The Dervish House (39 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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‘It was probably a perfectly respectable gentlemen’s religious society, with a preference for esoteric alphabetic and numerology games. You know how tarikats split and change and reform. And I don’t believe any form of supernatural power was involved, there was no battle of magics. A war of words sounds to me like a clash of legal systems; local, orally-based millet against shariat. They lost the case, and the coffin. But, if they were a secret Bektaşi order that survived the Auspicious Incident, and if Sinan had used Hurufi mysteries held by the military Bektaşis to draw the Seven Letters, it seems altogether reasonable to me that the Tarikat of the Divine Word would have known about it too. When they were threatened with destruction after the foundation of the Republic, they would have tried to hide their greatest treasure, to keep it safe from Atatürk’s reforms, and also as an investment should the order ever rise again. They must have known its commercial value. My belief - my theory - is that they buried it where only they could find it, using their esoteric knowledge of the Seven Letters. Why do I think it’s the seventh letter? Because it’s the one even you can’t find. It’s the hidden key to the secret name of God. They knew it, but the destruction of the Order was more total than they ever imagined. The society was destroyed. The information was lost. But I believe it’s still there, lost for over a century somewhere among Sinan’s architecture. Find the final letter, find the coffin.’
‘Find the coffin, find the final letter.’ When Barçin Yayla is engrossed, his fingers perform a little unconscious trick that Ayşe finds quite disturbing. He flicks the glass eyedropper over the back of his knuckles, round his hand, back again, over and over. She imagines it shattering, spraying hydrochloric acid in her face. ‘This is fine intellectual play but it leads us only to where we are already. I have dedicated years to prayer and the study of the Holy Koran and Seven Letters.’
What you won’t say because you are polite is, if I can’t find it, no one can
, Ayşe thinks.
‘This is the most complete collection of material on the Seven Letters of Istanbul in Turkey,’ Ayşe says. ‘In the world. No one has more books, more drawings, more architectural plans, more notes and cuttings and articles. There is nothing to know that is not here. Everything sufficient to faith is contained with these in this room. The answer is here. You’ve seen it. You just didn’t recognize it.’ She goes to the bookshelf. She can’t begin to calculate the value of the antiquarian volumes on the shelves. Faith, even solitary, maniac faith, can always find money. ‘Come on, let’s think. You’re not the first to have read these books. Which are the key texts? The Tarikat of the Divine Word, what would they have read? Because they’ve certainly read these. Come on man, come on! You want to see the secret name of God? Books books books. Show me the books. The question is a written word, the answer is a written word. Sinan is the key. The man, not the buildings. Where can I read the mind of Sinan? Where does he betray his secrets?’
Barçin Yayla is dazed by Ayşe’s aggression.
This is not how women act in your world
, Ayşe thinks.
If there are any women in your world
. He pulls out three paving slab volumes, leather bound, worked in beautiful gold leaf.
‘
The Architectural Archive of the Grand Mufti of Istanbul
, Sai Mustafa Çelebi,
The Book Of Buildings
and the
Tezkiretül Bünyan
of Sinan. Do you read Arabic?’
‘I read Arabic.’
Barçin Yayla hands Ayşe the Sinan autobiography.
‘Do you read Arabic quickly? One question. What am I looking for?’
‘The thing the eye of faith overlooks.’
Lines run. Pages turn. Hours pass. The silence is utter. All Istanbul is outside the window but it seems muted, slowed, suspended in golden heat, mellified. Ayşe glances up to refresh her eyes. Arabic imposes a rhythm, a diction, a direction on the world different from the left-to-right, up and down of Roman alphabets. The room is cut free from time; it could be a hundred years from now, a thousand years ago. Sacred time. Ayşe understands it now. The words run. The words run. Look for what the eye of faith overlooks. See with the eye of the unbeliever, with the eye of the dealer, the merchant. Light moves across the room, another layer of yellow and brittle laid on the stacked newspapers and magazine cuttings. Shadows lengthen, the heat is immense. Ayşe long ago stopped noticing the smell.
. . . the Chief Architect of the Abode of Felicity commissioned a pattern for the Tomb of the beloved Kadina Hürrem with Yakov Assa of the kehalim of the Sephardim.
Ayşe reads the line again.
. . .
Yakov Assa of the kehalim of the Sephardim.
She can’t breathe. This airless, dusty, stifling, stinking box is suffocating her. She sets the book down.
Yakov Assa. Sephardim.
