The Sultan of Byzantium Read online

  Another night Askaris sent two Jamaican girls to my room. I didn’t know they were going to be identical twins. M.’s left leg was false to her knee. Since she was a reader of the poet Derek Walcott, I invited her to see ‘The Mousetrap’ with me. The play, inspired by an Agatha Christie story, has been staged 23,000 times since 1952. I shivered when the murderer made his entrance in the first scene. I was thinking about my ordeal, which would come up in six weeks. M. believed I was the heir apparent of an organization involved in some kind of shady business. (Emperor Constantine VII was poisoned in 959, Emperor Romanus II was poisoned in 963, Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas was stabbed and then beheaded in 989, Emperor John I Tzimiskes was poisoned in 976, Emperor Romanus III Argyrus poisoned and strangled in 1034, Emperor Michael V died in 1042 as his eyes were being gouged out … )

  I had no idea where my three assistants were staying, so I met them for dinner at my hotel restaurant. Askaris’s dialogue with the waiter was impressive; he spoke with an upper-class accent and wielded a rich vocabulary. I was willing to bet that he’d graduated from an elite British university and lived in London. Kalligas’s English was good too and he had a general air of self-confidence. Pappas, on the other hand, barely knew English at all. His struggles with the menu were amusing. Maybe he’d been hired as a personal favor to somebody, I thought – then what might the reason be? If he was a bit on the shallow side, at least he had a warm heart.

  I gave orders to my team and asked them to account for themselves when necessary but never inquired into their pasts. So, to rescue the evening, I began improvising on this and that, warming to my subject as I saw success in surprising my audience. I summarized my educational history, then delved into passages from private life. Askaris was a wise but pragmatic man who liked to finish what he started. Yet he seemed to want to conceal his virtues. I could tell that he was a bit disturbed that I was sharing a table with Kalligas and Pappas. I met with him twice more before returning to Istanbul; his manners were always efficient and measured and I felt myself warming toward him. I was sure that his mysterious job had prevented him from marrying or developing a hobby. We met the first time at the hotel bar and he was embarrassed to ask my permission to leave, after his second mineral water, to catch the train to Winchester. (Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes had his eyes gouged out and was poisoned in 1071, Emperor Alexius IV Angelus was strangled, then beheaded in 1183, Emperor Andronicus I was torn to pieces after torture in 1185, Emperor Isaac II died as he lost his eyes in 1193, Emperor Alexius IV was strangled in 1204, Alexius V Murtzuphlus had his eyes gouged and his tongue cut out the same year – 1261 – that Emperor John IV Lascaris was blinded … )

  I presented Jocelyn a farewell bottle of perfume on my departure from the Center. I wasn’t brave enough to disagree when she said in her confident tone, ‘Don’t try to hide it, you’re here to research your Byzantine novel.’

  ‘Or a mysterious play from which I’m not absent.’

  ‘Does it have a title?’

  ‘… Sultan of Byzantium … ’

  ‘Well, that’s a provocative one for Anglo-Americans who aren’t total strangers to sultans and Byzantium. And ‘Sultan of Byzantium’ was what they called Mehmet II after his capture of Constantinople.’

  (The son, Andronicus IV Palaeologus, and the grandson, John VII Palaeologus, of Emperor John V Palaeologus were partially blinded in 1374 in response to the emperor’s orders and the meddling of the Ottomans … )

  EPSILON

  I was hanging up the map with the clues long after my meeting with Askaris when I remembered something beneath my pile of atlases. I’d never picked up this heavy book, assuming that it was just another of my grandfather’s tragicomic purchases. The letters on its spine proclaimed ‘Manassis’. Anxiously I lifted the cover of what looked to me like a box made up of straw. The book was printed in Venice in 1729. On the left side of the thin muslin-like pages was a text in Latin, and on the right side one in Greek. Together with the words of Constantine Manassis, I found passages from two authors whose names I had not encountered anywhere else. My own research told me that twelfth- and thirteenth-century historians had nothing to do with the Palaeologus family. The book seemed to have done time as a file cabinet: I found fifty-year-old business cards from Genoese restaurants stuck in its pages. One yellowing sheet of paper marked off in squares held directions to nightclubs. They were written in ink in old Turkish. In view of the grammatical mistakes, the author was surely my grandfather.

