The Dervish House (3 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
He only knew his mother was beside him by the touch on his arm.
‘What’s happening?’ Can asked. His own voice seemed small as a lizard’s. His mother knelt beside him, pressed her lips close to his ear. When she spoke he felt its tickle as much as heard the words.
‘Can, love, we’re Europeans now.’
Can runs through the hushed corridors of the dervish house. He knows all the best vantages on to the world beyond. Can runs up to the terrace. It smells of hot wooden patio furniture and desiccating geraniums. Can lifts himself up on his tiptoes to peer over the wobbly wooden shuttering. His parents will condemn him to a world of whispers but they never think that he might just fall off the terrace. He sees smoke rising up between the circling storks. There is not very much of it. Necatibey Cadessi, as he thought. Then his fingers grip white on the age-silvered balcony rail. The air above Adem Dede Square fills with grainy motion, as if from a dust dervish or a plague of locusts. The flock of insect-sized swarmbots barrels through the middle air, flowing around streetlights and electricity cables, channelled into a stream of furious motion by the close-pressing apartment blocks. Can beats his fists on the rail in excitement. Every nine-year-old-boy loves bots. Right in front of his eyes they turn in mid-air and pour down steep Vermilion-Maker Lane like water over rocks. In the open sky above the rooftops, the dancing-hall of storks, the wind would overwhelm their nano-fan engines and disperse them like dust. Can finds flocks within flocking, flows within flows, strange currents, fractal forms, self-organizing entities. Mr Ferentinou has taught him to see the blood beneath the world’s skin: the simple rules of the very small that build into the seeming complexity of the great.
‘Monkey Monkey Monkey!’ Can Durukan shouts as the tail end of the swarm vanishes around the twists and staggers of Vermilion-Maker Lane. ‘After them!’
A stir in the still-shadowed corners of the dining room, a scurrying in the intricate woodwork of the terrace screen. From nooks and crevices the machines come clambering, scampering, rolling. Tumbling balls fuse into scuttling crabs; many-limbed climbing things link and twist into arms. Piece by piece the disparate units self-assemble until the last section locks and a plastic monkey leaps up on to the rail, clinging with hands and feet and prehensile tail, and turns its sensor-dotted head on its master.
Can pulls the smartsilk computer out of his pocket, unfolds it and opens the haptic field. He flexes a finger. The robot monkey twitches alert. Can points and it is off in a thrilling spring up on to the power line and a hand-and-foot gallop over the street to a coiled jump to the balcony opposite where the Georgian woman insists on hanging her underwear out to dry. Up up and up again. Can sees it perched on the parapet, a shadow against the sky.
Can’s toy BitBots cannot compare to the police machines that flocked past him but Mr Ferentinou has pushed them far beyond the manufacturer’s specifications. Can clicks the Monkey icon. Bird, Snake, Rat and Monkey are the four manifestations of his BitBots. Between their four elements, they create the city that is barred to Can. He sees through their eyes. Can giggles in excitement as he falls in behind Monkey’s many sensors and careers across rooftops, weaves through mazes of aerial and cable, leaps the thrilling gaps between close-shouldering konaks. By map and the point-of-view camera link Can steers his eyes down through the roofs of crumbling old Eskiköy. Only a boy could do it. He is part superhero, part extreme-sports free-runner, part city-racer, part ninja. It is the greatest computer game. Parapet to parapet to pole to hands feet and tail scramble down the plastic sign of the Allianz Insurance. Can Durukan arrives at the scene of the blast, clinging upside down to the bottom of a giant letter I.
It disappoints. It is not a very big explosion. There are ambulances and fire trucks and police cars with flashing lights and news crews arriving by the minute but the tram hardly looks damaged at all. Can scans the crowd. Faces cameras faces cameras. A face he recognizes among the onlookers; that rat-faced guy who has moved into the empty quarter of the old house; the one with the brother who is some kind of street judge. At first Can resented their squatting. The deserted rooms filled with dust and pigeon shit were his undiscovered country. He had thought of sending Monkey - the only one of his agents with hands - to move things around, pretend to be the ghosts of old unquiet dervishes- but Rat-Face might lay a trap for mischievous Monkey and capture him before he could split into his separate units and slip away. Observation was the game.
Rat-Face is trying to slip away. He almost starts a fight with a big man in a white shirt. What is he doing now? He looks as if he’s seen a ghost. Now he’s barging his way through the crowd. If the Scene-of-Crime bots see him they’ll needle him with their stings. That would be exciting. Can still wishes ill on Rat-Face and his kadı brother, defilers of his sacred space. No, he’s made it out.
