Istanbul was a city in which everyone, from sultan to beggar, belonged somewhere-to a guild, a district, a family, a church or a mosque. Where they lived, the work they did, how they were paid, married, born, or buried, the friends they kept, the place they worshiped-all these things were arranged for them, so to speak, long before they ever balled their tiny fists and sucked in their first blast of Istanbul air, an air freighted with muezzins, the smell of the sea, the scent of cypresses, spices, and drains.

Newcomers-foreigners, especially-often complained that Istanbul life was a sequence of divisions: they noticed the harem arrangement of the houses, the blank street walls, the way tradesmen clung together in one street or a section of the bazaar. They frequently gave way to feelings of claustrophobia. Stambouliots, on the other hand, were used to the hugger-mugger atmosphere of warmth and gossip that surrounded them from the cradle and followed them to the grave. In the city of belonging, Yashim well knew, even the dead belonged somewhere.

He ran his thumb along the table’s edge. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that of all Istanbul he might be the exception which proved the rule. Sometimes he felt more like a ghost than a man; his invisibility hurt him. Even beggars had a guild that promised to provide their burial at the end. The ordinary eunuchs of the empire, who served as chaperones, escorts, guardians-they were all, in that sense, members of a family: many belonged to the greatest family of all, and lived and died in the sultan’s service. Yashim, for a spell, had served in the sultan’s palace, too; but his gifts were too broad to be comfortably contained there, between the women of the harem and the secrets of the sultan’s inner sanctum. So Yashim had chosen between freedom and belonging; and a grateful sultan had bestowed that freedom on him.