The Janissary Tree (33 page)

He
climbed up languidly onto the hot platform, the so-called belly of the hammam,
spread out his towel, and lay on it, facedown, his head turned to the left and
his eyes closed. The huge masseur, bald as an egg, every ripple of his flesh
hairless and shining, closed in and began to work Yashim's feet with great
force and dexterity, rhythmically smoothing and digging at Yashim's flesh until
Yashim felt his whole body rocking up and down. Up and down. Head to toe on the
burning marble.

Invisible
shivers ran up his legs. He thought of the pile of plates. He saw Eugenia's
white breasts, a tangle of sheets, her lips swollen with the heat. This was
another kind of heat, a heat that sucked at his will, sapped him of all his
strength. Once or twice he kicked out, involuntarily, as he rose from the sleep
he so desperately craved. " "S all right," he murmured to himself. A few
minutes, then the masseur will tap him off the bench and wake him up. Sleep.

Slowly
the room began to empty out.

The
masseur kept on working on Yashim's body.

Slowly,
and more slowly.

There
was only one man left in the hammam, asleep on a bench. The masseur raised his
fingers from Yashim's neck. Yashim didn't move.

The
masseur went over to the sleeping bather and scooped him up in his powerful
banded arms like a little baby. The man startled and opened his eyes, but when
the masseur set him down again he was in the tepidarium, facing a cold plunge. The
masseur gave him a friendly little shove, and he leaped into the cold tub,
gasping and laughing. He'd been asleep!

The
masseur shot the bolt of the hammam door and folded his huge arms across his
chest.

Inside
the hot room Yashim slept on, dreaming of melting snow.

93

***********

How
do I look now, old man?"

Fizerly
looked his friend up and down with a critical eye.

"Capital,
Compston. Or should I say, Mehmet? If we are going out to explore the old city,
you're Mehmet from here on, remember."

Compston
chuckled and looked at himself in the embassy mirror. Fizerly had been awfully
clever with the turban--in the end, they'd arranged it so that not a blond hair
straggled out, even if the balance of the turban had suffered slightly in
consequence. "Just keep moving your head about like a good chap," Fizerly had
suggested helpfully. Not Fizerly, that is. Ali. Ali Baba, at your service.

Compston-Mehmet
giggled and rubbed a little more soot into his eyebrows.

"Let's
hope it doesn't rain," he said.

94

***********

PALEWSKI
drank his coffee slowly, watching the sunset. Outside, the hubbub of traffic
was subsiding, the porters going empty-handed uphill, a few small donkey carts
returning to stables, while the number of people taking the evening air
increased. Sometimes Palewski recognized them--a palace official he couldn't
name, a Greek dragoman linked to one of the Phanariot merchant houses, an imam
looking exactly as he had looked fifteen years before, when Palewski had had a
discussion with him on the history of the idea of the transmigration of souls. Later
he saw a couple of juniors from the British embassy--Fizerly, he recalled, with
the straggling whiskers, now smoking a Turkish cheroot, sauntering along with a
boy in a curious sort of hat, apparently made out of various pieces of his
underwear, nodding and laughing at his side. Palewski wondered vaguely what
they were doing, dressed like children out of a Nativity play. Nobody seemed to
pay them much attention, and they strolled down the hill and disappeared around
the corner of the baths.

How
much Istanbul had changed in the thirty years he had known it! What was it that
he had said to Yashim? He had said he mourned the passing of the Janissaries. Well,
the past ten years had been particularly lively. Since the suppression of the
Janissaries, there had been nothing to restrain the sultan except the fear of
foreign intervention, and the sultan was a born modernizer. He'd taken to the
European saddle faster than anyone. The change that had come over the city went
beyond the gradual but continuous disappearance of turbans and slippers, and
their replacement by the fez and leather shoes. That was a change that Palewski
was romantic enough to regret, though he did not expect it to be complete in
his lifetime--if only because the great city still drew people from every corner
of the empire toward it, people who had never heard of sumptuary laws or
shoelaces. But more people from outside the empire were coming in, too, and in
the gradual rebuilding of Galata after the great fire there were oddities like
the French glove maker, and the Belgian who sold bad champagne, ensconced in
their little shops, with tinkling bells, just as if they were in Cracow.

The
door opened and a gust of cold air entered the fug of the cafe. Palewski
recognized the man who came in, too, though for a while he couldn't place him:
a tall, bullish man in late middle age, distinguished by a white cloak. He was
followed in by two European merchants Palewski had seen around but not spoken
to. He thought they might be French.

The
three men took a table slightly behind Palewski's line of sight, so it was a
while before he glanced back and recognized the seraskier, who had shrugged
back his cloak and now sat with booted legs tightly crossed, his blue-gray
uniform jacket buttoned to the neck. He was toying with a coffee cup, listening
with a slight smile to one of his companions, who was leaning forward and
making a point, quietly, with the help of his hands. French, then. Or Italian?

Palewski
wondered if he might order another coffee himself. He looked down the hill: the
doors of the baths were still shut, but another knot of men with bags of linen
had gathered outside, presumably rehearsing the complaints he had listened to
half an hour before. Cleaning the baths! On a Thursday night, too. Sacrilege!
Scandal! Palewski grinned and waved at the waiter.

Well,
he could see that they were cleaning the baths--and thoroughly, too. The little
air vent at the top of the dome was releasing a corona of white steam that
rose, eddied, and then trailed away in the dusk. Caught by the dying rays of
the sun, the steam sometimes refracted a rainbow of color. Very pretty,
Palewski thought. Next came a stick, bound with a trailing white cloth, to
clean out the vent. Very thorough, Palewski thought. If they finish in time, I
will certainly try my luck.

