The Dervish House, page 4
‘It was your tram.’
‘Do you not remember I said I was going in early? There’s a potential supplier calling before work.’
‘Well, you watch yourself. These things never happen in ones.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for suicide bombers. How’s the yalı?’
‘I’ll send you the video. I may be late back. I’m trying to get a meeting with Ferid Bey tonight.’ The name-drop is as much for the realtor as for his wife. There is a beat of radio silence that is the equivalent of an exasperated sigh.
‘I’ll see you when I see you then.’
At some dark hour he will slip back through the curve of taillights arching over the bridge to the eighth-floor apartment. She may be watching television, or half-watching it while she puts on laundry, or if his meetings have hauled on and on, be in bed. Then he will slip in without turning on the lights, a quick mumble as she surfaces through sleep like a dolphin, in behind her to press the rough warmth of his dick against the bed-heat of her smooth ass and the return press, then down with her, lured down into sleep so fast there is not even time for the twitch of the terror of drowning. All around, the sweet incense of fabric conditioner. It’s no way to live. But he has seen the end of it. A few more days of effort and it’s over.
Adnan Sarioğlu snaps off his ceptep.
‘One million two hundred thousand you say?’ he asks.
‘We’ve had a number of offers,’ the realtor says.
‘I’ll give you one million one.’
‘Offers are generally in excess of the asking price.’
‘I’m sure they are. But this isn’t an offer, this is a price. In cash.’
The realtor flusters. Adnan drives home his advantage.
‘One point one million euro in cash to your office by noon Friday.’
‘We, ah, don’t usually deal in cash.’
‘You don’t deal in cash? Cash is king, is what cash is. Do anything with cash, you can. Friday, lunchtime. You have the contract on the desk and I’ll sign it and shake your hand and you take my fucking cash.’
Three minutes later Adnan Sarioğlu’s car leans into the on-ramp to the bridge, accelerating into the stream of Europe-bound vehicles. Autodrive makes microadjustments to the car’s speed; the other vehicles read Adnan’s signals and correspondingly adjust their distances and velocities to accommodate him. All across the Bosphorus Bridge, through every arterial of vast Istanbul, every second the ceaseless pump of traffic shifts and adjusts, a flock of vehicles.
Drive-time radio news at the top of the hour. The tram bomb is already downgraded. No one dead besides the suicide bomber. A woman. Unusual. No promise of Paradise’s rewards for her; just eternity married to the same old twat. Something in the family. It always is. Men die for abstractions, women for their families. No, the big story is the weather. Hot hot hot again. High of thirty-eight and humidity eighty per cent and no end in sight. Adnan nods in satisfaction as the Far-East gas spot-price ticker crawls across the bottom of the windshield. His forty-eight hour delivery options on Caspian Gas will hit their strike this morning. Nice little earner. He’ll need the premiums for a few small necessary purchases on Turquoise. Cash is always king. Adnan slips the nozzle of the inhaler up his nostril. The rush of inhaled nano breaks across his forebrain and the numbers become sharp, the focus clear. He hovers high above the golden fabric of deals and derivatives, spots and strikes. Only the concentration-enhancing nano makes it possible for Adnan to pick a pattern from the weave of transactions. The old traders use more and more to keep pace with the young Turks. He’s seen the shake in their hands and the blur in their eyes as he rides down the express elevator with them to the underground car park after the back office has settled out. Nano, Caspian gas, CO2 and traders: all the many ways of carbon.
Music: the special calltone of his Paşa, his white knight. Adnan clicks him up on the windshield.
‘Adnan Bey.’
‘Ferid Bey.’
He is a fat-faced man with skin smooth from the barber’s razor, almost doll-like in its sheer buffed finish. Adnan recalls from his research that Ferid is very vain, very groomed.
‘I’m interested in this. Of course I’ll need much more detail but I think we can do business. I’ll be at the Hacı Kadın baths from seven thirty.’ He laughs hugely though there is no comedy in his words.
‘I’ll see you there.’
The call ends. The Audi stitches itself in and out of the traffic and Adnan Sarioğlu beats his hands on the dashboard and whoops with delight. A new call chimes in; a poppier tune, the theme from an animated TV series that Adnan and his three fellow Ultralords of the Universe grew up with.
‘Hail Draksor.’
‘Hail Terrak.’
