The Dervish House (6 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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‘Just a few what you might call trinkets.’
‘Show me.’ Ayşe does not wait for Topaloğlu to open the box; she snatches off the lid. Inside there is indeed a rattle of junk; Armenian crosses, Orthodox censers, a couple of verdigrised Koran covers. Grand Bazaar tourist tat. Amidst the tarnished brass, glints of silver. Miniature Korans. Ayşe greedily lays them out in a row along the table. The recessed ceiling bulbs strike brilliants from the thumb-sized silver cases.
‘These I’m interested in.’
‘They’re twenty euro pilgrim curios,’ Topaloğlu says.
‘To you, Mr Topaloğlu. To me, and to the people who collect them, they’re stories.’ She taps the cover of a twentieth-century electroplate silver case, the crystal magnifier an eye, a good-luck boncuk charm. ‘A boy goes off to military service. Despite her best efforts his mother can’t get him into a soft option like the jandarmeri or the tourist police, so gives him a Holy Koran. Keep the word of God close and God will keep you folded into his breast.’ An early nineteenth-century gold shell case, exquisitely filigreed. ‘A merchant from Konya, after years building up his material goods, finally frees himself from his worldly obligations to undertake the Hac. His concubine gives him a keep-sake. Remember, the world will be waiting.’
‘How can you tell it’s a Konya piece?’
‘It’s in the Mevlevi style, but it’s not a souvenir from the Rumi pilgrimage - those usually are cheap mass-produced tourist junk. This is altogether a much more fine work. There’s money and devotion here. Once you learn to see, you begin to hear the stories.’ Ayşe rests her finger on tiny silver Koran no larger than a thumb, delicate as a prayer. ‘This is eighteenth-century Persian. But there’s only half a Koran. A Holy Koran, divided?’ She opens the case and sets the little Persian scripture in the palm of her hand. ‘What’s the story there? A promise made, a couple divided, a family at war with itself, a pledge, a contract? You want to know. That’s the market. The Korans, as you say, are trinkets. Stories; people will always buy those.’ Ayşe sets the tiny hemi-Koran back into its case. ‘I’ll take these three. The rest is rubbish. Fifty euro each.’
‘I was thinking three hundred would be more appropriate.’
‘Did I hear you say that they were only twenty euro pilgrim curios? Two hundred.’
‘Cash.’
‘Cash.’
Topaloğlu shakes on two hundred.
‘Hafize will arrange payment. You can bring me more of these. Then we’ll see about the miniatures.’
Topaloğlu almost bares his rural teeth in a smile.
‘Good to do business, Mrs Erkoç.’
Footsteps on the stairs and along the wooden gallery; Hafize’s heels. Modest headscarf and fashion heels. A tap at the door. The look on her face is part puzzlement, part suspicion.
‘Madam, a customer.’
‘I’ll see him. Could you deal with Mr Topaloğlu? We’ve settled at two hundred euro for these three.’
‘Cash,’ Topaloğlu says. Hafize will screw another twenty per cent off the price; her ‘administration fee’. For a young woman with aspirations to respectability, she’s as tough a bargainer as any street seller spreading his knock-off football shirts on the quay at Eminönü.
From the encircling balcony, Ayşe looks down into the old semahane, the dance-floor where in another age dervishes spun themselves into the ecstasy of God. A man bends over a case of Torahs. The great brass chandelier hides him, but Ayşe catches a ripple of gloss, like oil sheen in an Eskiköy puddle, across his back. Nanoweave fabric. Expensive suit.
As Ayşe descends the stairs Adnan warbles a video clip on to her ceptep. She glimpses wide Bosphorus, a white boat at a jetty, dipping gulls, a slow pan along the strait to the bridge. A gas tanker passes. So Adnan to let the camera linger on the gas tanker. His palace, his dream, when he closes Turquoise. Still the wrong side of the Bosphorus, Anatolian boy. She needs to get back to Europe.
‘I am Ayşe Erkoç.’
The customer takes her proffered hand. Electronic business cards crackle from palm to palm.
‘Haydar Akgün. I was just looking at your Jewish manuscripts. There is some very fine micrography here.’ Moiré patterns, blacker on black, mesh across the fabric of his suit. Silver at his cuffs. Ayşe admires silver. There is restraint in silver.
‘It’s actually double micrography. If you look closely you’ll see there is calligraphy within the calligraphy.’
