Altai: A Novel (29 page)

As he pushed me away, he whistled. Hafiz and Mukhtar came running, and kept running at my side. Because almost without noticing it I had started running with all the speed I had.

For the words of Amos.

For the Israelites, whoever they might be.

For those who could still be saved.

9.

The dust rose up in the streets of Famagusta, stirred by the wind and by people’s footsteps. Only the blood-drenched ground was undisturbed by our passage. Ismail’s words rang in my mind. I prayed to the Almighty that we would get there in time.

Turning a corner, we bumped into the disorderly troops. They were dragging away a broken door, furniture of little value, brass candlesticks, pieces of cloth. We faced each other in silence. Two young women and an old man were being kicked out of the door, their pursuers on their heels. The hubbub of the soldiers died down when they saw us. I caught the eye of one of them. The looter pointed at us with the tip of a knife.

“You. Find another house, this stuff is ours.”

I trembled with rage and counted them in silence. There were more of them than of us. Hafiz touched my arm and gestured to me to go. We moved cautiously, giving them a wide berth, amid the sniggers and insults of the mob.

As we hurried toward the port, I trod in a pool of pitch. My feet stuck as I tried to run; I risked losing my shoes with every step. The ground, drenched in death, wouldn’t let me go.

We reached the port. As if the walls that separated it from the city enclosed another world, a dazzling calm lay upon the water and the ships, the quays and the distant sea rocks.

The sun beat down, and the only shade to be found was on the water, beside the bulk of the ships, but no one was able to enjoy it. I walked over to a
mahona
that was laden to bursting, and still a line of men, like processionary caterpillars, was loading barrels, cases, wooden planks, bales of cotton. One was herding animals that had somehow survived against the odds. Goats, most of them. The pigs, unclean animals, had been killed and left to rot, along with the carcasses of many poor human wretches.

On the deck were men who looked as if they might be Venetian. I shouted, cupping my hands around the sides of my mouth.

“Weigh anchor, as quickly as you can! There’s no time for more!”

Some of them leaned forward, craning their necks, demonstrating that they hadn’t heard. The wind was blowing in my direction.

“Go, I tell you. Force your captains, you’re in the majority.”

A man shouted back, his voice carried clearly on the wings of the wind.

“We can’t sail these ships on our own. Not many of us are seamen. Who are you? Why would a Turk and two Moors be worried about our fate?”

“I used to be a Venetian, and I tell you that you must go, right now. If you see no way, try and come up with something.” The men looked at me in alarm, and then started talking excitedly to one another.

Mukhtar called my name. I had heard her voice very seldom, and was surprised, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong. Her eyes glittered, the color of honey. She pointed toward the fort that the Turks had built on the hill behind the port to check the embarkations.

A yelling mob was approaching. Armed men were also coming from the citadel side, a human landslide down the side of a mountain.

I drew my dagger and started cutting the hawsers that secured the ships to their moorings. Hafiz helped me with swift blows of his sword, running along the dock. I picked up a long pole, and together we tried to push the boat away from the shore.

The ship moved, and the gangway connecting the deck to the quay fell in the water with a great splash, but the vessel was too heavy and could not get under way.

Mukhtar called out again. As when a great galley bursts into flames in the quay the rats run along the hawsers to the dock, so the mob hurtled down from the citadel and attacked the ships, one by one, gradually drawing nearer to the place where we were standing. On the fort side, the charging men moved more slowly, and they still had a long way to come. The men on the deck of the
mahona
ran shouting towards the stern. They had worked out at last what fate awaited them.

I gesticulated and shouted at them again to leave, before Hafiz dragged me away, forcing me to turn my back on what was about to happen.

We climbed back up toward one of the minor access routes leading to the city. The Greeks who had decided to stay were being carried out of their houses. The screams of the women subjected to the law of the victors echoed heartrendingly from one house to the other. But many rapes occurred in the light of the sun, in the middle of the road. There was nothing we could do, and our knees buckled in despair.

Suddenly, behind a gap in a wall, we came upon a little boy. He was quivering, crouching like a rabbit, his face covered with dust, his clothes in rags.

