Yashim glanced at Hasan. He was swaying, as if uncertain what to do; eventually he turned away and began to go down the hill. Many joined him; a few, however, only moved farther off, and squatted under the trees, planning to see what happened next.
“And now,” said Mullah Dede, “we will knock on the door, and hope that we are answered, inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” Yashim echoed.
10
At the sultan’s palace at Besiktas, the lady Talfa was jingling an enormous bunch of iron keys threaded onto an iron loop.
“Some of you girls,” she announced, “will receive keys yourselves as you settle in to your duties. That will be a matter for the Kislar aga to arrange, with my help, naturally.”
They were on the ground floor of the palace, where the windows were shuttered on the inside with diamond-shaped lattices to prevent anyone from looking in.
The girls avoided one another’s eyes, anxious not to be thought overbold. Many of them hoped to receive a key and to be allotted an important task. They had already inspected the laundry, under the lady Talfa’s direction: there would be a laundry kalfa, maybe two. They had looked into rooms containing the coffee sets for the coffee kalfa to manage; a silver room, stacked with plates, trays, and ewers; a china room, whose china kalfa would preside over the proper storage and cleaning of the Chinese porcelain.
The lady Talfa had familiarized them with each part of the building she knew so well. Baths had a key; so did the dressing rooms, where the sultan’s linen would be stored, properly folded and stacked away, and his frock coats, brushed every day and inspected for any sign of moth or dirt, with lengths of silk and muslin for his turban. There was even a slipper room, to which a slipper kalfa would possess the key.