

  Yashim bowed his head.

  “They came from Erzurum, the girl and her family. I heard that she drowned there two weeks later, in the pool.”

  She shuddered.

  Yashim bit his lip. He knew what Preen had told him would be true.

  “Fevzi Ahmet was my mentor for three years,” he said.

  He saw her shrink back. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere farther off.

  “Mentor? Like—a teacher?”

  His own voice sounded harsh. “I worked for him years ago. I was at the palace school, Preen. You knew that. I ran away, like Kadri. My training was almost over, and I didn’t know what they had planned for me. I didn’t know what I was good for. I was afraid of being … inactive. I thought they might make me carry shawls for odalisques, or library books, you know. I was afraid of being trapped in the palace.”