Birds Without Wings (27 page)
Out in the sunlight, he stood on the steps of the mosque and slipped the prayer beads into the inside pocket of his new coat. For a moment he watched the crowds, the red fezzes of the men, with their black tassles, reminding him of the wheat fields full of poppies at home, before they had all turned pink. A group of Mevlevi dervishes walked past together, clad
in their great skirts and their hats that looked like tombstones. A hamal strode by, bearing a cast-iron cauldron upon his head. A Jewess was borne past, her sedan chair inlaid with nacre and ivory. Behind her came a letter-writer, bearing his pens and scrolls, an accidental ink mark slanting across his cheek like a scar. A mixed party of Muslims and Christians took their first steps towards Ephesus, making pilgrimage together to the house of the Virgin Mary. Two gypsy women with babies at their backs walked hand in hand with two capuchin monkeys. A portly Orthodox priest sweated behind a party of bedouins draped in white cloaks, and after them a golden-vested Greek merchant rode side by side with a merchant from Italy, discussing prices in French. Four more hamals appeared, bearing between them a small dead camel that hung forlornly from two poles that rested upon their shoulders, then came another, laden with a black tin trunk. Clutching a pink silk parasol, the dainty wife of one of the European ambassadors tripped along, flanked by four black servants and a grotesque eunuch from Ethiopia. A small group of Maltese nuns, whispering and giggling together, pattered along with parcels of medicines in their hands, whilst a group of Persians jostled with a band of Albanians, armed to the teeth and dressed entirely in white. Two young Greek women with scarlet skullcaps, their black hair flowing down over their shoulders, caught Rustem Bey’s eye and nudged one another. A solemn Turk on a small ass led twelve ludicrously pompous camels, strung together, their halters hung with large azure prayer beads. Such was the normality of Istanbul, and none of these people found anything remarkable in such heterogeneity.
All this mommixity and foofaraw was compressed into a street no more than three paces wide, and was further complicated by the dogs who, exhausted by their nocturnal serenades and excursions, slept promiscuously in the paths and alleyways. Their numbers had begun to decline rapidly because of the advent of wheeled vehicles, since for centuries they had merely been stepped over, and had never been obliged to develop any ideas about getting out of anyone’s way. At this time, however, they yet populated the city in numbers equal to the humans, and fouled it to about the same degree. The Muslims were very fond of them, fed them, and even left them money in their wills, but at night the Greeks left them poison. This was because, although they were sweet-natured with humans, the dogs themselves were tribal, and had divided the city between them into small canine republics, devoting much of their energy to assaulting dogs that strayed in from foreign neighbourhoods. This made it impossible for
Christians to keep dogs as pets, since Christian house-dogs were considered to be interlopers and were routinely set upon. Muslims, fond as they might be of the street-dogs, never adopted them as household pets because the Koran declares them to be unclean, and hence their concern was only for the ones that lived in the streets, pleading for alms with their big brown eyes. So it was that the followers of Christ poisoned the freebooting Muslim dogs so that they could keep captive Christian ones. Situations analogous to this, involving humans rather than animals, but just as hard to explain, are not unknown to this day in the nearby regions of the Balkans.
Stepping over these somnolent Islamic mutts, and avoiding as best he could the press and shove of the crowds, he sidestepped the open sewage channels with their varied but uniformly loathsome flotsam, holding to his nose a kerchief soaked in lemon cologne. He pressed small coins into the hands or turbans of the wonderfully distorted cripples and beggars that loomed up to bar his passage, and worked his way back towards the railway station, because from the waterfront nearby he would be able to take a boat across the Bosporus. At the khan he would collect two of his servants, because he was about to venture over to Galata where no sensible outsider, however brave or strong, would hazard himself without a bodyguard, a place so infamous that it had even been heard of back home in Eskibahçe.