Adnan and Oğuz graduated from the MBA and entered Özer together. Adnan floated into lofty hydrocarbons and the realm of abstract money, Oğuz was pumped into Distribution, the all-too-solid domain of pipelines and compression stations, tanker terminals and holding centres. It’s lowly, unglamorous; very far from lunch at Olcay and champagne at Su come bonus time. Too easily overlooked. That was why, when the idea of Turquoise struck in its full, lightning intensity as he rode the elevator up the glass face of the Özer tower, Oğuz was the first call of his old college friends.
‘Volkan’s got a fitness test at twelve.’
‘He’ll never make it,’ Adnan says. ‘Fat bastard’s so out of condition he can’t even touch his toes.’
Oğuz’s face grins in the smartglass of the windscreen. The four Ultralords of the Universe are also ultra-Galatasaray fans. On their bonuses they could easily afford a corporate box at Aslantepe but they like to be in the stands, with the fans, with their kebabs and their small flasks of sipping rakı. Cimbom Cimbom Cimbom! Fighting stuff that rakı. The Ultralords understand going to games. It is not about sport. There is no such thing as sport. It is about seeing the other team lose. One million goals would not be enough to crush the opposition. When he is up there with the rest of the boys, Adnan wants to see the opposition all die on stakes. The Romans had it right. It’s fighting stuff. Give us blood.
‘So where are you?’ Oğuz asks.
Adnan flicks on his transponder. A map of mid-Istanbul overlays Oğuz’s grinning face on his windshield. Oğuz is on the Fatih Sultan Bridge to the north. The distances are comparable; the driveware calculates traffic densities. A little jockey-programme generates odds. Oğuz’s grin widens. He likes those odds.
‘I’ll go five hundred euro.’
‘Eight hundred.’ Adnan likes those odds too. ‘And the tip.’ There is etiquette to the Ultralords of the Universe’s street races. The tip is that the loser pays the winner’s traffic fines.
‘Element of Air assist me!’ Adnan shouts. ‘In three. Two. One.’ He grabs the steering handset and flicks off the autodrive. Warnings blare through the car. Adnan ignores them and floors the pedal. The gas engine barely raises a note but the car leaps forward into the traffic. The self-guiding cars fluster and part like panicked chickens as Adnan piles through. There is a time to peel out from the flock. Adnan Sarioğlu laughs as he spears through the traffic. The Audi leans like a motorbike as he crosses lanes. Cars peel away like the bow-wave of a Russian gas-tanker. The game is on. Adnan feels the roar build inside him, the roar that never goes away, that is in the kick of the nanotuned gas engine of his street-sweet German car, that wells in him when Ayşe moves against him on those nights he slips home in the dark, when she murmurs so and opens to let him press inside her; but most, most in the shriek of gas hurtling down the Blue Line, under the Bosphorus, out into the world of money, that is the deal, every deal, every closing. The roar that never, never stops. In seven minutes he will take Oğuz for three hundred euro and a dozen traffic-cam fines. Tonight he will meet the manager of one of Istanbul’s fattest hedge funds. On Friday he will slap down a briefcase full of notes in front of that piss-eyed realtor in his hideous shiny little Lidl suit and set the name of Sarioğlu down by the waters of the Bosphorus. It is the game, the only game and the always game.
The angel is blind and shackled by an iron band around his right foot. His eyes are blank stone orbs. He is naked and wreathed in flame, male, marvellously muscular and lithe, yet sexless. He flies by the power of his own will, arms outstretched, intent but ignorant, blind to his own blindness, straining against the single shackle. The blind angel’s left arm claws for the child. He craves it with sense other than sight.
The second angel cradles the child away from that grasp. He too is male, defined yet kept chaste by the leg of the child. He stands on a ribbon of cloud low on an indefinite sea. He looks to the blind angel with an expression of incomprehension. The child, a sturdy lad improbably muscled, faces away. His arm is held up in a plea for help. His hair is very curly. The succouring angel looks like a prig. All the passion, all the energy, is in the blind, burning angel.
‘William Blake, Good and Evil Angels,’ Ayşe Erkoç says, leaning close over the print. ‘I love William Blake. I love his vision, I love the prophetic fire that burns through his art and his poetry, I love the completeness of his cosmology. I’ve studied William Blake, I’ve read William Blake, I’ve seen William Blake, in folio, and in London. On very rare, very special occasions, I’ve sold William Blake. Original William Blake. This is not William Blake. This is garbage. The paper’s all wrong, the line is like a five-year-old’s, I can smell the bleach from here and there’s a spelling error in the text. This is an offence to my professionalism.’
