The Dervish House (16 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Here I come. What do you think?’ Ayşe strides down the hall that has smelled of cooking onions and trapped grease as long as she can recall and into the living room. Her mother sits in her chair in the window bay where she can survey both inner and outer worlds. ‘Now, it’s not designed to be worn with these boots, but will it do?’
‘Do for what?’
‘I told you ten minutes ago, this dinner with Ferid Adataş tomorrow.’
‘Ferid who?’
Tulip Apartment was a House of Memory. Ayşe had first encountered these edifices in the pages of Renaissance writings from fifteenth-century Florence. There masters of the art of memory constructed fabulous Palladian palazzos of visualization in which every hall and room and painting and statue, every piece of furniture and ornament on that furniture was the key to a painstakingly remembered fact. Contracts, legal cases, poems and discourses, were parsed into phrases of memory and assigned to locations in the mnemonic palace. A walk from the portico through the vestibule and along the loggia could be a complex argument in logic; another walk from that same starting point, by way of a certain niche, into the withdrawing room to a balcony overlooking a formal garden of cypress trees like dark flames could be a family genealogy or a marriage contract. As the ties between Fatma Hanım’s memories grew less coherent, Ayşe’s mother devised her own informal art of memory, investing the lamps and ornaments and family photographs, the books and years-out-of-date magazines and little jewelled boxes she loved so much with moments and recollections. She had set them at precise angles that Dicle the cleaner was forbidden from moving, for that would completely change the memory. A shift of twenty degrees might transmute a school prize into a cousin’s wedding; the brother’s graduation in the silver frame on the table beside the sagging sofa could, by a single move to the other side of the table, turn into New Year fireworks for the turn of the century and be utterly lost. As even those associations disintegrated, Fatma Hanım had taken to sticking yellow Post-its inscribed with cryptic, SMS-like memos to her mementoes. She raged with the spectacular spite of the old at Dicle when the little
aides-memoires
started disappearing. What had happened was that the glue dried out and the sun-paled yellow notes, the handwriting faded almost to invisibility, fell through the dusty air to the ground like leaves. Memory by memory, Fatma Hanım was being indexed on to the Erkoç Apartment. To Ayşe it seems like the necessary entropy of Fatma Hanım’s life as family archivist. While she and her sisters and brother, her cousins and aunts and the whole carnival of the extended Erkoçs ran around going to school and falling in love and getting married and having babies or careers or both and splitting up and living big and wide, her mother picked up the memories, cleaned them off and arranged them in sense and place for when they might be needed, years or lifetimes later. Now the house was too full of rememberings and Fatma Hanım too empty of them. To her that was success: it was all written, had you eyes to read it.
aides-memoires
started disappearing. What had happened was that the glue dried out and the sun-paled yellow notes, the handwriting faded almost to invisibility, fell through the dusty air to the ground like leaves. Memory by memory, Fatma Hanım was being indexed on to the Erkoç Apartment. To Ayşe it seems like the necessary entropy of Fatma Hanım’s life as family archivist. While she and her sisters and brother, her cousins and aunts and the whole carnival of the extended Erkoçs ran around going to school and falling in love and getting married and having babies or careers or both and splitting up and living big and wide, her mother picked up the memories, cleaned them off and arranged them in sense and place for when they might be needed, years or lifetimes later. Now the house was too full of rememberings and Fatma Hanım too empty of them. To her that was success: it was all written, had you eyes to read it.
‘Mother, what do you think?’ Ayşe’s sister Günes calls. Fatma Hanım’s gaze had been sliding from Ayşe to the veins on her hands folded in her lap, the annotated ornaments on the mantel, the blue flicker of the television in the corner furthest from the light. The ebb of her mother’s memory had grown stronger in the past three months, sucking details and names and even faces out into forgetting. Fearful of water left running and gas hissing in the kitchen, Günes had moved in with the children. Recep and Hülya, her nine- and five-year-olds, cantered around the apartment heedless of meaningless heirlooms and carefully positioned
aides-memoires
, liberated by the sudden spaciousness of the generous old Ottoman rooms. Ibrahim, her husband, remained at the crammed little modern apartment at Bayrampaşa. Günes had been waiting years for this. She had long wanted the messy and unpredictable being-married part of her life to be over so she could fold herself back into family. She had always been a carer and a coper. Ayşe had always been a chaser and a smoker. Günes’ haughty moral superiority, her mother’s enduring grey disappointment that Ayşe had married beneath herself did not trouble Ayşe any more. God or DNA had ordained it. You don’t argue with them.
aides-memoires
, liberated by the sudden spaciousness of the generous old Ottoman rooms. Ibrahim, her husband, remained at the crammed little modern apartment at Bayrampaşa. Günes had been waiting years for this. She had long wanted the messy and unpredictable being-married part of her life to be over so she could fold herself back into family. She had always been a carer and a coper. Ayşe had always been a chaser and a smoker. Günes’ haughty moral superiority, her mother’s enduring grey disappointment that Ayşe had married beneath herself did not trouble Ayşe any more. God or DNA had ordained it. You don’t argue with them.
