The Janissary Tree

[ 18 ]

Yashim arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet alcove which overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gun-metal which reflected back the shape of the city it had built.

The water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the deck of an Ottoman frigate which was tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks, broad-beamed and single- masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water-beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged cutters from the Black Sea coast, house-boats moored by the crowded entrance to the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out tiskiidar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.

The Greeks had called Uskiidar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name. For a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of the Roman empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman empire. It was still officially called Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It remained the biggest city in the world.

Fifteen hundred years of grandeur. Fifteen hundred years of power. Fifteen centuries of corruption, coups and compromises. A city of mosques, churches, synagogues; of markets and empo-ria; of tradesmen, soldiers, beggars. The city to beat all cities, overcrowded and greedy.

Perhaps, Yashim sometimes reflected, the Chalcedonians hadn’t been so blind, after all.

He had half-expected the Albanian to stay away, but when he looked up there he was, massive and grim, hitching his cloak. Yashim gestured to the divan and he sat down.

“Ali Pasha of Janina,” said the soup master. “The name means something to you?”

Ali Pasha was the warlord who by guile and cruelty had built up a semi-independent state in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece. It was fourteen years since Yashim had seen his head displayed on a pillar at the gates of the seraglio.

“The Lion,” Mustafa rumbled. “We called him that. I soldiered in his army—it was my country. But Ali Pasha was foxy, too. He gave us peace. I wanted war. In 18061 went to the Danube. That is where I joined the corps.”

“The Janissaries?”

The soup master nodded.

“As a cook. I was already a cook, even then. To fight—it’s not so much for a man. For an Albanian, it’s nothing. Ask a Greek. But cooking?” He grunted with satisfaction.

Yashim clasped his hands and blew into them.

“I am a man of tradition,” the soup master continued. “For me, the Janissaries were the tradition. This empire—they built it, didn’t they? And it is hard for an outsider to understand. The Janissary regiment was like a family.”

Yashim pulled a sceptical face. “Every regiment says that.”

The soup master shot him a scornful look. “They say that because they are afraid, and must fight together. That is nothing. There were men in the corps I loved because they could handle a falcon, or make poetry, better than anyone in the world before or since. Believe me. There was a brave fighter who trembled like a leaf before each battle, but fought for ten. We looked after each other, and we loved each other—yes, they loved me because I could make them food anywhere, the same way we loved the cobbler who would see us shod even when he had nothing but bark and pine needles to work with. We were more than family. We had a world, within a world. We had our own food, our own justice, our own manner of religion. Yes, yes, our own manner. There are various ways to serve God and Mohammed. To join a mosque is one way, the way of the majority. But we Janissaries were mostly Karagozi.”

“You’re saying that to be a Janissary was to follow a form of Sufism.”

“Of course. That and all the other rituals of being a Janissary. The traditions.”

The traditions. In 1806 the sultan, Selim, had begun to train up a parallel army to the Janissaries. In that respect it had been a forerunner of Mahmut’s New Guard. But Selim, unlike Mahmut, had had little time to organise: the result was that when the Janissaries rebelled against their sultan, they crushed him, and destroyed his reformed army. The rebel Janissaries had been led by Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, commander on the Danube.

“So you were there,” Yashim suggested, “when Selim was forced off the throne, in favour of his brother Mustafa.”

“Sultan Mustafa!” The Albanian ground out the title with scorn, and spat. “Girded with Osman’s sword, maybe, but mad like a dog. After two years the people were thinking how to get Selim back. Bayraktar had changed his mind as well, like all the rest of us. We were in Istanbul, at the old barracks, and for a night we prayed for guidance, talking with the Karagozi dervishes.”

“They told you what to do?”

“We stormed the Topkapi Palace next day. Bayraktar ran through the gates, crying for Selim.”

“At which point,” Yashim recalled, “Mustafa ordered Selim to be strangled. Along with his little cousin—just in case.”

The soup master bowed his head.

“So it was. Sultan Mustafa wanted to be the last of the House of Osman. Had he been the last, I think he would have survived. Whatever else we might have been, we Janissaries were loyal to the House. But God willed otherwise. Even though Selim was killed, the little cousin escaped alive.”