Topaloğlu’s cheeks quiver in embarrassment. Ayşe thinks of them as two slabs of condemned liver. Offal propped apart by a wide, rural moustache.
‘I mean no insult, Mrs Erkoç.’
‘There’s a world—no, a universe—of difference between unclear provenance and a Grand Bazaar fake,’ Ayşe continues. ‘If I can see it, my buyers can see it. They know at least as much as I do. These are collectors, aficionados, investors, people who purely love religious art, who love nothing else. They may not care where or how I get a piece. They care very much that it’s genuine. The moment they hear I’m selling fakes, they go to Antalya Fine Arts or the Salyan Gallery.’
Topaloğlu’s humiliation deepens. He is cheap little pedlar with the soul of a carpet seller, Ayşe thinks. Abdurrahman recommended him to Ayşe as a man who could get Isfahan miniatures. She will have to have a word with Abdurrahman Bey.
‘I may have to reconsider our business relationship.’
He’s pale now. Hafize, the gallery assistant, eavesdropper and interferer in concerns not hers, dips in and haughtily sweeps away his tea glass on her tray. She’s wearing the headscarf again. Ayşe will have to have a word with her. She’s become bolder in her flaunting of it since the tarikat, the Islamic study group, began meetings in the old kitchen quarters. Ayşe’s seen how the young men look at her as she locks the gallery shutter of an evening. They want her and her idolatrous images out. Let them try. The Erkoçs have good connections and deep purses.
‘What else have you got?’ Ayşe asks.
Topaloğlu sets out miniatures like fortune-telling cards. He has donkey teeth, yellow plates of enamel. They make Ayşe feel ill. She bends over the miniatures laid out on the table in the private viewing room and clicks down the magnifier lens in her ceptep eyepiece.
‘These are genuine,’ Topaloğlu says.
But very poor, Ayşe thinks, scanning the brushwork, the framing, the fine detail of the backgrounds. In the Isfahan and Topkapı schools, miniatures were the work of many hands. Each artist had his specialization and spent all his life perfecting it. There were masters of roses, of cloudscapes, of rocks, there were maestros who never painted anything but tile work. These are obvious apprentice pieces. The contrast between the exquisitely drawn figures and the crude backgrounds is glaring. The fine eye, the minuscule detail has not yet emerged. The great miniaturists, anonymous all of them but for their style, could paint a trellis, a window screen, a tiled wall, with a single hair. These are production line works for volumes of Sufi poetry, the kind which minor paşas and beys bought by the shelf to impress their inferiors.
‘Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Is that it? What’s in the shoe box?’
Topaloğlu has been keeping it by his side, half hidden under the flap of his jacket. A Nike box, a style from five years back, Ayşe notes. At least he is wearing proper gentlemen’s shoes for this meeting, decently polished. Shoes speak loud, in Ayşe’s experience.
‘Just a few what you might call trinkets.’
‘Show me.’ Ayşe does not wait for Topaloğlu to open the box; she snatches off the lid. Inside there is indeed a rattle of junk; Armenian crosses, Orthodox censers, a couple of verdigrised Koran covers. Grand Bazaar tourist tat. Amidst the tarnished brass, glints of silver. Miniature Korans. Ayşe greedily lays them out in a row along the table. The recessed ceiling bulbs strike brilliants from the thumb-sized silver cases.
‘These I’m interested in.’
‘They’re twenty euro pilgrim curios,’ Topaloğlu says.
‘To you, Mr Topaloğlu. To me, and to the people who collect them, they’re stories.’ She taps the cover of a twentieth-century electroplate silver case, the crystal magnifier an eye, a good-luck boncuk charm. ‘A boy goes off to military service. Despite her best efforts his mother can’t get him into a soft option like the jandarmeri or the tourist police, so gives him a Holy Koran. Keep the word of God close and God will keep you folded into his breast.’ An early nineteenth-century gold shell case, exquisitely filigreed. ‘A merchant from Konya, after years building up his material goods, finally frees himself from his worldly obligations to undertake the Hac. His concubine gives him a keep-sake. Remember, the world will be waiting.’
‘How can you tell it’s a Konya piece?’