‘Yes, lovely dress dear; what did you say it was for?’ Fatma Hanım asks.
‘The dinner, out on the Princes Islands.’
‘The Princes Islands? Who would you know out there?’
‘Ferid Adataş.’
‘I think you mentioned that name. Who is he? Do we know him?’
‘He’s an investment fund manager. A businessman, very successful.’
Fatma Hanım shook her head.
‘Sorry dear.’
A diplomat, a bureaucrat or a nouveau eurocrat; even a member of that most endangered species, a prince: that was the kind of society the Erkoçs enjoyed in the Princes Islands when Fatma and the most dashing Captain in the Northern Sea Command would be whisked out to a ball in a navy launch by smartly uniformed ratings, the red star and crescent billowing behind them. Businessmen have fingers yellow with money. Businessmen have beady peery eyes from looking at the bottom line, not the dazzling horizon of the blood-dark Black Sea.
‘He’s a friend of Adnan’s.’
Fatma Hanım’s gaze slides away again. That’s it said now, good and proper. Business. Not a decent society thing at all. Across the room in the chair by the window where the light is good for needlework, Günes presses the tip of her tongue to her lips in a soft lizard-hiss of disapproval. That name is not to be spoken in front of Fatma Hanım. Any reminder of what her youngest daughter could have and refused to marry into moved the easy tears of old age.
Ayşe kisses her mother on the forehead. As she closes the door Fatma Hanım asks again,
‘Where is it she’s going?’
‘The Princes Islands,’ Günes says patiently.
The Marmaray out from Sirkeci is solid with bodies. Ayşe strap-hangs under the Bosphorus. The carriage smells of electricity and the light is migrainous. There is fear in the train: everyone knows where there was one bomb there will be another, from the same group or from another wanting a shine of the glory. Ayşe tries not to imagine a bomb in this deep tunnel. She tries not to imagine the blast of white light, the roof cracking open, the tunnel splitting, the water blasting in like a knife under millions of tons of pressure. The train sways over the points, blue lightning illuminates the tunnel. Ayşe knows everyone else thinks the same thought. Deep tunnels, tall buildings, fast trains and high-flying aircraft, all these things are irresistible to angry males. All these things defy God.
A million euro and she never has to do this again.
Tonight the dolmuş winds interminably between the spindly apartment blocks of Ferhatpaşa. Roads, eroded, dusty verges, concrete facades and the scrubby hillside are doused in yellow light. Ayşe can no longer stand the ugliness. A million euro would take her across the Bosphorus, back to Europe again. Kids hang around the lobby of the apartment block. Doesn’t the new mosque run some kind of youth club?
He’s not home. He won’t be for hours. After the hamam, there’ll be drinks, more talk. She won’t wait up for the signature purr of the Audi pulling into the parking lot. The apartment is still with trapped heat and smells of fabric conditioner. Ayşe can hear upstairs’ television through the floor. Whatever channel they watch seems to consist of constant cheering. She drinks cherry juice from the carton, so cold it hurts. Ayşe lays out tomorrow’s clothes on her dresser. It is bliss to unzip and slip off the boots, a ridiculous fashion in such weather, but the fashion nonetheless. She slips naked beneath the sheet but even that is too much covering. Sleep won’t come. Ayşe tries her comfortable side, her less comfortable side, her back, moving to the cooler part of the bed, arranging one leg over the other so, one arm under the other so. Nothing. Her mind races. She sees Adnan at the bath-house, so serious, as he is so beautifully serious when he does business; Adnan over drinks - he loves a party but he will always be at least one drink behind his host. She imagines the dinner tomorrow; the men talking to each other about football and politics and deals, the women around the table discussing family and gossip and society.
And what do you do to pass the time, Ms Erkoç?
I’m on a quest for a mellified man.Which is more absurd in Istanbul, a legend bubbling up out of a magical past or turning down a million on the smell of man’s aftershave?
And what do you do to pass the time, Ms Erkoç?
I’m on a quest for a mellified man.Which is more absurd in Istanbul, a legend bubbling up out of a magical past or turning down a million on the smell of man’s aftershave?
She pulls on a robe to make the call. Akgün takes a moment to recognize her name.
