The Dervish House (35 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Only after you’ve seen Cimbom.’
‘That sounds reasonable. But my wife would very much like to meet yours.’
‘Of course,’ Adnan says. ‘Your hospitality honours me.’ Meaning: I
would sooner see Ayşe doing the splits naked at half time in the Aslantepe Stadium than hide herself in one of those ugly, woman-hating coat things
. ‘When we have money.’
would sooner see Ayşe doing the splits naked at half time in the Aslantepe Stadium than hide herself in one of those ugly, woman-hating coat things
. ‘When we have money.’
‘You wait thirty-one years for a prophet and then another one turns up.’ Mustafa raps the flat screen with the back of his hand. The first thing he does every day is to read the online papers, at length, over tea.
The djinn have been quiet since the judgement in the Tulip Mosque, orderly. They are still present, thick in the air as pages in a book, and as rich. Bound, disciplined. Necdet doubts that it’s his own doing. Do they obey God’s shariat, as ordered by the Adem Dede dervishes, or the mastery of Hızır?
‘Did you hear that? Do you listen to anything I say? I said, you’re not the only one.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a woman out in Ereğli. She sees into souls. Peri and all kinds of fairy folk are speaking to her. People are coming from all over for cures and healings and fortune tellings, all that sort of thing. It’s all in
Cumhuriyet
.’
Cumhuriyet
.’
Necdet cranes over Mustafa’s shoulder to read the article. He flicks down the article, stops abruptly at a bad photograph of a motherly woman.
‘That’s her.’
‘The Prophetess of Ereğli. I think that’s slightly over-egging it.’
‘No no, her. Her. I need to go there. I need to talk to her. I know her. I’ve seen her before. She was standing right beside me on the tram when the bomb went off.’
DEFENDED BY ROBOTS says the sign on the door, right above the one that says CLOSED FOR LUNCH. Ayşe pushes the door. She knows it will be open. The bell tinkles.
‘Can’t you read?’ a voice shouts from further than the architecture of the shop should allow. ‘Defended by robots! They have stingers. Three days of pain and a permanent unsightly rash.’
‘You can’t afford a cleaner, let alone robots,’ Ayşe calls.
A bark of laughter from deep in the impossible perspectives.
‘Ayşe! Buttercup! I’m down the back.’
To go down the back in the Sultan Mektep Bookstore is to journey through Istanbul’s architectural history. The nineteenth-century Ottoman frontage, original wood, opens on to part of an arcade from early post-Conquest which in turn, through a homebrew knock-through, gives on to a Byzantine era vault. Burak Özekmekçib arranges his stock accordingly. Set textbooks - the Sultan Mektep is close enough to the university to be the official Subversive Bookstore - contemporary fiction and non-fiction fill the street face of the shop. Towards the rear, political texts, banned books and underground magazines, some of them dating back to when the Sultan Mektep was a landmark on the Hippy Trail. Tickets from the Pudding Shop, travel books and Herman Hesse from the Sultan. Burak’s father had owned it then, and been prosecuted many times for sedition and insulting Turkishness. Burak is the architectural adventurer; armed with ranging sonar, GPS and ancient maps of Beyazit, he has expanded his legacy into three millennia. Under the arches of the old Han are, in the first bay, translations, English language in the second and the third, fourth and fifth for Arabic volumes. Burak is down in Byzantium. Here the old, the forged, the perplexing, the visionary, the insane; the occult and the revelatory and the hallucinatory. The pornographic, the prophetic and the profane lie together on the stone-cool shelves.
‘Someone is going to clear you out some day.’
‘What? Steal books?’ Burak peers over his glasses. Floppy, thick, dark hair; inadequate glasses, check shirt, corduroy pants with suspenders, hand-made brown brogues; Burak Özekmekçib is every inch the antiquarian bookseller.
‘Someone like me, Burak. Who knows what they’re worth.’ For all his affected bookish style, Burak Özekmekçib is an exact contemporary of Ayşe’s. They met at university on a course on Classical Persian Nastaliq Calligraphy. Adnan would hate him on sight. He would think Burak was gay when the truth is that Burak just didn’t like the idea of sex with anyone or anything.
‘So, flower, what can I do for you?’
Old Sezen Aksu songs smoulder on the audio.
My mother loved these
, Ayşe thinks. They are the soundtrack to her childhood; autumn evenings in the Samanyolu Sok watching her mother put on make-up to go out with the dashing Captain Erkoç, summers in the house by the sea dancing around on the patio waiting for the barbecue to heat. Burak kisses Ayşe in the French style. After graduating he spent five years in Paris, returning to inherit the shop on his father’s death. In Paris he claims to have learned kissing, anarchy, red wine and the concept of the leisured lunch.