Mukhtar held out her open hand. The boy shrank back and pressed himself even harder against the wall. I spoke Italian to comfort him. “Don’t be afraid.”

Lost, the little boy looked round. He must have been six or seven. Emaciated, eyes wide, skin diaphanous, almost spectral. He must have been in hiding for months.

“Hands off. This booty is ours,” a voice croaked.

They had emerged from an alleyway, a dozen sinister faces. I recognized the man who had pointed at me in the distance with the tip of his blade. I threw myself between them and the little boy, my dagger in my fist. Hafiz bent his knees and drew his saber.

Mukhtar unlaced something under the sash around her waist. It was the weapon that I had seen glittering in Bandirma.

The looters were startled by the tangle of blades whirling toward them. A cascade of blades descended, and the blood spurted vividly. They laid hands on their weapons, but before they could draw, one of them was struck by Hafiz’s curved saber. The young warrior moved like a beast of prey, crouching down on his legs.

The man who had spoken hurled himself at me. I parried, our blades giving off a grim clang. I tried to kick him in the belly; he repelled the blow. Then he tried to circle me to grab the child, and I brought down my dagger on his outstretched hand. He drew back with an animal cry, blood splashing his leather jerkin. He shouted something at those of his companions who were still capable of fighting, and they began to arrange themselves in a circle around us. The child’s body trembled, leaning against mine.

We heard a shot, then another. The leader of the gang fell forward, followed by one of his companions. The circle of enemies opened up, spewing insults and curses.

I saw Ismail, his pistols still smoking, then Ali, his unsheathed scimitar flashing in the sun’s rays, dealing murderous blows to any looters who came within range. The others scattered like jackals at the arrival of a lion.

I picked up the little boy, who clung to me with all the strength he had, and we hurried toward the beach. Only when we were outside the city did we stop to catch our breath. From a distance, we saw the horde attacking the last of the ships, the one we had urged to leave. It had managed to pull away from the quay, but not to take to the sea. The looters held it back with ropes and grapnels, and were climbing up the plank. In a furious voice, Ismail gave us an order.

“Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do here now.”

10.

A massacre calls for revenge. Murder cries out for murder. Man washes out with innocent blood the blood the guilty shed, until a horrendous stain spreads over the earth.

After our failure to stop the carnage, after the sacking of the ships, Ismail withdrew into silence. We waited for the order that would allow us to leave the port, but Lala Mustafa had other things to do: tyrannize and humiliate Bragadin. He had had him shoved and kicked to the southern side of the walls, where the last attacks had taken place, and ordered him to fill the breeches opened by the cannon. The plain was still scattered with corpses; the stench reached our nostrils even on the ship. Bragadin shoveled and mixed, tortured by a pointless task, with black crusts where his ears had once been.

Lala Mustafa wasn’t thinking about the ships on the Beach of the Gardens. He was thinking about pushing that exhausted man all the way down to the port and having him tied to the main yard of a galley. Then he planned to hoist him aloft, again and again, onto the stern of a
kadirga
, so that he could await the arrival of the Christian fleet on the horizon.

“So, Captain. No ship in sight?”

Better check again, and again, amid the shouts, laughter and insults.

Lala Mustafa wasn’t thinking about us, the emissaries of one of the commanders of the venture. He was thinking of leaving this man, defeated and betrayed, in a tent, untended, with his wounds infected and flies buzzing around his head.

In the days that followed, a funereal calm fell upon the city and its surroundings, reduced now to misery. Men cling to life with all their might; they are like flowers or weeds that put down roots in the sparse soil on the rim of a ravine and hope that the next storm won’t carry them off. The Greeks who remained in the city were trying to resume the course of their own lives, trusting that their new master would, in a time of peace, show a face less terrible than the one he wore in a time of war.

I was counting the days. What I really wanted was to leave the island. My soul was torn: on the one hand, what I had seen prevented me from feeling victorious in any way. The triumph I had been waiting for was a gimlet that pierced my heart. On the other hand, it was a start. The next generation would inherit a Kingdom.

Such reflections were pale attempts to heal my soul. I had never imagined a massacre on such a scale, and yet my eyes had seen it.

