The Dervish House (9 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘May I?’
Akgün slides the book across the table. It lies beside the envelope of cash. Ayşe wills down the lights as she studies the binding. The stitching seems authentic, strong linen thread; the header tapes of their time. Dust falls from the right places and the leather smells of old skin and is creased where a book should be, like a face lined with experience. It crackles as Ayşe opens it. Inside is in the swift, clear Sumbuli script of a lad who has transcribed the Holy Koran from memory, setting down the thoughts of God as they form in his memory like water welling from a spring.
Heather honey, from the uplands of the barbarous realm of Scotland, which comprises the northernmost part of the island of Britain. Heather is a small ground-covering plant, with springy woody boughs and small, thyme-like leaves which commonly grows on the sides of the hills and mountains that characterize that country. Trees are almost entirely unknown in upland Scotland due to the proximity of the pole and the general inclemency of the weather, which is of a wet, gloomy and sunless nature and of a boggy disposition.
‘So?’
‘On a cursory inspection it looks authentic, but we are the world capital of fakery. To be sure I’d need to carry out a molecular analysis,’ Ayşe says. The small room is filled with the cedary perfume of an old book opened to the light. Smell is the djinni of memory, all times are one to it. As she pores over the book, her eye-write scanning the calligraphy, Ayşe is simultaneously in her grandfather’s bookstore in Sirkeci that rambled through a series of seemingly arbitrarily connected rooms (were they in different cities, different ages, different universes?), the books becoming older and more compressed the deeper and darker you went, like a geology of words. As a nine-year-old she would close her eyes and wander surely through the warren, guided by the sharp, spicy ketones and esters of modern pulps and A-format paperbacks through the teetering towers of remaindered hardbacks and the glossy, oily tang of coffee-table books to the musks and spices of the antiquarian volumes on their sagging shelves, many of which were written in letters she could not understand and which read the wrong way. Understanding did not matter; Ayşe could wander, entranced, for hours along the lines of Arabic cursive. Often it was enough to stand, eyes firmly shut, under the little coloured mosque lamps with their low-voltage bulbs and breathe in the perfume of history, the pheromones of the dead. ‘It would involve destroying a small sample.’
Akgün’s shock is genuine.
Here is a man who knows and loves books, Ayşe thinks. And cannot countenance any violence to them. He would return borrowed paperbacks on time, their spines uncracked, the covers of their corners un-foxed. But he doesn’t know that with modern nano-assay chips the clipping is a few fibres of paper, a few molecules of ink
. That he doesn’t know that is another circling suspicion. After the adrenaline always comes clarity and judgement. A Mellified Man, the blood burns, the brain blazes at even the possibility of it being true. But like djinn in a house, her doubts will not be driven out: of all the shops of all the dealers and all the antiquarians in all of Istanbul, why this shop, this dealer? The world is simple but it is never neat. This man in the right suit and the wrong aftershave is too neat. Ayşe Erkoc closes the book and slides the envelope of five-hundred-euro notes across the table.
Here is a man who knows and loves books, Ayşe thinks. And cannot countenance any violence to them. He would return borrowed paperbacks on time, their spines uncracked, the covers of their corners un-foxed. But he doesn’t know that with modern nano-assay chips the clipping is a few fibres of paper, a few molecules of ink
. That he doesn’t know that is another circling suspicion. After the adrenaline always comes clarity and judgement. A Mellified Man, the blood burns, the brain blazes at even the possibility of it being true. But like djinn in a house, her doubts will not be driven out: of all the shops of all the dealers and all the antiquarians in all of Istanbul, why this shop, this dealer? The world is simple but it is never neat. This man in the right suit and the wrong aftershave is too neat. Ayşe Erkoc closes the book and slides the envelope of five-hundred-euro notes across the table.
