The Dervish House (20 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The blue house is the last in the row, hard against the chain-link fence. Behind it, judas trees climb the steep valley side. Ayşe rattles the wind chimes by the front door. A face appears from a heart-shaped opening in the balcony screen; a woman of middle age and wild big curling hair, frog-featured, bright eyed.
‘The door’s open, come on up.’ Kuzguncuk famously closed its police station from a dearth of crime.
Selma the urbomancer is dressed in floppy silk pyjamas and toe rings. Cushions and bolsters line three sides of the balcony, a proper divan. Ayşe eases her killing fashion boots off. There is not a breath of wind up on the balcony either. Tea there is, and sesame halva.
‘The Jews, darling. They make the best halva.’ A remnant Jewish community survives in Kuzguncuk. Also Greeks and Armenians. Churches, mosque and synagogue face each other over a crossroads. Selma Özgün’s purpose is to know these things, and why. Urbomancer. City witch. Selma Özgün had been Ayşe’s tutor in Ottoman divan calligraphy but discovered that a better living could be made just walking the city’s streets charting mental maps, recording how history was attracted to certain locations in layer upon layer of impacted lives in a cartography of meaning; delineating a spiritual geography of many gods and theisms; compiling an encyclopaedia of how space had shaped mind and mind had shaped space through three thousand years of the Queen of Cities. Hers was a walking discipline, like the practices of the peripatetic dervishes. It proceeded at the speed of footsteps, which is the speed of history, and at that speed, on those long walks which are the science’s method, connections and correspondences appear. Strange symmetries appear between separated buildings as if some urban continental drift has taken place. Streets follow ancient, atavistic needs. Tramlines track ancient watercourses, the words of gods and emperors are spoken in stone. Human geographies, maps of the heart; fish markets far from the sea, districts in which trades have become fossilized, or die out in one generation only to return decades later. Subtle demarcations; odd transitions between restaurant cuisines: Aegean on this junction, eastern down that alley; cursed sites where no business had ever succeeded though a neighbour two doors down will flourish; addresses where if you live on one side of the street you are ten times more likely to be burgled than on the other. All these things Ayşe has learned on long evening walks with Selma Özgün through the city, seemingly meandering, always rich with hidden purpose and secret intent. The lost peoples of Istanbul fascinate Selma Özgün most; the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians and the Syrians, the Rom and the Rus, the remnants of the old empire, and how the incomers from the hinterland of the new European empire have unconsciously taken up the districts and streets and lives and voices of the displaced ghosts.
Articles and papers Selma Özgün has produced:
A list of Bosphorus wrecks.
Outbreaks of contagious suicides.
The homosexual map of Istanbul, from the days of the Janissaries to the present.
The seemingly spontaneous paths called desire lines that humans track across any newly bared piece of terrain.
Geographic clusters of needs and desires in small ads on online forums.
Evolution in populations of fish that became isolated in lost Roman tanks and cisterns; towards paleness, clamminess, eyelessness.
Today Selma Özgün paints her toenails, puffing with effort as she leans forward to apply the brush; she’s a rurally built woman.
‘I’ve been invited on to a bastarding government think-tank,’ Selma Özgün says, pushing her toes into the light and the air, the better to dry the polish. ‘I tried to tell them they’d made some kind of ridiculous mistake - me, for all that’s holy - but no. A car is being sent, apparently. So I’d better look worth the money they’re lavishing on me. So how’s the gallery doing? Are you still selling those iffy Armenian gospels?’
‘They’re all perfectly genuine.’
‘That’s the problem.’ Selma has never concealed that she thinks Ayşe a smuggler, a looter, a calligraphic mercenary, a Jimmy Choo tomb-raider. ‘So what whim brought you over to Asia this pleasant morning?’
‘I’m trying to find a Mellified Man.’
‘Roc eggs, Prophet’s swords, djinn lanterns; any other impossible things you’d like me to find before dinner?’
‘I’ve taken a commission from a client. He seems to think it’s entirely possible.’
Selma Özgün pulls her shameful feet out of the air and public view. Even in easy-going, accommodating multicultural Kuzguncuk, she is considered an eccentric of English proportions.
‘And who is this client?’
‘Professional confidentiality.’
‘Professional confidentiality be damned. Tell me.’
