The Sultan of Byzantium (21 page)

If Karacaoğlan were in my place he would say something like, ‘We had nobility when we set out / But we lost it on the way.’ I had to smile. I decided to drop in on Elsa in Venice. I hoped that she would say, ‘So are you an unmitigated blockhead, or what?’ when she heard what had happened to me. It wasn’t enough to change my mind when I learned that she’d taken off for Melbourne to celebrate her father’s seventieth birthday; I determined to fly to Venice anyway the next day, via Rome. I’d already made reservations for five days at a hotel with a long name.

After breakfast I went to the Stockholm municipal aquarium to rest and watch the big fish peek out and sneer at mankind. And I wanted to have a look at those buildings stacked up like barricades on either side of Gamla Stan, which refused to abandon the Middle Ages, before going home. I made a move to chase some accordion tunes wafting through the deserted street, wondering who was the musician. But I turned tail and went straight back to my hotel when a platoon of aged tourists walking like wound-up toys hove onto the scene.

Feeling a great sleep coming on, I focused on Freya Stark’s Anatolia-loving historical travel book. That night I brought in two immigrant prostitutes to give me a massage. In the morning I set out for the airport without calling Nedim from Kulu.

*

I found the Westin Hotel Europa and Regina an appropriate name for a hotel that was born with difficulty out of the merger of two private palaces. I didn’t smile when the receptionist, a friend of Turkey, said, ‘We saved the best room for you.’ Suite 106 overlooking the Grand Canal had a noble ambiance. I remembered the aphorisms I’d written in honor of Venice during my student days when I was trading winks with my neighbor across the way, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute. I’d never shown them to anyone, even Elsa.

If you say, ‘Venice is the earthly corner closest to heaven,’ you may be doing it an injustice. Are you sure that heaven has mystery?

Do you wonder why the protective water encircling Venice evokes glass? If so, it means you didn’t notice that the city is inside a glass jar.

Every year 14 million tourists pour into Venice. Only five out of a thousand visit the Museo Correr and its original art works. The other 99.5 percent beleaguer the city with pollution of sight and sound. The city may be paying for its past sins.

Will you go out at night to explore the streets of Venice? Can you slip between the fog and the echoes with the agility of a gondola?

Venetians never take off their masks. They laugh secretly at the tourists who think they wear them only at carnival.

I spent a while thinking that the best thing to come out of the mess Nomo had made of my life was meeting Mistral. The next morning I set out on a tour to renew memories and strengthen old ties with Venice. What immediately struck me was how I had gradually become an advocate of Byzantium. In the architecture of palaces and other landmark buildings on the water the Byzantine influence was obvious. I tried to visualize similar buildings on the shoreline between Sarayburnu and the Golden Horn. They had nearly all been destroyed – with Venetian support – by the hooligans of the Fourth Crusade. My feet took me to the Church of San Marco, the garish copy of Haghia Sophia. At the top they’d put the Quadriga, the Four Horses sculpture stolen from the Hippodrome at Constantinople. I went up close. A plate beneath read, ‘Brought from the Conquest of Constantinople.’ In fact the Venetians worked hard at their plunder, stealing whatever was light in weight and heavy in value. I had an odd feeling, here before the most famous horses in the world. It was like running into some of one’s own people now forced to work in an international circus. Their innocent looks hurt my heart. They seemed to know who I was, and expected me to take them home. I wondered what punishment Constantine XI had thought fit to mete out to the Venetians in return.

The last charismatic European emperor, Napoleon, deemed the San Marco Piazza the most beautiful living room in Europe. There I visited the Museo Correr. The Marciana Library enjoyed the glories of both a palace and a temple and boasted ceilings as ornate as a church’s. The bibliophile and collector Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1477) donated to the Marciana all the manuscripts and rare books he’d acquired from the Byzantine scholars and artists who scattered across Europe after the Conquest of Constantinople. Basilios Bessarion was a monk from Trabzon whom the Emperor Joannes VIII appointed metropolitan of Nicaea when he was having trouble convincing the Orthodox community to join the Catholics. Basilios took refuge in the Vatican and there was raised to cardinal-hood. But I couldn’t bear looking very long at those Byzantine documents collected by that apostate bibliophile. What went through my mind was that I’d paid good money to admire the jewellery stolen from my house and now on display in the thief’s window. I withdrew into a dim room full of antique globes of the world. I watched the guard dozing on his chair, swaying like a potential soothsayer who hasn’t filled his quotient of prophetic dreams. I circumambulated the spheres until closing time and found my favorite cities hiding in time tunnels. My judgment of Venice: you were the most advanced city-state in the world, but instead of becoming a far-seeing diplomat you devolved into a pocket-picking shyster.