  Another, less worn-out sheet of paper contained a pentagram drawn with a ruler. Its only difference from the stars you see on flags was that the lines were elongated to form five isosceles triangles, with the bases delineated by dots. In two of the triangles were numbers. Another two were full of Latin letters, whereas the fifth one contained a sentence written in Arabic. I thought this document was a list of clues or maybe a cheat sheet for roulette. Or was it perhaps an attempt at using gothic letters to enhance the sophistic plot to siphon more money from my naïve grandfather’s pocket?

  As soon as I got back to Istanbul from London I pulled out the photocopy I’d made at the Center and compared the handwriting with these documents. It certainly looked like the two pieces of writing had come from the same hand. Now must be the time, I thought, to find out whether that hand belonged to Paul Hackett, for three years the son-in-law in the Ipsilandit Apartments. I’d been conditioned to hate my father as the reason for the dissolution of our family, but I was curious about Paul Hackett simply because of my grandmother’s charge that, ‘Except for your curmudgeonly manners and the pride you got from your mother, you’re the spitting image of your father.’

  During my last year at high school, when I was applying to universities around the world, Eugenio once asked, ‘Is it because Virginia was your father’s school that you don’t want to go there?’ I remembered how he slowly shook his head when he saw that I had no idea what school my father had attended. The publishing company Paul represented had gone belly-up; now the only chance I had of connecting with his past lay in whatever clues I could pick up at the University of Virginia, if I could go there. I composed a proleptic consolation for myself against the eerie possibility that the handwriting was his. I had no right at this point to promote my life from mystery novel to television soap opera. I don’t know why, but a sarcastic graffiti at LSE came to mind: ‘Where science ends, prayer begins.’

  The night of my return from London, I took the family to dinner at the Müzedechanga. I liked this museum restaurant in Emirgan because the shallow bourgeoisie overlooked it. We took a table with a view of an Ottoman Palace on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. As the second bottle of white wine was being uncorked, I thought I saw a muezzin in a turquoise caftan on top of the building’s tower. While looking hopefully around at his environment, would he be moved to recite a classical Bosphorus poem? He slowly disappeared behind a curtain of fog. Had I seen this illusion when I was a student, I would have thought, ‘If there are still people who can see the man in turquoise, I wonder how many?’

  At home that night I browsed my pile of poetry magazines. The rhythmic sounds rippling from the pages as I flicked them seemed a challenge to the night, cracking like a whip in the intensifying silence. I rose and went to the balcony to contemplate old Istanbul. I saw a horde of horsemen galloping across the plain bathed in the light of churches and mosques. In the forefront was a prancing white horse that seemed to be saying ‘Let’s go!’ to the commander it was waiting for. I was as thrilled as a child on his first trip to the amusement park.

  *

  Instinctively, I picked twenty-two Byzantine monuments that I hadn’t visited yet. I was a stranger to the names and faces of all but four of them. My excursion might be received by Nomo as an act of deception. But I had no private agenda for this safari, although I thought I might receive a sign of some kind while paying my twenty-two visits. One gift of Persian is the word ‘serendipity’: in the course of searching for one beauty, to end up with ano
ther …

  It would have been disrespectful to chronology not to begin my trip through the time tunnel with the city walls: this ring of stone from Sarayburnu to Ayvansaray, from Yedikule to Topkapi, had made Constantinople the best-protected city on earth from the fifth to the fifteenth century. I executed a slalom on and around them both with and without a car. Iskender Abi drove the Lancia that I took out of the garage once a month. I knew he would ask ‘How long are those huge walls?’ at the first opportunity. I rewarded him with the information that they were a little over twelve miles in length and incorporated ninety-six watchtowers. I waited for the next question – ’What’s a watchtower?’

