The Dervish House (23 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘How long ago was this?’ Leyla asks.
‘Three years.’
‘Did anyone ever ask him where all this money came from so suddenly?’
‘A bit of trading, a bit of property development, migrant worker deals. Every flash bastard was coining it after we joined the EU,’ Uncle Cengiz growls.
Sub-Aunt Kevser clears her throat. Great-Aunt Sezen does not approve of salty language. Leyla is making Cengiz Gültaşli look like a fool in his own living room. She forestalls her next question:
And you believe that?
But she has to ask, she has made him look like a fool.
And you believe that?
But she has to ask, she has made him look like a fool.
‘Whose idea was it to go to this man for a loan?’
‘None of the commercial banks would touch us,’ Yaşar said.
‘What about Aso? Did he not have contacts, or relatives who could have helped?’
‘There are Kurdish regional development funds for high- and emerging tech start-ups. The problem is, they’re based in Diyarbakır.’
‘Are you saying that you didn’t apply for regional funding because you didn’t want to go Kurdistan?’
‘I work with a Kurd. A Kurd is my business partner. And he’s more than that, he’s a friend. What I’m saying is, I didn’t apply because they don’t have the infrastructure. Istanbul is a nano town, Ankara’s a nano town, Diyarbakır’s a . . . town.’
‘I made the decision,’ Uncle Cengiz says. ‘No one would touch the boys, or they wanted impossible securities or too much of the company or the rates they were asking were sinful. Family rates and the option to buy back the fifty per cent when they made proper money. You go to your family first.’
‘He was people trafficking then,’ Yaşar says. ‘Smuggling in migrant workers from the Stans.’
‘Well he’s doing nano now,’ Leyla says. ‘The kitchen was full of plastic vials. Does anyone have any idea who this man is who hijacked the car? The one he owes money to? Can we do a family thing and ask around? Someone must have an idea. It’s important, he said he was going to keep an eye on me. If he’s keeping an eye on me he’s keeping an eye on everyone. He scares me a lot.’
The men at the table mumble.
‘And does anyone know anything about Mehmet Ali? All I’m told is second-cousin Mehmet Ali has half a Koran that gives him half the company: find the Koran. Am I looking for a Holy Koran or am I looking for the man? Is he alive, is he dead, is he in Istanbul, is he in Turkey?’
‘He’s alive,’ says Aunt Betül. ‘I’d know if he wasn’t. It’s a gift.’
‘Well then, help me. You wanted to keep it in the family, then I need the family to help me.’
‘We will help you,’ says Sub-Aunt Kevser. ‘We’re your family, we will always support you.’
From the balcony comes the voice of Great-Aunt Sezen, like the voice of the holy book itself, ‘The Koran wants to be one.’
Let there be no doubt, Ayşe Erkoç is wearing the best shoes on the Galata Bridge. Not that anyone but her will notice; the trams are too relentless; the traffic too dense and male; the tourists too dazzled by the revelation that Istanbul, close with its vistas and wonders, suddenly spreads itself to them against a cloth of gold sunset; the pedestrians too intent on home; the teenagers sneaking out of the informal nano-bazaar that has grown up in the underpasses and tunnels and gun shops at the Beyoğlu end of the bridge too paranoid and inarticulate; the thieves and pickpockets and phoney shoe-shines too focused on their scams to notice a pair of shoes flashing past them. As for the men and very occasional women leaning over the rail, rods bristling the air like whiskers, no shoes could disturb their concentration even if they were on the feet of the Mahdi himself. Ayşe momentarily imagines that the hundreds of rods are oars and the bridge is a fishing-galley, unmooring itself, as the old iron pontoon bridge had been unmoored and sailed upstream to Balatkarabaş, a
dromon
swinging out into the Golden Horn bound for high adventure. Between the stools and the plastic buckets of catch and bait and jars of maggots and mackerel heads and the plastic tool boxes of hooks and flies and the butts of rods resting on the ground are many traps for fine shoes. But Ayşe passes lightly and fleetly. God, they are good, these shoes.
dromon
swinging out into the Golden Horn bound for high adventure. Between the stools and the plastic buckets of catch and bait and jars of maggots and mackerel heads and the plastic tool boxes of hooks and flies and the butts of rods resting on the ground are many traps for fine shoes. But Ayşe passes lightly and fleetly. God, they are good, these shoes.
‘What is the dress for, darling?’ her mother had asked as Ayşe once again stripped and clothed herself in the museum of her childhood.
‘I told you last night,’ she said, pulling on the shoes.
‘You were here last night?’ Ayşe had seen Fatma Erkoç look over to her diligent daughter Günes, who had nodded. ‘Oh yes. Of course you were. Lovely dress. Is it new?’
