The Dervish House (14 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The jerky, disjointed images hurt Georgios’ eyes. He looks up to the visual peace of his white walls.
The door buzzer is so loud, so sudden it stabs his heart. A man at the door. Georgios’ heart hammers. They’ve found him, they’ve come for him. They know everything. They are at his door. His heart flutters, unable to land on the beat. Be logical. Killers would not ring the doorbell. They would kill quietly, strangle him like an old Ottoman prince.
The buzzer jars again. The man looks up into the camera.
‘Georgios Ferentinou?’ He is well spoken, educated. They usually are. Fanaticism is a middle-class vice. Decent suit, clean shirt and neatly knotted tie. ‘My name is Heydar Bekdil.’ Georgios sits back from the screen. The smartpaper can’t see him but the man at the door frowns as if he is looking right into the room. A third buzz. ‘Mr Ferentinou, it’s quite important that I talk to you.’ He presses a palm to the doorplate. An identification flows through his hand to the computer. MIT. The National Intelligence Organization. What interest could the intelligence services have in him? ‘Mr Ferentinou?’ Georgios buzzes him in.
‘I’m sorry about the dust,’ Georgios apologizes as he shows the visitor into his living room. The room is another converted cell; two sofas face each other rather too closely over a long narrow table. ‘I’ve grown rather accustomed to my own rules of living. After a few months the dust doesn’t seem to get any worse, I’ve found. You’ll take some tea.’
In the adjoining kitchen Georgios Ferentinou boils the kettle and finds two unbroken glasses of the same design. He balances a cube of Lefteres’ sesame halva on the edge of each saucer. The visitor has wiped a small section of the table clean with a handkerchief, a landing pad for the hovering saucer.
‘If it’s about the news feeds,’ Georgios says. He lowers himself heavily on to the sofa. The two men’s faces are close over the table, too intimate for strangers.
‘It’s nothing to do with the news feeds.’ The man smiles to himself. ‘No, that’s a . . . privilege. No, that will continue, you’ll be glad to hear.’ He is nervous, his glass rattles. ‘Mr Ferentinou, I have a confession to make. I am actually a player. I’m a trader in the Terror Market.’ Now Georgios realizes that the man may be in mild awe of him. ‘Longsightedson?’
Georgios cannot conceal his distaste. Anonymity is part of the rules. He likes it that the man at the low table at the Fethi Bey çayhane across the square, that driver tapping his fingers on the steering wheel impatient at traffic lights, that woman he passes at the frozen food section on his weekly trip to the supermarket, may be Terror Traders incognito.
‘Thank you, I’m glad the game enjoys attention at such high levels. So what does MIT need with me?’
Bekdil puts his hands together.
‘You are aware of the Haceteppe Group?’
‘I was a founder member.’
‘Forgive me. I was not aware. You may not be aware that MIT has recently set up a second research group with a much lower profile, working in parallel with the Haceteppe Group, based in Istanbul and using unorthodox and speculative techniques. We believe that the creative tension between the two methodologies may yield fresh insights into our security situation.’
Georgios Ferentinou turns his tea saucer so the spoon lies like a compass needle trained on Bekdir’s heart.
‘You want me to join this group.’
‘We do.’
Georgios laughs to himself, a heaving grunt of humour.
‘Security must be in a pretty sorry pass if you need me to save the country. Why do you think I should have any desire to be part of this . . .’
‘Kadiköy Group. Curiosity, Mr Ferentinou?’ Bekdir takes a small plastic phial with an inhaler nozzle from the jacket of his cheap suit and sets it on the little dusty table. ‘There’s a one-use number in there. Your questions will be answered there. The memory carbon is coded to your DNA so if anyone else tries all they’ll get is a brief auditory hallucination of bird wings.’ It does not surprise Georgios that MIT still holds his DNA. The State is always reluctant to relinquish its grip. ‘I’d be quick about it, though; the nano is time coded. You’ll forget it one hour exactly after you inhale it. Well, thank you for the tea, Mr Ferentinou and, whatever you choose, I will keep playing the Terror Market. It’ll be a different username though.’ Bekdir offers a hand. Georgios shakes it dazedly, hypnotized by the unlabelled translucent phial.
