The Janissary Tree (14 page)

The
kadi gripped a doorway for support. The seraskier skipped to one side. Yashim
himself stood breathing heavily, staring at the pile of white bones and wooden
spoons. Wedged in the pile, unmistakably dark, was a human head.

Yashim
hung his head and said nothing. The violence is terrible, he thought. And what
have I done to stop it? Cooked a meal. Gone looking for a toy cauldron.

Cooked a meal.

The
seraskier put out a booted foot and stirred the heap with its toe. The head
settled in its grisly nest. Its skin looked drawn and yellow, and its eyes
glittered faintly beneath half-lowered lids. Neither of them noticed the kadi
leave the room.

"No
blood," said the seraskier.

Yashim
squatted down beside the bones and spoons. "But one of yours?"

"Yes.
I think so."

"You
think so?"

"No,
I'm sure. The mustache." He gestured faintly to the severed head.

But
Yashim was more interested in the bones. He was laying them out, bone by bone,
paying particular attention to the shin, the femur, the ribs.

"It's
very odd," he murmured.

The
seraskier looked down. "What's odd?"

"There's
not a mark on them. Clean and whole."

He
picked up the pelvis and began turning it this way and that between his hands. The
seraskier pulled a face. He'd dealt with corpses often enough--but fondling
bones. Euch.

"It
was a man, anyway," Yashim remarked.

"Of
course it was a fucking man. He was one of my soldiers."

"It
was just a thought," Yashim replied pacifically, setting the pelvis in
position. From overhead it looked almost obscenely large, thrusting out from
the skeletal remains spread on the marble floor. "Maybe they'd used another
body. I wouldn't know."

"Another
body? What for?"

Yashim
stood up and wiped his hands with the hem of his cloak. He stared at the
seraskier, seeing nothing.

"I
can't imagine," he said.

The
seraskier gestured to the door and heaved a sigh. "Like it or not," he said,
"we're going to have to tell the people something."

Yashim
blinked.

"How
about the truth?" he suggested.

The
seraskier looked at him levelly.

"Something
like that," he said abruptly. "Why not?"

33

****************

FINE
cities whose contented citizens support an intelligent administration do exist,
containing not a single dilapidated public building, a solitary weed-strewn
building lot, or even a crumbling palazzo; but a great city must have them all,
for decay, too, is a sign of life. In the right ear, dereliction whispers of
opportunity. In another ear, of delinquency and corruption. Istanbul in the
1830s was no exception.

The
ragged bellpull that now lay, inert, in Yashim's hand as he stood at the top of
the steps by the front door of a building in Pera, Istanbul's so-called
European quarter across the Golden Horn, inspired a similar reflection. He
sensed that in some way the broken bell claimed kinship with much that was
already ragged and moldering in the ancient metropolis, from cracked basilicas
to sagging wooden houses, from the office of the patriarch to waterlogged
pilings in the port.

At
the last, mortal wrench of the cord, a bell had pealed somewhere inside the old
mansion. For the first time in weeks, and the last time for years, a bell
announced to the Polish ambassador that he had a visitor.

Palewski
maneuvered himself off the divan with an oath and a tinkle of broken glass.

At
the head of the stairs he gripped the balustrade and began to descend, quite
slowly, toward the front door. He stared for a moment or two at the bolts, then
stretched, flexed the muscles in his back, ran a hand across his hair and
around his collar, and wrenched it open. He blinked involuntarily in the sudden
rush of winter light.

Yashim
shoved the remains of the bellpull into his hands and stepped inside. Palewski
closed the door, grumbling.

"Why
don't you just come in through the windows at the back?"

"I
didn't want to surprise you."

Palewski
turned his back and began to mount the stairs.

"Nothing
surprises me," he said.

Yashim
glimpsed a dark corridor, which led to the back of the residency, and a sheet
covering some furniture stacked in the hall. He followed Palewski up the
stairs.

Palewski
opened a door. "Ali," he said.

