The Sultan of Byzantium (2 page)

The owner of the Tigris Buffet on Galata Tower Street was Devran from Diyarbakir. Rumor had it he’d been tortured during his five years in jail as a political prisoner. This, he well knew, was what drew young folk to his café despite the bland food he dished up. To the left of the entrance was the ‘Spark’ bulletin board. There Devran posted clichés from left-wing pundits and excerpts from acceptable poems and nonfiction. One of his recommendations helped me make peace with poetry, which high school had turned into an unlovely thing. The title of that masterpiece was a remarkable poem in itself. Thanks to Ahmet Arif’s
Fetters Worn Out by Longing
, I began each of my days by reading poetry and began my own poetry collection. Whenever I dove into a poem, I felt a pleasure like that of solving mathematical equations, or maybe skating on a chessboard with countless squares hanging from the heavens. I found silence in poetry and scolded whoever came into my room, my grandmother included. I found the distilled eroticism of the seventeenth-century folk poet Karacaoğlan extremely seductive. I concealed even from Iskender Abi the fact that I sometimes masturbated over his lines. The poems I wrote in my lycée years I showed only to Selçuk Altun. He was a close friend of Eugenio’s who favored his bibliophilic side over his writer’s side. When he declared my poetry ‘Not hopeless,’ I tried my hand at translation. My versions of Montale and Cavafy looked to me like the back of a silk carpet. Eugenio said, ‘Well, what can you do if a poet’s soul refuses to collaborate with you?’

In the old days the real-estate office just below the Tigris Buffet was the watch repairman Panayot Stilyanidis’s shop. When I was in middle school Panayot was in his seventies and worked alone. Since hardly anyone was left to have their watches and clocks repaired, he worked mainly on the stubborn old pieces sent him by antique dealers. I was happy when he let me watch him work. It tickled me to hear the duelling salvos between the shop’s antique wall and table clocks. I’d stop breathing when he put the loupe in his eye and took his special tweezers in hand. A watch’s internal body was as complicated as an aeroplane’s control panel for me and, when the tweezers prodded it into ticking, as fantastic as an Egyptian mummy waking up. Panayot the master craftsman would just chuckle when I became flustered over the number of errands he’d asked me to do. In the middle of his desk stood an antique French clock. I watched open-mouthed as the rainbow-colored mechanical bird in its gilded cage oscillated right to left with every second ticked off. Master Panayot’s heart stopped ticking five days after he gave me the watch left him by his father. He had no children; he was the last link in the chain of the Stilyanidis family, who had been watchmakers for four generations. After he died his widow sold their building to my mother and went home to Chios with the rest of her husband’s ancient clocks and watches.

*

When people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered impatiently, ‘A watchmaker.’ When my grandmother inquired what subject I wanted to study I said, ‘Semiology,’ and paused. My ideal was to be Umberto Eco’s student at the University of Bologna. Haji Ulviye, discovering that semiology meant sign language, asked whether I was an idiot. Then, with my mother’s connivance, she made an offer: if I chose engineering or business she would underwrite my education in America. With Eugenio’s guidance – he’d taken a PhD from Berkeley – I applied to a dozen schools. At the insistence of Selçuk Altun I added Columbia to the list at the last minute. When the letter of acceptance from Columbia University Department of Economics arrived, I read it three times, at different hours of the day.

It was only later when I was filling in the registration forms that I learned Columbia was in New York City. For my four undergraduate years I lived in an encyclopaedic city. I saw that actually it was only the rich and the daring poor who enjoyed New York; the rest of us had to be satisfied with philosophizing the ordinary.

The years went by quickly, with no love stories and adventures and before I knew it I was flying home to Turkey with a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University. Was it me or my country that something had happened to? On boarding the plane to Istanbul from New York, I wondered what irritating headlines full of trivialities I would encounter on landing. A great many of my fellow citizens seemed to feel no worse about the constantly updated corruption than about a missed goal by their favorite football team. In truth, they didn’t even read the newspapers, just glued themselves passionately to the TV soap operas. I was prejudiced about the Parliament they’d elected, too.