As the day warmed up and the sun brightened they dipped past the Kizkalesi Tower, where once upon a time a tragic princess had been immured, in order to preserve her from a prophesied death by snakebite, only to be killed by a serpent hauled up to the windows in a basket of fruit. Rustem Bey trailed his hand in the black water and marvelled at what he saw. He wondered how he might have described it to the people back home in Lycia. He felt both exhilarated and discomfited by the splendour, diversity and cacophony of it all. The channel was clogged with caiques, rowing boats, skiffs and barques of all shapes and sizes and in all states of repair, some propelled by sail, but most of them by brawn. The air seemed crowded by the hollow knock of hulls, the creaking of rowlocks, the shrieks of seagulls, and the hoarse shouts of the boatmen as they called insults to each other and jested in their impenetrable patois. Before him on the southern side of the Golden Horn rose the imposing walls of the Topkapi Palace, and on its northern side, those of the Galata Tower. Beneath him on the seabed, he fancied, shivering a little at the thought, bobbed the corpses of those discarded wives and concubines of past sultans, which were popularly supposed to have been disposed of in weighted sacks.
Rustem Bey found it hard to concentrate on the sights around him,
because his boatman was engaged in the sort of inconsequential monologue that everywhere in the world passes for friendly conversation among such people, rendered curiously stilted and unbalanced by the deep breaths that he drew before each stroke of the oars. The boatman himself had the shoulders and arms of a titan, the skin of a disused waterbag, the moustache of a hog, and the pointed ochre teeth of an inveterate smoker and drinker of highly sugared tea. His black eyes squinted out from beneath beetling eyebrows, and his nose, which must at some time have been flattened in a fight, was like a small aubergine that has been bruised by a passing mule and left in the road for the birds.
“… so,” he was saying, “this is my uncle, this is, he goes into his neighbour’s house and he says, ‘I feel dizzy, I’m so hungry, you couldn’t spare me a little nibble, could you? My wife’s out and I don’t know where she keeps the food,’ and so this neighbour says, ‘How about a bit of chicken?’ and so my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and so he eats two legs of chicken, and the neighbour says, ‘How about some potatoes?’ and my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and so eats this heap of potatoes, and then the neighbour says, ‘How about some bread?’ and my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and he eats three or four pieces, and then the neighbour says, ‘How about some baklava?’ and my uncle gets all annoyed and says, ‘Do you think I’m a pig or something? I said I only wanted a nibble.’ Well, that’s my uncle for you, that is, that’s just what he’s like, he’s a cantankerous ungrateful old piç, and that’s for sure, and my father says he doesn’t know why God punished him with such a brother …”
“Yes, yes, how interesting,” interjected Rustem Bey at appropriate points, as the boatman changed seamlessly from one topic to another.
“… so there’s this old lady and she’s up in court testifying, and the kadi is trying to work out what date she’s talking about, and he asks her, ‘When did this happen, exactly?’ and she says, ‘I can’t be sure, but I do know that we were eating okra,’ so the judge says, ‘Well, it must have been July or August then,’ and she says, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that,’ and he says, ‘Well, it must have been; are you sure it was okra?’ so she says, ‘Yes, I’m sure it was okra,’ so he says, ‘Well then, it must have been July or August because that’s when the okra comes in,’ and she scratches her head and says, ‘Yes, but this okra was pickled,’ so anyway, they never did get that one sorted out.”
“How interesting,” repeated Rustem Bey, beginning to feel nervous and dubious about what he was about to do when he got to the other side. It was impossible to collect himself whilst enduring the boatman’s disorientating
verbal bombardment. Finally he leaned forward and asked, “If I pay you twice the fee we agreed, would you be quiet for the rest of the trip?”
It was useless, however, for after a few moments’ silence he was told a story about a Greek who ate a lethal herb, which expanded in his stomach so greatly that ultimately he exploded and died, although apparently not before bidding a philosophical farewell to his relatives, and dictating a will in which he forgave his wife for serving him the lethal herb, since it had been a genuine accident, but even so the wife committed suicide because of the remorse.
