The Dervish House (43 page)

Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House

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You are an icon of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Theotokos. You are small and crude; the eye and hand of faith shaped you but devotion was not enough to overcome want of skill. Your hands are painted from three different perspectives, your eyes are wide but flat; turned away from the world. Your face is brown and long and has in its gaucheness captured your ineffable sorrow, dyed in the melancholy of this city long before it was called hüzün. No precious gilts or crushed mother of pearl went into the making of you, your frame is painted wood. You are small and dowdy. The casual eye glances off you, hanging among the bolder and brighter and more outwardly radiant paintings on the iconostasis of St Panteleimon’s Church. The eye of faith sees deeper. There is something ineffable, numinous, about this small, faded, grubby work. It’s not the face, the hands, the fingers raised in clumsy blessing. It’s the blue veil that drapes the Virgin’s head. How could the same hand have produced this? It seems to float free from the wood, light and luminous, almost sparkling with light. You are the Icon of the Little Virgin of the Protecting Veil. You have hung among lamps and images of the divine for fifteen hundred years. Your painter set pigment to wood the same year Justinian dedicated the great church of Aghia Sofia. You were too humble and clumsy for that basilica of emperors; lesser churches, the churches of the people were your proper place. You gained their veneration. You earned their love. You attracted a mythos as a worker of small miracles: lost things found, soldiers kept safe, travellers protected. You escaped the razing of the Iconoclast Era because a widow, thankful for a son returned safe from the eastern borders of the empire, hid you in her bosom for a year and a day, ever after bearing the rectangular mark of the Little Virgin pressed into her flesh. When the Mother of God appeared in a vision to the Holy Fool Andrew and spread her mantle over Constantinople to defend it from Saracen invasion, your beautiful shawl became part of that greater protecting veil. When Mehmet the Conqueror released his armies on defeated Constantinople for three days of looting, you were hidden, face down, in a horse manger as blood ran in the streets and the last memory of Byzantium burned. Now Muslims as much as Christians venerate you and come to leave small offerings for a lost thing found, a stubborn bureaucrat charmed, a son on military service kept safe.

Fourteen hundred years, four empires, a dozen churches; now you rest on the sanctuary screen of St Panteleimon, neither ancient nor venerable, a hidden treasure among the dozens of images that adorn the iconostasis. This is the trick of it: the profane eye can’t recognize you, the eye of faith must seek you out. You teach that everyday miracles are found in everyday places; hidden, unassuming, vanishing into the crowd as soon as they’re performed. The divine is in the faces you see every day, all around, covering you like a veil.

This evening Father Ioannis has honoured the Little Virgin of the Protecting Veil by lifting her from the iconostasis and setting her in the stand in the narthex, a special icon for special vespers. There is already a small pile of euro and cents under the stand.

The cosmic blue of the veil shines out in the stifling shade on Havyar Sok and calls Georgios Ferentinou in. He has been wandering, thinking, shaping thoughts about faith and chemistry, when old faith catches his eye in a kingfisher flash. He has not intended to go anywhere near St Panteleimon, but the cool of the protecting blue veil seems to infuse the little tiled vestibule. The growl of Istanbul is pushed away. Georgios Ferentinou can breathe, breathe deep without catch or tightness. The air smells sweet, not of incense, or the cleaning liquids Father Ioannis used to cleanse the urine, but an older deeper fragrance; the perfume of the Virgin, and older than the lady of Christianity, to the old gods of the Greeks and the Hittites, the fecund Venuses of primeval Anatolia.

Father Ioannis chants the Prokeimenon. He has a fine, basso voice, deep as a cistern. Bell-true. Georgios murmurs the lines of the liturgy. Never forgotten. Teach a child in the true way. He’s never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such a chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing it. He stands by the corner of the narthex door, in the shadows where he can see and not be seen. Candles and oil lamps burn in rows before the iconostasis. The agony of St Panteleimon is all the more brutal in the flickering light. His martyrers nailed his hands to his head. There is the gap usually inhabited by the Little Virgin of the Protecting Veil, surrounded by nailed skulls, flayings, cruel executions, those art works so coveted by Mrs Erkoç in the gallery. Russians pay ridiculous money for them; gas lords and mineral oligarchs fill walls with the martyred. Dark and enigmatic people, the Russians.