Akgün bends closer to the page. He blinks up his ceptep. Lasers dance across his eye, drawing a magnified image on the retina. The folio is from a Pentateuch, the panel of lettering set within a decorative frame of twining flower stems, trellises and fantastical heraldic beasts, dragon-headed, serpent tailed. The decoration teases the eye, the look beyond the surface dazzle shows the outlines to be made up of minuscule writing. It is only under magnification that the second level of micrography appears: those letters are in turn made up of chains of smaller writing. Akgün’s eyes widen.
‘This is quite extraordinary. I’ve only seen this in two places before. One was a dealer in Paris, the other was in a codex in the British Library. Sephardic I presume? Spanish, Portuguese?’
‘You’re correct on Portuguese. The family fled from Porto to Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The micrographic border is a genealogy of King David from the Book of Ruth.’
‘Exceptional,’ Akgün says, poring over the weave of calligraphy.
‘Thank you,’ Ayşe says. It is one of her most adored pieces. It took a lot of discreet envelopes of euro to get it away from the police art crime department. The moment her police contact showed the Pentateuch to her, she had to possess it. For others it might be the prestige they could garner, the thrill of control, the money they could make. With Ayşe it was the beauty, that cursive of beauty spiralling through Aramaic and Syriac texts to the demotic Greek of the Oxyrhynchus, the painstakingly squared-off Hebrew of the Talmudic scholars of Lisbon and Milan, the divine calligraphy of the Koranic scribes of Baghdad and Fes and learned Granada. It flowed into the organic lines of gospel illumination from monasteries from St Catherine’s to Cluny, in the eternal light of Greek and Armenian icons, through the hair-fine, eye-blinding detail of the Persian miniaturist to the burning line of Blake’s fires of Imagination. Why deal in beauty, but for beauty?
‘You wonder how far down it can go, writing within writing within writing within writing,’ Akgün says. ‘Nanography, perhaps? Do you think it could be like nanotechnology, the smaller it gets, the more powerful it becomes? Are there levels so fine we can’t read them but which have the most profound, subliminal influences?’
Ayşe glances up to the balcony where Hafize is guiding Topaloğlu to the back stairs down into the old tekke cemetery. She subtly unfolds three fingers. Thirty per cent discount. Good girl. Gallery Erkoç needs every cent it can find.
‘Pardon?’
‘A nanography that slips into the brain and compels us to believe in God?’
‘If anyone could it would be the Sephardim,’ Ayşe says.
‘A subtle people,’ Akgün says. He unbends from the codex. ‘They say you can get hard-to-find items.’
‘One should always take the praise of one’s rivals with a pinch of salt but I do have a certain . . . facility. Is there a particular piece you’re looking for? I have private viewing facilities upstairs.’
‘I think it’s unlikely you’d have it in stock. It is a very rare, very precious item and if it can be found anywhere it will be in Istanbul but if you can source it for me I will pay you one million euro.’
Ayşe has often wondered how she would feel if a life-transfiguring sum of money walked into her gallery. Adnan talks of the fist-solid thrill of the leveraged millions of his gas trades solidifying into profit.
Don’t let it seduce you
, he says. That way is death. Now a thousand euro suit offers her a million euro on a Monday morning, how could she not be seduced?
‘That’s a lot of money Mr Akgün.’
‘It is, and I wouldn’t expect you to embark on such a project without a development fee.’
He takes a white envelope from inside his jacket and gives it to Ayşe. It’s fat with cash. She holds the envelope in her hand and orders her fingers not to feel out the thickness and number of the notes.
‘You still haven’t told me what you’d like me to find.’
Hafize has returned from exiting Mr Topaloğlu. Her customary haste to make tea - tea for every customer; tea, tea - is frozen by those words,
one million euro
.
‘It’s quite simple,’ Akgün says. ‘I want to buy a Mellified Man.’
 
Leyla on the Number 19, wedged hard against the stanchion in her good going-to-interview suit and business heels. Her chin is almost on the breastbone of a tall foreign youth who smells of milk, behind her is a fat middle-aged man whose hand keeps falling under social gravity to her ass. If he does that one more time she’ll knee him in the nuts. What is keeping the tram? Five minutes ago it jolted to a stop dead in the middle of the Necatibey Cadessi. Doesn’t IETT know she has an interview to get to? And it’s hot, getting hotter. And she’s sweating in her one and only going-to-interview suit.
