The Dervish House (48 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Tea?’ Ayşe yelled.
‘How is anyone going to believe we’re Istanbul workmen if we don’t take tea every half-hour?’ Mehmet said. ‘Get the pot on.’
Now the tea-boy collects the glasses and excitement shoots up strong as bile in Ayşe’s stomach. She feels weak. She tries to breathe deeply, slowly, through her nostrils, deep centring breath. Her breathing shakes. Her hands shake. She feels nauseous. Last night, when she finally slipped into bed beside Adnan after hours hurtling around Sultanahmet making the deal with Mehmet and Ahmet, she had deliberately tried to push this moment from her mind by thinking of trivialities, necessities, contingencies, emergencies. In the morning too she had thought about Adnan and his deal and the kit and attention he would need for that, to keep the excitement from paralysing her. It’s now. Now. In a very few minutes she will go down into that hole on a rope with a torch on her head. What will she see? Ayşe pushed her imagination away from imagining. Be here, be present. But before that, a necessity and contingency. She takes Ahmet and Mehmet round the back of the van, draws them into a huddle.
‘Do you think you can handle our Hurufi friend?’
‘Why, is he likely to get violent?’ Mehmet asks.
‘Only to himself. After he sees whatever’s down there he plans to burn his eyes out with a vial of acid he carries with him everywhere. He’s convinced it’s the Seven Letters, the Secret Name of God.’
‘Is it?’ Ahmet asks.
‘What?’
‘What’s down there?’
‘It’s what he believes. I need you to take it off him before he can do any damage to himself or anyone else.’
‘If he’s that insane, he can do it the moment he goes home.’
‘What he does in his own home is his own business. I just don’t want to be around anyone pouring acid in their eyes.’
‘Acid,’ says Mehmet.
‘Nasty,’ says Ahmet. ‘Okay, let’s get you roped up.’
As they fit the harness around her and tighten the webbing, Ayşe wishes she had not worn a dress this morning. It rides up altogether too high around her thighs, and her boots are altogether too urban for subcity exploration. Her hi-vis bunches up uncomfortably, and the hard hat is an affront. Ahmet and Mehmet’s unspeaking assistants have set the tripod over the open drain and hitched the harness cable to the winch in the back of the white van.
‘You’ll swing a bit when we get you up so we’ll steady you,’ Mehmet says. And now here comes Burak Özekmekçib sauntering up, hands in pockets, nodding to Mehmet and Ahmet.
‘I see you’re dressed for action, primula,’ he says pulling on a hi-vis.
‘The security on this project is ridiculous,’ Ayşe says, standing on the edge of the metre-wide hole.
‘My my, Ms Erkoç, whatever could you have found at the bottom of that big dark hole?’ Burak says. ‘I want to see it, buttercup. I want to see you find a legend.’
Mehmet mans the winch. Ayşe is lifted and swung over the hole. Even as the sun lifts high over the many-domed skyline of the medreses, it reveals nothing in the darkness of the hole. Ahmet steadies Ayşe and switches on her lamp. She is perfectly at peace now. She will do what must be done. It is all ordained now. The winch starts.
Coriolis force reaches out and slowly sets Ayşe spinning as she drops into darkness. Her head light flashes across columns, columns beyond columns beyond columns. She is being lowered into a vast underground cistern. When she dropped the ring the previous night she heard no sound of water but Ayşe sends her beam down to be sure. No sign of water, just a gently angled stone pavement with a half-metre deep channel — the sewer into which these gratings fed — running from south to north. Her ring catches the light and glints. Good. Tulip Era turquoise is hard to find. Dust dances in the beam. Ayşe glances up. Her eyes have dark-adjusted, the open drain is a blinding circle of white. Are those faces? Shattered light beams down through the roof vaults from the other drains; shafts of absence, the inverse of calligraphy. Two metres to the floor, one metre. Her heels scrape stone. Ayşe picks up the ring and pushes it back on to her finger. Complete. She unhooks the line and taps up her ceptep. The signal is acceptable, barely.
‘I’m down, stop winching,’ she says, ‘I’m about ten metres down on the floor of a large cistern, about twenty metres by twenty metres. It doesn’t look Roman, I’d say it’s contemporary with the rest of the mosque. I’ve no idea what it’s for — there’s a drainage channel in the floor, maybe it was supposed to supply water to the mosque şadirvan. There are pillars maybe every four metres. I’m looking around, there’s no sign of the . . . oh.’
