Passengers crouch around the schoolchildren, trying to ease their crying with word of comfort, offered hugs.
Can’t you see the blood on your faces is scaring them all the more?
Necdet thinks. He remembers the warm, wet spray into his own face. He looks at the wet wipe balled up in his hand. It isn’t red. It wasn’t blood.
Everyone looks up at the beat of a helicopter. It slides in over the rooftops, defying talk and phone calls. Now sirens lift above the morning traffic noise. It will be the police before the ambulances. Necdet doesn’t want to be near police. They will aks him questions he doesn’t want to answer. He has ID; everyone has ID. The police would scan it. They would read the carbon debit Necdet used to buy his ticket that morning and a cash withdrawal the night before and another carbon debit that previous evening at eighteen thirty. They might ask about the cash. It’s grey but not yet illegal.
And is this your current address?
No, I’m staying at the old Adem Dede dervish house in Eskiköy. With my brother.
Who is your brother? Here they might find they had more questions.
Ismet had replaced the padlock with the new one he had bought. Bright brass, a golden medal on a chain. The tekke’s shuttered wooden balconies overhung the steps; this was a private, shadowed entrance, behind the industrial steel bins of the Fethi Bey teashop, miasmic and greasy with the ventings from the kitchen extractor fans. The door was of old Ottoman wood, grey and cracked from centuries of summer heat and winter damp, elaborately worked with tulip and rose motifs. A door into mysteries. It opened on to gloom and the acidic reek of pigeon. Necdet stepped gingerly into the enfolding dark. Light fell in slats through the closed and barred window shutters.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ Necdet whispered. It was an architecture that commanded whispers. ‘People live here.’
‘Some old Greek and a married couple at the front. And an office girl on her own. And that shop for blasphemies in the old semahane. We’ll sort that eventually. This end’s been left to rot for fifty years, just falling apart.’ Ismet stood proudly in the centre of the floor. It was his already. ‘That’s the crime here. God wants this to be what it was before. This is where we’ll bring the brothers. Look at this.’
Ismet flung open a matching door across the dusty room. Colour flooded in and more than colour: a growing verdure of clipped box; the perfume of sun-warmed wood; the burble of water and the sudden song of birds. Ismet might have opened a door on to Paradise.
The garden was six paces across but it contained a universe. A shady cloister walled with floral Iznik tiles ran around the courtyard affording shade or shelter in every season. The fountain was a single piece of sun-warmed marble, releasing water over a lily-lip into a basin. A jewel-bright lizard started from repose in the sun and dashed along the scalloped rim to vanish into the shade beneath. Herbaceous plants grew tall and cool in small box-bordered beds. The soil was dark and rich as chocolate. A green place. House martins dipped and bobbed along the eaves of the wooden gallery directly above the cloister. Their shrills filled the air. A copy of yesterday’s
Cumhuriyet
lay sun-yellowing on a marble bench.
‘It’s all still here,’ Ismet said. ‘The redevelopers never got around to the back. The old cells are being used for storage - we’ll clear them out.’
‘Someone looks after this,’ Necdet said. He could imagine himself here. He would come in the evening, when the light would fall over that roof on to that bench in a single pane of sun. He could sit and smoke blow. It would a good place for a smoke.
‘We’ll be all right here,’ Ismet said, looking around at the overhanging balconies, the little rectangle of blue sky. ‘I’ll look after you.’
Necdet can’t let the security police know he has moved into the dervish house which his brother intends to make the home of the secret Islamic order to which he belongs. The police think secret Islamic orders blow up trams. And if they look at his old address, they’ll see what he did, back there in Başibüyük, and why Ismet Hasgüler took his brother of the flesh under his care. No, he just wants to go to work quietly and soberly. No, no police thank you.
The air above the still-smoking tram thickens in buzzing, insect motion. Swarmbots. The gnat-sized devices can lock together into different forms for different purposes; above Necatibey Cadessi they coalesce like raindrops into scene-of-crime drones. The sparrow-sized robots flit on humming fans among the milling pigeons, sampling the air for chemical tracers, reading movement logs from vehicles and personal cepteps, imaging the crime scene, seeking out survivors and photographing their blood-smeared, smoke-stained faces.
Necdet drifts to the periphery of the mill of survivors, haphazard enough to elude the darting drones. Two women in green paramed coveralls crouch with the tram driver. She’s shaking and crying now. She says something about the head. She saw it wedged up under the roof behind the grab-bars, looking down at her. Necdet has heard that about suicide bombers. The head just goes up into the air. They find them in trees, electric poles, wedged under eaves, caught up in shop signs.
