The Snake Stone (17 page)

“Y
ASHIM
efendi. Excuse me, please.”

Yashim looked around. Marta was standing in the shadows below the stairs, knotting her apron between her fingers.

“Marta!” He took a step closer.

“Enver Xani, efendi. He is disappeared!”

“I heard, Marta. But you mustn’t worry. There are any number of reasons why he might have had to stay out.”

He tried to think of one. A catastrophic leak, perhaps? A crumbling reservoir? He wondered how far the watermen’s guild communicated with the families involved: if Xani was being kept on overnight, someone should have sent a message. So perhaps it was really a night out with the lads instead, in the taverns of the port.

Marta put a knuckle to her lips.

“I do not want to trouble the lord ambassador,” she said. “But perhaps you will help? You are his friend, and a good man.”

Yashim inclined his head. Marta had done him kindness in the past, he would not refuse her.

“Mrs. Xani says they must pay the moneylender tomorrow. Forty piastres. She has very little money.” She lifted a small red leather purse, which hung from the belt slung around her hips. “I have twenty-seven piastres. It is my money. If they do not pay, the debt will grow worse.”

Yashim frowned. He tried to remember Mrs. Xani, but his impression was indistinct: a woman in red skirts, a broom in her hand. Was Marta right to give her savings to this woman? Twenty-seven piastres: it was quite a lot of money.

“Can’t Mrs. Xani ask for time, until her husband gets back? Maybe he can pay off the debt.”

Marta shook her head. “You don’t understand, efendi. Forty piastres is the interest. Every month they pay.”

Yashim pursed his lips together and blew out. “Forty a month! I don’t believe it. How much does Xani owe?”

“Six hundred,” said Marta, lowering her voice. “Mrs. Xani, she is afraid for the children, if they cannot pay the money.”

Yashim knew nothing of the Xanis, but any fool could recognize Marta’s gullible good nature. Marta was fond of the children, Palewski had said. He wondered if it had all been planned: an estimate of Marta’s resources, Xani staying away to provide a pretext for this approach. My children, Marta! Oh, I am so afraid! Just forty piastres…

“Marta,” Yashim said firmly. “Xani is a poor man. Where would he borrow six hundred piastres? Why would he ever need so much money?”

Marta almost jumped in surprise. “Oh no, efendi! Xani is a good man. And a waterman, too. But he needed this money to pay the guild. An entrance fee, you understand, to buy the position.”

Yashim scratched his head. That, he admitted, made more sense. The guild would expect a payment—Xani was a kind of apprentice.

“But now he’s not here to pay? It’s convenient, Marta.”

“His wife is afraid, when he does not return. Maybe—”

She made a frightened little gesture, sketching a possibility she didn’t want to shape aloud.

Yashim tapped his foot angrily on the ground. He folded his arms and looked away.

“And Mrs. Xani has no money?”

“No, efendi. She does not. And the lord ambassador is very kind, but—Mrs. Xani does not want him to know. You understand, Yashim efendi?”

“Tchah!” Yashim exclaimed. “Very well. Who is this moneylender?”

“A Jew. He is called Baradossa. He lives in Balat, but Mrs. Xani does not know where.”

“Then how does she plan to get the money to him?”

Marta looked down and stirred the ground with her foot. “Yashim efendi, I thought—maybe, as a favor—maybe you could take him the money. You could find out where he lives. Please?”

Yashim stamped his foot, and said angrily: “Baradossa. Balat, forty piastres. Very well, Marta—no, you can keep your money. I’ll show you I can be a bigger fool than you or your master. And when Xani gets back, he can deal with me.”

Marta began to protest, holding out her little purse, but he waved her away.

Going out, he almost slammed the door, but not quite. Just in time, he had remembered that he should have left ten minutes before.

“Bloody Albanians!” he said under his breath. “Balat!”

B
EFORE
heading across the Golden Horn to Balat, Yashim made a stop at the kebab shop at Sishane. At times when he didn’t feel the need or urge to cook, he often searched out something simple: a bean stew, perhaps, or a tripe soup recommended by his old acquaintance the soup master, whose strictures on simplicity were, if anything, more fierce than his own. Yashim was suspicious of elaboration in a public restaurant: like his sauces, the best results were achieved by cleaving to tradition, and using nothing but good judgment and the best ingredients. So many lifetimes had been devoted to the perfection of bean piyaz or tarator; Yashim had only one. It was a shame to waste an opportunity.

Poor Lefèvre: it had been a mistake to expect the man to know anything. The Turks had been testing and refining dishes when the Franks chewed meat off bones held in their two hands!