‘We’re having dinner out on the Princes Islands with Ferid Adataş. He’s a financier, very rich. Multi-millionaire. So, will I do?’
‘You’ll do for a multi-millionaire,’ Fatma had said. Ayşe kissed her lightly on the lips. She left a molecule-thin whisper of lipstick. ‘Oh, darling, no, the shoes,’ she called after her departing daughter. ‘Red is no colour for a lady.’
Red the shoes. Red the man.
You can’t miss him
, Selma Özgün. Red the fisherman, Master of Mellified Men, is dressed head to toe in his titular colour. Red and gold Galatasaray baseball cap, red zip-up jacket, zipped to the neck despite the heat trapped up on the bridge, red track bottoms sagging at ass and knees. Only his shoes fail; fake Converse All-Star sneakers going at the welts and the eyelets, in standard denim blue.
You can get those in red
, Ayşe thinks. He leans against the rail beside the Eminönü-side stairway, cigarette in hand, sea-eyed, gaze drawn out along the line of his rod, beyond where Golden Horn opens into Bosphorus, beyond the passage-ships, beyond Asia. There is nothing in his bucket. There doesn’t need to be. Ayşe wonders how, in her many crossings of the Galata Bridge she could have failed to notice the fisherman in red, so garish among his demure, old-man-coloured colleagues. How many times has she been the fast one, the busy one, the preoccupied one, not raising her head to look? The invisibility of red. You see the colour but not the man.
You can’t miss him
, Selma Özgün. Red the fisherman, Master of Mellified Men, is dressed head to toe in his titular colour. Red and gold Galatasaray baseball cap, red zip-up jacket, zipped to the neck despite the heat trapped up on the bridge, red track bottoms sagging at ass and knees. Only his shoes fail; fake Converse All-Star sneakers going at the welts and the eyelets, in standard denim blue.
You can get those in red
, Ayşe thinks. He leans against the rail beside the Eminönü-side stairway, cigarette in hand, sea-eyed, gaze drawn out along the line of his rod, beyond where Golden Horn opens into Bosphorus, beyond the passage-ships, beyond Asia. There is nothing in his bucket. There doesn’t need to be. Ayşe wonders how, in her many crossings of the Galata Bridge she could have failed to notice the fisherman in red, so garish among his demure, old-man-coloured colleagues. How many times has she been the fast one, the busy one, the preoccupied one, not raising her head to look? The invisibility of red. You see the colour but not the man.
Ayşe finds a place at the rail beside the fisherman. Odours of barbecuing fish rise from the restaurants on the lower deck.
‘Any luck then?’ Ayşe asks.
‘Not a whit. The weather’s all wrong. They’re all staying down where it’s dark and cool. Sensible fish says I.’ Ayşe cannot but wonder if the reason he isn’t catching, the reason all the buckets lined up along the footpath are empty, is because the mackerel have all been fished out long ago. The legendary gold of Byzantium, sunk in the Golden Horn to keep it out of the hands of the conquering Turks, would surely have long since been hooked up piece by piece by generations of Galata fishermen. It’s a recognized Istanbul profession, fishing lives away by the water’s edge.
‘Selma Özgün sends her regards.’
‘And how is the bold Selma?’
‘Working for the government.’
‘I hope they’re paying her a lot.’
‘It’s a government think-tank.’
Red suppresses a smile. His face is thin and dark from elements and seasons, his chin stubbled. His fingers are yellow from cigarettes he never smokes.
Ayşe says, ‘I am . . .’
‘Ayşe Erkoc.’
‘Have we ever . . .’ Ayşe tries to picture him shaved, suaved, suited and scented.
‘No. I’d remember. It’s a small city, is what. We all live in small cities.’
‘Selma says that you’re the man to ask about Hacı Ferhat.’
Red taps the fisherman next to him and points to the lower level. He puts a newspaper on Red’s stool and repositions the tackle boxes. Territory at the rail is fiercely contested and tightly time-shared. It is only as Red passes the giant Turkish flag that covers the stairway and pier head that Ayşe realizes why she has never noticed him on all her crossings of the Golden Horn. A man in red beside a red flag. Hiding in plain sight. He raises a finger to the maitre d’ of the first landward-side restaurant. The maitre d’ flicks a finger; teenage waiters set up a table and two stools by the footpath.
‘These are the worst restaurants in Istanbul,’ Red says. ‘The prices are outrageous, the fish is dreadful and the coffee execrable but I can keep an eye on my line.’ He nods at the weft of lines dropping from the upper level past the restaurant front into the water. Ayşe wonders how he can tell his from the hundreds of others. This may be part of the legend. Coffee is brought, with water and roasted pistachios. Close to the water, in the shade of the bridge, there is respite from the heat. Cool eddies spiral in across the water.
