Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (27 page)
Silence around the table. The waiters take the opportunity to whisk away the untasted spoons of palate cleansers and deftly serve the final course.
The sound in the alley is tremendous, alien, terrifying. Necdet comes down the steps on to Vermilion-Maker Lane and it’s a physical force. It pushes him back into a shuttered shop doorway. Hızır is master of djinn and it is not beyond the old Green Saint to have some mother-of-djinn the size of a cloud squatting over the dervish house. He presses his cheek to the red-painted plaster. The sound creeps along the wall, waxes and wanes, eddying on the stifling air through Eşkiköy’s labyrinth of alleys and fountain-fed squares, reverberates from the steel shutter and Coke machine chained to the wall and the balconies leaning close over Vermilion-Maker Lane. It’s huge, it’s strangely familiar, it’s hair-raising. It’s real.
Hızır is not a tame saint. The Green Man took everything, every memory, every grace and vice and gave him back something he now remembers as his life. He burned his sister. Ismet took him to the dervish house to save him from his family.
‘What do you want me to do?’
The Green Saint had closed his eyes and turned his face away. Necdet thinks he may have been crazy then. Corridor opened on to corridor, tunnel on to tunnel, drawing him ever deeper, ever darker into vaults and cisterns older than any of the three cities whose names stood over these stones. He found himself by a pipe, thick through as his body, running from darkness to darkness. It thrummed beneath his hand, and when he pressed his ear to it he imagined he could hear through the tick insulation the scream of speeding gas. What was real, what was fantasy, what was the world between; he could no longer tell. When Mustafa finally tracked down the banging on the never-opened firedoor and broke the security seals, he found a Necdet dirty dusty bloodied but his face was as radiant as the Prophet’s. He was touched, he was changed.
The noise booms louder, focused and amplified by the alleys as Necdet comes cautiously up Vermilion-Maker Lane. Adem Dede Square is filled with people. Most are women in headscarves with a scattering of young men with leather jackets, smart hair and polished shoes. They all face the dervish house. Necdet sees Ismet’s head above the headscarf-horizon. He must be standing on the gallery steps. Now he picks out the rest of his brother’s study-group. Their jackets are snappy, their shoes smart. They’re a well-dressed tarikat, of men with jobs. A high-toned expectant murmuring rises from the crowd. This is the sound that has haunted him through Eşkiköy.
Bülent and his enemy Aykut watch from their respective doorways. Tables and chairs are safely folded away. The Greeks who drink tea at Bülent’s have wisely taken themselves elsewhere. Aydin closes up his news and lotto ticket stall, apologizing his way around the women in headscarves and respectable coats. The last of the day’s simits, stale now, feed the pigeons. The neighbourhood watches from their balconies. Even the deaf kid’s family have thrown open the shutters and look cautiously down, wary of being seen. There’s the kid, peeping over the railing. Necdet looks up; there’s the boy’s pet robot, the bird, circling over the square. Some windows are shut. The fat old Greek, of course. The Georgian woman, who everyone thinks is a prostitute. Does he see a flicker of movement at the curtains, gone as soon as he focuses on it? Details. It’s like he has been given new senses. The world is sharp, the world is detailed, the world is connected. Words are painted on the gallery door. Something idolators. Yet there is the girl from the gallery, the one whose karin he saw underneath the earth, at the back of the crowd. She mustn’t want the crowd to know she works there. Necdet quite fancies the woman who owns the gallery. He likes the boldness of her boots and skirts. She would be classy and make a lot of noise.
A movement to his right. The crowd parts as the women pack into a denser configuration. Hızır is there, perched on the lip of the fountain. In the same instant the gallery girl turns and sees him. Her point and simultaneous shout silence the square. Everybody turns towards him. Necdet doesn’t try to run. This is why Hızır is waiting for him here in all of Istanbul. You can’t outrun the will of God.
Ismet pushes through the crowd. His tarikat boys are close behind him, they form an honour guard around Necdet and guide him between the bodies to the porch of the art gallery.
Burn Idolators
is what’s written in silver paint. Heads faces, heads faces, heads and faces and scarves. On the balconies, more faces. No scarves.
Burn Idolators
is what’s written in silver paint. Heads faces, heads faces, heads and faces and scarves. On the balconies, more faces. No scarves.
‘Listen, listen, listen!’ Ismet shouts raising his arms. ‘God has given us a great gift, right here in Eşkiköy. In our days, in our own streets, God is still at work. I followed God and set up his study-group here, to bring justice - proper justice, God’s justice, to Eskiköy, and God has blessed our work. He has given us a gift: a shaykh, our own shaykh!’
