The Abyssinian Proof (7 page)

Puzzled, Kamil assured him that he would.

“Thank you, my friend.” Malik squeezed Kamil’s arm, then turned and walked away quickly.

Omar was in conversation with a tall, thin man by the mosque entrance. As Kamil drew closer, he recognized the policeman Ali. The two spoke in low voices and then Ali left.

“Our snitch in Charshamba has reported that there’s going to be a big smuggling operation late tonight,” Omar told Kamil. “Do you want to join us in the raid?”

“Of course.” So far, he had learned nothing about the thefts here, only about Byzantine architecture. He wondered what it was that Malik had to tell him.

“Good,” Omar said amiably. “Let’s go fishing and see what lands in our net.”

They went looking for Malik and found him sitting on a sarcophagus in a long, narrow room with a domed ceiling. More sarcophagi rested in niches along the wall. One side of the room was piled with sacks and chests. In the corner, someone had arranged a circle of cushions around a low tray.

“The reliquary that was stolen was silver and somewhat damaged. It’s very old,” Malik explained, getting to his feet. “The rug once belonged to Sultan Ahmet I, so I think it must have been valuable.” His face looked drawn and Kamil had the impression that his friend had aged in the few moments since their whispered conversation.

“What was in the reliquary?”

Kamil noted a slight hesitation before Malik answered.

“It was empty.”

“Where was it?”

“In here.” Malik went to the back corner and opened a dusty chest.

“How often was this chest opened?”

“Never, that I know of.”

Kamil pointed to numerous finger marks in the dust around the latch and lid. “So these must be the thief’s. Was the lid open or closed when you arrived?”

“Open. That’s how I knew the reliquary was missing.”

“How did you know what was in here if the chest was never opened?”

Malik looked startled. After a moment, he said, “I saw it open once and I remember seeing the reliquary.”

This seemed unlikely to Kamil. The chest was filled with a jumble of objects. Why would Malik notice an unremarkable reliquary with enough accuracy to be able to tell it was missing? It was also clear to Kamil that Malik was not accustomed to lying and it made him enormously uncomfortable. Malik wanted the reliquary found, yet he also wished it to appear unimportant. Perhaps, thought Kamil, that was why he had asked Omar to send for him, knowing he would investigate the matter out of friendship, despite the trivial value of the stolen object. Perhaps the reliquary had personal meaning for Malik and he could think of no other way to convince the authorities to look for it. Kamil planned to have his officers make the rounds to the other police stations that had reported thefts, but for the moment the reliquary was his only lead. He systematically checked the other chests and bundles in the room. The dust on all of them had recently been disturbed.

Omar pointed to one of the open chests. “If I wanted to steal something, I would have taken some of these.”

Kamil looked over and saw dented gold plates, a chalice, and other objects he didn’t recognize, some elaborately decorated with niello work and a few with jewels.

Omar lifted up a heavy gold chalice studded with rubies. Kamil was flabbergasted. A chalice like this could buy a small villa. “Why are these objects not under lock and key?” He thought of Hamdi Bey’s museum with frustration.

Malik looked embarrassed. “The imam occasionally likes to do an inventory.”

It could have been the imam, then, who had drawn his fingers through the dust. Omar flipped open a small carved box, revealing a cache of coins, not a few of them gold liras.

“Tithes. The thief didn’t take them either.”

“Was the box open?” Kamil asked.

“For inventory,” Malik repeated, then paused before pointing to a small, upended medicine bottle on the tray. “The imam has terrible toothaches. Sometimes he’s a bit forgetful after taking his medicine.”

“Forgetful enough to leave the door unlocked?”

“I always check the door before I retire,” Malik insisted. “Whoever came in here had the key.” Malik sounded so despondent that Kamil found himself wondering whether Malik had an idea who had taken the reliquary.

Kamil sniffed the mouth of the bottle. “Laudanum.” The imam had turned his pain into his own version of paradise.

“In the future, I’ll add such details to my reports,” Omar promised, then turned to Malik. “My brother, I’ve learned that up on their unholy hill of Pera, the magistrates actually read the crappy reports we send them. That alone will help me sleep well tonight.”

