The Sultan of Byzantium (20 page)

‘For work leading to such an obviously auspicious conclusion, I would not ask for more than I deserve, my friend,’ said Nedim. We planned to meet again on Monday evening at six o’clock in the lobby to assess the situation and then proceed to his house for dinner.

I was gradually pulling myself together. While eating breakfast on Sunday morning I observed the American and Japanese tourists, who accepted no boundaries in their sightseeing. While the Americans were living the pleasure of each moment, the Japanese appeared to be dutifully carrying out their jobs as tourists. It wasn’t snowing and I toured the city in the taxi of Tarik from Sarajevo.

I imagine one of Stockholm’s missions is to imply that heaven may be a boring option. Its buildings were not engaged in a contest for beauty or size. Winter precautions were in force on the streets; no traffic jams were to be seen nor car horns to be heard. I saw no queues, either on the streets or in the buildings. Needless to add, there were no beggars anywhere. In this city exempt from visual pollution, I didn’t see even one partially rusted garbage can. The designer’s touch was revealed in the weekend dress of these urbanites who moved, annoyingly, as if they were models prancing down a catwalk. I wondered about the incidents that caused them to burst into laughter – maybe the flawless mechanical order of which they were components honed the edge of their responses. Meanwhile I thought about how Istanbulites refreshed their joy of life by fighting against a new and different kind of infrastructure problem that popped up every week. My Sarajevo taxi driver, who had read every Yashar Kemal novel translated into Swedish, informed me that in order to deal with the monotony of life in Sweden the Stockholmers took refuge in detective novels. I was delighted indeed not to find any global masterpieces in the city’s museums: thus the imposition of fashions and names upon the people was avoided.

A couple passed by me arm in arm as I ducked into a coffeehouse for a break. The tall beautiful girl walked triumphantly close to her shorter, unhandsome boyfriend. I took the sight as an auspicious omen. I had dinner at a pizzeria close to my hotel. Later, as I sat in the hotel bar with a Sudoku book in my hand waiting for sleep, an immigrant prostitute approached and suggested a massage in my room. I sent her away, this hustler who was trying to tempt me into betraying Mistral. Ten minutes later I saw her walking to the elevator with an eager Far Easterner. I laughed at myself; Mistral could be in her lover’s arms at that very moment.

The next morning I went to a second-hand bookshop with a skeleton in reading position in its window and bought Freya Stark’s
Rome on the Euphrates
. After that I stayed in the hotel until my private detective showed up. Nedim began his report with, ‘My friend, I have not brought you bad news.’

‘I found somebody I knew on her street and asked questions of somebody who knows somebody who knows her. Your lady does not have any boyfriends so far. People say good things about her. She lives alone, and for the last ten days she’s been hosting her father who is visiting from Athens …’ This news gave me the reassuring feeling that I’d covered half the journey.

As for Nedim, he lived in a suburb whose name I couldn’t remember, near the airport. Having agreed to meet his family, I arrived at his house on a street that looked so portable as to make one wonder if it was real. The neighbors were mostly from the Balkans and Somalia. His wife had a name as complicated as mine and worked at a bakery. I presented a bottle of perfume to his ceremonially dressed daughter and pressed a hundred-euro note into his son’s pocket as he kissed my hand. The claustrophobic living room achieved a kind of primitive kilim design out of the fusion of Anatolian and Scandinavian furniture. I was apparently a good reason for the Arapoğlu family to cheer up, for they exhausted me with their hospitality. We laughed throughout the night and exchanged big hugs on parting.

I asked Nedim to keep the next Tuesday open for me too. According to his intelligence, Mistral’s father dropped in at the Butterfly House café in Haga Park every morning at eleven o’clock. This botanical garden was situated across from the university and not far from Mistral’s house. I needed to meet Costas Efendi from Edremit.

My tour of the 230-year-old park was cut short by the Imperial Cemetery, which reared up like an oasis of ice. Among the small buildings the most charming, according to Nedim, was the tent that was the Ottoman Pavilion. The Butterfly House, wherein a tropical climate was recreated, looked like an aquarium made of sailcloth. Inside it hundreds of butterflies freely and amicably came and went among the guests, perching on them at will. All manner of beautiful native bird and fish species were displayed there also, like objets d’art. I was sure they resisted eye contact with humankind.

