The Sultan of Byzantium (7 page)

The mother of Byzantium’s founding father, Constantine the Great, was named Helen. There was an oracle that when a second Constantine with a mother named Helen became emperor, the end of the empire was nigh. Of course, when Helen Dragases’ son Constantine XI Palaeologus (1449-1453) became emperor at the age of forty-five and did not change his name, the oracle was happily relegated to a marginal note by all the historians.

*

I read the book carefully and like a diligent student took a lot of notes. It was as if I were patiently writing a talisman for myself by reducing the feckless behavior of my forefathers to dry sentences. I stopped at
page 143
and took up a thin biography, hoping to get the Constantine XI story over with in three short chapters. I planned to finish Donald M. Nicol’s
The Immortal Emperor
in two sessions. I thought about browsing the shelf of ‘Turkish sources’, and so I did. Every one of the 150 books, most of them from university presses, had been rebound, probably because of their cardboard covers. My hand reached for Semavi Eyice’s
The Architecture of Late Byzantium
, on the monuments of the Palaeologan period.

Under the section written in Ottoman on the Chora church restoration was a note in English, in purple ink: ‘These frescoes are what make the Chora even more important than Haghia Sophia!’ I was amazed. That graceful Gothic handwriting was not unfamiliar to me. Hadn’t I seen a message from that pen in Istanbul? I photocopied the page for later study. If my hunch was right I would follow it up in the US, and do so without informing Nomo. Perhaps my mission had just taken a more sensitive turn. To visit America would require a plausible excuse; I resorted to the Internet. Among Byzantine centers there, Dumbarton Oaks stood out. Located in Washington, DC, it had a research library and a small museum.

‘It’s number one in its field,’ said Jocelyn, with a sneer in her tone.

The Immortal Emperor
was available at academic bookstores. I was a little surprised to catch myself admiring the statue of Constantine XI on the cover of the copy I bought at Blackwell’s. I decided I would wait until Istanbul to read it; I would head home after two more days of watching documentaries at the Center. I informed Askaris of my desire to complete my education at Dumbarton Oaks after, of course, visiting the Byzantine monuments of Istanbul. He nodded respectfully, I was glad to see, after first greeting the idea with widened eyes.

*

The library closed at 5:30. I usually exited my adventures in ancient time with a buzzing head. It was a pleasure to regain my balance by falling into the charming rhythms of London. Had my grandmother sent the angel Hâtif, whose voice was just loud enough to be heard, to look after me? At a private moment of my day he would whisper two or three words in my ear and slip away.

Every other evening I walked to Heave(geteria) on Bentinck Street for dinner. I discovered this vegetarian restaurant on my way to Daunt’s bookshop across from which on a corner of the three-way crossing, was a building that resembled the Galata Tower. If I had no particular agenda for the evening I would stop in after dinner at Waterstone’s, across from my hotel. More important than the 2 million books sprawling throughout its five storeys was that it stayed open until ten. There I discovered the poet Pascale Petit and read Aeschylean drama. I tried to guess which of the drooping people around me were Nomo operatives. But I didn’t want this game to turn into a habit. If I believed that I was being followed, I preferred to think that it was for my own security rather than for fear of my betraying the mission. I probably shouldn’t have stopped in at that café in Golders Green with chess-lovers for regulars. I decided to hide my deeper self from Nomo while allowing my normal habits and desires to show through. (Emperor Basiliscus died of hunger in prison in 477, Emperor Zeno was buried alive in 491 … )

My excursion to see my usual dealer in antiques and rare books and to peer into the windows of the clock and watch emporium coincided with rush hour. I began to think that the Brits all locked themselves in their houses because there were people from seventy different nations murdering their language. Some evenings I went on bus tours of shop windows full of international brands. I saluted the weary mannequins. At twilight I followed the trail signposted by the great stone buildings. I dove into bars with tragicomic names and drank chamomile tea to amuse the dull drunks. In my room the vodka bottle was never far from my hand as I watched DVDs of Coen Brothers films one by one. (Emperor Maurice had his throat cut in 602, Emperor Phocas was torn to pieces in 610, Emperor Heraclius died in 641 under torture … )

On my first weekend in London I asked Askaris to find two prostitutes for me. We were both embarrassed as I specified: ‘They should not be bony or quarrelsome.’ That night M. from Prague and O. from Brno went with me up to my room; both were lively, and taller than me. To impress them I recited a stanza of their compatriot the poet Jaroslav Seifert – Nobel Prize, 1984 – and they were as startled as a couple of novice nuns who’ve stumbled on a pornographic graffito. (Emperor Constantine III was poisoned in 641, Constans II beaten to death in 668, Emperors Leontius and Tiberius II beheaded in 705 … )

I went to see the lions incarcerated in the London Zoo. Abi, a playful cub the last time I saw her, was now the princess of the cage. Lying on the wooden platform, she was on the brink of dozing off, while her mate Lucifer was already in deep sleep.