Omar was right, Kamil thought. The mystery lay in what the thief hadn’t taken. He began to see that this reliquary might be more valuable than he thought.

He placed his hand on Malik’s arm. “Each loss is a counsel,” he reassured him. “There’s much here to help us.”

T
HREE YOUNG BOYS
lay flat on the ground, heads hung over the edge of the cistern wall, frightened by the unprotected distance to the rocky earth below, but daring each other to creep closer. The wall was built in layers, five courses of brick and five of stone, scored at intervals by lines of large marble slabs, with moss and grasses growing from its crevices. Despite its great age and state of disrepair, the wall appeared massive and more enduring than any of the flimsy wooden cottages in Sunken Village below. At intervals, the cistern bent inward in shallow arches, revealing masonry the width of a man’s reach.

The boys watched people emerge from their cottages and converge like trails of ants on the domed stone structure in the village square.

“Why are they going to the mosque? I didn’t hear the ezan.”

“And look, the women are going too.” The boy raised his arm to point.

His friend pushed him and laughed.

The boy quickly pulled in his arm and grabbed a protruding stone to keep from sliding over the edge. “Stop it,” he whined.

“They’re slaves,” his friend pointed out proudly. “You know what they do in Africa? They cut off their yaraks.”

“They do not. How do you know, anyway?”

“My uncle told me. He was there. He said that’s where they make eunuchs.”

“Where?”

“Addis Ababa.”

“That’s not really a place.”

“Is too.”

“Isn’t.”

They tussled on the lip of the cistern until the third boy, who had been watching the line of people in the square below, turned and slapped them both on the ear.

O
NE DAY A
red line had appeared at her mother’s wrist where she had cut herself on the tine of a monstrance, a top-heavy gold receptacle with a flattened face shaped like the sun. How and when the monstrance had come into the family’s possession was unknown, but it must once have served Roman Catholics to display the wafer they adored as the body of their God. The red line had slowly but inexorably lengthened, reaching up along the inside of her mother’s arm until Balkis imagined it had tied her heart up like butcher’s string and stilled it. After her mother’s death, Balkis kept the gold monstrance, tarnished by her mother’s blood, on a shelf in the receiving hall. It reminded her of many things: to live, never to forgive.

This Friday, she had risen early and passed through the door at the back of her house that led to a small marble hamam bath. A servant fed the wood-fired boiler. Hot water flowed through ceramic channels beneath the floor and spilled from a spigot set over a marble basin. Balkis took her time bathing, allowing the heat to penetrate her muscles and release her from her body. The midwife Gudit, an old, square-shouldered woman with a face and neck like a bull, scrubbed her skin with a textured silk mitt and denuded Balkis’s body of hair with aghda, a mixture of sugar boiled with lemon juice, until the space between her legs was as smooth as an egg. After Gudit left, Balkis reached down and drew her fingers along the two lines of small round scars from the thorns that the midwife had used to pin her wound shut after circumcising her. A small pinhole at the center, where the midwife had left a straw reed inserted until the wound healed, was the only opening that remained.

“Container of the Uncontainable,” Balkis thought sourly. They hadn’t told her beforehand that the priestess became the container, never to be opened again, forever empty. After performing the circumcision, the midwife had told her that she would look beautiful, but Balkis had felt only despair. Now, seventeen years later, her wounds had healed, but the rage she felt was still raw.

After her bath, Balkis lay wrapped in a towel on a bench in the cooling-off room, thinking through her plan. She was short and plump, with a round face, a patrician nose, and lips tightly pressed, a door slammed shut on an elegant ruin. Her golden complexion highlighted her alert brown eyes, framed in starbursts of wrinkles; the face of a once beautiful woman violated by time.

Gudit brought a glass of tea and withdrew.

Balkis ran her fingers over the designs cut into the crystal and thought about the community she led, the Habesh and their Melisite sect. She focused her mind on her two children, Saba and Amida, who would lead the sect when she and her brother, Malik, passed away. It was all well and good that Saba believed in their sacred mission, but the girl would have to stop reading long enough to learn the affairs of the community. Bees only rush to the hive with a queen bee in it.

