The Dervish House (41 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘So that’s why you’re wearing those prick-ass mirrorshades.’
Mustafa lets out a bray of laughter.
‘Do you know how long I’ve waited for that, Mr Hasgüler?’
‘For what?’
‘You to make me laugh. I’ll tell you how long. Six months, fourteen days and eight hours exactly. There is one rule to working in the Levent Business Centre and it’s that if you don’t possess a sense of humour you go insane. I love you like a brother, Necdet Hasgüler, but you have never shown anything remotely resembling a sense of humour. All those mad business plans, that Urban Golf shit; I tried my damnedest to get some kind of a smile out of you and you’d just nod like a dumb-ass mule. Whatever those things are, they’re changing you.’
‘Would it be very dull if I asked you what you meant?’
‘You react to what happens around you. Things surprise you. Other people exist. You talk. You have opinions. They may be wrongheaded, but they’re yours. They’re turning you into a real person.’
The water-deep serenity and certainty Necdet had felt in the Tulip Mosque, the crushing memories the Green Saint had summoned deep under the Business Rescue Centre; until now he had not thought they might be part of a greater process: the reinvention - or was it more, the invention? - of Necdet Hasgüler. What is, who is this Necdet Hasgüler? Yet he feels familiar in his skin, alert, eyes wide open. He is becoming truly conscious for the first time. Hızır, bringer of waters, master of spring and new growth, is growing him.
Necdet glances at the boiling sky as the car speeds over the Halıçoğlu Bridge. The djinn have formed a circling flock over the big intersection by the main bus station. Mustafa drives into the djinn storm. Among the narrow, apartment-gloomy streets of Ereğli, Necdet spies a corner store, makes Mustafa stop the car
‘The woman who sees peri, where does she live?’ Necdet asks. The shopkeeper shifts nervously.
‘We’re not journalists,’ Mustafa adds. He points to the Levent Business Rescue Centre logo on his polo shirt. ‘My friend here is a shaykh. He has seen djinn. He’d like to commune with Lady Peri.’
The storekeeper’s eyes bulge, he fumbles at his worry beads.
‘God preserve us. Crimea House. Günaydin Sok. You’ll have to pay the kapıcı. He runs the operation.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Necdet says with a pass of his hand, the kind that shaykhs and saints and masters of mystery make. ‘By the way, your store djinni says you really should check up on your security.’
‘Did he?’ Mustafa asks back in the stale heat of the street. ‘Need to check up on his security?’
‘Doesn’t every small shopkeeper?’
The concierge has a small tiled cubicle beside Crimea House’s elevator shaft. The elevator is a brass and iron cage, a guillotining thing of oily cables and hurtling counterweights, clashing metal gates and flanged wheels. The lobby smells of old tobacco, cleaning fluid and thick gloss paint. It feels like another century. Few djinn dwell here, just furtive spirits around the gas pipes and the cable ducting.
‘Günes Koser,’ Mustafa asks.
‘You have to make an appointment,’ the concierge says. He is of the tribe of kapıcıs, round and fat and yellow. He opens a desk diary. ‘Consultations with the shaykha are fifty euro. Morning or afternoon? You can have an evening appointment for a twenty euro supplement.’
‘My friend here is a shaykh himself.’ Mustafa says. ‘He would like to meet Günes shaykha as an equal. He is a master of djinn.’
‘It’s still fifty euro.’
Necdet tenses, leans forward as if sniffing out perfumes of other centuries.
‘You have a lung problem,’ Necdet says. ‘You smoke too much. You’re thinking of seeing a doctor about this. You should. It’s serious. It’s not what you fear, but it will be bad unless you do something now. You don’t want to die with a tube up your nose.’
‘Apartment 16,’ cries the concierge. ‘You are bad men. Away from me!’
‘We are God’s men,’ Mustafa says.
The elevator cage sinks an alarming half metre as Necdet and Mustafa step into it. Mustafa turns the brass pointer round to the fifth floor. Heavy engineered objects clank overhead and are answered from below. With a jerk the car starts upward.
