Altai: A Novel (24 page)

Interlude

Three days of fever

4–7 Rabi’at Thani 978

(September 5–8, 1570)

The old man kneels on the mat, in front of his writing board. Evening is falling outside, but enough light is still filtering through the window, and the lamps are out. He has spent the whole afternoon in the room, leaving his pen only to drink
kishir
with Ali and receive a merchant from Scutari in search of advice on a cargo of coffee.

He dries the page and stacks it on the pile to his left: It’s a hand’s span high, ten years of memories for each finger. Worn-out paper, ink scars, written in a Latin that is by now threadbare, patched by the old man with Turkish, Arabic, German, and Venetian terms. Saints Jerome and Augustine would not recognize their chosen language.

He rereads his last words, his head heavy, then gets up and stretches his back. He needs to move, to smell the salt, silence the voices and listen to the sea.

In the doorway, Mukhtar holds him back by his shoulder. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, sheik. Are you sure you don’t want to lie down?” Ismail touches her hand with his fingers and shakes his head.

Leaning on his stick, he slowly walks up the hill. As he does every evening, he punctuates his walk with greetings and quick visits to people’s houses, he eats a
borek
stuffed with mince, quenches his thirst at the fountain of the big cemetery of Karaca Ahmet. The scent of hundreds of cypresses fills his lungs. When he comes down to the shore, near the site of Chalcedon, the profile of the old city is already a dark shadow against the purple of the sky. Flocks of storks fly down along the Bosphorus, migrating toward a place that they call home.

In the twilight breeze, the old man is prey to long bouts of shivering, not just from the cold. He feels a subtle unease traveling down his bones; his legs are frail as plaster. He has walked for more than two miles, and now he’s wondering if he’ll get home before dark.

His feet sink into the sand, his stick gets stuck. He falls, gets up, falls again.

He shuffles over to a little fishing boat, clutches its edge and drops into it, seeking shelter under the fabric of the sail. His teeth chatter like a crazed machine, a sign that the fever has returned. The same fever that made him late in reaching Tiberias.

The fever of the oasis of Elim.

The sandy course of the
wadi
opens and narrows, the first channel between rocky highlands, then stretches, leveled by herds, wide enough for the dromedaries to proceed along it several abreast. I take a little sip from my flask, and the water turns my body’s interior into a garden in bloom. There is no wind, but effort is a dull pain that tries to stay hidden.

Silent days, an incessant march, eating on the hoof, pausing only to sleep and pray, men and animals as old as the desert, as the oasis we must reach.

Elim, among the rocks of Sinai, halfway between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

In that place, the morning dew turned into manna, to appease the hunger of the Israelites fleeing the pharaoh.

The palms of Elim sway over the fiery sand.

Unloading the dromedaries, preparing the fire, drawing water from the wells.

We eat cooked food, after many days of nothing but dates.

I struggle to swallow a few mouthfuls, then collapse exhausted, without finishing my meal.

“Ismail,
shayk
!” Hafiz’s face is framed by stars, the smell of damp sand and night.

“Ali, Ali, we’ve found him.” Mukhtar’s voice, choking in her throat.

Sturdy arms lift him up, supporting him under the armpits, gripping his legs.

“What’s happened, old man? Is it the fever again?” The Sufi rests his rough hand on the sick man’s forehead.

Ismail feels the fresh, dry palm caressing his skin. “I’m home now,” he whispers, before closing his eyes.

This is the place where the head will be severed. The wheels groan, the donkeys lower their heads, the cart comes to a standstill. Around us, a pack of rabid dogs has been following our course, and now it is approaching. A vicious gang, barking and foaming at the mouth.

The heretic’s swollen face attracts blows and spittle. There isn’t a shadow of repentance in his face. Only a huge crow spreading its wings.

His neck is on the block. The crowd points and comments, shouts insults, throws mud and rotten vegetables and pots of piss. The sun is halfway through its course.

The executioner spins the axe, tests the blade, looks around so that the pack of dogs has a clear idea of who’s been given the job.

The condemned man shouts his heresy: “Freedom!”

Bones shatter, but one blow is not enough.

It takes another, then another.

Through the first day, Ismail trembles like a leaf. During the night he talks in his sleep, groaning and shouting. Ali stays close to him at all times, practicing the
dhikr
. The repetition of the divine names is powerful, but Ali also thinks of covering the old man with additional blankets.

Hafiz recites the Koran from memory. From the Sura al-Fatiha to the Sura of men, he can chant every verse of the sacred text.

Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Day of Judgment.

Mukhtar picks up shield and
urumi
and fights, until dawn, the shadow of death.

Beatrice is lying on the bed, much thinner than I remembered. Her eyes are hollow, her cheeks sunken. Her shoulders sink into her pillows as she sips a glass of water with unsteady hands.

“The first and last letter of the word
Torah
joined form
mother.
The last and the first form
heart.”

I come slowly forward into the room, as though approaching a frightened puppy. It’s eight years since I last heard her voice, eight years that I’ve reconstructed her face from memories no longer true.

“I haven’t long now, Ludovico, perhaps not even a day, and there are so many things that I would like to tell you, but the first, the most urgent, is of Yossef. He needs your help.”

I lean over her, kiss her on her boiling forehead, hug her hard, but I don’t relax my grip in time, and I feel her bones breaking, crumbling, turning to dust and splinters.

I leap back, as if scorched by flames, and look in terror at the pillows.

A pile of skin, ribs and nerves has taken the place of my love.