‘Abi, hey girl, Abi,’ I called.

Suddenly she perked up. Our eyes locked, and she began to nod her head up and down. Slowly she rose onto her front legs as if posing for a sculpture. With a movement of her head she indicated the sleeping Lucifer, suggesting, ‘I can’t come down to you now because of this guy.’

I went to the London Aquarium. There I was at first annoyed by the endless hordes of children screaming their heads off in the dim cavernous space, but then I remembered that I’d never screamed so happily in my own childhood. I looked at the stingrays and the sharks and the sea monsters that occupied a niche somewhere between seahorses and plants. Did the stingrays seem to be challenging mankind? No? With menacing looks they nosed up to the humans standing at their end of the tank, then retreated with wings flapping like a curse on the crowd. Were I an emperor, I thought, I would definitely have an aquarium full of stingrays and sharks.

I went quickly past my old student lodgings and into the British Museum. It was something of an embarrassment to see the weakness of the Byzantine section amid the treasury of objects pilfered from the four continents. I took up a position on the bottom step of the quiet stairs in the courtyard, closed my eyes and rested my head on my arms and my arms on my knees. Four silent tornadoes rose up from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and China and united high in the air. In a discipline of constellations music was improvised while being tossed to and fro … (Emperor Justinian II was beheaded in 711, Emperor Philippicus had his eyes gouged out in 713, Emperor Constantine VI lost his eyes in 797, Emperor Leo V was stabbed and then beheaded in 820, Emperor Michael III was stabbed to death in 867 … )

Another night Askaris sent two Jamaican girls to my room. I didn’t know they were going to be identical twins. M.’s left leg was false to her knee. Since she was a reader of the poet Derek Walcott, I invited her to see ‘The Mousetrap’ with me. The play, inspired by an Agatha Christie story, has been staged 23,000 times since 1952. I shivered when the murderer made his entrance in the first scene. I was thinking about my ordeal, which would come up in six weeks. M. believed I was the heir apparent of an organization involved in some kind of shady business. (Emperor Constantine VII was poisoned in 959, Emperor Romanus II was poisoned in 963, Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas was stabbed and then beheaded in 989, Emperor John I Tzimiskes was poisoned in 976, Emperor Romanus III Argyrus poisoned and strangled in 1034, Emperor Michael V died in 1042 as his eyes were being gouged out … )

I had no idea where my three assistants were staying, so I met them for dinner at my hotel restaurant. Askaris’s dialogue with the waiter was impressive; he spoke with an upper-class accent and wielded a rich vocabulary. I was willing to bet that he’d graduated from an elite British university and lived in London. Kalligas’s English was good too and he had a general air of self-confidence. Pappas, on the other hand, barely knew English at all. His struggles with the menu were amusing. Maybe he’d been hired as a personal favor to somebody, I thought – then what might the reason be? If he was a bit on the shallow side, at least he had a warm heart.

I gave orders to my team and asked them to account for themselves when necessary but never inquired into their pasts. So, to rescue the evening, I began improvising on this and that, warming to my subject as I saw success in surprising my audience. I summarized my educational history, then delved into passages from private life. Askaris was a wise but pragmatic man who liked to finish what he started. Yet he seemed to want to conceal his virtues. I could tell that he was a bit disturbed that I was sharing a table with Kalligas and Pappas. I met with him twice more before returning to Istanbul; his manners were always efficient and measured and I felt myself warming toward him. I was sure that his mysterious job had prevented him from marrying or developing a hobby. We met the first time at the hotel bar and he was embarrassed to ask my permission to leave, after his second mineral water, to catch the train to Winchester. (Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes had his eyes gouged out and was poisoned in 1071, Emperor Alexius IV Angelus was strangled, then beheaded in 1183, Emperor Andronicus I was torn to pieces after torture in 1185, Emperor Isaac II died as he lost his eyes in 1193, Emperor Alexius IV was strangled in 1204, Alexius V Murtzuphlus had his eyes gouged and his tongue cut out the same year – 1261 – that Emperor John IV Lascaris was blinded … )

I presented Jocelyn a farewell bottle of perfume on my departure from the Center. I wasn’t brave enough to disagree when she said in her confident tone, ‘Don’t try to hide it, you’re here to research your Byzantine novel.’

