The Janissary Tree

[ 92 ]

Eslek had picked up fast, Yashim thought. He had not refused payment, to his relief: the task was crucial, too important to be carried out purely as a favour. He’d had his favour already, anyway. It was time to make returns.

He slipped off his clothes and handed them to the attendant, shuffling into a pair of wooden clogs to protect the soles of his feet from the hot stone. Inside the hot rooms of the hammam the floors were always dangerously slippery. Naked except for a clout around his hips he clip-clopped through the door into a large domed chamber filled with steam. The dome was supported on squinches which created semi-circular niches around the walls, where one could sit by a flowing spout of hot water that ebbed away downhill to the drain in the centre, scooping up the water to clean one’s body to the very depths of one’s pores.

Yashim stepped gratefully into the steamy room. He set his feet apart, arched his back, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. Then he ran his fingers through his black curls and looked around for somewhere to sit. He took possession of a niche, and sat on a small low bench with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him. For several minutes he did not move, allowing himself to absorb the heat, feeling his sweat begin to run. At last he bent forward and picked up a tin scoop at his feet.

He stretched out an arm to fill the scoop, and very slowly tipped the water over his head. His eyes were closed. He loved the way the water sought out runnels through his hair and trickled, like soothing fingers, down his neck. He did it again. He heard a man laugh. He smelt the animal scent of clean skin. After a few more minutes he picked up a bar of soap and began to lather himself completely, beginning with his feet, working his way up his body to his face and hair.

He continued to pour the water over his head and shoulders. Eventually he began to wash the soap away, from top to toe, working at his skin with his fingers, watching the way the hairs on his legs followed the course of the water. It always reminded him of Osman’s dream, the dream in which the founder of the Ottoman dynasty had seen a great tree, whose leaves suddenly trembled and then aligned, as if in a wind, pointing a myriad sharp points towards the Red City of Byzantium. Finally he gave his feet a thorough kneading with his thumbs, and stood up and crossed to find room on the raised platform in the centre of the room.

He climbed up languidly onto the hot platform, the so-called belly of the hammam, spread out his towel, and lay on it, face down, his head turned to the left and his eyes closed. The huge masseur, bald as an egg, every ripple of his flesh hairless and shining, closed in, and began to work Yashim’s feet with great force and dexterity, rhythmically smoothing and digging at Yashim’s flesh until Yashim felt his whole body rocking up and down. Up and down. Head to toe on the burning marble.

Invisible shivers ran up his legs. He thought of the pile of plates. He saw Eugenia’s white breasts, a tangle of sheets, her lips swollen with the heat. This was another kind of heat, a heat which sucked at his will, sapped him of all his strength. Once or twice he kicked out, involuntarily, as he rose from the sleep he so desperately craved. “Salright,” he murmured to himself. A few minutes, then the masseur will tap him off the bench and wake him up. Sleep.

Slowly the room began to empty out.

The masseur kept on working on Yashim’s body.

Slowly, and more slowly.

There was only one man left in the hammam, asleep on a bench. The masseur raised his fingers from Yashim’s neck. Yashim didn’t move.

The masseur went over to the sleeping bather and scooped him up in his powerful banded arms like a little baby. The man started, and opened his eyes, but when the masseur set him down again he was in the tepidarium, facing a cold plunge. The masseur gave him a friendly little shove and he leaped into the cold tub, gasping and laughing. He’d been asleep!

The masseur shot the bolt of the hammam door and folded his huge arms over his chest.

Inside the hot room Yashim slept on, dreaming of melting snow.