The extremity of her beam lights up a stone coffin standing on a low plinth next to the northern wall of the vault. Ayşe is speechless, thoughtless, actionless.
‘Ayşe, are you okay?’ Burak is at the end of Mehmet’s phone. ‘Is everything all right.’
‘Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes yes yes. There’s a coffin here. It’s not Islamic, it’s definitely earlier than that. It could be Lycian — it’s definitely Lycian. I’m going over to it. Wait, there’s something on top of it.’
Ayşe runs her hands and beam over the massive stone sarcophagus, tracing satyrs and fauns, bacchuses and naiads with her fingers, casting shadows of ancient warriors and horsemen, naked athletes, discus throwers. The lid is guarded at its four corners by lions, the head covered by the solar flame-haloed, sensual face of a goddess. Her lips are sealed with lead. The sarcophagus alone is a treasure. The object set on the top is from a different era, a different race, a different civilization, a different faith. It’s a stone flag, roughly chipped from the floor and set over the heart of the sarcophagus. Ayşe picks it up and turns it in the beam of her torch. The light casts the dusty, low-relief shadow of a Kufic letter. Fa.
Ayşe sits for a while on the edge of the drainage channel. She is exhausted. She pants as if she has run a race. Elation, dread, superstitious fear, crowing pride, sex, energy, power, towering achievement surge and clash. Ayşe calls up Burak.
‘I’ve got it. Get down here.’
Ahmet and Mehmet go into action. Extending ladders are sent down into the vault and made fast. Power cables are run down, lights, power tools, ropes and hawsers. Ahmet plugs in the floods and the cistern is filled with the clean clear light of the twenty-first century and sixteenth-century shadows.
‘So what have we got here then?’
Ayşe looks up at Mehmet.
‘Hacı Ferhat the Mellified Man of Iskenderun.’
‘Lady, your fee just went up.’
Ahmet squats down on his hams to study the sarcophagus.
‘I’m wondering how they got in,’ he says.
‘I’m wondering how we’re going to get it out,’ Mehmet says.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ayşe says. ‘My contract is to find the Mellified Man of Iskenderun. I’ve done that. Getting it out is the client’s problem.’ She blinks up a number. It rings for a long time before being answered.
‘Akgün? Ayşe Erkoç. I have your artefact. You can inspect it at this GPS location, minus about fifteen metres. I’ll accept payment by draft or cash.’
A figure descends the ladder into the light, Barçin Yayla.
‘You have it?
Ayşe nods wearily at the stone slab propped against the side of the drainage channel by her feet. Yayla rushes to it, dust flying from his scuffing feet and goes down on his knees, head bobbing in adoration. Ayşe looks at Mehmet. The big men are fast for their size. Mehmet seizes Barçin Yayla in a wrestler’s pin-hold while Ahmet deftly goes through his pockets.
‘Sorry brother.’ Ahmet slips the eyedropper into the palm of his hand but Yayla struggles, knocking into Ahmet who, momentarily unbalanced, drops the glass tube of acid. Ayşe crushes it under the heel of her boot. The limestone paving hisses and fumes, acidscarred. Barçin Yayla whimpers. Mehmet releases him.
‘Barçin, I couldn’t let you do that.’
Barçin Yayla sits down, the Fa slab clutched to him like a child. The acid seethe has been neutralized.
‘I wasn’t going to use it. Don’t you see? Finding the letter is the part, not the whole. The whole is seeing the pattern entire. All I have are letters. This is only the beginning of the work. Here is a tiny stone with a letter the size of my hand carved on it. Up there is the greatest mosque in Istanbul, which is still only one tiny part of a Zay, a Thaw and a Jim the size of a city. Big, little; little, big. How do I fit this with this? How do I see the infinitesimally small and the inconceivably vast at the same time, in the same vision? But that is Sinan’s plan. This is the true work. God is great.’
‘That acid always scared me.’ The leather has peeled from the boot heel that crushed the vial. The metal tip is corroded. Ayşe does not want to trust too much weight or sudden movement to it.
‘You collect art, you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.’
Now Burak Özekmekçib descends the ladder. He peers down into the light and stark shadows.
