The Dervish House (50 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘That’s what they said too. Yes and no. Nothing that could be explained.’
‘They?’
‘The ones after Divrican. I’m from the next valley over but everyone knows someone who was affected. The valley of saints and shaykhs.’
‘What’s this?’
‘It was just over five years ago. The Turks launched a final assault on the Kurds before the EU put a stop to it. One night a drone appeared over Divrican, a village in the next valley over. It circled for half an hour. The next morning, everyone was like you. Djinn and angels. Demons. Peris and spirits. Some saw Hızır, some saw Melek Tawus, some saw the Prophet Himself.’
Big Bastard bows his head, as if he fears he has said too much.
‘What happened to them?’ Necdet asks. In his captivity he’s learned that humans possess a huge talent for normalizing. This room, this mattress, this big man with a gun, he’s used to them now. He’s not scared of them. They are the architecture of his life. Big Bastard’s words open a fear inside that comfortable fear, a hole within a hole. ‘What happened to them?’
He’s assumed too far. Big Bastard bares his teeth, jabs at Necdet with his assault rifle. Necdet backs down again on to the mattress. Hızır sits by the wall, forms and manifestations folding through him like convection patterns in a pan of boiling syrup.
Green Headscarf and Big Hair enter from the next room, where Necdet can make out styrofoam clamshell containers, plastic tidy boxes and cardboard cartons.
‘Everything all right here?’ Big Hair says. Big Bastard defers in everything to Big Hair. Green Headscarf kneels in front of Necdet. She always assumes the same position, kneeling demurely, knees together, sleeves pulled over her hands. This may be part of her strategy.
‘In this session we’ll talk about the nature of faith,’ Green Headscarf says.
‘I don’t have any,’ Necdet says. ‘I don’t need it. I can see. Faith is what you can’t see. If I can see it, it’s not God.’
‘There are other definitions of faith. You can have faith in a person, or an object, that it’s trustworthy.’
‘That’s faith in the future,’ Necdet says.
‘Another way of considering faith is that it’s the method by which we hold our reasoned ideas.’
‘That doesn’t mean they’re true,’ Necdet says. ‘Why should faith only hold true for reasoned ideas and not unreasoned ones?’
Big Hair takes a note.
‘Faith is submission to the will of Allah,’ Necdet says. ‘What are you testing me for?’
‘Tell me about the nature of your faith in Hızır.’
‘Not the djinn?’
‘You insist they aren’t from God, that they are manifestations of your own mind. How does Hızır differ?’
‘He’s other.’
Again. The exchange of glances.
‘Religious experience is a universal human trait,’ Big Hair says. ‘God is hard-wired into us, into the brain chemistry, into the neurons. At a fundamental level, all human religions share common experiences and a common language.’
‘The mystics all agree,’ Green Headscarf says. Big Hair is annoyed by her words. Disunity among God’s Engineers? Necdet wonders.
‘We don’t believe in a supernatural God beyond the rules of the universe,’ Big Hair says. ‘We believe in God, in here. God is part of us, God has always been part, God is the part of us that is beyond consciousness. We believe that up until a thousand years or so, human consciousness was quite different from what it is today. We were not one self, we were many selves, one of which was our God self. This was a divine age when God spoke to men and women, when we saw visions and wonders, miracles and saints. God spoke to us in parables and prophecies and allegories and poetry. We’ve lost that. We’ve become too conscious. We need to reconnect to our personal Gods.’
‘This is no different from the djinn, that’s what you’re saying. Hızır is from my mind as well.’
‘You said he was other. We have reason to believe he’s from somewhere different from what you think of as your mind. From somewhere before your mind.’
‘I could be mentally ill,’ Necdet says. This talk scares him. Fear within fear through fear. ‘You said before I had dissociative disorder, something like that. Maybe I wasn’t ill, maybe I’m ill now. All this is sickness.’
Green Headscarf tilts her head to one side, pondering.
‘Necdet, listen to yourself. Do you think you sound like a sick man?’
‘How would I know?’ Necdet cries.