‘Before I tell you anything about the Mellified Man of Iskenderun, I must first ask you to take a look at me. What do you see? Do you see a first class honours graduate? Best in his year? Do you see a promising local historian, a writer for magazines on the secret delights of Istanbul life? You see a tramp and a bum, a man who stands with a line in his hands in all weather, a man with a face like an infant teacher’s handbag, a ghost of the Galata Bridge. You see a wasted life. This is the face, this is the life of a man who pursued the Mellified Man of Iskenderun. Do not ever let the scent of honey seduce you.’
Too late
, Ayşe thinks.
Selma Ozgün already dripped that on to my tongue.
, Ayşe thinks.
Selma Ozgün already dripped that on to my tongue.
‘It’s not for me, it’s for a client.’
‘Has he paid you?’
‘A retainer.’
‘As long as he’s happy seeing his money thrown to the wind and the gulls.’
‘My clients tend not to entertain such worries.’
‘Good then. Here’s how you will waste time, money and happiness on the Mellified Man. If Selma has sent you to me then she’s given you the basics; the Ferhats, the curse and the Hairy Man of Cappadocia. After that, stories diverge, and stories become theories. I mistrust theories. They’re poor foundations for belief.’
Red lights a cigarette. He moves it like a baton, beating the rhythms in his words.
‘Theories on the subsequent history of the Mellified Man of Iskenderun fall into three main categories, all of them geographical. By that I mean, they derive from which way the Hairy Man of Cappadocia turned. Thus we have the Northern School, the Eastern School and the Western School. The Northern School posits that Hacı Ferhat was brought to Trabzon on the Black Sea Coast, and thence to Crimea to the summer palace of the Putyatins, a princely family descended from the former kings of Kiev. Of course, the story is that it wasn’t Rasputin cured the Tsarevich, it was honey from the coffin of Hacı Ferhat. When the Putyatins fled the revolution, they brought the Mellified Man with them in their exile to Istanbul. Depressingly, it’s become tied in with Anastasia-hunters and Tsarevich theorists - if there’s one thing worse than Mellified Man bores, it’s Romanov theorists. Theories. Always these theories.’
Red leans forward, glowers at his fishing line, sits back and takes a nonchalant sip of coffee.
‘The Eastern School posits that the Hairy Man of Cappadocia didn’t come from central Anatolia at all but was a wandering dervish from Persia who had temporarily joined one of the anchorite communities around Nevşehir. He went back east with the coffin. This is where the story gets untidy, which interests me because real history is never tidy. The Northern School is one consistent theory, albeit embellished. The Eastern School is an entire bouquet of theories. Most agree that the dervish lost the coffin - died of disease, was assassinated, set upon by robbers, strangled by a rival, strangled by a lover, gambled it away. Some say that a renegade order of Alevis took it and that it passed down family lines and it only came to Istanbul in the 1970s when people started to migrate from the east en masse. Some say that it passed into the hands of Syriac Christians, or the Armenian Church, or older, primeval forms of Christianity like Nestorianism. Others say that the Kurds murdered the holy man, stole his coffin and took it to what is now Iraq to use as a centrepiece of a blasphemous Yazidi rite. Every ten years they draw off some of the honey and use it to cure ills and work wonders. People come from all over, both sides of the border. In this version the coffin only came to Istanbul in 2003, after the American invasion, and the Kurds brought it because it was the last place their enemies would look for it, in the Turks’ greatest city. Another version has it that CIA special operations agents bought it in later 2001. They’d been working up there on the border for years - the place was a virtual dollar economy. It got impounded at Izmir when we refused to let the American fleet load and resupply just before Operation Restore Freedom. Customs has it, allegedly. Now, I particularly like these stories because I like the way that fable evolves in parallel with real world events. Unfortunately, I can’t give them any credence. They’re too public, and the Customs Secretariat is way too corrupt for the Mellified Man of Alexandretta to lay undisturbed in some warehouse for twenty-five years. Hacı Ferhat’s been to Mecca - again - and Medina and St Catherine’s monastery on Sinai and Jerusalem and even as far south as Ethiopia, to Axum, where he’s been conflated with stories about the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. You’ll note there isn’t a Southern School; there used to be southern stories but they merged with the Eastern interpretation about fifty years ago. He’s even been as far east as the Fire Temple in Baku.’
Red flicks the burned-down cigarette end into the water and lights another. A ferry sweeps through the gap between the lower tiers. It’s good to be close to water, close to ships, low down on the waterline, Ayşe thinks. It’s a fresh way to see. Were she wearing less formal shoes she would kick them off to curl her feet up beside her on the seat. This is story hour.
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