Free The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin Page A

himself quiet and saying
little, so that people tended to overlook his presence.
    But
while he was grateful for the long hours that kept his mind sharp, still the
old torment, all the worse for being fresh, had flourished in the heavy
atmosphere of trade and politics, a secret agony among secrets: to be a eunuch
was, for Yashim at that time, the grammar of a language he could not
understand. And so he had felt himself isolated in the most cosmopolitan
society in Europe.
    He
had met Preen at a party that Mavrocordato threw for a pasha he wanted to
impress, hiring dancers for the evening. Yashim had been sent, afterward, to
pay them off, and he had found himself talking to Preen.
    Of
all the traditions that bound Istanbul together, the long history of the
kdfek
dancers was probably the least celebrated and possibly the oldest. Some said
that they were descended--in a spiritual sense--from Alexander's dancing boys. The
foundation of Constantinople would have occurred almost a thousand years after
the
kdfek
tradition had migrated from its homelands in northern India
and Afghanistan to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The
kdfek
were
creatures of the city, and the rise of a city on the banks of the Bosphorus
would have sucked them in like dust to a raging fire. What was certain was that
the Greeks had entertained these dancers, selecting them from the ranks of boys
who had been castrated before puberty and subjecting them to rigorous training
in the stylized arts and mysteries of the
kdfek
dance. They danced for
both men and women; under the Ottomans, it was usually for men. They performed
in troupes of five or six, accompanied by a musician who plucked at a zither
while they whirled and stamped and curved their wrists. Each troupe was
responsible for engaging new "girls" and training them. Many of them, of
course, slept with their clients, but they were adamantly not prostitutes, whom
they regarded as utterly wanton--and unskilled. "Any girl can open her legs,"
Preen had once reminded him. "The
kdfek
are dancers."
    But
it was undoubtedly true that the
kdfek
were not too picky about their
friends. They stood on the very lowest rung of Ottoman society, above beggars
but with the jugglers, actors, conjurers, and others who made up
thedespised--and well-patronized--classof professionalentertainers.
    They
had their snobberies--who doesn't?--but they lived in the world and knew the way
it turned.
    Yashim
had at first been amused by Preen and her "girlfriends." He liked the open way
they spoke, the roguishness and candor, and in Preen he came to admire the
chirpy cynicism that concealed a heart plunged in romantic dreams. Compared to
the heavy secrecy and dark glances of the Phanariot aristocracy, Preen's world
was rough but full of laughter and surprises. And when at the outbreak of the rebellion
on the Peloponnese ominous shadows had gathered over the Greeks in Istanbul,
Preen had reacted to his proposals without a thought, either of her own danger
or of the prejudice flaring in the streets. For two days, she had sheltered
Mavrocordato's mother and his sisters, while Yashim arranged the ruse that
would carry them to the island of Aegina, and safety.
    Sometimes
he wondered what she saw in him.
    "Come
on in." She twirled from the door and returned to her face in the mirror. "Can't
stop, sweetie. The other girls'll be here in a moment."
    "A
wedding?" Yashim knew the form. Many times since that year of drama he'd helped
Preen prepare for the weddings, the circumcision celebrations, the birthdays
for which people required the presence of the
kocek
dancers. And
Preen, in return, perhaps without quite knowing it, had prepared him for his
days: those new, flat days when agonies of lust and anger gnawed at him from
the inside, and all the better days that were to come.
    "Boys'
night," she said, without looking around. "You're lucky to find me.
    "Business
is good?"
    "Never
better. There. How do I look?"
    "Eye-catching."
    She
turned her head