The Sultan of Byzantium

Also by Selçuk Altun

Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

Many and Many a Year Ago

Selçuk Altun

Translated from Turkish
by Clifford Endres and Selhan Endres

TELEGRAM

If I kiss, they’ll kill me
And if I don’t, I’ll die.
K.

I always mentioned the Arabic origins of my name whenever I told it to someone and was embarrassed if anybody mispronounced the last syllable. Once when I asked my grandmother how I’d got my name she replied, ‘It was your great-grandfather’s name.’ My business-minded forefathers had started out as exporters in Trabzon and eventually became the wealthiest family on the Black Sea. I grew tired of hearing how these blockheaded relatives had wasted it all after the Crimean War.

The excuse for my grandfather’s going off to Istanbul was my mother’s admission to law school when she graduated from the Trabzon high school. But her law practice was limited to matters connected with the family’s apartment block in Galata, where they lived, and the commercial building they owned in Şişli. My grandparent’s last bone of contention was about their one and only daughter falling in love with their American tenant. In the end my mother married Paul Hackett with her father’s consent. Paul was the regional representative of a worldwide business journal. The next year, at a private hospital seventy steps from our home, I came into the world. When I was two my grandfather died, and four months later my parents divorced. Paul Hackett returned to his country without a trace, and we moved into my grandmother’s apartment, which adjoined ours.

Our home had broken up because of Paul Hackett’s affair with an enticing Canadian woman. I was eight years old when I found this out from our doorman who probably gave me the information with my grandmother’s consent. My mother was always irritated to see me in the mornings. This ill temper of hers continued right up to the moment the news reached us of Paul Hackett’s death. The old Jewish psychologist I was dragged off to claimed that the situation was due to my mother’s ‘conditioned default reflex’ toward her ex-husband.

My grandmother ruled the roost and my mother and I behaved like two unruly siblings in constant conflict. My grandmother had gone on the Haj. She had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, after my grandfather’s death. Whenever people referred to her as ‘Haji Ulviye’, she would thumb her prayer beads more rapidly. She radiated benevolence and rarely missed an old Turkish movie on TV. I put up with those grossly incompetent films just for the pleasure of hearing her curse the evil characters, using the actors’ real names. To please her I went to the mosque early in the morning, prayed on the big religious days and fasted at the beginning and end of Ramadan. You could see Topkapi Palace from the window of the bathroom, which she’d done up with a Middle Eastern flair. She gave me strict warning: ‘Don’t look at the Palace while you do a Number Two.’ I didn’t allow myself an audible fart in that bathroom for years.

To my question, ‘Don’t we even have a picture of my father?’ came my grandmother’s prickly answer, ‘If you want to see what that good-for-nothing looks like, try the mirror!’ Thanks to my ‘good-for-nothing’ father, I didn’t look like my mother. She was a horse-faced, curly-haired woman with bug eyes and an ugliness only enhanced by the chic get-ups she was renowned for wearing. It was natural for her to spend many hours at the beauty parlor. Ambitious and efficient, she was a finely honed mixture of mystery and perfidy. As if her thirty-four commercial and twelve residential tenants weren’t enough, she’d bought three more buildings on the street below us at a bargain price.

My mother never bought toys for me or threw any birthday parties nor did she ever even help me with my homework. For a long time I lived with the belief that in her mistreatment of me she was exacting a form of revenge on her ex-husband. Disregarding my mother’s neglect, I would seek help with my schoolwork from Eugenio Geniale or as we playfully referred to him, the ‘Lord of Galata’. He was a Levantine whom the Anatolian immigrants called Engin Baba and a retired professor of art history. From that wise, ageless man, (he always looked like a sixty-year-old), I learned how to read encyclopedias item by item, how to memorize dictionaries, how to tell architectural styles by observing the façades of the desolate stone buildings, how to give orders to the sea and tell riddles to the sky.

The year I started elementary school, it was Eugenio who bought me a stuffed kingfisher in honor of the event. After that I had no eyes for any other toy and I named it ‘Tristan’ under God knows whose influence. It was a foot long and had a sharp beak. Its back and tail were a dazzling blue, its neck was white, and its wings dark green.

The handsomest building on Hoca Ali Street was the Ispilandit Apartments. The weary structures on either side of it seemed to lean inward while those facing it appeared to bow slightly as if in sacred ceremony. We lived on the top floor of the cut-stone building in two spacious apartments. Every time I stepped into the antique elevator and reached for the seventh-floor button up to our apartment a familiar breath of coolness met me. Stepping into the living room from the elevator was to be practically embraced by the Byzantine and Ottoman silhouette of the historical peninsula. Framed by the windows, in the foreground, a sea extended from the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn and that hazy panorama formed the backdrop of my childhood games. After doing my homework I would press up against the windows and direct the sea traffic with my imaginary control baton. I shrank the Marmara Sea to a pond and made up love stories about the captains, crew and passengers of passing cargo ships, fishing boats and ocean liners. When the sun rose and beamed like a movie projector over the sea, I would start a war between two hostile sets of wave armies. The Marmara army flowed from the Black Sea down the Bosphorus while the Aramram rebels poured in from the other direction. I conducted the war with all possible dramatic effects while poor Tristan’s wings trembled on my lap.

The neighborhood buildings, the youngest of which was 150 years old, enjoyed a rooftop life provided by seagulls. I imagined a disconcerted Tristan as I befriended a dwarf seagull who grew fond of our balcony. I named my seagull friend Ali, and tried to feed him regularly. When I caught it eating its own droppings one day I converted immediately to vegetarianism. Whenever I felt the urge to view the Galata Tower – my lucky charm – I would hurry to the kitchen. Pushing the lace curtain aside, that cylindrical monument seventy meters high would seem to take a step toward me. It was initially built of wood in the year 528 by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, then rebuilt in stone by the Genoese in 1348, and restored by the Ottomans in 1510. Surveying the tower stone by stone, was like embarking on a three-dimensional safari through time. And when I reached its conical hat, I would be seized with a craving for an ice cream. I lost all hope for Turkish art and poetry because none of our painters or poets had ever jumped from its parapets. I would look through my binoculars for interesting and mysterious faces among the weary tourists clustered around the tower while an automaton-like guide recited clichés.

