The Dervish House (51 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Coming up from Çaldıran into the main Nabucco line right about now and heading towards us at forty kilometres per hour,’ Oğuz says, settling back into his seat as the wave passes.
The motivational video, for all its shameless plagiarism and metal powerchords, is working. Oblivious to the heat, the foam-mummified mascots turn handstands and leap and point. Then the stadium PA kicks in at full volume and Adnan feels a shudder run through him. This is where he ceases to be Adnan Sarioğlu, gas trader. This is where he becomes fan. Arsenal run out holding the hands of little children, dazed and tearful in too-large team strips. A distant cacophony from the Arsenal end. Boos and whistles and jeers from the Cimbom seats. It’s not about sport. It’s about football. The DJ screams an introduction, fire-fountains shoot up along the touchline and Here! Come! Cimbom! The crowd rises and Adnan rises with them, a roar in his throat, his fist clenched. The eyes of the tiny child mascots in Galatasaray cream and red are wide in terror. The DJ announces the team; each player nods or glances at his feet or at the sky or rolls his beads as he is called. There is a cheer for every name, and a seismic thunder for Volkan: fit at last. The teams run to their positions as the captains shake hands, exchange pennants and watch the toss.
‘Russian ref,’ Kadir shouts up the line.
‘Ah no, they fucking hate us,’ Kemal says.
‘They hate the English more,’ Adnan says.
‘That’s true,’ Kemal concedes. Arsenal win the toss and take the ball to the spot. The referee blows his whistle, the players start to move, the captain kicks off and the Aslenteppe Stadium is a hemisphere of noise. Arsenal push forward, playing a long passing game that exposes Galatasaray square at the back but Gündüzalp the big ox of a central defender heads the ball sweetly out to Ersoy and it’s the break back, Galatasaray going forward and Adnan’s ceptep rings.
Ayşe’s calltone.
Adnan glances at the display, then notices the location. GPS is on. Bibirdirek Police Station in Sultanahmet. The headset is hooked over his ear in a moment.
‘Ayşe.’
‘Adnan, I’ve been arrested.’
Against the green pitch, the blue sky, the mosaic of brightly dressed fans, the words seem impossible. Ayşe. Arrested. They can’t fit with each other, with this reality of men in short pants kicking a ball around a grass arena.
‘You’ve what?’ Adnan asks.
‘Been arrested. They’re holding me down in Bibirdirek. It’s stupid really, they’ll realize they’ve made a mistake and have to let me go.’
Almost he asks,
Who’s holding you, why were you arrested, what’s the charge?
But he’s not alone in this crowd. Galatasaray under pressure in its own half pass the ball to Aykol who sees space open before him and runs into it, half the pitch. Aslanteppe surges forward with a vast unison inhalation of anticipation. Into the crowd rumble, Adnan says, ‘I’m coming down. I’ll get a lawyer. He’ll be with you by the time I get there.’
Who’s holding you, why were you arrested, what’s the charge?
But he’s not alone in this crowd. Galatasaray under pressure in its own half pass the ball to Aykol who sees space open before him and runs into it, half the pitch. Aslanteppe surges forward with a vast unison inhalation of anticipation. Into the crowd rumble, Adnan says, ‘I’m coming down. I’ll get a lawyer. He’ll be with you by the time I get there.’
Kadir catches threads of conversation drifting like spider-silk. He leans forward, mouths
What? Ayşe
, Adnan mouths back, then, before questions can be asked, he pushes along the line to the stair, fans frowning and cursing and craning to see past him. He is the lone figure moving against the thrilled thrust of eighty thousand Cimbom fans. As he trots down the concrete stairs that smell of piss and new paint he hears Aslanteppe erupt behind him. Goal to Galatasaray. Out on Cendere Cadessi Adnan whistles up the car. He’ll drop it at the police station and send it to find a parking space, or just orbit until he needs it again. As he hikes up the road, looking for the driverless Audi seeking him through the traffic, Adnan realizes the prime incongruity, the keystone that holds the arch of improbability together. He has always assumed he would be the one to be arrested.
What? Ayşe
, Adnan mouths back, then, before questions can be asked, he pushes along the line to the stair, fans frowning and cursing and craning to see past him. He is the lone figure moving against the thrilled thrust of eighty thousand Cimbom fans. As he trots down the concrete stairs that smell of piss and new paint he hears Aslanteppe erupt behind him. Goal to Galatasaray. Out on Cendere Cadessi Adnan whistles up the car. He’ll drop it at the police station and send it to find a parking space, or just orbit until he needs it again. As he hikes up the road, looking for the driverless Audi seeking him through the traffic, Adnan realizes the prime incongruity, the keystone that holds the arch of improbability together. He has always assumed he would be the one to be arrested.