*

The waiters at Harry’s Bar played a considerable part in its status as the most expensive bar-restaurant in town. Besides remembering my favorite salad dressing, they were skilful humorists. This time, however, they did no more than greet me. After dinner I went to my room and watched the emptying-out of vaporettos at the stop on the opposite shore. I descended to the dim bar in the lobby. I wondered how many times the pianist had exhausted his routine stock of commercial songs. I intended to read Attilio Bertolucci’s
Viaggio d’Inverno
with a dry martini for an escort. The barmaid wore a tag on her breast that said ‘Intern’ and dropped my drink while handing it to me. I said, ‘It’s all my fault’ to the bartender who came running to see what the crash was about, and the intern looked at me with pity. I will never solve the riddle of women. I was draining my third drink when Eugenio called on my cell phone. Believing I was in London, he asked me to bring his favorite tea, which could only be found at Fortnum and Mason.

‘But I don’t think I’ll be back for three or four weeks.’

‘Then you can bring three or four packages.’

The sarcastic exchange raised my spirits. I saw an attractive middle-aged woman approaching. ‘When I hear a sentence in Turkish, I greet the owner,’ she said, and I invited her to sit down.

Wendy Sade had been a teacher at Üsküdar American Girls’ School twenty years ago. She was in Venice chaperoning her cellist daughter, here to play a concert with the rest of her string quartet. I couldn’t sort out what Wendy of Boston really did other than work as a freelance translator.

Still, when she whispered, ‘Are you abandoned or abandoning?’ in my ear, the charismatic woman was almost sure that I would spill my guts to her. I began my narrative like a character in a pop song: ‘If a man is going to be abandoned, he first has to have a lover. I was eliminated in the previous stage: the proposal.’ Instead of answers or diagnoses from Wendy I wanted to hear comic prognostications, as though she were a crone of a fortune teller who’d chanced to come my way. By rights the night ought to end with a witty remark or two, after which I should go out and hunt up a prostitute.

‘Wherever did you get the idea that not answering a text message means “No”. The Brazilian soap operas? Believe me, you’d have been rejected with a sentence if she had negative feelings about you. This young woman is quite possibly just waiting for the right opportunity to call you.’

‘Wendy, until that development occurs, may I call you Aunt Pollyanna?’

‘It’s nothing to me, young fellow with the unusual name. But if some day you do manage to marry the girl with the beautiful name, send a plane ticket along with my wedding invitation.’

The card she left on my table said that Wendy Sade was a literature professor at Florida State University. (Did I know this spirited professor, whose name sounded like a pseudonym, from somewhere else?)

I met the morning in Venerotica. To gain admission to this nightclub, where male clients wore masks, I first had to meet a one-legged pimp on the Rialto Bridge, and then follow him for ten minutes.

On the day before carnival began, I moved on to neighboring Ravenna, which had served as Byzantium’s representative in Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries. I stayed at the Hotel Byzantio and visited the churches trying vainly to compete with Haghia Sophia in the field of mosaics. I found traces of Constantinople in the Piazza del Popolo; and I realized that I’d had enough of Byzantine relics here in this town where my fellow citizen, Basilios Bessarion, exhaled his last breath. I don’t really know why, but I flew to Nice – the city of Reha Ekin’s suicide – and grew bored with its spa-camp atmosphere in two days. I then dropped in on Seville, merely because a retired sea captain said, in the lobby of Le Meridien, ‘The worst thing that can happen to a man in Seville is to be born blind.’ I picked Lausanne, which was suffering an invasion of aged tourists, by personal lottery. Because the first letter of its name happened to be ‘H’, I went to Hamburg. The reason for Nantes was its last letter, ‘S’; and for Liege, its five letters. I read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and returned to London. There I reunited with my team. Askaris did not find my thesis that historians would make good dream interpreters funny. When my grandmother phoned on the morning of March 6 and posed her sarcastic question, ‘Spring is coming and where are you, son of a worthless American?’ I was busy making up my calendar of work at the Research Center for Byzantine History.