My mother loved these
, Ayşe thinks. They are the soundtrack to her childhood; autumn evenings in the Samanyolu Sok watching her mother put on make-up to go out with the dashing Captain Erkoç, summers in the house by the sea dancing around on the patio waiting for the barbecue to heat. Burak kisses Ayşe in the French style. After graduating he spent five years in Paris, returning to inherit the shop on his father’s death. In Paris he claims to have learned kissing, anarchy, red wine and the concept of the leisured lunch.
‘I need information.’
‘It’s always something with you, rosebud. Here, come up the front, I’ve a lovely bottle already open.’
Ayşe follows Burak up through time. It is a lovely bottle: a 2022 Madiran, standing on Burak’s gargantuan Ottoman era desk. Burak produces dusty glasses from a drawer and wipes them with a handkerchief. He takes the swivel chair, Ayşe the old rocker. Madiran is shared.
‘So?’
‘The Hurufis.’
‘Created by Fazlallah Astarbadi aka Naimi born Astrabad Iran 1340 Christian Era. Started preaching fairly orthodox Sufism around Persia and Azerbaijan circa 1370. Moved towards more esoteric beliefs which he incorporated in the
Jawidan-Al-Kabir
. Tried to convert Tamurlane the Great and was executed for his presumption, which caused his followers to rebel, for which they were put down with proper Mongol efficiency. They struggled on as a sect for a couple of decades before fizzling out or being incorporated into other more orthodox orders. The Balkan Bektaşis and Shataris in India are the guardians of the legacy. How’s that for WikiBurak? The Hurufis are dead, rosebud, dead and long gone.’
Jawidan-Al-Kabir
. Tried to convert Tamurlane the Great and was executed for his presumption, which caused his followers to rebel, for which they were put down with proper Mongol efficiency. They struggled on as a sect for a couple of decades before fizzling out or being incorporated into other more orthodox orders. The Balkan Bektaşis and Shataris in India are the guardians of the legacy. How’s that for WikiBurak? The Hurufis are dead, rosebud, dead and long gone.’
The Madiran is very good, tannic, then deep and soft, thrillingly dehydrating. The pleasure of lunchtime drinking, to sit back in a cave of books air-conditioned by Byzantine architecture, glass in hand and watch perspiring Istanbul pass the window.
‘Well that’s the official history, but I come to you for unorthodox history, Burak. If there were Hurufi orders still operating today, you would know.’
‘Well, of course there are any number of wannabes calling themselves Hurufis, petal. Every half-baked occultist and kabbalist and Letterist and crossword compiler calls himself a Hurufi or a neo-Hurufi. The order is dead, poppy. If you want I can point you to a couple of Bektaşi shaykhs who have copies of Naima’s original text and maps of the correspondences of the
zuhur kibriya
on the human face. Then there are people like the Meru Foundation who claim connections with the Hurufi tradition and claim to have a universal alphabetic motif in the first line of the Hebrew Genesis, but that is principally an American Kabbalist project. About twice a year you’ll get an article in
Toplumsal Tarih
about the sacred geometries of Sinan mosques or the Seven Letters of Istanbul . . .’
zuhur kibriya
on the human face. Then there are people like the Meru Foundation who claim connections with the Hurufi tradition and claim to have a universal alphabetic motif in the first line of the Hebrew Genesis, but that is principally an American Kabbalist project. About twice a year you’ll get an article in
Toplumsal Tarih
about the sacred geometries of Sinan mosques or the Seven Letters of Istanbul . . .’
Ayşe lifts a finger from her wine glass.
‘Tell me more about that.’
‘The Seven Letters? It’s a legend put around just after Sinan’s death, that the seven letters omitted from the opening verse of the Koran spell the secret name of God and are written on the geography of Istanbul in the alignment of his architecture. The man who reads it whole and entire will unlock the heart of the Holy Koran and see the unveiled face of God. To me it’s clearly a piece of clunky propaganda put out by the Kalifate to justify the the profane sums they spent on Sinan’s building spree, establishing Istanbul as a pilgrimage to rival Medina and Mecca - which would rake in the money - and reinforce the Ottoman claim to be the head of the Islamic world. Of course, no one has ever found the seven letters.’
‘Man?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You said, “the man who reads it whole”.’
Burak tops up the Madiran.
He is a dangerous drinker
, Ayşe thinks,
the kind with whom your glass is never empty
. When this is done, when she has the money, she must go out with him and talk art and old Istanbul and university and all those things she can’t get from Adnan.
He is a dangerous drinker
, Ayşe thinks,
the kind with whom your glass is never empty
. When this is done, when she has the money, she must go out with him and talk art and old Istanbul and university and all those things she can’t get from Adnan.
