The Oracle of Stamboul (3 page)

In spite of Ruxandra’s repeated efforts to shoo them away, the hoopoes that had attended Eleonora’s birth settled permanently in a fig tree outside the Cohens’ house, as a result of which the front walk was perpetually splattered with a slick coat of green-and-white bird droppings. It was not clear at first why the flock was so intent on inhabiting this particular tree, why they would tolerate broom, bleach, and boiling water when there were any number of more hospitable roosts nearby. With time, however, it became apparent that their attraction was connected in some way to Eleonora. It was almost as if they regarded her as part of their flock, the queen without which their lives had no purpose. They slept when she slept, stood guard while she bathed, and when she left the house, a small contingency broke off to follow along overhead. They were strange birds, in both appearance and behavior, but eventually Eleonora’s flock became a part of daily life, a familiar fixture atop East Hill. The townspeople paid them no more attention than they did the pigeons lined up along the gutters of the Constanta Hotel, and Ruxandra ultimately resigned herself to scrubbing the front walk every week with hot water and bleach.

The hoopoes would have been more surprising perhaps if Eleonora were not such an extraordinary creature herself. Even when she was an infant in her nurse’s arms, one could already discern the first shoots of what would later blossom into a stun
ning and demure beauty, her pleasant flushing cheeks crowned with a nest of curls, wide green eyes the color of sea glass, and milk teeth like tiny cubes of ivory. She rarely cried, took her first steps at eight months, and was speaking in complete sentences by the age of two. She brought a childish, though astonishingly precise, logic to bear on the world around her, and the intensity of her presence, that indescribable inner radiance and clarity, drew people to her from across the marketplace with no more desire than to kiss her on the forehead. In spite of this undeniable uniqueness, Eleonora’s early childhood was, for the most part, rather normal. She spent her days sleeping, eating, and exploring the world around her, playing wooden spoons on pots in the kitchen or lost in concentration of a pattern on one of the carpets in the living room.

Among Eleonora’s earliest memories were the stories her father told sometimes after dinner. Climbing into his lap, she could feel the scratchy wool of his jacket against her arm. There was the crackle of the fire settling, the worn leather smell of the armchair, and Ruxandra darning in the corner of the room. Before he began his story, Yakob would reach into his coat pocket, pinch out a dram of shredded tobacco, and pack it into his pipe with the flat of his thumb. The mouth of the pipe was a tawny-gold lion’s head, carved from a stone called meerschaum. Eleonora held her breath as her father took the matchbox from his coat pocket, struck one, and held it to the crown of the lion’s head. It was as if this act were some ancient rite and they the sole remaining keepers of its secrets. After two or three preparatory puffs, he would lay a hand on the ridge of her shoulder and ask if she wanted to hear a story. Of course, she always did.

Her father’s stories told of wise men, travelers, merchants, and fools. They were stories of Bucharest, Paris, Vienna, and all the
other faraway cities he had visited as a young man. Cities with names like Lanzhou, Andizhan, Persepolis, and Samarkand; cities with hanging gardens, towers as tall as the sky, and more people than you could ever imagine; cities with tigers lurking in the shadows and elephants tromping down the middle of the street; cities as old as the mountains, teeming with magic both good and evil. He had been all over the world, her father had, and seen more places than he could count, but his favorite city of all was that ancient hinge of continents, home of Io and Justinian, envy of Constantine and Selim, the pearl of the Bosporus, that dazzling jewel at the center of the Ottoman Empire. His favorite city was Stamboul and all his best stories took place there.

Apart from her father’s stories, Eleonora’s first memory was of an incident that took place just after her fourth birthday. It was on that halcyon blue afternoon in early fall that she first realized the power of her concentration. Barefoot and dressed in a simple red cotton smock, Eleonora sat cross-legged under the tomato vines, digging a hole in the wet, clumpy earth with her fingers. There was a warm breeze blowing up the hill, the hoopoes were chattering among themselves, and from the back steps one could see all the way to Navodari. She had just scooped up a shiny gray pill bug and was watching it unfurl itself in her palm when she heard a rustling at the edge of the garden. It was a deer, tentatively poking its head out from the forest. She watched it take a step forward into the onion patch, then half a step back. To see a deer in the garden was not unusual, but there was something about this particular young buck that caught her attention. After observing the animal through the tomato vines for a few moments, she decided to investigate.

