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Authors: Michael David Lukas

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“You are most welcome.”

He closed the door behind him, and for a full three minutes Eleonora stood with her back to the open window, staring into the darkness of her bedroom as she worked over her plan. Then she closed the window, undressed, and slipped into bed. Before snuffing out the candle, she untied the soft leather pouch and peered inside. There were two ten-kurus coins and five hundred-pound notes. She was not very good with money, but she knew that this would suffice.

Lying in bed, Eleonora listened to the sounds of the house die, the creak and swing of doors giving way to smaller, outside sounds, the wind blowing through leaves and animals pattering in the gutters. The moon rose like a distant city on the horizon, illuminating her desk, her armchair, and her dressing table with the white light of late summer. She would miss this room, just as she missed her room in Constanta, but she could not stay. She just could not. When the moon was at its full height and the
house was silent, Eleonora slipped out of bed and muffled across the floor to her closet. She pushed her dresses aside and took down the pair of pants, shirt, fez, and suit jacket she had noticed that first day in Stamboul. She dressed herself in it as best she could. With pins in her hair and a bit of kohl dust under her eyes, she was able to affect a rather convincing image of an errand boy with delicate features.

Next came the note. She removed a piece of paper from the middle desk drawer and, dipping her favorite pen in its inkwell, wrote a single word across the top of the page.
Good-bye
. Below this, she signed her name. Her heart was beating faster now and her breath came shortly when it came at all. She opened the top drawer of the dresser, removed her mother’s bookmark, and placed it in the inside pocket of her coat. Stretching her toes and cracking her jaw, she slipped her father’s leather pouch alongside the bookmark. Then, glancing at herself once more in the mirror, she poked her head out into the hallway and left her room behind.

At the top of the stairs, she stopped and gazed down on the antechamber. It was a cavernous room with dull corners and shadows flickering at the edges. Closing a hand over the banister, she crept down the stairs toe-to-heel, breathing through her mouth as she listened to the echoing of her own footfalls. When she reached the bottom, the house moaned, as if she had stepped on an open bruise. In front of her, the carpet stretched out like a lake of fire sparked by reflections of moonlight in the chandelier. She touched the pouch in her coat pocket and, with a shiver, continued on, down the main hall, into the women’s quarters, through the stuffy black corridors, down the stairs, and through the small iron door, out into the heavy straw air of
the Bey’s stables. Leaving the door ajar, Eleonora crept past a team of nickering horses and through the stable gates.

She was outside. There was a wind at her ankles and only sky above her, a dark sheet pricked with glimpses of the firmament it obscured. A white cat skulked across her path and winked its single blue eye. She understood. The world was big, it was cold, and it reeked of possibility. Her flock had dispersed; they had no more business here.

Eleonora glanced back at the yellow grandeur of the Bey’s house and, unsure whether she had glimpsed the stooped silhouette of Mrs. Damakan framed in her second-floor bay window, hurried down the main road. She made her way across the moonlit bridge toward the Sircesi Station. From there, she could catch a train to anywhere in Europe, to Paris, Budapest, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or Prague. She could stow away and slip, unnoticed, out of history.

On the thirtieth of August 1886, nine years and a week after Eleonora Cohen first came into this world, the city of Stamboul woke to find its oracle vanished. Purple-and-white hoopoes were sighted perched above the entrance to the Egyptian Bazaar, in the branches of an olive tree near Le Petit Champs du Mort, and passing over the Old Greek Hospital just outside the Yedikule Gate. One enterprising young boy in Balat captured a hoopoe in his mother’s bread basket. Unfortunately, the bird died soon after its capture. The other hoopoes were sighted alone, heading in contradictory directions.

At the order of the Sultan, His Excellency Abdulhamid II, all traffic leaving the city was stopped and searched. The gendarmerie was put on high alert, and all the railway officials within a fifty-kilometer radius of Stamboul were given descriptions of Eleonora. The Bosporus was dredged and a pack of Sivas Kangals was given her scent. Moncef Bey was detained for questioning, as were Monsieur Karom and Mrs. Damakan. However, no one, it seemed, had any knowledge of Eleonora’s whereabouts. She was gone, vanished, leaving no trace but a note and a closet full of dresses.

