by Selcuk Altun
‘What are you two doing on my grandfather’s aqueduct?’ I said half-jokingly.
‘I swear we didn’t know, sir,’ said the one wearing a T-shirt with ‘F.C. Köln’ written on it.
I attempted to befriend Sadun from Silvan and Hamdullah from Eruh, both eastern towns with beautiful names. All at once I felt sleep overcoming me, and suddenly decided to do the weirdest thing of my life. I informed the boys that I would give them twenty liras each if they watched over me while I had a nap. Their eyes brightened. One said, ‘God give you rest’; the other said, ‘May your life be long.’ I made a bed for myself out of the newspapers and plastic bags strewn around. When I go down in The Secret History of Byzantium as the first emperor to sleep on the Valens Aqueduct, I hope it will be noted that I had two guards, on my right an Arab and on my left a Kurd.
The one with the T-shirt that said, in English, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world,’ woke me as the evening ezan was just finishing. I gave them fifty liras each and they insisted on kissing my hand, then ran off in the direction I’d come from. I stood and started walking in the opposite direction. I was disillusioned at coming away empty-handed from this safari that I’d embarked on without knowing what I expected to find anyway. The descent from the Valens Aqueduct, which I’d climbed purely for the sake of climbing it, reminded me of Aztec temples where the stairs extended farther and farther as you went down and down. Just as I began to think that I was stretching my imagination, my feet touched the ground. I found myself in the rear courtyard of the Kalendarhane Mosque, once the Akataleptos Church. I’d visited this monument, which served as a dervish lodge during Ottoman times, on the first day of my safari. I felt a warm glow, as though I were back in a sympathetic labyrinth. Serendipity?
*
The common conclusion reached by history books, encyclopaedia articles, and internet sites was that Constantine XI was quite a liberal and straightforward emperor who became a martyr by heroically defending his capital city from the powerful Ottoman army. Yet there were others who were also instrumental in the fall of Constantinople: the Pope, who pretended to provide aid, and the Venetians and Genoese who offered symbolic support.
The Immortal Emperor squeezed the life story of Constantine XI into 128 pages and listed 200 works in the bibliography. For the sake of being academic, the author, D.M. Nicol, was apparently determined not to deal with his inner world at all. I thought I should read this book exactly the way I would observe a game of chess.
… Emperor John VIII had no children. He had in mind that the oldest and most talented of his three brothers, Constantine, would succeed him. But on the day he died the other two brothers, Thomas and Demetrius, made moves of their own to take the crown. Thomas, the younger, reached the palace first. Demetrius, the Selymbrian despot who opposed the Orthodox church’s joining the Catholics, had a fighting chance as well. But Constantine was the favorite son of Manuel II’s widow Helen. She persuaded the avaricious younger brothers to yield, and succeeded in having Constantine installed as the last emperor of Byzantium. She informed Murad II, the Ottoman sultan, of this step and obtained his assent. Between Constantine and his brothers there always remained a chill. When the emperor was desperately defending his capital against Mehmet II with limited resources, his brothers were nowhere near him; and after the Byzantine defeat they continued as despots in the Morea by the expedient of paying taxes to the Ottomans. Over time the waning of their power kept pace with the waning of their honor.
Thomas’s son Andronicus, the legal heir to the Byzantine throne, sold his rights to King Charles VIII of France. I couldn’t help thinking that if Mehmet II had been in my far-off grandfather’s shoes, the first item of business would have been to have his two brothers strangled for the sake of efficiency and the prevention of dishonorable intrigue.
… Constantine’s paternal grandmother was Italian, and as a prince he’d married – without love – two noble Italian ladies, both of whom he lost to sickness. On becoming emperor, he sent his confidant Sphrantzes to friendly neighboring kingdoms in search of potential wives. He wanted to counter the empire’s gradual loss of power with a majestic marriage. After two years of fruitless searching, the matchmaker thought about Fatih’s stepmother Maria Brankoviç, daughter of the Serbian despot George Brankoviç. After the death of Fatih’s father Murad II, Maria had gone back home to Serbia (Fatih was the son of Murad by a different wife). Constantine’s mother Helen was also related to the Brankoviç family, in fact. But this attempt failed too, and the emperor ended his quest for a wife.
