Gorgeous East

by null

  And so on, page after page.

  Phillipe found this letter amusing, mostly for the strident, pseudo-Koranic style and purposefully bad French of the imposter who wrote it. Still, he couldn’t sleep, though not from fear. He would never sleep again, he knew this now, and for him it was an end: the doom that had preyed on his family since the days of Saint Louis had at last found him.

  This condition, a creeping kind of violent madness, was the peculiar curse of the males of the de Noyer line. Records documenting its effects went back hundreds of years, the pattern more or less always the same. The afflicted male stops sleeping and after weeks of relentless insomnia begins to hallucinate. He is possessed by freakish manias, hears voices, sees unspeakable visions. These visions drive him to commit terrible crimes—usually murder—or in some cases prompt a spectacular suicide. The history of the curse of the de Noyers—long, tragic, and bloody, but relieved by occasional episodes of low comedy—mirrored the history of modern France.

  The dastardly Ravillac, a bastard son of the family, was chained to four horses and pulled limb from limb for the regicide of Henry IV in 1558. In 1620 another one of Phillipe’s ancestors, believing the Bishop of Rennes to be a wild pig, and believing himself to be out hunting in the woods, shot the prelate dead with an arquebus during mass at the cathedral and for this was burned at the stake. A hundred years later, Phillipe’s great-great-great-grandfather, an amateur naturalist and friend of Voltaire’s, tied stones around his neck and jumped into the murky waters of the Vieux Port at Honfleur during the Blessing of the Fleet. He left a note saying he intended to investigate the secret lives of fish and, not to worry, was adequately prepared for a long stay at the bottom of the sea. Another great-grandfather, a famous soldier who had fought at Valmy, sat out the entire fifteen-year run of the Napoléonic Wars because he suddenly conceived the notion that God intended people not to wear clothes and they wouldn’t let him fight naked. And there was Phillipe’s own grandfather, killed charging the German guns at the Somme during the First World War, carrying nothing but a toilet plunger and a scandalously pornographic novel written by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. (These awkward items were changed in army dispatches to an officer’s sword and a copy of the Gospels. Subsequent newspaper editorials made the man a hero of both church and state; he was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur and interred in the Panthéon near the tomb of Maréchal Lannes.)

  Horrors similar to these, as yet barely visible, were coming toward Phillipe slowly through the ancestral mists. It remained for him now only to choose his particular form of madness; a choice—the last act of his rational mind—in which lay the essential difference between murder and suicide. But Phillipe, summoning all his mental discipline, chose neither. His act of will, existentially perfect, was in keeping with the best traditions of the de Noyers: The ancient motto of the family, engraved on the armorial shield hanging over the family crypt at Saint Marie’s church in Honfleur—Tantum Transiere Probi, Only the Righteous Shall Pass—suggested just this kind of heroic denial of an unalterable destiny.

  So, instead of murder or suicide, Phillipe chose the two things he loved most, sacred objects to carry along with him as he entered his personal twilight: Satie and the Foreign Legion. Satie, whose music exuded peace and humor, for the peace denied him at night. The Legion for its order, for the beauty of men marching in lockstep to the sound of the kettledrum, the bass oboe, the Chinese chimes—difficult instruments completely unknown to any other marching band. Only this kind of order, both military and musical at once, might withstand the irruption of unreason Phillipe had experienced in the desert. Choice made, fate settled. But Phillipe still couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed at 3:00 A.M.—the high noon of the sleepless—and went downstairs to the piano and played from memory Satie’s Trois Morceaux. Playing Satie was nearly as good as sleep. It soothed the raw, torn-away places in his brain, quieted the electric buzzing in his mind’s ear. As he played, he closed his eyes and viewed scenes from the Legion’s last Bastille Day parade in Paris as if watching 3-D slides through one of the precious View-Master visionneuses of his childhood.

