The Oracle of Stamboul (4 page)

In deference to what her father called Ruxandra’s concerns, Eleonora was told repeatedly that she should not, under any circumstances, speak of her lessons outside the home. She did not understand the purpose of this rule, but she followed it
nonetheless, having learned long ago that it was best to abide Ruxandra’s concerns, whether they made sense or not. In any case, it was not a particularly difficult rule to follow. Aside from holidays and the occasional picnic, Eleonora only left the house once a week, when Ruxandra brought her shopping at the Monday market.

One such Monday, in the early spring of Eleonora’s seventh year, Eleonora and Ruxandra were finishing up their shopping at Mr. Seydamet’s dry goods store when it began to rain, a sudden and heavy storm that drove the entire market toward cover. The fruit vendors found refuge in a small arcade off the town square. The hoopoes that had followed Eleonora down the hill huddled under the awning of the Constanta Hotel. And a number of people crowded into Mr. Seydamet’s shop, pretending to consider this jar of beets or that tin of roe. The store smelled like a forest of wet pants, and the empty barrel next to the door brimmed with umbrellas.

“Good afternoon,” Ruxandra announced, pulling Eleonora up to the counter. Craning her neck, Ruxandra caught the eye of a young clerk named Laurentiu.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Cohen,” he said and, bending over the counter, gave Eleonora a hard candy. “And a very good afternoon to you, Miss Cohen.”

A stringy, mop-haired boy with an easy smile, Laurentiu had worked in Mr. Seydamet’s store for as long as Eleonora could remember. He was a kind soul, though somewhat slow. On more than one occasion, he had wrapped the wrong item into their package and they were forced to walk down the hill again to replace it.

“We would like one kilogram of kidney beans, two bars of that green soap over there, a kilo of yellow lentils, and,” Ruxan
dra paused, glancing down at her list, “two spools of thread, a tin of sweetmeats, and a hundred grams of cumin.”

“Is that all, Mrs. Cohen?”

“Yes, it is.”

Repeating the list to himself, Laurentiu went about the store, gathering everything Ruxandra had requested, piling it into the cradle of his left arm while he bagged the bulk goods with his right. He returned a few moments later with their package, neatly wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string.

“Two rubles even.”

Ruxandra pulled her coin purse out and was counting the money into her hand when Eleonora reached up to tug at the sleeve of her dress.

“It should be one and a half rubles, Aunt Ruxandra.”

Pretending not to hear, Ruxandra handed over the coins.

“Thank you, Laurentiu.”

“But Aunt Ruxandra,” Eleonora persisted, pulling hard on the sleeve of her dress. “It should only be one and a half.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ruxandra said, raising her voice. “You think you know the prices better than Laurentiu?”

Conscious now of the other customers, Ruxandra grabbed hold of Eleonora by the scruff of her dress and began toward the door. They were stopped, however, by a voice from the other counter.

“How much did you say it should be?”

It was Mr. Seydamet, a cork-faced Dobrujan who occasionally visited their house to drink tea after dinner with Yakob.

“How much did you say it should be?” he repeated, bowing graciously in their direction. “We wouldn’t want to charge you the wrong price, Mrs. Cohen.”

Eleonora felt the grip on her collar relax.

“Go on,” said Ruxandra, her lips pursed to a hyphen. “Tell him what you said.”

Eleonora glanced up again at her aunt before she began.

“It should only be one and a half rubles,” she said, straightening out her dress. “The kidney beans are forty kopek per kilogram, soap is ten a piece, yellow lentils are thirty-five, the thread is two for ten, sweetmeats are fifteen, and a hundred grams of cumin is thirty. That makes one-fifty.”

Mr. Seydamet took a moment to check the math in his head.

“She’s right,” he said, addressing the onlookers as much as those involved in the transaction. “It should be one-fifty. Laurentiu, please give Mrs. Cohen her money back.”

