Balthasar's Odyssey (14 page)

No, that's not true — not all of us! Marta came on this journey for her own reasons. Habib came out of chivalry or for romance. And all Hatem did was follow his master to Constantinople, just as he would have followed me anywhere. I am the only one who gave in to Boumeh's promptings, and it's up to me to restrain him now. But I don't do it. I listen to him patiently, even though I know his reason is unreason and his faith impiety.

Perhaps I ought to act differently towards him. Contradict him, interrupt, make fun of him — in short, treat him as an uncle usually treats a young nephew, instead of showing so much consideration for him and his learning. The truth is that I'm rather scared of him, terrified even. I ought to get the better of this apprehension.

Anyhow, be he an envoy from Heaven or a messenger from Hell, he's still my nephew, and I mean to make him behave as such!

5 November

At her request I went with Marta as far as the Sultan's palace. But I soon left again at the request of my clerk, who thought my presence made his task more difficult. I'd put on my best clothes in order to make a good impression, but I'd only aroused greed and envy.

We had entered the palace through the outer courtyard, together with hundreds of other plaintiffs, all as quiet as if in a house of prayer. But this was because of their terror at being close to one who had the power of life and death over each one of them. I'd never been in such a place before, and was anxious to get away from that crowd of whispering intriguers, creeping diffidently across the sand and reeking of misery and fear.

Hatem wanted to meet a clerk in the Armoury who'd promised him information in exchange for a small amount of money. When we reached the door of the building, which was once the church of St Irene, he asked me to wait outside for fear the man would put up his price if he saw me. But it was too late. As ill luck would have it, the official was just emerging on some business or other, and took the opportunity to examine me from head to toe. When he returned a few minutes later, his demands had risen to fifteen times what they were before. You don't ask a wealthy Genoese for the same amount you'd gouge from a Syrian villager escorting a poor widow. Ten aspres had become 150, and on top of that the information wasn't complete — instead of telling all he knew, the fellow held back most of it in the hope of getting more money. He told us that according to the ledger he'd consulted, the name of Sayyaf, Marta's husband, didn't appear among those condemned to death, but there was another ledger he hadn't yet been able to look at. We must pay up and be grateful, and still be left in uncertainty.

Hatem wanted to go on and see someone else “under the cupola”, through the gate of Salvation. But he begged me not to accompany them any further, and, more amused than annoyed, I went and waited for them outside in a coffee shop we'd noticed when we arrived. All this tangling with officialdom gets on my nerves; I'd never have gone if Marta hadn't insisted. From now on I'll save myself the bother. I hope they'll get on faster and more cheaply without me.

They rejoined me an hour later. The man Hatem wanted to see had asked him to go back again next Thursday. He is a clerk too, but in the Tower of the Law, where he receives innumerable petitions and passes them on to higher authorities. He charged a silver coin for making the appointment. If I'd been there he'd have demanded gold.

Friday, 6 November

Today what was bound to happen did happen. Not at night, not in the form of a surreptitious embrace in a bed of confusion, but right in the middle of the morning when the narrow streets outside were swarming with people. We were there in Master Barinelli's house, she and I, looking through the blinds at the comings and goings of the people of Galata, like a couple of idle women. Friday is a day of prayer here, observed by some as a holiday, an occasion for taking a stroll or resting. Our travelling companions were all abroad on their various errands; our host had gone out too. We'd heard the door bang to behind him, and watched him and his pregnant lady-love walking carefully along the alley beneath the window, avoiding the heaps of rubble. She moved with some difficulty and clung to his arm, almost tripping over at one point because she was gazing fondly at him instead of looking where she was going. He just caught her in time and scolded her gently, putting his hand protectively on her brow and drawing an imaginary line with his finger from her eyes to her feet. She nodded to show she understood, and they went on more slowly.

As we watched them coping with their difficulties, Marta and I broke into laughter tinged with envy. Our hands touched, then joined like those of the couple in the street. Our eyes met, and as if in some game in which neither must be the first to look away, we remained like that for some time, each gazing at the other as into a mirror. It might have become ridiculous or childish if, after a moment, a tear hadn't started to trickle down Marta's cheek — a tear all the more surprising because she was still smiling. I stood up, went round the low table where the steam was still rising from our two coffee cups, and stood behind her, clasping her tenderly in my arms.

She tilted her head back, parting her lips and closing her eyes. At the same time she breathed a little sigh of surrender. I kissed her forehead, then her eyelids, then either side of her lips, shyly approaching her mouth. At first I just brushed it with my own trembling lips, murmuring her name and all the Italian and Arabic words for “my dear”, “my love”, “my own”, and then for “I want you”.

And then we found ourselves entwined together. The house was still silent, the outside world farther and farther away.

We'd slept side by side three times, but I hadn't encountered her body nor she mine. In Abbas the tailor's village I'd held her hand all night out of bravado, and in Tarsus she'd spread her black tresses over my arm. Two long months of timid attempts and gestures, with both of us looking forward to this moment with a mixture of hope and fear. Did I say earlier on how beautiful the barber's daughter was? She's still just as lovely as ever and has increased in affection without losing any of her freshness. It must be said that she has increased in passion too. But every act of love is different. Before, her love-making must have been greedy and fleeting, bold and reckless. I didn't experience it, but you can tell how a woman makes love by looking at her and her arms. Now she's both tender and passionate. Her arms enfold you like those of someone swimming for dear life; she breathes as if her head had been underwater till now; but any recklessness is just a pretence.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her when we'd got our breath back and were calmer again.

“Our host and his maid. They ought to have nothing in common, yet it seems to me they're the happiest people in the world.”

“We could be that too.”

“Perhaps!” she said, looking away.

“Why only ‘perhaps'?”