Eventually, a funeral was held and life returned to its natural course. Ruxandra went back to Constanta and her new husband. Reverend Muehler finished up his term at Robert’s College and, with the assistance of his contacts in the Department of War,
took a position at Yale. Moncef Bey went back to organizing his meetings at the Café Europa, and Monsieur Karom continued to provide the palace with reports on his master’s activity. Mrs. Damakan left Stamboul to live with her niece in Smyrna. The Sultan resolved to dismiss Jamaludin Pasha, then agreed, at his mother’s behest, to give him one last chance. A new girls’ school opened in Zeytinburnu, the Yildiz Hamidiye Mosque was dedicated; plans for the Berlin-Baghdad railroad were scuttled; Robert Louis Stevenson published
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
; and the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York Harbor.

History marched on and the story of Eleonora Cohen was forgotten; a footnote to late Ottoman history, she slipped into permanent obscurity. Whether she fulfilled Mrs. Damakan’s prophecy or escaped it, whether she was, indeed, the one who would set the world right again on its axis, the answers to these questions we will never know for certain. And so it should be. For the stones in the river of history look different depending on where you stand.

This book owes its existence to the wisdom, generosity, patience, love, and support of many people. At the top of the list is the best agent/editor team anyone could ask for. Thanks to Nicole Aragi, who is not just a wonderful literary agent, but also a wonderful person; and to Terry Karten, whose wisdom, kindness, and dedication are a consistent inspiration. Thanks also to Jane Beirn, Olga Gardner Galvin, Sarah Odell, Christie Hauser, Jocelyn Kalmus, Jim Hanks, Katherine Levy, and everyone at HarperCollins, for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

I am enormously grateful for the patience, passion, and encouragement of my mentors: Engin Akarli, Marilyn Booth, Maud Casey, Elliott Colla, Michael Collier, John Keene, Joan Nathan, Howard Norman, Ben Percy, and Michael Ray.

Much thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hall Farm Center, William J. Fulbright Foundation, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, and Rotary Foundation, whose generosity allowed me the time and space to write.

Endless thanks to the friends, family, and fellow writers who read previous incarnations of this book and whose insights helped make it what it is now: Adam Akullian, Anna Akullian, Jenny Asarnow, Lillie Brum, Jonah Charney-Sirott, Avery
Cohn, Nava Et Shalom, Bucky Fazen, Kevin Fingerman, Danny Fingerman, Leah Fisher, Cooper Funk, Daniela Gerson, Billy Karp, Ben Lavender, Krys Lee, Cheryl Ossola, Ethan Pomerance, Robby Rapoport, Ana Maria Santos, Charles Shaw, Seth Shonkoff, and Nomi Stone.

Thanks to the Lukases, the Colemans, the Colmans, the Brums, and the Akullians for being the best family ever and for not asking too many times when I was going to get a real job. Thanks to my Dad, for dreams, for teaching me how to take things apart and how to put them back together again; and Wendy, for Narnia, Dickens, and Harriet the Spy. Thanks to my Mom, for chicken soup, Super Mario 3, and everything in between; and Dave, for Uncle Gaby, Baby Bobby, and Inspiration Point. Finally, thanks to Haley, for all of the above and more.

MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS
has been a Fulbright scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a Rotary scholar in Tunisia. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, and his writing has been published in the
Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, National Geographic Traveler
, and the
Georgia Review
. Lukas lives in Oakland, less than a mile from where he was born. When he isn’t writing, he teaches creative writing to third-and fourth-graders.

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Jacket photo montage © Mary Evans Picture Library (mosque) and Getty Images (birds)

Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor

THE ORACLE OF STAMBOUL
. Copyright © 2011 by Michael David Lukas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lukas, Michael David.
     The Oracle of Stamboul / by Michael David Lukas.
          p. cm.
     ISBN 978-0-06-201209-8 (hardcover: alk paper)
     1. Girls—Turkey—Fiction. 2. Oracles—Turkey—Fiction. 3. Sultans—Turkey—Fiction. 4. Istanbul (Turkey)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.
     PS3612.U258O73 2010
     813’.6—dc22

2010014810

EPub Edition © January 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-208543-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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BOOK: The Oracle of Stamboul
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