The Oracle of Stamboul (16 page)

“Eleonora.”

Mrs. Damakan pronounced her name with care, as if it were an inscription etched into the back of an amulet. Moistening her lips, the handmaid brought her stool around to the front of the tub. Her kerchief was pushed back much farther than normal, revealing a stringy white field of hair woven through with strands of black.

“You did what was right,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

How the old handmaid knew what had happened, Eleonora didn’t know. This pronouncement, however, that she had done the right thing, was spoken with such assurance that it washed away her doubts, at least for the time being.

“You did the right thing,” Mrs. Damakan repeated and Eleonora knew it was true. She had done the right thing.

After rinsing Eleonora’s hair, the old handmaid stood, pulled the plug, and quickly gathered up her things, leaving Eleonora alone to watch the remains of her bathwater swirl and cough down the drain. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, then caught herself. When the last of the cloudy gray water disappeared, a shiver ran from her shoulders to her knees, and the entire length of her skin bristled.

The termination of Eleonora’s lessons did not change much the structure of her daily routine. She still woke at the same hour, bathed, and went downstairs to breakfast with the Bey. Her afternoons, she still spent primarily in her armchair or at the Colonel’s desk, twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she read. The Bey’s library was large enough to keep her busy for at least a few more years, but without Reverend Muehler behind her, without the constant prodding and pacing of her tutor, she found it difficult to marshal her concentration. As she read, trudging through the annals of ancient history and oration, exhuming the petty rivalries and disputations of centuries past, her thoughts often wandered from the text at hand. Even lighter reading, like the stash of mystery novels she found alongside
The Complete Works of Honoré de Balzac
, had trouble holding her attention.

Although the question of Reverend Muehler was, for all intents and purposes, settled, Eleonora returned to it again and again. Gazing at the wallpaper in front of her, she lingered on her memory of the incident: the open drawer, the Reverend calling her name before he left the room. Her own role in the affair, she knew, was beyond reproach. There was no doubt she had seen the Reverend rummaging through the Colonel’s desk; there was no doubt he had put a piece or a stack of papers in his briefcase; and there was no doubt she had done the right thing in telling the Bey. It was not a complicated situation, she told herself. Reverend
Muehler had stolen something and, as a result, the Bey did not want him in the house. Still, something about the matter bothered her. She didn’t understand why the Reverend would want to steal anything from the Bey in the first place, nor why the Bey had reacted so strongly. Perhaps it was the influence of the mystery novels she had been reading; perhaps it was her natural sense of curiosity. Regardless of where it came from, Eleonora could not rid herself of the notion that the matter of Reverend Muehler was connected somehow to that strange young man at the Café Europa, and possibly also to the encrypted note the Reverend had shown her just a few weeks before his dismissal. How they were related, she didn’t know.

It was during this period, between the termination of her lessons and the end of Ramadan, that the Bey began to propose various excursions around town. If they were discussing Homer, he might mention that the ruins of Troy had recently been discovered less than a day’s ride from Stamboul. If she asked him a question about the architect Sinan, he might praise the interior of Sultan Ahmed Mosque. More than once he mentioned the wonderful view of the city from the top of Rumelihisari, adding that it was by far the best picnic spot in Stamboul. Not wanting to pressure her into anything, however, Moncef Bey never suggested any of these excursions outright, and Eleonora never outright rejected them. Hinting and demurring, they returned again and again to the same positions, like a king and rook in eternal check. The Bey praised the beauty of the day and Eleonora nodded, her thoughts elsewhere.

One afternoon, toward the end of the month of Ramadan, Eleonora was sitting at the Colonel’s desk in the library, reading Aristophanes. It had rained the night before, a short summer thunderstorm. As a consequence of this, Mrs. Damakan had
pushed the curtains open and a late-afternoon light suffused the room, giving the furniture and the pages of her book a melancholy tint they weren’t accustomed to.

What cares have not gnawed at my heart? And how few have been the pleasures in my life! Four, to be exact, while my troubles have been as countless as the grains of sand on the shore!

