On the slab, in the steam room, Yashim shuddered as the heat attacked his limbs; sweat poured from his skin.
All around him, men were being soaped and sluiced, scrubbed and pummeled by the bath attendants. He could hear the clack of sandals on the stone and the gurgle of running water in the traps. He pressed his fingers to his eyes.
For most of his adult life, Yashim had struggled to put the past behind him.
What is done is done, people said. They gelded him, but he did not die. He revived to become useful: it was another way to be a man. Day by day he lived and breathed and slept to live another day, without bitterness, without remorse. That was the lesson he had learned at the palace school: not how to wrestle, or to memorize the Koran, but how to shed his regrets, how to master his memories, so that he could hold himself together as a man.
He pressed his feet against the side of the slab.
He had made himself… quiet.
Fevzi Pasha had detected that. Fevzi Pasha had used it.
Yashim remembered one long vigil, on a warm night, when he had begun to talk to punctuate the silence. When Fevzi wanted to know a thing he was like a fishmonger filleting his fish with a narrow blade, probing and slicing, moving from one muscle to the next. Yashim had told Fevzi everything: all the memories he’d buried.
“I’ll find out who did it, Yashim.”
“I–I don’t think I want to know.”
“Ignorance keeps you weak.” He sneers. “You don’t have a choice.”
He had told Husrev Pasha the truth. They had not parted as friends.