The Oracle of Stamboul (20 page)

“Will you swear on the Koran, the memory of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and the rightly guided caliphs, that you did not speak to anyone, anyone at all, of this matter?”

The librarian put his hand on the Koran.

“Perhaps,” he said, his nostrils wide with fear, “it is possible, Your Excellency, that I did not convey the confidential nature of the request to the palace archivist, or to the copyists who have been assisting me. If that is the case, I take full responsibility for
the matter. And I am happy to offer my resignation if you see fit.”

“Beyond the palace archivist and the copyists, did you tell anyone else of the request?”

“No, Your Excellency, as you wish I swear on the Holy Koran and the memory of the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him. I did not.”

“Very well then,” said the Sultan and he stood from the desk. “Bring the crates to my chambers as soon as they are complete.”

As Abdulhamid left the room, the librarian crumpled to his knees and laid his forehead against the floor.

Eleonora sat alone at the head of the Bey’s shiny dining-room table, considering the residual crumbs of her breakfast. It had been more than a week since her audience with the Sultan, but the memory of it was with her still, floating at the edge of her recollection like a hot-air balloon. She stirred the last, lukewarm sip of tea with her smallest finger and touched it to her lips. The morning after the audience, she and the Bey had discussed her experience at some length. She described to him the palace garden, the guards, the Viziers and their heralds, the impasse in the Black Sea, and her advice to the Sultan. The Bey listened to her descriptions with pride and keen interest, particularly after it became clear that the Sultan had acted on her advice. His primary concern, however, was whether the Sultan or the Grand Vizier had asked her any questions about himself, his routine, or anything else to that effect. When Eleonora assured him they had not, his face relaxed. And eventually the questions tapered off. She wiped the corner of her mouth with a napkin. Thumbing a herd of crumbs around the edge of her plate, she attempted to recall some of the smaller details about the palace: the gentle curve of the audience chamber’s roof, the smell of lilac and lavender, the interlocking silver triangles embroidered on the collar of the Grand Vizier’s caftan, and the patterns of light that fell through the branches of the walnut trees around the great fountain.

She was lost in these memories when she heard a knock at
the front door and the confident clomp of footsteps entering the house. The footsteps, she saw, belonged to a troop of palace porters. From behind the doorjamb, she watched them stream through the front door like a procession of purple beetles, each with a wooden crate as large as a steamer trunk. The great carpet of the anteroom had been rolled back and the crates were stacked two by two by two in the space between the visiting table and the front door. Monsieur Karom and a palace herald watched in silence as the procession unfolded. When the final crate was put into place, the herald produced a silver document holder from behind his back.

“This is for Miss Cohen.”

“I will see that it gets to her,” said Monsieur Karom.

The herald glanced at his outstretched glove.

“His Excellency has requested that the letter be given directly to Miss Cohen, and no one else.”

Eleonora stepped out from behind the doorjamb.

“If you please.”

The entire assembly turned to watch her pad across the room in her slippers and housedress. When she reached the herald, he lowered his head, as if he were unsure whether to bow.

“I should mention,” he said as he unlatched the silver tube and unfurled a heavy sheet of paper, “that the note was written by the hand of His Excellency himself.”

Eleonora held the letter at both ends. It was written in French, in an elegant and confident hand.

Ultimately, the crates found their way to the library, and were lined up neatly under a bank of windows facing the Beşiktaş Harbor. On the other side of the glass, an unseasonably harsh wind blew off the water, lashing tree branches and tossing sea birds into somersaults. Inside, however, was quiet. Thick veins of cigar smoke were striated with the musty smell of old book leather and cognac, while fringes of the heavy curtain brushed against the tops of the crates. Pushing up the lid of the crate stamped with the number one, Eleonora leaned over its mouth and fingered through it. She plucked out a miscellaneous bundle
of letters tied with a silk cord and unloosed it. The top letter was enclosed within a large square envelope. Addressed to Major General Nikolay Karakozov, it was smudged at the corner with what appeared to be strawberry jam. There was no return address. Eleonora pushed together the edges of the envelope and let the missive slip out. It was a handwritten invitation to a party celebrating the newly renovated residence of the French Ambassador. Finding nothing of immediate interest in this particular bundle, she replaced it at the back of the crate and carried the first two files to the Colonel’s desk.

Crate number one was a mishmash of correspondence between Stamboul and St. Petersburg: personal notes, invitations, veiled threats, unveiled threats, remonstrations, apologies, and a few pleas for asylum. For the most part, the correspondence was in French, with Turkish and Russian words mixed in when appropriate. The import of the letters was generally quite clear, though the Russian Consul at times referred to agreements, conversations, and officials with which she was not familiar. Other than a short break for lunch, Eleonora read straight through the day. By the time Monsieur Karom knocked to announce dinner, she had read through nearly half of crate number one. Although there were still a number of large gaps in her understanding, she apprehended now the basic outline of the relationship between the Russians and the Ottomans.

