The Snake Stone

17

He ate the lufer simply grilled, with a squeeze of lemon and the bread he had picked up from the Libyan baker on his way back from the hammam. Yashim dropped the remains out of the window for the dogs, made a pot of tea, and retired to his divan with the oil lamp and a French novel he had been lent by a friend at the palace. He enjoyed Balzac, relishing the light he shone into the secret heart of Paris, a city he had often visited in his imagination, with all its deceit and greed.

He opened the book and smoothed out its pages. As the night air flooded into the city he could hear the building crack as it cooled, easing its wooden joints inch by inch. Down in the street a dog began to bark, with deep, hoarse repeated barks; then a casement squealed and the dog was quiet. Yashim put out a hand to tug at the shawl that lay beside him on the divan, and heaped it around his shoulders. The lamp threw a steady yellow oval of light around the gleaming pages of his book. He bent his head and started to read.

He read the first few lines quickly, eagerly: he had already glanced at them earlier, savoring the promise of new faces and unfamiliar names, and the casual-sounding opening phrase on which Balzac had lavished so much consideration in order to create between him and his reader that sense of enjoyable complicity. But when he reached the end of the paragraph, he found he had remembered nothing.

He scratched his thigh and stared absently at the page. Like the old building itself, he seemed to be finding it hard to settle. Odd cracks and reports still sounded through the floorboards; the stairs creaked. He’d been reading too fast.

What did it mean, he wondered, to remember nothing? Like George: thinking of something else, thinking about the Hetira, perhaps. Digesting the blow to his pride, puzzling out his attitude to fear.

Yashim, too, was thinking about the Hetira. Malakian had recognized the name: it was something Greek, he’d said.

Yashim rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was letting this business run away with him. Hadn’t he already done his best by George? Bringing him food. Checking on his condition, as a friend should. Goulandris’s death was shocking, certainly; but it wasn’t his affair.

He pressed his hand down on the Balzac and stared at the first page, listening to the sound of warm wood cracking as it shrank in the evening air.

He thought of the sultan: fading like the light. It was months since he had been summoned to the sultan’s palace. And George, or Goulandris-were they simply victims of the same unease? Like a creak in the rafters as the sunlight drained away.

Yashim raised his head abruptly and listened. That crack on the stairs outside had sounded unusually loud. But everything was quiet. And then he heard, distinctly, a soft rasping that seemed to come from close to his door.

Yashim slipped the shawl from his shoulders with his left hand and swirled it swiftly around his fist. His other hand closed on a knife that lay on the shelf, a plain straight-shafted blade that Yashim sometimes used to cut tobacco. Slowly he uncoiled himself from the divan and stood up, tensing his legs.

As he did so, there came a scratch on the door. Yashim stepped forward, took the handle in his left hand and wrenched it back, slipping behind the door as it opened wide.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Yashim rubbed his thumb against the knife’s hilt and straightened his back to the wall, looking sideways. He heard a moan, which sounded almost like a plea, and a man stumbled across the threshold, dragging a leather satchel into the room behind him.