I took a job in the investment department of a big bank to appease my family. But I couldn’t endure my blockheaded colleagues or the clumsy management. Besides, I have to admit, I hated taking orders. At the end of my first month I resigned, certain my grandmother’s would declare: ‘Just like his grandfather.’

I thought I might try an academic career in economics. Haji Ulviye liked serious titles like Governor/General/Professor. She agreed to finance my sojourns outside the country so long as the process ended in a professorship. My favorite Columbia professor was Assael Farhi, the son of an Istanbul Balat family, who used to teach on a doctoral program at the London School of Economics. I applied and was accepted for the winter term, which meant my current ‘holiday’ was extended for three months. I went to Italy for two weeks. There I dropped in on Elsa, who was running an art gallery in Venice. She shared her spooky mansion with a woman artist who smelled of paint thinner.

‘You look like one of those antique Mediterranean gentlemen,’ the artist said, ‘the type that women would just love to exterminate.’

Over dinner at the mansion Elsa filled me in on Alberto. He had emigrated to Australia and was now teaching chemistry at a Sydney high school. His wife worked in the human resources department of a hospital and was six years older than he. I booked a ticket to Australia, excited to see Alberto again, but things did not go well. His wife did not miss a chance to scold him. I endured their soulless house for a week, then took a train up to Adelaide. Just because its name was Ararat, I stopped off at a remote station in the outback for two days. From Sydney I flew to Alexandria, my last stop. There I wandered among the places where Cavafy had once sequestered himself reciting his last poems like a long prayer.

It was mid-autumn when I returned to Istanbul, where I was thoroughly bored by an old high school friend’s wedding. The cheap wine they served gave me a headache in the bargain. On the way home I sank down on a bench in front of the Tower and chatted with the kids hanging out there, whose families were migrants from eastern Anatolia. They weren’t impressed when I ticked off the names of the small towns and smaller villages they’d all come from. I rose, hoping to sober up by strolling the silent and deserted streets in the pleasant evening. I began walking in the direction of the thin wind that was blowing towards me. The street, so narrow a bicycle could barely get down it, was a source of annoyance. A little way into it I saw a girl of seven or eight crying in front of a half-abandoned building with a single light burning on the third floor. She wore a one-size-too-small sweatshirt and sweatpants and no shoes. She was shivering. I couldn’t keep from thinking that her teardrops were prettier than pearls. Moved, I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her. The dark olive-eyed girl was Devran Abi’s daughter Hayal. Her father had often brought her to his café when she was a baby. She was a sweet girl. I remembered how she would run to me and wrap her arms around my leg whenever she saw me. Devran had died of cancer, may he rest in peace, when I was in New York. His widow then married an old friend of his whom Devran had considered of dubious character. Now Hayal told me that her mother had died in hospital two days earlier, and her stepfather had put her out of the house.

I knew there would be no answer, but I rang the worthless bastard’s doorbell all the same. I turned to the shivering girl and said, ‘Come and stay with us tonight. You’ll be rid of that drunk, God willing, by tomorrow.’ With that I picked her up and hoisted her on my back. She cried until she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. The tick-tock of her little heart and the warmth of her body were too much for me; tears came to my eyes. I was a well-regarded idle man who hadn’t yet done any good deeds for anyone. My mother received the surprise as she was watching TV.

‘Akile,’ I said, ‘this princess is my new sister.’

The next day Iskender Abi and I buried Hayal’s mother. In exchange for a bit of money the stepfather turned the child over to me and left Galata for good.

Hayal was as sturdy as her father. She overcame her trauma with a little help from a psychologist and grew into a smart and charming young girl. She’s a student now at the Austrian High School; she wants to be a doctor. She parts her hair in the middle because I like it like that. She calls my grandmother ‘Haji Grandma’, and my mother, ‘Mama Akile’, She goes with Haji Grandma to my grandfather’s grave, to the spa in Gönen, and to visit her sister in Artvin. Is it a rule that an old annoying custom should haunt you from the cradle? Since older brothers are supposed to marry first, Hayal is convinced, in view of my confirmed bachelorhood, that her turn will never come. ‘Mama Akile,’ she likes to complain, ‘I’ll never have a chance to get married.’