‘What are you up to, meadowsweet?’ Burak says, frowning in suspicion.
‘I’m following something.’
Burak throws up his hands in caution.
‘You be careful, I’ve heard Antiquities is cracking down again.’
‘Burak, you insult me. These articles about the Seven Letters, do you remember who wrote them?’
‘I do indeed. Most of them are by a chap by the name of Barçin Yayla. I get books for him. Arabic stuff, Persian theology, Sufi and Kabbala stuff. I’m surprised he hasn’t called on you; he’s forever harassing me for calligraphic panels.’
‘He couldn’t afford me.’
‘Too true, too true. Lovely guy but completely barking - now there is a man who considers himself the last Hurufi. Lilac, are you thinking of talking to him? I must insist you let me talk to him first. I’m sure he’ll agree, it’s just that, well, he’s a touch brittle.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
‘Give me a moment.’ Burak slips on his ceptep eyewriter. It looks supremely incongruous, like a ray-gun, or a turban. Ayşe watches digits flicker over his eyeball. Sezen Aksu belts out torch songs of lost love and hüzün. A movement at the foot of the stack of Turkish pulp thrillers almost sends Ayşe’s wine glass to the floor. Rat! No, even more surprising - a rat would be no surprise at all in the Sultan Mektep: a little domestic robot, the size of two hands together, assiduously vacuuming around the piles of books. Burak frowns at her from behind the eyewriter.
‘It’s ringing now. Did you think I was making it up about the robots?’
Within ten steps of the Anadolu Hotel’s front door Adnan’s shirt is saturated and clinging. The heat on Yeniçeriler Cadessi is like a blow, a burden on the back of the neck. Only fools and teenagers in almost no clothes brave the solder-hot pavement. Even the English hide from the sun, red faces burning at the backs of shady cafés. Trams slide past, windows packed with weary, heat-drained commuters. Buses manoeuvre clumsily, lumbering away from stops, wedged to the door with hot, irritable, drained Istanbulus. Car drivers have long since given up any hope of forward motion and sit resigned in their inching traffic jam, windows wound down, T-pop and talk radio blaring. The heels of their hands rest permanently on the horn. One word, one spark to the vehicular tinder, and this whole street could erupt into a death-fight. There are no buyers for the Fresh! Squeezed ! Pomegranate! outside the bar on the corner of Çemberlitas. It looks to Adnan like the greatest thing in the world, a plummet into bottomless cool. The bar’s air-conditioner has a fluttering rattle. As he identifies it he becomes aware of another, deeper, more breathy pitch from the ceptep store, then, as he attunes to that, a third voice chimes in, a high-pitched, asthmatic whine from the cheap fashion shop, then the overheated shush from the second-hand bookstore, the insect buzz from the long-distance bus, the whistle of the car air-cons. Last comes the bass drone of the big roof fans. Adnan is at the centre of a symphony for air-conditioners. Best fucking tune in the world.
‘Are you going straight back to the office?’ Kadir asks.
‘I’m in no hurry.’
‘The Beyazit Mosque is supposed to be good for the contemplation. It’s designed to be cooling in summer. All that marble.’
‘What do you know about mosque architecture?’
‘Walk with me anyway.’
Frantic Beyazit Square has surrendered to the heat, its crowds driven into shade and down alleys and soks under the shadows of balconies and leaning walls. The step through the arch of the mosque gate into the courtyard is a step across worlds and times. The growl of the street is pushed away. Adnan can hear the water dripping from the brass faucets into the marble trough of the fountain at the centre of the court. The cloisters are deep and domed, shaded and sheltering. The marble invites the touch of bare feet. Suddenly crazy in the heat and the escape from it and the excitement of the deal, Adnan kicks off his hand-made shoes and peels off his socks. Halfmillennium old marble under his soles. Geological reflexology.
‘You should try this.’ Adnan flexes his toes.
‘I wish you hadn’t done that,’ Kadir says. ‘It’s so much harder holding a serious conversation with someone without footwear.’
Adnan’s arches flex, tense with a foreshadowing of cramp.
‘Tell me.’
‘Kemal may not be staunch.’
‘Kemal is a shit-talker.’
‘Kemal assuredly is. Kemal has also lost something in the region of two hundred and eighty million euro over the past four weeks’ trading.’
The marble beneath Adnan’s feet is suddenly ice cold, clammy as corpse skin. The courtyard, the colonnades and fountain and the cascade of domes, a waterfall in stone from the crescent moon finial of the mosque, all sway and swoon. Bare feet are very bare, very silly, very exposed.
‘Kemal’s not a trader. He’s back-office.’ Adnan’s cool has fled like startled starlings. He is jabbering, ranting, saying the first obvious thing in his head.
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