With an apologetic shrug, Laurentiu dug into the register and held a half-ruble coin over the counter, but Ruxandra was already on her way out of the store.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling Eleonora through the crowd. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

It was still raining hard when they left Mr. Seydamet’s store, the sky dark with clouds and the road muddy up to their ankles, but Ruxandra was in no mood to notice the rain. She walked quickly with her head high and her packages tucked under her arm, paying as little heed to the puddles as she did to Eleonora. She didn’t look back once and she didn’t say a word until they arrived home.

“This is precisely,” she said, slamming the door with such force that the ceramic cats shook in their pedestals, “this is precisely what I said would happen. This is exactly why I said these lessons should be clipped at the bud. Now the whole town will be talking about us. And the last thing we need is to draw more attention to ourselves. The widower and his barren sister-in-law, Jews, doing business with Turks. And now the girl, doing figures in her head, correcting shop boys.”

“But Aunt Ruxandra, I just thought the money—”

“The money,” Ruxandra said, snorting a laugh through her nose. “You and your father both with the money. I can tell you one thing, Miss Cohen. Your lessons are over. You broke the rule, the only rule there was and you broke it.”

“But,” Eleonora objected, her voice straining, “I didn’t break the rule. I didn’t say anything about my lessons.”

“You broke the rule in both spirit and in letter. Now go to your room and don’t come out until I say you can.”

When she awoke—who knew how much later—Eleonora was lying on top of her quilt, the pillow pulled over her head and her thumb stuck to the roof of her mouth. It was cold, and the sky outside her window was a steely blue. She felt as if she were in a different world, or at least a different person in the same world. Pulling her head out from under the pillow, she removed her thumb from her mouth and smacked at the paste of dried saliva. She could smell fried potatoes and mince pie. She heard Ruxandra laugh and the sound of chairs scraping against the floor. They were talking, but she couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. In order to hear more clearly, she slid off her bed and put her ear to the door.

“And furthermore it’s for her own good,” said Ruxandra. “You remember the story of my great-aunt Sheidel. Couldn’t stop her from reading, spent all her time in the library, and when the time came to find a husband no one wanted her. The matchmaker treated her like a cripple. Is that what you want for her? Is that what you want for your daughter?”

There was a short pause and Eleonora could hear the sound of meat being cut.

“I just want Ellie to be happy.”

“We all want Ellie to be happy. But the fact of the matter is she broke the rule.”

“Maybe,” her father said, through a mouthful of meat, “we could continue with the lessons every other day, or once a week.”

“She broke the rule. There was only one rule and she broke it.”

Her father didn’t respond.

“There is something strange about her, you said so yourself. And now everyone knows, now everyone has seen it.”

After a few moments of silence, Eleonora heard a chair scrape back from the table and her father cleared his throat.

“I’ll be in the living room.”

Eleonora continued listening at the keyhole while her father’s pipe smoke mixed with the sound of Ruxandra clearing the dishes. After a few moments of this uneasy quiet, she returned to bed and, lying curled up on her side, looked about her little room. She let her gaze drift from the rickety three-legged washstand to the flaw in the windowpane and the squat dresser beneath it. She hadn’t intended to break the rule, nor had she intended to upset Ruxandra. She just wanted to do what was right. Rolling onto her back, Eleonora stared up at the ceiling and watched the shadows move across her room. Was there really something strange about her? She didn’t feel strange, or different, or anything beyond what she imagined was normal. Closing her eyes, she listened to the faint cooing of her flock and drifted off to thoughts of Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on his desert island of despair. If she couldn’t continue her lessons, if she couldn’t finish the book, he would be stranded there in her mind forever.

