Joseph is not just a janitor at the worn-down community center in a distant diaspora community; he is a Janissary in his soul. Once, centuries ago in another life (or so it feels to him), Christian boys like him were taken, converted, trained, and molded into the elite Ottoman infantry. They were men of two worlds, masters of discipline, holders of a fierce, complicated loyalty. That history lives in Joseph’s measured movements, his patient eyes, and the old, unsung dignity he carries with his mop and bucket.
He notices the boy, Karim. Each evening, Karim is dragged to the basement for “cultural classes” run by a severe, ideology-hardened teacher—a remnant of the Taliban’s ethos that views certain traditional Afghan dances, like Attan, not as joy but as a rigid exercise in discipline and masculine control. For Karim, who loves sketching birds and listening to pop music on hidden earbuds, these sessions are a special kind of torment. He is not dancing; he is being marched, his spirit crushed under the weight of a perverted tradition.
Joseph sees the boy’s eyes, hollow with compliance. He recognizes that look. It is the look of a conscripted soul.
He doesn’t speak much at first. Just a nod. A shared glance when Karim passes. Then, one day as Karim limply polished his shoes before class, Joseph stops nearby and says, very softly, “You know, the greatest Janissaries… they were artists, too. Poets, musicians. Their discipline was to protect beauty, not to crush it.”
This becomes their ritual. In stolen minutes, Joseph tells stories—not of battles, but of survival. He speaks of Janissaries who carried forbidden flutes in their kits, who recited poetry in secret scripts, who learned to move with such grace in formation that it became their dance, a dance of endurance and hidden self.
“The strongest stance,” Joseph murmurs one day, demonstrating as he leans on his mop, “is not always the most aggressive one. Sometimes, it is the rooted stance that says, ‘You cannot move my core.’ They can command your feet, but they cannot own the rhythm in your heart.”
He teaches Karim not open rebellion, which is too dangerous, but internal defiance. To hold his spine straight not as a soldier, but as a prince of his own mind. To subtly slow a frantic spin into something more deliberate, his own. To meet the teacher’s glare not with fear, but with the distant, unreadable calm of a Janissary gazing across a field—seeing beyond the immediate battle.
The day comes during a final inspection. The teacher barks at Karim, “Faster! More fire! You are weak!”
Karim, sweating, completes the move. Then, instead of bowing his head, he does something extraordinary. He slowly brings his feet together, stands impossibly tall, and lifts his chin just a fraction. It’s not a gesture of submission, but of acknowledgment—the way a guard might acknowledge a superior, with respect that carries no humiliation. His eyes, for the first time, hold a silent, unyielding light.
The teacher is stunned into silence. He sees not a broken child, but a young man with an unsettling, ancient steadiness in his eyes.
Afterward, Joseph is cleaning the hallway. Karim walks past and stops. No words are needed, but he speaks anyway. “They tried to make you a weapon, too, didn’t they?”
Joseph nods, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “And like me, you have learned a more difficult art: to be your own man in someone else’s uniform. Your dance floor is your battlefront. Dance their steps, but guard your soul.”
The Moral woven into this story is that courage is often passed on like a secret heirloom. It comes from understanding that others have endured different, yet similar, forms of coercion and found ways to preserve their identity. Joseph the Janissary—a symbol of forced assimilation and ultimate strength—gives Karim not the courage to physically fight, which would be futile and dangerous, but the courage to inhabit his own spirit unbreakably. He teaches him that standing up first happens within, in the quiet fortress of the self, long before it can change the world outside. The true rebellion is in the unassailable dignity of a straight back and a steady gaze.