'His job was to watch'

BOOK EXTRACT

That same morning, in the Fener district of Istanbul, Yashim woke in a slab of warm Spring sunshine and sat up, drowsily rubbing his hands through his curls. After a few moments he cast aside his Korassian blanket and slid from the divan, dropping his feet automatically into a pair of grey leather baluches. He dressed quickly and went downstairs, through the low Byzantine doorway of the widow's house, and out into the alley. A few turns took him to his favourite cafe on the Kara Davut, where the man at the stove gave him a nod, and put a small copper saucepan on the fire.

Yashim settled himself on the divan facing the street, beneath the projecting upper windows. He slipped his feet under his robe: and with that gesture he became, in a sense, invisible.

It was partly the way Yashim still dressed. It was several years since the sultan had begun to encourage his subjects to adopt western dress; the results were mixed. Many men had swapped their turbans for the scarlet fez, and their loose robes for trousers and the stambouline, a curiously high-necked, swallow-tailed jacket, but few of them wore European lace-up boots.

Some of Yashim's neighbours on the divan resembled black beetles, in bare feet; all elbows, and pointy knees. In a long cloak, somewhere between deep red and brown, and a saffron-coloured robe, Yashim might have been a ruck in the carpet which covered the divan; only his turban was dazzlingly white.

But Yashim's invisibility was also a quality in the man "" if man was the proper word. There was a stillness about him: a steadiness in the gaze of his grey eyes, a soft fluidity to his movements, or an easiness of gesture, that seemed to deflect attention, rather than attract it. People saw him "" but they did not quite notice him, either; and it was this absence of hard edges, this peculiar withdrawal of challenge or threat, that comprised his essential talent, and made him, even in 19th century Istanbul, unique.

Yashim did not challenge the men who met him; nor the women. With his kind face, grey eyes, dark curls barely touched, at forty, by the passage of the years, Yashim was a listener; a quiet questioner; and not entirely a man. Yashim was a eunuch.

He took his coffee propped up on one elbow, and ate the corek, brushing the crumbs from his moustache.

Deciding against having a pipe with his coffee, he left a silver piastre on the tray and walked down the street towards the Grand Bazaar.

At the corner he turned and glanced back, just in time to see the cafe owner pick up the coin and bite it. Yashim sighed. Bad money was like poison in the bowels, an irritant that Istanbul could never rid itself of. He hefted his purse and heard the dry rustle of his fortune susurrate between his fingertips: this was one of those times when currency seemed to melt like sugar in the hand. But sugar was sweet. The sultan was dying, and there was bitterness in the air.

In the Street of the Booksellers, Yashim stopped outside a little shop belonging to Goulandris, who dealt in old books and curiosities: sometimes he stocked the French novels which Yashim found hard to resist.

Goulandris fixed his visitor with his one good eye and ground his teeth. Goulandris was not one of your forward, pushy Greeks; his job as a bookseller was to watch, not speak. One of his eyes was filmed with cataracts; but the other did the work of two, recording the way a customer moved, the speed with which he selected a certain book, the expression on his face as he opened it and began to read.

Old books, new books, Greek books, Turkish books "" and precious few of those "" books in Armenian and Hebrew and even, now and then, in French: Dmitri Goulandris stocked them as and when they came to him, pell mell. Books did not interest him. But how to price a book "" that was another matter. And so, with his one good eye, he watched the signs.

But the eunuch "" he was good. Very good. Goulandris saw a well-set gentleman in early middle age, his black hair faintly touched with grey beneath a small turban, wearing a soft cloak of an indeterminate colour.

Goulandris believed that he could penetrate any of the ruses that people used to throw him off the scent "" the feigned indifference, the casual addition, the artfully contrived and wholly careless impulse. He listened to what they said. He watched the way their hands moved, and the flicker of their eyes. Only the damned eunuch remained a constant puzzle.

'Are you looking for a book?'

Yashim lifted his head from the page he was reading, and looked round. For a moment he was puzzled: he had been far away with Benjamin Constant, a French writer whose single slim novella laid bare the agonies of love unfulfilled.

Adjusting his gaze, Yashim found himself in the familiar cubbyhole in the grand bazaar, with the walls lined with books from floor to ceiling, the dim lamp and Goulandris himself, the bookseller, in a dirty grey fez, cross-legged on his stool behind a Frankish desk. Yashim smiled. He was not going to buy this book, Adolphe. He closed it softly and slid it back into its place on the shelf.

Yashim bowed, one hand to his chest. He liked this place, this little cave of books: you never knew what you might find. Goulandris, he suspected, had no idea himself: he doubted if he could do more than read and write in Greek.

And today, hugger mugger with the Frankish textbooks on ballistics, the old imperial scrolls bearing a sultan's beautiful calligraphic tugra, the impenetrable Greek religious tracts, the smattering of French novels which Yashim so enjoyed "" there, bizarre as it was, a treasure that caught his eye. It had not been there last month. It might not be there the next.

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The Snake Stone Author: Jason Goodwin
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Pages: 308
Price: Rs 475