The Sultan of Byzantium

by Selcuk Altun

  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 i
nto 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.’

  XI

  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.

  If Karacaoğlan were in my place he would say something like, ‘We had nobility when we set out / But we lost it on the way.’ I had to smile. I decided to drop in on Elsa in Venice. I hoped that she would say, ‘So are you an unmitigated blockhead, or what?’ when she heard what had happened to me. It wasn’t enough to change my mind when I learned that she’d taken off for Melbourne to celebrate her father’s seventieth birthday; I determined to fly to Venice anyway the next day, via Rome. I’d already made reservations for five days at a hotel with a long name.

  After breakfast I went to the Stockholm municipal aquarium to rest and watch the big fish peek out and sneer at mankind. And I wanted to have a look at those buildings stacked up like barricades on either side of Gamla Stan, which refused to abandon the Middle Ages, before going home. I made a move to chase some accordion tunes wafting through the deserted street, wondering who was the musician. But I turned tail and went straight back to my hotel when a platoon of aged tourists walking like wound-up toys hove onto the scene.

  Feeling a great sleep coming on, I focused on Freya Stark’s Anatolia-loving historical travel book. That night I brought in two immigrant prostitutes to give me a massage. In the morning I set out for the airport without calling Nedim from Kulu.

  *

  I found the Westin Hotel Europa and Regina an appropriate name for a hotel that was born with difficulty out of the merger of two private palaces. I didn’t smile when the receptionist, a friend of Turkey, said, ‘We saved the best room for you.’ Suite 106 overlooking the Grand Canal had a noble ambiance. I remembered the aphorisms I’d written in honor of Venice during my student days when I was trading winks with my neighbor across the way, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute. I’d never shown them to anyone, even Elsa.

  If you say, ‘Venice is the earthly corner closest to heaven,’ you may be doing it an injustice. Are you sure that heaven has mystery?

  Do you wonder why the protective water encircling Venice evokes glass? If so, it means you didn’t notice that the city is inside a glass jar.

  Every year 14 million tourists pour into Venice. Only five out of a thousand visit the Museo Correr and its original art works. The other 99.5 percent beleaguer the city with pollution of sight and sound. The city may be paying for its past sins.

  Will you go out at night to explore the streets of Venice? Can you slip between the fog and the echoes with the agility of a gondola?

  Venetians never take off their masks. They laugh secretly at the tourists who think they wear them only at carnival.

  I spent a while thinking that the best thing to come out of the mess Nomo had made of my life was meeting Mistral. The next morning I set out on a tour to renew memories and strengthen old ties with Venice. What immediately struck me was how I had gradually become an advocate of Byzantium. In the architecture of palaces and other landmark buildings on the water the Byzantine influence was obvious. I tried to visualize similar buildings on the shoreline between Sarayburnu and the Golden Horn. They had nearly all been destroyed – with Venetian support – by the hooligans of the Fourth Crusade. My feet took me to the Church of San Marco, the garish copy of Haghia Sophia. At the top they’d put the Quadriga, the Four Horses sculpture stolen from the Hippodrome at Constantinople. I went up close. A plate beneath read, ‘Brought from the Conquest of Constantinople.’ In fact the Venetians worked hard at their plunder, stealing whatever was light in weight and heavy in value. I had an odd feeling, here before the most famous horses in the world. It was like running into some of one’s own people now forced to work in an international circus. Their innocent looks hurt my heart. They seemed to know who I was, and expected me to take them home. I wondered what punishment Constantine XI had thought fit to mete out to the Venetians in return.

  The last charismatic European emperor, Napoleon, deemed the San Marco Piazza the most beautiful living room in Europe. There I visited the Museo Correr. The Marciana Library enjoyed the glories of both a palace and a temple and boasted ceilings as ornate as a church’s. The bibliophile and collector Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1477) donated to the Marciana all the manuscripts and rare books he’d acquired from the Byzantine scholars and artists who scattered across Europe after the Conquest of Constantinople. Basilios Bessarion was a monk from Trabzon whom the Emperor Joannes VIII appointed metropolitan of Nicaea when he was having trouble convincing the Orthodox community to join the Catholics. Basilios took refuge in the Vatican and there was raised to cardinal-hood. But I couldn’t bear looking very long at those Byzantine documents collected by that apostate bibliophile. What went through my mind was that I’d paid good money to admire the jewellery stolen from my house and now on display in the thief’s window. I withdrew into a dim room full of antique globes of the world. I watched the guard dozing on his chair, swaying like a potential soothsayer who hasn’t filled his quotient of propheti
c dreams. I circumambulated the spheres until closing time and found my favorite cities hiding in time tunnels. My judgment of Venice: you were the most advanced city-state in the world, but instead of becoming a far-seeing diplomat you devolved into a pocket-picking shyster.

  *

  The waiters at Harry’s Bar played a considerable part in its status as the most expensive bar-restaurant in town. Besides remembering my favorite salad dressing, they were skilful humorists. This time, however, they did no more than greet me. After dinner I went to my room and watched the emptying-out of vaporettos at the stop on the opposite shore. I descended to the dim bar in the lobby. I wondered how many times the pianist had exhausted his routine stock of commercial songs. I intended to read Attilio Bertolucci’s Viaggio d’Inverno with a dry martini for an escort. The barmaid wore a tag on her breast that said ‘Intern’ and dropped my drink while handing it to me. I said, ‘It’s all my fault’ to the bartender who came running to see what the crash was about, and the intern looked at me with pity. I will never solve the riddle of women. I was draining my third drink when Eugenio called on my cell phone. Believing I was in London, he asked me to bring his favorite tea, which could only be found at Fortnum and Mason.

  ‘But I don’t think I’ll be back for three or four weeks.’

  ‘Then you can bring three or four packages.’

  The sarcastic exchange raised my spirits. I saw an attractive middle-aged woman approaching. ‘When I hear a sentence in Turkish, I greet the owner,’ she said, and I invited her to sit down.

  Wendy Sade had been a teacher at Üsküdar American Girls’ School twenty years ago. She was in Venice chaperoning her cellist daughter, here to play a concert with the rest of her string quartet. I couldn’t sort out what Wendy of Boston really did other than work as a freelance translator.