The Dervish House (28 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘An economist?’ Ariana said it as she might have said,
torturer
.
torturer
.
‘Experimental economics,’ Georgios apologized. ‘Evidence based economics.’
Riot troops were disembarking from trucks and forming into columns up in Taksim Square, though Georgios could not see anyone abroad more dangerous than home-bound salary men. In the weeks since the generals had ousted Süleyman Demirel, random troop deployments had been the order, the better to sow a sense of omniscience, that the army knew its opponents’ minds before they knew them themselves. He scurried past the phalanx of riot shields, head dipped. Martial law scared him.
The Karakuş café was a smoky brown bar with old photographs of French intellectuals and Turkish poets on the walls. A new, large portrait of Atatürk hung behind the bar; beside it a scarcely smaller picture of General Kenen Evren. There were tables crowded together with a mishmash of chairs, there was a raised dais at one end with a microphone. Loud English ska music played from a DJ booth in a broom closet. The bar was crowded, all the tables full. Young men in German combat jackets and denims, young women in tapering jeans and cavalry-style jackets pressed against the walls. The cigarette smoke was solid. Georgios faltered as he opened the door and every head turned to him. He would likely have run but Ariana Sinanidis detached herself from the table nearest the stage - more handsome, intent young men - to welcome him.
‘You made it, come on in. There’s a seat for you up here. We’re all dying to hear what you have to say.’
Self conscious in his suit, Georgios nervously drank coffee which only made him more edgy, and oversmiled at Ariana’s attempts to bring him into the conversational circle, which was all about the coup and who had been disappeared and how the army had finally turned on its Grey Wolf stooges who had been stupid to have ever believed they were invulnerable but what could you expect from the Grey Wolves and the CIA was behind it, and their Deep State running dogs.
Georgios heard his name called from the DJ cupboard and he stepped up through the sparse applause on to the stage and blinked into the tiny spotlight fixed to the ceiling that turned the cigarette smoke into a wall of luminous blue and it was all of a sudden deadly deadly quiet. He started stammeringly, shuffling his careful notes on the postcards, reaching for words. The room was far away, the room was cold and closed. Then the passion kindled in him and the cards in his hand went ignored and he talked about what he had found in economics and how he was trying to take the subject out of the dead sea of mathematical modelling into an empirical, experimental science - a true science of hypothesis and proof. It was the most human of sciences because it was the science of need and value and cost. He talked about the new subject of non-linearity, of how mathematical predictability can cascade into randomness, into chaos; and Thomian catastrophes, where one state of behaviour suddenly collapses into its antithesis. He talked about the irrationality of rational actors and experiments in economics, of expectation and paradox and non-zero sum games. He talked about his hopes for a future economics that more closely modelled the human world than modelling itself, that nestled into a new roost between psychology, sociology and the emerging physics of non-linear systems. He talked well past the ten o’clock curfew. He thanked them for coming, he thanked them for their attention.
The questions started. He was deep in an argument with a Marxist with a Che beret on the inevitability of class war when the police came in through the door. Tear-gas grenades rolled between the chair legs leaking vapour. The door came down, the police came in with riot shields and sticks and gas masks. A girl in a Lady Di frill-necked blouse went down spraying blood from a hideous head wound. Patrons stormed the stage. The Marxist bravely turned on the assailants, chair raised. A policeman knocked him off balance with his shield and smashed him to the ground with his heavy black riot baton. CS gas turned the air opaque. There was constant screaming. Outside, a tinny, distant voice shouted unintelligible orders through a bullhorn. The surge pushed Georgios hard against the wall. Photographs of Sartre and de Beauvoir cracked in their frames behind him. The audience stormed the bar, desperate for the back entrance. A dull roar came from the kitchen area, the crowd checked momentarily. The police were at the back too. In the second of indecision, Ariana dived through the crowd, seized Georgios by the hand and hauled him toward the DJ booth.
‘There are stairs up to the roof.’
She pulled him up three storeys of boxes and stores and decaying rooms to burst out on to the gently sloping asphalt. Others followed, seeping away between the water tanks and television aerials, roof to roof to roof. Ariana did not seek safety but went to the parapet to look down into the street.
‘They’ll see you,’ Georgios said.
‘I don’t care.’
Army trucks and vans blocked the street in each direction, their backboards down, their doors open. Soldiers wrestled men from the meyhane into the trucks; hands cuffed behind them, bent over, head down. Up and in they went. It was done with skill and ease. They went quickly and quietly. The women went to the vans. They were allowed to stand up, but they shrieked and shouted more. Army dogs on short leashes barked, lips curled, at them and that quieted them. The women who went to the Karakuş café had heard of females stripped and thrown into a room with specially trained rape dogs. You could only kill yourself if that were to happen. You could never be clean after that kind of defilement. Four soldiers carried the Marxist with the Che beret. His head hung loosely, like the Christ taken down from the cross. Blood gleamed on the cobbles. There was a light in every apartment window both sides of Şirket Sok. Silhouettes behind the shutters and net curtains.
‘Go on, I see you, I see you!’ Ariana raged at the lighted windows. ‘Tell what you see, I dare you, tell what you see. But will you? Oh no. Not Şirket Sok. You probably called them in the first place. Bastards! Bastards!’
She drew herself back and spat full and furious into the street.
‘Ariana, you have to come!’ Georgios shouted. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they make it up here.’
But she stood hurling curses down into Şirket Sok, her dress billowing in the Meryem Ana Fırtanısı, the wind of September. To Georgios she was magnificent, she was the proud, fierce heroine of Greek legend; she was mad Electra, she was Nemesis. But the soldiers had heard her and were breaking out hand-held searchlights from the trucks while others were unshouldering their guns and he was paralysed by dread until he seized Ariana and hauled her away from the edge.