Necdet subtly merges with the circle of onlookers, presses gently through them towards the open street. ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ But there is this one guy, this big guy in an outsize white T-shirt right in front of him, with his hand up to the ceptep curled over his eye; a gesture that these days means:
I am videoing you
. Necdet tries to cover his face with his hand but the big man moves backwards, videoing and videoing and videoing. Maybe he is thinking,
this is a couple of hundred euro on the news;
maybe,
I can post this online
. Maybe he just thinks his friends will be impressed. But he is in Necdet’s way and Necdet can hear the thrum of swarmbot engines behind him like soul-sucking mosquitoes.
‘Out of my way!’ He pushes at the big man with his two hands, knocks him backwards, and again. The big man’s mouth is open but when Necdet hears the voice say his name, it is a woman’s voice speaking directly behind him.
He turns. The head hovers at his eye level. It’s her. The woman who left her head in the roof of the tram. The same scarf, the same wisp of grey hair coiling from beneath it, the same sad, apologetic smile. A cone of light beams from her severed neck, golden light. She opens her mouth to speak again.
Necdet’s shoulder charge sends the big man reeling. ‘Hey!’ he shouts. The surveillance drones rise up, fizzing at the edges as they prepare to dissolve and reform into a new configuration. Then they firm back into their surveillance modes and swoop around the flashing blue lights which have only now made it through the city-wide traffic jam rippling out from the destruction of Tram 157.
In the hushed world of Can Durukan the explosion is a small, soft clap. His world is the five streets along which he is driven to the special school, the seven streets and one highway to the mall, the square in front of the Adem Dede tekke, the corridors and balconies, the rooms and rooftops and hidden courtyards of the dervish house in which he lives. Within this world, lived at the level of a whisper, he knows all the noises intimately. This is new, other.
Can looks up from the flat screen in his lap. He turns his head from side to side. Can has developed an almost supernatural skill at judging the distance and location of the nano-sounds that are allowed to enter his world. He is as acute and weird as a bat. Two, three blocks to the south. Probably Necatibey Cadessi. The living room has a sliver of a view down on to Necatibey Cadessi, and if he squeezes right into the corner of the rooftop terrace that leans out over Vermilion-Maker Lane, a silver shard of the Bosphorus.
His mother is busy in the kitchen with the yoghurt and sunflowerseed breakfast she believes will help Can’s heart.
No running!
she signs. Şekure Durukan has many faces she can put on to augment the hands. This is furious-tired-of-telling-you-concerned face.
‘It’s a bomb!’ Can shouts. Can refuses to sign. There is nothing wrong with his hearing. It’s his heart. And there is nothing wrong with his mum’s hearing either. Can often forgets that.
Can has found that his greatest power in the first-floor apartment is to turn his back. Half a world can be ignored. His mother will not dare shout. A single shout can kill.
Long QT Syndrome. A dry, form-filler’s name. It should be called Cardio-shock; Sheer Heart Attack; like a title you would give to the kind of freak-show TV documentary featuring a nine-year-old boy with a bizarre and potentially fatal heart condition. Patterns of chaos flow across Can’s heart. Potassium and sodium ions clash in wavefronts and graphs of fractal beauty like black tulips. A shock can disrupt those synchronized electrical pulses. A single loud sudden noise is enough to stop his heart. The shriek of a car alarm, the clang of a shutter dropping, the sudden blare of a muezzin or a popped party balloon could kill Can Durukan. So Şekure and Osman have devised a tight, muffling world for him.
Odysseus, ancient sailor of these narrow seas, plugged the ears of his crew with wax to resist the killing song of the Sirens. Jason, a subtler seafarer, drowned them out with the lyre-work of Orpheus. Can’s earplugs are inspired by both those heroes. They are smart polymer woven with nanocircuitry. They exactly fit the contours of his ears. They don’t drown out reality. They take it, invert it, phase shift it and feed it back so that it almost precisely cancels itself. Almost. Total precision would be deafness. A whisper of the world steals into Can’s ears.
Once a month his mother removes the clever coiled little plugs to clean out the ear wax. It’s a fraught half hour, carried out in a specially converted closet at the centre of the apartment into which Can and his mother fit like seeds into a pomegranate. It is padded to recording studio standards but Can’s mother still starts and widens her eyes at every muted thud or rattle that transmits itself through the old timbers of the tekke. This is the time she speaks to him, in the softest whisper. For half an hour a month Can hears his mother’s voice as she tends to his ear canal with medicated cotton buds.