I felt like the keeper of a lighthouse stuck in the middle of a valley. I was at a rock hotel at Uçhisar, the highest point of Cappadocia. Suite 234 of the Cappadocia Cave Resort had probably been carved out by a Hittite family 4000 years ago. For the umpteenth time I stood by the window to inhale the view of the fairy chimneys filling the panorama. I listened to the silence of the rock and thumbed my virtual prayer beads as I focused on the chimneys one by one.

I don’t believe that the conical masses people call fairy chimneys erupted 25 million years ago from the volcanic mountain range thirty-five miles away. That’s as dubious to me as all those pages of official Byzantine history. Or maybe the volcanic mountain that threw them out vanished into thin air afterward, like an octopus dying after giving birth?

When I was in high school, the fashion was to liken the fairy chimneys to Indian wigwams. But now I regarded them as shamans assembled to perform auspicious ceremonies. They’d kept their real colors from the photographers, which I thought was an act of poetry. I felt the sun’s respect for this melancholy rainbow of colors. The valley imposed its rules of silence on humans, minarets and the zoo of animals in the Hittite reliefs. If I asked, ‘Why didn’t other volcanoes create such artistic lava?’, it would be a trick question.

The valley that from my hotel window looked like a messy table top, up close looked like an exhibition sculpture. I don’t believe either that the word ‘Cappadocia’ came from the Persian and meant ‘land of beautiful horses’. Only a camel would do as a metaphor for this sea of silence.

Cappadocia lay between the first civilization, Mesopotamia, and the city-states of western Anatolia. The Hittites came down from the Caucasus and settled in this strategic corridor. Official history skipped the fact that they were art teachers to the Greeks. It’s also interesting that historians cannot agree on the dates of their rise and fall. They rivaled nature in sculpting and were more accomplished in this field than any other civilization. Maybe it was this rivalry that did them in, as they went extinct by famine in the seventh century
B.C
.

First it was the fundamentalist Christians banned by the Romans, then the eastern Christians fleeing from the Arabs, and after that the Byzantine Christians frightened by the Iconoclasts who took cover in Cappadocia. There, by patiently carving out the conical rocks, they made many a monk’s cell, monastery and church. They even hollowed out underground cities where they could hide from pagan armies.

My expedition to Cappadocia lasted two days. The valley was as full of mystery as a chessboard made up of an unknown number of squares and pieces. Here, for mortals, nature modeled the divinity of silence and the wisdom of patience. I felt myself growing lighter as I walked, like a hotair balloon slipping its ballast. I wondered how many holy places there were thousands of years ago if there were only 300 of them open to tourists today. The biblical stories in those claustrophobic caves were as vivid as if they had been inscribed a thousand days ago. In fact, those dim places didn’t need a lot to be ready for an evening Mass. They looked like they might have been sending a message to the massive and over-ornamented churches of Constantinople.

In the Göreme Open Air Museum, standing at the door of the Girls’ Monastery, a seventy-year-old American woman ran her hand over the fairy chimney and said, ‘Why is the surface of this monolith so soft? It feels like it would crumble if I pushed it hard. Can it really be 20 million years old?’

Her dried-up husband, in shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, who would have been a contender in the Ugly Old Age Pageant, said, ‘Well, honey, if you consider that alligators have been having a good time in our fresh water for the last 200 million years, maybe these cones could actually use some more time.’

The million tourists who come to Cappadocia each year prefer spring or fall. They’re mostly elderly Christians from all corners of the world, plus a few quiet Far Easterners. Some of them unconsciously want to fulfil a religious duty before passing away. As they zigzagged among the fairy chimneys they lit up like country kids taken to an amusement park in late childhood.

The outskirts of the valley possessed the quietness of a desert or inland sea; in the far corners the calm belonged to a cotton field or an abandoned farm. As the owls saluted the sunset Cappadocia turned slowly into a deserted monastery, and this was excellent.