The Snake Stone

15

Yashim stopped by the fish market on the Golden Horn. Still smarting from the Frenchman’s indifference to the dolma he had so lovingly prepared, he chose two lufer, the bluefish that all Istanbul took as the standard for excellence. He watched the fishmonger slit their bellies and remove the entrails with a twist of his thumb.

Yashim was proud of Istanbul-proud of its markets, the cornucopia of perfect fruits and vegetables that poured into them every day, proud of the fat-tailed sheep from Anatolia, which sometimes came skittering and bleating through the narrow streets. What other city in the world could produce fish to match the freshness or the variety offered by the Bosphorus, a finny highway running straight through the heart of Istanbul? Why, at any season of the year you could practically walk to Uskudar on the torrent of fish that passed along the straits-

“Don’t wash it,” he said quickly. A fish would begin to deteriorate from the moment it lost its slimy protective coat.

“Bah, we have too little water,” the fishmonger grunted. “The supply is weak again.”

But it flowed: that was what mattered. Sometimes, standing on Pera Hill and looking back across the Golden Horn to the familiar skyline of the city, marked by the great domes of Sinan’s mosques; or passing the jumble of buildings-mosques, houses, caravanserai, churches, covered markets, shops-which lined the Stamboul shore of the Horn, it seemed incredible to Yashim that the city should function from one day to the next and not simply explode, or tear itself apart, or at the very least subside into a confusion of bleating sheep, rotting vegetables, and men gesticulating and thundering in twenty languages, unable to progress or retreat through the overcrowded streets.

Yet whenever Yashim looked more closely, at the level of a particular street, say, he was struck by the air of invisible good order that kept everything and everyone flowing smoothly along, like water in the pipes and aqueducts: so that when a man was murdered, and another attacked, both traders, both Greeks, they seemed inevitably to belong to some hidden economy in the city, a single channel of a commerce freighted with menace and brutality.

Yashim delivered one of the bluefish to the nuns at the hospital.

“Perhaps he can manage a little of this?” he asked tentatively.

The nun smiled. “It will do him good.”

“And perhaps-then, if he can eat, he can speak-a little?”

She laughed with her eyes. “Very well, efendi. If he is not asleep, you may have a moment. Not more, please.”

Yashim bowed.

George looked worse than when he had first seen him in the filtered subaqueous light of the wardroom, for the bruising on the side of his head had come up. He was still bandaged, with one eye covered; the other peered with difficulty through swollen, bulging lids. His breathing, however, seemed normal now.

Yashim squatted by the bed. “They’ll be giving you some fish today. Lufer.”

“Too much soup,” said George finally. His voice was a croak.

“You’re a big man, George. Fish is just the start of it. We’ll get you onto some proper meat in a few days.”

George made a faint whistling sound between his lips. It appeared to be a laugh. “Tough to shit,” he croaked.

“Yes, well, perhaps that’s right.” Yashim frowned. “The nuns will know.”

George closed his one eye in agreement. Yashim bent closer. “What happened, George?”

“I forgets,” he whispered back.

“Try to remember. You were attacked.”

The eye opened a crack. “I slips, falls over.”

Yashim rocked back on his haunches. “George. You were badly beaten up. You were almost killed.”

“No beating, efendi. Is accident. I falls on stairs.”

“So you remember that, do you?”

George’s eye swiveled toward him.

“Who pushed you, George?”

The eye slid away. Nothing.

“The Hetira?”

But his friend had rung down the shutter on his one good eye. His swollen face was incapable of expression.

George was a proud man. Tough and proud enough to take a beating-and too proud to speak, as well.

Or too afraid.

Yashim had a question for the nun as he left.

“Only his wife, efendi. She’s been coming here every day. She always talks. He is a good man. He listens to his wife.”

“And does she think-that he had an accident?”

The nun lowered her eyes and answered demurely. “We do not judge our people, efendi. We try only to heal.”

She glanced at him then, and Yashim turned his head away. Muttering a farewell, he found his own way out into the street, and heard her bolt the door at his back.