The Dervish House (67 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
He clutched the bag of BitBots to his chest all the way to Kozyatağı Central Hospital.
A woman in green scrubs comes banging out of the cardiac ward.
‘Doctor.’ She stops with an audible sigh of exasperation. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Are you family?’
‘I’m his grandfather.’
‘We’ve stabilized the heartbeat. He was anoxic for several minutes. We’ve run a scan and we haven’t detected any neurological damage. Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t any but he has youth on his side. Kids are robust things.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘You still can’t go in. Immediate family only. Grandpa.’
Stabilized. Anoxic. The terrible euphemisms of doctors. Georgios remembers the terrible looseness of the boy’s body, everything flopping, impossibly heavy, lifeless, no movement no breath no life. No life. The dreadful panic. Not knowing what to do. Not knowing what he should do.
Can Can Can Can Can
, he had shouted.
Can Can Can Can Can
, he had shouted.
The television in the nursing station, burbling away to itself, is showing footage from the gun battle on the afternoon news. The street looks very wide. The camera jerks wildly. He hadn’t noticed there was so much smoke. That must be him, that round, ridiculous little man, trying to run in a crouch with Can tucked under his arm, waving his white handkerchief. Men in bright orange nanohazard suits lope towards him, waving their arms:
get down get down
. Why do they always order people to get down?
get down get down
. Why do they always order people to get down?
‘Officer.’ The policewoman comes. She smells very fresh, of the iron and a musky bodyspray. She’s married. Georgios envies her husband. ‘The woman, the one they captured before she could blow herself up, do you know what’s happened to her?’
‘I would imagine she’s being questioned.’
‘I mean, she’s all right?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Good, good. I’d be very interested to hear what she has to say, but I suppose that’ll have to wait for the trial, if we even hear about it then. It’ll be one of those trials where the public aren’t admitted, I suppose.’
‘Probably, sir.’
The news anchors have serious faces. In the space of two hours he watches himself seven times, dragging the boy, waving the handkerchief, dragging the boy, waving the handkerchief. New footage is added as it comes out of edit. There is the big fellow in the SuperDry T-shirt, running across the street firing. He goes down. Did he fire the shot that took Can down? Georgios had never seen anyone collapse before. They went straight down, so fast, so hard.
‘Necdet!’
The policewoman is there in an instant.
‘Sir, quiet please. It’s a hospital.’
‘The young man, the hostage, Necdet. What happened to him?’
‘He’s being treated in another centre. Sir, you probably should go home. Nothing’s going to happen here. I can get you a car, you can call back tomorrow.’
No, I need to hear Can speak. I need to hear him tell me I’m innocent, that I’ve done nothing wrong. I need him to forgive my sins and absolve me
. He saw how Şekure and Osman looked at him as they were taken out from the cardiac room for a brief press piece. They blame him absolutely. They will never forgive him. He has abused their son as completely as if he were a paedophile.
I only helped him go where his own curiosity led him
. You can’t lock up a nine-year-old boy in a prison of silence. You can’t take away half his world and expect him not to want to explore the absence, not to push his intelligence and faculties into the forbidden. If he had had a son, Georgios might think different.
If I had a son whom a single noise could kill
. They won’t let him see Can again. He knows it. Georgios is terribly, terribly afraid that they will take him away. They’ll get compensation and they’ll move out of the dervish house and then he will be utterly alone.
. He saw how Şekure and Osman looked at him as they were taken out from the cardiac room for a brief press piece. They blame him absolutely. They will never forgive him. He has abused their son as completely as if he were a paedophile.
I only helped him go where his own curiosity led him
. You can’t lock up a nine-year-old boy in a prison of silence. You can’t take away half his world and expect him not to want to explore the absence, not to push his intelligence and faculties into the forbidden. If he had had a son, Georgios might think different.
If I had a son whom a single noise could kill
. They won’t let him see Can again. He knows it. Georgios is terribly, terribly afraid that they will take him away. They’ll get compensation and they’ll move out of the dervish house and then he will be utterly alone.
It is a terrible thing to be caught up in current affairs.
‘I’m going off shift in about ten minutes, if you want me to take you back to Eskiköy,’ the policewoman says.
‘Officer. I might.’
