The Sultan of Byzantium (25 page)

‘Rhodes,’ he answered without a moment’s thought. Then he added, stuttering, ‘Santorini, Mykonos, Paros,’ but it was no good.

Weeks earlier, when we were in Athens, Askaris had confided to me at the hotel bar that he’d spent an unhappy childhood on one of the Aegean islands. Immediately afterwards he apologized in panic. The event suggested something I could not put my finger on at the time. Apparently that heavenly venue was Rhodes. The time had come for me to visit the island to unearth the original name of Nikos Askaris. I didn’t want to think about what the move might drag me into after that. My one hope was that I was dreaming all this up.

At nine the one-man orchestra at Il Pomodoro was about to begin his show. As I paid the bill I sought to put Askaris at ease. ‘I think I should choose Paros among the options you offered. I just remembered that it was the favorite of George Seferis, the poet from Izmir.’

I sailed from Marmaris, in Turkey, to Rhodes on a tired sea bus. The Greek passengers looked like happily exhausted picnickers on their way home. When I was dragged away from Vladimir Holan’s poetry by a snore, I shifted my attention to the family seated opposite me. The old woman wearing a headscarf and raincoat in the heat of June, fixing her eyes on the floor, made my neck sweat. I had trouble believing that she was headed to the island on the same holiday as her lümpen son, flirtatious daughter-in-law, and five-year-old grandson. Whenever the boat rocked through a series of waves, she would loudly say her prayers, which in turn caused the boy to break into laughter. His name was Candancan and he probably giggled more in these two hours than I had in my thirty-four years. His young mother, chewing gum ‘like a clitoris riding a bicycle’ in Iskender Abi’s words, pointed to me and said to her unruly son, ‘That man is a circumciser, you better behave!’ The spiky-haired boy cautiously leaned toward me.

‘Are you really a circumciser?’

‘A circumciser and a king too!’

‘Do you know the Lion King?’

‘Whenever he sees me, he runs away.’

‘Do you have a horse that gallops on the ocean?’

‘I have a blue horse that gallops on the ocean, flies and turns somersaults in the air now and then. He’s waiting for me where we’re going. If you stay nice and quiet, I’ll let you ride him when we get there.’

With Candancan glued to his seat, not to leave it again, I was quite amused to see the family peering at me with suspicion. When we arrived at the island he was in deep sleep on his grandmother’s lap. I hastily left the boat before he woke up and was welcomed by Rhodes, with no magical blue horse. I was startled by my sudden assumption that I would fall in love with this island. There was a faint aroma of apricot in the air. I felt I was being pulled slowly into the scene by an octopus’s tentacle. I chose the ‘Splendid’, in the Old City, as my hotel for its name. I compared the monumental locust tree in its courtyard to a dervish raising his hands to the sky. I wanted to sit under it and read Ritsos. But it would be impossible to make an action plan without taking my customary exploratory tour as soon as I got settled. It was a fine late afternoon. According to the receptionist, who assumed that he was speaking English with an urban British accent, I could enjoy the pleasures of the Old City because all the loud tourists were on the beach.

On the maps Rhodes looked like a giant leaf fallen on the sea. When that green mass met the blue Aegean, a bright yellow layer of earth came into being. If the castle on the hill was a shepherd and the warehouses on the waterfront the shepherd’s dogs, then the groups of buildings squeezed in-between were flocks of sheep and lambs. The residents looked like aliens tired of waiting for a message that never arrived. They had Turco-Greek physiques and elegant postures. I walked randomly along the narrow streets free of souvenir shops. When the tourists started to come down to the Old City for their evening’s entertainment, I continued moving through the avenues connected to each other by time tunnels. The urbanites leaving their offices zoomed down the streets in their cars. Every clock, inside or outside, told a different time. I would have believed it if somebody said that they’d forgotten to lift the blackout after World War II.

The taverns and cafés outside the tourist routes were filled with locals. In every bar I dropped into I saw primitive icons. The bizarrely literal translations into English on the shop marquees were almost tragicomic. This was the Turkish approach too, of course. The owner of the restaurant recommended to me was originally from Izmir and was named Theo. He claimed that he could deduce my Turkishness from the way I sat in my chair. The Albanian waiter did not believe that I’d read a novel by their national author, Ismail Kadare. I tried to sound convincing as I said that I was combining business and pleasure when Theo posed the question, what was I doing all alone on the island? Mistral, for her part, thought I had an appointment in Rhodes with an Arab businessman.