Father Ioannis steps into Georgios’ view and takes a position before the sanctuary gates. The old man draws back. The occasional prayers. Father Ioannis’ voice commands the space beneath the star-painted vault of St Panteleimon. It’s not the first time he has celebrated divine office to God alone. But he is not alone with God. A movement, a shadow in the intimate gloom of the nave. A worshipper; a veiled head: a woman.

Georgios’ heart catches in his chest. He steps away from the door, doubly terrified of being seen. But he must see. He moves carefully around the door until both Father Ioannis and the woman worshipper are in profile. Her head is bowed. The veil hides her features. A strand of silver hair escapes over the collar of her blouse. Georgios hardly dare breathe. It is her. It must be her. The Song of Simeon ends, the woman looks up. Her face catches the light. She is perfect in her unselfconsciousness, smiling in delight at the ringing resonance in the old church’s acoustic. Father Ioannis’ basso toll begins again.
Let it last forever
, Georgios thinks. Let it be the unending threnody of the Mother of God for the broken world, outside time. His hands shake. This is voyeurism; he is a Peeping Tom of the soul. The incense is suddenly cloying. He must leave. He has to leave. In his haste he catches the icon stand. The Little Virgin of the Protecting Veil, aloof for fourteen hundred years, tips towards the tiles. Georgios sets her back in her position but the scrape and rattle of the brass stand has turned Ariana’s head to the narthex. Georgios whirls away, hunches his shoulders and pulls his jacket close around him.
Don’t hear me, don’t see me, lady draw your veil around me.

Behind his wooden door, in his wooden kitchen, Georgios sets the kettle to boil. There is his tea, a Black Sea blend prepared specially for him. There are the tea glasses, winking in the down-lighters. Georgios Ferentinou hurls the tea glass at the wall. The tiny bulb of delicate glass explodes. Another, then another, all of them, Georgios roaring now in wordless rage and loss. All of them. He can’t breathe, is there nowhere to get away from the heat in this house, this terrible house? He hates it; he always has hated it. He only came here because he couldn’t afford anywhere better, after Ogün Saltuk told him his career as a tenured professor was over. Decisions he was not conscious of making chipped his life away to leave this splinter of a man. There should have been friends beyond a few old Greeks; there should have been family, there should have been children. There should have been Ariana Sinanidis.

Economics was not always the dismal science. For half a season, the early autumn of 1980, economics was thrilling, economics was revolutionary. Economics was, for a few sweet weeks at the rag end of summer heat, cool. Georgios Ferentinou had never been cool. He had never spent the night in Taksim bars and Beyoğlu cafés with people who could talk ideas long after curfew, who were as excited about new ways of thinking and looking at the world as he. He had never marched beside names and faces he knew from the newspapers and realized that they were just people. He had never turned his back to police water cannon or learned how to scoop up a CS gas canister and lob it back at the armoured ranks, then run madly through the alleys and soks of old Beyazıt and Eskiköy to stop in a doorway, breathless, wide-eyed with the sudden realization of danger, breath-close to Ariana Sinanidis and have that breathlessness break into the hugest laughter. He had never even known he could run. He had been thin and pale and abstract. He became ever so quietly, ever so modestly, political. He fell in love.

Love blinds you most to the times. The lectures he gave, the rallies he attended, the flyers he ran off at midnight on the department Gestetner, it was not socialism or communism or islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution. Even when the faces from the newspapers were no longer at his shoulder in the demonstrations, when more bodies without faces turned up in the prop-wash at Kadiköy and Eminönü and remote laybys on the Bursa highway, nothing like that could happen to him. Love protected him like the word of God.

