What Casanova Told Me (31 page)
Read What Casanova Told Me Online
Authors: Susan Swan
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Psychological
On the third morning in the hills, I saw my chance to save us from the thieves. It came about, if I may humbly say, because Kemal had taken a liking to me and admired the sayings I copied from the Holy Book for him and his wife. The thieves, by now, had grown lazy and unconcerned, believing we could not find our way out of the hills without their help.
So Kemal was agreeable when I asked him to show me the secret path to the ledge, and once we were out of sight he let down his guard and warned me that the food supply was dwindling and that his companions spoke about shooting us so they could return to their homes before the winter set in. Perhaps because I am less than thirty years of age, Your Majesty, I was unable to imagine my own death. If I may humbly say, the end of a man in the middle of his life is a crime in the eyes of God the Almighty—like the sun setting at midday.
In addition, I lived in daily torment because we broke camp often to avoid detection and our constant movement
kept me from the tasks whose sacred nature is well loved by Your Majesty. With each hour that passed, I grew more aware of the nimbleness leaving my fingers. At night, I dreamt that Your Majesty had replaced me with my enemy, Kabasakal Edib Efendi, who rides through my dreams like a stalking horse, ever ready to take for himself the favours you bestow, O Glorious Master.
I have not forgotten how he slyly copied my tale of “The Scribe’s Honeymoon” and offered it as his after Your Majesty asked us to provide stories during the long, rainy weeks last winter. Then my enemy left out the delicate ending I’d provided, foolishly imagining it would evoke Your Imperial Anger. Does Your Majesty recall the tale? One night, around the campfire, while Miss Adams slept, I recited the tale in its entirety to the Chevalier de Seingalt who was delighted by the charm of its ending, which I humbly include here for Your Imperial Pleasure:
I accepted the little invitation that she offered me and began to introduce my reed into her ink pot when she cried: “One-third, that is already too much. Don’t you see that its inner parts have not taken on the imprint before?” It was too late. The head of my instrument was inclined at an angle, the ink flowed, and my sentiments found their satisfaction.
There are very few who understand the soul of a scribe, and I count Your Majesty among them. Our essence is this—if we do not copy God’s words, we do not live.
Ender put down his notepad because Luce was laughing.
“I’m sorry, Ender. The scribe—it’s the same old male preoccupation with size!”
“It
is
a quaint and humorous tale,” Ender agreed. “Not to mention the scribe’s evident lack of interest in his partner’s satisfaction. Ah, that reminds me. I had almost forgotten.” Ender rose and disappeared into his uncle’s apartment. He returned a moment later carrying a little enamelled wooden box.
“It’s a scribe’s pen-box. I found it this morning on my uncle’s desk. He likes to collect old things. And this was in the pen-case,” he said, handing her a postcard. “My uncle must have put it there to show what the man who used such a box looked like.”
The card depicted a scribe seated on the floor of a disorderly room, making brush strokes in a book on his knee. She was touched by the scribe’s fastidious appearance and the delicate way he held his reed pen.
“You see how serious he remains in the midst of chaos? I thought of our scribe’s confession—if he does not copy God’s words, he does not live!”
“Yes, he looks like he takes his job and his faith very seriously.” She set down the card and opened the little pen-case, gently extracting a reed from its innards. The reed pen felt brittle to the touch of her fingers. She quickly put it back. Heaven knows how old it is, she thought. “What did the scribes make their ink from?”
“Out of lampblack usually. And this makes me remember another fascinating thing. The architect of Süleyman the First designed his mosque so air currents brought the soot from all the oil lamps in the building to a special room. The currents deposited the soot on the wall of this room so his subjects could come and scrape it off to use in the making of ink.”
“Are you serious Ender?”
“I’ll take you there one of these days and show you the room. Believe it or not, Luce, they knew a few good tricks back then.”
“You’re making fun of me.” She was quiet for a moment. “Are you religious?”
“I grew up a Muslim but I do not practise any faith. I avoid religious doctrine—as much as possible.” He waved dismissively. “It is the cause of too many troubles in the world.”