The deaf kid at Apartment Four is almost climbing out of the balcony. His mother has hold of the back of his football shirt. From his place at the fountain Hızır watches. He might be amused. Ismet keeps his arms up. Necdet is expected to say something.
I’m not a shaykh, I’m a skunkhead. I’m not a saint, I’m a slacker. I’m not a Sufi, I’m a sister-torcher. I am the Black Sheep.
Necdet remembers where he saw this before. The crowd on Necatibey Cadessi, the wall of faces as he fled from the police drones, the man in the white T-shirt who was videoing him, just before he turned and saw the woman’s head with the light pouring from it.
Hızır casts his eyes upwards. Necdet sees the smoke pour into Adem Dede Square, hears by djinn-sense the mosquito shriek of micro-fan engines.
‘Get out of here!’ Necdet shouts. ‘The police, the police are coming. They’ve sent robots!’
The headscarved faces look up as the faint smoke of swarmbots clusters together into insect-scale crowd-control drones. The crowd breaks up into fleeing women, hands over their heads and faces, protecting themselves as the police-bots buzz and strafe, hunting for exposed skin to tag with their RFID-seeded dye sprays. Headscarves flutter to the ground, long modest street coats are cast off, the women shedding anything that might have picked up the betraying orange stain of an RFID-tag, that could draw the police to their front doors. There’s a different noise in Adem Dede Square now, a high-pitched panicked shrieking. The square is deserted in seconds. The balconies are empty, the shutters locked tight. Cobbles, walls, shop fronts, cars are polka-dotted orange with tagging-dye. Ismet drags Necdet away as a salvo of dye pellets splat against the gallery shutter.
Burn Idolators
; orange-flecked silver. The swarm of insect-machines spirals high into the air above Adem Square and explodes into its component smart-dust. Sirens approach. Necdet glances over his shoulder as the Tarikat boys hustle him down Güneşli Sok. Hızır is gone. In his place a solitary robot creeps like a spider in a relentless nightmare from beneath the lip of the bowl and scurries up the orange-pocked wall. It’s not the police; it’s not the deaf boy’s bird-toy. It’s an alien watcher.
Burn Idolators
; orange-flecked silver. The swarm of insect-machines spirals high into the air above Adem Square and explodes into its component smart-dust. Sirens approach. Necdet glances over his shoulder as the Tarikat boys hustle him down Güneşli Sok. Hızır is gone. In his place a solitary robot creeps like a spider in a relentless nightmare from beneath the lip of the bowl and scurries up the orange-pocked wall. It’s not the police; it’s not the deaf boy’s bird-toy. It’s an alien watcher.
Adnan has a theory about cigars. Cigars are the amputated cocks of your foes. They are the businessman’s equivalent of the cum-spurt of champagne on the Grand Prix podium. I chew up your penis, enemy.
The Budaks had barely outwaited coffee. The caleche rattled off down the hillside at the fast-trot-verging-on-a-canter. The Güneys took their leave, Güney tight and over-formal, his wife smiling, twinkling even. Did Adnan hear her whisper,
Tremendous fun, darling
, to Ayşe? Mrs Adataş was skilfully guiding Ayşe, the general and his wife to her collection of Byzantine mosaics in the day room. The result was imminent. Nothing could be read. Everything hung suspended. Adnan felt no fear. ‘Come on back out to the terrace,’ Ferid Adataş said.
Tremendous fun, darling
, to Ayşe? Mrs Adataş was skilfully guiding Ayşe, the general and his wife to her collection of Byzantine mosaics in the day room. The result was imminent. Nothing could be read. Everything hung suspended. Adnan felt no fear. ‘Come on back out to the terrace,’ Ferid Adataş said.
The night was still and incredibly, infinitely clear. Everything seemed poised, on the edge of falling. Adnan felt terribly terribly afraid, terribly terribly alive; present in every cell, every flake of skin and hair. The slightest movement, the least breath, the very touch of the lightest thought would shatter this moment of pure being.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you got an invitation to dinner,’ Adataş said.
‘What, who?’
‘Pinar .’
‘You think?’
‘Oh, I think. She loved you. She’s an old Trot but she respects someone with an opinion. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as they can argue it. Nothing she likes better than a good row. All that poking and prying was to test if you were solid or just Ozer corporate balls. You’ll get an invitation to dinner. She’s got a fabulous cellar. She won’t be so easy on you next time. She’ll take you apart. No, she’s wonderful fun, Pinar. Her husband now, he’s a sanctimonious shit. Have a cigar.’
That was when Adnan knew he had it. It felt like every star in the sky was falling through him, a vertigo, a rush of fire.
The smoke spirals down into the hollows of Adnan. This is the greatest thing he’s ever felt.