  I felt the thrill of entering a foreign country without a passport as I passed outside the walls from Samatya, the only place whose name has remained unchanged since the beginning of Byzantium. There was once a wide moat in front of these walls, and on the other side of the moat another row of walls thirty feet high. Invaders who made it past those two obstacles would come back empty-handed from the ninety-foot inner walls. If you looked closely from the outside, the walls looked like heavyweight wrestlers standing shoulder to shoulder, whereas from the inside they resembled a troop of retirees who could hardly stand straight. This picture was an accurate portrayal of the Byzantium that was handed over to Palaeologus.

  I walked along the walls, mentally skipping the ‘restored’ sections. I scrutinized them as if I were reading my own coffee-grounds, and interpreted the lack of insight as: ‘No obstacles on your road.’ It was mildly satisfying to see Iskender Abi watching me prostrate to the walls out of the corner of his eye as if he were reluctantly witnessing an outlandish and bizarre ritual.

  Traversing the coordinates of the Imrahor Mosque (St John the Baptist Church), Molla Gurani Mosque (St Theodore Church), Fethiye Mosque (Pammakaristos Church), and the Gül Mosque (St Theodosia Church), I zigzagged from the fifth to the tenth, then the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries. My guide to these mysterious and remote corners of the city was the Byzantine expert Cevat Mert. When he remarked that in the thirty-three years of his professional life this was the first time he had directed a tour like this, I explained that I was doing ‘preliminary research for a Selçuk Altun novel’. I’m sure he was convinced.

  I thought of the most important playwright in history – Samuel Beckett – as I wandered in and out of the minimuseums and churches-become-mosques. His masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, was received with unworthy criticism when it was first staged in 1953. He made a gesture to the theater world by emphasizing that the whole play was a symbiosis. It was tragicomic how the sole clue he gave went unnoticed – in fact it could have been the stuff of a play within a play. Symbiosis is a biological term that means, ‘the interaction between two different species as they live together.’ If you take this into consideration regarding GODOT, you can see that the words GOD and (idi)OT are intermingled. It may also be easily understood that the leading characters, Vladimir and Estragon, were acting out ‘God’ and ‘Idiot’ and exchanged roles according to their zig-zagging moods to create an eccentric harmony. Beckett generously provided secondary clues via the nicknames of Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi). Hence GODOT would never come; Estragon and Vladimir were GODOT. They were not waiting for anyone. While they were joking ‘absurdly’ with each other they were also setting a trap for the sleepy audience.

  Suddenly a magpie landed on top of a nearby disused Ottoman fountain and crowed twice towards me, as if it was waiting for an answer. Perhaps it was my inner voice which said, ‘The symbiosis of a story and (hi)story is the most enigmatic.’ With this, the elegant bird crowed once more and flew off towards the Byzantine dungeons nearby.

  The Byzantine monuments, which I was sure I was seeing for the first and last time, existed in symbiosis with their environment. They took a step forward to today while their neighbors took a step backward to yesterday, both of them meeting at a central point in time, looking like they were all wearing the same pale, faded clothes. For the time being they enjoyed the pleasures of quietude, but they were waiting for a sign. The few cars passing through the crooked streets did not honk and no children’s cries echoed. On the faces of the oldsters walking hesitantly along was satisfaction, something between happiness and unhappiness. It was clear that they were well aware of the fragrance of fig trees emanating from the overgrown gardens, the small Ottoman cemeteries which suddenly sprang up at the end of streets that curved about like narrow streams, and the barely standing wooden houses incongruously harboring pharmacies.

  There were no traces of pretense in the stance of the buildings converted from churches to mosques. Were they more likeable with all those carpets on the floor and their new embellishments?

  In the back streets of the Süleymaniye neighborhood a mustachioed young man idling in front of a barber shop shouted at me, ‘Hey, are you a tourist or a terrorist?’ It was obvious that he resorted frequently to this kind of behavior. I strode toward him, growling, ‘It depends on the day of the week.’

  ‘I thought you were a tourist, Abi,’ he said and ran inside. In case he had advanced instead of retreating, my trust was in the guards that Nomo had assigned to shadow me. But did I really want to put that possibility to the test?