She wished Malik took more interest in Amida, her beautiful boy who had become such an attractive, talented, but wayward young man. They had to find a way to channel his angry energy into the community. The Habesh needed his leadership so they would become prosperous again and so that the young people would stay in the village. Without a thriving community, the Melisite traditions wouldn’t survive. Four hundred years of Melisite ancestors sat in judgment, should she fail.

The Habesh had long supported themselves by serving as intermediaries, buying stolen and forged items from certain families in Charshamba and passing them on to dealers in the bazaar. It was a risk-free business based on trust, and lucrative enough to have supported her village for generations. She remembered her own mother in the receiving hall of this very house, setting terms with men from the Covered Bazaar. But in the past year, the supply had dried up and the villagers were suffering. Young people were moving away to look for work. Their children would grow up Muslim, never knowing the joy of witnessing God, the blessing of their ancient community. She had to find a way to keep them here and the community alive. They must love her and, through her, their God. This sacred hunger, to which she fed her rage, was what kept her alive.

Balkis returned to the house. In the dressing room, Gudit rubbed her down with warm towels, then laid out the traditional garments worn by the priestess. Shivering with cold, Balkis put on a finely worked, backless linen robe held up by straps of pearls. She lowered her head so Gudit could place a gold chain, from which hung a key, around her neck. Gudit then settled a turban on Balkis’s head and draped a welcome cloak around her shoulders.

Gudit said little these days and her expression, which had never been pleasant, was perpetually sour. When Balkis became priestess, she had initially avoided the midwife, the agent of her circumcision, but quickly realized that Gudit was very knowledgeable. Feuds among villagers, bad harvests, epidemics—these were recurring problems. Gudit remembered how they had been handled in the past. On her advice, Balkis had revived old institutions, such as her grandmother’s informal court of mediation over which the priestess presided as neutral arbiter. She added her own innovations, for instance, rotating crops so the harm of one season wouldn’t pass easily to the next, and adding winter crops. A stand in the market now sold village-produced crafts, providing income even when the gardens failed. When disease gripped the surrounding areas, Balkis took advantage of the natural boundary of the cistern wall to quarantine the village. For all of these schemes, Gudit had been a sounding board, until the young surgeon Constantine Courtidis came to the village and she fell sullenly silent.

Courtidis had begun to visit Sunken Village a year ago, offering to care for the sick at little charge. Although he brought modern European medicines, people continued to ask Gudit for her traditional remedies on the principle that two cures were better than one. But Balkis was certain Gudit felt pushed aside. The problem, she thought irritably, was of the midwife’s own making. She was becoming old and had trained no one to take her place.

Balkis stepped from her dressing room into the opulently furnished receiving hall, which stretched the entire length of the house with rooms radiating out from it. The ceiling rose to the height of two men, lending grandeur. Servants stood at the back near the doors to the kitchen and hamam, waiting for instructions.

She saw Saba perched on the divan at the front of the hall, oblivious to the requirements of running a household, head bowed over a book. Behind her daughter, the sharp tines of the monstrance radiated outward like a cruel sun. When Saba raised her head, the monstrance made a halo around it. Her skin was the color of burnt sugar, her nose long and straight, with high, fluted nostrils like those of an Arabian horse.

Saba put her book aside. “Are you ready, Mama?” she asked. “Uncle Malik isn’t here yet.”

Balkis nodded. Retrieving a long, narrow box from a corner of the room, Saba took from it a scepter. It was a diamond-shaped cross of iron and brass, decorated with small stylized birds, attached to the top of a long iron stave.

Just then, Malik arrived. He stood inside the door to catch his breath before limping into the receiving hall and greeting them warmly. Saba hurried over to kiss her uncle.

“Ah, Priestess, you’re ready. Give an old man a few minutes.” He leaned over so Balkis could brush her cheek against his.

He looked ill, Balkis noted worriedly. They were both getting old. She was almost forty and Malik three years older. She was plagued by a pain incubating deep within her belly and a fatigue that stole upon her like a blanketing mist.

