An Evil Eye

42

There was no reply to Yashim’s call; he knew he had not expected one. He slipped off his shoes and stood at the head of the stairs, gazing at the doors that led off the upper landing and wondering where to begin. There was a faint smell of starch and roses.

The house was an old country villa built by some Greek merchant, with wide, scrubbed oak boards, walls of planked and polished cedar, and a plaster ceiling decorated a long time ago with a painted motif of flowers. Here and there the ceiling needed repair.

Gingerly he tried a door. It swung back onto what might have been an apartment for one of Fevzi’s ladies, but when Yashim stepped cautiously inside he was reminded of a linen merchant’s warehouse. Even in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, the greatest emporium on earth, with its fourteen miles of covered alleys, its workshops and restaurants and cafes and hammams, Yashim would have been surprised to find such a collection of printed cotton quilts, hammam towels and sheets. In teetering piles on the divan, spilling onto the rugs on the floor, stacked against the walls, were pantaloons, with frills, and pretty striped chemises; handkerchiefs and pattens with cotton sides; yards of muslin of a fine grade, and bolts of cloth-blue, green, a deep indigo, patterned cotton, figured silks.

Out on the landing he stopped to listen. The silence rushed in his ears.

He pushed the door to the room that overlooked the entrance.

In the corner, a narrow pallet lay rolled up on the floor. Otherwise the room looked empty. The shutters were closed in the room beyond, and Yashim stood for a while on the threshold to let his eyes adjust to the slatted shade.

Two blue eyes were staring at him across the room.

He stumbled back, shocked: it was a child. He looked again. Its eyes were fixed on him, under a cascade of light brown hair.

His heart was thumping as he crossed the room. It was only a doll, a ferenghi doll nestling in shavings packed into a cardboard box. The lid of the box lay beside it, as if someone had lifted it to take a peek; on the lid were the words A. DAUMIER-JOUETS-COSTUMES-POUPEES and beneath, in smaller type, an address in Paris.

Around the box, heaped on the lid of a trunk pushed up against the wall, lay an array of children’s toys: a mechanical monkey beating a drum, with the key on the drum; a miniature dressing case; a hoop; a collection of little wooden animals. In spite of himself he reached into the box and picked up the doll. It was stiff, dressed in the French style, with a head and hands made of painted china.

Yashim touched his nose to the light brown hair. It felt real. He did not think he had ever seen such a horrible thing. Its dreadful blue eyes bored into him expressionlessly: Yashim was not overly superstitious, but blue eyes were always a sign of bad luck… the little painted smile, the tiny cold china hands raised in perpetual supplication, the mockery of fashion. Worst of all, perhaps, the hair, grown from a real woman’s scalp. Repelled, he put it gingerly back into the box.

As he did so something inside the doll made a muffled clunk. “Mamaaa…” the doll sighed, as a little bellows inside subsided.

Yashim jumped. “By Allah!”

He picked up the doll again, and tilted it back.

“Mamaaa…” it wheezed.

He put it back with a tremor, and turned, nudging something with his foot. He bent down and picked up a wooden duck. It had a stick coming out of its back, and wheels. As you pushed the duck along its leather webs went flip-flap along the floor. Much better than that horrid doll.

He put it on the chest, then he went into the other room and unrolled the pallet bed.

It had been slept in, often enough: Yashim could see the faint impress of a man’s form where the wadding had settled. He stood staring down at it for some time.