‘Well, I’ll just visit the ladies room first.’ The corridor is empty, backs turned, attention away from the fat old man in the dark suit. Georgios tips the contents of the carrier bag on to the floor.
‘Go to him,’ he whispers. As he suspected, the BitBots are bonded to Can’s smell. The puddle of gnat-sized robots seethes and shifts: waves, spikes, strange geometrical patterns, then with breathtaking alacrity snaps into a thread and winds slowly under the ward door. Georgios watches until the rag-end vanishes.
This is what his world has come down to. Year upon year, decade upon decade, Georgios pulled the borders of his life in around himself, drawing the circle tighter: Istanbul University. The economics community. The Greek community. Eskiköy. Three old Greeks and a teashop owner. The dervish house apartment, its white walls full of cities he is afraid to visit. A plastic chair in a hospital, an empty carrier bag on his lap.
He has lost everything.
The policewoman is bathroom fresh and vigorous.
‘Are you coming then?’
‘Yes, yes, can I just make a quick call first?’
‘Go ahead.’
Georgios shuffles to the ceptep-safe area. He has done enough without his phone call interfering with the machines firing modulated patterns of charge across Can’s heart. The phone rings. It will be tight. He may have mistimed it. Hope, old man. Allow yourself to hope. The phone rings. Is answered.
‘Ariana. Don’t catch the plane. Not today. Don’t catch the plane. Don’t go.’
The last light catches the upper gallery of the dervish house. From buses and trams the workers are coming home, criss-crossing Adem Dede Square on their various paths to apartment blocks and konaks of Old Eskiköy. If they are more leisurely than lately, if they bustle less and stop and talk on the steps and in the soks more, it’s because at last, at last, at last the heatwave has broken. The cool has come. This is an evening to enjoy in the proper Istanbul fashion. Some stop to buy a paper from Aydin, some fruit or bread from Kenan, or coffee from Bülent or his eternal rival Aykut across the square. The shutters roll down on the Improving Bookstore. Early evening unfolds over Adem Dede Square like a flock of birds taking to the air and all Leyla Gültaşli can think about is keying Adnan Sarioğlu’s Audi.
‘She’s run an art gallery!’ Leyla says to Aso. ‘What does she know about marketing? I set the deal up, I did everything, and what do I end up with? Operations. I should be out there with with Adnan, getting the meetings, talking to the distributors, doing the deals.’
She settles for kicking the Audi’s tyres. It is a beautiful car. It would be vicious and if she’s feeling anything it’s underappreciated not vicious and anyway Bülent at the teashop across the square is watching.
‘That’s capitalism,’ Aso says. His face is turned to the sky, he stands very still, feeling the air against his face. He looks like a saint.
‘You’re pretty damn cool about it.’
‘I have a million reasons to be.’
‘Two million reasons.’
‘Tell me. Of course they’ll want to pay themselves large directors’ salaries and sink as much money as they can into capital assets, but they’re still getting it cheap.’
‘Are you happy with it?’
‘We get to develop the Besarani-Ceylan transcriber. We get to fire the starting gun of the next industrial revolution. We get to change the world in our own lifetimes. Downside, the name sucks. We’ll talk about that. The licensing percentages are a little low. Then again, it’s the law of large numbers. Very very large numbers.’
‘And I’m going to have to find somewhere new to stay, I mean, no way can I keep on living here, it is just too damn close to the shop . . .’
‘Leyla,’ Aso says, ‘shut up. Just shut up. Enough business, enough career, enough money, enough deals. It’s a beautiful evening.’
It is, she realizes. It has crept over her as it has crept up the sky, minute by minute, a huge purple streaked golden twilight. The air smells new. The light is heartbreaking; all the more luminous because in a few moments it will be lost. Bülent has switched on the little fairy-lights around his shop front; Kenan’s shop glows from within. Lights come on in the apartments around Adem Dede Square. Leyla’s never loved the square, never loved the dervish house, never loved Eskiköy. This is a place without horizons, without panoramas or sweeping vistas. Wherever you look, you only see another building. The houses feel to her like they are pressed up against her window, full of eyes and mouths and loud lives. It doesn’t welcome the young, it’s too full of history and old memories. She understands why the rest of the girls left as soon as they could. There are many women here but it’s not their world, it’s old and male and secretive. She’s never loved it and never will and now she has decided to move out she can’t wait to be gone but this evening she almost could.