The kebab shop was open to the street, where sliced hearts of lettuces were set out on a marble slab, beside sheep heads and feet, bowls of yogurt and clotted cream, some toorshan, or pickles, and a small array of simple meze. A waiter was flicking away the flies with a clean cloth; he nodded at Yashim. Inside, china pots, plates, and glasses sparkled on the shelves; a small fountain played in a corner. There was a glazed screen where a man with long mustaches ruled over a small empire of vases containing syrups and preserved fruits; on the other side the grills smoked against the wall, a half tunnel of brick and clay lined with small coals. Various cuts of meat were on a spit; little skewers sizzled and popped above the flames; now and then the bare-armed cook slapped another pide on the hot bricks and peeled it away as it began to crisp at the edges.

Yashim was led to a seat in the gallery, from where he could look down on the cooks. He saw the cook swing a spicy köfte kebab from the coals and wipe the meat from the skewer onto a fresh pide. Yashim felt hungry: he and the waiter put their heads together and decided what Yashim would eat. As he sipped his turnip juice, Yashim looked about him. It was a working crowd, he noticed: people who came to eat, not to loaf about with a pipe and a coffee. The sight of a small, stocky man with a shaved head across the restaurant reminded Yashim of an old friend, Murad Eslek. He was a supplier for markets across Istanbul, a cheerful, honest young man who had helped Yashim in a week when it sometimes looked as if the whole city were about to explode with fear, anger—and a sense of loss. Help was hardly the word: Eslek had once saved his life.

It wasn’t Murad Eslek, of course, who touched his kebab to the red pepper flakes on his plate and bent forward to eat, just someone who looked a bit like him. But from now on Yashim looked up when anyone walked in. These images didn’t arise by accident, Yashim was sure of that. Eslek the marketeer: he’d be a good man to talk to right now.

Yashim could smell the lamb on the coals, and the clean, singeing smell of the coals themselves. He had nothing against Xani. He would be like the quiet, hardworking men eating around him, a man with a wife, two children, the usual ambitions. Given a chance to escape the grind of poverty, he had seized it with both hands. A man to be congratulated, perhaps.

Debt, it was true, was dangerous ground. Yashim’s own were debts of honor: to those like Eslek, who had saved his life; to friends who helped him live it; and to others, innumerable, who gave him what he needed because they were good people. But at least Xani’s had not been the wasting indebtedness of the poor, the shabby contrivance that leads to penury and the betrayal of one’s loves and beliefs. A chance had come. The calculation was sound: with a proper job, the capital could be repaid. It was a shame that Xani had been driven to borrow from a stranger. Perhaps there hadn’t been time to make the necessary tour of his homeland somewhere in the Albanian hills.

Yashim’s kebab arrived. He took a piece of smoking lamb between the fingers and recognized its texture: this was good. He put it into his mouth, and with the same hand he broke off a piece of pide. He wondered that he had never eaten here before; he would like to come again.

He glanced down into the restaurant. There was the kebab cook, riddling a grill; another man ladling sweet syrup from a jar for a cooling khoshab: guild members, every one. The waiter had said the water came from the Khorosan spring, and Yashim had a comfortable sense of everything being done well, unhurriedly, according to the proper formula. Xani had taken that step himself, hadn’t he—from a common porter, to membership of a noble guild!

Istanbul was a city of water, of course: but saltwater. Salt on three sides—and half a million people who needed to wash and drink fresh water every day. Paris had the Seine; London the Thames; half the cities of the Ottoman Empire were watered by the mighty Danube; but Istanbul—however perfect its setting—had only the Sweet Waters. A pretty name for the measly springs that bubbled up at the head of the Golden Horn. Water for a village.

Pipes and channels, siphons and aqueducts: for fifteen hundred years the city had leached its water from the eastern hills, where streams ran through the stands of oak and beech in the Belgrade Forest. Istanbul itself was a city of trees, of course. The old Janissary Tree that stood at its center, in the Hippodrome, was like a sturdy root from which the others sprang: the cypresses and the planes, even the great gnarled oak, which sprawled out over the water at Galata. But the Belgrade Forest was a wilderness.

It had been twenty years since Yashim had gone up there—he was surprised it had been so long. In the time of Grigor and his barbs, when he struggled to stay sane because he was not whole, he would sometimes take a cart ride to the hills and walk all day under the shade of the trees. Odd people lived there, he remembered: the scent in the kebab shop reminded him of the charcoal burners with their conical huts, and of gypsies with sunburned faces, men who talked cheerfully in impenetrable languages. There were descendants of the Serbs who Mehmed the Conqueror had settled in the hills, and who gave the woods a name. The watermen would have been there, too, though he had never seen them: only the lovely reservoirs they tended, where the water slid out in thin sheets across marble slabs, and frogs had mocked him, coupling incessantly among the reeds.

