Arabesk

by Barbara Nadel

  'Oh,' Mehmet Suleyman said as he approached his office door and saw the figure of Erol Urfa standing in front of it 'Tansu Hanim is downstairs, did you come—'

  'Tansu is not too interested in seeing me right now,' the singer said with a sad smile.

  'Ah. I understand.'

  'No, you don't.' Erol shrugged. 'But then why should you.'

  Embarrassed by what he now saw as a faux pas on his part, Suleyman opened the door and showed his guest into his office.

  'I just came to assure you that as soon as I have buried Ruya, I will come back to the city.' He placed a small piece of paper covered in rather childish writing on Suleyman's desk. 'Here is my address.'

  Suleyman took the paper and glanced at it 'You will have to report to the station in Hakkari. If you can let me know when you are going, I can inform them.'

  'Yes.'

  The cacophony of honking car horns from outside the window seemed to grow louder as the two men were silent for a few moments, until Erol said, 'When the trial is over I will take Merih, my parents and sisters to Germany.'

  Suleyman frowned.

  'I am told that Shaitan has a different shape there,' the singer continued. His tone was one of sadness rather than bitterness.

  'Will you sing there?'

  'I have made more money in three years than most men make in their whole lives and fame, for me, has become . . . difficult.'

  'I see.'

  'We are all leaving our traditional homes now,

  Inspector, whether they're in this country, Iraq or Syria.' He got up and walked thoughtfully towards the window. 'My kind. We need to be where peacocks mean nothing to men, where people worship only money.'

  'Do you not fear that you may become something of an oddity in those lands? Don't you think you might be even more misunderstood?'

  Erol turned, the light from the window behind him throwing his face into a darkened pit of shadows. 'I live in hope that questions about a man's religion are questions that the Europeans do not ask.'

  Suleyman looked doubtful. 'I think that they do, Mr Urfa. I think that despite what you might think you believe about their overt materialism, such fundamental differences do have meaning for them too. It was, after all, the Europeans who devised the Court of the Inquisition.'

  Erol frowned 'The what?'

  'Many centuries ago,' Suleyman explained, 'the Christians in Europe devised a special type of court to try anyone suspected of consorting with demons. They tortured, burnt and hung tens of thousands of people.'

  'But not now. They don't do that now.'

  'No.' Suleyman smiled. 'No, they don't But what Fm saying to you, Mr Urfa, is that they did. They have a history, just like us, of fear and prejudice against that which they do not understand. And just because they do not feel this way now, perhaps, that doesn't mean that they will not do so in the future. Things change.'

  'You're saying I will never be safe, wherever I go?'

  'With the cultural ground, metaphorically, shifting beneath our feet every minute of the day, who amongst us is safe?' Suleyman smiled. 'My family, Mr Urfa, once commanded vast armies. We were Ottomans, we ruled the rest of you.' He sighed. 'But now I am a Turk just like everybody else and, like a Turk, I must sometimes decide whether I am going to eat today or just simply smoke a few cigarettes. No one is safe from change, Mr Urfa, no one.'

  Tansu Hamm stood in silence as Orhan Tepe noted the time, 3.15 p.m. and date, August 16th, of her entrance into the cells.

  'Is Latife Hanim prepared?' he asked the duty officer who was, though responsive, almost dozing under the influence of the extreme heat.

  'Yes.'

  'Right' And then turning to the white-faced woman at his back he said, 'If you'd like to come this way, madam.'

  Wordlessly the woman, who was now clad in a very simple black dress, her face almost devoid of all make-up, followed him. For his part, had Orhan Tepe not known that this visitor was indeed Turkey's own true darling, he would never have guessed. Not only was she dressed much more simply than she had been the previous night, she also looked older, much older.

  There were two sets of locks to get through in order to gain entry to the festering concrete box in which Latife Emin was now incarcerated. After checking that his charge was ready for her visit via the observation flap in the door, Tepe opened first the top and then the bottom set of locks.

  'I'll be outside,' he said as he ushered the woman in black into the presence of her counterpart in grey.

  'That won't be necessary,' the singer said, her eyes fixed hard upon those of her sister.

  Tepe closed the door on the two silent, standing women. The crackle of fury in the air was so tangible as to be almost audible. But Tepe left them anyway -stood outside with a cigarette and looked up and down at the grim cell walls.

  Ten minutes later when he came to tell Tansu that her time was up, the two women were still standing exactly where they had been when he left them. Silent, stone-like, the only movement between them the monstrously developed feeling of fury that, Tepe felt, would utterly crush and destroy bom the women, and him if he didn't leave soon.

  Quite what had passed between them neither Tepe nor anyone else would ever know. Or indeed want to know.

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