‘You know, I might go back home.’ Leyla sees Aso suddenly freeze.
Why, what, who, me?
She adds quickly ‘Just for a visit, just to make sure everyone’s all right and everything’s where I left it and the tomatoes are still growing. Just touch back home for a day or two, that’s all.’
Why, what, who, me?
She adds quickly ‘Just for a visit, just to make sure everyone’s all right and everything’s where I left it and the tomatoes are still growing. Just touch back home for a day or two, that’s all.’
He froze. He looked shocked when she said she might go home, as if he would never see her again. As if he might miss her. That’s incredible. But the lesson of Demre, the secret of her chaotic, messy, ever-expanding family, is that love is always under your nose. You love what you see every day.
‘Aso,’ Leyla says suddenly, ‘let’s go for dinner. I don’t know where, just somewhere away from here where we don’t have to talk business and I can kick off these heels.’
‘What, you mean, somewhere like a date?’
‘No, somewhere to go and eat. Yes, like a date. Somewhere lovely, somewhere you can see from, somewhere with a view, somewhere you can get wine and good table linen and people who’ll be polite to you because you’re wearing a suit. Somewhere we can be a little bit glamorous. Aso, what do you think?’
For a moment he doesn’t speak. Leyla fears she’s blown it, run away at the mouth, overtalked her pitch. Maybe she always was a shit marketeer and achieved what she did by sheer self-confidence. Which is running out through the soles of her business heels like water.
‘Yes,’ Aso says, ‘yes, I’d like that very very much.’
You are the Boy Detective and you are lying in a big bed that goes up and down and changes shape with a thought. There is a mask on your face and a tube in your arm and machines watching over you like people praying. You feel the hair-tip tickle of a haptic field. That’s how the machines are watching you. That steady blue line the beat of your heart. That grainy, pulsing ghost is your heart. It keeps going and going and going, without rest. You are amazed at that. Beneath the screens are numbers and smaller displays but you can’t read them without turning your head and the nurse has told you not to do that because you might pull out a tube, dislodge the thing sitting on your chest.
You’re wearing just a pair of pants. That’s odd and creepy. Strangers must have undressed you while you were in the black, in the no-time, the place that is deeper and darker than any sleep. You remember a noise, a sudden, big noise and something like fireworks going off in your chest, except that each burst was bright red pain through your heart and up your chest into your head, burst after burst after burst until the red all joined up. There was nothing but red. Then you woke up in this bed in just a pair of pants. You think you may have been dead for a while.
The doctor is good. The doctor you like. She’s gruff and no nonsense and always looks impatient as if she has ten thousand more important things to do than talk to you but you think you can trust her. She will answer your questions if you can catch her in flight and tells the truth.
When she heard about the earplugs her face became more and more serious. ‘That’s medieval,’ she said. ‘That’s not a cure.’ There’s a new way of treating Long QT syndrome. Like the earplugs, it takes noise - in this case the noise of electrical patterns across the heart going crazy - and turns it upside down and feeds it back on itself so that the great roars and shouts drown themselves out and all that remains is the small, constant voice of the heart. It’s much more complex than that but it’s what this nano-plastic spider sitting on his chest is doing and what the smaller, smarter one will do when they put it into his chest and it wraps its spindly legs around his heart. It will be the new tech that’s not quite machine and not quite living. Protein computing, she calls it, though Can suspects that the doctor doesn’t understand it either. But she has a plan.
‘We’ll give you a couple more days to recover and make sure there’s no underlying trauma or damage and get you fit. Then we’ll go in and fit the spider.’
‘I’ll be able to hear.’
‘You always could hear.’
When you dream, and you dream often and brilliantly from all the drugs they drip into you through that tube, you don’t dream of the gunshot that stopped your heart or the police swarmbots falling out of the sky like snow, or even Necdet seen through the mouse-hole in the office above the accountants’. You dream of the container ship, sailing away up the Bosphorus to the Black sea, and all the doors of the containers bursting open and all the sounds in the world pouring out.
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