As soon as they had scrambled up the ladder to the quay on the other side, Rustem Bey and his servants found themselves besieged by a ragged horde of street urchins. Some fifteen smutty-faced and snotty-nosed gypsy children swooped upon them like a flock of jackdaws upon a carcase, clamouring for coins or for errands to run. Rustem Bey kept his hands firmly upon his purse and, through the thicket of waving hands, searched for one face that looked open and honest. Finally he pointed: “You,” he said.
The appointed child, a twelve-year-old boy with a confident air and a rent in his shirt that was pulled together with a zigzag of string, led them away from the harbour. Rustem addressed his servants: “Keep your eyes open. Keep your hands on your knives. Don’t look nervous. Puff out your chests. Walk slowly. Look people in the eye but don’t hold their gaze too long. Don’t smile.”
Rustem Bey himself kept his left hand upon the inlaid hilt of one of the pistols that he had placed conspicuously in his sash, and with the forefinger of his right hand he smoothed his moustache, as if in thought. Thus he overlaid his inner anxiety with a thick carapace of outer calm.
They entered the lowly streets of Galata. The respectable Muslims of Scutari, on the other side of the water, used to like to whisper in prurient and self-righteous tones that in Galata there lived the worst kinds of Greeks. Here there were pimps and whores, card-sharps, confidence tricksters, counterfeiters, cutpurses and pickpockets, one-legged blind alcoholics, opium addicts, unemployable sailors, abortionists, charlatans, fortune tellers, sexual deviants, poison-makers, false prophets, beggars with sham disabilities, prodigal sons and dissolute daughters, deserters, contract murderers, illegal distillers, foul-mouthed sluts, footpads, procurers, tax officials and thieves.
The boy led the three men through streets so squalid that Rustem Bey once more felt impelled to pour lemon cologne upon his handkerchief and
walk with it held to his nose. Emaciated dogs squabbled with naked infants and pigs over heaps of rubbish, offal and excrement. Prostitutes, filthy, flaunting and inebriated, howled and catcalled from the doorways and balconies. Tattered chickens with bleeding rumps scratched in the gutters. A dead cat lay swelling on the cobbles, circled by crows. Rats preened their whiskers in the cornerways. Shutters and doors sagged from their rotting frames on broken hinges, roofs patched with packing case and cardboard caved gently in upon their beams, and dead-eyed drunks swerved along the straitened alleyways or slept stupefied in the gutters, their mouths working soundlessly, their chins flecked with spittle. “At least,” thought Rustem Bey, “there is no one here who will have to endure the pains and troubles of growing old,” but it was so grim that he found himself thinking that there was nothing to do with such a place, except burn it to the ground and start again. He gave thanks to God that it had not been his destiny to live in such a hell of desperation, filth and iniquity, but it did not yet strike him as paradoxical that he had come here in order to seek his happiness.
CHAPTER 33
The Circassian Mistress (3)
The gypsy boy led them down a tight alleyway, and pointed wordlessly to a doorway that was partially sunken below the level of the stones outside. Rustem Bey looked at the building, and noticed that although the walls were particoloured, and pocked with what appeared to be bullet holes, it was in better condition than those that neighboured it. A musky odour seemed to emanate from it, and from within there came the cheerful sound of someone plucking an oud. He heard the laughter of a young woman, and the tinkle of something brassy being dropped to the floor.
Wordlessly, the boy held out a grubby hand, palm upward, and Rustem Bey pressed a coin into it. “Stay here,” he said, “I will need you to guide us back.”
On the door was a knocker in the shape of a small hand holding a ball, and he raised it on its hinge with some trepidation. Back home only the Armenians had door knockers, and having to use one gave him the same kind of misgivings that one might have upon mounting a horse for the first time.
The grille opened, and a pair of dark eyes peered out, heavily made up with kohl. “Who is it?” demanded a curiously strangulated voice. “I’m very busy just now, and I can’t go wasting my time.”