‘You tempt me but I can’t take this commission.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘You said I can obtain hard-to-get items - that’s because I’ve built up a network of dealers and antiquarians and experts. I’ve built it up by word of mouth. I guard it very jealously. This is a very small business. Everyone knows everyone else and rumour moves like wildfire. You live or you die by reputation. When word got around that Ünal Bey was passing Kazakhstani fakes off as Timurid miniatures he was shunned. Two weeks later he drove his car through the crash barrier of the Bosphorus Bridge in shame. Maybe you heard about it on the news? I know my suppliers and my agents and I know my clients - many of them are very wealthy and influential men, but everything is done by personal recommendation. Now, I have no doubts that your provenances are genuine and that this Alexandretta mummy has washed up in Istanbul and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t very very tempted. But there’s an etiquette in this business. I am very sorry, Mr Akgün.’
He chews his lower lip, flicks his head.
‘You have my card.’ He straightens the cuffs of his shirt. ‘I hope you’ll reconsider.’
‘Trust me, nothing would give me more pleasure than to track down a mellified man,’ says Ayşe. She extends a hand. Akgün’s grasp is firm and dry. No spark of data between them. She waits on the balcony as Akgün descends the stairs. Hafize’s eyes are wide and hands spread in astonishment as the street door closes behind him. She has been watching, as she always watches, the deal on the security cameras. Her hands say,
You turned down a million euro?
You turned down a million euro?
Yes
, Ayşe will tell her when Akgün is gone.
You didn’t smell his aftershave.
, Ayşe will tell her when Akgün is gone.
You didn’t smell his aftershave.
His was love in a time of military rule. It was the late summer when Georgios Ferentinou looked up from the beautiful abstract weave of statistical regressions and complexity algorithms and saw the tumbling curling hair and magnificent sullen cheekbones of Ariana Sinanidis across Meryem Nasi’s pool. A fresh and zealous undergraduate, he had been engaged in a season-long combative correspondence with a New York-based Lebanese economist. Georgios’ enemy argued that random events beyond the predictions of theory shaped the world. People and lives bobbed in a storm of probability. Georgios argued back that complexity theory folded the spikes and pits of randomness back into the everyday, the humdrum. All storms whimper out in the end. That summer they argued across the Atlantic by flimsy blue airmail while in Istanbul demonstrators marched and protestors rallied and political parties formed and drew up manifestos and made alliances and schismed into new parties and bombs went off in Istiklal Cadessi litter bins. In Ankara generals and admirals and jandarmeri commanders met in each other’s houses. In the university library Georgios Ferentinou - thin and lithe and luminous-eyed as a deer - worked on, as oblivious to the deteriorating political climate as to the season.
Then the invitation came to Meryem’s party. Meryem Nasi was as close as modern Istanbul came to aristocracy, of an intellectual Jewish family that claimed to have lived by the Bosphorus since the Diaspora. Of no special gift herself, she was hopelessly attracted to talented people. She collected them. She enjoyed bringing disparate, even antagonistic talents together to see if they would achieve a critical mass, if they would fuse or fission or generate some other burst of creative energy.
‘If there is one thing will kill Turkey,’ she would say, ‘it is a famine of ideas.’
No one in her coterie dared mention that if anything was killing Turkey it was a surfeit of ideas, too many political visions and ideologies. But the head of the school of economics did mention a particularly bright and aggressive undergraduate who was fighting a ridiculous but valorous battle against an American academic of ten times his experience and a hundred times his reputation. Three days later the invitation arrived on Georgios Ferentinou’s desk. Not even his unworldliness could ignore a summons from Meryem Nasi. So he found himself stiff as a wire in a hired suit and cheap shoes clutching a glass on her Yeniköy terrace, grimacing nervously at anyone who moved through his personal space.
‘Darling, there’s someone I want you to meet.’ Meryem was a short, big-haired gravel-voiced fifty-something in shoulderpads and wasp-waist jacket but she seized Georgios Ferentinou by the arm like a wrestler and hauled him to the group of men by the pool steps. ‘This is Sabri Iliç from
Hürriyet
, Aziz Albayrak from the State Planning Organization and Arif Hikmet from the faculty you already know. This is Georgios Ferentinou; he’s the bad boy’s been baiting Nabi Nassim at Columbia.’
