The Sultan's seal

29

Kamil sits on a cushioned bench under a trellis of jasmine in the garden of his mother’s house, reading Reese’s Manual of Toxicology, which he has borrowed from Michel with the excuse that it would help him with his investigations. Kamil has always taken satisfaction from knowing exactly how things work. But his reading today is in the service of a more uncertain project, his father. Opium poisoning, he reads, leaves few consistent clues in the body after death. The pupils are often contracted, but may also be dilated. Death may be sudden, or staved off altogether, depending on whether the stomach was full or empty, how many grains of opium were administered, and whether the poison was in liquid form or solid, as tincture of laudanum or crystals of morphia. But a drop of starch diluted by iodic acid will identify a residue of only one ten-thousandth of a grain of morphia by turning blue. There is nothing in the book about weaning a man from the habit of opium.

Sparks of light from the strait give the garden an air of motion and exuberance that intensifies its tranquillity. One of Kamil’s most vivid childhood memories is of the delicate, colorful crocheted butterflies edging the cotton scarf draped loosely over his mother’s hair. When she leaned over his father to serve him tea, the butterflies vibrated in the breeze and seemed to be trying to lift the scarf away from her face.

Why had his mother chosen to live here on her own? he wonders again. Her presence in the garden is strong. He can almost believe he sees her, stitching her tapestry on the bench beside the roses. Maybe he is seeing visions like Baba, he muses. He supposes his mother tired of the immense staff, the constant surveillance, the wives and families of officials and other visitors she was required to entertain at the official residence. During this time, Kamil remembers watching his parents carefully when they were together. One day, from behind a door, Kamil saw his father embrace his mother, swiftly, almost furtively, in a passageway. This embrace, though brief, relieved Kamil’s fear that his parents would part from one another, that he would lose them. At that moment he became aware of this possibility, lodged like a splinter in his heart.

After this, the family moved permanently to his mother’s house. Kamil’s father came twice a week, bringing his documents and a small retinue of assistants. He settled himself to work at a table under the short, sturdy pine tree overlooking the roses and, beyond them, the strait. Kamil’s mother refused to let the servants pour her husband’s tea, but took the empty glass herself to the samovar steaming on a nearby table. She spilled the remnants in a copper bowl, washed the glass with hot water from the spigot at the samovar’s base, emptying this water too into the bowl. Then she carefully poured two fingers of the rust-black concentrate from a small china pot atop the steaming brass urn, topping it up with hot water. Holding the glass against the light, she carefully inspected the color of the tea, adjusting it with more tea concentrate or more water until the color was just right-a brilliant brownish red that she called rabbit’s blood. She brought the glass to her husband balanced on her smooth palm and bent to place it on the table before him.

Enraptured by this peaceful memory, Kamil drowses. His grasp on the book weakens and it slips from his hand. He is awakened by the clink of glass against glass. For a brief moment, in the late afternoon shadows on the patio, he thinks he sees his mother standing by the door. Her face hidden behind a wing of cloth, she is wearing Sybil’s dress. When she moves into the slanted sunlight, he sees it is Karanfil, the cook, bringing him tea.