The Janissary Tree

[ 41 ]

The Polish Residency was favoured by the dark. As dusk gathered, even its railings seemed to shed their rust, while the ragged curtain of overgrown myrtles which sheltered the carriage-sweep from the eyes of the street jostled together more closely, bulking black and solid as the darkness deepened. Then empty rooms, long since uninhabited, where the plaster sifted in eddying scales from the ornate ceilings and settled on wooden floors that had grown dull and dusty through disuse, gave out false hints of life within, as if they were merely shuttered for the night. And as night fell, the elegant mansion reassumed an appearance of weight and prosperity it hadn’t known for sixty years.

The light which flickered unevenly from a pair of windows on the piano nobile seemed to brighten as the evening wore on. These windows, which were never shuttered—which could not, in fact, be shuttered at all, owing to the collapse of various panels and the slow rusting of the hinges in the winter damp -revealed a scene of wild disorder.

The room where only a few hours before Yashim had left the Polish ambassador dithering over whether to open the bison grass or simply a rustic spirit supplied to him, very cheap, by Crimean sailors on the sly, looked as if it had been visited by a frenzied bibliophile. A violin lay bridge down on a tea tray. A dozen books, apparently flung open at random, were scattered across the floor; another twenty or more were wedged haphazardly between the arms of a vast armchair. Tallow dripped from a bracket onto the surface of a well-worn escritoire, on which was piled a collection of folio volumes and tiny glasses. It seemed as if someone had been searching for something.

Stanislaw Palewski lay on the floor behind one of the arm—chairs. His head was thrown back, his mouth open, his sightless eyes turned upwards towards the ceiling. Now and then he emitted a faint snore.