Hürriyet
, Aziz Albayrak from the State Planning Organization and Arif Hikmet from the faculty you already know. This is Georgios Ferentinou; he’s the bad boy’s been baiting Nabi Nassim at Columbia.’
In the warmth of an early September evening their talk turned to the oil crisis of the previous winter when old women froze in their apartments in Istanbul. Stammering at first in such prodigious company, Georgios suggested that a more secure energy future could be fuelled by natural gas. It was less subject to the political price fluctuations of OPEC, the TransCaspian area had so much of it they burned it off in tail flares and it would hook Turkey back into its traditional hinterland of the Caucasus. Arif Hikmet, with a wink to his student, said that the Americans would not look well on their prime security partner in the Middle East tying itself to its ideological enemy for energy policy. Sabri Iliç,
Hürriyet
’s new business editor, commented that it was the Americans who had driven the oil prices up in the first place. Aziz Albayrak from Ankara maintained that Turkey must always look west, not north, to the EEC, not the USSR. Georgios was nineteen years old in a funeral suit and bad shoes; people whose opinions shaped the nation nodded when he spoke. He felt weightless, filled with light ready to burst from every pore, giddy with intellectual excitement yet at the same time assured and controlled. He could trust his mouth not to open and scuttle him. Now they were energetically debating the ongoing effects of the lira’s devaluation and convertibility; how it opened the Central Bank to international markets and investors but also made it vulnerable to currency speculators. What did Georgios Bey think? Georgios Bey had been glancing away from the debate for a moment but in that moment a woman in equally rapt conversation across the pool also looked away. Their eyes met. That look wiped away all thought. Georgios Ferentinou was struck by the lightning of his oldest gods. Her gaze moved on, the moment was gone. She returned to her conversation but he was lost. With the skill of an academic son used to studying between television, blaring radio, shouts and calls and raucous animated conversations, he screened out his own party and tuned, like a radio telescope eavesdropping on a distant and radiant star, to hers. She was talking politics with a group of entranced men, sitting around on the marble poolside benches like the
demos
of ancient Athens. She was theorizing on the Deep State; that enduring Turkish paranoia that the nation really was a conspiracy run by a cabal of generals, judges, industrialists and gangsters. The Taksim Square massacre of three years before, the Kahramanmaraş slaughter of Alevis a few months after, the oil crisis and the enduring economic instability, even the ubiquity of the Grey Wolves nationalist youth movement handing out their patriotic leaflets and defiling Greek Churches: all were links in an accelerating chain of events running through the fingers of the Derin Devlet.
To what end?
the men asked.
Coup
, she said, leaning forward, her fingers pursed. It was then that Georgios Ferentinou adored her. The classic profile, the strength of her jaw and fine cheekbones. The way she shook her head when the men disagreed with her, how her bobbed, curling hair swayed. The way she would not argue but set her lips and stared, as if their stupidity was a stubborn offence against nature. Her animation in argument balanced against her marvellous stillness when listening, considering, drawing up a new answer. How she paused, feeling the regard of another, then turned to Georgios and smiled.