Gold with silver; plaster-peeling domes. Yellow-roofed soks refuse to run true; every cross-way reveals new alleys and corridors that slope unpredictably between coffin-tight shops and stalls before opening into dome-roofed plazas and bedestens. Turkish flags in all conceivable geometries. Red and white, crescent and star. No home for the starry coronet of the EU here. A painted finger-board points to a tiny mosque, tucked up a twisting flight of steps. Men hurry high-stacked trolleys along the stone-flagged passages. Water spills down the tiled face of a fountain. Everything is very small, packed, wedged together. The shopkeepers are too big for their tiny stands, oppressed by their piled merchandise. The glare of white neon never changes by day or by night. The Grand Bazaar keeps it own time, which is time not marked by the world’s clocks or calendars.
Aso navigates Grand Bazaar by ceptep. Yaşar is busy with lawyers and accountants and spreadsheets so Aso has been despatched with Leyla to seek the treasure at the heart of the labyrinth. Leyla knows she would be lost in an instant. Some distracting glint or glitter and she would be wandering. That, say the merchants of Grand Bazaar, is the point. It’s only when the mind ceases seeking that true discovery is made. Serendipities: entering the same little bedesten from four different directions and thinking it a different square each time. Stumbling on that quirky little wooden Ottoman coffee stall, a building within a building, knowing that you will never be able to find it again. One footstep taking you away from the pushing, thieving alleys into a dimly lit sok where a solitary cobbler sits by a rusted last and you wonder if he has sold anything in this century or the one preceding it.
Leyla had loathed the Grand Bazaar on first visit. The tat, the fake, the overpriced, it’s all still piled high and pushed in your face and shaken, but Leyla sees the line that runs from Capalli Carsi through Hazine Auctions and Nano Bazaar into her. Everyone is huckstering, to everybody all the time. She’s no different from these troglodyte men behind their walls of merchandise. The sell is all.
‘Aso.’
He has been wandering, following the glowing djinni-dust like the ceptep navigation system drawn on his eyeball.
‘This is going to sound like a silly question. I can sell the Besarani-Ceylan transcriber backwards and forwards, I can tell you its functions and its features and it benefits, I can tell you it’s the new nano revolution, that nothing will ever be the same, that this is the future today but I can’t see that future. I can see fancy graphics of DNA but I can’t connect it to me, to people, to somewhere like this. You have these things called Thought Experiments? Here’s a Thought Experiment: in fifty years’ time, what will I see here?’
‘One question: why here?’
‘Because it seems the most conservative and resistant to change. It seems the last place a nanotech revolution would conquer.’
Aso gives an odd, ugly-cute little smile and nod of the head as he follows the light only he can see.
‘Well, this place will look pretty much the same. Tea shops and antiques and Turkish Delight will still sell. Authenticity will be big. What won’t sell is all this domestic tat and consumer electronics. That kind of stuff you do at home, or in specialist plants for the big things like cars. Everyone will have a fab, a home fabrication plant, like a
3
D printer only much more sophisticated. As electronics and biology move closer and closer together, we’ll print things from proteins and semizotic plastics. When you’re tired of that jacket or want new shoes, you just let the old ones die. The fab will recycle them. Everything will be designer. When commodities are cheap, people pay for the label. Take the Donna Karan off the T-shirt and it’s just a 2-euro rectangle of cotton. Status won’t be measured by product but by styling. Designers will be the new footballers. They’ll have cult followings. That’s why I said about authenticity being big. Anything that hasn’t been fabbed, that is genuine and has the provenance to show it, will be the thing of value. People will pay for authenticity, people will pay for experience. A good cup of coffee will be more valuable than a new ceptep — because a ceptep you can just fab up at home, and we’ll be way post-ceptep anyway. Good coffee, that’s an art.’
3
D printer only much more sophisticated. As electronics and biology move closer and closer together, we’ll print things from proteins and semizotic plastics. When you’re tired of that jacket or want new shoes, you just let the old ones die. The fab will recycle them. Everything will be designer. When commodities are cheap, people pay for the label. Take the Donna Karan off the T-shirt and it’s just a 2-euro rectangle of cotton. Status won’t be measured by product but by styling. Designers will be the new footballers. They’ll have cult followings. That’s why I said about authenticity being big. Anything that hasn’t been fabbed, that is genuine and has the provenance to show it, will be the thing of value. People will pay for authenticity, people will pay for experience. A good cup of coffee will be more valuable than a new ceptep — because a ceptep you can just fab up at home, and we’ll be way post-ceptep anyway. Good coffee, that’s an art.’
The life of the Grand Bazaar streams around Leyla and Aso. Leyla tries to impress Aso’s pictures on to the faces; that good-looking youth lounging against his father’s stock of kelims, that yellow-toothed old man in the trinket stall, those two German tourists, that scurrying woman in the full hijab.