She bent over me as if to look more closely into my eyes and my thoughts. Then she smiled, and dropped a kiss between my eyebrows.

“Don't say any more. Gome here!”

She lay on her back again and pulled me to her. I'm the size of a buffalo, but she made me feel as light as a newborn infant on her breast.

“Closer!”

Her body seemed as familiar to me as a man's native country, with its hills and gorges and pastures and shady lanes — a land that's vast and generous and yet suddenly very tiny. I held her tight, she held me tight, her nails digging into my back and leaving sizeable marks.

“I want you!” I panted again in my own language. “My love!” she answered in hers, almost weeping as she breathed the word “love”. And then I called her my wife.

But she's still the wife of another, damn him!

8 November

I'd sworn not to go back to the palace, and to leave Hatem to work out his schemes in his own way. But today I decided to go with him and Marta as far as the High Gate and wait for them all morning at the same coffee shop as before. My presence may not have any effect on the proceedings, but it does have a new meaning now. Getting hold of the document that will make Marta a free woman is no longer a minor consideration for me amid all the other concerns arising out of the journey — in particular, the search for Marmontel and
The Hundredth Name.
The Chevalier is dead, and I now see Mazandarani's book as a mirage that I should never have pursued. But Marta is really here, no longer an outsider but the closest and dearest to me of all my companions — how could I just leave her to manage as best she can amid all these Ottoman complexities? I wouldn't dream of going home without her. And, for her part, she could never return to Gibelet and face her family without a document from the Sultan establishing her as a free woman again. She'd have her throat cut the very next day. No, her fate is bound up with mine now. And since I'm a man of honour, my fate is just as much bound up with hers.

There I go, talking about it as if it were an obligation. It isn't that, but it does involve a kind of obligation which it would be misleading to deny. Marta and I didn't come together by accident or sudden impulse. I nurtured my desire for a long while, letting the wisdom that comes with time work upon it; and then one day, that blessed Friday, I stood up, took her in my arms and told her I wanted her with all my being. And she gave herself to me. What sort of person would I be if I abandoned her after that? What would be the good of bearing a venerable name like mine if I let Barinelli, the son of an innkeeper, behave more nobly than I?

But if I'm so sure of what I should do, why am I arguing about it, why am I reasoning with myself as if I needed to be persuaded? It's because the choice I'm in the process of making is of much greater consequence than I thought. If Marta doesn't get what she wants, if they won't give her a certificate saying her husband is dead, she can never go back home again, and if so, I can't either. What would I do then? Would I be prepared, in order not to forsake her, to abandon everything I possess, everything my ancestors worked to build up, and wander around the world?

The thought of it makes my head spin. It would probably be wiser to wait and take each day as it comes.

Hatem and Marta emerged from the palace at lunch time, exhausted and desperate. They'd been obliged to pay out every aspre they had, and to promise more, and still they'd got nothing to show for it.

The clerk in the Armoury told them at once he'd been able to consult the second ledger containing the names of people who'd been hanged, but he demanded more money before he would tell what he'd found in it. Once he'd pocketed the cash, he informed them that Sayyaf's name wasn't there. But he added in a whisper that he'd learned there was a third list covering the most serious crimes, though two very highly placed officials would have to be bribed in order to gain access to it. He demanded a deposit of 150 aspres for this purpose, but magnanimously agreed to take 148, which was all his visitors had left on them. He threatened he wouldn't go on seeing them if ever they were so improvident again.

9 November

What happened today makes me want to leave this city as soon as possible, and Marta herself begs me to do so. But where could we go? Without that accursed firman she can't go back to Gibelet, and it's only here in Constantinople that she can hope to get it.

We went back to the Sultan's palace, as we did yesterday, to try to advance Marta's case, and again I stationed myself in the coffee shop while my clerk and “the widow”, swathed in black, disappeared amid a crowd of other petitioners into the outer courtyard, known as the Courtyard of the Janissaries. I was resigned to the prospect of waiting for three or four hours, as I had done yesterday, but the shopkeeper makes me so welcome now that I didn't mind. He's a Greek from Candia, and keeps telling me how glad he is to be able to talk to someone from Genoa about how much we both dislike the Venetians. They've never done me any harm, but my father always said people ought to despise them, so I owe it to his memory to do so. The owner of the coffee shop has more serious reasons to hate them. He hasn't said it in so many words, but from various allusions I gather one of them seduced and then abandoned his mother, and he was brought up to hate his own blood. He speaks Greek interspersed with snatches of Italian and Turkish, and we manage to have long conversations, punctuated by orders from his customers. These are often young janissaries who drink their coffee in the saddle and then throw the empty cups at the shopkeeper for him to try to catch them. He pretends to join in their laughter, but as soon as they have ridden away he crosses his fingers and curses them in Greek.

I didn't have much time to talk to him today. After half an hour Hatem and Marta returned, pale and trembling. I had to make them sit down and drink several glasses of water before they were able to tell me of their misadventures.

They went through the first courtyard and were making their way to the second and their interlocutor “under the cupola”, when they noticed a crowd had gathered around the gate of Salvation separating the two courtyards. A severed head was lying there on a stone. Marta averted her eyes, but Hatem went up close.

“Look,” he said to her. “Do you recognise him?”

She forced herself to look. It was the clerk from the Tower of the Law, the one they'd been to see last Thursday “under the cupola”, and who'd made an appointment to meet them again next Thursday! They'd have liked to find out why he'd been punished in this way, but they didn't dare ask. Instead they helped one another to totter away, hiding their faces lest their expressions of horror be taken as a sign of complicity with the victim!

“I'll never set foot in the palace again,” Marta told me on the boat taking us back to Galata.

I didn't say anything, so as not to upset her further. But she'll have to get that cursed paper somehow!