The fate of Eleonora’s lessons was not a matter for debate. She had broken the most important rule, the only rule there was, and no amount of reason or pleading would convince her aunt to relent. However, in acknowledgment of her dutiful behavior in the months following the episode at Mr. Seydamet’s store, Eleonora was permitted to read for pleasure at the pace of one book per month. Anything more than a book a month, her aunt reasoned, would cease to be pleasurable. While Eleonora did not agree with this sentiment, she savored her monthly ration without protest, limiting herself as best she could to a set number of pages each night. Toward the end of the month, Eleonora would expend an enormous amount of time and energy selecting the next book. Whole evenings were spent under the blank gaze of the ceramic cats, contemplating the contents of the bookcase. She paid especially close attention to the books themselves, to the hue and texture of the binding, the quality of the paper, and the shape of the letters on the spine, as if these external traits might somehow reveal the story within.

One drizzly morning toward the end of September, a bit more than a month after her eighth birthday, Eleonora was considering the bookcase in this same manner while waiting for the iron to become hot. Starting at the bottom shelf, she went book by book, lifting the iron off the coals every so often to check its progress. As she grew older and proved her competence, Ele
onora had gradually been entrusted with a few of the more difficult household tasks, such as chopping vegetables and knitting. Ironing was the most recent addition to her repertoire, and had quickly become one of her favorites. She liked the greasy black smell of the coals, the smooth wood of the handle, and the crisp lines she made pressing her father’s pants. It was a big responsibility, but she was up to the task. She had never once burned any of her father’s clothes and was always exceedingly careful when extracting the coals from the stove. What was more, the location of the ironing board afforded her an excellent view of the bookcase.

When the iron was hot enough, Eleonora took a pair of her father’s pants from the pile at the end of the board and laid them flat. She sprinkled a handful of water over the left cuff, touched the bottom of the iron with her wet fingertips, and, watching the sizzle disappear, began to work. When she finished with the left leg, she put the iron back onto the coals and glanced up again at the bookcase. Having spent August on
Jane Eyre
and most of September deep in the fortunes of David Copperfield, she was particularly excited about her prospects for October. Scanning the top shelf, she took in her options.
Swiss Family Robinson
she had read in April. There was a volume of short stories by Nicolai Gogol, which looked interesting, but it was too short to justify a whole month.
Tristram Shandy
. She lifted the iron off the coals and a hissing sheet of steam brushed her forehead. The iron was more than hot enough. She sprinkled water on the cuff of the right leg and was about to begin pressing when she looked up again at the shelf.
Tristram Shandy
. It was an intriguing title and certainly big enough to last the month.

Setting the iron aside, Eleonora reached up onto her tiptoes and pulled
Tristram Shandy
off the top shelf. After reading the
first few pages, she decided it probably wasn’t what she was looking for, not this month at least. As she reached up again to put it back in its place, she noticed another book peeking out of the space between, a dark blue volume with thin silver writing on the spine. Bracing a palm against the wall, she raised her foot to the second shelf and pushed herself up to the level of the ceramic cats. From this vantage point, she could see that the book was part of a larger set. It was the fourth volume, the spine indicated, of
The Hourglass
. Hidden behind a stretch of Dostoyevsky were the other six volumes, the complete set, waiting patiently to be discovered. Eleonora pulled down volume four, opened it to a thin wooden bookmark in the middle of the twelfth chapter, and began to read.

It was not without a small piece of remorse that Lieutenant Brashov reported that next morning to his garrison. Walking to the streetcar, his heels clacking against the cobblestones, he more than once looked back over his shoulder to admire his new wife in the doorway. More than anything, he wanted to turn around and run back into her arms, to share that stuffy spring morning with her, to share with her the rest of the day. But alas, life is not all dancing and kisses. There are papers to sign, cases to argue, products to manufacture, and wars to fight. It was unfortunate, he thought. But true. There will always be wars to fight.