‘What do you actually see, when you see djinn?’ Mustafa asks.
‘Burning babies, faces in computer screens, tiny flying people with very long legs, bodies all wound together like rope. The one inside the guy downstairs looked like a lung, with a beak, and tiny hands sticking out the side. What’s that thing smokers get where their lungs go hard and they can’t breathe?’
‘Emphysema.’
‘Like that would look like if it was a living person.’
‘I wonder if Günes Hanım sees exactly what you see but just calls them peri where you call them djinn.’
‘It’s never the same thing twice.’
The elevator grinds up its iron shaft. A sudden loud commotion from the ground floor snaps Necdet’s and Mustafa’s attention from the ceiling to the floor. Doors banging, voices shouting. Feet running. Figures in dark clothing pounding up the stairs that wrap around the lift shaft. Soft-peaked military-style caps. Necdet crouches, pulling Mustafa down beside him as the figures rush past: impact protection jackets, hi-vis tape at wrists and ankles, pants cuffs tucked into heavy boots.
‘Police,’ Necdet whispers. He tugs at the dial, punches at the finger-polished brass button. The elevator is intent on delivering them right to the police. The police are ranged around the door of Apartment 16. They are armed and armoured for riot, they have shock sticks and a black battering ram. The tops of Necdet’s and Mustafa’s heads rise above floor level. Then a hand, a hand from nowhere, grasps the floor pointer and wrenches to the left. Without a grate, without a plaint, the elevator stops and starts to descend again.
‘Did you see that?’ Necdet whispers.
‘They’re kicking in her door,’ Mustafa says. ‘They’re in her apartment.’
‘The hand, it was green.’ But the elevator is sinking surely now, taking them away from the shouting and crashing at the top of the stairs. The hand was green, disembodied but not disconnected; there was a person, beyond the elevator, beyond this entire world. Eyes deep as springtime. Help from beyond comprehension. Clattering bootfalls with the clank, clank of an object being taken down one stair at a time. The elevator sinks down beneath the level of the lobby and stops, jammed, its uppermost metre and a half above the marble floor. Necdet and Mustafa press back into the shadows. The police beat down into the lobby. Two of them handle a gurney, the type Necdet recognizes from the Business Rescue Centre for taking sick and injured down flights of stairs. Clank clank clank. A woman wrapped in a silver thermal blanket is strapped into it so firmly she can only flex her hands and feet. Her head is covered by the foil sheet but she tosses it so hard she shakes off the covering and Necdet sees her mouth is taped. Eyes connect. Necdet reels back. The life of another world cracks between them like lightning; djinn, peri, gods, all, none. Creatures of power. Then four police hurry her out the door. The remaining four haul the concierge, babbling and covering his head, out of his tiled office, out of Crimea House. Necdet leaps up to take action, Mustafa tackles him down and holds him down until the sirens have dopplered away. Then the two men force open the lift gates and haul themselves up on to the marble.
‘Did you see that? Did you?’ Necdet runs down the steps on to the street. Günaydin Sok is stunned to stillness: a photograph, Istanbul Street, 18:25, April 14th 2027. ‘It was her, I saw her on the tram, she was right beside me when the bomb went off. That wasn’t any old cops, that was security police.’
Mustafa takes Necdet’s arm to hurry him away before he attracts the other sort of police, but Necdet tears free from his grasp. He stands motionless as Günaydin Sok resumes movement and noise around him, intent as if straining to hear music at the edge of audibility. He frowns, shakes his head, then seems to catch a thread of melody. Mustafa sees him strike out across the street. Necdet stops outside the Türkcel ceptep store and points up at the dirty yellow-and-black hornet-chevronned robot clinging like a feeding wasp to the plastic shop-sign.
