The Dervish House (38 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The glass eyedropper contains 36 per cent hydrochloric acid. When Barçin Yayla beholds the Seventh Letter written on the face of Istanbul and sees reflected there the face of God himself, he will uncap it and calmly, religiously, drop half a syringe on to each unblinking eyeball. Having seen the secret name of God, what worldly visions could compare? They can only clog and cloy and confuse the purity. As the last thing Barçin Yayla ever sees, it will be fresh, blazing forever.
The apartment smells. Ayşe had thought it would; a cheap top-floor walk-up next to a light-well into which generations of citizens of Küçükayasofya have casually thrown garbage. Add a heatwave. It must be bad. The smell is worse. It is a many-layered reek, complex and rich, individual odours combining into new, unidentifiable stenches; no sooner has the sense of smell acclimatized to one reek than it discovers a new one to evoke a gag reaction. Dust bunnies man sweat unwashed sheets dirty floor ancient sofa rot mould piss - Ayşe vows never to go near the bathroom - but with them the more esoteric smells of the single male obsessive: fusty books, printer inks, old incense, stale oils, yellowing newspapers, a peculiar phenolic plastic smell with no identifiable source, photographic chemicals, fixatives and preservatives, overheated electrics and hot halogen bulbs. As Ayşe examines the photomontage of aerial shots of peninsular Istanbul and Üsküdar that occupies an entire wall of the living-room/kitchen, Ayşe slips a thumb-sized atomiser of Chanel 5 - only the classics - from her bag for a surreptitious spritz.
It is a staggering work. Mosques, tombs, baths are outlined, handcoloured and annotated with threads leading to satellite pieces of text, photocopies of newspaper, inscriptions and pieces of tâlik script, photographs and compilations of thumbnails, contact sheets, line-of-sight shots of the minarets of one great mosque from another, and the alignment of the minarets of yet another mosque beyond that; pages torn from old tourist guides, drawings of sacred knots and the thirty variations of cat’s cradle, print-outs of multi-dimensional geometrical polygons and topological forms, Persian, Arabic, Turkic, Nabatean, Hebrew and Greek alphabets and scripts, prayers arranged in magic squares and Trees of Life and sacred ladders, architectural plans, detailed close-ups, with dimensions pencilled on, of the design of domes, numerological treatises, articles in English from
Scientific American
on network theory and graph theory, reports from city surveyors and Marmaray engineers, brief biographies of Sultans and paşas, curling Post-it notes with brief jottings, in a neat, tight hand, written tersely on them. The cloud of annexed material overshadows even the wall-filling map; Ayşe traces threads of connectivity over the door, on to the roof, bouncing along the line of the skirting board through a brief history of the Haseki Hürrem Hamam, marginal verse-counter in decorated Korans in
Sülüs
script and a piece on the Three Utilities Problem in mathematics. The ceiling is a mosaic of articles and photographs, drawing and writings, held up against gravity with Blu-tack, yellowing Sellotape and thumb-tacks from which the connecting lines run back through dozens of ideas to a source on the montage. It is the totality of the sacred geometry of Istanbul. It is the mother of mash-ups.
Scientific American
on network theory and graph theory, reports from city surveyors and Marmaray engineers, brief biographies of Sultans and paşas, curling Post-it notes with brief jottings, in a neat, tight hand, written tersely on them. The cloud of annexed material overshadows even the wall-filling map; Ayşe traces threads of connectivity over the door, on to the roof, bouncing along the line of the skirting board through a brief history of the Haseki Hürrem Hamam, marginal verse-counter in decorated Korans in
Sülüs
script and a piece on the Three Utilities Problem in mathematics. The ceiling is a mosaic of articles and photographs, drawing and writings, held up against gravity with Blu-tack, yellowing Sellotape and thumb-tacks from which the connecting lines run back through dozens of ideas to a source on the montage. It is the totality of the sacred geometry of Istanbul. It is the mother of mash-ups.