… It seemed as if my many-times-great-grandfather had spent his whole life doing homework and standing guard. I don’t think he ever tasted the pleasures of power. Although he was quite just and generous, he lacked the full support of the church and his people for siding with his father and older brother. They felt that uniting the Orthodox and Catholic churches under the hegemony of the latter was not a bad idea. For Constantine, who was fond of philosophy, the reasons behind the quarrel between the churches were insignificant. Union would win the support of Europe in the event of danger from the East; and furthermore Byzantium, as the inheritor of the Roman and Hellenic cultures, would find a way to bring the callow kingdoms of Europe to accept its superiority. Unfortunately this goal was embraced neither by the church nor the people. Loukas Notaras, who was the equivalent of a prime minister and was thought to be supporting the emperor’s efforts from behind the scenes, uttered a sentence for the history books: ‘Better the imam’s turban than the bishop’s hat.’
DM Nicol wrote that Constantine XI was born on February 8, 1405, whereas the pedestal of the statue on the book’s cover proclaimed February 9, 1404, as his birthday. To me this ambiguity, with the second month the only common denominator, was typical of the Byzantine destiny. I liked the book. What I read in The Immortal Emperor’s conclusion lent support to Askaris’s hypothesis: that my many times great-grandfather had not died fighting on the walls, and that six Palaeologi were on the passenger list of the last Genoese ship to leave the battle …
Constantine XI, who assumed his rightful throne only with his mother’s help, and was helpless in finding himself a wife, tried always to do good for his people but could not avoid fatal mistakes. This situation suddenly brought someone else to mind – me! I remembered so many instances of exemplary behavior, like not running red lights even at midnight on deserted streets, never cheating on exams, and as for girls – well, let alone accosting one on the street, I never even raised my voice around them for fear it might be misunderstood. I rushed to a phone booth and called my tenured pimp.
ZETA
Washington DC was 2,400 years younger than Istanbul, and although I thought that a population of 600,000 was rather insignificant for the capital of the great USA, I appreciated the symmetrical avenues laid out by letters and numbers. It reminded me of Ankara with its gloomy official buildings, unsmiling civil servants, and military officers roaming the streets in shifts. I was a university sophomore when I first saw the concrete-hued Potomac River, and I thought it added some color to the city. Spring was coming to an end and the humidity was terrible. I visited the museums, took the train back to New York, and put Washington on my list of cities not worth seeing twice.
This time I was surprised to notice so many brick buildings erected at strategic points, as if a nearby brick mine had nourished the city’s architecture here and there until it petered out. The Four Seasons Hotel’s suit of brick armor annoyed me too, but the luxurious interior was soothing and the staff spoke like they were crooning lullabies. My suite was on the second floor, with a view of the Rock Creek Park so calming that it put me to sleep. Maybe my settling into this hotel on Askaris’s recommendation was a plot to get me used to luxury?
Dumbarton Oaks was a private mansion before it became a research institute. Its brick walls looked as if they were waxed every month and in its well-tended gardens the birds sang carefully. Its major research areas were Byzantium a
nd pre-Columbian America. That these two fields were not in symbiosis was clear from the museum section, where the busts were challenging the masks and vice versa. To bolster the image of the library, which resembled a bomb shelter, it was emphasized that it accommodated 200,000 books and documents.
‘Two days at Dumbarton Oaks will complete my personal education,’ I told Askaris. ‘And then I’ll drop in on a few American friends and relatives. You won’t need to see me for ten days.’
‘Yes, Excellency,’ he said. As he diverted his eyes to the floor I knew he’d already drawn up the list of men he would put on my tail.
