The Sultan of Byzantium

by Selcuk Altun

  I had breakfast early, then went the upper, Turkish, part of the island by way of the cool Sokratous Avenue. There were about 1500 Turks and thirty mosques still on the island. I strolled down the deserted cobblestone streets toward the coast. The low houses had gone unpainted since they were built and reminded me of dying Aegean mountain villages. I peeked through partially open curtains; the rooms were simply furnished. I eavesdropped on the gossip; it was the bookish Turkish of forty years ago. The best adjective for the attitude of the kids on the streets was ‘melancholic’. I was overwhelmed by it all with a brief but intense feeling of ironic guilt.

  Was I wandering through an open-air exhibition called ‘The Charm of the Ruined and the Tired’? I concluded that the aim of the broken, rusty, cracked, torn, run-down, sunken, hollowed-out artifacts was to provoke an accounting in the mind of the traveler. Perhaps it was the low walls that time had harmed the most – I thought the mission of the ivy army covering them was to pull them skyward so they wouldn’t fall down further.

  I tried to remember who the Byzantine emperor-in-exile was when the Ibrahim Pasha Mosque opened for prayer in 1530. The architect had definitely taken into consideration the dimensions of the island’s churches. An old man with a kindly face sat inside the grounds. He was probably waiting for the noon prayer in the place he hadn’t moved from since the morning prayer. We said hello as I was on the way out: I was afraid even a three-sentence conversation would create a bond and then I would be in for his life story.

  There were ‘about a thousand’ manuscripts at the Hafiz Ahmet Ağa Library – opened in 1793 – according to the library’s best estimate. The collection of the Ağa and his son, Rhodes natives who rose to eminent positions under Selim III, was displayed in primitive conditions and left to the ravages of time. I remembered that two Koran manuscripts stolen from here had been sold at auction in London. The library, with its simple courtyard and outbuildings, was like the mansion of an exiled pasha. On a cushion in the shade sat a sweet-faced old woman who could have been a hundred years old. I would have bet that her family had been caretakers of these buildings for generations. At that moment a ney solo gradually filled the courtyard. It turned monotonous in ten minutes, or I would have stayed longer. As I continued along the labyrinthine streets, the case of the stolen Korans preyed on my mind. The back of my neck itched.

  I felt a little relieved when I got a phone call from Theo, the restaurant owner. Over coffee the night before I’d asked him to find me an experienced English-speaking guide. I planned to put him on the trail of Askaris while I stayed in the background. I met Mikis for lunch at Theo’s; he was a retired English teacher in his fifties and spoke like a machine-gun when answering a question. He was relaxed and charming. When I told him I was reading Odysseus Elytis, he asked, ‘Are you really a Turk?’

  In keeping with the image of a harried businessman who had to snatch his tourist sorties from his work schedule, I accompanied Mikis to the Walls of the Knights. I wasn’t impressed by these fourteenth-century piles of stones. There was something about them that disturbed the harmony of the island. The Archaeology and Byzantine art museums – so-called – that we entered and exited were, in reality, little more than display rooms. The primitive quality of the icons and frescoes brought from Byzantine churches on the Aegean islands made me uncomfortable. The north coast of the island, where we drove in Mikis’s little car, was infested by ungainly hotels for middle-class tourists.

  By this time I was quite friendly with Mikis. That night, when the second bottle of wine was ready to be uncorked at Theo’s restaurant, I had a flash of inspiration. I showed him Askaris’s picture on my cell phone.

  ‘Last month,’ I said, ‘as I took a friend around Cappadocia I ran into this fellow here. He told me he came from Rhodes. I don’t remember his name now, but I was impressed by his knowledgeable and mysterious attitude. Would you happen to know him?’

  If my assumption was correct that Askaris was a native of Rhodes, then Mikis ought to know him. They were about the same age and Rhodes was a small place of 50,000 people. In fact, when I asked Theo to find me an experienced guide my real goal was to increase my chances in this regard. Mikis took my phone for five seconds and handed it back.

  ‘It’s probably twenty years since I last saw him, but this is Yannis the Raven. He was four years ahead of me in elementary school. His mother was Greek and his father Turkish. To his alcoholic father and the other Turks he was Melik. He left the island during high school and came back only once, for his mother’s funeral. Rumor had it that he was a professor, or a spy, or something like that. His father was a fisherman and died young in an accident at sea …’

  ‘Well, this bit of information has raised my curiosity even more. If you could arrange a meeting between me and somebody in Yannis’s family tomorrow, it would be worth the best tip of your life.’

  Grapefruit juice, melon, white cheese, and two pieces of bread dipped in red pepper and olive oil constituted my breakfast under the locust tree the next morning. Mikis showed up with a grin on his face just as I was getting bored with the panting of the mischievous wind. It seemed, according to Mikis, that a man named Raci Cemal, who lived in Koskinou village fifteen minutes away, was a cousin of Yannis’s father. We had an appointment to see the retired university teacher at five o’clock, after we came back from Lindos.

  Lindos was a district on the eastern coast whose natural beauty was erased and historical richness robbed. It was, besides, blighted by innumerable sightseeing buses. Added to this was the interminable desert heat. We left hurriedly, without staying for lunch. We reached Koskinou after stopping for breaks in all the summer-camp villages along the way. The houses of Koskinou, which was apparently in eternal siesta, perched on a hill as green as fresh almonds and seemed to prostrate on command. I didn’t see even a cat on the streets down which two people could hardly walk side by side. We came to a house with a garden at the end of a culde-sac. The elongated house in the midst of a grove of young olive trees looked like a caravan. Raci Cemal was probably in his seventies. His long white hair did not suit his rotund physique. He’d probably worn the same faded clothes for the last ten years. The house smelled of soap and was plain but tidy. He invited us into his study, where I was thrilled by the enormous library of scholarly and classical books. Raci Bey lived with his sister. She was a hunch-backed old woman – possibly owing to intra-family marriage – who tired me with her endless questions and offerings of food.