‘You were ill. We’ve brought all those conflicts and confusions and anger together in one place, and given it a shape and form and you seem happy to me. They have a voice and a body. They are your God within. They are your Friend. We’re delighted with the results so far. We’ll talk later Necdet.’
Again they leave. Through the open door he glimpses Surly Fucker’s feet next to those of Big Hair and Green Headscarf. He’s not getting out. He knows that now. They’ll keep him until they have all the answers they need and no longer. He knows what happens to laboratory animals. Yet Hızır flickers from evanescence into a smile. Big Bastard is still twitchy but Necdet senses that he’s the weak one. Surly Fucker is enforcer and executioner, Big Hair the technocrat, Green Headscarf the theorist. For Big Bastard it’s personal.
‘Man, tell me. Those Kurds, the ones from the next valley, I have to know. What happened to them?’
A transparent plastic cylinder of green slush churns on the shelf at the back of the Kebab Prophet’s stall.
‘What is that fucking shit?’ Adnan asks. ‘It looks like stuff kids drink.’
‘That fucking shit is granita,’ the Kebab Prophet says. ‘Lemon and lime. You mix it up from powder, the machine does the rest. It is considered highly refreshing. Want some?’
‘I’ve got a bad enough headache without sucking ice through a straw,’ Adnan says. ‘I tell you this as the man who’s putting your kid through college, I hope you didn’t pay much for it, because you wasted your money on that heap of scrap. This’ll break by tomorrow.’
‘I got it on trial loan anyway.’ The Kebab Prophet considers a moment. ‘So you’re in the money then.’
Adnan can’t resist a self-satisfied smile.
‘Got out at four nine five.’
‘What’s it down to?’
‘Four twenty-two.’
The Kebab Prophet nods his head. He is impressed. ‘I’ve other kids need putting through college.’
‘Adana kebab, by three. Like you’d make them for the President. I want meat juice running down my chin.’
‘Three?’
‘Lord Ultror will be joining us a little later.’
The Kebab scoops up handfuls of meat and starts shaping it around the skewers. He gets them thin as pencils, just shown to the fire; browned and sweet on the outside, bleeding in the heart. The way they should be. Kadir crosses the plaza with Oğuz. No ritual exchanges, no Hail Draksors.
‘You didn’t do it,’ Oğuz shouts. ‘Man, we are so fucked. We are fucked every way.’
Adnan sits on his stool at the counter and does not take his eyes from the kebab, which he turns and studies, seeking a point of attack. The meat is fragrant, cumin and garlic tempering the mild rankness of the lamb. The tomatoes are warm and filled with sun. The Kebab Prophet keeps his breadmaker secret — such genius could only be spoiled by commercialization — and treats him like a favoured son. The bread smells like life. ‘I have made you a millionaire this morning. So, sit down, eat this exceptional kebab which I have bought you, and then, when you’ve finished, I shall tell you why we are not fucked.’
The Ultralords of the Universe form a line at the Kebab Prophet’s gleaming steel counter. ‘Truly, you have exceeded yourself,’ Adnan says wiping fingers and mouth on a moist towellette. ‘God himself could not make a finer Adana kebab.’ The Kebab Prophet bows in acknowledgement. Taking the cue he busies himself at the back of the stall cutting salad.
‘Why didn’t you give it to him, he’s got all the account numbers, everything.’ Oğuz picks up without a break.
Adnan turns on him.
‘I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not Lord Draksor and you’re not Lord fucking Terrak. We are not the Ultralords of the Universe. There are no Ultralords of the Universe. They’re cartoon characters. Do you remember how every show used to end? With a big fight. Superpowers, the whole shebang. Big explosion. Bad guy beaten again for another week. Well, if we blow up the bad guy, he stays blown up. He’s dead. We killed him. And we don’t have superpowers. We work for a finance company. We’re not cartoon characters. We’re men. Men don’t do things like that. Not to a friend. Not for money. I don’t need you to understand why I didn’t slip Kemal the nano. I expect you to accept that I was right, like I’ve been right about everything else in this operation.’
‘What I understand is that when the shit hits, and it’s only a matter of time before that Cygnus X account pulls us all in, they are going to take the top off Kemal’s head and go in there with something that makes Kadir’s nano look like popping candy,’ Oğuz says. The Kebab Prophet’s knife moves like death, fast and precise and unfailing.