The little boy never spoke his name. Not to me, at least. I tried to talk to him on a few occasions, but he sat huddled under the ladder of the fo’c’sle, and wouldn’t let anyone near him. Hafiz and Mukhtar took care of him; they brought him food and water, which he accepted without a word. The young man’s presence in particular seemed to calm him; with Hafiz he was less wary. Coming down the steps, I sometimes spotted a pair of gleaming eyes, and thought of the burden of suffering that their owner had already been forced to carry.

It was a fate common to all of us. Everyone on board was facing up to the tragedy in his own way. I saw the Indian siblings, their faces weary, performing the rites of the Muslim faith. I, too, tried to pray, in my heart. But the words wouldn’t come.

Ali prayed with the Indians, but his way of approaching God took a different form as well. In the shade of a bulwark, he sat ceaselessly repeating a formula. One day I asked him how it was that what he had seen didn’t seem to have touched him.

He replied that, on the contrary, his heart was in mourning. All the people who had died or suffered deserved to be remembered. God was the master of righteousness.

“My old
shayk
took the words of the Prophet seriously: ‘Go and seek knowledge, even if it’s in China.’ He traveled for years, beyond the boundaries of the Umma, the world run by the Muslims. In a place of idolaters, he had met a wise man and exchanged thoughts with him. God, He who embraces all things, could not have left those people completely deprived of his light.”

A shadow passed across Ali’s face.

“So the wise old man said to my
shayk
: hope and fear are like two thieves trying to slip into a house. Have you understood, my friend, what the house represents?”

I shook my head. Ali picked up the thread. “The house is man’s conscience. If they find it full, the thieves will steal. If they find it empty, they are forced to leave.”

Perhaps my keenness of mind had been dulled by the last events that I had seen, but I wasn’t sure I had understood. I asked, “How did you interpret the story?”

Ali paused, then continued. “My only fear is to be displeasing in the eyes of God. My only hope is to be pleasing in his eyes. Other than that, my house is empty.”

It was the last moral fable that Ali ever told me.

The next day, they brought Bragadin into the main square. His face was swollen, the remains of his ears reduced to rotting stumps. They kicked and shoved him to the column. Two renegades undertook the task of torturing him; one of them was said to be Genoese. I saw him talking to the victim, but I didn’t catch the words. The hubbub and the shouted insults subsided. Silence fell on the square.

The Genoese ran the blade of a big knife from one shoulder to the other, behind the head Marcantonio Bragadin.

They say he didn’t scream.

They lie.

The Genoese and his assistant, with meticulous slowness, flayed the man. First his back, then his arms and legs, then his trunk and his chest, peeling the fat from his skin. The rector screamed, struggled and tugged at his bonds. Flies settled on his living flesh.

My companions and I couldn’t take our eyes off him.

The rector was spared the sight of his own skin flapping off in front of his eyes. His head sank long before that.

The Genoese and his assistant put the man’s skin in salt and then in vinegar. They stuffed it well with straw and cotton. They sewed up the pieces. They put two mother-of-pearl buttons where the eyes should have been. When the puppet that had once been Bragadin was finished, they dressed it the clothes of a magistrate, the ones he had worn on the day of the surrender. They sat it on a cow, protecting it from the sun with a little parasol. They sent it off among the streets of the city, so that even those who had escaped the horror in the square might see it.

Then they butchered the flayed body and scattered the pieces all around the walls.

11.

At last we were granted permission to leave the port. We took to the sea and never looked back. Opposing winds and a rough sea slowed our return. The ship struggled, apparently running through a medium denser than water. Men and things were empty, transparent, bubbles blown by a glass maker, mirages. Famagusta had attached itself to my soul as a long piece of seaweed does to your legs when you’re walking on a beach.

During the days of the journey I exchanged few words with Ismail or my other companions. I had the captain assign me the tasks required to keep body and mind occupied, so that I could do nothing but gaze straight ahead when it came to reporting what I had seen, and demanding an explanation for it.

One day, when we were about halfway through our journey, I saw the little boy smiling at a silly face that Hafiz had made. I stood and watched the scene, to snatch some of the light given off by the two of them.