Selma Özgün finds the idea of skin-to-skin data transfer horrifying so Ayşe writes the client ’s name on a card. Selma Özgün dons reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck.
‘No, nothing, darling. Is he from Iskenderun?’
‘Should he be?’
Selma Özgün sighs.
‘It’ll be the Iskenderun mummy. He pops up every ten, fifteen years or so. You’re not the first; very far from it, my dear. There’s an entire minor industry built up around the Mellified Man of Iskenderun. It’s one of the great legends of Istanbul, up there with the Lost Jewels of Aya Sofya. People have followed entire careers and published libraries of veritable tripe and squandered all-too-real fortunes on the Mellified Man of Iskenderun without any of them getting close to a single whiff of honey.’
‘And I’m just the owner of a fine-art gallery who’s good at the hard-to-get stuff.’
Selma Özgün pours more tea from the brass pot perched atop the double-boiler.
‘According to Ergün Şaş at the Boğazici, the Mellified Man of Iskenderun is Hacı Ferhat, a member of a prosperous Alexandretta mercantile family whose fortunes faded spectacularly through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has evidence of a series of theological disputes and shariat judgements between the resident imam and an itinerant dervish known as the Hairy Man from Cappadocia who fancied himself as a legalist, over the religious status of the Mellified Man. The Hairy Man declared it haram, which was why the Ferhats were suffering the judgement of God. Not only had Hacı Ferhat not been buried properly, in the earth, but he had been laid in a pagan coffin and, most heinous of all, mummification was an indirect attempt to avoid the Day of Judgement. The curse could only be lifted if they freed themselves of that pagan object and returned to true submission to God.’
‘Sounds to me like the Hairy Man from Cappadocia knew a valuable religious artefact when he saw one.’
‘I’m sure the point wasn’t lost on the Ferhats. Anyway, they gave it to the Hairy Man who recited a couple of suras at them, proclaimed them halal and buggered off with Hacı Ferhat. The principle is simple, darling, find the dervish, find the Mellified Man of Iskenderun. Hacı Ferhat’s journey in the company of the dervish and how he found his way to Istanbul, that’s where theories come in. Sunni and Shi’a are nothing compared to the Mellified Man-hunters. They’re a pack of vicious old queens. They get scratchy when their theories are criticized. One man you can trust spends his days down fishing off the Galata Bridge, everyone knows him as Red. Him you can trust; he’s as mad as a lorry but he’s neutral and everyone trusts him. He is Istanbul’s greatest living authority on the Mellified Man of Iskenderun. You can’t miss him but ask for him in my name, otherwise he’ll just talk about fishing. Me, I’m not about truth, I’m about the beautiful lies that make up this city. And speaking of those . . .’
Selma Özgün heaves herself up off the divan. She has grown larger and more luxuriously ungainly since Ayşe met her last at a gallery opening in the autumn with the Storm of the Mating Ram blowing dust across the tiled floor. The days of the great meandering peregrinations across Istanbul may be ending. Selma Özgün’s future pilgrimages will be through memory cities.
Selma Özgün’s ascent of the stairs is heavier than her descent. She sets a small jar of amber fluid on the tea table.
‘Go on.’
Ayşe holds the jar up to the broken light. Tiny flecks and flakes float suspended in the gold. It moves thickly, mellifluously when she tilts the jar. The lid is rusty, the smell confirms her analysis.
‘Is it?’
‘What do you want it to be?’
‘Can I taste it?’
‘If I said it was five hundred years old and I paid a three thousand old New Turkish lira for it, would that change the way it tastes?’
Ayşe unhesitatingly dips a forefinger into the amber fluid and puts it into her mouth.
‘How did it taste?’
‘Like honey.’
‘Or I might have bought it from the corner shop.’ Selma Özgün takes a spoonful and stirs it into her tea. The flecks swirl: flowers fragments, bee scales, flakes and shreds of human flesh. She drains the glass in a toast. ‘Live forever. Well, darling, you’re obviously intent on this and there’s nothing I can do about it. Part of me fears what might happen if you find it. It’s a treasure, a wonder of the world. Legends should stay legends, otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend. But I think that if anyone can, you can, darling.’
A car crunches big and heavy on the dead-end street. Its engine is very quiet. Selma Özgün glances through the pierced woodwork.