  There they are, the ten thousand, assembled on the Champs-Élysées, la Musique Principale in the lead. Then, the opening notes of “Le Boudin”—the Legion anthem—played on a single cornet, high and clear and sweet. The whole band picks up the tune a moment later and the battalions, moving in unison, begin their march down the famous avenue slow as a funeral cortege at eighty-eight paces per minute, always at the back of the back, behind the Mechanized Artillery and the Armored Cavalry of the Armée de Terre, beneath the streaking blue, white, and red contrails of the Mirage jets of the Maritime Airforce. They are in no apparent hurry to reach the draped grandstand full of foreign dignitaries and generals, politicians and movie stars. But they arrive at last and there, they halt, and the heels of ten thousand boots strike the cobbles in unison with a precise, martial clatter. Silence. Every eye turns toward the central dias beneath the vast tricolor flag. But instead of the President of the Republic in his elegant dark suit, flanked by cabinet ministers and Isabelle Adjani, there sits on a pillow in the place of honor poor Phillipe’s brain, a pink, spongy mass full of tiny holes, its very cells being eaten from the inside out by hideous, invisible little creatures like dust mites, eating away until everything, every last memory has been eaten up, digested, defecated.

  Phillipe’s eyes snapped open at this horrible vision, his pajamas soaked in a cold sweat. But he continued to play, he didn’t miss a note. Satie would quiet the creatures, put them to sleep, make them eat his brain more slowly. This was his secret weapon against them. And so, Satie’s plaintive, melancholy Trois Morceaux echoed in the empty town house, absorbed by the beautiful carpets, the paintings on the walls, by his wife’s expensive clothes hanging in the closets upstairs. Poor Louise. The thought of her peerless flesh filled Phillipe with revulsion now. He still loved her, but what was love? A concept invented by idealists to palliate certain uncomfortable requirements of human nature for the continuation of the species. And in France, as someone once said—was it La Rochefoucauld?—love was merely the exchange of two whims and the fleeting contact of one skin against another.

  Out in the garden a pear tree swayed somberly in the breeze, in time to the music.

  3

  RAPUNZEL

  1.

  Kasim Vatran’s house stood at the top of a narrow pedestrian street off Istiklal Caddesi in the Beyoglu District of Istanbul, not far from the old monastery of the Whirling Dervishes. The cable cars of the Eski Tramway hung suspended above the dark mouth of the funicular tunnel just a few blocks away. Heartbreaking afternoon light shone now on the Lower Galata, on the blue-green waters of the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping.

  The house, painted gray and pale green with dark green shutters over the sharply arched windows, was one of the few remaining Ottoman-era buildings in this increasingly developed neighborhood. A traditional onion dome crowned the square tower that ran up the front, but Vatran (Yale Architecture; AIA, Frank Lloyd Wright Notable Design Winner; First Place, Prix Viollet-le-Duc) had brutally deconstructed the once elegant facade. He had ripped out the third floor, tower and all, to install a spare, postmodern interior behind a wall of tinted plate glass, its smooth, greenish surface interrupted with a complicated arrangement of stainless-steel pins and cables, like a set of braces on otherwise perfect teeth.

  Smith hid in the shadows across the street as sunlight crept up house by house until it shone directly on Vatran’s monstrosity, glinting off the cables and pins and illuminating the aquariumlike box of the third floor. From this vantage Smith could make out every detail: the barely functional stylized furniture, the austere lighting fixtures, the asymmetrical wall hangings made from shredded pop cans interwoven with strands of pure, beaten gold, bought by Vatran and Jessica at the Gagosian Gallery, Mayfair, during their last junket to London. Who could live in such a room? Smith thought bitterly, even though he knew the answer.
Who could rip out one-hundred-and fifty-year-old hand-carved cabinets and crenelated alcoves and install this postmodern bullshit?