The djinn are waiting for Necdet as he comes blinking up the concrete steps from the Levent Business Rescue Centre into the sun-blast of drive-time. Djinn by the flock, djinn by the blizzard, watching from every rooftop and balcony and elevator shaft and window-washing cradle, perched on every street light and road sign and advertising hoarding, every electricity and telecom cable, jammed together on the roof of every passing bus and dolmuş, peering down from the glass cornices of the towers of Istanbul and the minarets of the ugly new mosque with its cheap silvery dome - there especially. The djinn have always been drawn to mosques. They flicker in and out of reality like cold flames, more than there are souls in great Istanbul.
‘What?’ he shouts at the waiting djinn. ‘What is it?’ A woman bustling homewards stares. Eccentric is suspicious in this time when everyone has a grudge and a means to express it. Necdet glares at her. When he looks away, the plaza is empty, a million soap-bubbles bursting silently, simultaneously.
Necdet takes the dolmuş. Bombs haunt the trams and metro. Most of Levent has made the same calculation. The Gayreteppe Road is clogged with trucks, inter-continental executive coaches, citicars and blue-and-cream dolmuşes. The little microbus starts and fits a metre at a time through the clog of traffic. Horns shout on every side, traffic policemen blow whistles. A three-quarters-empty tram sweeps past. Necdet is buried at the back of the dolmuş behind a ruck of cheap business suits, fearing djinn. He dreads the head, the woman’s head, the shining head. He glances out the window. A still, blue flame, as motionless as if carved from sapphire, hovers over the hood of every vehicle on Cumhuriyet Avenue. The djinn of internal combustion. Necdet closes his eyes and does not open them again until he hears the shared taxi pull into the great roaring traffic gyre of Taksim.
Walking down the sweating alleys between the lowering, exhausted apartment blocks, windows open, air-conditioners rattling, Necdet feels the djinn as a closer heat, heat within heat, knots and whirls of electrical energy trapped between the old buildings. In Adem Dede Square, dark and filled with the whistlings of pigeon wings, they swirl, feeding on the exhalations of the trapped day-heat and the stench of rancid cooking fat from the Fethi Bey çayhane, making themselves solid. Necdet fumbles for the key to the big brass padlock. They’re at his back, piled high as a thunderhead. He can smell them like cooking oil.
‘Necdet.’ A woman’s voice, a voice he knows though it’s never spoken directly to him before. It’s the girl who helps at the art shop, walking down the steps between the dervish house and the teahouse. She is upside down. She is inside the earth. The steps, the square, the buildings are obdurately solid, but by some trick of djinn-sight Necdet can see into the earth and the woman walking there, her feet to his feet. She is identical to the shop-girl except that she is pregnant. She leans back, takes it easy on her back, her knees as she climbs the staircase. She stops on the step ahead of Necdet and looks up at him between her feet. She rests her hands lightly on her belly, sighs and labours on up the steps, climbing the imperceptible upward curve of her hollow world. A karin. They are minor spiritual beings - theologians differ over whether they are creatures of clay, like men, or fire, like the djinn - but they are no less capable than the djinn of envy and petty spite. Maiden aunts and dervishes and back street healers sometimes sense them; shaykhs hear and speak with them and may command them. All agree that each karin is a mirror, underneath the earth, of the life lived above ground, guardians of the happiness and peacefulness of their siblings. Necdet staggers against the tekke door, it falls open.
