The Sultan of Byzantium (12 page)

‘Paul strove hard to keep our family intact and helped me survive that period with the least possible harm. He was not only a model student but at the same time a man of good sense.

‘I’m sure he tried to compensate for his father’s notoriety with his own academic success. Paul tried to open up to life by reading history at the public library and, in his words, dueling with mathematics. Every new act of helplessness by my father was a multiplier of Paul’s resistance. I figured he would end up a good liberal academic because he loved listening to jazz.

‘He was as happy as a child when he got the job in Istanbul. I wasn’t surprised that he married an Istanbul girl, only that she wasn’t an Istanbul Greek. They only had a civil ceremony because of the ruckus in your mother’s family, but they came to America on their honeymoon. My sister-in-law and I weren’t crazy about each other. I didn’t find either her face or her disposition pleasant. Paul said she was a noble and mysterious Easterner and it was only natural that I should fail to grasp her superiority.

‘The next thing to be surprised by was not the divorce but the reason for it. If Paul had to find a lover, and so managed finally to find his soul-mate, it was because of his wife’s capricious ways. When the news hit the papers he lost his job. Muriel was Canadian; they moved to Montreal. After taking a long time to get a PhD there, he started teaching at universities I was hearing the names of for the first time.

‘Our correspondence fell off after my brother moved to Canada. I met Muriel twice. She was a beautiful and naive person. She treated Paul with a blown-up respect, like he was the greatest scholar in the world. I heard about their marriage two years after the event. They didn’t have money problems. Your father resigned his jobs often and went through long periods of not even looking for another one. Yet he was always irritable. He seemed to be waiting for bad news and nobody dared to ask him why. Muriel called me for the first and last time to give me the news of her husband’s death. They were living in Vancouver. As Paul was leaving a bar suddenly a jeep came out of nowhere and hit him and then vanished. My brother had a drink now and then, but he couldn’t really hold his alcohol. On the night of the accident he was apparently drinking with a middle-aged man that nobody else knew. They left the bar separately.

‘You were very precious to your father, Adrian. Your mother used a bag of tricks to prevent you from getting to know each other. When you grew big enough to go out and play in the street, he used to come and watch you from a distance. In the second year of this your mother sent her men to give him a bad beating. He always had your baby pictures in his wallet and in his house … ’

At this point in her monologue she leaped up and fetched an album with photos of my father. Trying not to see his sad face, I turned the pages quickly. Suddenly a five-by-seven inch picture fell out. The man trying to smile at the camera eye was my father, and the startled baby holding his hand was me. On the back of this photograph, taken on my first birthday, was written:

Dear Em,

Adrian is one year old. He started walking a month ago. He will come and visit you one day.

With all my heart,

P.

My aunt was enjoying the situation’s implications, while I was astonished. If it was indeed my father who wrote those lines, I’d found the answer I was looking for. The handwriting was identical with that of the photocopies. I knew I should not be too hasty to invent conspiracy theories. This probably wasn’t sufficient evidence to associate my father with Nomo, I told myself.

To make my aunt happy, I took the picture. We said goodbye to each other and promised to get together again but neither of us believed it. A taxi waited for me in front of the house. As I got in, it occurred to me that the men who attacked my father in Galata could also be working as secret agents put on my own trail by Nomo. I felt I should properly introduce myself to this organization that might one day be my savior, and the next my executioner.

I read Hadrian’s biography on the San Francisco-New York and New York-Istanbul planes. If you omitted the religious factor, he and Fatih might have been (up to and including the whispers about their sexual preferences) soul-mates who ruled the greatest empires of the world like chess masters.

With the approval of the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo (1107?-1205), the army of crusaders who had lingered in Constantinople for ten months instead of continuing to Egypt commenced to plunder the town. Historians, noting their extreme violence, have described how the pious looters who set out on their crusade for the love of God ended up plundering the houses of the poor and killing young and old without exception, even raping the nuns. At the end of the third day the 900-year-old capital of the world lay in ruins, and the magnificent complex called the Great Palace was totally destroyed.