Yashim
followed his friend into a small, low-ceilinged room lit by two long windows. Against
the opposite wall stood an elaborate chimneypiece decorated with sheaves of
carved shields and the bows and arrows of a more chivalric age; in the grate, a
fire glowed dully. Paleiski threw on another log and kicked the fire; a few
sparks shot up. The flames began to spread.

Palewski
threw himself into a massive armchair and motioned to Yashim to do the same.

"Let's
have some tea," he said.

Yashim
had been in this room many times before; even so, he looked about with
pleasure. A mottled mirror in a gold frame hung between the louvered windows;
beneath it stood Palewski's little writing desk and the only hard chair in the
room. The two armchairs, drawn up to the fire, were leaking their stuffing, but
they were comfortable. Over the fireplace hung a portrait in oils of John
Sobieski, the Polish king who lifted the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683; two
other oils, one of a man in a full wig on a prancing horse, and the other a
family scene, hung on the wall by the door, over a mahogany side table. Palewski's
violin was perched on it. The farther wall and the alcoves by the fireplace
were ranged with books.

Palewski
reached forward and yanked once or twice on a tapestry bellpull. A neat Greek
serving girl came to the door and Palewski ordered tea. The girl brought a tray
and set it down on the charpoy in front of the fire. Palewski rubbed his hands
together.

"English
tea," he said. "Keemun with a trace of bergamot. Milk or lemon?"

The
tea, the fire, and the rich tones of the German clock on the mantelpiece
soothed the Polish ambassador into a better mood. Yashim, too, felt himself
relax. For a long while neither man said anything.

"The
other day you quoted something to me--an army marches on its stomach. Who said
that? Napoleon?"

Palewski
nodded and pulled a face. "Typical Napoleon. In the end his armies marched on
their frozen feet."

Not
for the first time, Yashim promised himself to probe Palewski's attitude to
Napoleon. It seemed a combination of admiration and bitterness. But instead he
asked, "Does anything about the way the Janissaries named their ranks strike
you as significant?"

"Significant?
They took titles from the kitchen. The colonel was called the soup cook, wasn't
he? And there were other ranks I remember--scullion, baker, pancake maker. Sergeant
majors carried a long wooden ladle as a badge of office. As for the men, to
lose a regimental tureen in battle--one of the big cauldrons they used for
making pilaf--was the ultimate disgrace. They had the provisioning sorted out.
Why the Janissaries?"

Yashim
told him. He told him about the cauldron, about the man trussed ready to roast,
the pile of bones and wooden spoons. Palewski let him speak without
interruption.

"Forgive
me, Yashim, but weren't you in Istanbul ten years ago? They call it
suppression, don't they? Laughter can be suppressed. Emotion. But we're talking
about flesh and blood. This was history. This was tradition. Suppressed? What
happened to the Janissaries wasn't even a massacre."

To
Yashim's surprise, Palewski was scrambling to his feet.

"I
was there, Yashim. I never told you this, because no one--not even you--would
have wanted to know. It's not the Ottoman way." He hesitated, with a rueful
smile.
"Have
I told you this before?"

Yashim
shook his head. Palewski raised his chin.

"June
sixteenth, 1826. Sunny day. I was over in Stamboul on some errand or another, I
forget," he began. "And boom--the city explodes. Kettles drumming on the
Etmeidan. Students in the madrassas humming like ripe cheese. Get back, I
think. Down to the Golden Horn, grab a caique, tea on the lawn, and wait for
news."

"Tea?"
Yashim interjected.

"It's
a figure of speech. Rather like the lawn. But never mind: I never made it here.
Golden Horn. Silence. There were the caiques, drawn up on the Pera side. I
waved and capered on the landing stage, but not a miserable soul stepped
forward to ferry me across. I tell you, Yashim, it made the hairs prickle on
the back of my neck. I felt as if I'd been quarantined.

"I
had a rough idea of what was brewing. I thought of some of the pashas I
knew--but then, I thought, they'd have trouble enough without me tagging along. To
be honest, I wasn't sure it was wise to be barricaded into some grandee's
mansion at the moment of crisis, which we all knew was coming. Guess where I
went instead."