A gust of wind scatters everything.

During the second day, the old man alternates long intervals of unconscious peace with violent feverish rages. When the madness leaves him, he lies as if all his energy fled with it. Pale, cold, in a sleeplike state that is not sleep.

Hafiz goes on reciting the Koran. Mukhtar listens to him, motionless, kneeling on the prayer mat.

Every man’s fate we have fastened to his own neck: on the Day of Judgment we shall bring out a scroll that he will see spread open. Read your record: Sufficient is your soul this day to make out an account against you.

Ali tries not to despair. He knows that fever, and he has seen Ismail shake it off and return to health within a few days. He gives him some lime tea to drink, and cools his skin with liquors and perfumes.

He wonders what he would do if Ismail died there, two thousand miles from home.

He thinks of Mokha, of the thousand tensions running through the city and finding a focus in the old man, a basin in which to mix, like raging but harmless floods.

He feels a void is opening, spreading through his heart, and everything is becoming futile. Ali curses his own lack of faith, and throws himself headlong into the
dhikr
.

“You’re not thinking of having it printed in Constantinople, are you? Listen to your old bookseller friend, it would be pointless, you hear? These are things that need to be published in Europe, in the belly of the beast, to give it ulcers. If that genius Oporinus were still alive I would advise you to go to him, in Basilea, but the poor man died of gout two years ago, I don’t know if you knew that. I had my little print works, in Ferrara, and then things took a turn for the worse. In the end the pope managed to impose his will even there, and people like me had to shut up shop.”

Pietro Perna leans against the desk. His hair, the little he has left, is all white, but his shining eyes are the same as ever. He collects the papers and reads them out loud, quickly running through them with his little fingers. He lingers over a phrase, murmurs an enthusiastic comment, pulls grimaces of disapproval, makes annotations on some incomprehensible passages.

“This is a good time for me to be going to England. Things are good here in Constantinople; certainly they drink more wine here than they do in London and the sunsets are unforgettable, but you have to keep too many people happy, always licking someone’s feet, kissing the hem of someone else’s garment, and the third vizier of I-don’t-know-where, the bey of Buggeration, and the pasha, the dragoman, the imam, the cadi, the favorite and her cousin, the black eunuch, the white one, the striped one, the Sultan’s hundred pages, his gardener, the man who scratches his back, the one who rinses his balls: each one of them, from one day to the next, could rise up against you and remember the time you didn’t greet him, that you published a book that insulted his grandmother, that you spoke ill of his tribe. The English are more concerned with the substance, you know? They don’t rot your balls with this kind of nonsense.”

Perna smiles, puts the sheets in order.

“But for now, get better, old fellow. The last few chapters are always the hardest.”

Ali picks up a red and blue blanket, mutters something and arranges it over the old man’s quivering body. It is dawn, and Ismail has been talking in his sleep, words that sound like delirium, and he is still fighting the fever. The disc of the sun is flooding the horizon with reddish light. Hafiz and Mukhtar have finished their prayers and come in to check on the course of the illness.

“Do you think our sheik will live?”

Ali tries to offer a drink to the old man, who doesn’t recognize him. “If God wills it, Hafiz. What I think is that this man, now, is dead already. In fact he speaks languages that belong to dead men, men of the past. If he opens his eyes and gets back on his feet it will be because God, He who resuscitates, dragged him from the depths of Gehenna.”

Mukhtar kneels next to the old man and grips his hand, murmuring in a half whisper words in a language that is not Arabic.

What sign is it when a rainbow appears, when there has been no rain and the air is dry and clear?

It is that the earth is about to tremble and the whole world shakes.

Rows of horsemen gathering on the crest of a hill.

And the army of the humble has assembled, too, and the cannons vomit fire and flames.

People crouching in prayer. Eviscerated, butchered people, turned to smoke, wind, scraps as far as the eye can see.

What sign is it when the head of a man with a noble soul is exposed and paraded around on top of a pole?

It is that the battle is lost. Lost a thousand times, and the enemy gives no ground, because he never has and never will.

The horizon is moving, it is coming toward us. The horizon, black with armor, with horsemen, men of iron, men who make metallic noises and are already dead, the horizon that is Death, is advancing to crush me.

God. I see them now. The army of princes against the flock of the Lord. Blackened breastplates, helmets in monstrous shapes, grins behind the sallets, smiles from ear to ear, fixed in steel.

It is just dawn. I hear a voice crying, “Magister! Magister!” and it is mine, my own voice as always.

How old are dreams?

I see him on his knees, bent double. “Magister! Get up, for the love of God.” I take him by the shoulders and try to lift him up. He is a leaden statue and I have to lift him. I try my best; I put one knee on the ground and try to turn him, to look him in the face.

There is no face. The features are meaningless.

I shout, get back to my feet, and my eyes seek the horizon that is now running toward us.

It will engulf us. It will drive us into the deepest of holes, the one that we call hell. Inside the flesh, inside the heart, a bitter place, intact after years, after a century, after a millennium, after all the time in which we have been drifting, paper boats, prey to the wind.

I’m sitting in front of a skeleton. It has a snake in its mouth, between its white jaws, and a rat is running around on the cap of its skull. Beneath the bones of its right arm, between the shoulder and the ribcage, it holds a guitar. It laughs. It jokes. It gesticulates with the bones of its other hand, it looks as if it has been delivering a speech for a long time. It tells me about its causes. It invites me to a wild party of death.