The puppet Latin Empire founded by the crusaders would limp along for fifty-seven years. Michael VIII Palaeologus, the usurper of the Byzantine throne in exile, expelled them from Constantinople in 1261. He then settled into the Blachernae Palace that butted up against the land walls, away from the city center. Because it had been built in the twelfth century and was now the home of an emperor, he had it remodeled. The Ottomans called it the Tekfur Palace, a derogatory appellation since ‘tekfur’ meant feudal lord and that was no way to address the emperor of Byzantium.

I remembered these details as I walked along the street of the Chora Monastery – now the Kariye Mosque – toward the palace ruins. I was satisfied with the quietness of the street. I refrained from asking the precise whereabouts of this 800-year-old legacy of our (?) family. Later in the morning I heard first a rooster, then a jackhammer, but there was neither chicken coop nor construction site to be seen.

The improvised duet continued until the palace walls rose up before me. I went up a short rise near Hoca Çakir Avenue, afraid I might miss an important clue to the puzzle if I skipped any part of the walls. The crude restoration work made them look like patched clothes. It didn’t upset me to see that, as a reaction to this barbaric enterprise, the symmetrical indentations had been turned into toilets and garbage pits. Two recesses that looked like caves had been transformed into makeshift warehouses by a carpenter and a greengrocer. I wondered who on earth the moustachioed men working there paid rent to. In front of the walls was a barricade of garbage containers. As I walked by, some street cats jumped in and out of them in panic. I climbed a rickety staircase to the top of the wall. On the plot of land between that point and the E-5 motorway was only one building: the Tekfur Palace. The rest of the space was dedicated to a children’s playground, a car park, and sports fields.

From a height of sixty feet I surveyed the movement on the motorway. The hum of a flood of motor vehicles swelled like a chorus, then receded as if it had hit a breakwater. I was satisfied with the music, and resumed my stroll toward the Golden Horn to see the palace up close. The highway curved in parallel to the curve of the walls. Between them was a park containing a kiosk that looked like a dead bull. A few puny olive trees grew in front of it and I was reminded that an olive tree could live a thousand years. Maybe these saintly-looking trees had breathed the same air as my ancestors. Where the park ended I saw the gate to the palace. It had bars like a prison and a sign on it that said: ‘Restoration in Progress. No Trespassing.’ In truth there was no restoration in progress and I was certain that nobody knew when or if such work would ever start. From outside the bars the palace at first glimpse looked like a mammoth skeleton. Looking at the façade more carefully, I noted a kind of ornamental symmetry. I shut my eyes to imagine how glorious it had been in its heyday, but the image lasted no longer than a sonnet. When I opened my eyes, I was appalled by the sight of a palace that looked like a nun who’d been stripped of her garments, raped, then beheaded.

I wondered about the last hours of Constantine XI at the palace that now served as the base for an army of pigeons. I continued my descent toward the Golden Horn as the noon prayer call began to rise in unison from the city’s 3,000 mosques. Bushes grew on these jaded walls, and small trees grew in the gaps. Neither history nor nature could complain of this symbiosis. A small but neat Ottoman cemetery nestled on Eğrikapi Street where the walls ended. I made a note to myself to come back and read the epitaphs later. Cars and trucks were passing beneath an arch that divided the cemetery into two; I made this my landmark. At the time he settled into this palace on the edge of the city it was said of Michael VIII – who stole the throne from the seven-year-old emperor he was supposed to protect by putting out his eyes – that he would flee ‘at the first chance’. But he turned out to be a leader who fought for his country; and when he died, his burial without a funeral ceremony was an oriental irony.

I retraced my steps, observing the odd neighbors of the walls frame by frame. All those streets bearing spiritual names were like huge maquettes drawn without rulers. I saw women leaning from the windows of their miniature houses in startling postures and locked in a studious chorus of gossip. The lady of a house painted in a hue of green I’d never seen before was scolding her son – ’My worthless fucking offspring’ – while her husband sat like a chieftain at the window counting his beads. Young men about to begin their military service strolled up and down the streets holding cell phones like bombs. The colors of the clothes worn by the carefree, jobless neighborhood crowd and of the aging cars they drove faded at the same rate and met in the same hue. A robed
imam
approached me with a folk song on his tongue. I felt a kind of test in his greeting; he was surprised by my reciprocal sincerity. As he pranced off I wondered if he knew that most of the words in his memory were borrowed from the Old Testament.