*

I spent my four years in London as a postgraduate living in an apartment near to the British Museum. I could walk from there to the university in fifteen minutes. From the front the brick building looked like it was built by Lego. Only after I moved in did I notice a plaque in the lobby commemorating the fact that the Nobelist Bertrand Russell had lived there. During one of her religious holidays my mother came with Hayal to visit. I took Hayal to the London Zoo, since she wanted to go – before that I hadn’t even gone to circuses, believing they were a symbol of enslavement. But at the lions’ cage – was I awake or dreaming? – my eyes locked with those of a young lioness. We gazed at each other a long time, then she came to the edge of the cage and bowed her head as if she wanted me to pat it. The rest of her family stood gazing sympathetically at me, like they were waiting for my signal to attack. The other big cats, the tigers and panthers, said hello to me from a distance by wagging their tails. The next month I went again to the zoo and again enjoyed the same rites of hospitality. It occurred to me that these noble cats perhaps recognized a real friend at first sight. I thought of Tristan with great longing. Thanks to Tristan I’d learned the Latin names of hundreds of bird species. When my grandmother refused to buy me an aquarium, I bombarded her with the names of the twenty-seven kinds of shark that lived in our seas. The better I got to know people, the more I respected animals. I always loved children, especially mischievous little girls with runny noses. I used to go to Tünel Square just to hand out change to the child beggars there. My grandmother said, ‘If I don’t will my fortune to the Children’s Charity Foundation I’m afraid you’ll do it for me.’

For the last six years I’ve been teaching two days a week at Bosphorus University. Last year, when I was promoted to associate professor, my grandmother asked, ‘What does it mean?’

‘Well, if professors are generals, then I’m a colonel,’ I said.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘In that case, congratulations.’

I started teaching one day a week at Kadir Has University too, simply because I never felt bored on my walks to that nostalgic building on the Golden Horn. The students, who lose their innocence as soon as they start making money, all call me ‘Hocam’, which means ‘my professor’ and it warms my heart. In my free time I read poetry, study semiology or play chess, and compose Sudoku puzzles. If I happen to go out into the city, I’m appalled at the colossal new skyscrapers. And I feel truly sorry for all those people running around like robots in blue jeans. As I confessed to Tristan, I’m more than ready to work for any honest political leader who could save the country from turning into Boorishstan. Other than that I find no reason to be acquitted of Galata.

During my first summer vacation while I was at Columbia, I became my grandmother’s neighbor by moving into my mother’s perpetually empty apartment. I furnished it with antiques from old Galata mansions: my desk, my weary armchair, my end tables and the busts on them of my family members. Eugenio, hearing that I’d already introduced the busts to Tristan, said, ‘You’re a one-of-a-kind animist.’ I hung some old maps on the living-room wall in the places vacated by my mother’s library shelves. One of the maps was a 1559 engraving by Sebastian Münster. It was the most exciting object among a treasure trove that one of my grandfathers – not even my grandmother could remember which one – had left behind. The map, which Hayal described as a graphic novel squeezed onto a single sheet of paper, pictured Galata before the Conquest. Everything was in a jumble behind the ancient citadel walls, with our Tower standing erect and powerful beside an aqueduct.

I collected quite a few old map books with money I squeezed out of my grandmother for school expenses. I took courses in Latin to examine them more thoroughly. All the city names on those maps never failed to be poetic. The ones I focused on, letter by letter, drew me inside their walls. I was taken on exemplary tours; I supposed I was expected to experience what had happened to humanity because of individual mistakes.

Alberto, whose mother forced him to listen to classical music for half an hour every night because she thought it sharpened the mind, used to cheat off me in school every chance he got. To me, classical music was like an insistent lullaby, and pop music assorted canned vegetables. In Istanbul a great many musical-instrument shops were to be found on Galip Dede Street, which connects the Galata district to Istiklal Avenue. Hayal once asked, ‘Abi, are you trying to make people think and laugh at the same time?’ I told her I hurried down that street to keep the instruments hanging in the shop windows from squirting anti-musical notes at me. My own musical notes were, and are, the sound of the wind rustling through the labyrinths of our neighborhood, the screams of seagulls, the foghorns, the train whistles, the prayer calls and church bells and giggles of little girls – natural and free of expectation. If I’m in the mood for a symphony, I take a very long journey.