“You saved one.”

Ismail was beside me, although I hadn’t noticed him.

“Just one,” I replied.

The old man nodded.

“It was what you were able to do, and that’s what counts.”

Yedikule, the village of tanners and slaughterhouse men, greeted me in its own way, announcing the proximity of the capital, just as it had done on the day when I first arrived. Less than two years had passed since then.

The day was gray, the sky milky. A cold wind came down from the Black Sea, the kind that heralds the end of summer.

When we disembarked, I knew that Ismail wouldn’t follow me to Palazzo Belvedere.

“We’ve got to talk to him,” I said to the old man.

“You know what you must do. I have finished here.” He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and set off, followed by the others, in search of a boat for Scutari. Hafiz was holding the child by the hand.

Yossef Nasi welcomed me with a hug. “Welcome back, my brother. There’s no hurry. Have a rest now; we will have time to talk.”

David Gomez greeted me warmly, though with a certain awkwardness. The map of the New Kingdom was still spread out on the table, the wine-stain faded but still visible.

“Famagusta has fallen,” I said.

Nasi replied that he knew. Many rumors had arrived ahead of me. He used the word
victory.

“At what price, Yossef?”

Fields plundered and devastated until not a blade of grass remained.

Rivers of blood.

A vast cemetery all around the town.

As I advanced through the story, I saw Nasi’s face darkening. Gomez looked at the floor. I continued undaunted. “Our ally Lala Mustafa revealed himself to be a bloodthirsty lunatic.”

I told them about the violation of the treaties, the captains slaughtered just as they surrendered. About the Venetians pulled off their ships and enslaved, about the city sacked by dogs and murderers. Last of all, I told him of the torture reserved for Rector Bragadin, leaving nothing out, not a single detail. So I reached the end of my story, the empty, stunned expression of that terrible puppet still in front of my eyes.

Nasi cursed between his teeth. He looked as distraught as I felt. Gomez clenched his jaw, his face pale.

“Are these the foundations of the New Zion?” I asked. “Slaughter, torture and shame?” I didn’t expect a reply, so I continued. “One day you said you wanted to heal the world, and I certainly didn’t expect the suture to be painless. But now the wound is bigger than it was before, and infected, and I don’t see what could cure it.”

Yossef Nasi sat supporting his bearded chin with the fingers of his right hand. David Gomez shook his head in disbelief, muttering to himself. In that same room we had praised the courage of the defenders of Famagusta. Now magnanimity was only a memory.

“Marcantonio Bragadin was a fanatic,” said Nasi. “He sacrificed everything to his own pride. If he had surrendered six months ago, none of this would have happened. Nonetheless, I shall say this to you, Manuel: There isn’t a kingdom on earth that hasn’t been born from the blood of the conquered. The first furrow in Rome was watered by an act of fratricide. The Lord’s hand helped our forefathers to scatter and annihilate the people of Canaan. Their cities were destroyed and the inhabitants put to the sword.”

I clenched my fists until my hands hurt. “At least our forefathers took the land themselves. They knew what they were doing, and they carried the weight of the dead on their own shoulders. We carried out our massacres through the janissaries, heedless of the evil that would come.”

Yossef’s voice assumed a feverish tone. “Manuel, Manuel, in a hundred years none of the young people of Cyprus will give the slightest importance to what happened. From today, this war is over. Our kingdom is the future. The future of all our people. I expect a summons to the Seraglio very shortly. Will you be with me?”

I didn’t reply. I felt the need to go outside, to be in the open air. I reached the garden and walked down the avenue, as I hadn’t done for months. When I reached the little clearing surrounded by bushes, I stopped and sat down on the grass. A circle of disturbed and barren earth still marked the place where the carob tree had grown.

It was there that Nasi found me. He sat down next to me, to contemplate the same empty space. He gripped my shoulder to give me courage, but I had the impression that he was the one clinging to me.

He asked me about Ismail, about his reactions to what we had seen and experienced on Cyprus. I replied that the old man had saved my life. It was only thanks to him that I had come back.

“Gracia didn’t call him back in vain,” he observed. “May the Lord bless him.”