The summer lethargy at the library expanded my lack of energy. I wandered aimlessly through the stacks. I grabbed a heavy tome on the statesmanship of Manuel II, the model Palaeologus, and seated myself at a remote table. On one of the pages I flipped through was a photocopy of the conclusion of a Venice-Byzantium treaty. Manuel II’s signature on the document, dated 1406, filled up a whole line and spilled over – it contained more than fifty letters. I couldn’t help laughing. It was as though the large ornamental letters had righted a wrong. I took two history books from my bag, one in Turkish and the other in English. I was going to read the biography of Fatih, the executioner of Byzantium, here in the most important Byzantine library on the planet.
According to our school books Fatih was a leader of genius who opened and closed an era; a bibliophile and art lover; and a peerless sultan who would have conquered the rest of Europe had he not been poisoned by Western schismatics. His contemporaries in the West, on the other hand, knew him as a deceitful bisexual and ruthless enemy of Christianity and civilization, who was poisoned by his son Beyazit II.
He was a polyglot in command of eight languages. He was an aesthete who loved philosophy and the arts and who absorbed the classical literature of both East and West. My partiality for him, caused by his secret talent for poetry, became respect when I realized how he’d ruled the Empire like a chess master to improve and expand it. He drew lessons from the palace intrigues he’d witnessed as a boy. He placed spies in countries he was interested in, Byzantium above all. And he always based his actions on the intelligence he received from them. He was ruthless towards his family when pre-emptive action was needed, and towards even his favorite pashas when it was necessary to punish a lack of success. Historians who had difficulty accepting the Conquest of Constantinople exaggerated the number of soldiers in the Ottoman army by a factor of three, and disregarded the presence in his camp of the vizier, Halil Pasha, who was actually a Byzantine spy. Halil Pasha passed along tactical plans to the Byzantines and tried to demoralize the Ottomans by spreading rumors such as that a huge Hungarian army was about to engulf them from behind. At the proper time he was beheaded.
Fatih Sultan Mehmet benefited from both the right and wrong of Byzantium. He avoided the trap hidden in the Pope’s honeyed words: ‘Your mother was a Christian; so join us and rule the whole of Europe.’ Intelligent and philosophical, he was playful but haughty. His goal was to surpass what Alexander the Great had done in the East by seizing control of the West and holding onto his power.
He was forty-nine when he died, either from poison or from a kink in his intestines. Wasn’t Constantine XI also forty-nine at the time of his pseudo-martyrdom? It’s no surprise that history has missed this coincidence, since it prefers inventing to decoding. Askaris declared that my distant grandfather made the arrangements for Fatih to be poisoned at the age of forty-nine. I’m waiting for the moment when I’ll hear the story of this impossible-to-prove irony in detail. As the portrait of the mysterious sultan came to life in my mind, it dawned on me had Byzantium a leader of Fatih’s caliber at the time of the Fourth Crusade, Europe today would have a less checkered map and the globe a less irritating balance of power. But I’m sure Samuel Beckett would have scorned this view and said, ‘The gods enjoy chaos.’
Whenever I went to the library I ran into a certain South American historian. He had a body at the uppermost limit of dwarfism and a thin high-pitched voice. He was sure the history books would need rewriting when he finished his research on Theophilus II (829-842), the aesthete emperor. He took me for a British academic and I was too lethargic to correct him. He once asked who was my favorite Byzantine emperor. The name of Constantine XI popped out of my mouth at the last second instead of Fatih.
‘But why?’
‘Because he was my great-great-great grandfather,’ I said, and we both laughed merrily.
*
The University of Virginia is in Charlottesville, which was a three-hour drive from my hotel. To prevent Ed, the talkative driver of my rented limo, from disturbing me with any other royal statistics, I was prepared to read The Washington Post down to the most minute advertisement. I was looking for an adjective combining apathy and irritation to define my feelings towards history.
‘Charlottesville owes its population density to the presence of the university and its many rich retirees.’ Ed’s murmur of a sentence equipped me with the good news that we’d reached Charlottesville. The brick buildings scattered across the university campus looked like scattered flocks of sheep, and the Jeffersonian stone buildings among them like exhausted shepherds.