“But you have a faith, Ender. Everyone does. I suppose mine is a belief in the importance of keeping records,” she added, remembering Lee’s comment in Athens that, like her mother, she believed in posterity.
“Then my hobby of studying Ottoman calligraphy is my faith. Let me tell you a story that will explain the way writing is seen in Islam. Once, an Islamic scholar found a boy sitting on an oil can manufactured in England.
“‘Get up,’ the scribe told the boy. ‘There are words on the side of the can.’
“‘This is infidel writing,’ the boy said, pointing to the English words.
“‘There are Muslim people and infidel people,’ the scribe replied. ‘But all writing is equally holy.’”
“I like your story,” she said softly.
He gazed at her so warmly that she dropped her eyes, pretending to be absorbed in his uncle’s enamelled box.
“Good. And now allow me to read you the next section of the letter.” He grinned as he picked up his notepad. “Our scribe is a surprising fellow.”
I digress from my purpose, Your Majesty. I was recalling the night when I spoke with the Chevalier about my plan for our escape. We whispered about it to one another after the thieves had slipped into their opium dreams. He is a man it seems of imagination and talent, who has escaped from a few tight corners in his time. He undertook to convince Miss Adams that there was no other course open to us.
I do not know if Your Majesty has heard the story of Bendis. But as the thieves danced about their fire, a figure appeared on a rocky ledge and, as a result of my cunning, our captors were able to behold the goddess.
One by one the idolatrous thieves climbed the steps on the cliff and knelt before her. When it came time for Mahmud’s guard to take his turn, he pulled Mahmud along with him, thinking that if he did not, the young prince might try to use this opportunity to escape. Mistakenly believing I was in awe of their despicable ways, they allowed me, too, to climb up the steps carved into the cliff face, with my hands bound and my head bowed. As we approached the ledge, the moon passed behind a cloud, and we were in darkness. Cursing softly, Mahmud’s guard lit a small torch and pushed the young prince forward. We beheld a naked figure, tall, with arms as well muscled as our palace guards. Yet the idol of the thieves was feminine in all aspects, with ruby lips and eyes the same glorious turquoise as the Bosphorus on summer days. And then the goddess cried out to the awestruck thieves that their poppies would grow again if they freed their prisoners.
Overcome, Mahmud took a step backwards, extinguishing his guard’s torch, and nearly fell from the ledge. As he cried out, a hand grasped his arm, and the idol whispered his name. When the torch was relit and we looked again,
she had vanished. The young prince was deeply troubled and confused by what he had seen, until I told him it was the hand of God Almighty gripping his through the hand of the pagan goddess of Thrace.
I have not told Mahmud the true identity of the Thracian goddess, Your Majesty. But I humbly urge Your Majesty not to overlook the bravery of the Giaour who grasped the prince’s hand in the presence of the thieves. She did not know Mahmud would be among her worshippers, and if I may humbly say, even with the benefit of my coaching, it was terrifying for her to stand unclothed in the moonlight.
The next day, we awoke to find our guns and horses restored to us, and the thieves gone. They left us boiled rice and a map with crude instructions on how to reach Xanthi at the eastern end of the plain.
Evening was falling in Istanbul. Luce and Ender were finishing supper at a little fish restaurant in Kumkapi, facing a small square.
“So it seems your ancestor saved the young sultan-to-be,” Ender said.
“Or the scribe made up the story to impress the sultan. After all, he wasn’t just a scribe, was he? He invented erotic tales to please Selim.”
“You may be right. Ah, look at the sunset, Luce. Isn’t it wonderful?”
In the dying light the spires of minarets gleamed in every direction like magic flutes designed by a wizard to delight and fascinate. She didn’t exclaim on the beauty of the city in case Ender decided she was an impressionable Western tourist exoticizing the East.