At the smell of burning wool, Eleonora looked up from the book. The iron had fallen, she saw, and singed her father’s pants. As she stared at the mark she had made, a discoloration in the cuff about the size of a strawberry, tears swelled up and collected along the cusp of her eyelash. Ruxandra was right. She was too distractible, too much lost in her own thoughts. There would be a scene, no doubt. And Eleonora would likely never be allowed to iron again. She would probably be punished in other ways
as well. Perhaps she would be sent to her room without dinner; maybe her reading privileges would be taken away. All this for such a small mistake, for a mark her father wouldn’t even notice. Even if he did notice, he wouldn’t care. And wasn’t it his opinion that mattered? They weren’t Ruxandra’s pants.

With this logic and the heavy pounding of her heart, Eleonora finished pressing the pants, folded them, and laid a new pair out on the ironing board. A moment later, she heard the back door open and Ruxandra walked in with a bunch of green onions in her hand. She looked as if she were going to say something about the onions, then paused and sniffed in the direction of the ironing board.

“What’s that smell?”

Eleonora sniffed in either direction and scrunched up her nose.

“What smell?”

Ruxandra brought her face closer to the board.

“It smells like burning wool.”

Eleonora sniffed at the new pants, the air above them, and the iron itself, squinting as if trying to make out the source of the smell.

“I think it might be the iron.”

Ruxandra brought her nose to the same three places and looked to be on the verge of making a final judgment when she noticed volume four of
The Hourglass
lying open on a stool next to the ironing board.

“
The Hourglass
,” she said, as if she had encountered an old friend in a strange country. “Where did you find this?”

Eleonora indicated the top shelf of the bookcase.

“Behind
Tristram Shandy
,” she said. “The fat green one. There’s a whole set up there, behind the others.”

Ruxandra picked the book up by its back cover and flipped to
the frontispiece. As she turned the vellum, it crinkled like a sheet of phyllo dough.

“This used to be my favorite book, when I was younger.”

She ran a finger down the inside cover.

“Where did you find this?”

Eleonora pointed again to the top shelf of the bookcase.

“Behind
Tristram Shandy
.”

Ruxandra stood silently contemplating the cover of the book for a long while before Eleonora ventured a question.

“Are they yours?”

“They’re your mother’s,” Ruxandra said. “My father gave this set to her for her fourteenth birthday. She was always his baby—his little turnip, he called her. In any case, she must have taken them with her when she married Yakob.”

Ruxandra put the onions on the stool where the book had been and flipped back to the frontispiece.

“Leah Mendelssohn,” she said, reading her sister’s maiden name aloud.

Hearing Ruxandra speak her mother’s name sent a chill down the back of Eleonora’s leg. So rarely spoken, the very sound of her name had become almost sacred. Like the name of God, uttered only on the holiest of days, only in the holiest of chambers, by the high priest in the temple in the holiest city of Jerusalem, her mother’s name served in her mind as a sort of incantation, a spell possessed of unknown power. Eleonora stood silently behind the ironing board until Ruxandra left. When she was alone again, she sat down with the book and opened it to the frontispiece. It was an etching of a shield and two swords, below which the words
ex libris, Leah Mendelssohn
were written in a childish hand she could only assume was her mother’s. She shivered and closed the book.

Eleonora began reading volume one of
The Hourglass
that next Tuesday, the first of October. Like anyone who has had the pleasure of reading that magical seven-volume chronicle of a notable Bucharest family in decline, Eleonora was quickly swept up in the current of events, the parties, the war, the revenge, the tragedy, and love affairs too numerous to count. Being so young, she was particularly affected by the novel. Other books had a significant influence on her imagination, but none affected her quite so much as
The Hourglass
. Staring at the page, Eleonora felt sometimes as if she were a peasant pressed up against the windows of a great house in hopes of catching a glimpse of the ball. It was as if she had discovered the door to another world, a world filled with action and sudden violent reversals of fortune, greed, capriciousness, and desire. If only, she thought sometimes, if only I were a baroness, if only I had grown up in Bucharest and spent my evenings in a literary salon. That October and far into November, Eleonora was perpetually with her nose in the book. She read before breakfast, after dinner, and anytime she could steal in between. She slipped sentences between stitches and pilfered whole paragraphs beneath potato peels. She was so engrossed in the book, so caught up in the death of Miss Holvert’s parents, in Count Olaf’s betrayal, and in Miss Ionescu’s dwindling marriage prospects that she didn’t realize there were decisions being made around her.

