Stanislaw Palewski, unlike Dr. Millingen, was not a man who placed much faith in the benefits of regular exercise. His arms were thin; his legs were long. But he was still capable of sudden, violent physical effort.
He stood back, leaned against the parapet, and doubled those long legs by bringing his knees up close to his chin.
Then with a splintering crash he brought both feet down hard on the door and burst it open.
The ambassador turned to the little boy, who was watching him with astonishment from across the street, and gave him a most unambassadorial wink.
Then he went into the icy gloom to find his friend.
87
Yashim was singing an old song from the Balkans, about a man who went down to the river and caught the soul of his dead lover in his nets.
He spun slowly in the darkness, sometimes kicking his legs, sometimes reaching for a better grip on the man who had become his new friend. They’d only just met, too, he thought. Dear Xani! Stinking, buoyant, and obliging. What very good luck it was they’d met, at last.
If only Xani were still warm, Yashim thought dreamily. The pit was slowly filling, deeper and deeper as the flow backed up against the cloak and stones overhead. He heard a tapping, unlike the sound of water gushing into the pit from the blocked conduit above. For some minutes he tried to imagine what it could be, before he discovered that it was the sound of his own chattering teeth.
He found that his whole body was shaking, convulsing in sudden spasms that shook his grip on the dead man and sometimes sent him spluttering and flailing beneath the surface of the ice-cold water. Sometimes he had a sense of being underwater altogether; sometimes he closed his eyes and felt a wave of great lassitude and peace wash through him, so that he wanted to let go and sink, gently and dreamily, into the depths. He had not touched the bottom of the pit in hours, it seemed. Now and again he found himself beneath the spout of water dropping from the blocked conduit.
He heard someone singing an old Turkish marching song, in a small, tired voice. He thought it must be Xani. Then he supposed it was him. Either way it no longer mattered. He could not feel his legs.
But he must have drifted off into another pit, because the spout had stopped dropping on him: he could no longer hear it splashing on the surface. He saw himself floating endlessly from pit to pit, but he was too tired to be anxious about that. Xani’s corpse began one of its gaseous rolls beneath him, and he felt himself sliding off again, back down into the deep murk, into the comfort of the cold and the dark. He’d fought it so hard before, but he could no longer remember why. He knew that this time he would let himself go.
It was then, and only slowly, that he began to sense that he was not floating anymore. He lay faceup, with a pain in his back, breathing air. His elbow stirred. It made a rough, rasping sound-the first noise that was not gaseous or liquid he had heard in hours. He turned himself over with difficulty and stretched out his hands. The movement seemed to take minutes, as if he were rolling a huge stone uphill. He could no longer feel his hands, and to make them obey him he tried hard to imagine them there, at the end of his unfolding arms, groping weakly on the bricks.
With a slowness that was immeasurable, in the dark, he began to squirm up the conduit. It was hours before he remembered that he had to keep to the right. It was the first moment of real terror he had experienced since his ordeal began. Perhaps he had already missed a turn? He might have gone a hundred yards already, he might have gone five. He could no longer judge.
He saw Xani crawling up the pipe beside him, with his guts trailing in the water.
A blaze of magnificent fireworks went off inside his head.
He heard his old friend Palewski calling his name.
He crawled for a minute, then for a year, and after a night and a day Palewski was there, but very, very small, like a mouse in his little hole.
Palewski was shouting, and then Yashim was in a litter and was jouncing, jouncing over the cobblestones, retching and trembling and wishing he could simply die.
Like happy Xani. Big and fat and soft, twirling forever and forever in a little eddy underground.
88
Bundled into shawls, Yashim slept for sixteen hours. He woke to find Amelie beside him, reading a book.
“What you need,” she said, “is the old lady’s soup. I’ll fetch you some.”
When she had gone, Yashim tested his limbs: his joints were sore, he had some chafing on his chin and chest, and all his muscles ached, as if he had run a long way. He sat up, feeling weary. The thought of soup made him feel sick; but strangely, when Amelie presented him with the bowl, he found that he was starving.
“There’s no bread,” she said apologetically.
“It can be arranged,” Yashim said. “I’ll call the boy. You’ll find some money in that purse.”
He stuck his head out of the window. “Elvan!”
“Is this enough?” Amelie held up a coin.
Yashim nodded. “That will be enough.” He set the soup aside and closed his eyes.
Darkness. He was in the pit again. His limbs twitched. He opened his eyes and there was Amelie, the steaming bowl, his own room.
“The Gyllius. You read it?”
“Yes.”
“And it suggested-some idea?”
“Yes. I think so.”
Yashim closed his eyes again. He was very tired, but he was not afraid of the dark. He, above all people, could not be afraid of the dark.
Long ago, reaching manhood, he had stepped into a region that was darker than any tunnel underneath the city, an unrelieved blackness that ran through his veins and turned his eyes backward in their sockets. His despair had been a cell from which there was no escape at alclass="underline" the prison of his own ruined body.
But in the end he had found a way. Not a way out, exactly, but a way, perhaps, of seeing in the dark. It made him useful. Yashim the eunuch: a guide when others fell into the darkness, too.
Until sometimes a woman came, beautiful, shedding her own light, a woman, perhaps, with brown eyes and a cloud of brown hair, who watched him as he slept. And fetched him soup. And who shed so much light that as she passed he was dazzled, blinded-and would stay blind, long after she had gone away. Groping in the dark, again.
It was not her fault.
Yashim opened his eyes. Amelie had her arm stretched out, and she was looking at her hand with a concentrated expression on her face, wiggling her fingers.
Then the coin fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up.
“The Great Church,” Amelie said, turning the coin around her thumb. “Aya Sofia.”
Elvan knocked on the door. Yashim sent him to the Libyan baker for a round of bread. He took the coin with a curious glance at Amelie, and sped off on his errand.
“The Byzantine Greeks believed in an old legend about Aya Sofia,” Amelie explained. “The legend was that one day an enemy would succeed in breaking into the city. Everything would appear lost-except that the enemy would never reach the Great Church. Before that happened, the archangel Gabriel would appear with a flaming sword and drive the invaders out.”
“Hmmm.” Yashim looked doubtful. “It didn’t happen.”
“No. But Max always said that every myth contains a kernel of truth. So when the Turks broke into the city there was, in fact, a miracle at Aya Sofia. Just not the miracle everyone hoped for.”
“No archangel.”
“No. But a priest, saying mass. When the Turks arrived, he vanished.”
“Vanished?”
“Stepped into one of the great pillars, apparently, carrying the Host. The legend goes that he’ll reappear on the day the cross is raised over the dome again.”
Yashim frowned. He tried to picture the scene: Ottoman troops crashing against the great doors of the church, the terrified people huddled inside for protection, and a priest at the altar with a cup and plate. Something about the picture in his mind was vaguely familiar: he couldn’t remember. Something he’d seen, perhaps? Something Lefevre had said. But at that moment Elvan reappeared with the bread, and the memory was lost. Yashim gave him a few piastres, and he bowed out with unusual solemnity.