Brushing the pill bug back into its hole, Eleonora stood and crossed the garden. The deer did not move, though it seemed
anxious being in such close proximity to a human. Standing at the edge of the onion patch, less than an arm’s length away from it, she could feel its warm, sour breath on her forehead. She looked up into the polished granite of its eyes and brought her hand, slowly, to rest at the base of its neck. Still it did not move. Beyond the quivering of its nostrils and the soft rise of her own breath, both stood completely still.

Then, in one motion, the buck stepped back and lowered its antlers, lifting its left leg like a soldier presenting his weapon for inspection. Eleonora immediately saw the cause of the animal’s distress and she knew what she would need to do. Just above the hoof lay a barb, a twisted piece of metal buried deep in the flesh. It looked as if it had snapped off of a fence, or perhaps some hunting implement. Brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes, Eleonora took the injured limb in her hand and inspected the wound. The veins around it were pulsing frantically, and a white froth bubbled up against the metal. The deer’s leg hair bristled as she brought her free hand toward it. She blinked and, with one swift tug, removed the barb.

Watching the deer bound off through the forest, Eleonora quivered at the thought of what she had just done. The hoopoes above her broke into a chorus of throaty chirps, and the very crunch of the underbrush sounded like subtle applause. Her ovation, however, was not long to last. A moment later, she was caught up by her armpits and carried to the bathroom.

“You must never,” Ruxandra said, pulling her frock up over her head, “ever do that again. If this gets out—”

She stood hunched over herself, shivering in the middle of the bathroom while Ruxandra prepared a washcloth. Eleonora had never seen her aunt like this. She seemed shaken, scared almost.

“What do you mean, Ruxandra? What did I do?”

In lieu of a reply, Ruxandra began scrubbing vigorously with a soapy washcloth, first the arms then the hands, especially between the fingers.

“Please,” Eleonora whined. “Tell me what I did wrong. I can’t be better if I don’t know what I did.”

Ruxandra stopped scrubbing.

“It’s not normal to cavort with animals. We have enough trouble as it is, being Jews and your father constantly shipping carpets to Stamboul. The last thing we need is to attract more attention.”

“But it was hurt,” Eleonora said. “There was a piece of metal in its leg. It wanted me to help.”

Ruxandra dunked the washcloth in cold water and began scrubbing again.

“I don’t care what you think that deer wanted. I don’t ever want to see you doing anything like that again. And I don’t want you to tell anyone about this, not even your father. Do you understand me?”

Eleonora knew better than to protest. When the bath was over, she told Ruxandra she was very sorry for what she had done and would never cavort with animals again. That, she supposed, was the end of that. And, in a way, she was right. Her aunt never mentioned the incident again. Even so, Eleonora couldn’t help but think there was a connection between the deer and Ruxandra’s announcement the next morning at breakfast. It was high time, she declared, that Eleonora begin to learn the art of housekeeping. These skills would serve her well for the rest of her life. They would help her attract a good husband. And, what was more, empty hands invite the devil. Although Yakob expressed
some reservations about the plan, he deferred his authority on the matter to Ruxandra, who assured him that Eleonora was more than up to the task. With that, it was decided.

“The first lesson,” Ruxandra proclaimed, “will be sewing.”

She reached into the front pocket of her apron and produced one of Yakob’s old handkerchiefs, along with a needle and a spool of thread.

“Do you see this?”

She leaned over Eleonora’s shoulder and pointed at the blue fishbone stitching along the outside edge of the fabric. Eleonora nodded. She propped her elbows on the table and let her chin rest in the cradle of her palms.

“Repeat the same pattern along the inside. If you have any questions, I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Eleonora looked down at the needle and thread, coiled like a snake in the middle of the fabric. This was not going to be fun at all, but there wasn’t much she could do to protest. Taking the needle between her thumb and forefinger, she stared through its eye. Squinting slightly, she pinched the end of the thread between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. With a fierce concentration, she slipped it through. Once the needle was threaded, sewing was easy. Careful to avoid poking herself, she made her first stitch and pulled the thread tight. Then she made another, and another, and another. The pattern wasn’t particularly difficult, just the same two lines over and over, repeating around the edge of the fabric. It was boring work, but not especially difficult.