‘We keep our nerve. We hold our fire. We turn up for work, we do our little jobs diligently and efficiently. In the background we roll up Turquoise like a carpet, like we planned. We keep our heads down. We follow through, step by step, just like we rehearsed it. Twenty million euro in two hundred million, in two billion which is probably closer to what Özer owes: what’s that? They’re not looking for us. They’re looking for Mehmet the Cunt.’
‘You say, we keep our nerve,’ Kadir says. ‘I could say back, you don’t have a plan.’
‘I have a plan. Who says I don’t have a plan? I always have a plan. We liquidate right away. Because as soon as the first crack appears in the glass, we need to able to walk out of the Ozer tower with it in our back pockets while that place comes raining down behind us. Liquidity works every time. I fancy bearer bonds, they’re neater than cash.’
‘And Ferid Bey?’ Kadir asks.
‘He gets his in cash. Cash cash cash. Cash is king, always was, always will be.’ Adnan raps his knuckles on the cleanser-scratched steel counter. ‘Lord Kebab-or! Another Adana for our fourth member.’
The other Ultralords look up. Kemal is crossing the plaza, skipping around the delivery scooters and mopeds. Adnan holds the kebab up like a trophy. ‘Hail Ultror! Take this, eat and walk, because we have a football match to get to, and I’m not turning up at Aslanteppe dressed like this.’
When the Kebab Prophet turns back from adjusting the temperature on his silo of viridian granita there’s a hundred euro bill tucked under the napkin holder and four men in dark suits are loping in unconscious lockstep toward the taxi rank like fine criminals.
8
High afternoon sun pours into the white concrete bowl of Aslanteppe Stadium. Cup Tie! Cup Tie! Galatasaray versus Arsenal, Semi-Final European Champions League. Winner to meet Barca in the final in Munich! The biggest prize in Europe! The stands slowly fill, body by body, obliterating the massive CIMBOM written in red seats on white along the home stands. The Arsenal fans have been admitted early to the visitors’ end of the stadium where they have draped their banners over the crash barriers and rehearse their songs in the ebb-and-swell oceanic chant of English football supporters. Some have already stripped off their shirts. Turkish drummers and horn sections blare back. The Arsenal fans stab their fingers at them and bellow: you you you! Advertising scrolls up the pitchside hoardings and across the big screens in the stands. The media is here; television trucks parked up along the main road, celebrity pundits half visible in the glass tank of the gallery, a dozen different commentators down on their benches, photographers lolling around the goal-line. Cameramen practise sending their flittercams on strafing runs across the stadium while the touchline cameras shriek up and down. Supporters cheer and wave as they see themselves and their friends ten metres tall on the screens. A blimp manoeuvres overhead: Turkcell. The club DJ blares T-pop over the PA at seat-shaking volumes. Mascots in oversize foam costumes caper along the touchline and try to whip up the crowd.
Adnan Sarioğlu pauses at the top of the stairs. He squints up into the blue dome over the white dish of Aslanteppe.
‘See that? A cloud in the sky.’
The Ultralords of the Universe descend the steps to their season-ticket seats on the middle bar of B of Cimbom, squeezing past and exchanging greetings with well-known regulars. Kemal pauses a moment to take a message from his ceptep, then leans across his friends to whisper, ‘It’s through. You can take it out any time you want.’
He’s officially rich.
They’re screening that great Galatasaray motivational video, the one where they storm the walls of Constantinople from the
Mehmet the Conqueror
movie. And here comes the first Mexican wave: there are enough in the stadium for it to work. Adnan surges to his feet and feels himself soften into the atavistic spirit of fandom. This is the Kingdom of Cimbom. People are different here.
Mehmet the Conqueror
movie. And here comes the first Mexican wave: there are enough in the stadium for it to work. Adnan surges to his feet and feels himself soften into the atavistic spirit of fandom. This is the Kingdom of Cimbom. People are different here.
‘So where exactly is our gas?’ Kemal asks, on his feet, arms raised.
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