I had breakfast early, then went the upper, Turkish, part of the island by way of the cool Sokratous Avenue. There were about 1500 Turks and thirty mosques still on the island. I strolled down the deserted cobblestone streets toward the coast. The low houses had gone unpainted since they were built and reminded me of dying Aegean mountain villages. I peeked through partially open curtains; the rooms were simply furnished. I eavesdropped on the gossip; it was the bookish Turkish of forty years ago. The best adjective for the attitude of the kids on the streets was ‘melancholic’. I was overwhelmed by it all with a brief but intense feeling of ironic guilt.

Was I wandering through an open-air exhibition called ‘The Charm of the Ruined and the Tired’? I concluded that the aim of the broken, rusty, cracked, torn, run-down, sunken, hollowed-out artifacts was to provoke an accounting in the mind of the traveler. Perhaps it was the low walls that time had harmed the most – I thought the mission of the ivy army covering them was to pull them skyward so they wouldn’t fall down further.

I tried to remember who the Byzantine emperor-in-exile was when the Ibrahim Pasha Mosque opened for prayer in 1530. The architect had definitely taken into consideration the dimensions of the island’s churches. An old man with a kindly face sat inside the grounds. He was probably waiting for the noon prayer in the place he hadn’t moved from since the morning prayer. We said hello as I was on the way out: I was afraid even a three-sentence conversation would create a bond and then I would be in for his life story.

There were ‘about a thousand’ manuscripts at the Hafiz Ahmet Ağa Library – opened in 1793 – according to the library’s best estimate. The collection of the Ağa and his son, Rhodes natives who rose to eminent positions under Selim III, was displayed in primitive conditions and left to the ravages of time. I remembered that two Koran manuscripts stolen from here had been sold at auction in London. The library, with its simple courtyard and outbuildings, was like the mansion of an exiled pasha. On a cushion in the shade sat a sweet-faced old woman who could have been a hundred years old. I would have bet that her family had been caretakers of these buildings for generations. At that moment a
ney
solo gradually filled the courtyard. It turned monotonous in ten minutes, or I would have stayed longer. As I continued along the labyrinthine streets, the case of the stolen Korans preyed on my mind. The back of my neck itched.

I felt a little relieved when I got a phone call from Theo, the restaurant owner. Over coffee the night before I’d asked him to find me an experienced English-speaking guide. I planned to put him on the trail of Askaris while I stayed in the background. I met Mikis for lunch at Theo’s; he was a retired English teacher in his fifties and spoke like a machine-gun when answering a question. He was relaxed and charming. When I told him I was reading Odysseus Elytis, he asked, ‘Are you really a Turk?’

In keeping with the image of a harried businessman who had to snatch his tourist sorties from his work schedule, I accompanied Mikis to the Walls of the Knights. I wasn’t impressed by these fourteenth-century piles of stones. There was something about them that disturbed the harmony of the island. The Archaeology and Byzantine art museums – so-called – that we entered and exited were, in reality, little more than display rooms. The primitive quality of the icons and frescoes brought from Byzantine churches on the Aegean islands made me uncomfortable. The north coast of the island, where we drove in Mikis’s little car, was infested by ungainly hotels for middle-class tourists.

By this time I was quite friendly with Mikis. That night, when the second bottle of wine was ready to be uncorked at Theo’s restaurant, I had a flash of inspiration. I showed him Askaris’s picture on my cell phone.

‘Last month,’ I said, ‘as I took a friend around Cappadocia I ran into this fellow here. He told me he came from Rhodes. I don’t remember his name now, but I was impressed by his knowledgeable and mysterious attitude. Would you happen to know him?’

If my assumption was correct that Askaris was a native of Rhodes, then Mikis ought to know him. They were about the same age and Rhodes was a small place of 50,000 people. In fact, when I asked Theo to find me an experienced guide my real goal was to increase my chances in this regard. Mikis took my phone for five seconds and handed it back.