  I had a small surprise at the Fethiye Mosque as I stood outside listening to a lecture on the significance in art history of the ceiling frescoes inside. The mosque, lately turned into a museum, had been the seat of the Orthodox Patriarchate for part of the Ottoman period when it was still a church. Now the street in front of it was populated by women in black chadors, long-bearded men in flowing religious garb, and young men sporting turbans on their heads. A sign in a shop window said: ‘Our perfumes are alcohol-free.’ I felt like I’d suddenly stumbled onto the set of a film shoot in Afghanistan.

  Architecturally the most attractive of these converted churches is the Gül Mosque near the mouth of the Golden Horn. A group of old-timers from the Cibali neighborhood were holding down chairs across the street from the building and focusing their gazes upon it, apparently experiencing the pleasure of being hypnotized. I was surprised at the intense interest shown by tourists as I waited in line at the door to take off my shoes and go in. The mosque, as a church, was thought to have provided the last resting-place of Constantine XI. In front of me was a group of lively and aged American women. A female passer-by wearing a villager’s baggy pants, who had probably never been to Taksim Square – the center of the city – in her life, observed unforgettably that, ‘These days you see crazy old women wandering around here all the time.’ The lack of proportion between the square footage of the floor and the height of the ceiling was impressive. I could believe the story that the floor of the ninth-century building shrank over time while the ceiling grew higher. For Cevat Mert an additional feature was that the church had served as an arsenal for the Ottoman navy after the Conquest.

  The Pantocrator monastery – Zeyrek Mosque – was closed to visitors because of a wide-spectrum renovation project. But I walked decisively to an adjacent building, which had been built by the empress Irene, of the Comnenus family. The monastery, looking from the outside like a caravanserai, contained the tombs of Michael VIII, founder of the Palaeologus dynasty; and of Manuel II, Constantine XI’s father. The complex included a hospital, a retirement home and a small cemetery. I parted from my guide in front of a cistern wall that stood like a lacey screen between the city and Zeyrek. The guide believed that without knowing the life story of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, no one could understand the finale of Byzantium. The wooden houses on my route looked frail enough to blow away in the first strong wind. But those houses, now the color of coal, had survived who knows how many powerful earthquakes? It was odd that the most important monastery of the city was shrouded in sack-cloth for its restoration. I only hoped that it would not come out on the other end looking like a boutique hotel. In the annex was a café with more cats than customers. From the farthest table it was possible
to watch the parade of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments; and impossible not to come eye-to-eye with the Galata Tower. I was a bit irked by its innuendo.

  I drank two glasses of tea while going over my superficial notes and then ambled down to Atatürk Boulevard to catch a taxi home. The street nearest the Boulevard appeared to be an open-air ethnology exhibition. A row of butchers from Siirt, a region in the southeast, were busily cutting up sheep carcasses for local kebab, and a mélange of charcuteries offered delicacies exclusively from Siirt. Customers sat on low stools in teahouses conversing in Kurdish and Arabic in low voices and laughing in loud bursts. In the last one a rooster strutted about nervously.

  On my right, a thousand feet away, the Valens Aqueduct shimmered like an oasis. We began to gravitate toward each other. This half-mile-long and ninety-foot-high structure straddled the avenue like a science-fiction giant, supported by six arches through which vehicles passed with appropriate respect and fear. Eugenio said about this fourth-century work that it had ‘broken away from the walls and marched into the city to hunker in the middle and serve as a warning’. Spying a couple of boys playing on top of it, I was spurred to exercise my right to walk across it. Where the aqueduct started up it was closer to the ground. Moreover, a small abandoned shack had been put there by fate. I worried that I would raise a laugh from the claque of nearby tire repairmen as I clumsily climbed first onto a garbage can, then the roof of the shack, and finally up to the aqueduct. It was slightly less trash-filled than urban beaches. I started off, swaying like an inexperienced tightrope walker. As I climbed upward my body cooled down. It was like being on a Ferris wheel; I was astonished by the feeling of spaciousness. In a small nook overlooking the boulevard two boys about ten years old were smoking cigarettes and throwing rocks at the cars below. They were surprised to see me.