Yashim took the knife from the table and hefted it in the palm of his hand. Years of sharpening had taken the blade down a fraction of an inch. He had asked the sharpener to take out the slight bell where the curve met the straight, and the knife weighed equably between his fingers. The grip, he supposed, was new.
He had known what he wanted to do the moment he saw the artichokes in George’s stall. The appearance of the first tiny artichokes always made up, he felt, for the disappearance of asparagus.
“Is summer!” George waved a bunch of the greeny-purple artichokes under his nose. “Not more to wait, Yashim efendi. You wants?”
Yashim, who felt he’d been waiting weeks already if not for summer then at least for Palewski to come home, seized a dozen. He bought broad beans, fresh onions, lemons, and a fistful of dill and parsley.
At home, he halved a lemon and squeezed the juice of both halves into a bowl of water. He set an onion on the board and chopped down on its spiraled top, wondering how many hands had held this knife, and how many times it had been asked to perform the same simple function in Damascus, or Cairo.
Smiling, almost dancing around the blade, he sliced the onion in half. He sliced each half lengthways and sideways, watching his fingers while he admired the fineness of the blade.
He set a pan on the coals, slopped in a gurgle of oil, and dropped in the finely chopped onion. He reached into a crock for two handfuls of rice. He cut the herbs small and scraped them into the rice with the blade. He threw in a pinch of sugar and a cup of water. The water hissed; he stirred the pan with a wooden spoon. The water boiled. He clapped on a lid and slid the pan to one side.
He began to trim the artichokes.
Summer was good. The knife was even better.
He smiled as he slid the blade smoothly across the tough tips of the leaves; inside was the choke, which he lifted with a spoon. One by one he dropped the artichokes into the lemony water.
He thought of Malakian, waiting for that chess set to appear one day. At least he could make him supper in exchange for the knife.
The rice still had bite, and he took it off the heat. As it cooled he ran his thumb down the soft fur inside the bean pods, trying to remember his first meeting with the old calligrapher.
Metin Yamaluk had been working on a beautiful Koran. It was probably the old sultan’s gift to the Victory Mosque, built as a thanksgiving for his deliverance from the Janissaries sixteen years ago. Like all Ottomans, Yashim had a respect that bordered on reverence for the bookmaker’s art, but it was dying all the same. For many years, the ulema and the scribes together had successfully resisted printing. First the Greeks and then the Jews had set up presses, and now the sultan himself had ordered certain scientific works to be printed in Arabic. One day, Yashim supposed, they would print the Koran, too.
He sighed and dipped a finger into the rice. He took an artichoke out of the water, shook it dry, and stuffed it, scooping up the rice in his fingers and pressing it in. As each one was finished with a little mound of rice, he put it upright in an earthenware crock.
When the crock was full he sprinkled the artichokes with the beans and a few chopped carrots. He drizzled them with oil, around and around, then threw in a splash of water and the rest of the dill and parsley, roughly chopped. Over the top he squeezed another lemon.
He covered the pan with a smaller plate, to weight the artichokes down, and settled the earthenware onto the coals. He set the rice crock on top of the plate. It would be done in an hour or less. He and Malakian would eat it later, cold.
Perhaps he would go to Uskudar later, after all. Take a caique, enjoy the cool breezes on the Bosphorus, maybe stop for tea in one of the cafes that lined the waterfront. He liked to go there: it was a little Asian village, really, scarcely a town, in spite of its magnificent mosques. And Yamaluk, and his treasures-why not?
Perhaps, somehow, the Bellini book would help.