‘It’s us it will all come down on,’ his mother said. ‘I saw it in ’55. It always comes down on the Greeks, and the Kurds and the Armenians. And the Jews. You think you know it all, running around with that Sinanidis girl, that they can’t touch you, but they have long memories, the Turks. All those great research posts, those big academic promotions, you’ll just never quite make the grade. There’ll always be some Turk who’s better qualified, has a better publishing record, fits the position better.’

‘They won’t be here,’ Georgios said. ‘We’ll have swept the generals away and proper socialism in.’

‘What do you know about socialism?’ Georgios’ father said.

The arrests began three days later with the Armenians; prominent members of the community, socialites, professionals, fourth estatists lifted from their places of work, from their family tables, from their beds. Most were released within twenty-four hours. Some subsequently stood trial and were jailed, to be returned to their homes and hearths years later when a democracy acceptable to the military took control in Ankara. Some never returned at all. The Greeks read the signs. Within a week eighty families had moved out of Cihangir. Georgios’ family finally, desperately, contacted their son by a telegram sent to his department concierge.

‘Oh son, don’t say you won’t, you can’t stay,’ Georgios’ mother had begged. He remembers that night at the house as the first time he had seen her old, so small, her legs terribly thin and frail.

‘I’ve work to do here.’

‘Work, you mean running around with those Young Socialists, whatever they call themselves, that Sinanidis girl? She thinks too much of herself, she does.’

Georgios bit down anger.

‘No, I mean work. I have a doctorate to finish.’

‘You can transfer that to an Athens university.’

‘Which Athens university would that be?’

‘Now son,’ his father interrupted but Georgios’ mother went down on her knees then and wept without shame.

‘You break the family, you break my heart, why won’t you come? It’s only for a year or two, and maybe then everything will different and you can move back.’ Knowing, as everyone in the cramped, stale-aired living room into which the cooking smells wandered to die, that they never would, that none of the Greeks piling their lives into cardboard boxes and fruit crates ever would.

‘Tell me at least you’re not doing it for her,’ his mother implored. It was an underhanded, unclean blow, the type only a mother can hope to deliver.

‘I have a doctorate to finish,’ he said in a voice of stone.

He helped them load Mr Bozkurt’s delivery van. He was careful not to carry any of the boxes holding his childhood things. He let his parents take them, mutely; he would have to come for them some day. No son could give away his childhood. What he would not watch was them drive away in Mr Bozkurt’s white van, turn out of Somuncu Sok on to Cihangir Cadessi, to the new highway west, through Edirne to the border. They went down into Greece, a foreign country, and rented a cramped, overheated apartment in Exarcheia, which they hated for the rest of their lives because no one could understand their accent and called them Turks.

He went back to his university room and ignored Ariana’s phone calls. Three days after the Ferentinous left Cihangir, where they had lived since Hellenic times, the government moved into the university, breaking up sit-ins, beating students, arresting agitators, detaining academics and researchers. Then the black car came to take Georgios Ferentinou over the Bosphorus Bridge.

Three times Georgios finds the ceptep in his hand, three times he sets it down. He is sick with fear. He tries to imagine how she will sound. He’s forgotten her voice. He has rehearsed what he will say, but he can’t anticipate her answers. She may not even want to speak to him. She may just disconnect. He couldn’t bear that. He has spent his professional life estimating risk, how people assess it, judge it, accept it; now he can’t face it. Georgios snatches up the ceptep. The number is on speed dial. It’s calling. A voice answers in a foreign language. Greek, it’s Greek. Georgios stumbles for words.

‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Hello, who is this?’

It was the strap on the front and the back of each hand for anyone Göksel Hanım caught speaking Greek in her class.

‘Hello, is that Ariana Sinanidis?’ Georgios hears the waver in his voice.

A pause. Georgios holds his breath. The voice speaks again.

‘Who’s calling?’ She’s spoken six words but the voice, that voice, floods back to him in every syllable and nuance.

‘It’s Georgios Ferentinou,’ he says.

Thursday