Yashim
creased his brow. I know just where, old friend, but I won't spoil it. "A Greek
tavern? A mosque? I don't know."

"The
sultan. I found him in the Seraglio, at the Circumcision Kiosk-- he'd just
arrived from Besiktas up the Bosphorus. Various commanders with him. The grand
mufti, too." Palewski gave Yashim a long, hard look. "Don't talk to me about
suppression. I was there. "Victory or death!" the pashas shouted. Mahmut took
the Holy Standard of the Prophet in his two hands. "Either we win today," he
said, "or Istanbul will be a ruin for cats to prowl through." I'll say this for
the House of Osman: it may have taken them two hundred and fifty years to make
the decision, but when they made it, they meant it.

"Students
came pouring into the Great Court at Topkapi. They were given arms, and they
carried the Holy Standard to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque--all that end of the city
was ours, around the Hippodrome, Aya Sofia, and the palace. The rebels were at
the end of the street closer to their barracks, around the Beyazit Mosque and
down by the old clothes bazaar, which was always a Janissary stronghold. That's
where the sultan's troops attacked first. Grapeshot. Like Napoleon at the
Tuileries. A whiff of grapeshot.

"Just
two cannons--but under a fellow they called Ibrahim. Infernal Ibrahim. The
Janissaries ran back to the barracks and started to barricade the doors with
stones--not a thought for their companions left out in the streets. Even when
the artillery had surrounded them, they refused to talk about surrender. Just
crowded together inside the Great Gate, apparently. The first cannonade that
blew it open killed dozens of them, there and then.

"We
saw the flames, Yash. They burned the Janissaries out--some of them, anyway. It
was like dismantling a hayrick, killing the rats as they scamper out. The
prisoners were sent to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, but those who were strangled on
the spot were dumped under the Janissary Tree--there were half a dozen corpses
there by nightfall. The next day, the Hippodrome was a heap of bodies.

"It's
always made me feel sick, that tree. Thinking of the men hanged in the
branches, like fruit. And the Janissary corpses piled around its trunk. It must
have blood in it, Yash. Blood in its roots.

"But
that's what I saw, and I'm saying this. I've known pogroms and massacres. I've
seen worse, to be frank, than what the Janissaries got in the end. Women and
children--I've seen that. The Janissaries were men, and they deserved it in a
way, poor fools, for what they'd done, and what men before them had done and
been doing, time out of mind. They knew the racket they'd joined. It was
killing the empire slowly, and they must have known that one day there'd be a
reckoning.

"Perhaps
they didn't expect it, coming quite like that, so utter and complete. It wasn't
"party's over and leave your sabers on the counter as you file out," was it? It
was annihilation, Yash. Ten thousand dead? Burning them out of the Belgrade
Forest. Winkling them out of the provincial cities. Tartar horsemen, flying
across the empire to spread the news. The Auspicious Event, that's the phrase,
isn't it? The Janissaries don't even get a mention on their own death
certificate. They're gone, and beyond trace, too.

"You
know, a few weeks afterward, I saw the sultan with an executioner, in a
cemetery among the cypress trees. Their ancient dead. The loyal and the brave,
as well as the venal and corrupt. The executioner beheaded every gravestone
with a heavy sword."

Yashim
raised a finger.

"There's
one left. Over in Scutari, with the sleeve carved into the stone."

Palewski
waved him away.

"There's
always one left. And maybe dozens. It doesn't mean anything. The Ottoman Empire
endures, but it's changing right under our noses. Everything that was strange
and magnificent about your people, Yash, everything that has kept this world
turning for centuries--it's dissolving beneath your feet because the Janissaries
are gone. They were the bedrock of the empire, don't you see? Every day,
Istanbul has sights that would make your ancestors weep. The sultan riding on a
European saddle. The army drilling like Napoleonic soldiers. Christians opening
liquor shops in Pera, men in fezzes instead of turbans, all that. And more: the
Janissaries were thieving, overweening, narrow-minded bastards, but they were
poets, and artisans of skill, too, some of them. And all of them had culture of
a kind. Something that was bigger than them, bigger than their greed and
faults.