What the eye of the faithful overlooks. Ayşe hooks on her eyewriter. She clicks in to the architectural image archive. All Istanbul exists here, digitized, eternal, fully explorable. The tomb of Roxelana, built by Sinan in 1558 in the great Süleymaniye Mosque complex. Heart pounding, Ayşe swoops around the tiled interior. Tree of life motifs blossom over niches lined with floral tiles. Above each door is a panel of calligraphic Iznik tiling, gold on blue. This is the only writing. Ayşe focuses on a word, clicks in, refocuses, clicks in; in on the letter, in in. She can’t breathe. Each letter is made up of minute individual letters. The resolution is just enough to show the letters are distinct from each other, but Ayşe does not doubt that each letter contains the working of the entire panel in micrography. Fractal geometry. The great composed of the small.
‘Micrography,’ Ayşe breathes, the first word in how many hours? Ayşe can’t tell. The sun is low, striking directly into this attic room. ‘The seventh letter, the final Fa, is there. It’s always been there. It was just too small for you to notice.’
It’s a privilege, Ayşe realizes, one given only to a few, to see a man undergo a spiritual revelation. As she explains the history and practice of the micrography the Sephardic Jews brought with them to the liberal society of Ottoman Constantinople after the Alhambra Decree banished them from Spain in 1492, Barçin Yayla goes from bafflement through amazement to the same stunned wonder Ayşe felt when she saw the answer, whole and entire, written in minuscule in the tomb of Sultana Roxelana. She now understands what Adnan felt when he saw the plan for Turquoise, whole and entire, in a flash of clarity, but Yayla sees something neither she nor Adnan can. He sees a universe closed to all others, unbeliever or faithful alike. He sees his own private revelation. He sees the culmination of his life. He sees the proof of his faith. If God is in every atom of the universe, the Name of God must likewise be written into every stone of the city, every cell of the body, every molecule, every subatomic particle. Reality is woven from the Seven Letters. The name of God is a cat’s cradle of superstring.
God is great
, he whispers.
God is great.
‘Elements of Sephardic micrography informed the Bektaşi calligrams. The Sephardim were well established in Istanbul by Sinan’s time, he would be familiar with the idea of micrography through the Bektaşi influence on the Janissaries. We know he commissioned Yakov Assa to create pieces of micrography for the tilework in Sultana Hürrem’s tomb. The small in the great, the great composed of the small. The secret name of God can only be properly known by understanding that it is written into the heart of everything, every day. We’re not looking for something on the scale of cities and landscapes. We’re looking for something quite small, something in plain sight, something seen every day that is easily overlooked.’
‘In Istanbul? Such a search would take lifetimes.’
‘But he wants it to be found. The secret name of God can always be found by the dervish who truly understands. The Tarikat of the Divine Word wanted to bury the Mellified Man where it could only be found by future Hurufis. If the greater letters are formed around his architecture, I think it’s a safe bet that the minor letter is also.’
‘There are twenty-two Sinan mosques in Istanbul, let alone hamams, mescids, medreses, hans, turbes,’ Yayla says. But his fingers have again found the glass tube of hydrochloric acid and toy with it.
‘Well it won’t be the first piece he built and it won’t be last because no one knows what his last work will be.’
‘God willing,’ Yayla adds.
‘I’d suggest we start with the clue we have: the micrography in the Haseki Hürrem Turbe.’
‘The interior of the tomb of Roxelana is covered in three thousand tiles. Any one of them could contain the final Fa.’
Yayla’s resolve is weakening. Ayşe has seen this in many of the treasure hunters and fixed-focus antiquarians she has met in the small city of Istanbul art dealing. The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended. There will be a day after Barçin Yayla reads the Secret Name of God and he will need to sleep and eat and excrete like any other day. The search could be over this very night, so quickly, and not by his own effort. He could have wasted fifteen years more and still not found the Lost Letter because he could not see beyond the meaning of letter to letter as art. It took the insight of another. A woman.
‘I don’t think so. Small things are easily lost. What if that one tile broke or came off? It will be small and inconsequential, but I think it will be in multiple places.’ Get him. Grab him. Don’t let him waver. ‘We can go now. We can go right now. It’s still open. Come on. You could see it this very night. This very night.’
Hesitation. Revulsion. Dread. Then exultation.