Thanks to his quick-thinking mother, Yashim reflected. At the crucial moment, with Mustafa’s men scouring the palace with their bowstrings, the crafty Frenchwoman he now knew as the Valide Sultan had hidden her boy beneath a pile of dirty laundry. Mahmut became sultan by the grace of a heap of old linen.

“You were there?”

“I was in the palace when they brought the boy to Bayraktar Pasha. I saw the look on Sultan Mustafa’s face: if he had seemed mad before, then—” The soup master shrugged. “The chief Mufti had no choice but to issue a fetwa deposing him. And Mahmut became sultan.”

“For myself, I was tired of this kind of soldiering. Rebellion, fighting in the palace, the murder of Selim.” He gestured with his arm: “Back and forth, here, there. I’d had enough.”

The soup master took a deep breath, and blew the air through his cheeks.

“I left the corps at the first opportunity. I was a good cook, I had friends in Istanbul. In five years I was working for myself.”

“Did you give up your pay-book, too?” Plenty of men had been on the payroll, drawing a Janissary’s wage and enjoying all the privileges of the corps without the slightest intention of turning up for war. It was a well-known scam.

Mustafa hesitated. “Not immediately,” he admitted. “But within a few years I no longer needed help, and I gave it in.”

Yashim doubted it, but said nothing.

“You can check the records. I ceased to be a Janissary in May 1815. It took courage. You wouldn’t understand.”

Yashim did his best. “They didn’t want to let you go? Or you wanted the money?”

The Albanian shot him a look of contempt.

“Listen. I go where I want. Today is an exception. I didn’t need the money, I was doing well.” Yashim blinked, believing him. “I found it hard to break with them.”

Yashim leaned forwards.

“How did you do it?”

The guild master spread his huge hands and looked at them.

“I learned to trust myself. I saw with my own eyes what had happened to the Janissaries. What they had allowed to happen to the real tradition, the one that mattered. They no longer served the empire.”

He looked up.

“You think that’s obvious? I was only waiting—many, like me, only waiting—for the tradition of service to come back to us. In the end, I decided I could wait no longer. I saw that we were doomed to repeat our mistakes. You think the Janissaries were lazy, cowardly, arrogant. The mutinies. The interference.”

The soup master stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes at Yashim, who sat transfixed.

“I tell you, the men we hung upon the Janissary Tree were all too easily taken. When we got angry, then someone fed us names, and we shouted: Kill him! Kill so-and-so! They threw them to us. We thought it would go better after that.

“You put coriander in the soup. Well, some people like it, some don’t, some don’t even notice. Forget the people who don’t like it. You add some beans. Some carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don’t. But more people don’t care much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody will know any better. Only a few.”

He tugged at his moustache.

“The Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly and completely altered. In the city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave.”

Yashim could admire the older man’s guts. So much in this city was founded on pretence: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then, the Albanian hadn’t stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about the guards at the guild were true.

“Your old friends,” he suggested.

“No, no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn’t blame me, either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they remembered.”

He picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it down. His eyes were sparkling.

“The fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons—we all did, didn’t we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for a boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force which had destroyed Selim.”

Perhaps, Yashim thought. But Mahmut’s motives were more complex than mere vengeance for his uncle’s death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude, and took carte blanche. Yashim could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night, showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. “You see how we use our dogs,” the notice ran. “While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets.”

“The people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening sound, wasn’t it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened, all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as they’d beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming, and the barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.

“Look, I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand years.”

He wiped his hands over his face.

“Later, after the killing and the demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives, for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody would be interested in them any more, not after a few weeks, a few months.

“And slowly some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of sight—stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands, I suppose, unknown to me.”

“Thousands?”

“I knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “I can’t understand it. Ten years, and all good, quiet men. Grateful for the work.”

“So what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?”

The soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.

“That’s what I don’t understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can’t do it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe.”

Yashim thought of the dead officer, coiled in the cauldron’s base.

“It was always pretending, wasn’t it?” Yashim asked. “That’s what you said. Tripe soup made of beans and bacon.”

The soup master looked at him in surprise, and folded his hands.