The Dervish House (18 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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The panic leaps to become absolute, gibbering, paralysing; the panic of total loss and total helplessness. Then Necdet hears the music of a single flute. He turns in his swivel chair to identify the source of the notes. Djinn stream through the air, like smoke or water running away through subtle, unseen courses. Djinn constantly changing shape and size, from motes of dust to birds or scurrying things swimming in air to veils and scarves of twisting silver fire. Creatures from beyond the world, more than living. He knows he is meant to follow. Mustafa, still rapt in argument with Suzan, does not notice when Necdet slips out of his work cube and goes with the flow.
The stream of djinn slips under the utility room door. Of course. It eddies around the leaning brooms and mops, the buckets and dustpans, the squat cylinder of the floor-polishing robot which hasn’t worked since Mustafa tried to turn it into a self-guided cocktail bar. Under another door to the electricity meter cupboard and fuseboards. The energies contained here excite the djinn; they boil and deliquesce, shifting from vapour to fluid in gushes and plumes of silver but Necdet carefully follows their course to an air-conditioning grille low in the wall. The spiritual fluid pours through the mesh. All the while the flute calls.
The vent is fitted with plastic pegs, cheap like everything else; they give at the first tug. Necdet pushes head and shoulders into the dark passageway beyond. There’s a cold draught with a current of old stone and deep earth. The river of djinn flows past him. They feel like cat fur against his body. This is thrilling and heady and the only thing Necdet can do is go forward. Lights flicker on and he’s in a man-sized service shaft, lined with ducts and cables, pipes and wiring. The service way leads steadily downward; the smells of old earth and a more ancient damp grow stronger and condensation glistens on the walls and drips from the pipes. It’s cold. The djinn foam and gush around his feet like rapids. At the end of the tunnel is a door; the djinn force themselves under it like water through a mill race. The door opens to his touch. Beyond is darkness and age. Blinking in the deep dark, senses more intimate than sight tell Necdet he is in a place from another age. Stone. A drip of water. Moving air tells him there is a dome over his head. Echoes suggest pillars. He realizes it’s some time since he heard the flute. The djinn pool at his feet. Photon by photon his eyes adjust to the light. He is in a pillared stone vault. The exact dimensions are beyond him, the darkness reaches beyond his seeing, there are pillars all the way. Alcoves, domes, cupolas above his head. This is a deep place, this is an old place. Now he begins to make out an object in front him, massive, low, sculpted. It reminds him of the fountain in the dervish house garden where he goes to sit and smoke. His memories are coming back. With that moment of recognition comes another: a figure sits on the coping of the fountain.
Necdet starts, then, as the djinn flow towards the sitter’s feet, gathering and for the first time giving light, a tremendous peace fills him. The robes, the long beard, the green eyes of deepest penetration, the green turban wound loosely around the head. How can Necdet be afraid of him? He is the oldest one, the Green Saint, older than Allah, older than God’s Christ and his mother Mary, older than Yahweh. If he now wears the green robe of a Sufi it is because Islam took the colour of life from him. His is the green of the floods of the Tigris and Euphrates, of the Anatolian spring of Hattuşa and Çatalhöyük. He is Hızır, Khidr, Al-Khidir, saint, prophet and angel. He is water, he is life. He is the help from beyond comprehension; his the hand that pulls you back from in front of the tram, that inflates the airbag, that pulls you out of the air crash. He is the obstreperous parking lot attendant, the obstructive security official who makes you miss that doomed plane in the first place.
But yet Necdet is afraid. Hızır is the unpredictability of water, the lawlessness of a higher law. Hızır can bless, Hızır can kill, he is creation and destruction, the drought and the flood. Now he turns his green eyes on Necdet.
Recite.
Recite what?