Monkey uncurls his tail from the stanchion and prepares to swing back up into the rooftops. Nothing decent to post online. Then Can notices a glint of movement in the Commerzbank sign on the building to the left. There’s something in there. Monkey swivels his sensor-studded head and zooms in. Click click click. Movement, a glitter of plastic. Then the disparate motions come together. Can holds his breath. He looks close up into the face of another many-eyed monkey bot. And as he stares the head turns, the smart-plastic camera eyes bulge and focus and stare back.
The confectioner Lefteres used to say that all the Greeks in Eskiköy could fit into one teashop. Now they fit around one table.
‘Here he comes now.’
Georgios Ferentinou waddles across Adem Dede Square.
Square
is too grand for what is little more than a widening of the street that runs past the Mevlevi tekke. An old public fountain stands in a niche in a wall, dry longer than any Eskiköyu’s memory. Room enough for two çayhanes, Aydin’s kiosk on the corner of Stolen Chicken Lane with its spectacular display of Russian porn clothes-pegged to the bottom of the canopy, Arslan’s NanoMart, the Improving Bookstore that specializes in colourful publications for elementary schoolchildren, and That Woman’s Art Shop. Aydin the pornographer takes his morning tea in the Fethi Bey çayhane, on the insalubrious staircase on the derelict side of the dervish house. Adem Dede Square is small enough for two teashops but big enough for rivalries.
Square
is too grand for what is little more than a widening of the street that runs past the Mevlevi tekke. An old public fountain stands in a niche in a wall, dry longer than any Eskiköyu’s memory. Room enough for two çayhanes, Aydin’s kiosk on the corner of Stolen Chicken Lane with its spectacular display of Russian porn clothes-pegged to the bottom of the canopy, Arslan’s NanoMart, the Improving Bookstore that specializes in colourful publications for elementary schoolchildren, and That Woman’s Art Shop. Aydin the pornographer takes his morning tea in the Fethi Bey çayhane, on the insalubrious staircase on the derelict side of the dervish house. Adem Dede Square is small enough for two teashops but big enough for rivalries.
‘Hot,’ Georgios Ferentinou wheezes. He fans himself with a laminated menu. The order is immutable as the stones of Aghia Sofia but Bülent the çayhane owner always lays out the menus. That cheap bastard Aykut across the square never takes that trouble. ‘Again.’ He sweats freely. Georgios Ferentinou is a fat bulb of a man, balanced on tiny, dancer’s feet so that he seems permanently on the teeter-totter. None of his çayhane compatriots have ever seen him in anything lesser than the high-waisted trousers and the white linen jacket he wears today. A hat perhaps, in the highest of summers, like the terrible Twenty Two and when the sun gets low and shines through the slot of sky along Vermilion-Maker Lane, a pair of tiny, round dark glasses that turn his eyes into two black raisins. On those increasingly rare days when snow falls in Adem Dede Square and the tea-drinkers are driven inside behind breath-steamed windows, a red woollen scarf and a great black coat like some old Crimean trader from the last days of the empire.
‘Hot as hell,’ Constantin agrees. ‘Already.’
‘We’ve saved you a leg.’ Lefteres pushes a plate across the small café table. Upon it a marzipan lamb lies slaughtered, its body broken. Delicate red frosting crosses adorn its grainy, yellow flanks. For over one hundred and fifty years since they arrived from Salonika into the capital of the empire, the family Lefteres made marzipan Paschal lambs for the Christians of Constantinople. Lambs for Easter, crystallized fruit made lustrous with edible gold and silver foils, the gifts of the Magi, for Christmas. Muslims were not ignored by the Lefteres: sesame candies and brittle sugary confection dishes for Sweet Bayram at the end of Ramazan. Boxes of special lokum and pistachio brittles for wedding calls and sweetening conversations. Family Lefteres sold the shop before the end of the century but the last of the line still makes his sweet lambs and jewelled fruit, his Bayram delights for Adem Dede Square. And he is still known as Lefteres the Confectioner.
Bülent sets down Georgios Ferentinou’s invariable glass of apple tea.
‘Here’s the Father now,’ he says. The last of the four old Greeks of Aden Dede Square sets himself down heavily in his ordained seat beside Georgios Ferentinou.
‘God save all here.’ Father Ioannis stretches his legs painfully out under the table. ‘God damn my knees.’ Without a word Bülent sets down his linden tea in its delicate tulip glass. Father Ioannis takes a sip. ‘Ah. Great. Bastards have been at it again.’
‘What are they doing this time?’ Bülent asks.
‘Someone slopped a bucket of piss into the porch. Half of it ran under the door into the sanctuary. I’ve been up since four trying to scrub it all off. Bastards. What I can’t figure is, they must have been storing it up for days. All those teenagers standing around pissing in a bucket and giggling to themselves.’