Hürriyet
’s new business editor, commented that it was the Americans who had driven the oil prices up in the first place. Aziz Albayrak from Ankara maintained that Turkey must always look west, not north, to the EEC, not the USSR. Georgios was nineteen years old in a funeral suit and bad shoes; people whose opinions shaped the nation nodded when he spoke. He felt weightless, filled with light ready to burst from every pore, giddy with intellectual excitement yet at the same time assured and controlled. He could trust his mouth not to open and scuttle him. Now they were energetically debating the ongoing effects of the lira’s devaluation and convertibility; how it opened the Central Bank to international markets and investors but also made it vulnerable to currency speculators. What did Georgios Bey think? Georgios Bey had been glancing away from the debate for a moment but in that moment a woman in equally rapt conversation across the pool also looked away. Their eyes met. That look wiped away all thought. Georgios Ferentinou was struck by the lightning of his oldest gods. Her gaze moved on, the moment was gone. She returned to her conversation but he was lost. With the skill of an academic son used to studying between television, blaring radio, shouts and calls and raucous animated conversations, he screened out his own party and tuned, like a radio telescope eavesdropping on a distant and radiant star, to hers. She was talking politics with a group of entranced men, sitting around on the marble poolside benches like the
demos
of ancient Athens. She was theorizing on the Deep State; that enduring Turkish paranoia that the nation really was a conspiracy run by a cabal of generals, judges, industrialists and gangsters. The Taksim Square massacre of three years before, the Kahramanmaraş slaughter of Alevis a few months after, the oil crisis and the enduring economic instability, even the ubiquity of the Grey Wolves nationalist youth movement handing out their patriotic leaflets and defiling Greek Churches: all were links in an accelerating chain of events running through the fingers of the Derin Devlet.
To what end?
the men asked.
Coup
, she said, leaning forward, her fingers pursed. It was then that Georgios Ferentinou adored her. The classic profile, the strength of her jaw and fine cheekbones. The way she shook her head when the men disagreed with her, how her bobbed, curling hair swayed. The way she would not argue but set her lips and stared, as if their stupidity was a stubborn offence against nature. Her animation in argument balanced against her marvellous stillness when listening, considering, drawing up a new answer. How she paused, feeling the regard of another, then turned to Georgios and smiled.
In the late summer of 1980 Georgios Ferentinou fell in love with Ariana Sinanidis by Meryem Nasi’s swimming pool. Three days later, on September 12th, Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren overthrew the government and banned all political activity.
Now Ariana is back in this tangle of streets, on this square beneath him. He tries to imagine how time might engrain itself in her face, deepening lines, accentuating her sharp features, adding shadows. She would not have coarsened, grown gross like him. She would always move like a muse. Why has she come back? He’s old, it’s been forty-seven years. Dare he seek her out?
All minorities possess a sense for being watched. Georgios turns slowly in the creaking chair. The snake clings to the wall, fixing Georgios in its jewel-bright eyes. Georgios Ferentinou nods to the watching robot and lumbers down the stairs to his library. He is so stiff today. The machine slides ahead of him along the wall. That same old Fener-Greek instinct introduced Georgios to neighbour Can Durukan. Poring over his smart paper screen one winter afternoon with the Karayel, the Black Wind, seeking out the gaps in the window frame, a prickle on the back of his neck had made him look up. There, a tiny watcher tucked into the carved wooden fitting for the chandelier. He stood up on his chair to peer at it and the thing dropped to the floor and made a break for the door. But Georgios was in the heart of his demesne. In a thought he whipped his jacket from the back of his chair and flung it over the scuttling thing. He snatched it up, only to drop the jacket, startled. It squirmed and boiled as if infested. A swarm of tiny spider robots scattered in every direction. Georgios shook his head with wonder. As the last spider headed for the gap at the bottom of the library door he grabbed a glass and brought it down over the device. ‘I’ve got you!’
An hour later came the knock on his apartment door.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I think I have something of yours.’ The boy frowned, leaned forward. Of course. The heart condition. Like every other occupant of the dervish house Georgios received a note under the door every New Year reminding him to avoid rows, heavy footwear, power tools, excessive thumping or dropping heavy pans and keep the volume on his music and television down. It was twenty years since Georgios Ferentinou kept anything heavier than a kettle for tea in his cramped kitchen and, unusually for a mathematician, he had no ear for music.
It’s down in the library
, he wrote in propelling pencil on the wall by the door. The boy goggled at such nonchalant vandalism.
It’s down in the library
, he wrote in propelling pencil on the wall by the door. The boy goggled at such nonchalant vandalism.
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