An old servant with a wrinkled face the deep purple-black of aubergines took Malik’s arm and led him toward the dressing room. “Someday one of us will become worn out and have to be replaced,” Malik joked. “Judging from the strength of your grip, it’ll probably be me.”

The old man didn’t respond, though Balkis saw a shy smile cross his face.

After a few minutes, Malik emerged in a linen robe and matching ceremonial cape similar to Balkis’s. The caretaker’s traditional garment covered him from waist to ankle, leaving his chest and back bare. A key, larger than the one around Balkis’s neck, hung from a wide leather belt around his waist. His chest was bony and the olive skin above his belt sagged, but she thought he still looked magnificent.

“Use your fur-lined robe, brother,” Balkis admonished him. “See. I have mine.”

“Next week, sister. I promise.”

Saba ran outside and returned with a freshly plucked peacock feather. She dipped its nib in molten wax from a candle and handed it to Malik.

“Thank you, my dear girl.”

Gudit reappeared, dressed in a red smock.

Their motions were routine, but Balkis saw the unrehearsed portends in the actors’ ready lines, the advanced age of those carrying out the ritual, her brother’s decline and foolish refusal to take care of himself, and Saba’s naïveté. She was a child still, and attached to her uncle, who was filling her head with pious thoughts and ignoring her wits, which also needed to be developed.

They waited for Amida, but when he didn’t arrive, they stepped out into the courtyard. The house of the priestess was an imposing structure set within the embrace of the cistern wall. Flanking the house were two cottages. The larger one backed against the cistern wall and was hidden behind a row of oleanders. Amida had recently had the doorway enlarged to accomodate a grand piano he had purchased. Six brawny men had maneuvered the instrument like a giant scaled insect down the stairs from Charshamba, providing entertainment and gossip for half the district. In the evenings, Balkis could hear the halting canto of him practicing.

A shabbier cottage, inhabited by Gudit, stood just before two columns with elaborate Corinthian capitals that guarded the entrance to the courtyard. Both cottages were made from wood, then plastered and whitewashed like the other village homes. They had been rebuilt many times. The ruins of similar cottages jutted from the weeds.

No one knew the age of the house of the priestess, the only substantial stone building in Sunken Village besides the prayer hall. Its walls, like those of the cistern, were courses of bricks alternating with bands of marble. A marble frieze—a mosaic of warriors engaged in violent encounters with lances and swords, archers on horses, women in elaborately draped robes, and muscular men—wrapped around the house above the windows. Snakes, horses, and other animals, interspersed with acanthus leaves, paraded around a narrower band just below the eaves. Inset directly above the lintel was the carving of a winged lion. The outlines of the figures were blurred after centuries of scouring by the elements, but Balkis never tired of studying them. The house and the ritual reminded her that she was one of a long chain of priestesses, each given a sacred trust.

Malik and Balkis crossed the courtyard, Saba behind them, followed by Gudit and the other servants. Balkis slowed her steps so Malik could keep up. It was midmorning and the sky had darkened. The poplars slashed at the sky in a hard gust of wind, then were still again.

Amida strode across the courtyard and fell in place beside his sister. Balkis felt a surge of pleasure at the sight of her son. As they walked slowly down the lane to the village square, groups of men and women fell in behind them. People bowed as they passed. By the time they had crossed the square to the prayer house, a crowd had formed.

The Melisite prayer house was old, perhaps even older than the home of the priestess. Its walls were built of precisely cut limestone fitted seamlessly together in alternating bands of stone and brick. Its iron-studded wooden portal was shut. Flanking the entry were two shoulder-height granite pillars scored by a series of thick horizontal lines and protruding circles.

The procession stopped before a large, flat stone in a clearing next to the prayer house. Lying on the stone was a young ewe, its fore and hind legs bound, held in place by a middle-aged man in a red smock.

Balkis stood before the sacrifice and, together with Malik, began to pray. The villagers followed, their voices rising and falling.

Hail Mary, Mother of God,

Take us under your wing.

O Virgin of the Closed Door,

Who doth songs of David sing.

Hail Mary, Mother of the Word,

Hear those who bear your message,

Container of the Uncontainable,

Grant us your intercession.