‘Galata Tower was always a mediator between Byzantine and Ottoman,’ Eugenio told me.

I met the chronic bachelor Eugenio Geniale, whom I took as my adopted father, through Alberto. Alberto and I went to the same schools up to our university years. He lived with his mother and older sister Elsa in the monumental Doğan Apartments not far from the tower. Eugenio was their neighbor. Alberto’s Italian father had deserted his Greek mother in order to move to Melbourne. But at least Alberto could be with his father, a yacht captain, during the summers. His workaholic mother was bookkeeper for a hotel and always giggled when she pronounced my name in reverse. Green-eyed Elsa, two years older than I, was my first sweetheart. I thought she loved me too because she would take my arm or pinch me on the cheeks on the way to the movies. But the year she was supposed to start high school she went to visit her aunt in Genoa, where she discovered the world of lesbianism. Eventually she moved to Venice to start a new life.

I enjoyed Okçumusa elementary school, which was 222 steps from home and stood with a theatricality in reaction to the sloping decline of our street. It was there that I exerted all my efforts to win countless honor certificates, first to impress my grandmother and then a few girls who remained standoffish. It was all in vain. After Elsa I never fell in love again, never had any flirtations of the mesmerizing kind. I had my own primal fear of being rejected and those guys who acted like clowns to impress the girls disgusted me. My grandmother, thinking of me as haughty, said that I was the spitting image of my grandfather.

I moved on to the Austrian high school, 155 steps from home. Eugenio said, ‘Well, you’ll learn good German and English,’ and fell silent. In those days it was the thing to liken schools to prisons; to me the place looked like one of those portable hospitals we saw in epic movies. I was surprised at students who were afraid of the language courses, because every word that I learned fed my appetite for more. It was as if I’d solved one more square in a mosaic puzzle. My favorite teacher was Herr T.B., who every now and then passed on to us an aphorism from his favorite author Elias Canetti. He taught me how to play chess and said, ‘I won’t be responsible if you turn into an addict.’ He diagnosed me as a natural polyglot and I didn’t disgrace him. By the time I graduated, in my eleventh year, I’d learned Italian, French and some Ottoman Turkish, enough at least to decipher the inscription on the dry fountain next to the Galata Tower.

I made my grandmother buy the Turkish
Britannica
, telling her it was a required school book. Reading five pages a day, I finished the twenty-two volumes line by line in eight years. I was in the eighth grade and busy with ‘Entomology’ when the door of my room opened ceremoniously. The touch of irony in Akile’s modest smile aroused a faint suspicion.

‘Your father died,’ she said in an easy, ho-hum tone of voice. I was reading with some skepticism the sentence, ‘There are more than 700,000 known species of insects and at least that many unknown …,’ and wondering where she’d got the news. But all I said was, ‘How?’

She just said, ‘Eat your grapes and don’t ask what vineyard they come from,’ making my blood run cold.

The news of my father’s death brought peace between us. Akile was relieved. She dropped the role of mother entirely while fully adopting that of a big sister, which was helpful when I needed it. I forgave her.

*

Alberto and I were always glad to stop off in the next-door neighborhood on the way down the hill from Galata to Tophane. In our high school days all the major craziness happened at the Nezih Café, which sat on the border of the two districts. We had to pay a bribe to get into this place reeking of stale tea and cigarette smoke. The excitement started the moment we slipped the first pack of cigarettes into the hand of the garrulous waiter. Nezih’s regulars consisted of taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the retired and the neurotic unemployed, and gambling addicts. Alberto and I played cards and secretly hoped a dramatic fight would break out. Once a young drunk came up to our table on some trivial excuse and began hurling insults at us on the lines of ‘You infidel Galata chicken-shits, go back where you came from!’ when a fine-looking man in his thirties suddenly appeared. Taking the perpetrator by the ear, he dragged him to the door and threw him out. That’s how we met ‘the Albanian’, the blond-haired Iskender Elbasan. Iskender Abi – we called him ‘Abi’ for ‘big brother’ – had, after losing his wife in childbirth, moved out of his father-in-law’s suburban house and come to Galata. I never visited the jewellery shop at the Covered Bazaar that he partially owned. I smiled and paid little attention to the Nezih café regulars who assumed he was an antiquities smuggler. He was a patient listener who enunciated his words distinctly and lucidly with an immigrant’s accent. It was he who first took me through the swinging doors of a
meyhane
, and he who found the Slavic nurse who first took me to bed. One day Iskender Abi moved to the ground floor of the sleepy apartments diagonally across the street from us. As time went by he became my confidant and protector. Akile used to call him the proletarian ‘Knight of Galata’.

Eugenio said the Byzantines put the Genoese in Galata for logistical reasons. ‘We’re a floe that separated from the Genoa iceberg 800 years ago and got stuck to Constantinople.’ Maybe that’s why when visiting Genoa I wasn’t surprised to see reflections of Galata there. Galata in its heyday had been a district inhabited by an upright middle-class minority, my grandmother said, ‘But when we first got here it was like a camp of ghosts.’ The first to revive Galata were migrants from Eastern Anatolia. Then in the 1990s its aesthetic and practical virtues were rediscovered by foreigners teaching at the new private schools. After that writers, painters, more artists, and some professionals who thought they possessed a bohemian spirit invaded those stone buildings still holding out against time.