‘Ms Erkoç. Forgive me, what can I do for you?’ She catches a phantom wisp of
Arslan
aftershave.
Arslan
aftershave.
‘Your mellified man.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll do it.’
Tuesday
3
‘Hot,’ says Father Ioannis.
‘Hotter than yesterday,’ says Georgios Ferentinou.
‘Hottest yet,’ says Lefteres the Confectioner. ‘It’ll break thirty-eight. ’
‘Hot as hell,’ says Constantin. ‘Your pardon, Father.’
‘Hell is hotter,’ says Father Ioannis.
Bülent brings a stick with simits threaded on it.
‘What are these for this time?’ Lefteres asks. He stirs his tea, sugar crystals whirl and blur in the hot liquid.
‘Volkan passed the fitness test, didn’t he?’
Lefteres throws his hands up in despair.
‘How do you do this?’
‘I’m a natural-born entrepreneur, I have deep-rooted market instincts.’
‘So why are you still running this place?’ says Lefteres the lampoonist.
‘I wouldn’t be if it were real money,’ says Bülent. ‘Maybe I’m scared of success. It’s our abiding national failing.’
Constantin tears a piece from his simit.
‘Here, Ferentinou, anything on that bomb yesterday?’
‘Why are you asking him?’ asks Father Ioannis.
‘You weren’t here for this bit,’ says Lefteres. ‘Our good doctor here is all of a sudden a security consultant. Right in the middle of his morning tea there’s a knock on the door and who should be there but some spook from MIT.’
‘For a start, I’m not a security consultant,’ says Georgios Ferentinou. ‘What I have done is agree to work with a new government think tank. They want people with heterodox ideas. The orthodox ones don’t seem to be working. And it’s good
professor.’
professor.’
‘He means, they don’t predict tram bombs,’ says Lefteres.
Bülent lifts empty glasses on to his tray.
‘Call me naïve, but surely one of the first things about a security think tank is that it’s, well, secure?’
‘All I’m saying to you is that I’m a member of the Kadiköy Group. That’s no national secret.’
‘You’re going to Kadiköy?’ says Lefteres.
‘Yes. This afternoon. Is this so very strange?’
‘I’m trying to remember the last time you went further than Taksim.’
‘They’re sending a car,’ says Georgios Ferentinou but the lampoonist has sunk a barb into him. For years now he has let his world contract until it is as close and comfortable as an old suit. The ghost Istanbuls of his white room have replaced the old wonderful names of the streets and alleys: The Street of a Thousand Earthquakes, Alley of the Chicken that Thought It Could Fly, Avenue of the Bushy Beard, the Street of Nafi of the Golden Hair.
‘So what were you poking around at yesterday up the side of Kenan’s shop?’ Bülent asks.
‘Young Mr Durukan claims he was chased by a robot.’
‘You still letting that kid visit you?’ asks Constantin.
‘You’re a fool to yourself, Georgios,’ says Lefteres.
‘Now I did see something yesterday,’ Bülent says. ‘That kid’s toy bird-robot thing, and another one as well. I thought it was a flowerpot or a satellite dish come off a roof or something.’
‘The boy went down to have a look at the bomb on Necatibey Cadessi,’ Georgios says. ‘He finds he’s not the only robot watching the events. And what’s more, they’re following someone. He goes to investigate, but another robot - a third robot - spots him and tries to grab him but he escapes. It chases him all the way back here but he manages to trick it into a jump it hadn’t foreseen, and it falls and smashes.’
‘That would be what I saw then,’ Bülent says.
‘Go back a bit,’ says Father Ioannis. ‘You said they were following someone.’
Georgios raises an admonitory finger.
‘Yes, and someone known to us.’
Every breath is bated.
‘One of the young men from the basement,’ Georgios says.
‘Well, in that case I hope it’s the police and that they find him and evict him,’ says Father Ioannis. ‘Those boys have been nothing but trouble since they moved in. It’s them poured piss over my church, I’m sure of it. Get the lot of them out; this has always been a mixed area.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you something,’ says Bülent leaning over his counter as if it is a pulpit. ‘That same guy, he sees djinn.’
‘He smokes his head off on marijuana all day,’ drawls Constantin.
‘Well, what about this then, unbelievers,’ Bülent says. ‘Hafize, who works with Erkoç Hanım over in the art gallery - right underneath you, Georgios. Well, the brother Ismet - the street kadı, he has a reputation for being good at opening the book, so she went to see him and get a reading because she thought she might be pregnant. Necdet takes one look at her and tells her straight to her face, you most certainly are pregnant. How does he know? Because he’s seen her karin, upside down in the earth, with the big bulging belly. A karin.’
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