Such was Eleonora’s life in the months following the incident with the deer: boring, but not especially difficult. She helped Ruxandra around the house, sewing and peeling vegetables, dusting and cleaning the front walk. On Wednesdays they
scrubbed the floors, Sundays they did the wash, and every Monday they walked down the hill to market, where Ruxandra initiated her into the fine art of bargaining. Housekeeping was not quite as bad as Eleonora had expected and, no matter what she had to do during the morning and afternoon, she could always look forward to six o’clock, that delightful hour when, without fail, she heard the clank of the door handle and the squeak of her father stepping over the threshold. Running to him, she would bury her face in his jacket and inhale the dusty smell of wool mixed with hibiscus tea. In these moments, she knew everything would be fine.

It was in the spring before Eleonora’s sixth birthday, by which time she had learned the basics of housekeeping tolerably well, that Ruxandra suggested they might proceed with her academic education. Men these days wanted a woman who could read and write and figure, a woman who could do the books and order from catalogs. Yakob saw nothing wrong in expanding the scope of his daughter’s instruction, and so it was decided. They began that very morning with the first reader of Ruxandra’s youth, a small green book in surprisingly good condition. By lunch, Eleonora had mastered the alphabet, the special shape of each letter and the various sounds it could make in different situations. By dinner, she was piecing together sentences. And that evening, she memorized her first lesson, a discourse on the habits of crocodiles. With her back to the fireplace and her hands clasped in front of her, Eleonora repeated the lesson in its entirety for her father and Ruxandra.

“Was that correct?”

She looked to her aunt, who had been following along in the reader.

“Yes,” she said, her face the pale color of astonishment. “Precisely.”

Yakob removed the pipe from his mouth and examined his daughter curiously, as if he had met her somewhere a long time ago and was trying to remember her name.

“When did you learn that lesson, Ellie?”

“Just today, Tata, after dinner.”

“And you learned that entire passage just now?”

She looked from her father to Ruxandra and back again.

“Did I say something wrong?”

The fire felt warm on the backs of her legs as she waited for a response.

“No, Ellie. Not at all. It’s just that we were surprised, or at least I was, by how quickly you were able to learn your lesson.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Ruxandra, flipping through the reader. “This should have taken at least a month, perhaps two weeks for a particularly bright child.”

Yakob drew deeply on his pipe, then turned back to his daughter.

“Tell us how you did it, Ellie.”

She didn’t know what to say. How could she explain something so simple? She had learned the letters and, with a bit of concentration, there it was.

“Once I learned the sound each letter makes,” she said, taking a small step away from the fire, which had become quite uncomfortably hot, “once I knew that, I looked at the words and heard them in my head. And once I could hear the words in my head, it was easy to memorize the lesson.”

That night Eleonora overheard a quarrel between her father and her aunt. She couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but between the pounding of fists and slamming of doors, she understood that her father was in favor of continuing her education while Ruxandra was opposed. The next morning at breakfast,
her father announced that he would be taking over her academic education while Ruxandra would remain in charge of the domestic instruction. Buttering a piece of bread, Ruxandra nodded tersely. From that morning forward, Eleonora’s days were split between these two spheres. Her mornings and afternoons continued to be occupied by needles and thread, feather dusters, and scrub brushes, while her evenings were kept solely for academic pursuits.

For the first few weeks, Eleonora’s academic education consisted primarily of memorizing lessons from the reader, descriptions of famous capitals, discourses on the habits of various animals, and short stories about children tempted by mischief. However, it soon became clear that she was ready for more advanced reading materials. At that point, they moved on to the bookcase in the corner of the living room, an imposing elm structure ornamented on either side by Chinese ceramic cats. The shelves of the bookcase were stuffed with a cascading multiplicity of books, bound in red, blue, green, and black leather: tall, skinny, plump, short, and embossed with all manner of writing on the spine. Over the next six months, Eleonora read through much of the bottom shelf, sitting in her father’s lap while he smoked his pipe and occasionally ran a hand through her hair. She read
Aesop’s Fables
,
Gulliver’s Travels
,
The Three Musketeers
,
Robinson Crusoe
, and
The Arabian Nights
. In addition to her reading, Eleonora’s father also introduced her to writing, arithmetic, and the rudiments of Turkish, each of which subjects she mastered with astonishing ease.