Among the web of threads and sheer weight of research, Ayşe at first doesn’t notice the patterns on the aerial photograph. It’s a blue thread following the line of a Byzantine watercourse that draws her attention. Direction, purpose, ignoring street patterns and architecture. She follows it to a pin in the Cistern of a Thousand Pillars, then under Sultanahmet Park to the Haseki Hürrem Hamam. Here she loses the blue thread - a water thread, Ayşe concludes - in the tangle of annotations and drawings - until she picks it up again at Haseki Hürrem Mosque, dedicated to the same wife of Süleyman the Magnificent. Then she sees it, the pattern, the plan, whole, entire. That same gift that makes the letters in the hands of long-dead Sephardim move on her gallery wall lifts the blue line off the streets and and soks and houses and mosques of Istanbul and turns it into a letter, a Kha, floating above the rooftops and domes. A Kha two kilometres on its longest side, written in the angular, blocky, archaic Kufic Arabic script, pinned out in the mosque and turbes and hamams of Sultanahmet. Then she see another connection.
‘Sinan,’ she breathes. The great builder, the Armenian convert who became the architect of Sultans. His ambition to build a greater dome for Islam than the Christian dome of Aya Sofya would always be frustrated.
Barçin Yayla nods vigorously. As befits a man who attends prayers in the nearby Sokullu Mehmet Paşa Mosque the prescribed five times daily, he is as ablution-sweet as his apartment is detritus-foul. Apart from his breath. He seems not to know of toothbrushes. Ayşe places him in his mid-thirties, but she knows from the many antiquarians, dealers and forgers she meets that it is hard to tell the age of a man with an overweening passion. He is as Burak promised, polite, shy, intense, naïve, dedicated, wary. He is the last Hurufi.
‘Sinan surely would never have had any contact with Hurufism,’ Ayşe says.
Barçin Yayla nervously touches a finger to his lips, as if to suppress contradiction.
‘I think you’ll find that Sinan was a military engineer and architect with the Janissary Corps for over twenty years. The official order for the Janissaries was Bektaşi - and as we know, the Bektaşis appropriated much of their theological discourse from Hurufism. I think it exceedingly likely that Hurufism existed in the form of an order within an order, an initiatory secret society for the elite. The military loves its hierarchies and rituals. My work makes it very clear that Sinan expressed Hurufi philosophy in the mathematics of his great buildings. The use of space, the proportions, the ratios of volume, are all numerologically derived from the Holy Koran.’
‘It’s one thing building a cloister to reflect the 768 of the numerological Bismillah, it’s another planning a giant alphabet out of an entire city before you’ve even built your first mosque.’
‘It is, but remember, Sinan was chief architect and city planner at the time of the conquest of Cairo. He practised on that city; demolishing and building where he liked. I have no doubt that he was already forming the idea of a sacred geometry. His first building as Architect of the Abode of Felicity was the Haseki Hürrem Mosque for the Kadin Roxelana. Not his greatest work by any means, and he was working from existing designs, but it was identifiable as his first mature work. There’s a story in his autobiography
Tezkiretül Bünyan
that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.’
Tezkiretül Bünyan
that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.’
‘He later built the Haseki Hürrem baths.’
‘And her tomb, yes. All to the plan, all to spell out the Seven Letters.’
Ayşe traces other threads looped around the pin in the Mosque of Roxelana. Green, the colour of the prophet, reaches across the Bosphorus to Atik Vallide and Mihrimah Sultan Mosques in Üsküdar in a Shin ten kilometres across. Thread by thread, Sinan’s buildings are tied into a monumental alphabet. Only in slab-sided, rectilinear Kufic could such a work, drawn in lines of connection between buildings, even be attempted. The insight is that the letters are not sequential, written across the city. They are placed on top of each other, superimposed. One site may form a node in several letters. They are not meant to be read. They are meant to be apprehended whole, at once, by the eye of God immanent everywhere.
Ayşe tries to imagine the years of effort entailed in drawing these letters out of millennia of history of Constantinople, training the perceptions to remove the houses, the streets, the Roman and Byzantine wonders, the works of prior and lesser engineers and see only the buildings of Sinan and their geometrical relationships to each other. Trying out the permutations must have been the work of years. A dark and perversely delicious fear gnaws Ayşe, the intellectual intoxication she experiences from opening a new manuscript or unwrapping an unseen miniature and knowing that she stands on the edge of the incomprehensible, that she holds in her hands a world and a way of thinking alien to her in every way. The past is another universe: a long dead sect drew its truths across whole cities for generations it could not imagine. Yet the Seven Letters traced out in coloured thread on the satellite images of Istanbul confidently proclaim that this is a truth that should stand as long as the Queen of Cities herself. This is dark, occult fruit. Ayşe is dizzy with strange.
She steps back from the wall. ‘There’s one missing.’
‘That’s correct.’
Ayşe traces the pattern of the threads.