‘Well lookie at that.’ Burak slides the last three metres of ladder. ‘Well, aren’t you going to open it, rosebud?’
Breaking the lead seal is a slow, painstaking process. Equipment must be lowered into the vault, a generator set up, a rig built around the sarcophagus and levelled and aligned with micrometric precision. Mehmet hands out masks and goggles.
‘There’s going to be a lot of lead vapour,’ he says. ‘And lasers.’
Dust and metal sparkle in the beam and Mehmet and Ahmet, demented, demonic figures in their goggles and respirators guide the beam millimetre by millimetre along the line of the seal, boiling away the lead seal. The achingly slow work gives time for Ayşe’s triumphalism to decay into doubt. What if the coffin is empty? What if it is just a Lycian coffin that has stood here for two thousand years while vault and drain and the entire Süleymaniye complex, tens of thousands of tons of masonry, were built over it? A piece of historical flotsam that has attracted legends, story upon story under the accumulated mass of myth solidifies into a popular truth: the Seventh Letter, the tomb of Hacı Ferhat.
The beam flicks off. Mehmet and Ahmet push up their goggles.
‘That’s us.’
A new figure descends the ladder. Ayşe identifies it by its aftershave: Haydar Akgün. He wears a yellow hi-vis vest over his shimmering nano-weave suit. His shoes are shiny.
‘Your timing’s good,’ Ayşe calls. ‘We’re just about to open it up.’
She tries to read Akgün’s face as he runs his hands over the sarcophagus. Amazement is there, awe, disbelief. Reverence, humility. She doesn’t see proprietorial pride. His forefinger explores the lead dimple that fills the stone goddess’ mouth. Akgün presses his fingers together as if in prayer, touches them to his lips.
‘This is a treasure,’ he says. ‘A treasure. You found it. I can’t believe it. This is legend.’
At Ayşe’s sign Ahmet and Mehmet gently move Akgün to one side and work the ends of the pry bars into the crack between sarcophagus and lid. Ayşe stands between them, hands raised as if conducting an orchestra. She lifts her hands.
‘Gently.’
The pry bars lift the massive stone lid a fraction of a centimetre but that is enough for Ahmet and Mehmet to slip in the wedges of the lifting rig. Again, on the other side of the coffin. Everyone is on their feet now, casting immense shadows across the vault. Silence is absolute. Ahmet passes the control pad to Ayşe. Three buttons; up, down, stop. She presses up. Very slowly, the rig lifts the lid off the coffin. Acrid, fireworky metal fumes still hang in the air but Ayşe rips off her respirator. She wants to smell it. The lid is now half a metre above the open sarcophagus. Higher: a metre. Stop. A musty sweetness, ancient yet fresh, fills the vault. It is the smell of honey.
Ayşe goes to the open coffin of Hacı Ferhat. It is filled with a golden, translucent, sludgy slush of granulated honey. Too much to hope that it would have survived centuries transparent, but Ayşe can see far enough into the congealed honey to make out the dark shape barely submerged in it. A human figure, arms by its side. It’s intact.
‘Light,’ she commands. Ahmet and Mehmet drag lamps across the stone floor of the tomb and adjust them to better illuminate the thing in the coffin.
Ayşe looks on the face of Hacı Ferhat. The degree of preservation is obvious even through the crystallized honey. The body is unclothed, the flesh is sunken and pulled away from the orifices and extremities, the bones jutting like tent poles but the skin, a deep mahogany, is folded and wrinkled, swollen up with sugar, and looks as soft and fragile as gold leaf. The body has exuded a sepia halo that extends a few centimetres into the enclosing honey. Bubbles of gas have become trapped in the human-honey matrix. Fine detail is hard to distinguish through the crystalline mass, hair, beard, nails seem intact, the eyes are mercifully closed, the teeth long and brown, rat-teeth. Ayşe has never seen a thing quite so extraordinary. She has seen mummified bodies, this is nothing like them. They are dry and rattling, more dead than death. There is nothing of death and desiccation about the Mellified Man. It’s a man spun from sugar. It’s a work of confectionery. For an instant Ayşe imagines plunging her fists into the heart of the Mellified Man, bursting him apart. Would he be gelatinous, or would he be soft and grainy, like halva, or is what she sees merely patterns, hues in the honey left by his slow dissolution over centuries?
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