An Evil Eye

88

The village of Ortakoy straggled out to nothing in a few hundred yards. Spiked with the wintry stems of Judas trees and hibiscus, the cliffs advanced toward the shore, and Yashim could see the road climbing its flank, deserted except for an unlit bullock cart that strained noiselessly against the gradient, laden with broom from the upper slopes.

He pushed on down the track. Certain details returned to him: the angle of a tree hiking its branches above the water; a tilted Roman milestone half sunk in furze; a long view of the Bosphorus where it slipped away between two promontories, Asian and European, etching the outline of the castle at Rumeli Hisar against the gray sky.

He had forgotten the little row of fishermen’s shacks opposite the yali. They were built of wood and tile, single-story houses resting on massive foundations of uncut stone. Their view of the Bosphorus was uninterrupted, over the sunken wattle wall and the lurching gateway where he had said goodbye to Fevzi Ahmet years before, and shivered in his furs.

The yali itself was gone. Yashim pushed against the wooden gate, overgrown with the brown tendrils of a summer past; he shoved with his shoulder and felt the grasping shoots break as the gate slowly wheeled back.

Yashim wondered how Fevzi Ahmet had come by the yali. Armenian merchants, Greeks in the banking line, privileged governors who sojourned for a season in the capital when their own gubernatorial konaks sweltered in provincial deserts: these were the men who took yali, owned them or borrowed them, with landing stages at the water’s edge and shady gardens for their ladies to sit in through the hotter months.

Yashim sometimes dreamed of a yali himself, a small wooden house where the water would bounce light onto the ceiling and he would fish with a line; Palewski had said it was the Greek in him. But that was only in the summer months, when Yashim’s small apartment in Balat could be stifling and the breeze failed to lick through the open window. In the winter, the yali lost their charms. Even a yali a few miles along the Bosphorus could be cut off by storms and ice, no closer to Istanbul than the Rhodopes or the mountains of Anatolia. Mountain houses were snug and solid, while in winter, the airy yali revealed their drafts; damp seeped into their floors; cold sank through their walls. Shuttered and forlorn, the yali of the Bosphorus sat out the snows until the spring returned: the trees put out their leaves for summer shade, the cold retired, the damp was cleared by a few days’ sun and the passage of air through rooms that had been locked for months.

But Fevzi Pasha had clung to his yali throughout the year: Yashim had seen the smoke rising from the chimney. And now it was gone, hollowed out like a candle in its socket, only a few charred timbers pointing wickedly toward the sky.

Yashim went along the path to where he had once stood by the front door. The building was already returning to the soil. Weeds had sprouted and withered in the ash. He stirred the ashes with his foot and dislodged a sour, acrid smell.

He took a step back. Mrs. Satzos had been right: there was always a thread to be unraveled in a man’s life; a question you could ask about this house whose answer would lead ten years down the line to a Kapudan pasha sailing his fleet into the harbor at Alexandria. A question about a pile of charred wood that would explain his treason.

The day was cold and overcast. Yashim turned his back on the ruins and walked on to the next village. The fishermen had erected tiny platforms, like crows’ nests, between an arrangement of poles, and between the platforms hung nets of heartbreaking length, straining the current for fish.