‘Your hand, Mr Sarioğlu.’ Data jumps from palm to palm, coded on to the natural conductivity of the flesh. ‘That’s your deal memo.’
‘I’d like to take a look at it.’
‘I’d be offended if you didn’t.’
Adnan deftly slips the ceptep out of his breast pocket and behind his ear. The writer drops over his eye.
‘Due date the sixteenth.’
‘Take it or leave it.’
‘Twenty-five per cent.’
‘You’d expected more.’
‘As you say, that’s the contract . . .’ But it’s the full two million. It’s everything he asked for.
‘How soon can I draw down the credit line?’
‘Just as soon as you get this back to my lawyers with an account.’
Accounts are not Adnan’s terrain. He is Ultralord of the Deal. Kemal in the back office will set up the nested folders of paperwork, the payment schedules and transfers and dummy account names.
‘It’s not securitized.’
‘Hedging is what I do, son. What’s two million here and there between me and Özer? It’s a good bet. A thousand per cent return? We’re not standing on my terrace here because I didn’t know a good gamble when I saw one. Your figures check and your contacts are legitimate - as legitimate as this kind of business allows. I told you I was impressed with your balls - passing off hot Iranian gas - and I value Pinar as a judge of character but the bottom line makes sense. Everything follows from that.’
A hollow knock of steel shoes on cobbles; the caleche has returned, the horse in its fringed eye-wear stands with one fore-hoof raised.
‘That’ll be for you. The general and Mrs Çiller are staying. They’re old friends. Don’t think me an ungenerous host, but you do have to work in the morning.’ Ferid Bey laughs like a detonation and claps Adnan mightily on the back. ‘And please don’t throw the cigar butt. We’re on a brush fire alert.’
In the hall, Adnan and Ayşe exchange the final codes of the evening.
Ayşe: hands upturned in a small plea.
What
?
What
?
Adnan: a small clench of the fist.
Yes
.
Yes
.
He is quite quite lost. These are the streets, the sudden flights of steps and darting alleys, the hidden gardens and lost cemeteries, the shops and small lycées and slimy drinking fountains of Georgios’ childhood world, yet he stands paralysed in the middle of Soğanci Sok with the girls huddling together in their short summer skirts and bright shoes and the boys pushing past with their dangerously-gelled hair and sleeveless brand-name T-shirts. Barkers call:
Come and have a real good time in our bar
. Neon and plastic signs, awnings and street tales, young men smoking fashionable-again şiş; tiny gas-powered citicars and mopeds. A dozen musics assail him, snatches and snippets of private beats. Georgios walked up this street every morning for six years with his bag on his back like a soldier’s pack on the way to Göksel Hanım but the buildings look different, their faces are harsh concrete not the soft, too-flammable wood of old Cihangir. The lights hang wrong, the gutter down the centre of the narrow street is too deep, there should be a narrow sok with a low green double door at the end of it; everything is cartographically correct but nothing is familiar.
Come and have a real good time in our bar
. Neon and plastic signs, awnings and street tales, young men smoking fashionable-again şiş; tiny gas-powered citicars and mopeds. A dozen musics assail him, snatches and snippets of private beats. Georgios walked up this street every morning for six years with his bag on his back like a soldier’s pack on the way to Göksel Hanım but the buildings look different, their faces are harsh concrete not the soft, too-flammable wood of old Cihangir. The lights hang wrong, the gutter down the centre of the narrow street is too deep, there should be a narrow sok with a low green double door at the end of it; everything is cartographically correct but nothing is familiar.
Georgios stops a pizza delivery boy on his way to his moped. He holds out the hand-drawn map Constantin gave him that morning at the çayhane.
‘I’m trying to find Maç Çok.’
Pizza boy takes the map and frowns at it.
‘Three up on the left and then down past the April Mosque.’
‘Thank you.’
The boy has removed the muffler from his moped engine; when he drives off, pizzas stacked and bungied on the parcel shelf, the roar is like gunfire among the windowed walls. Still Georgios stands petrified on Soğanci Sok. A few steps and he will be there. On her streets, at her door. It’s all too sudden, too quick, too close.
Every Tuesday the New Thinking Group met at the Karakuş meyhane in Dolapdere. Monday was poets, Wednesday was experimental film-makers, Thursdays was singer-songwriters with proper musicians on Friday and Saturday but Tuesday was New Thought: politics, philosophy, feminism, critical theory. Economics.
‘Darling, you really have to have this young man,’ Meryem Nasi had said as she disengaged Georgios from the coterie of politicians and pundits on her terrace and dragged him to where Ariana Sinanidis kept her court of dazzling young men. ‘Most brilliant economic thinker in thirty years. Shake up all those dreadful tired old lefty dogmas, what?’
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