The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (11 page)

Natasha laughed. “No elephants? You disappoint me. I thought every Ottoman picnic had at least one, to carry the musicians!”

“First I must go home to prepare the food,” Yashim said. He hesitated. “If you like, we could go home and cook together.”

“I can make soup. And pancakes.”

“I’ll cook. But I’d like your company.”

She pressed her hands together. “Oh, I’ll come! Just don’t tell me that you live in a palace, too.”

“I think, Natasha, you’re in for a shock. And now we will take a caïque, as I promised. It’s always cooler on the water.”

20

S
HE
untied the ribbons of her bonnet and reached up to take it off.

“This is where you live?”

She knelt on the divan, and looked out of the window. “I—I have never been so high up. In a house.”

The juice of the grated zucchini looked like jade in the bowl. He lit a fire in the grate, sprinkled it with charcoal, and set a pan to boil. With a sharp knife he peeled the celeriac, chopped it into small cubes, and dropped the pieces into the water, with the artichokes.

The pan was boiling: he skinned a dozen small onions and blanched them.

“I like to watch you work,” Natasha said.

He had almost forgotten her sitting on the divan.

“Tell me about Siberia. Tell me about your home.”

He worked while she talked. He put carrots, onions, artichokes, and celeriac into a bigger saucepan, with a sprig of thyme and a bay leaf, and covered them all with stock.

“We used to pretend we were in Saint Petersburg. Uncle Sergei had money—they didn’t confiscate his estates, I don’t know why—and he had the opera house built in Irkutsk. We sewed our own clothes, but we threw proper balls, with an orchestra. Everyone always wanted to believe that we would go home.”

Yashim broke two eggs into a bowl with a cup of flour and beat them together. He gave the zucchini a final squeeze and mixed them in. On the board he chopped onions with a handful of dill and parsley, and pounded some garlic in the mortar with a pinch of salt. He swept it all into the zucchini mixture and stirred it around. Finally he set an open pan on the heat, and threw in butter and olive oil.

“One by one, the families left. We used to give them a ball on the night of their departure. The boys who were leaving would ask the girls who were staying for the first dance…”

Her voice trailed off.

“Eventually the balls stopped happening, when everyone had gone.”

“And your father?”

“He runs the school where I have been teaching. He paints. He is making a book of Siberian wildflowers. It’s very beautiful, very detailed. I think he’s the first person to really study Siberian plants.”

She laughed a bit awkwardly. “His real problem is me.”

The butter was bubbling. Yashim began to drop spoonfuls of the zucchini mix into the pan: they spread and blossomed as they fell.

“Why you?”

“I think he feels he’s let me down. There’s no society. He feels that.”

“No one to marry, you mean?”

Natasha blushed. “I suppose so. Oh, Anton the miller is rich, but he thinks only about trees. And there’s a furrier who sends furs all over the world, and spends the winters in Moscow, but he’s old and has a mustache that gets into his soup. My father says he was a sort of criminal once. I can’t marry him.”

Yashim slid the zucchini fritters from the pan, then started to make some more. “No, I see that.”

“Do you? It sounds silly, perhaps. But I think it would break my father’s heart if I married one of the mujiks. As it is, he has very little heart left to break—it’s been broken so many times already.”

“But you’ve come here to get him out of Siberia.” The vegetables were done. He fished them out of the broth and laid them on a platter.

Natasha was so silent that Yashim looked around.

“He has his school and his flowers,” she said, thoughtfully. “My mother is buried there, too.”

“And you?”

“Me? I’d stay with him.”

Yashim cocked his head. “Then—” He waved a spoon. “What are you looking for?”

“A pardon. I want the tsar’s forgiveness, for my father. He was so young when he joined the Decembrists. I would like to see him as a free man, not a prisoner. It is how he would wish to be seen.”

Yashim nodded. He chopped a larger onion into shreds, and began to soften it in a pan with butter and garlic. He threw in a handful of pine nuts, and then a cup of rice, pushing the grains against the pan, feeling them stick and move reluctantly.

He reached into the stockpot, tore off a piece of chicken breast, and laid it steaming on the board. He chopped it quite fine, stirred it into the rice, added currants, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and a pinch of salt, then poured in some stock. The pan hissed and steam rose into the air.