‘That’s the man from the ministry, come to take me away. Finish your tea, linger as long as you like, just leave the door. Good hunting my dear.’ She embraces Ayşe, kisses her on each cheek. Her toenails gleam as she waddles down the stairs. Ayşe sits back in the divan and watches Selma bundle into the big car. She will finish her tea, but not linger because she has just enough time and Red is in just the right place to call on him among the fishing lines before she meets Adnan on the quay.
4
‘Have you come for me?’ Georgios Ferentinou asks the driver of the black car at his front step. It has black windows. The driver wears black. Heat shimmers from its black curves. The driver opens the door for Georgios Ferentinou. Clutching his briefcase to his chest, Georgios gingerly pats the upholstery as if he is sitting on living skin, as if his Greek body might defile it. The car is very quiet and smooth running. Georgios looks over his shoulder to see the frontage of the dervish house disappear around the crook in Stolen Chicken Lane. He has lost connection with his small world. The driver indicates right on Inönü Cadessi.
‘Could we go the other way, by the ferry?’ Georgios asks.
The driver flicks the indicator left.
The last black government car Georgios was in had turned right, over the Bosphorus Bridge into Asia.
The room was the colour of a diseased lung. Tobacco smoke had permeated the thick, glossy paint. Georgios had reckoned he could have run a licked fingertip over the wall and it would have come away brown. The three men across the trestle table smoked constantly and rhythmically, an ordered sequence of stubbings out, tapping a new cigarette out of a packet, the scratch of a cheap disposable lighter, the next grinding of a dead filter into the growing pile in the Efes ash tray. It was part of the intimidation, as was the smell; cigarette smoke mingled with the oils and phenols of military paint and a persistent hack of bleach. You could imagine anything being covered up by the bleach: urine, vomit, blood and excrement. It masked everything and concealed nothing.
‘I will help any way I can,’ Georgios had said. The seat was placed far enough away from the table to afford no psychological protection. ‘I want you to know that I am a good citizen.’ The men looked up, frowning, from their typed notes. They studied the sheets, showed lines to each other.
‘Your parents,’ said the man in the middle. The man on the right uncapped a blue ballpoint pen and held it poised over lined paper. Georgios Ferentinou began to feel more afraid than he had ever been in his life, ball-afraid, gut-afraid, bone-afraid; the afraid you will never be free from again.
‘They’ve left the country,’ Georgios Ferentinou said. Ballpoint man began to write. He did not stop for twenty minutes. The men, their room, their constant constant cigarettes, the smell of something concealed and the ever-present fear that his future depended completely on what happened in this room forced the words from Georgios like water from a pump. He had always imagined he would be stout in the face of intimidation, the interrogatee they would never break. It gushed from him. He was entirely in their power. Georgios was too young to have experienced the 1955 riots that would drive half of Istanbul’s ancient Greek population - the last children of Byzantium - from their city. But the stories of that September night were the terrifying folk tales of his childhood: arson, rape, men forcibly circumcised on the street, the beards ripped from priests’ faces, a man carefully smashing pearls one by one with a hammer in a looted Istiklal Cadessi store, blind to worth and beauty alike. The threats of 1980 hid behind a paint-sprayed shop shutter, an excrement-daubed church, an Advice to Quit taped to the door of Georgios’ father’s dental surgery. They took the advice. Spitefully, the new government stripped them of their citizenship.
Now he sat in a cigarette-smoke-coloured room pouring out his heart as if he were in love to three Intelligence men. How many traitors had he met? Well there was Arif Hikmet from the faculty and Sabri Iliç the economics editor from
Hürriyet
and Aziz Albayrak but he was from the State Planning Organization, he couldn’t possibly be a traitor, and Recep Gül the mathematician and Devlet Sezer the novelist. The names went down on ballpoint-pen man’s pad. All day Georgios babbled out answers. At seven o’clock they set down their pens and folded their hands.
Hürriyet
and Aziz Albayrak but he was from the State Planning Organization, he couldn’t possibly be a traitor, and Recep Gül the mathematician and Devlet Sezer the novelist. The names went down on ballpoint-pen man’s pad. All day Georgios babbled out answers. At seven o’clock they set down their pens and folded their hands.
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