‘The final letter: Fa. I don’t see it. It’s not here.’
Barçin Yayla bows his head. He sits down at his work table, as rambunctious with cuttings and magazines and prints-outs and photographs as his walls. Ayşe notices that between the piles of paper, the table top is incised with dizzying circular graph patterns, all lines and nodes and vertices, seemingly scratched into the wood with the point of a pair of compasses.
‘I can’t find it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t find it. The last letter. The Fa. It has to be a Fa, but I can’t get it to fit. I’ve tried every permutation on the photographs and maps, I’ve even got a friend at the university to write me a little programme to try out different topologies, I’ve even looked at different scripts. I can’t get it to fit. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there’s a clue I’m missing, or a building has been demolished that I don’t know about - but I don’t see how that could happen; I’m pretty sure I have all the architectural records and copies of old maps. Maybe what happened is Sinan simply didn’t finish it. He died before the pattern was completed.’
‘He can’t have,’ Ayşe says emphatically. It’s not about the million euro now. It’s the puzzle, the chase, the mystery for its own sake. The city still wears a jewel of secrecy next to her heart. Ayşe’s theory is beautiful and elegant and fresh and thrilling and she can’t bear that it might fall to sand because the Great Architect failed to complete a mystical schema he had set in motion fifty years before. The great Sinan did not work that way. If Barçin Yayla is correct and the Seven Letters were intellectually complete even as Sinan was building fleets on Lake Van to ferry Ottoman soldiers to war against the Safavids, he will have allowed for the vagaries of a career as an Ottoman court official. Sinan won’t have left the best to last. ‘No, the pattern’s complete. It has to be. This is the Chief Architect of the Abode of Felicity. This is our Leonardo Da Vinci.’
‘You sound, how shall I say, most certain of that.’
Tell him. You will have to tell him some time. She could lie but Barçin Yayla’s manic, monastic dedication deserves better. His apartment stinks like Iblis’ shitter but she respects him. He is serious and he is trustworthy. He doesn’t care for Mellified Men and million euro deals; all he wants is to finally be able to read the Seven Letters superimposed over the divine geography of Istanbul and burn his eyes out so that the Secret Name of God will remain indelibly branded into his retinas. He’s an innocent. He’s God’s fool. He is the Sufi of chaos. Tell him.
‘I believe that the Mellified Man of Iskenderun is buried somewhere inside the final Fa.’
The gallery interests and repels Yayla: his eyes brighten at the mention of her Bektaşi calligrams; letters manipulated into the shape of a pear or a rose or a bird or, most pertinently to a self-proclaimed member of a sect that saw humanity as the perfect image of the divine word, a man. They darken again when he hears this is for commercial gain. They narrow at the story of Hacı Ferhat.
‘This is not right action. Only the undying one is permitted to see the Day of Resurrection in his own flesh. The man who dabbles in forbidden practices buys his own destruction.’
They widen when Ayşe confesses that she has a buyer for the Mellified Man.
‘Money will break the superstitious hold of this monstrosity. It’s a good thing. Sell it, break it up, destroy it, let the soul of this misguided Hacı return to the earth.’
His sits back in his chair, eyes wide as a child’s when Ayşe unwinds the thread of reasoning that brought her to his door.
‘When I hear of a battle of magics, between the spoken word and the written word, that sounds to me like an echo of a much older battle, between the oral tradition and the written tradition. This Tarikat of the Divine Word - the name itself is deeply Hurufi. If we take Beshun Ferhat’s chronology at face value, her family lost control of the Mellified Man towards the end of the nineteenth century, not the end of the eighteenth century. The Corps of Janissaries was destroyed by Sultan Mahmud the Second in 1826 in the Auspicious Incident. At the same time the Bektaşis, who were the Janissaries’ particular religious order were disbanded and their shaykhs and babas executed. We know that the Bektaşis were the repository of Hurufi philosophy and theology: it seems reasonable to me that in Istanbul the order went underground, especially if it was an elite group.’
‘But Beshun Ferhat claimed that Hacı Ferhat had been a member of this secret Tarikat in the eighteenth century,’ Yayla says. ‘Before the Auspicious Event.’
Ayşe has always admired the Ottoman talent for euphemism. The Auspicious Event was the massacre and execution of ten thousand Janissaries. Bodies had been heaped in the Hippodrome, rotting in the June heat. The more perfumed the language, the more brutal the repression.
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