Eleonora exhaled and looked up at the stretch of wallpaper in front of her. It was the same design as always, a dark red paisley with gold stripes. As she stared, however, she noticed for the first time that a battery of tiny gold swords was scattered throughout the paisley. She leaned her chair back on two legs, so as to better observe the expanse of wallpaper, and her knee grazed the side of the desk. She looked down and her eyes came to rest on the curved brass handle of the left drawer. Rubbing her knee, Eleonora wondered, as she often did, what the Reverend had been looking for and whether he had found it. That afternoon, for reasons she could not explain even to herself, she did more than wonder. Scooting her chair back from the desk, she looped two fingers through the handle of the drawer and pulled. She had expected it to be locked, but it gave easily, and there, like a nest of birds hidden at the back of a clerestory, was a stack of letters tied neatly with a string.

Glancing at the door to the hallway, she unloosed the string and peeled off the top letter. It was a thick, square envelope, an invitation addressed to Mr. Moncef Barcous. The return address was embossed on the back flap:
American Consulate, Beyoglu
. Underneath these words was a picture of an eagle with the world in its talons. She lifted the flap and, pushing together the edges of the envelope, let the invitation slip out.
The presence of the bearer is requested at a costume ball at the American Consulate
. At the bottom of the invitation was a date in October of 1883, almost two
years previous. Laying the invitation aside, Eleonora lifted out the entire stack of letters. It was a hodgepodge of personal correspondence, a few invitations, and two pieces of what appeared to be official communication from the palace, nothing of particular interest. She was on the verge of going back to Aristophanes, when she found, at the bottom of the pile, a letter quite unlike the rest.

Covered with oily fingerprints and dust, it gave off an air of provinciality. There was no stamp or return address, and the only clue as to its destination were the words
Moncef Barcous Bey, care of Mrs. Damakan
. Eleonora held the letter to her nose and inhaled the remnant of a familiar smell, a country road buried somewhere deep in her memory. This was clearly not what the Reverend had been looking for, but its smell struck a chord inside her, as did the small, uncertain hand on the front of the envelope. Replacing the rest of the stack, she closed the drawer, sat up straight, and pulled her chair closer to the desk. She slipped the letter out of its envelope and let it fall onto the blotter. It was yellow at the edges and folded into a square, two sheets covered front and back with an anxious scrawl.

“Miss Cohen.”

Before he said her name, Eleonora heard Moncef Bey clear his throat. And in the shape of that sound she knew immediately that he had been watching her for some time. He crossed the room and leaned against the edge of the Colonel’s desk. He saw the letter. He was looking at it directly. Beyond his gaze, however, he did not acknowledge its presence.

“What is that you are reading?” he asked, motioning toward the book.

She turned the spine to face him.

“Aristophanes,” he read.

In the absence of anything else to do with her hands, she straightened the book and moved it to the middle of the desk.

“I have been thinking,” said the Bey, “that it would be nice to take a trip to Rumelihisari.”

Eleonora nodded, unsure where he was going with this line of conversation but glad it had nothing to do with the letter on the blotter.

“The wildflowers are blooming,” he continued. “I have no other appointments this afternoon. It’s a short ride and we could bring a picnic dinner with us.”

Eleonora glanced about the library, with its stuffy red velvet curtains, its globes, its carpets, and shelves upon shelves of books. How many hours had she spent in this room? How many pages had she read? The Bey clearly wanted very much to go with her to Rumelihisari. She owed him that at least, didn’t she?

“What do you think?” he asked. “Would you like to go to Rumelihisari today?”

Yes. A picnic would be nice.

She replaced the Aristophanes book on its shelf, and within the hour they were off, riding along the western shore of the Bosporus toward the narrow mouth of the straits. It was indeed a glorious day. The late-afternoon sun was waning, a brown-and-white rabbit hopped alongside the road, and, with her face to the latticework, Eleonora could see flashes of her flock overhead. As the Bey had promised, the ride was rather short.

“This,” he said as they rumbled to a stop, “is Rumelihisari. It was from this tower, more than four hundred years ago, that Fatih Sultan Mehmet laid siege to Stamboul and took the city from the Byzantines.”