At the Information Center I was surprised by the officials’ lack of surprise at my interest in old student records and where they were kept. They directed me to the Alderman Library. Alderman Library was a five-story brick building that impressed me. The pillars in front seemed to be made of material left over from construction of the stone buildings and didn’t seem out of place. As I passed through the door I momentarily wondered what the School of Architecture must look like. Although it was still the summer holiday there was some kind of liveliness in the library and suddenly I missed my students, almost to the point of regretting that I was here.
What I wanted was quietly to trace my father by looking through his graduating class’s yearbook. These collections usually listed the home addresses of graduates at the back to make it easier for alumni organizations to contact them. I thought I might contact a family member and find out whether the handwriting sample was really his or not.
My father was born in 1944, so I asked the student in charge for the 1966 and 1967 yearbooks. When she brought them to me I realized that she was a Turkish Cypriot, but I was too preoccupied to say hello in Turkish.
When I saw the picture of my father in his mortarboard cap in the 1966 yearbook I collapsed into the first empty chair. Except for my mother and grandmother, anybody who saw this face – to which the photographer had managed to add the hint of a smile – and me would exclaim, ‘But this is a picture of you ten years ago!’ Paul Hackett had an innocent charm and could be considered handsome. I could not be considered handsome; though I had his facial features, probably they were positioned somewhat disproportionately.
There were no addresses at the back of the yearbook, but I discovered a mysterious clue next to my father’s picture. It was a forget-me-not aphorism from a Greek philosopher written in Latin by Randolph S. Fitzgerald IV. There could hardly be more than one person with that name. I consulted the Internet via my cell phone for information on Randolph IV. It seemed that after graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, this friend of my father’s, who had inscribed the esoteric good wishes, completed a doctoral degree at the same institution. He’d taken an editorial job at a small New York publishing house after retiring from teaching at a college I’d never heard of. I sent a note to his electronic address: I was Paul Hackett’s son, in Washington on private business, and I would like to meet him.
By the time I climbed aboard my limo for the trip back to my hotel, I’d corresponded with Randolph IV twice. He invited me for dinner at his home and added, ‘If you’re thinking of bringing wine, I prefer Margaux.’ I sent my counter-suggestion: ‘If my vegetarianism is a problem, I can drop by for coffee.’ I decided I liked this guy when he answered, ‘I’ll make the necessary changes in the menu but as punishmen
t you may bring two bottles of Margaux.’
At the Richmond turn-off Ed said, ‘Could a mystery-novel project possibly be the reason for your visit to Virginia?’
‘Is hatching conspiracy theories a regular feature of Washington DC limo-drivers?’
‘Well, it’s just that I remembered that Edgar Allan Poe was a student at the University of Virginia, sir.’
His remark about Poe brought to mind Selçuk Altun’s novel, Many and Many a Year Ago. Despite Eugenio’s recommendation, I’d never read the book, which took its title from the first line of Poe’s sentimental poem. Had it been Askaris, he would have said, ‘A prejudice passed through a sieve, Excellency, is the sign of nobility.’
*
I always liked New York twilights. Twilight is the hour when the city surrenders to time, and it’s unimaginable that there’s not a single poem to celebrate it. I was on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, bird-watching in Central Park, as I tried to think of a movie set in New York that did not include the Park. I somewhat enjoyed the quiet of the hotel. After two martinis at the bar I went out to Lexington Avenue, the city’s kaleidoscopic boulevard, but there was something sad about it. Still I kept walking until I realized that I was reciting Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ from the end to the beginning. I turned right on Park Avenue to find the wine shop recommended by the hotel. The salesperson, who looked like a nun, attached a holy significance to what she was selling. I endured her exaggerated sales pitch and chose two bottles of a certain label because they cost $150 each.
The worn-out taxi driver was from Bangladesh. I startled him with my ‘Selamün aleyküm’ and gave him the Morton Street address. In August the New York streets appear to be lying pleasantly fallow. When you go south the town looks like a chameleon that gets cuter as it gets smaller. Randolph IV’s penthouse had a plain appearance in harmony with the bohemian atmosphere of the street below. The newest book in his library could have been an Ernest Hemingway novel. I thought the ungraceful reproductions on the walls and the geometrically patterned prayer rugs on the floor might have a secret wish to exchange places.