Necdet asks. But he already knows the answer to that. Any medrese-trained boy knows that. He learned that in the Friday school where he sat with Ismet, reciting until he knew it like he knew his own heartbeat. Afterwards he would go with Ismet to the big dusty pitch with the goalposts sagged in the middle. Ismet played. Ismet was a good central defender. Necdet sat on the dirt bank minding the jackets and watching the big truck trains rolling up the expressway to the bridge. Necdet was never any good at ball games. He couldn’t see the point of them. He learned to recognize the alphabets on their taut-buckled sides and know that this truck came from Russia and that one from Syria and that other one from Georgia and this last one of all, well, that’s easy because it’s in Arabic, God’s language. That was another thing he couldn’t see the point of: sitting on a Friday afternoon on the floor nodding to those words in God’s language. Why couldn’t God just talk like everyone else? If he was God he could say it as well in Turkish as Arabic. He would blink out the windows at the sun in the dusty sky and then one day, without thinking, almost without realizing it, he found his hand was up.
‘What’s the point of this?’
The other boys had been shocked and angry but the imam was a patient man, quietly addicted to televised sport.
‘The point is that someday this will be asked of you. It may be tomorrow, it may be at the end of the world when you stand before God, but asked it will be, and you will have to answer. And what shall you say?’
Another memory. The djinn shift at the feet of the Green Saint, casting long shadows over the dome of the old cistern. Again, Hızır says,
Recite
.
The assault of memory reels Necdet backwards.
He hears the point-blank bang of nailguns, the rev of the chainsaw cutting roof timbers. All the uncles had turned out to help build the house. They began at sunset, by the law. Concrete blocks and mortar. Row upon row. Plastic windows from the double-glazing centre: this was no slum. Towards midnight the roof went up, the uncles holding the bucking plastic sheeting against the rising wind, while Necdet’s father picked his way carefully over the chainsaw-cut joists, waterproofing the tie-bolts with his sealant gun. He took his time for there is no house without a roof but he worked with one eye on the horizon. If the roof was raised before sunrise, no one could take the house away from you. That was the law. Under highway intersections, at the back of industrial parks, on eroded hillsides and flash-flood valleys, whole neighbourhoods sprung up like flowers after rain. Townships - gecekondus - built on the law and hope.
The women sat in the cars and made food and tea in the gas cooker that would be proudly wheeled into the new kitchen. They talked, they laughed, they listened to the radio and kept an eye on the children. The memory is so old Necdet is not sure if it’s something he has been told that has turned into a memory. He is certain he was very small. New sister Kizbes was even smaller, bouncing on her mother’s lap in the back of the pick-up. Ismet, only two years older but big enough for men’s work; running up with boxes of nails for the gun or new tubes of sealant or cleaning mortar from trowels. Necdet wanted that; the attention, the feeling of being useful. He saw the nailgun lying by the back of Uncle Soli’s pick-up and lifted it up the night sky.
Dang!
he went,
dank-an-dang-a-dank
, the banging of big nails right into things. It was a beautiful thing, the nail gun held up against the sky glow of great Istanbul; the noise it made, the way it left things permanently, unalterably changed, two things that had been apart forever joined.
‘Hey, hey stop him, get him away from that thing!’ Uncle Soli had shouted too slow too late, for Necdet rolled over on to his side and with a dang! pulled the trigger and sent a ten centimetre nail clean through Aunt Nevval’s foot into the dusty ground.
Houses terraced along the hillside, plastic roofs one by one replaced by red tile as the gecekondus became official suburbs. The dazzling aluminium dome of the new mosque down at the side of the expressway, built, like the attendant religious school, with Saudi money. Aunt Nevval coming slowly up from the dolmuş stop on the stick she needed ever after the nail gun, the baptism of the home, for Necdet understood even then that no house can stand without blood. Before the dervish house, this was where he lived, this hot, dusty ex-urb strung like a hundred others along the expressways into Anatolia. Istanbul was a rumour here; where the trucks came from, where the buses and dolmuşes went. Başibüyük, home and heart.
‘What is this?’ Necdet shouts. ‘Is this true, is this real, what is this? Get out of my head green man! Get out, just get out, get out, get out!’
Hızır holds Necdet’s glare, raises a finger.
Recite.
