Stanislaw Palewski, Polish Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, remained in town.

It wasn’t that Palewski felt the need to remain close to the court to which he was accredited. Far from it: the ordinary burdens of diplomatic life rested lightly on his shoulders. No frowning monarch or jingoistic assembly issued him daunting instructions; no labyrinthine negotiations were ever set afoot by the Polish Chancellery. Poland had no monarch and no assembly. There wasn’t, indeed, a Poland at all-except one of the heart, and to that Palewski was bound with every fiber of his body.

Palewski had arrived in Istanbul a quarter of a century before, to represent a country that did not, except in the Ottoman imagination, exist any longer. In 1795, Poland had been invaded and divided by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, putting an end to the ancient commonwealth that had once battled the Ottomans on the Dnieper and at the walls of Vienna.

“You must always try to forget what you have lost,” Palewski had once remarked to his friend Yashim. “And I must always remember.”

On a whim, because the day was so hot, Yashim went past the gates of the Polish residency and over the Grande Rue to the cluster of Greek coffeehouses that had sprung up by the entrance to an old burial ground. Far away across the Bosphorus, beyond Uskudar, he could just make out the snowy slopes of Mount Olympos, shimmering in the heat.

Yashim bought a pound of Olympian ice, wrapped in paper.

He knocked several times on the peeling boards of the residency door. Eventually he pushed it open and spent a few minutes wandering alone through the ground floor of the dilapidated building. Out of curiosity he tried the dining room and found it as he had expected, almost impenetrably dark behind the tangle of clematis at the windows; the dining table sagged in the middle, and the stuffed, hard chairs ranged against the walls were green with mildew.