‘Everyone will be gorgeous, glorious, dazzling. It will be an age of style and colour. People will remember how the Ottomans dressed, it’ll be back to robes and turbans. Maybe we’ll be surrounded by clouds of free-flying microbots that can assemble into any shape we want, like djinn. Nobody will wear glasses. No matter how bad your eyes are, your vision will be internally corrected, like autofocus on a camera. Nobody will have money, it’ll all be credited by the shake of a hand or the blink of an eye or the transfer of a thought. It’ll be quieter than it is now. A lot of communication will be done directly, mind to mind. Voices will be reserved for the public world, and for performance. We’ll have two ways of speech, like some languages have two ways of talking to people, the formal and the intimate. Verbal speech is broadcast, everyone in earshot hears you. Direct speech is intimate, you have to be invited to it, only the people to whom it’s addressed can hear you. You can tell secrets in direct speech. You can be in a crowded room and have a conversation in direct speech without anyone else overhearing. Or you can have that same conversation with someone on the other side of the planet. Direct speech is not limited by distance. It will be an age of gossip and intrigue and little conspiracies.
‘Old friends will meet and sit down here in this çayhane and recall conversations from ten years before, word for word. They’ll be able to recreate the scenes in their heads, because the D NA never forgets. It’ll be like time travel — a shared illusion of the past. Or they could go to another world entirely, maybe a designer secondary world, a social networking world, that will seem as real to them as this world. People will slip casually between worlds. There will be shared, socially networked worlds and there will be private worlds where you can do whatever you like.
‘We’ll have extra sensory organs. We’ll need some way of getting the information inside out, and outside in. We need to be wired. I sort of like the idea of horns or little antlers, maybe at the back of the head. Or maybe antennae. But I reckon we’ll be shy about them, they’ll be a private body part that’s shameful to show in public or to strangers. They’re the gateway to your soul, you don’t go showing that to everyone. We’ll cover them up. So turbans will be back! I can’t wait.
‘Then, pretty soon after this, we’ll stop covering up. We’ll go in exactly the opposite direction. It’ll be bare skin everywhere. Why? Because we’ll have learned to photosynthesize. We already have photosynth panels for domestic electricity, all we have to do is couple it with a nano transcriber, bind it to the ATP cycle and make like the plants: get naked and soak up the sun. Places like this will be dark and scary. Roofs? No light? Perverse. After photosynthesis, it’s anyone’s guess. The graphs all go vertical.’
‘I wonder if I’m helping you build a future I wouldn’t want to live in,’ Leyla says. ‘I grew up under roofs. Demre was a roofed city. All plastic greenhouses and polytunnels, kilometre after kilometre after kilometre. They go right up to the edges of the road. The houses and the mosques stick up in between. The land’s too valuable to build on so the houses go up, whenever someone marries they build a floor on top of the one below. Some of the old houses in Demre are like mini skyscrapers. I remember when the Americans were talking about going to Mars and putting a base there and growing food thinking that it should look like Demre. We know how to keep the air in and let the light through. Maybe if they’d asked us it would have worked. We pump in waste CO
2
from the hotels along the beach; the tomatoes go up to the roof. They’re like jungles of chillies and aubergines. Some people have low CO
2
tolerance so they can’t work in there and there was one kid was allergic to tomatoes so he couldn’t go near them otherwise his face would swell up and explode. I can still smell the tomatoes, and the plant food. We processed it from the sewage from the hotels. We ran it through a digester so we got methane for power and the plant food was clean. My dad wasn’t a grower; he was a service engineer for drip irrigation systems. That’s all you’d hear in the tunnels, drip drip drip, and the hiss of the misters to help them set fruit. Why am I telling you about Demre? Because people wonder how anyone can live there with no open ground and plastic roofs over everything, but do you know? I loved it. I was so happy there as a kid. So I guess what I’m saying is you can get used to anything. People adapt.’
2
from the hotels along the beach; the tomatoes go up to the roof. They’re like jungles of chillies and aubergines. Some people have low CO
2
tolerance so they can’t work in there and there was one kid was allergic to tomatoes so he couldn’t go near them otherwise his face would swell up and explode. I can still smell the tomatoes, and the plant food. We processed it from the sewage from the hotels. We ran it through a digester so we got methane for power and the plant food was clean. My dad wasn’t a grower; he was a service engineer for drip irrigation systems. That’s all you’d hear in the tunnels, drip drip drip, and the hiss of the misters to help them set fruit. Why am I telling you about Demre? Because people wonder how anyone can live there with no open ground and plastic roofs over everything, but do you know? I loved it. I was so happy there as a kid. So I guess what I’m saying is you can get used to anything. People adapt.’
Topaloğlu Antiques is a brassy cubby of old mosque finials and sanctuary lamps and Greek censers, of framed Hebrew texts and fake icons and illustrations of the Parliament of Birds. And miniature Korans, a display case of them, rank upon rank, gleaming in the light. Topaloğlu himself is a rotund man of middle age, with prominent teeth and male pattern baldness. He wears a cardigan, even in the heat of Grand Bazaar. The shop smells of metal polish.
‘You like the miniature Korans?’
‘I’m looking for one in particular,’ Leyla says. ‘It’s a family heirloom. ’
‘There are a lot of places in Istanbul sell miniature Korans,’ Topaloğlu says.
Leyla comes clean.
‘Turgut of Hazine Antiques might have sold it to you.’
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