A coffee-shop entrepreneur had set up a few small tables and chairs in the shade of the walls, and sidewalk pedestrians had to detour around them. I sank into one of his chairs next to a group who spoke in whispers, perhaps in Kurdish. The young waiter seemed surprised by my question: ‘How old are these walls?’

‘How should I know?’ he said, almost scolding me. Then he reported me to his boss and had him laughing too.

Down from the arched gate was a row of one-storey houses that were perhaps attached to the walls. It looked like they would fall down if they were separated from one another. I crossed to the other side of the street and looked at the fourth one from the left. Its windows were paved over. Anyone would think it was a small innocent warehouse. Not very much later I would show up at its door full of curiosity about the trials I would meet inside.

*

At midnight the following day I rang its doorbell, three long and two short. (I’d rehearsed in advance to prevent possible rhythmic embarrassment.) I knew that I would find Askaris and his two assistants bowing and scraping the instant the door opened. If I said ‘Good evening’, they would cast a respectful glance or two at me. I was becoming accustomed to the dichotomies of the period. Two of the rooms were full of large cardboard boxes: a successful camouflage. In the room on the left Kalligas moved one of these boxes, stepped on a spot just beneath it, and stepped back. There was a faint mechanical whine, then a black rectangular opening appeared. We descended as a team and as we did the room darkened and the basement we stepped into lit up. I must admit that I was stunned when, after twelve steps, we entered a salon. The ceiling was painted with colorful icons and along the walls in glass cases were marble busts of the Byzantine emperors. Had I failed to scrutinize the ten-inch-high busts one by one, I would have insulted the Nomo representatives. Constantine the Great, Theodosius II, Justinian I … it was embarrassing to see myself commemorated there along with the others. But I was relieved, as I passed Fokas, to realize that I was not the ugliest link in the chain. My many times great-grandfather’s expression carried the resignation of an old Casanova constantly rebuked by his wife. The bust of my own majesty, Constantine XV, had perhaps only been brought yesterday. In it I tentatively confirmed the condescending features of a young man listening to someone else.

In the middle of the salon was a huge white marble table, and on it a large ivory model of Constantinople. I almost expected to find a button on this splendid toy city that I could push to start up the life within. I wanted to caress the figures belonging to the palace, the hippodrome, the aqueducts. I inspected the model for a long time, monument by monument, magnifying each at least 200 times in my imagination. I could not have cared less whether the Nomo representatives might think I was putting on a show. When I looked up I felt mentally exhausted, and wiped my forehead weakly. I heard someone say, ‘Excellency, would you like a glass of water?’ I turned and with an effort stammered out, in every language I knew, ‘Mankind is a worse plague than natural disasters.’

It was odd of me not to have noticed earlier the bitterness in the Byzantine emblem on the black lacquer table between my bust and the model. The purple double-headed eagle glowering at East and West simultaneously was a true mirror of the Empire’s fatal dichotomy. They invited me to be seated in the most ostentatious leather armchair in the room. The team, with Askaris in the middle, sat opposite me on the edge of their chairs, after of course asking my permission. They clasped their hands and bowed their heads. Askaris first expressed Nomo’s gratitude to me and then began to explain the nature of the examination.

He took a two- by six-inch silver box from a purple leather bag and pointed at a not-quite-antique mechanism just under the lid. It was stamped with a royal seal. This he slowly raised. When he held the box upright you could see, on the left side of an aluminum panel within, six small empty squares lined up equidistant from one another. And at the very bottom was a one- by two-inch rectangular glass surface that was gray in color. On the right side of the uppermost square was written, ‘Antioch Museum’. What I had to do was go to that museum and find a half-inch by half-inch piece of magnetized purple metal hidden in one of the objects on display, then place it in the first square. When this was done, the name of a historic site would appear on the right side of the second square. I was then expected to look for a second piece of metal at that venue. The last item in Constantine XI’s will was concealed in the artefact that I needed to find as the sixth step. I had a year in which to do all this. Either my great-grandfathers had failed to find that final item or else they could not decode its meaning. If I were successful – and Askaris could not enunciate this possibility in a tone indicating confidence – Nomo and I would together formulate a plan to carry out the will’s last instructions.