An Evil Eye

59

“ Can you sing? Dance?”

Kadri shook his head. “I can run-and jump.”

“All right, darling.” Preen pursed her lips. “Let’s work with that. For the time being, I’ll get you to help Mustafa with the props and scenery. Learn some of the ropes.”

“I’ll pay for his board,” Yashim said, fishing out his purse. He shook the money into his hand.

“Don’t worry about that,” Preen said, with a wave. “Another mouth makes no difference.” She frowned, and pointed at something glinting in Yashim’s palm. “What’s that?”

“Oh, something… a nail,” he said carelessly. “I found it-in someone’s house.”

Preen peered at it for a moment, then her head snapped back. “Get rid of it, Yashim. Throw it out.” She gestured toward the window, but then her expression changed. “No, don’t throw it. You shouldn’t have touched it.”

Yashim picked up the nail and spun it between his fingers.

Preen winced. “Stop! You don’t know what it does!”

“I’ll throw it away,” Yashim said reluctantly.

“No, no.” She bit at her finger. “I know a woman, not far away. It’s better that we go to see her. Believe me, Yashim, don’t be stupid.”

Yashim shrugged and put the nail in his pocket.

“We can go there now,” Preen continued. “Kadri, come and meet Erkan, the Strongest Man in the World.”

The Grande Rue was lined with European shops, behind whose bright windows people came with money and left with packages wrapped in paper. Preen led Yashim across, and plunged into the network of alleys that lay in a tangled skein above the Bosphorus. Here, by a dimmer light, matters were decided by superstitious gestures, by almanacs and eggs broken into a bowl of oil, by imprecations and talismans. Here people sought out propitious days, avoided dark corners, waggled their fingers behind their backs, resorted to nostrums, prayers, and the prognostications of wise women. These were the ordinary calculations of the everyday world, in which every moment held its weight, every movement was a portent, each word and gesture held a meaning.

Yashim put a hand to his pocket and felt the nail, with its little ridge of thread, and hastily withdrew it again.

Preen knocked at a door.

“Who is it?”

“Preen, Mrs. Satzos. With a friend.”

“Please come in. The door is not locked.”

The light seemed to bend and flutter toward them. The whole room was lit by dozens of tiny candles, burning and flickering in glass jars all around the walls.

A little table held a jug and a bowl, and several plain glasses. The walls were lined with shelves. On the shelves stood the flickering lights, and over each of them loomed an indistinct shape. Some were crosses, of tin or bronze, occasionally inset with small beads of colored glass that twinkled in the candlelight, but there were also books, set flat against the wall, and on one shelf-a more disagreeable surprise-a row of stuffed dolls with beady eyes and silk faces, their arms fixed in a gesture of benediction. Behind one candle he noticed a hand of Fatima, made of punched tin. Several small icons, almost black with age or soot, defied analysis.

“I brought him straight to you, Mrs. Satzos,” Preen was saying. “He wanted to throw it out the window. Yashim?”

Yashim laid the nail on the cover of a brassbound book he supposed to be a Bible.

Mrs. Satzos leaned forward. She was a small, birdlike woman with ice-white hair braided into a bun and dark patches around her eyes.

“You did right to bring it to me. You found this in your house? Your room?”

“In the house of-a friend. He’s away.”

Mrs. Satzos frowned.

“Away-gone to sea,” Yashim explained.

The old lady cocked her head, as if she found something puzzling. “And the women in the house…?”

“There were none.”

Mrs. Satzos looked at him kindly. “As you wish. The little threads-what do they suggest to you, efendi?”

“I don’t know. I thought there was something deliberate.”

“Whoever twisted this thread around the nail was thinking of the past.” She peered more closely at the nail. “The knot tied here, you see? I think it represents an event. Perhaps a decision. Whoever tied it wanted your friend to remember something.”

Yashim glanced at Preen. “So it is not a curse?”

The old lady clicked her teeth impatiently. “Curses. Charms. Kismet!” She dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “That is for the bazaar, where people go like children to Sufis and gypsies. Do you not think that memory can also be a curse?”

Yashim felt the blood rise in his cheeks. “Memory?”

Mrs. Satzos folded her hands on her lap and regarded him with her panda eyes. “The curse is not what is to be, efendi. The curse belongs to what has been.”

“And this”-he gestured to the nail without looking at it-“revives a memory?”

“There are things that people wish to forget, efendi.” She was staring at him in surprise, as if she had seen something she didn’t expect. “Some disgrace. A loss. A source of pain.”

She stood up and turned to one of the shelves. She selected one of the curious dolls that Yashim had disliked on sight, and opened the drawer of the little sideboard to take out a roll of lint. She cut a length off the roll and returned to the table. Pressing the nail flat against the doll’s back, she began to bind it on with the lint, murmuring what sounded like a prayer.

“There!” She nodded to them brightly. “We will guard the charm, and draw its sting. If you wish to make an offering to the saint it will not be refused.”

She put the doll back on the shelf. Yashim and Preen got to their feet, and Yashim dipped in his wallet for a silver kurus, which he placed in the woman’s hand.

She touched his arm. “You have troubles yourself, efendi. You will come to visit me again.”

“My troubles-” He was not sure what he meant to say. He shrugged. “Perhaps.”