An Evil Eye

44

Downstairs a door opened into a salon paneled in polished walnut, furnished on two sides with a low divan. On one side stood a tall, narrow fireplace with a scalloped lintel of stone; on the other the paneling was fretted and carved into a series of elegant cupboards and shelved alcoves.

Yashim knelt in front of the fireplace. A little white ash, mixed with fragments of charred wood. He stirred it with a poker.

He leaned the poker against the wall and stood up, brushing the ash from his thighs.

Everything seemed laced with expectancy. New toys, still in their boxes of shavings. Bolts of cloth, awaiting a woman’s shears. Towels, slippers, quilts, and divans, unused.

Not a house that had been abandoned by its women and its children.

A house that was waiting for them, instead.

He turned his head suddenly, as if someone had entered the room. There was nobody there.

He crossed the hall. The room beyond was the mirror image of the one he had just left, but it, too, contained no paperwork.

He returned to the hall and followed it to the kitchens at the back, poking his head into the understairs cupboard. He was about to close the door when he noticed something sparkling-a bright copper nail, driven up into one of the treads. He looked more closely. There was a small piece of stained linen fixed to the nail, which was wound with colored threads. He reached out; the nail came away easily in his hand.

In the kitchen a thick mortar, like his own, was mounted in a cradle. Against a wall stood a narrow table, heaped with jars and bowls-spices, saffron, dried mint, sumac, salt. He tried the jars, stirring their contents with his finger.

He touched the ashes in the stove: they were brittle under his fingers. Damped, perhaps, by summer rain. Then in the heat, they’d dried again. They had not been warmed for many weeks.

He looked at the copper pans that hung on the wall above the stove, twelve of them-but only two were blackened on the base.

For coffee, he thought. A pan for coffee and a pan for rice.

He ran his fingers along the rough oak boards. A kitchen furnished an account, like the impress of a man on a pallet bed.

When he imagined his own kitchen, he saw the jars and the mortar, the pans and the little stove. The kitchen of a man who lived alone, like this.

He pursed his lips, and reached into the crock of rice. The rice slithered between his fingers.

At the bottom he felt something else.

He gripped the packet and drew it out carefully, spilling rice across the board.