She had overheard pieces of conversation about a trip, and more than once raised her eyes from the page at the mention of Stamboul, but Eleonora was wholly unprepared for the news brought down on her that evening in late November. She was sitting at the dinner table with volume three—and had just arrived at the famous scene where General Krzab calls the remaining members of his family together to berate them and distribute the
fortune he had uncovered at the back of his mother’s closet—when her father pulled up to the front door in a donkey cart laden with four steamer trunks. As he and the driver finished unloading the trunks in the corner of the living room, Eleonora looked up at him with a curious tilt.

“What are all those trunks for, Tata?”

“They’re for my trip.”

She laid the book facedown on the dinner table and they looked at each other with mutual confusion.

“Don’t you remember?” he said. “I’m going to Stamboul next month.”

“Stamboul?”

To her ears, Stamboul was not a place you could just up and visit. It was a city of legends, a ruined metropolis shimmering at the edge of the desert, the lost capital of an ancient civilization, ossified over centuries of neglect or buried somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

“I’m going to sell carpets,” he explained. “Maybe buy some. Business hasn’t been very good these past few years and I think I would do better in Stamboul.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“It’s not such a long journey,” he said. “Maybe a week or a week and a half, depending on the weather. But I’ll need to stay there at least two weeks, perhaps more. Luckily, my contact there is very hospitable.”

What could she say to such news? While Eleonora tried her best to swallow the idea, Ruxandra emerged from the kitchen with a pot of chicken soup and served out three bowls. Eleonora stared down at her bowl and stirred it with her spoon. Slices of carrot, celery, onion, and eddies of dried parsley swam in languid circles under an oily film. Letting a pinkish-white piece of
chicken breast float into the well of her spoon, Eleonora tried to imagine a month without her father, a month alone with Ruxandra. Just the thought of it made her sick to her stomach.

“Tata,” she blurted out. “I don’t want you to leave.”

Her father put down his spoon and looked at her as he chewed on a gristly joint. She hid her face in her forearms. If only there were something she could say to make him stay, but she knew there wasn’t. It had already been decided.

“I’ll miss you, Ellie,” he said. Reaching across the table, he put his hand on her back. “But I will only be a month.”

“It will only be a month,” Ruxandra repeated. “And there will be plenty for us to do around the house in the meantime. He’ll be back before you know it.”

Eleonora looked up at her father and her aunt Ruxandra. She felt as if the whole world were falling apart around her, as if it had been disintegrating for weeks and she was only just now being informed of the situation. She swallowed hard and bit her bottom lip. A month was such a long time, thirty days, maybe thirty-one, and it was a dangerous journey. There were thieves, wild animals, landslides, and bandits. What if something happened? Then where would she be? The sadness rose up into her throat like a salty wave, but she knew that crying would not solve anything. It would just make things worse. Instead of succumbing to the sadness, Eleonora put the feeling out of her head. She recalled the words Miss Holvert said to her cousin after the tragic death of her parents.
Why should I not decide myself how to feel? They are, after all, my feelings. If I want to cry some other time, I will cry some other time. I do not want to today
.

After dinner, Eleonora excused herself and went straight to bed. Lying on her back with her quilt tucked under her heels, she
listened to the house sounds die down. She watched the shadows move across the ceiling, her breath tracking the rustle of night animals. It’s a different world, night, the bottom of the well, a hole from which we might never emerge. At one point, in what might have been a dream, a deer glanced past her window, its eyes reflecting some hidden luminosity like a string of lighthouses multiplied along the shore. Then it was gone, off again into darkness.