Every day for two weeks, Eleonora immersed herself in the world of the crates, in the delicate ephemera of diplomacy, mutual acrimony, and unsteady alliances. As she read, her understanding of the current geopolitical situation expanded. The War of 1878 and the subsequent Treaty of Berlin had forced the Ottomans to relinquish their hold on much of southwestern Europe. The Crimean ports were handed back to the Russians,
Bosnia was given over to the Hapsburgs, and more than a few new nations were birthed, including the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Romania. Meanwhile, France and Britain sat perched at the edge of the carnage, biding their time like crows on fence posts.

Caught as they were between Moscow and Vienna, London and Paris, the Ottomans had turned to Berlin. At the behest of the Grand Vizier, German admirals were brought on as military advisors, the Kaiser was welcomed to Stamboul with an imperial parade, and the empire took onto its books an enormous loan from Deutsche Bank, intended in large part to finance the Stamboul-Baghdad link of the Berlin-Baghdad railroad. Such an artery, the Kaiser wrote in one of a few personal letters to Sultan Abdulhamid II, would bolster both empires and would serve to reinforce the relationship between them for years to come. The Kaiser signed his letter with an official stamp and the strangely informal valediction:
With Regards in Alliance, Willy
.

Those first twelve nights, Eleonora slept soundly, her mind whirring through connections and possibilities. The last night, however, the night before she was set to visit the Sultan, she could not bring herself to sleep. The sky was a bottomless silky black, sprinkled with stars like spilled sugar and quiet but for a few lonely stray cats prowling the waterfront. A loose association of ships slipped through the straits and the moon was pregnant with reflected glow. Eleonora rolled onto her stomach and pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders. She had read about insomnia, in Aristotle’s treatise
On Sleep and Dreams
and in
The Hourglass
. In these books, the word conjured romantic scenes such as that famous depiction of a sleepless young Colonel Raicu haunting the garden of his recently deceased father’s house, a cup of warm milk in his hand and the rise of a still unraveling sonata at his lips. Insomnia itself, however, was an en
tirely different and unpleasant experience. She could feel an alloy of fatigue and dread at the base of her neck like a five-kilogram weight. She wanted to sleep, desperately, but as much as she did, her mind would not cease and her limbs stirred with an anxious anticipation of morning.

She had gone through the crates, all six of them, through hundreds of pages of saber-rattling and cautious rapprochement. Still, she had no idea what to think, what to say when the Sultan asked for her advice. Bound up inexorably by geography, the Russian and Ottoman empires had been locked in the same bloody stalemate for centuries, grappling over the same relatively unimportant swaths of territory, building up their armies, and placating the Great Powers. She had no idea what to say. Even if she did know what to say, how could she, Eleonora Cohen, possibly have any influence over such enormous, intractable forces?

Three times that night, the fog horn sounded, guiding sleepless freighters through the straits and rustling the residents of Stamboul in their beds. Just after dawn, the fourth blast roused Eleonora from a sleep she had fallen into moments before. She knew she would not be able to return to the land of sleep. It was hours still before breakfast, but the kitchen fire was lit. Bread peddlers cawed up and down the street like gulls separated from their flocks. And the prowling felines of the night before skulked in fetid alleyways with their plunder. Eventually, Eleonora reasoned that if she could not sleep, she might as well take one last look at the crates.

She was not particularly surprised to find the Bey in the library, though his appearance did somewhat shock her. He was asleep in his armchair next to the fire, his suit rumpled and his eyes drooping like lazy dogs. There was an empty tea glass on
the table next to him, as well as a kerosene lamp and a bundle of letters. The crates, it seemed, were undisturbed, resting silently beneath their curtains. Eleonora shut the door behind her and, seating herself in the chair across from him, pulled her knees to her chest. As she watched him sleep, embers creaked in the fireplace and a dim halo of sunlight stole through the drapes. Finally, the Bey stirred and opened his eyes.

“Miss Cohen.”

His voice trailed off as he glanced about the room.

“It is morning?”

“Yes sir, almost.”

He stood and straightened his suit, pulling down on both legs and running his hand along the length of each sleeve.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, glancing at the tableaux on the table beside him.

Eleonora tucked her legs beneath her housedress.

“Neither could I.”

In the silence that followed, the Bey removed his pince-nez from an inside coat pocket and glanced about for a handkerchief. Finding none, he wiped the glasses on the corner of his shirt. Then, he removed two letters from the top of the pile next to him and held them out to Eleonora. She took them from him.

“I wanted to wait until you were older,” he said. “But the time has come.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, though she knew not what for.

“I will leave you with your thoughts,” he said and, taking the rest of the bundle with him, left the room.

Rearranging herself in the seat of the armchair, Eleonora leaned over the letters the Bey had given her. The top letter was the same one she had found a few months previous in the Colonel’s desk. Covered with fingerprints and dust, it bore no stamp,
nor postmark, nor return address, only the words
Moncef Barcous Bey, care of Mrs. Damakan
written across the front. She held it to her nose and inhaled. The paper was yellow at the edges and folded into a square, two sheets covered front and back with a small, anxious script. Already the ink was beginning to brown, but she could read it with no trouble in the rising light of the morning.