“You like this—cooking?”

The question surprised him. “Yes. Why not?”

Natasha shrugged. “In Russia, it’s a job for old women.”

Yashim let the stock liberate the rice, and settled the pan to a low simmer on the edge of the stove. “You know
L’ Avare
? The Molière play?”

She smiled.
“You should eat to live, not live to eat.”

“I think the truth is somewhere between the two.”

“In Russia we have bread, butter, and cheese. We eat a lot of soup.”

“Soup’s good. I make soup in winter.”

“I suppose you have many things to choose from in Istanbul.”

Yashim chopped a clove of garlic with salt, and stirred it into a bowl of yogurt. “Try this, see if you like it.” He put a fritter on a plate, added a dollop of yogurt, and offered it to her.

“What is it?”

Yashim smiled, and explained.

“Eggs. Of course, we have eggs, too,” she said hastily.

Yashim was rolling the peppers on a board, shaking out the seeds. He lifted the lid of the rice, which was almost done, and squeezed some lemon juice over it, with a twist of pepper from the mill.

“It’s delicious,” she said, handing him back the plate.

“Would you like a job? It’s easy. Just spoon this rice into the peppers, like this.”

She held one, green and waxy, between her fingers, and took a teaspoon. “Ow! It’s hot!”

“Leave a little room at the top—the rice expands. Then, like this—put the lid on again, and lay it in the pan.”

They stood side by side, working the rice into the peppers. When they were all done, Yashim poured some more stock over them and covered them with a plate.

“Now they can lie quiet,” he said. “And we can go out again.”

He led her downstairs, and out onto the street. At Kara Davut he shepherded her to the café. “I’ll show you how we drink coffee in Istanbul,” he said. “I think you should try it sweet.”

When the coffee came, black and thick and small and strong enough almost to stand without a cup, she tried it gingerly.

“Just sip it,” he warned her. “And then—like this.”

He drank the coffee, set the saucer on top, flipped it, and laid it on the table.

“Why?”

“Because you can read your fortune in the shapes the grounds make in the cup. The bottom of the cup is the past, and the sides tell the future. What’s left on the saucer—that tells you about your home. Let me see.”

A shadow fell across the table and a man clamped his hand over Natasha’s cup. She pulled back in alarm: he was a wild-looking fellow, with long mustaches and ill-kempt gray hair tied back with a dirty ribbon; the nails of his hand were chipped and rimmed with black.

“I will read the cup for the Frankish lady,” he said.

Yashim and Natasha exchanged glances. “Very well,” Yashim said. Sufi or beggar, it was polite to let him go on.

The man squatted down by the table, and when he drew the coffee cup and saucer toward him Yashim noticed he put a coin on the cup—perhaps to encourage them to pay him afterward, perhaps to avert bad omens.

He turned the cup over and peered into it silently. He looked so serious and intent that Natasha suppressed a smile. “What does it say?”

“The lady has no family?”

“She has a father.”

“Hmm. But not here. She has come a long way by sea.”

Yashim gave Natasha an amused glance.

“There is something here she very much wants.” The fortune-teller shook his head slowly. “Different paths may lead to her goal, but it will not be easy for her to decide which one to take. The quickest route is not the best. It is unsafe. Dangerous. But the other route is slow and seems hard, so she will be tempted. I am afraid when she realizes, it will be too late.”

Yashim frowned, but translated faithfully what the fortune-teller said. “How is she to recognize the path of danger?”

“Because a man will offer it to her, but—” The man frowned, and cocked his head. “He is a man and not a man. I don’t understand it.” He leaned sideways and laid a hand on Yashim’s arm. “I see death, efendi. Death and punishment,” he added, looking at him with yellow eyes.

“A woman’s death. I do not like this reading,” the fortune-teller said, replacing the cup. “I had not expected such a fortune.” He made a gesture with the flat of his hand, and stood up.

Natasha looked anxious. “But what’s he saying?”

The man had left the table.

“He rambled, Natasha—many of these men are charlatans, beggars really. I am sorry.”

“You think so? Why did he leave us with a coin?”

Yashim followed her pointing finger, and there, on the table between them, was a copper asper.