‘Or a mysterious play from which I’m not absent.’

‘Does it have a title?’

‘… Sultan of Byzantium … ’

‘Well, that’s a provocative one for Anglo-Americans who aren’t total strangers to sultans and Byzantium. And ‘Sultan of Byzantium’ was what they called Mehmet II after his capture of Constantinople.’

(The son, Andronicus IV Palaeologus, and the grandson, John VII Palaeologus, of Emperor John V Palaeologus were partially blinded in 1374 in response to the emperor’s orders and the meddling of the Ottomans … )

I was hanging up the map with the clues long after my meeting with Askaris when I remembered something beneath my pile of atlases. I’d never picked up this heavy book, assuming that it was just another of my grandfather’s tragicomic purchases. The letters on its spine proclaimed ‘Manassis’. Anxiously I lifted the cover of what looked to me like a box made up of straw. The book was printed in Venice in 1729. On the left side of the thin muslin-like pages was a text in Latin, and on the right side one in Greek. Together with the words of Constantine Manassis, I found passages from two authors whose names I had not encountered anywhere else. My own research told me that twelfth- and thirteenth-century historians had nothing to do with the Palaeologus family. The book seemed to have done time as a file cabinet: I found fifty-year-old business cards from Genoese restaurants stuck in its pages. One yellowing sheet of paper marked off in squares held directions to nightclubs. They were written in ink in old Turkish. In view of the grammatical mistakes, the author was surely my grandfather.

Another, less worn-out sheet of paper contained a pentagram drawn with a ruler. Its only difference from the stars you see on flags was that the lines were elongated to form five isosceles triangles, with the bases delineated by dots. In two of the triangles were numbers. Another two were full of Latin letters, whereas the fifth one contained a sentence written in Arabic. I thought this document was a list of clues or maybe a cheat sheet for roulette. Or was it perhaps an attempt at using gothic letters to enhance the sophistic plot to siphon more money from my naïve grandfather’s pocket?

As soon as I got back to Istanbul from London I pulled out the photocopy I’d made at the Center and compared the handwriting with these documents. It certainly looked like the two pieces of writing had come from the same hand. Now must be the time, I thought, to find out whether that hand belonged to Paul Hackett, for three years the son-in-law in the Ipsilandit Apartments. I’d been conditioned to hate my father as the reason for the dissolution of our family, but I was curious about Paul Hackett simply because of my grandmother’s charge that, ‘Except for your curmudgeonly manners and the pride you got from your mother, you’re the spitting image of your father.’

During my last year at high school, when I was applying to universities around the world, Eugenio once asked, ‘Is it because Virginia was your father’s school that you don’t want to go there?’ I remembered how he slowly shook his head when he saw that I had no idea what school my father had attended. The publishing company Paul represented had gone belly-up; now the only chance I had of connecting with his past lay in whatever clues I could pick up at the University of Virginia, if I could go there. I composed a proleptic consolation for myself against the eerie possibility that the handwriting was his. I had no right at this point to promote my life from mystery novel to television soap opera. I don’t know why, but a sarcastic graffiti at LSE came to mind: ‘Where science ends, prayer begins.’

The night of my return from London, I took the family to dinner at the Müzedechanga. I liked this museum restaurant in Emirgan because the shallow bourgeoisie overlooked it. We took a table with a view of an Ottoman Palace on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. As the second bottle of white wine was being uncorked, I thought I saw a
muezzin
in a turquoise caftan on top of the building’s tower. While looking hopefully around at his environment, would he be moved to recite a classical Bosphorus poem? He slowly disappeared behind a curtain of fog. Had I seen this illusion when I was a student, I would have thought, ‘If there
are
still people who can see the man in turquoise, I wonder how many?’