‘Take my hand.’
The spell was broken. Georgios closed his fingers around hers and rushed her over the cracking roof tiles, under the leaking water tanks, through mazes of washing and gardens of pot geraniums, over the roofs of Dolapdere.
He was on Taksim Square two days later. The body of a young man had turned up down at Karaköy in one of those black Bosphorus currents that trapped suicides and extra-judicial execution victims in private, endless whirlpools. His face was so badly broken neither his mother nor his father could recognize him. The props, the police said. Bodies that go into the water get chopped up pretty bad, with all the ships going up and down. His parents identified him by his German Army surplus combat jacket and the crimson revolutionary’s beret folded neatly into his pocket.
Three hundred people were in Taksim Square that October Saturday in defiance of martial law. Six weeks before it would have been thirty thousand, raging in the aftermath of the coup. Anger has a half life. Generals become just another government. Ranged against the three hundred were phalanx after phalanx of soldiers, twelve deep around the Atatürk memorial, always the goal of protestors; yet Ariana slipped Georgios’ hand to surge forward among the leaders. They were lovers by then. The square was huge, the sky the flat blue of judgement and the forces against them were monstrous and implacable, but Georgios felt an unfamiliar cry go from his throat and tears of huge pride in his eyes at Ariana’s righteous ferocity, in his city, in what he dared to do and plunged after her. He was never so truly in love again.
Pizza boys are the truest guides. Maç Çok is a shallow entry off Maç Sok, one frontage deep, no wider than its green double-front door. The shuttered windows zigzag up four storeys. He can’t go up there and knock. He can’t cold call, he can’t turn up into forty-seven years of exile and silence. What if she answers? What if she takes him by surprise before he knows what to say? What if she speaks first? What if she says nothing? What if she doesn’t know him? What if she’s become like this building, crabbed and pressed, staggering and lines untrue?
Opposite the mouth of Maç Çok is a tobacconist’s, neon-lit, radio-murmurous. A teenager squats on a low stool reading a football magazine by the glow from the Coke machine. Georgios fumbles through the newspapers and magazines on the rack. He looks ridiculous and mildly criminal.
‘Do you know if a woman has moved in here recently? Not from the east; European, a Greek woman from Athens.’
The shopkeeper shakes his head but the boy with the football magazine looks up. Whatever he might say is now irrelevant for Ariana Sinanidis is there, walking down the middle of the street with two bags from the local mini market in each hand. It’s her, so her; there can be no doubt; how could Georgios ever have feared that he might not recognize her? Older but not aged. Thinner but not wizened - and not coarse, not thick and waddling. She moves with grace on the treacherous cobbles, her heels are high. No blue veins in the hands gripping the plastic bags. She has not changed her hair in forty-seven years. It falls straight and long as shining as he remembers it. Her face - he daren’t look at her face too long for fear she might catch his eye and see him watching her. She looks tired. Georgios wants to step out and take her bags from her. The urge is so strong it feels like sickness. Then the moment is gone, Ariana turns into the short entry to the narrow, slanting apartment.
The teenager stares at Georgios when he buys the legitimizing bottle of water he has been turning over unconsciously in his hands. Then he realizes tears are running down his lapels.
The Riva powers through the dark waves, bounding and slapping hard on the troughs. Deep night, black water, swift machine. Ayşe stands in the cockpit, bracing against the brass trim of the windshield, ecstatic in the engine throb and the lash of spray in her face and the salt stiff in her hair.
‘Can you make it go faster?’
The pilot nods and opens up the throttles. The computer synchs the engines, the boat lifts its nose harder out of the water. The surge of speed is immediate and atomic. Ayşe imagines tracing two radioactive wakes across the water behind her. Light. It is a blazing night. Beneath a sky-glow dome, the city spreads on either side of her in wings of light; rank upon rank, tier upon tier, the hills mounting one above the other, the individual lights blurring layer upon layer into glow and sparkle. Ayşe glances over her shoulder. Adnan sits in the centre of the rear seat, arms spread wide along the seatback in what he imagines looks like nonchalance, but Ayşe knows he is clinging to the leather-work.
I love you, man, this bright night
, Ayşe thinks.
You were brave and brilliant and thrilling and beautiful - all the things I’ve always loved about you
.
, Ayşe thinks.
You were brave and brilliant and thrilling and beautiful - all the things I’ve always loved about you
.
‘Let me drive.’
The pilot frowns at her.
‘I’ve driven one of these before.’ How could the daughter of a naval father not know how to handle powercraft? He had taught her, on those summer weekends when the city grew too stifling and they moved lock and stock along the D100 to the summer house at Silivri on the Marmara shore. Ayşe lays her hands on the throttles and the smell of summer childhoods returns: barbecue lighter fluid, salty dust and after-sun lotion. Theirs had been an unglamorous old fibreglass double-outboard, nothing like this pearl of wood and carbon fibre and fat carbon-greedy engines, but Captain Erkoç had shown her how to make it stand up out of the water. Ayşe taps off the auto synch and pushes the throttles forwards. She tunes the engines by the throb of her body. It’s all vibrations. The boat leaps forwards. The tuning is breathtaking. Ayşe shakes her hair out, shakes the speed-tears from the corners of her eyes. In a long, roaring curve she takes the hurtling, bouncing boat in around Sarayburnu Point with its monster Turkish flag, carefully spotlit. The Golden Horn opens before her; Istanbul’s hills, carpeted with gold, fall on either side. This, this is the way to enter the Queen of Cities. She glances back again at Adnan. She’s got him scared now, but he’s excited. What, trader; am I hot, trader?
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