The Black Tulip

Growing Tulips

That winter, everything freezes solid. Laleena and her siblings still manage snowball fights, ice-skating on the lake, and races across its frozen surface—games that let them forget their troubles for an afternoon. But it is a rough season all the same, and firewood runs short. So the family eats dried chestnuts and bakes with chestnut flour instead of wheat, dressing in layer upon layer of clothes and hats and huddling together at night under every scrap they own to keep warm. Mother grows gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes, and the twins, always hungry, grow bigger anyway and cry for more food. Laleena is hungry, too, but she resolves not to complain. Somehow, with only a little help from neighbors, the family survives the winter, barely.

When spring finally arrives, warm winds and green shoots push through the muddy fields, and hope returns to the household. Sun-warmed earth gives rise to dainty leaves piercing the garden soil, and within days, clusters of tulip leaves reach skyward in torch-like stalks. The tips swell into tight, spear-shaped buds that slowly unfurl into pointed blooms, one by one. Laleena and Cengiz have succeeded.

To their surprise, the flowers aren’t all the purplish shade of the wild bulbs they originally discovered and planted. They open in every color of the rainbow, and the bright patch even coaxes a smile out of Mother. She tells Laleena that Father loved seeing the fields of tulips near the mineral springs, where she sometimes went with him before the children were born, her smile fading into sadness once more as she speaks. Laleena wonders what makes the transplanted bulbs change color; some bloom in shades different from the wild ones, and a few even burst into bloom with feathery petals like a bird’s plumage.

After such a long, dark winter, happiness fills Laleena’s heart when she watches these small miracles, and she begins sketching the tulips in charcoal and painting them in watercolor, remembering Father’s words about making the most of, or “manifesting,” a gift one is given. Word of the colorful blooms spreads quickly. Soon, neighbors and other villagers come to see the bright patch for themselves, and it eventually reaches old Ilia, a traveling scribe who has lived in, and traveled to, distant lands, and seen many unusual things along the way.

Ilia explains that the flowers are called lâle and that tulips first grew wild in this very region. About 100 years ago, an Ottoman padishah gave the Dutch their first bulbs, and to commemorate that gift, the Dutch have sent a cart of tulips back to the sultan in İstanbul every year since, as interest owed. Even so, the Dutch grew so obsessed with tulips that their whole country nearly went bankrupt. Wealthy families traded houses, ships, businesses, and farms for a single bulb, and people even killed one another over the flowers. Imagine, Ilia marvels, trading away an entire farm for one flower.

Now the Ottomans import their tulips back from the Dutch, crossbreeding the bulbs and selling them for unthinkable prices. Ilia says one variety alone recently brought two wagonloads of wheat, four fat oxen, four loads of rye, twelve barrels of raki, two barrels of butter, 1,000 pounds of feta cheese, a marriage bed complete with linens, and a sizable wagon just to haul it all away, all for a single tulip. The trade confirms something Laleena has begun to sense on her own, that a tulip’s worth reaches far beyond its beauty. When she asks what the İstanbul tulips look like, Ilia tells her they come in every shape and color except one. Many have tried, but nobody has ever managed to grow a black tulip.

Laleena mentions that Cengiz has been helping her, and she senses envy from the neighbors who hadn’t thought to gather and sell the wild tulips themselves. Now that they’ve watched it done, the neighbors climb into the hills, too, stripping the darkest bulbs from the ground. Undeterred, Cengiz and Laleena keep grafting and cross-pollinating their own darkest blooms, driven by a shared desire to coax out a true black tulip.

Even so, the family’s wealth doesn’t change. The roof still leaks, nobody has decent shoes, and the excessive wind and rain leave the vegetable patch too wet and heavy to welcome the seeds and nourish the crops the family depends on for food and its livelihood. Mother looks so unhappy that Laleena longs for a brilliant idea, however small, to console her and ease her burden.