The call to prayer blares out from the four minarets of Süleymaniye Mosque as Ayşe Erkoç enters the southern gate of the enclosure. Ayşe has always had a horror of the azan. Not the austere beauty of the human voice, even recorded and amplified as it is in these degenerate days, nor the counterpoint of many calls from different distances across the city, breaking across each other in waves of sound. It horrifies her because it has no respect for her. It says this is not your city and time. This is God’s city, this is God’s time and God’s time is absolute. Your comings and goings and doings and dealings are hung around these five pillars. Five times a day you must stop what you are doing and turn to God. She fears the azan because to her it is the sound of atavism. It denies change and the hope of change. It says that all works of hands are temporary, all hope of progress is futile. All that is necessary is here. This is the perfect way. Come and pray. She fears it because it says that Istanbul, Queen of Cities, Abode of Felicity, is a man’s city. The azan says there is nothing for Ayşe Erkoç.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying,’ Barçin Yayla says, ‘but I did notice the same car pass us three times while we were walking up here from Küçükayasofya.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘Oh, I’m afraid I don’t know very much about cars. A silvery one. Is Skoda a make?’ At the door to the courtyard he says, ‘You’re very welcome to come to the women’s gallery.’
Ayşe would sooner drip his acid in her eyes. While Barçin Yayla prays with the men in the glorious prayer hall that is precisely twice as tall as it is wide Ayşe explores the grounds. Families picnic in the cool shade of the trees, rugs spread on the grass, mothers peeling hardboiled eggs, fathers pouring tea from Thermos flasks. Leaves rustle, stirred by the slightest breath of wind. Ayşe is no stranger to the Süleymaniye Mosque with its attendant medreses and charitable külliye arrayed on two sides; its dome and minarets were the daily view from the window of her adviser of studies at the university but today she sees them fresh. Not with the eyes of faith - she has seen its particular blindness in BarçinYayla - but with the eyes of the architect, the decorator, the pattern maker. There are mathematical rhythms and harmonies in the order of the domes, from great through lesser to least. The span of the arcades, the placing of windows and buttresses under the dome, the heights of pillars and the numbers of balconies on minarets; the geometries of squares, hexagons, octagons: this place is not stone, it’s music. She could spend years, decades searching for the hidden sign in these magnificent stone choruses and correspondences.
Twilight gathers under the trees and in the gateways as Ayşe enters the graveyard where the mausoleums of the house of Osman stand. Does she hear bats? She circles the tomb of Roxelana three times. She studies the carvings in the deepening gloaming, she pokes around in the grass, peers at tomb slabs, feels out the carvings in funerary pillars, scrabbles the gravel back and forth with the toe of her boot. Nothing, anything. She could lose a year, visiting every day in all weathers, to this graveyard alone. How could she have imagined that she would find the key at first glance, fly to it straight as a bullet, that it would shine out among the architectural brilliance of this enormous mosque complex to her and her alone? But the answer is here, she is certain of it. As she wanders back to meet Yayla, the floodlights come on one by one, throwing unnatural, infelicitous light on the dome and minarets. Angular shadows could be Kufic letters concealed in the architecture, they could be buttresses, they could be birds. The families are packing up their crumbs and blankets and trying to find places to dump their empty drinks bottles.
She finds Yayla sitting on the steps by the courtyard gate, his backpack at his side. He shines. His face is radiant, his eyes bright, his skin firm. Ayşe has seen this light in any number of miniatures of the Twelve Imams and the saints, the veiled face of the Prophet himself. She wonders if what she has thought of as innocence and naïvety is not in fact holiness.
‘We have a task ahead of us,’ Ayşe says.
‘A joyful task,’ he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan’s greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson.
Picnickers and evening strollers pass in ones and two heading for the gate on to Sidik Sami Omar Cadessi, in Sinan’s times, the Street of the Addicted, not merely from the intoxicants on sale there, but from the hospital that compassionately treated the opium addicts.
‘We’ll make a proper start tomorrow,’ Ayşe says. ‘Are you coming or are you staying her for the yatsı?’
‘I’ll go back to my own mosque for the final prayers,’ Yayla says.
‘If they knew what you were pursuing, if they knew what you believed, they would call you heretic,’ Ayşe says as they walk on crunching gravel under the bat-whispering trees. ‘That’s not a safe or a private matter these days.’
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