“Hey!” Yashim was half on his feet but the man was already gone.

Natasha looked pale. “He said something, didn’t he? About my father?”

Yashim shook some money from his purse. “Come on, we’ll get the other things we need, and then go back. I’ll show you how we make an Ottoman picnic, without the elephants.”

At the cheesemonger’s stall they stopped for a block of salty white
beyaz peynir
, made of pure sheep’s milk, and a block of stringy
dil peyniri
.

They crossed the street to an old man with curved mustaches, whose wife’s pickles were widely considered to be the best in the market.

“
Dil peyniri
is good to eat with your fingers. It’s mild, and you pull it into strings and wrap the strings around a green pickled tomato and pop it into your mouth.”

They hesitated over the jars of pickles, eventually choosing three of Yashim’s favorites:
patlican tursusu
, made of stuffed eggplant; a jar of turnips, pickled in grape juice, with a sliver of beetroot thrown in, for the prettiness of its color; and some long green chilies.

The basket was almost full, and very heavy.

“We used to picnic on the Black Sea,” Yashim remembered. “They made me carry a basket, and I always grumbled.”

He smiled: he could see now that his parents had given him a little basket of his own to help him appreciate the coming feast. Of course, the real picnic was carried by porters and slaves. Hampers and hampers!

“Let’s get
pastirmi
.”

At the meat stall he bought a pound of the best from Kayseri, made from beef filet. He explained to Natasha how the meat was pressed, rubbed with
çemen
paste made of fenugreek, garlic, and chili, and then sun-dried.

“Fenugreek?”

“Smell it.”

She did, and pulled a face. They bought a couple of horseshoe-shaped
sucuk
, a dried sausage made of lamb with garlic and cumin, and moved on to buy pistachios and fresh green chilies.

“Do you like caviar?”

“Yashim, you’re joking…”

So he bought half a pound of Persian sturgeon’s eggs, the black kind, lightly salted in their own purse. “Try it from the other side of the Caspian,” he remarked. On their way out of the market, Yashim stopped a
simit
seller, and bought a dozen coils of the spiced dry bread from the tray the man carried on his head.

“I think the valide must be coming after all,” she whispered.

He selected a tray of baklava: “I think you’ll like this,” he said, thinking of Palewski’s joke. “The Italians love it.” They watched the man lay his selection carefully between thin wooden boards. The man’s young son bound the boards together with raffia ribbons, which he tied off and curled with a zip of his fingernail.

Finally, at the apothecary, he bought four ounces of China tea, wrapped in paper.

The basket was so heavy he engaged one of the porters who carried bales and boxes uphill on their backs, secured by a band across their foreheads. He was a stocky man with delicate hands, and he grunted with amusement when he saw Yashim’s load.

21

Y
ASHIM
was surprised to find Father Doherty sitting on the stairs on the half landing, reading a book.

“Ah, Yashim efendi! I was afraid you’d never come.” His blue eyes flickered over Yashim’s shoulder and fastened on Natasha. “The boys tell me you’re having a picnic—and invited me along as spiritual adviser. I came straight on.”

“The door wasn’t locked.”

“Well, I saw that, of course, but I’d no wish to invade, sir.”

“Not at all,” Yashim said. “You’re very welcome to join our picnic. Mademoiselle Borisova. Father Doherty.”

Once the cooked dishes were packed, the sturdy hamal took the picnic baskets down the street to the Balat stage, where Yashim had to engage a second caïque for the priest. Father Doherty sat nervously erect and let out a muttered invocation whenever the delicate craft rocked too far for his taste.

At Eyüp, at the top of the Golden Horn, they found Birgit and the Italians taking coffee at a small café and admiring the distant view of the city from an unfamiliar angle. The sun shone, the water sparkled; it was an excellent day, they all agreed, for a trip into the countryside.

“Count Palewski will be joining us, I hope?”

“I’m afraid he has other engagements, Miss Lund. He sends his regrets.”

Yashim engaged another porter to carry the baskets. Coffee taken, they set off through the village and past the shrine to the Companion of the Prophet, and up into the low wooded hills that surrounded them.

The porter proved quite incapable of giving directions; born and raised in the village, he had never left it, either.