A squat stone tower rising rather haphazardly from a pile of rubble and grass, Rumelihisari did not at first glance seem like
much of anything. As they disembarked, paid the guard, and climbed the curving steps to its crenellated crown, however, Eleonora saw that the tower itself did not matter. What gave Rumelihisari its significance was its position at the mouth of the Bosporus, and the vantage point such a location afforded. At that time of year, the watch of Rumelihisari was blanketed with light blue wildflowers, and tufts of grass sprouted up through cracks in the stone. The heat of the day had dissipated and a shallow breeze blew in from the sea. As the Bey arranged their picnic—cold meat, bread, cheese, and olives—hoopoes swept down from the minaret of a neighborhood mosque and stretched across the straits. A swath of purple against a bright orange sky, it contracted, then expanded, like an ethereal lung. She wasn’t sure what it was trying to say, but Eleonora had the distinct sense that her flock was speaking to her. After a few passes across the water, the birds dispersed into a grove of pine trees behind Üsküdar.

Eleonora inhaled and let the city wash over her. Instead of the framed and lifeless landscape she saw from her bay window, this city was alive, teeming with people, with shouting, music, and the smell of baking bread. There was the turtle dome of the New Mosque, the needle minarets of Sultan Ahmed. There was the Bey’s yellow-and-white house. And there, at the confluence of the waters, was the Sultan’s palace, the jewel at the tip of the Golden Horn, with its gleaming white marble walls, crystalline towers, and gardens of wisteria. She bit the inside of her cheek as the last breath of the sun held itself just above the curve of the hill and painted the walls of the palace pale orange fading into pink. As the last light of the sun disappeared, a cannon shot rang out from across the water.

“A number of years ago,” said the Bey as he motioned for her
to sit down and partake of the picnic, “I was given the honor of visiting the palace.”

He prepared a plate for her and handed it across the picnic blanket.

“You may know that, though, after the letters you read today.”

He paused and placed an olive in his mouth.

“When I first offered to take you in, Miss Cohen, I can’t say I was motivated by anything more than duty, and my fidelity to the memory of your father. The past months, however, while difficult in many ways, have proven to be some of the most gratifying this old bachelor can remember. Which is to say,” he continued, “I don’t at all appreciate you looking through my correspondence, but I understand the impulse. I understand you might have a number of questions about the letters and the matter with Reverend Muehler. Before you ask them, however, I would like to try to explain my end of things as best I can.”

He took a bite of the sandwich he had made for himself and swallowed.

“You have read Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”

She nodded.

“As a young man,” the Bey began to explain, “I was quite taken with Rousseau’s ideas: the social contract, civil society, the general will of the people, and so on. You might say his ideas were a kind of revelation to me. And I was not alone. At that time there were a number of young men like myself—sons of businessmen, bureaucrats, military officers, and tax farmers—who took to Rousseau’s ideas with full force. I started a reading group, which met once a month and was quite popular. I also
wrote a number of forceful essays in the newspaper, advocating for the rights of man.”

The Bey caught her eyes, to make sure she was following.

“It was as a direct result of Rousseau and my advocacy for his ideas that I was sent to Constanta. At the time I was a member of parliament and my father was a very important businessman, one of the largest suppliers of textiles to the military. So instead of putting me in prison, as he no doubt would have liked to do, the Sultan honored me with a diplomatic post at the edge of the empire.”

Eleonora nodded, indicating that she understood.

“It was in Constanta that I met your father and there that I established many of my most important business connections. But as much as I enjoyed my time there, Stamboul is my home. And so, when the political climate calmed down, I returned. I returned on the condition that I never participate in politics again. And I have not. I still hold my views, but my methods have changed. Since I returned, the Grand Vizier has kept a close watch on my movements. His suspicions are unfounded, I can assure you of that. I do not nor have I ever advocated for a constitutional revolution. But I understand why he would want to keep a close eye on me, with my past and all the clamoring about the boat accident. I must say, I never suspected the Reverend. I don’t know why I did not. In retrospect it makes all the sense in the world. I don’t know if he is working for the palace, for the Americans, or both, but in any case there is no way we could continue with your lessons. You understand, don’t you?”

Eleonora swallowed and looked up at the Bey. She understood what he was telling her. Still, her mind was buzzing with questions like a band of insects trapped in a jar of preserves.

“All this is to say,” he concluded, “I’ve had a good life, a charmed life, but lonely, devoid of a female touch, and without children—until now, of course. You know I take my responsibilities as your guardian very seriously. To that end, I must ask that you not poke through my documents. It is in your own best interest that I ask this of you. I will give them to you one day, but not now.”