The Janissary Tree

[ 25 ]

Yashim threw back his head as the moonlight came streaming through a break in the cloud. It seemed to him, as he stood with two hands touching its bark, that the tree was taller than he remembered: the black and twisted limbs corkscrewed upwards overhead, a nest of branches so thick and so high that even the moonlight struggled to break through between them.

The Janissaries had chosen this tree as their own. Some happy instinct had led them to adopt a living thing, in a part of the city that was stiff with monuments to human grandeur. Compared to this massive plane tree, Topkapi seemed cold and dead. To his left, Yashim could make out the black silhouette of the palace erected long ago by a vizier who thought himself to be all-powerful, before he was strangled with the silken bow-string. To the north lay Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines, now a mosque. Behind him stood the Blue Mosque, built by a sultan who beggared his empire to have it done. And here was this tree, quietly growing on the ancient Hippodrome, generous with its shade in the heat of the day.

Nobody had tried to blame it for what it had come to represent: the jeering power of the Janissary corps. That, Yashim reflected, was never the Turkish way. The same instinct that prompted the Janissaries to adopt the tree made the people reluctant to do away with it now that the very name of the Janissaries was consigned to oblivion. People liked trees, and they disliked change: the Hippodrome itself was proof of that. A few steps away stood an obelisk with incised hieroglyphs, which a Byzantine emperor had brought from Egypt. Further on, there was a massive column erected by some Roman emperor long ago. There was also the celebrated Serpent Column, a bronze statue of three green twining serpents that once stood at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The serpents’ heads were missing now, it was true: but Yashim knew that the Turks could hardly be blamed for that.

He smiled to himself, remembering the night in the Polish residency when Palewski, drunk and whispering, had revealed to him the astounding truth. Together they had peered by candlelight into the depths of a vast and elderly armoire, where two of the three heads, which had been a wonder of the ancient world, lay on a pile of dusty linen, practically untouched since they were snapped off the column by some revelling youths in the Polish ambassador’s suite a century ago. “Too dreadful,” Palewski had murmured, shuddering at the sight of the brazen heads. “But too late, now. What’s broken is better not mended.”

So the Janissary tree remained. Yashim leaned his forehead against the peeling bark, and wondered if it were true that a tree’s roots were as long and deep as its branches were high and wide. Even when a tree was felled, its roots continued to live, sucking up moisture from the ground, forcing new growth from the stump.

It was only ten years since the Janissaries had been suppressed. Many had been killed, not least those who barricaded themselves in the old barracks when the artillery was brought up and reduced the building to a smoking shell. But others had escaped—if the Albanian soup master were to be believed, more than Yashim would have guessed.

And that was only counting the regiments stationed in Istanbul. Every city of the empire had had its own Janissary contingent: Edirne, Sofia, Varna in the west; Uskiidar, Trabzon, Antalya. There were Janissaries established in Jerusalem, in Aleppo and Medina: Janissary regiments, Janissary bands, Karagozi imams, the works. From time to time, their power in provincial cities had allowed them to form military juntas, who controlled the revenues and dictated to the local governor. How many of those still existed?

How many men had formed the corps?

How effectively had they been put down?

Ten years on, how many Janissaries had survived?

Yashim knew just where to ask the questions. Whether he would be vouchsafed any answers, he was not so sure.

He looked up at the branches of the great plane tree for a last time, and patted its massive trunk. As he did so his hand met something that was thinner and less substantial than the peeling bark.

Out of curiosity he tugged at the paper. In the last of the moonlight he read:

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They spread.

Flee.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They seek.

Teach them.

Yashim glanced uneasily around. As the cloud blotted out the moon, the Hippodrome seemed to be deserted.

Yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that the verses he had read were intended for him. That he was being watched.