‘It’s in the Mevlevi style, but it’s not a souvenir from the Rumi pilgrimage—those usually are cheap mass-produced tourist junk. This is altogether a much more fine work. There’s money and devotion here. Once you learn to see, you begin to hear the stories.’ Ayşe rests her finger on tiny silver Koran no larger than a thumb, delicate as a prayer. ‘This is eighteenth-century Persian. But there’s only half a Koran. A Holy Koran, divided?’ She opens the case and sets the little Persian scripture in the palm of her hand. ‘What’s the story there? A promise made, a couple divided, a family at war with itself, a pledge, a contract? You want to know. That’s the market. The Korans, as you say, are trinkets. Stories; people will always buy those.’ Ayşe sets the tiny hemi-Koran back into its case. ‘I’ll take these three. The rest is rubbish. Fifty euro each.’
‘I was thinking three hundred would be more appropriate.’
‘Did I hear you say that they were only twenty euro pilgrim curios? Two hundred.’
‘Cash.’
‘Cash.’
Topaloğlu shakes on two hundred.
‘Hafize will arrange payment. You can bring me more of these. Then we’ll see about the miniatures.’
Topaloğlu almost bares his rural teeth in a smile.
‘Good to do business, Mrs Erkoç.’
Footsteps on the stairs and along the wooden gallery; Hafize’s heels. Modest headscarf and fashion heels. A tap at the door. The look on her face is part puzzlement, part suspicion.
‘Madam, a customer.’
‘I’ll see him. Could you deal with Mr Topaloğlu? We’ve settled at two hundred euro for these three.’
‘Cash,’ Topaloğlu says. Hafize will screw another twenty per cent off the price; her ‘administration fee’. For a young woman with aspirations to respectability, she’s as tough a bargainer as any street seller spreading his knock-off football shirts on the quay at Eminönü.
From the encircling balcony, Ayşe looks down into the old semahane, the dance-floor where in another age dervishes spun themselves into the ecstasy of God. A man bends over a case of Torahs. The great brass chandelier hides him, but Ayşe catches a ripple of gloss, like oil sheen in an Eskiköy puddle, across his back. Nanoweave fabric. Expensive suit.
As Ayşe descends the stairs Adnan warbles a video clip on to her ceptep. She glimpses wide Bosphorus, a white boat at a jetty, dipping gulls, a slow pan along the strait to the bridge. A gas tanker passes. So Adnan to let the camera linger on the gas tanker. His palace, his dream, when he closes Turquoise. Still the wrong side of the Bosphorus, Anatolian boy. She needs to get back to Europe.
‘I am Ayşe Erkoç.’
The customer takes her proffered hand. Electronic business cards crackle from palm to palm.
‘Haydar Akgün. I was just looking at your Jewish manuscripts. There is some very fine micrography here.’ Moiré patterns, blacker on black, mesh across the fabric of his suit. Silver at his cuffs. Ayşe admires silver. There is restraint in silver.
‘It’s actually double micrography. If you look closely you’ll see there is calligraphy within the calligraphy.’
Akgün bends closer to the page. He blinks up his ceptep. Lasers dance across his eye, drawing a magnified image on the retina. The folio is from a Pentateuch, the panel of lettering set within a decorative frame of twining flower stems, trellises and fantastical heraldic beasts, dragon-headed, serpent tailed. The decoration teases the eye, the look beyond the surface dazzle shows the outlines to be made up of minuscule writing. It is only under magnification that the second level of micrography appears: those letters are in turn made up of chains of smaller writing. Akgün’s eyes widen.
‘This is quite extraordinary. I’ve only seen this in two places before. One was a dealer in Paris, the other was in a codex in the British Library. Sephardic I presume? Spanish, Portuguese?’
‘You’re correct on Portuguese. The family fled from Porto to Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The micrographic border is a genealogy of King David from the Book of Ruth.’
‘Exceptional,’ Akgün says, poring over the weave of calligraphy.
‘Thank you,’ Ayşe says. It is one of her most adored pieces. It took a lot of discreet envelopes of euro to get it away from the police art crime department. The moment her police contact showed the Pentateuch to her, she had to possess it. For others it might be the prestige they could garner, the thrill of control, the money they could make. With Ayşe it was the beauty, that cursive of beauty spiralling through Aramaic and Syriac texts to the demotic Greek of the Oxyrhynchus, the painstakingly squared-off Hebrew of the Talmudic scholars of Lisbon and Milan, the divine calligraphy of the Koranic scribes of Baghdad and Fes and learned Granada. It flowed into the organic lines of gospel illumination from monasteries from St Catherine’s to Cluny, in the eternal light of Greek and Armenian icons, through the hair-fine, eye-blinding detail of the Persian miniaturist to the burning line of Blake’s fires of Imagination. Why deal in beauty, but for beauty?