Yashim knew that Istanbul drew its water from the forest, but he had only a vague idea how the water arrived at his standpipe in the yard. Heirs to the traditions of the Roman Empire, whose aqueducts they copied and repaired, the Albanian watermen practiced an art so vital and arcane that its secrets were handed down from father to son. And the thousands who drank and washed and cooked and refreshed their tired eyes and ears in the music of the fountains thought no more about it than about the dogs, or the gulls, or the paving underfoot.

That, then, was the secret that Xani had offered to learn. Six hundred piastres, Yashim thought: it was not, after all, so very much.

He rubbed his hands with a wedge of lemon and dipped his fingers in the bowl.

Murad Eslek had not yet appeared. It was a just matter of time, Yashim decided happily, as he touched the napkin to his lips.

J
UST
yards from the Balat landing stage the alleyways closed in. Yashim was funneled between old houses rotten at their bases, green with mildew, stepping past mounds of rubbish that spilled out into the passageway, negotiating stones and holes and ducking the laundry strung at head height. The lanes of Balat were all but impassable in winter; at the height of summer some were wet and squelchy underfoot, the mud green with algae, the stench of rot sweet and pervasive. A few children, whose shaven heads exposed the red sores of ringworm, tagged him up the alleyways. Women with loose turbans covering their hair and their ears watched him from the doorways of their houses; the alleys were so narrow he felt his cloak brush against them as he passed. From time to time he stopped to ask the way: a rabbi in a long robe, a clean-shaven young man with a yarmulke, an olive-skinned dandy in tight European trousers who lounged by a recess in the wall.

An elderly man with a thin white beard came carefully down the lane toward Yashim, prodding the ground ahead of him with a stick, and now and then touching the wall for support.

“Excuse me, efendi,” Yashim said. “I am looking for Baradossa.”

The old man touched the wall with his knuckles.

“You need money?”

“I’m paying a debt.”

The old man turned his head away, spat, and put out his stick.

“Do you know where I can find him?”

The old man mumbled a few words and began to walk away. Yashim felt his fingers tense and flex.

When the old man had gone, Yashim retraced his steps. Balat was still a maze to him, he who had walked over most of Istanbul in his time, but once he found his way to wider streets he remembered how to find Rebecca’s store.

Rebecca gave him an ironical smile when he stamped into her shop, setting the bell ringing.

“Yashim efendi!”

She was taller than Yashim, with a heap of red hair, dark freckles, elegantly plucked eyebrows, and astonishingly fine lips.

“I’m lost,” said Yashim brusquely. “Lost and unwanted. Help me, Rebecca.”

Rebecca laughed. She had three gold teeth. “You look hot and cross. Let’s have some ayran.”

She brushed past him in two strides and stuck her head out of the door. Yashim heard her give a piercing whistle.

Rebecca put her hands on her hips.

“So, you’ve come to our part of the city. You think it’s dirty and the people are unhelpful.”

“I didn’t say—” Yashim began to protest.

“No, but I see it. And it’s good. If you go into a house here, it is spotless. So clean you could eat off the floor.”

“I know that.” Yashim put up a hand. Rebecca folded her arms. A little boy with a shaved head came in with a silver tray.

“We are the same. Not much to look at, eh? If we are rude, it is like the dirt in the street. Your people do not look for gold in dross. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Yashim nodded and took the glass of ayran.

“That is why we are able to live in peace. Not like those Greeks.” She snorted. “Whatever they have, they like to show it off. If it is jewels or happiness, they wear jewels or go around smiling. If it is sores and afflictions, the long face and the crazy grief. Today they are your best friend, and tomorrow they want to kill you in the street. A Greek, he is like a child. Every day he forgets. A Jew is a man. He is a man who remembers, every day.”

“Remembers what?”

Rebecca gazed at him and shook her head. A lock of her hair swung across her face, and she slipped it back. “Ah,” she said, “that you would never understand.”

Yashim smiled: he knew she was right. Was it Spain, he wondered, whose language they still spoke? That al-Andalus which the Jews—like the Moors—mourned as the Paradise they had lost, treasuring the keys to a vault in Granada, as some old Jewish families did; recalling the pattern of streets and synagogues in Seville? Or was it a promise? Spain was a long time ago. And it must have been many centuries since the Jews had received a sign.

He drained his glass and placed it carefully on the counter. “If your memory is so good,” he said drily, “perhaps you can tell me where a moneylender called Baradossa lives.”

Rebecca pursed her lips. “You’re a glutton for punishment,” she said.