The
waiter brought him a fresh coffee. Palewski leaned back to overhear the
conversation going on behind him, but it was being muttered at a distance, over
the bubble of pipes, the hiss of boiling water, and the murmur of low
conversation around the room. Disappointed, he looked out the window again.

How
odd, he thought. The stick was still going up and down in the hole, and the
scrap of cloth was fluttering with it, like a tiny flag.

There's
cleaning, Palewski thought curiously, and obsession.

And
as he watched, the stick suddenly wavered and keeled over to one side. Stuck at
an angle, the little white cloth waved and flapped in the evening breeze like a
signal of surrender.

95

***********

YASHIM
had been dreaming. He dreamed that he and Eugenia were standing naked, side by
side in the snow, watching a forest fire crackle in the treetops. It wasn't
cold. As the fire advanced, the warmth increased, and the snow began to melt. He
shouted, "Jump!" and they both leaped over the edge of the melted snow. He had
no recollection of hitting the ground below, but he had started to run across
the square toward the huge cypress. Eugenia was nowhere, but the soup master
reached out with his enormous hands and lit the cypress with a match. It burned
like a rocket as Yashim held on to it, pressing his face against the smooth
bark, but when he tried to pull away he couldn't, because his skin had melted
and stuck to the tree.

He
coughed and tried to raise his head. His eyes opened. They seemed to be filmed
over: his vision was foggy. He made another effort to raise his head, and this
time his cheek sucked against the hard top of the massage bench, where he lay
in a pool of his own sweat. He rolled over, his whole body slithering on the
bench, and swung his legs to the floor.

A
dull pain throbbed through his feet, and it took him some moments to realize
that the soles of his feet were burning against the stone floor. He sat back on
the bench, legs raised, and looked around. There was nobody else there.

The
steam was peeling away from the floor in angry ribbons, which blended into a
fog that thickened as it approached the dome. Yashim found that he was
breathing hard: the air was so hot and humid that every breath stuffed his
throat like a rag. With a heavy hand he dashed the sweat from his eyes.

The
fog felt curiously intimate, as if it were really a problem with his eyes, and
this seemed to disorient him: he jerked his head about, searching for the
doors. He saw his wooden clogs beside the massage bench. With his feet in the
clogs he stood swaying for a moment, holding on to the bench, and then, like a
man struggling through the snow, he staggered forward toward the door. He fell
against it, groping for a handle, but the door was as smooth as the walls.

No
handle.

Yashim
drummed with his fists, unable to shout, his breath sobbing through his teeth. No
one came. Again and again he crashed against the door, throwing his whole
weight behind his shoulder, but it didn't budge, and the sound itself was
flattened against the iron-bound oak. He sank into a squat, one hand against
the door for support.

The
heat rolling off the floor made it impossible to hold that position for very
long. He slowly stood up; bent double, he pushed himself along the wall. The
spigot in the first niche had stopped flowing. There was a scoop on the floor,
but it contained only an inch of water and the metal was hot.

He
could not guess how long he crouched there, gazing down between his arms at the
water in the scoop. But when the water started to steam he thought, I'm being
braised.

But
I am thinking.

I
must get out.

Gingerly
he raised his head, for it felt as though it must burst at any minute: he
needed to keep the water out of his eyes.

A
faint pattern of light penetrated the fog above. It came from the pattern of
holes let into the roof of the dome, and for a second Yashim wondered if he
could somehow climb up and reach it, thrust his hands, maybe, and his lips
against the holes.

You
can't climb the inside of a dome, he said to himself.

His
eye followed the base of the walls, searching for anything that he could use.

He
almost missed it: the long bamboo cane attached to the head of a mop, tucked up
into the angle between the floor and the wall.

He
could hardly pick it up: his fingers were puffy and hard to bend.

Yashim
raised the flimsy cane with an effort. Too short.

Once
more he started around the room. Twice he almost blacked out and fell to his
hands and knees: but the burning stone tortured him back to life, and he
tottered on until he found the second cane.

Now
he needed a strip of cloth to bind them together. He tore at a towel with his
fingers and his teeth, whimpering now.

At
last he managed to create a nick in the hem. Even tearing the cloth he was like
a puny child, nearly too weak to raise his arms, but at last he had a bandage
of cotton that he secured around the two bamboos. The remaining scrap he tied
to the top of the pole, and then he began to raise it up. The bare end struck
on the side of the dome. He scraped it upward.

It
was too short.

Through
the vapor, against the dome, Yashim could hardly tell how short. His face was
set in a rictus now, his teeth bared. He staggered across to the massage bench
and clambered onto it. Every movement was an agony. As he raised his arms, he
noticed that they were almost purple, as if blood was starting to ooze from his
pores.

He
started to pump the stick up and down, up and down. At every stroke he felt
that he was pumping the blood, too, through the pores in his skin. He faintly
remembered that he needed to make the stick move, but he could no longer
remember why this had seemed important, only that it was all the instruction he
possessed. It was all he had left.

96

***********

"Avec permission,
Seraskier." Palewski stuck out his hand as he bowed. "Palewski,
ambassadeur
de Pologne."

The
seraskier glanced upward with a look of surprise. Then he smiled politely.

"
Enchante
,
Excellence."

"I'm
so sorry to interrupt," Palewski continued, "but I have just seen something
rather strange and I wanted your opinion."

"Mais bien sur."
The seraskier did not sound impressed. What he and the Polish
ambassador found strange could be entirely different things. "What have you
seen, Your Excellency?"