The day the sounds went away is the earliest memory Can trusts. He was four years old. The white hospital was square and modern with much glass and seemed to flash in the sun. It was a very good hospital, his father said. Expensive, his mother said, and said still, when she reminded Can of the health insurance that kept them in this dilapidated old tekke in a faded part of town. Can had known it must be expensive because it stood by the water. Beyond the window of the ear clinic was a great ship loaded high with containers, closer and bigger than any moving thing he had seen before. He sat on the disposable sanitized sheet and swung his legs and watched more and more ship come into view until it filled the window. They were looking at his ears.
‘How does that feel?’ his father said. Can turned his head one way, then the other, sensing out the new presences in his ears.
‘There will be some discomfort for a few days,’ the ear doctor said. On came the great ship, huge as an island. ‘You will need to clean them once a month. The electronics are very robust. You’ve no need to worry about breaking them. Shall we try it? Can . . .’ And his hearing had flown away, every sound in the world driven to the furthest edge of the universe. The doctor, his father, became like tiny birds. His own name turned into a whisper. The ship sailed past silently. Can thinks of it as the ship that took all the sound in the world away. When he goes up on to the terrace to peer down steep Vermilion-Maker Lane at that tiny vee of Bosphorus, he still hopes that he will see the ship that brings it back again, a different sound in each container.
His mother made aşure that night. A special pudding for a special time. Aşure was a big treat in her family; they were from the east. Can had heard the story of Noah’s pudding, how it was made up from the seven things left uneaten when the ark came to rest on Ararat, many times from his mother and his grandmother when she was still alive, but that night Mum and Dad told it with their hands. High on sugar and twitching at the discomfort in his ears, Can had not been able to sleep. Airbursts flashed on to the Barney Bugs wallpaper. He had flung open the shutters. The sky was exploding. Fireworks blossomed above Istanbul, dropping silver rain. Arcs of yellow and blue stabbed up into the night. Bronze fire cascaded silver from starbursts of gold so high Can craned hard to see them. All in a hush of muffled thuds and whispered whooshes, detonations muted as a bread-crust breaking. The near silence made the lights in the sky brighter and stranger than anything Can had ever seen. The world might be ending up there, the seven heavens cracking apart and raining fire on to the earth. Mortars lobbed their payloads higher and higher. Can heard them as pops on the edge of his perceptions, like pea-pods releasing their seeds. Now luminous armies battled above the solar water heaters and satellite dishes of Istanbul: battalions of blazing janissaries armed with flash and artillery against swift, sparkling sipahis who galloped from one side of the sky to the other in a whisper. Above, a little lower than the stars themselves, the angels of the seven heavens warred with the angels of the seven hells and for one searing moment the sky blazed as if the light of every star since the birth of the universe had arrived at once over Istanbul. Can felt its silver warmth on his upturned face.
As the light faded so the city returned the gift. From the Bosphorus first, the soft flute of a ship’s siren, building in a chorus of tankers, ferries, hydrofoils and water taxis. The streets replied with tram hooters, delicate as prayers, then the brassier, flatter blare of car and truck horns. Can leaned forward, trying to hear. He thought he could make out dance music spilling from the Adem Dede teahouse. He could feel its beat, a pulse against his own. Beneath it all, human voices, cheering and whooping, laughing and singing, shouting nothing at all except for the joy of making pure noise; all bleeding into an aggregate of
crowd
. To Can it was a hiss of static. The people packed the streets, the little square with its two teahouses and one minimarket. Many carried little flags, more had bottles. Can could not believe so many people lived in tight, enclosed Adem Dede Square. Cars sounded their horns in exuberance and flew flags from their windows; the white-on-red crescent and star of Turkey, and a blue flag bearing a circle of golden stars. Those same flags were in the hands of the people in Adem Dede Square: crescents and stars. Can watched a young bare-chested man dance-swing along the balcony of the konak on the corner of Vermilion-Maker and Stolen Chicken Lanes. His country’s crescent and star was painted white on his red face. The crescent made him look as if he were smiling. He turned to wave down to the crowd. They waved up. He pretended he was going to jump down. Can held his breath. It was the same height as his viewpoint. The crowd now seemed to be cheering the man on. Suddenly he let go. Can always remembers him falling through the streetlight, his skin shiny with sweat, his face eternally grinning in the face of gravity. He vanished into the crowd. Can never learned what happened to him.