The Janissary Tree

[ 83 ]

Yashim spent the morning visiting the three sites he had identified from the old map the night before. He hoped that something would strike him if he searched with an open mind.

A tekke did not have to be large, but a big space might provide a clue. A tekke did not, of itself, have to conform to any particular shape, yet a small dome might suggest a place of worship. So would, perhaps, a stoup for holy water, or a redundant niche, or a forgotten inscription over a doorway, in a corridor—little signs which might seem insignificant in themselves, but taken together would help to point him in the right direction.

Failing that, he could always ask.

The first street he visited was only gradually recovering from the effects of a fire which had burned so fiercely that the few stone buildings had finally exploded. Large, broken blocks still lay embedded in the ash that drifted listlessly up and down the charred-out street. Some men were poking in the ash with sticks; Yashim supposed they were householders, searching for their savings. They answered him slowly, as if their thoughts were still far away. None of them knew about a tekke.

The second place turned out to be a small, irregularly shaped square jTist within the city walls. It was a working-class district, with a fair number of Armenians and Greeks among the Turkish shopkeepers whose little booths were gathered along its eastern edge. The buildings were in poor repair. It was almost impossible to guess their age. In a poor district buildings tended to be repaired and recycled beyond their normal life-expectancy. Come a fire, and people built afresh in the same style as their fathers and grandfathers.

Across from the shops stood a small but sedate and clean mosque, and behind it a little whitewashed house where the imam lived. He came to the door himself, leaning on a stick, an old, very bent man with a straggling white beard and thick spectacles. He was rather deaf, and seemed confused and even irritated when Yashim asked him about the Karagozi.

“We are all orthodox Muslims here,” he kept saying in a reedy voice. “Eh? I can’t understand you. Aren’t you a Muslim? Well, then. I don’t see what—We are all good Muslims here.”

He banged his stick once or twice, and when Yashim got away he continued to stand there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him with his thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.

From the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of the old wall, discussed the matter between themselves, but their conversation soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story about a Mevlevi dervish he’d once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.

By late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested by Eugenia’s map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.

Yashim wandered around, defining a kind of circuit which he spent more than an hour exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted a ferrety man with a waxed moustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere, carrying a string bag.

The man jumped when Yashim spoke.

“Who do you want?” he snapped.

“It’s a tekke,” Yashim began—and as he said it he was struck by an idea. “I’m looking for a Sufi tekke, I’m not sure whose.”

The man looked him up and down.

“Doesn’t it make a difference?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “They aren’t all the same, you know.”

“Of course, I understand,” Yashim said peaceably. “In this case, I’m looking for a particular old tekke…I’m an architect,” he added wildly.

He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tea-room. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone else’s.

“An old tekke.” The man swung his nose left and right. “There’s a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They’ve only been there ten years or so, but the building’s very old, if that’s what you mean.”

The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.

“That,” said Yashim, smiling, “is exactly what I mean.”

The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said: “What do you make of all these murders, then?”

It was Yashim’s turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.

“Murders?”

“The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone’s talking about them.”

“Oh, yes. What do you think?”

“I only think…what everyone says. It’s something big, isn’t it? Something about to happen.” He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. “I keep rats.”

“Rats.”

“Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they’re clever, and they don’t mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.

“I’ve got three. They’ve been acting strangely these last few days. Don’t want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don’t want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too.”

Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked: “What is it? What do they feel?”

The man shook his head.

“I don’t know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I said, something’s happening and we don’t know what. Here you are, the tekke.”

Yashim looked round in surprise. He had passed the low, win-dowless box earlier. It looked like a warehouse or a store-room.

“Are you sure?”

The man nodded briskly. “There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in the evenings. Good luck.” He waved the string bag. “Got to pick up some food for the rats,” he explained.

Yashim gave him a weak smile.

Then he knocked hard on the double doors.