The one customer at the Butterfly House café was Costas Sapuntzoglu. He looked like Omar Sharif. It may be that he was trying to balance his eighty-year-old looks with his youthful beige suit as he disinterestedly turned the pages of a magazine. I gravitated toward the table next to his while Nedim went out to ring my cell phone once or twice and hang up. I took a peek at Costas as I supposedly talked to my mother – loudly – on the phone. I cut my imaginary conversation short; Costas looked up and said, in Turkish, ‘Hey, son.’ Two words in Turkish were enough; we pulled our tables together. My cap and reading glasses were a kind of disguise.

I started off by giving my name in reverse, and told him that I lived in Hisar and taught at Boğaziçi University. I was in Stockholm for research. It was clear from the way he chewed on his lip while listening that he was eager to spill his life story. Although he understood Turkish, he preferred to tell it in English.

His question, ‘What was the most grievous mistake that Atatürk ever made, in your opinion?’ startled me.

‘Dying too soon?’

His voice shook.

‘The population exchange between the Greeks of Turkey and the Turks of Greece.’ He used the Turkish word for the exchange – ‘mübadele’ – and as he did, he sounded like a small child unable to say ‘bogey-man’ without trepidation.

‘After the Holocaust, the greatest crime against humanity is to compel people to leave their homeland. Nobody had the right to uproot us from the Aegean that was bestowed upon our ancestors 3000 years ago!

‘I was born in Edremit the day before the Republic was declared. I wasn’t even a year old when we got to Athens in 1924. In those days the Greek situation, like that of the other Ottoman minorities who were involved in business, wasn’t so bad. We spoke both Turkish and Greek at home, like with the other exchange families. I was the spoiled boy since I came along after three girls. Until my father’s stroke, the whole family would visit Istanbul every other year. We had Turkish and Armenian friends there, in Pangalti and Büyükada, who were closer than relatives. The yearning of my father, mother, and two oldest sisters for the homeland lasted all their lives. My youngest sister and I respected their feelings. Our trips to Istanbul would not have ended if I hadn’t lost her last summer.

‘I graduated from a California beach city university in six years and started working at a maritime company in Piraeus. My life was pretty irresponsible; I had a weakness for women. My mother pressured me to marry the flighty daughter of a hotelier, but it only lasted a year. I was fifty-two when I married Anna, my daughter Mistral’s mother. She was twenty-four years younger than me and working as a guide at the Mediterranean branch of a Swedish tourism company. She made me chase her quite a long time. But I wearied her. We divorced when Mistral was finishing middle school. The two of them moved to Stockholm. My daughter visited me in Athens sometimes during the summer holidays, and it was always agony when she left. She was at university when her mother died of cancer. After that she went to live with her pianist grandmother, who died four years ago. After Anna died, my relationship with my daughter improved. God be praised, she’s turned into a lady and a very bright scholar. It made me happy that she broke off her flirtation with that widowed professor. Now my one desire is to be able to love my daughter’s children when they come along.

‘I live in Athens with my middle sister’s widowed daughter and spend summers with Mistral. Winters, if she calls, I come. She says her work-related stress dissolves when I’m around. It’s like a joke, to know you’re good for something after eighty … ’

He enjoyed the attention, and asked questions about my parents. When I said that my father was an American and my mother a Turkish-Greek-Georgian combination, he said, ‘Well, kid, it seems that you’re a less pure Anatolian than I am.’

He asked if I would sing an Istanbul song for him before he left, but said okay when I proposed a poem instead. I picked a section of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s ‘Istanbul Epic’ that I especially liked:

Just say ‘Istanbul’ and I think of

A basket full of reddish-colored grapes

On a fine evening at Şehzadebaşı

A girl walks by, ruthlessly female

Three candles on top of the basket

I would kill myself for her attitude

Taste of grape honey on her full lips

Desire filling her from top to toe

Willow tree, summer breeze, harvest dance

Surely she was born in a wine cellar

On a fine evening at Şehzadebaşı

Once more the keel of my heart

Runs aground on the rocks

Just say ‘Istanbul’ and the Grand Bazaar

Comes to mind the Algiers March

Arm in arm with the Ninth Symphony

A perfect bridal suite a splendid dowry

Only the bride and groom missing

For sale cheap cries the auctioneer

And in the corner a pot-bellied oud

Bedecked with mother-of-pearl

Tamburî Cemil Bey on old 78s …

As I came to the last two lines Costas of Edremit grabbed my arm and said in Turkish, ‘For God’s sake, stop.’ He stood, took his coat and cap with the initials AEK written on it, wrapped his turquoise scarf around his neck, and left me sitting there. Just before the door he stopped, flung his right arm up and, without turning back, walked out very slowly. It was pure drama.