They had spent part of the afternoon “Bosphorising,” as he called it. They had walked down the hill from his uncle’s apartment in Sultanahmet and taken a bus to Yeniköy. Then they wandered through the streets near the famous river, stopping to watch the freighters and public ferries gliding up and down the strait. It was warm by the water and an iridescent sheen of light played on the narrow wooden mansions lining the opposite shore.
Now, in the restaurant, Ender pulled out the translation and put the finishing touches on a new section of the scribe’s letter. He had left the document at his uncle’s apartment, but he wasn’t satisfied with his reconstruction of some of the scribe’s flowery sentences. She felt a thrill of pleasure at the sight of him sitting across the table, his eyes, under the thick black brows, bright with interest, his hand moving with slow, careful strokes across the paper. As he worked, the breeze from the Bosphorus ruffled his hair.
Finally, he put down his pen, apologizing for taking so long, and she teased him for being a perfectionist. He told her how he had become interested in calligraphy as a small boy, how an elderly man who knew his father had been a scribe, and how he and Theodore Stavridis used to go to the old man’s house and watch him make his flawless, sweeping strokes with an old reed pen. He had been fascinated with the man’s tales of medieval calligraphers like Shaikh Hamdullah, who died in
1520
. After his death, Ender said, other scribes would bury their reed pens for a period of time near Shaikh Hamdullah’s tomb, hoping the aura of the great calligrapher would be passed on to them through these pens. “If I lived then, maybe I would have been a scribe too. It was an honourable profession.”
“How do you do make a living?” She realized she had been too taken up with his translation of her document to ask him.
“I’m an art historian, only this summer I’m working as a copy editor at a publishing house here.” Ender smiled. “The pay is poor but it gives me time to work on my history of art under the Ottomans. And you?”
“I work at an archives in Toronto.”
“You? An archivist? How romantic!” His smile deepened. “Of course, I don’t precisely know what an archivist does …”
“Librarians store books and archivists preserve evidence … old documents and so forth.” She was aware of sounding a little pompous. “I guess I don’t look like who I am.”
He laughed and they turned to look at the Bosphorus where a fishing boat was vanishing into shimmers of golden light. The sun had set, and above the hilly, wooded shore on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, she noticed a large evening cloud assembling itself into the shape of a man’s head. She picked out a fan-shaped hat and a frock coat. It was the silhouette of a perfect eighteenth-century gentleman.
“Ender! It’s him, it’s Casanova!” she whispered, pointing. Too late. As he turned to look, the cloud broke into fragments across the evening sky. The way our lives change is mysterious, she thought as she watched the wisps of cloud drifting above the hills on the opposite shore. The process is often slow and gentle, like a symphony shifting into another movement. At first, we are oblivious as it carries us along into the next phase of our lives. Then gradually, we grow aware of how it is sweeping us up into the momentum we started ourselves.
“Are you far away, Luce?” Ender asked.
“Not so far.” She smiled. He nodded and picked up his notepad. In his deep, quiet voice, he began to read from his translation.
After twenty-four hours, we came to the old military road through the mountains that leads to Edirne, finally reaching the beautiful gardens and country houses that surround this city. I am tempted to tell of our adventures along the way, the new mosque and public clock Your Majesty commissioned in the square at D.; the strange sight at R. of Christians and Jews entering the mosque together, proving the habits of village life are sometimes stronger than religious differences; and the nuisance of having to rescue the old gentleman’s dog at the fair in U., where Russian furs are sold in abundance.
Your Majesty already knows about our problems with the officers of the customs house on the road outside Pera, and how angry I was when they held us up on the pretext of examining our luggage, falsely claiming that I had forgotten to obtain a
tezkire
in Constantinople when I set out for Belgrade with the young prince. Their impudence was an insult. I was pleased to learn that they were dealt with swiftly. And I accepted with humble gratitude Your Majesty’s gracious suggestion that we should not enter the city in open triumph. Your Majesty is wise to see that public knowledge of Mahmud’s kidnapping could weaken the faith of Your subjects in the Sublime Porte.