The driver announces an incident on the line ahead. That usually means a suicide. In Istanbul the preferred self-exit-strategy is the dark lure of the Bosphorus but a simple kneel and prostration of the head to the guillotine of the wheels will do it quick and smart. Down in Demre, where the sun glints bright from the endless polytunnel roofs, it was always the hose pipe through the car window.
‘There’s been a bomb!’ shrieks a woman in a better business suit than Leyla’s. There is a ceptep over her eye. She is reading the morning headlines. ‘A bomb on a tram.’
The effect on the Number 19 is total. The sudden surge of commuters lifts little Leyla Gültaşli from her feet and swings her so hard into wandering-hand-man that he grunts. People push at the doors but they remain sealed. Now everyone is thrown again as the tram lurches into motion. It’s going backwards. Wheels grind and flange on the track.
‘Hey hey, I’ve got an interview!’ Leyla shouts.
The tram jolts to a stop. The doors open. The crowd pushes her out on to the same halt at which she boarded. She has thirty-five minutes to get to this interview. Her shoes are trampled and her suit is rumpled and her hair is ruffled and she is lathered in sweat but her face is right so she puts her head down and pushes out through the turnstile into the traffic.
Leyla had organized the interview preparations like a wedding. With the hot night greying into day outside her balcony she was striding around in her underwear, unfolding the ironing board, flicking water over her one good suit and blouse as she applied the hot metal. She has got into terrible habits since Zehra announced she was moving back to Antalya. While the suit relaxed on the hanger, losing the just-ironed smell of fabric conditioner, she showered. The water was as mean and fitful as ever. Leyla wove and shimmied under the ribbon of tepid water. Seventy seconds, including shampoo. No more. The landlord last week had slipped a leaflet under every door explaining that the municipal water charges were going up again. Unquenchable Istanbul. The hair straighteners were already plugged in and coming up to temperature. Leyla Gültaşli got jiggly with the hair-dryer and went over her pitch.
Gençler Toys. Toys for boys. Six- to eleven-year-olds. Lead lines: BattleCats TM; Gü-Yen-Ji, their ceptep-handshake trading card game, was EU Toy of the Year two years ago. Their success is built on BitBots. The creepy kid upstairs has them. Leyla’s sure he watches her with them. But they have a vacancy in their marketing department and Leyla is Marketing Girl so she’ll talk BitBots and BattleCats TM as good as any of them.
The suit, then the slap. One hour twenty to get to Gençler. Plenty of time. Bag; a good brand not so high-marque as to be obviously a fake. Which it is. A girl of business needs one convincing accessory in her wardrobe. And the shoes and out.
Twenty-two minutes now and she curses herself for not thinking to wear trainers. Put the good shoes in the bag and change in the ladies’ room when you’re making the final adjustments to your face. She can run - just - in these shoes. But the crowd is growing thicker on Necatibey Cadessi and now she hits the police line and before her is the tram with its windows blown out and its roof bowed up and people standing around among the crisis vehicles with their red and blue flashing lights. The road is sealed. Leyla gives a cry of frustration.
‘Let me through, let me through!’
A policeman shouts, ‘Hey, where do you think you’re going?’ but Leyla plunges on. ‘Hey!’ To her left is a narrow sok, more stairs than is sensible in this heat and these shoes. Fifteen minutes. Leyla Gültaşli takes a deep breath, slings her bag over her shoulder and begins to climb.
Once there were four girls from the south. They were all born within fifty kilometres of each other within the smell of the sea but they didn’t discover that until the dervish house. The condition of Leyla moving from the plasticland of Demre to Istanbul was that she place herself under the care of Great-Aunt Sezen. Leyla had never met Great-Aunt Sezen or any of the distant Istanbul side of the family. Their third-floor apartment in the sound-footprint of Atatürk Airport had a Turkish flag draped over the balcony and a Honda engine under the kitchen table and was full of noisy, clattering relations and generations over whom Great-Aunt Sezen, a matriarch of seventy-something, ruled by hint and dint and tilt of head. The country girl from the Med found herself plunged into an involuntary soap-opera of husbands and wives and children, of boyfriends and girlfriends and partners and rivals and feuds and makings-up, of screaming fights and tearful, sex-raucous reconciliations. In the midst of this storm of emotions Leyla Gültaşli tried to work, seated at the kitchen table, her knees oily from the manifold of the Honda engine while her extended family raged around her. They thought her dull. They called her Little Tomato, after her hometown’s most famous export. That and Santa, its other global brand. Her studies suffered. She began to fail course elements.

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