The burning girl comes plunging out the house into the street. The light polyester of her sports top is perfect fuel: the burning fabric drops blazing, smoking drips of molten plastic on to her jeans, her shoes. Her hands are held up, flapping, beating at herself. She shrieks like nothing Necdet has ever imagined coming from a human throat. She is wreathed in flames now; the screams stop, choked for oxygen. Kizbes falls to the ground but the men are there, rushing from their tea, rolling her in the dirt. Neighbour of the left Etyen has the fire-extinguisher from his pick-up, Semih the neighbour of the right calls an ambulance though Başibüyük is far from hospitals and emergency services. Now the women have Kizbes, cutting away her shirt where polyester has fused to skin. Her cries are terrible. Her hair is half burned away. To Necdet, watching from the kitchen window, it is one of the most interesting things he has ever seen. Now Necdet’s father comes pounding up the hill from the gas station where he washes buses; he stops only a minute at the huddle of women around Kizbes, then runs into the house and drags Necdet out into the light. His father and all the men from the neighbourhood kick Necdet down the hill. He breaks free from their hands and runs straight out into the highway. Trucks blare their horns, cars swerve. A bus grazes his heel. He can see the looks on the faces of the passengers. Speed and insanity get him to the other side of the high-speed steel. Some of the bolder Başibüyük boys risk the highway - the bully boys, the ones who have always despised Necdet - but by now Necdet is way up into the maze of houses and alleys on the south side of the valley.
‘Why are you showing me this?’
Hızır fixes Necdet with his gaze.
‘Why are you looking at me? I didn’t do it!’
Djinn-light eddies around the Green Saint’s feet.
‘I didn’t do it. It was an accident she was smoking she dropped a cigarette.’
Hızır raises an eyebrow
‘She was bugging me, right? She was bugging me, just standing there and getting in the way, I couldn’t get away from her. Wherever I went she was there. She wanted some stuff and I didn’t have any but she wouldn’t listen to me when I said I didn’t have any.’
But he hadn’t felt anything. Numb; he was numb. He had watched Kizbes go up in a wreath of flame with remote, intellectual dispassion. Her cries were just the sound of breaking machinery. It was seen through glass, on a screen, a news report from a distant battle front. His own father had kicked him to the ground, kick after kick after kick, fighting through the other men and boys to get a kick in. Necdet knew terrible damage was being done to his body but he felt nothing. He had borne the whole thing with a mild smile on his face. He hadn’t thrown the cigarette on to Kizbes because she was bugging him, because she had made him angry. He felt no anger, he felt no impatience; he felt nothing at all. She had merely been the closest thing to hand when he wondered how well a woman might burn.
Necdet hid four nights at the house of his dealer. Ümit’s parents knew him, the man who set his sister on fire. Even Ümit seemed wary of him but he knew that a man who set fire to his sister would as casually inform on him to the police if he was refused hospitality. The fifth day Ismet - good, mosque-going, committed - came with a deal of his own. He would take Necdet with him to the European side, keep him in the care of the Islamic order he was setting up with a few like-minded brothers he had met online. Get him away from the downward ramp of slacking, small time cannabis dealing, sitting on a stool by the front door staring down at the highway. Give him order, stability, quiet, a sense of right and the divine. It was that or live like a wolf up in the hills. There was no welcome for Necdet back in Başibüyük. Kizbes would live. She was in the hospital. The imam was holding a fund-raiser. The hair would never grow back the same; she could cover that with a wig but not the glossy burn scars on her face. She would probably never marry.
Hızır the Green Saint lowers his finger and looks away.
‘There’s something wrong in my head!’ Necdet cries. He beats his temples with his fists. ‘Get in there get in there get in there! Why can’t I feel anything? There’s nothing there, it’s just wood. Nothing real.’
Hızır looks back. The smallest, holiest, most unworldly of smiles creases his mouth.
But you do feel. Anger and fear and numb and dazed, confused beyond belief half the time and the other half out of your head seeing things other people wouldn’t dare imagine. The most real thing that has happened to you, Necdet Hasgüler, is this Sufi saint and his legion of djinn. Hızır, help from beyond the world, but also perilous in his gifts. He’s offered you a childhood. Here it is, take it, but it’s a horror. A monster child. Now you must ask yourself, can you trust it? Is it a true childhood, or just what you think you remember? Old memories or new ones? In this old stone cistern, close to the waters which are his heart and his blood, is Hızır turning him into something different, a new Necdet?

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