‘This is assuming,’ says the most quiet of the Adem Dede çayhane divan, ‘that it was actually human urine. It could have been some large animal.’
‘In the middle of this city?’ says Father Ioannis. ‘Anyway, God and his Mother preserve me, I know what human piss smells like.’
Constantin the Alexandrian shrugs and examines the cigarette burning close to his yellow fingertips.
‘It’s going to take a lot of incense to get rid of the stink before Easter and who’s going to pay for that?’ Father Ioannis grumbles. ‘I can’t even get the Patriarchate to fix that tile on the roof.’
Georgios Ferentinou thinks this Easter he might visit the shrine of Aghia Panteleimon. He has no belief; faith is beneath his dignity but he enjoys the designed madness of religion. The minuscule church is tucked away down an alley off an alley off an alley. Older than any name in Eskiköy, Aghia Panteleimon let the district grow up around it like a fruit around a seed. It houses the sword that bent rather than behead its eponymous martyr (until he so decided) and a fine collection of icons of its patron saint, some in the alternate, Russian, style, with his hands nailed to his head. The woman who owns the art gallery in the former dancing hall has made Father Ioannis a fine offer for his macabre icons. They are not his to sell. If he does go this Easter, Georgios Ferentinou knows he may well be the only attendee. Perhaps a couple of old widows, come from Christ knows where in their raven black. Even before the ethnic cleansing of 1955 the tide of faith had ebbed from Eskiköy. Yet lately he has sensed it stealing back in little seepings and runnels, feeling its way over the cobbles and around the lintel stones. It’s a more strident faith than either that of Aghia Panteleimon or the Mevlevi Order. It has an easterly aspect. It’s rawer, younger, more impatient, more confident.
‘It’s the heat I say, the heat,’ says Lefteres the Confectioner. ‘Makes them fighting mad.’
‘And the football,’ Bülent adds. ‘There’ll be some English fan stabbed before the end of the week. Heat and football.’
The Greeks of the Adem Dede teahouse nod and murmur their agreement.
‘So have you finished that lampoon then?’ Father Ioannis asks.
Lefteres unfolds a sheet of A
4
and slides it to the centre of the table. It is blank white.
4
and slides it to the centre of the table. It is blank white.
‘I have decided not to do this one.’
Lefteres, master of sugar and succulence, paschal lambs and gilded fruit, is the resident Lampoonist of Eskiköy. A pestering boyfriend, an unrecovered debt, unwelcome big beats or somebody fly-tipping in your dumpster: go to Lefteres at the Adem Dede çayhane. Pay him what he asks. It will not be cheap. Quality is never cheap. But the very next morning Eskiköy will wake to find a single sheet of A
4
, always handwritten, thumb-tacked to the offending door, gaffer-taped to a window, gunged to the windscreen of a parked car. In the best Turkish verse and scansion and the highest of style, every vice is listed and shamed, every personal attribute ridiculed. Every intimate detail is excoriated. Lefteres’ research is immaculate. It works without fail. The crowd at the door is an ancient and powerful sanction. Word of a new lampoon travels fast. People come from far beyond Eskiköy to read and marvel. There are international websites dedicated to the lampoons of Lefteres the Confectioner of Eskiköy.
4
, always handwritten, thumb-tacked to the offending door, gaffer-taped to a window, gunged to the windscreen of a parked car. In the best Turkish verse and scansion and the highest of style, every vice is listed and shamed, every personal attribute ridiculed. Every intimate detail is excoriated. Lefteres’ research is immaculate. It works without fail. The crowd at the door is an ancient and powerful sanction. Word of a new lampoon travels fast. People come from far beyond Eskiköy to read and marvel. There are international websites dedicated to the lampoons of Lefteres the Confectioner of Eskiköy.
‘Have you told Sibel Hanım?’ Georgios Ferentinou says.
‘I have indeed,’ Lefteres says. ‘She wasn’t happy. But I told her that part of my commission is that I must be absolutely satisfied myself that there is just cause as well as clear social need. That’s always been the case. Always. The woman is not a prostitute. Simple as that. Georgian she may be but that doesn’t make her a prostitute.’
Since the Caucasus and central Asia found that the front door to Europe now opened on to theirs, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Ukrainians, workers from as far as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, Kurds in their tens of thousand have flooded across Anatolia, the buckle strapped across the girth of great Eurasia, Istanbul the pin. And that is how Georgios knows Lefteres’ reasons for not accepting the lampoon. Istanbul was a city of peoples before and knows it shall be again, a true cosmopolis. The time of the Turk is ending. Georgians, Greeks: sojourners alike.
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