‘Ismet! Ismet! Man, I need you. Ismet!’ Necdet stumbles into the kitchen, heart hammering. Ismet sits on one side of the cheap Ikea table, the Holy Koran in his hands. Ismet Hasgüler is one to whom the book speaks. His readings from the Holy Koran are light and musical and delight the ears. They cure ills, banish baleful influences, purify houses and bless children. When a woman comes knocking on the door with a question that has no answer in this world - and they are invariably women - in Ismet’s hands the book always falls open at the perfect ayah. Two women in headscarves sit across from him, close together. All look up, startled, as if guilty at having been caught divining God’s will. It’s her. The girl from the art shop, the sniffy one who’s never tried to conceal her contempt for Necdet. The one he saw upside down under the earth a few footsteps ago.
‘I saw you,’ Necdet stammers. He points. The woman recoils. The other woman, older, an aunt most likely, clings to her arm. ‘I saw you, outside. Just this second. Your karin, your earth sister. I saw her under the ground. She said my name. I saw you and you were pregnant.’
The young woman’s mouth and eyes are wide. Then her face crumples up into tears. She wails and hugs her aunt-mother-older-sister.
‘A sign, a sign!’ the older woman says, hands held up in praise. ‘God is good! Here, here.’ She pushes euro notes at Ismet. He steps back out of his chair as if the money is poisoned.
‘What?’ Necdet asks. ‘What is it? What’s going on?’
‘You are a real shaykh,’ the art shop girl says and Necdet realizes that she’s weeping in shivering joy. ‘I heard about your brother, that he’s a good judge, very straight, very fair, very fast; so Uncle Hasan said after he sorted the problem with his cousin at the sports shop. And Sibel Hanım said he was very good with the word of God too after he drove the djinni out of her daughter’s bedroom mirror. But you, you’re the master of djinn. Two brothers together; that’s a force from God. Thank you, thank you so much, thank you!’
Necdet scoops up the soiled notes and throws them at the women. ‘Here, here you are then. Are you answered?’
‘Yes,’ says the art-shop girl. She touches her hand to her belly, the same gesture her sister under the earth had made. ‘Oh yes I am, God is very good indeed.’
Aunt-mother-sister hears the crazy in Necdet’s voice, takes the art-shop girl by the hand and bustles her out of the kitchen into the street. The cash she leaves where it lies on the table among the tea glasses.
‘What was that about?’ Ismet demands. ‘You were incredibly rude to those women. Bundling them out like that. God willing, I’m trying to build some kind of reputation here and that’s never going to happen if you scare away people who need my help.’
Necdet closes his eyes. The room swarms with half-glimpsed spiritual and emotional forces, the air buzzes with dread and energy.
‘Listen. I was on that tram today, you know, the one where the bomb went off. I was on the tram, I saw the woman who did it. I saw her pull the strings and her head blew off. I was on that tram.’
‘Oh man, why didn’t you tell me? You should be in hospital. Necdet, you need to go to the hospital.’
Necdet shakes his head, trying to shake off the dizzying buzz of another world.
‘Doctors won’t help me. I see djinn. Do you understand that? I see djinn.’
Needles of yellow light fall on to Adnan Sarioğlu prone on the marble octagon. Steams wisps around him. Sweat pools on his belly - more fat there than he likes - trembles a moment then rolls down his side on to the warm marble. He stretches. His skin pulls against the slab. Every bone and sinew glows as if hammered in a forge. The tellak’s steel fingers left no muscle unraked, no joint uncracked.
Ferid Adataş, proprietor of one of Turkey’s largest non-military investment funds, is a member of the newest and most exclusive private bathhouse in the city. The hamam is fashionable again. The old bathhouses are appointment only; new private-members’ hamams open every week. It’s another post-EU incongruity. Spas are sissy, indulgent, European. Hamams are authentic and Turkish.
Drained on the slab under the starry dome - that bastard tellak had tried to get him to squeal like a virgin - Adnan melts into perfect relaxation. Muscles he did not know he possessed release and purr. Every cell is electric. Adnan gazes up into the dark dome pierced with concentric rings of circular skylights. He might be alone in a private universe.
Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.
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