  Then, a black metal door opened and Jessica, fresh from the bath, entered carrying a large-format fashion magazine and Smith’s heart missed a beat. Her gold-blond hair was wrapped in a blue towel. She was still wearing the plush, expensive terry-cloth robe he had bought her at Barney’s two Christmases ago, when they were still in love. She folded herself onto the uncomfortable sofa in sunlight reflected as green shade through the tinted glass, shook her still-damp hair from the towel and opened the magazine. Long minutes passed as she turned the pages slowly. Smith could see, or perhaps only imagined he saw, water droplets drying on her flesh in the sun, the blond strands of her hair curling as they dried. Desire and pain twisted in his gut; he became conscious of an uncomfortable stiffening in his travel-stained khakis. God, he wanted to fuck her. He’d thought about little else, all throughout the slow, miserable train ride from Paris—across Europe second class, then down through the Balkans on rickety locals, stopping at every sad, one-goat town, the sullen platforms full of half-starved Gypsies and hard-eyed ethnic cleansers in surplus military fatigues, rusty rabbit guns slung over their shoulders.

  Without knowing how it started, Smith felt tears on his face. His emotions in charge suddenly, his heart racing. What the fuck’s wrong with me? he thought desperately. Why am I such miserable bastard? Then control, motherfucker, get control!—these words echoing in his skull like the shrill warning bleat of a diving submarine—but he couldn’t control himself or didn’t want to, and his tears fell to splotch the cobbled pavement. He was thirty-two years old, physically fit, attractive, a moderately successful actor/singer/dancer with ten years of stage experience under his belt—he’d played Freddie for LORT A scale in an Equity production of My Fair Lady at the Guthrie in Minneapolis just a couple of years ago—how many working actors could say they’d done LORT A?—the only place to go from there was Broadway, name-in-lights stuff. And yet he felt finished, spent. Weak as a child with leukemia. And now the tears wouldn’t stop.

  Meanwhile, Jessica basked up there in the warm aquarium sunlight, still turning the big pages of her magazine. The Tünel-Taksim tram rattled along Istiklal Caddesi, packed to the doors with Turks on their way home to the working-class tenements of Dolapdere as the high, thin wail of the muezzin called all pious men to evening prayer.

  2.

  A few minutes later, an old Turkish man, wearing a ribbed woolen cap on his head and a dirty tweed jacket full of holes, clanked up the steps from Istiklal. Strapped to his back was a strange apparatus—a tin-lined wooden box with various brass domes and pipes attached, like a crazy homemade version of a scuba diver’s air tanks. From beneath his left arm protruded a long spigot; tin cups dangled from hooks on the thick belt around his waist. He saw Smith standing half hidden in the shadows and stopped.

  “Iyi aksamlar,” the Turk said. “Nasalsiniz? Çay? Su?”

  Smith knew enough Turkish to know the Turk wanted to sell him a cup of tea. The old man was one of a dying breed—the itinerant urban tea peddler. They used to wander the byways of Istanbul by the thousands, selling tin cups full of Turkey’s favorite beverage for a few lirasi, less than a penny, a little extra for the fresh mint that they carried around in fragrant leather bags. There were maybe a dozen left now, maybe twenty, in the entire city of ten million. Running into a tea peddler in Istanbul was like catching a cab in Manhattan not driven by a Pakistani or a Somali—what were the odds?

  “Hayir, mersi,” Smith said—no, thanks, a kind of knee-jerk American tourist reflex to peddlers of any kind.

  “Çay?” the tea seller persisted gently, holding out a cup. He was a small man, hunched from carrying his tin-lined tank of tea around for thousands of miles over these steep and windblown streets. His face, dominated by a scraggly gray mustache, was deeply lined but kindly; he might be sixty or perhaps eighty, hard to tell with Turks.

  “Hayir!” Smith said again, but he realized suddenly that he was very thirsty, that he was dying of thirst, that nothing had passed his lips, not food or water, since before noon. “Well, O.K. Tamam—” He went fumbling in his pocket for change.

  The tea peddler reached for his spigot, then caught sight of the tears still wet on Smith’s cheeks. He touched his own creased visage and put a concerned hand on Smith’s arm.

  “No, I’m fine,” Smith began, “just a piece of dirt in my eye . . .” He tried to say more, but found himself giving way to emotion again; it was no use. “Shit!” he said in a choked voice. “This is really fucking stupid!” And he tried to grin, but couldn’t and bowed his head and found himself heaving with sobs.