‘Yes, yes we will!’ Barçin Yayla cries. ‘If it’s there, let’s find it. Gracious God is good, God is compassionate.’ The marching chant of the Janissaries. Yayla disappears into his bedroom to get a backpack. Ayşe sighs. Intellectual exhaustion is the most draining type of tired, and she has far to go yet before she finds the resting place of Hacı Ferhat. It’s right. She knows she’s right. Rightness is stitched into every cell of her brain. It’s all about ways of seeing. She flicks out a cigarette and is about to light up when Yayla catches sight and calls, ‘Excuse me, would you mind not doing that? It stinks the place out.’
 
The lasers write on the eyeballs in perfect synchronization. It’s quite beautiful to watch. The beams are micron-width, only visible when dust falls, glittering, through the gap between eyewriter and eyeball. Dust. Shed skin cells. Eighty per cent of household dust is exfoliated, something like that. The truth that we are fountains of dirt and excretion gives Leyla the goose-flesh horrors. Icky. The dancing thread of light draws twining DNA strands on to the retinas of Team CoGoNano! The same animation into which she fell, dazzled, out at Nano Bazaar. The same animation which had baffled Mete Öymen of the European Emerging Technologies Investment Board. He had the soul of a civil servant. These are business people. They chase down cool, they’re hunters of the hip.
Leyla tries to read their faces but Mahfi Bey, Ayfer Hanım and Gülnaz Hanım have very carefully positioned themselves with their backs to the wrap-round window with its heartbreaking view down over Beyoğlu to the Golden Horn and the eternal Bosphorus. They are deliberate silhouettes. Leyla has to keep herself from squinting, shading her eyes, being seen to look.
She had kept her cool past security, past the exquisitely made-up receptionist with complexion like an apricot, past the leather-upholstered waiting area of sofas so deep and well-constructed she sank into them as she sank into sleep, up in the elevator with the meet-and-greet from CoGoNano!, into the fifteenth-floor office with its views over continents and empires.
‘May I freshen up?’
Certainly.
In the marble washroom, with its rose water and cologne and de-ionized water splashes, she gave the little squeal and skip of excitement. Done it. Made it. Top of the tower. Corner office. CoGoNano! on the swing tag. She thrust a can of deodorant up her blouse, aimed it at her armpits. When will this heatwave ever break? Squirt one squirt two. Leyla remembered that her mother had called it a Kurdish shower. She blushes, embarrassed by the memory. People you love can do bad things. Then she patted down her hair and freshened her lips and straightened her skirt and marched out to battle. New shoes, a shirt sharp from the iron, seemed to have focused and charged Aso.
‘You nano-ed up?’ she whispered as the PA escorted them to the conference room.
‘Just a little HFK-32Gamma, like anyone,’ Aso murmured back. ‘You mean you’re barebrained?’
In the conference room eyeballs go dull and leaden. The sexy animation comes to an end.
‘We’re talking about a revolution,’ Leyla says. ‘This is the first day of a whole new world. Information written into the genetic code. All the stuff we store on to flick drives or our ceptep or distance storage somewhere in Tajikistan; that will all be inside you. All the photographs you’ve ever taken; that’s like a fingernail of storage. And you can recall them just by thinking. Ever wished you had perfect, photographic recall? Now you do. Now all you have to do is see something and you will be able to recall it - and not just recall it, show it to others, in perfect detail. And that’s only the start. All the music ever written can fit into your appendix. Every book ever written, that’s a little bit bigger; that’s maybe a few centimetres of your bowel. All those things you wished you could do, like play the piano or learn a language or repair your car or do accounting: you can download that and store it permanently. You want to memorize a play, or you want to review every test case in the law library? It’s yours. Home plumbing, programming code, physics, chemistry, you’ve got them. You can know everything, I mean, everything. Ordinary nano gets purged from the system. The Besarani-Ceylan transcriber writes it into the cells of your body. You can’t forget your body.’ Leyla’s amazed how she’s remembered this. Word for word. As a child, Leyla would dress up with her sisters to perform that year’s Eurovision song contest entry or the winner on
Turkey’s Got Talent
for the big family New Year party. She grew up without fear of an audience, confident to speak to anyone, stand on any stage from a coffee table to a panel of investors, but until now she never appreciated the thrill of performance. The words pour out of her. She’s blazing. She loves this. ‘You can record and replay every detail of your life. All of it. And that takes up the space of, say, the size of your stomach. Your whole life, inside you. Another you. And you can live other people’s lives. They can download all their experiences into you. You can know what someone else really thinks. You can think what they think, you can predict exactly what they’re going to do. The next industrial revolution is here. This is more than just nano. This is the moment everything becomes smart. This is the Besarani-Ceylan transcriber.’

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