That “consult,” he thought, was a good touch.
“Et alors?” The valide gave a little shrug. “I am so out of touch, my friend.”
It was Yashim’s turn to use the mischievous look. “I don’t think so,” he said.
The valide suppressed the beginning of a smile. “ Enfin, I may be able to write a note. The sultan’s bostanci could help, I think; he deals with the watermen all the time. He’s an old friend, though he goes by some other title these days. Commissioner of Works, or nonsense of that sort.”
She knows his new title perfectly well, Yashim thought. She sits here, in a palace half deserted, and not a thing that goes on here or in Besiktas escapes her notice.
The valide rang a little silver bell. “Notepaper, and a pen,” she told the girl who answered. “In the meantime, Yashim, you may read to me a little from this book. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I like it. But it also makes me laugh. So don’t be afraid-I shan’t be laughing at your accent.”
And with this whisper of a challenge, the faintest tinkling of her spurs beneath the raillery, she held out a copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noire.
70
“Tell me,” Yashim said. “Tell me about the ancient Greeks.”
Amelie was lying facedown on the divan, her head in the sunlight, resting her chin on her hands. Yashim heard her giggle.
“I could talk for days,” she said. She moved her head so that her cheek was resting on her fingers, and she looked at him. “Let’s do a swap,” she suggested. “I’ll tell you about the finest hour of ancient Greece, and you tell me about your people. The Ottomans. Their greatest moment.”
Yashim cocked his head. “Agreed,” he said. He crossed his legs and sat by her in the window. “A time of war? Or a time of peace?”
Amelie smiled. “War first,” she said.
“Ah, war.” Yashim straightened his back. “The sultan Suleyman, then. Suleyman, the Giver of Laws. In French-the Magnificent. He is twenty-two when he leads our armies to Belgrade. The White City-impregnable, lying between two rivers, the Sava and the Danube, defended by the hosts of Christendom. It is a long and a weary march…”
He told of Suleyman’s victory at Belgrade, and his conquest of Rhodes two years later, of his prowling the borders of Austria, and humbling Buda.
“You look different when you talk like that.”
“Different?”
“Fierce. Like Suleyman.” She nestled her cheek against her palm, and her hips moved against the carpeted divan. “Tell me about peace.”
“I’ll tell you about a poet,” Yashim said. “In time of poetry-with a sultan who surrounds himself with poets. Every night they hold a Divan of poetry, each man trying to outdo the other with the beauty of his words. Rhyme, meter the highest expressions of love and sadness and remorse. But the sultan is better than them all.”
He heard Amelie give a little snort. He glanced down. Her eyes were closed, and a light skein of her brown hair had fallen across her cheek. She was smiling.
“Ah, but he was,” Yashim insisted. “He was a poet of love-because of all our sultans, he was the one who loved one woman most. He had hundreds of women-the most beautiful girls from Circassia and the Balkans-but one he loved beyond all the rest. She had red hair and pale white skin, and dark, dark soulful eyes. She was-they say she was a Russian. Roxelana. He married her.”
He bent forward and softly recited the lines he knew by heart.
Amelie lay still for a few moments. “What was his name? The poet-sultan?”
“Suleyman. Suleyman the Magnificent.”
She opened her eyes and sought him out. He was very close.
“The same sultan,” she murmured. She arched her back and raised her head, until she was looking at Yashim.
Slowly, hesitantly, she moved closer to him. Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his lips.
Yashim felt himself weightless, like a feather in the wind.
Their lips touched.
Her arm slipped around his neck. He put out a hand and touched the curve of her hip.
It was a long time before either of them could speak.
“You were going to tell me about the Greeks,” Yashim said.
Amelie smiled and touched a finger to the tip of his nose.
“Right now,” she said, “I’m more interested in Ottomans.”
71
Sunlight slid across the divan as the afternoon wore on.
He broke away from her once: from her interest. She had understood. She soothed him back to her with little cries, like a bird. She had put her fingers to his lips.
“Max never kissed me like that,” she said finally.
He left her reading the Gyllius; it was the least he could do.
“Remember, Gyllius is writing about a vanished world. Perhaps something in this will spark a memory.”
He caught a last glimpse of her on the divan: her hair in the sun, a finger on her chin, and the curve of her hip like a wave that could drown him.
72
Palewski was not at home; Marta said he’d gone for a walk and invited Yashim inside to wait.
“I’ll sit out here,” Yashim said.
He wanted the light-he needed air. He had walked all the way, hoping to drive the agonizing tedium from his limbs, breath into his constricted lungs. It was no good: Amelie that afternoon had invaded him, opening the space in his mind that he always kept closed.
He sat at the top of the steps with his back to the wall, in the sun, watching the little boy playing in the yard. He was kneeling by the front wall and digging in the earth with a stick.
The little boy didn’t look up when Yashim came and squatted down beside him.
He carved the stick into the dirt again, then laid it flat and began to polish the sides of the trench he had dug, a short, shallow trench that sloped gently from one end to the other.
At the lower end the boy had dug a small hole in the ground. He laid the stick aside and began to smooth the sides of the hole.
When it was done to his satisfaction he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. Yashim gave him a smile but he did not receive it.
The little boy stood up and walked away.
Yashim stared at the figure on the ground, puzzled.
The little boy was gone a few minutes. He came back carrying a jar and a ball. The ball was made of tin and had a big dent in it. The boy placed the ball in the trench, with the dent uppermost. Very carefully he stood the jar on its base and began to tip water from the jar into the trench. The ball floated a short way, then rolled over slowly and came to rest on its dented side.
The boy sighed. He looked up at Yashim for the first time and there were tears in his eyes.
“It’s only because the ball’s got a dent in it,” Yashim said quietly.
The boy looked down, but made no effort to touch the ball.
“I can get you another one, just like it,” Yashim said.
The boy didn’t move.
“Where did you get this one? From your daddy?”
The boy looked up, and his head seemed to shrink into his shoulders. He doesn’t speak, Yashim thought: his words are soundless shapes inside his head.
Yashim stood up and held out his hand. “Show me,” he said.
73
Amelie lay on the divan, fiddling with a lock of her hair, her attention focused on the old book her husband had left behind in Yashim’s flat.
She read quickly, sometimes skipping whole pages, sometimes turning the book in her hands the better to read the tiny brown scrawls that decorated the lines and margins of the text. Yashim was right: hers was an expressive face, and so as she read her expression changed. She frowned and bit her lip; she smiled; and once, holding the book with one finger between the pages to mark her place, she got up and walked around the little apartment with an anxious glance at the window.