  The tea peddler clucked sympathetically, still patting Smith’s arm. Then, something, a flash of sunlight off the stainless-steel cables above made the old man glance up, and he caught sight of Jessica in the aquarium window, engrossed in her magazine, her golden hair throwing off light. The thick terry-cloth robe had fallen away from her legs and a wide swath of creamy flesh shone there like the marble thigh of a goddess.

  “Eh-eh!” the tea peddler let out an exclamation. “Genk ksiz, cok pahali. Sini cekmek!” He looked from Jessica’s exposed thigh to the tears on Smith’s face and back again. Now he understood. Here was a scene from a storybook: the golden-haired princess in the tower; the lovelorn palace thief weeping from a broken heart in the alley below—though in the old Turkish stories it wasn’t a golden-haired princess at all, but a dark-eyed page boy with lips like rose petals and soft, fawn-colored skin.

  The tea peddler clucked again and filled a tin cup with tea and handed it to Smith, who drank deeply, not bothering to wipe the rim, slightly green and worn thin by the passage of many lips. The stuff was sweet and strong and cool, despite sloshing around the tank on the man’s back all day, and soothed Smith’s dry throat. When he tried to pay for it a moment later, the tea peddler shook his head. He wouldn’t accept a single coin.

  “Come on,” Smith said. “Here, take it—”

  The tea peddler only smiled sadly and began a speech in Turkish in a low earnest voice—advice for the lovelorn, Smith guessed—though he couldn’t understand a word.

  “Türkçe bilimiyorum,” he interrupted, a phrase from the guidebook—I don’t speak Turkish.

  The tea peddler nodded, thinking. At last he held up a finger and plucked at Smith’s sleeve and did a little pantomime that meant come with me, come with me, and descended a few steps toward Istiklal Caddesi.

  Smith hesitated, then let himself be drawn down the slope and into the crowds along the busy sidewalk. The tea peddler kept hold of his arm as they came up the steep grade to Karakoy, talking all the while, a soothing monologue. Maybe Smith was being taken somewhere dangerous where he might be robbed, held for ransom, murdered, his body dropped in pieces into the Bosphorus. No. The tea peddler seemed like a straightforward kind of guy and Smith trusted his instincts. Anyway, he had lost something crucial over the last year of struggle, self-indulgence, failure, and depression: curiosity. He no longer cared about what would happen next.

  3.

  The pillared arcade where the Whirling Dervishes once performed their ritual dances stood empty except for a few cats asleep on the cool paving tiles. At the far end of the arcade, near the street entrance, a fat man sat at a small table reading a newspaper. Crowding the table, an old typewriter, piles of dingy writing paper, pens, a few tattered paperback multilanguage dictionaries. A sign bore inscriptions in five languages, the last one English:

  PROFESSIONAL WRITINGS—LETTERS PERSONAL & ROMANTIC—PETITIONS, ETC.—TURKISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH. TRANSLATE UPON REQUEST. M. AYAK, PROP.

  Here was the public letter writer of the Tünel District; most city neighborhoods had at least one, a necessity in a country where nearly 30 percent of the population couldn’t read.

  There were no chairs for patrons so the tea peddler unstrapped his tank and squatted down and began speaking to the letter
writer in rapid Turkish, all the while gesturing at Smith, who stood there awkwardly, hands in his pockets. Smith saw that the typewriter was a 1940s-era crackle-black Remington Rand Noiseless and wondered where the hell you’d get ribbons for a machine like that in Istanbul, then noticed that it had no ribbons at all. It was rusty-keyed and just for show, a symbol of the trade.

  At last, the tea peddler stood back; the letter writer motioned for Smith to step forward:

  “You are English?” he said in a decent facsimile of the language.

  “American,” Smith said.

  “So”—the letter writer nodded—“I also write very good American. You want me to scribe a letter of love to the woman with the hair of gold in the window?”

  “No,” Smith said. “Thank you.”

  The letter writer paused, disappointed at losing this bit of business. Then he indicated the tea peddler: “Such a man here, he is from the country, from a place called Caltilibuk, which is in Bursa. Do you know Bursa?”

  “No,” Smith said.

  “A very beautiful area, many trees, many flowers. The people of Bursa are plain people, but honest.”