*

At the end of the street that ran in front of Mistral’s house Nedim and I kept watch in his beloved Volvo, which he called ‘my little black donkey’. It was seven in the evening and a reluctant snowfall had begun to fall, the kind my grandmother used to describe as ‘sifted through the finest sieve’. A minibus pulled up before the three-storey house and an old man emerged from it. A
sirtaki
tune wafted from the open minibus door as Costas came through the garden gate to welcome him. The two laughed and embraced and danced briefly to the tune shoulder to shoulder. This little scene lasted three minutes, during which the deserted street seemed to warm up a bit. The minibus drove off and the two old Greeks continued to sing.

We were eating our sandwiches when a small jeep pulled into the spot the minibus had vacated. Mistral climbed out from the passenger’s side and I tried to shrink down into my seat, dropping my water bottle. Both of her hands were full. Whatever she said to the woman in the driver’s seat made her break into laughter. Ten minutes later, when the lights on all three floors had come on, I asked Nedim to call her cell phone, say ‘Wrong number,’ and hang up. I wanted to be sure she had it close to her. Then, simultaneously invoking the names of all the Byzantine emperors in turn, I composed a text message for her:

You swept into and out of my life like a comet and my head is still spinning. I missed you so much I followed you here. At this very moment I’m across the street from you in front of the florist’s shop. I’ll count to 1001, and if you will come down to me, I’ll whisper to you the words I’ve been saving for the woman of my life …

H.A.

I read over what I’d written twice and felt embarrassed both times. I was sure my head would begin hurting as soon as my hesitant finger hit ‘Send’. I waited in the snow, but Mistral did not even bother to come to a window and look out to see if I was really there. Nedim understood that my gambit had failed from the way I stalked, sulking, furled umbrella in hand, back to the car, mortified as a host shamed in front of his guests. On our way back to the hotel he said, when he’d finished grumbling, ‘Listen. If this girl of ours is as perfect as you’ve painted her, maybe she’s a lesbian.’ I had to smile. At the hotel we exchanged addresses. He spoke first.

‘It’s not without reason that they say something good always comes out of something bad. You’re a fine gentleman. I hope it’s your fate to be happily married to a good Turkish girl. I haven’t yet seen a Turk marry a Swedish girl and be happy.’

‘If I hadn’t come to Stockholm and declared my feelings for that girl, I would always feel like something was missing,’ I said. ‘I thank you for your help and hospitality, Nedim. It was a good side effect of this visit to get to know you. Please pass along my regards to your family. I’ll call when I get my return flight straightened out. If you’re free, you can take me to the airport.’

I didn’t go in immediately but stood in the freezing cold weather for some time as if, I suppose, I was taking a meditative shower. Then a voice from inside me warned, ‘Come on, don’t show weakness, Your Excellency Constantine XV. A more majestic finale awaits you.’

When discussion turned to my sensitive skin and nature, my grandmother never failed to say, ‘Just like his grandfather.’ If I changed my shaving cream my cheeks would turn red; and every feeling that I bottled up inside me would turn into a sore in my mouth.

When I got up the next morning I had a sore the size of a baby aspirin on the tip of my tongue. Just drinking water was painful. Actually this was the first time the condition had surfaced since I’d made up with my mother. Now I felt stunned, like a victim running into his torturer again. It was probably because of shame over a move seriously unbecoming a chess master. If sending a syrupy melodramatic message to a woman newly met was what was called love, well, I could deal with that. Besides, I had a ready-made excuse for why I could not seduce women. It was because my forefathers married according to order; that is, if somebody caught their eye they only had to issue an order, and voilá! With this sentence I suppose I’ve accounted for why I hired expensive whores for my lovemaking.