Even so, as Your oarsmen rowed us across the Bosphorus, I was not prepared for the sight of four golden Montgolfier balloons soaring up over our heads and floating off down the Bosphorus like dazzling Imperial suns. We were all overjoyed by the demonstration of Your Majesty’s power. But the old gentleman grew increasingly sad the closer we came to Constantinople, for reasons which will soon become clear.
As Your Majesty knows, Giacomo Casanova did not accompany us to Topkapi Palace. He was weary from our journey, and indeed, he still seemed unwell. I found him rooms in Stamboul in a
konak
near the Imperial Gate. There he and Miss Adams rejoiced in the majesty of the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia whose domes rise out of the earth like the swelling chests of giant war-birds. They were delighted by the peaceful beauty of the Sea of Marmara, its waters lightly wrinkled by the passage of eight-oar caiques and fishing vessels.
Alas, there had been a fire in the neighbourhood the day before—one of the old wooden places went up like a tinderbox—and the acrid smell of burning still lingered. If I may humbly say, the late summer rain that God the Almighty sent to douse the blaze had, at the same time, muddied the roads up the hill named after Your glorious ancestor, Sultan Ahmet, whose abode is Heaven, may God’s mercy be upon him. The axles of our coach wheels continually ran aground, and each time it floundered in the mud, barking neighbourhood dogs surrounded us, driving the old gentleman’s terrier into a frenzy.
But when the Imperial Gate loomed in sight, these small nuisances vanished, Your Majesty. We settled the old gentleman in his lodgings, and there he gave Miss Adams a letter to deliver to Nakshidil Sultan.
But as we turned to go, he surprised me by begging her to stay instead.
“Dearest,” she replied, “I have resigned myself to our circumstances. Aimée is expecting your help. I set out to help you find her and I cannot intervene now.”
Giacomo Casanova sank onto a divan, his head in his hands.
“Dear Jacob,” she said. “You have given me so much. When we met, you taught me what
you
believed—that love is your
first
faith. But Aimée is your destination and it is your responsibility to help her. As for me, I have come to realize that my faith is travel. I intend to go around the world twice before I die.”
“Ah, the pupil has outgrown the master!” He rose, with tears on his cheeks. He held her to him and bade her farewell. I saw that she was fighting back tears. There was no reason that I could see for the old gentleman’s misery since they were about to attain the purpose of their journey together.
Why do I bother with an account of a personal matter like the old gentleman’s tears, Your Majesty? So that you will understand that while Mahmud’s homecoming was a celebration for you, it was a sad occasion for the Chevalier de Seingalt. And I will return to this matter in a moment.
Miss Adams was startled when I explained that as a woman she could not go with me to witness Your happy reunion with Mahmud. If I may humbly say, she later thanked me for my descriptions of the Imperial Gate which she said were as good as seeing it with her own eyes—Your Majesty’s dazzling carpets, the wall emblazoned with Your Majesty’s jewels and the lines of turbaned courtiers stretching out in impressive stillness, their eyes averted in deference.
She listened, wide-eyed, to my description of the viziers in the freshest spring green, the chamberlains aglow in scarlet, the ulema and mullahs, adamantine in purple and the deepest of blues. She was especially pleased when I mentioned the French engineers, distinguished by their bare heads and
carmagnoles.
Naturally, I could not go with Miss Adams into the Seraglio to deliver the letter to Nakshidil Sultan. I had arranged for her to go on her own. When I explained that Nakshidil means “beautiful picture embroidered on the heart,” she smiled sweetly. With the deepest piety, and with no wish to seem disrespectful of the garden of Your Majesty’s happiness, I later encouraged Miss Adams to describe her impressions of Your Imperial Palace and the Seraglio. She exclaimed at everything with a wondering heart—the monumental elegance of Your Majesty’s Tower of Justice and the airy grace of Your Pavilions overlooking the Golden Horn. She was delighted to find gardens as well tended as those in the Garden of Paradise. Then she was escorted into the Seraglio by one of the black eunuchs who had been selected to take her to the apartments of Nakshidil Sultan.