‘It’s probably twenty years since I last saw him, but this is Yannis the Raven. He was four years ahead of me in elementary school. His mother was Greek and his father Turkish. To his alcoholic father and the other Turks he was Melik. He left the island during high school and came back only once, for his mother’s funeral. Rumor had it that he was a professor, or a spy, or something like that. His father was a fisherman and died young in an accident at sea …’

‘Well, this bit of information has raised my curiosity even more. If you could arrange a meeting between me and somebody in Yannis’s family tomorrow, it would be worth the best tip of your life.’

Grapefruit juice, melon, white cheese, and two pieces of bread dipped in red pepper and olive oil constituted my breakfast under the locust tree the next morning. Mikis showed up with a grin on his face just as I was getting bored with the panting of the mischievous wind. It seemed, according to Mikis, that a man named Raci Cemal, who lived in Koskinou village fifteen minutes away, was a cousin of Yannis’s father. We had an appointment to see the retired university teacher at five o’clock, after we came back from Lindos.

Lindos was a district on the eastern coast whose natural beauty was erased and historical richness robbed. It was, besides, blighted by innumerable sightseeing buses. Added to this was the interminable desert heat. We left hurriedly, without staying for lunch. We reached Koskinou after stopping for breaks in all the summer-camp villages along the way. The houses of Koskinou, which was apparently in eternal siesta, perched on a hill as green as fresh almonds and seemed to prostrate on command. I didn’t see even a cat on the streets down which two people could hardly walk side by side. We came to a house with a garden at the end of a culde-sac. The elongated house in the midst of a grove of young olive trees looked like a caravan. Raci Cemal was probably in his seventies. His long white hair did not suit his rotund physique. He’d probably worn the same faded clothes for the last ten years. The house smelled of soap and was plain but tidy. He invited us into his study, where I was thrilled by the enormous library of scholarly and classical books. Raci Bey lived with his sister. She was a hunch-backed old woman – possibly owing to intra-family marriage – who tired me with her endless questions and offerings of food.

Raci Cemal had taken a PhD in sociology at the University of Minnesota and, until he retired, taught at rural universities. He confided that he never married because his dead mother had entrusted his sister to him; I hoped he would not refrain from giving information about his cousin Yannis. He’d started a novel five years earlier and planned to finish it in another five years. The title was
I Did Not Create a Character Able to Write a Novel Because He Won the Lottery; I’m Writing This Novel Because I Won the Lottery
. I told him the title alone was a poem. His sister, Rana Hanim, presented me with a white handkerchief she herself had embroidered with lace, and went out to visit her neighbor. She didn’t fail to promise to call when she came to Istanbul. I immersed myself in Turkish conversation with our host, while Mikis pulled out a book of aphorisms in English. The more he giggled as he read, the more Raci Bey scowled. It was a standoff. Finally I managed to bring up the topic of Askaris – I’d met him in Cappadocia, he impressed me with his personality, I believed he lived on Rhodes, etc. I traveled to London often and therefore if I might get his address, that is if he had one, just in case, you never know after all, anyway I would be grateful.

When Raci replied that he hadn’t seen his cousin since he’d come for his mother’s funeral, I showed him the photo on my phone. He mumbled to himself and tugged his forelock. But it was against the rules of Turkish hospitality not to tell what he knew.

‘My Uncle Arif,’ he began, ‘was a cavalier womanizer. He got the Greek spinster Tina pregnant and had to marry her. Tina was so ugly that there were jokes about her like, “She must have come out of the Byzantine palace.” Two years after she had Melik, she and Arif split up. Melik stayed with his mother. Turco-Greek relations were more civilized on Rhodes than on the other islands, but still the Greeks saw him as a Turk and the Turks saw him as a Greek. I was his closest relative on his father’s side. He wanted to run away from the island the first chance he got. He was hard working and ambitious and an introvert who read history books all the time. He lived with his mother and his blind aunt. They lived on money sent by his mother’s brother, whom nobody ever saw. He went to live with this uncle when he started high school, and didn’t come to his blind aunt’s funeral. He did come back to the island for his mother’s funeral, but that was twenty years ago. I was there. He was proud and withdrawn and cold to me. I wanted nothing to do with him beyond offering my condolences. He dropped English words into his sentences now and then, and his pronunciation made me believe he was living in England. I heard that he gave various answers to people who risked asking what he was doing nowadays. He’d developed a rude and shifty personality. I erased him from my books …’