  Raci Cemal had taken a PhD in sociology at the University of Minnesota and, until he retired, taught at rural universities. He confided that he never married because his dead mother had entrusted his sister to him; I hoped he would not refrain from giving information about his cousin Yannis. He’d started a novel five years earlier and planned to finish it in another five years. The title was I Did Not Create a Character Able to Write a Novel Because He Won the Lottery; I’m Writing This Novel Because I Won the Lottery. I told him the title alone was a poem. His sister, Rana Hanim, presented me with a white handkerchief she herself had embroidered with lace, and went out to visit her neighbor. She didn’t fail to promise to call when she came to Istanbul. I immersed myself in Turkish conversation with our host, while Mikis pulled out a book of aphorisms in English. The more he giggled as he read, the more Raci Bey scowled. It was a standoff. Finally I managed to bring up the topic of Askaris – I’d met him in Cappadocia, he impressed me with his personality, I believed he lived on Rhodes, etc. I traveled to London often and therefore if I might get his address, that is if he had one, just in case, you never know after all, anyway I would be grateful.

  When Raci replied that he hadn’t seen his cousin since he’d come for his mother’s funeral, I showed him the photo on my phone. He mumbled to himself and tugged his forelock. But it was against the rules of Turkish hospitality not to tell what he knew.

  ‘My Uncle Arif,’ he began, ‘was a cavalier womanizer. He got the Greek spinster Tina pregnant and had to marry h
er. Tina was so ugly that there were jokes about her like, “She must have come out of the Byzantine palace.” Two years after she had Melik, she and Arif split up. Melik stayed with his mother. Turco-Greek relations were more civilized on Rhodes than on the other islands, but still the Greeks saw him as a Turk and the Turks saw him as a Greek. I was his closest relative on his father’s side. He wanted to run away from the island the first chance he got. He was hard working and ambitious and an introvert who read history books all the time. He lived with his mother and his blind aunt. They lived on money sent by his mother’s brother, whom nobody ever saw. He went to live with this uncle when he started high school, and didn’t come to his blind aunt’s funeral. He did come back to the island for his mother’s funeral, but that was twenty years ago. I was there. He was proud and withdrawn and cold to me. I wanted nothing to do with him beyond offering my condolences. He dropped English words into his sentences now and then, and his pronunciation made me believe he was living in England. I heard that he gave various answers to people who risked asking what he was doing nowadays. He’d developed a rude and shifty personality. I erased him from my books …’

  ‘Raci, Yannis once told me his last name, but I don’t recall it precisely. Was it Askaris?’

  ‘You’re very close. Laskaris.’

  This was the name, unfortunately, that I’d come to Rhodes to hear. John IV Laskaris was the last emperor in the dynasty of Byzantine emperors exiled to Nicaea. He assumed the throne at the age of seven when his father, Theodore II Laskaris, died young of asthma. Michael, the founder of the Palaeologus dynasty, forcibly established himself as the young emperor’s regent, then sent him off to a castle in Gebze, where he had the eleven-year-old boy’s sight extinguished. I knew the story of the little emperor line by line. Michael’s ruthlessness, in contrast to the tolerance John’s grandfather had shown Michael, had always been an embarrassment to me.

  What Michael did to the young emperor was not forgiven by the Byzantine people either. According to Russian sources, John Laskaris accepted his destiny, living like a saint and dying in exile. In The Imperial Twilight, which I accepted as the most inclusive book on the Palaeologi, the method of blinding the child emperor was described as the most ‘humane’ one: John IV’s pupils were made to focus on the sun until darkness descended. However, the dissenting modern historian Michael Geanakoplos maintained that Laskaris in his adult years began to see again and fled to Sicily.

  The business reminded me of the case of Cem Sultan. The kings of Europe, fearing the Ottomans, kept Cem as an involuntary ‘house guest’ as a precaution against his older brother, Sultan Beyazit. Similarly, the king of Sicily might have kept John IV under his thumb for a long time as a ploy against the Byzantine emperor, with whom he had frequent skirmishes. I expanded my hypothesis: John IV Laskaris was never able to regain his throne, perhaps, but he managed to marry and produce progeny, thus continuing the bloodline. And now the one wish of – probably – the last member of the family, who was also John’s namesake, was to exterminate me and recapture the throne stolen from his many times great-grandfather. Nomo, who’d only just noticed this enterprise, was warning me without intervening. They too were helpless in the face of the ‘divine justice’ principle that was the cornerstone and dead-end of the Byzantine Empire. John Laskaris could help the Empire by eliminating me; therefore he should not be stopped. This kind of fatalism was a black hole involuntarily bequeathed to Byzantium by Justinian. Because Nomo would remain neutral, the last John Laskaris could not learn that I had unmasked him. It was an advantage I needed in order to neutralize him. I had to prepare for the worst-case scenario. But more than anything else, I wondered what long list of evils this ruthless avenger, who was more Byzantine than I was, had visited on my family.

  CHI

  Those residents under no obligation to stay in town in June had already departed for warmer places of the northern hemisphere. Even the summer wardrobes of those who stayed behind possessed the touch of a secret designer; I wondered about their beachwear. It was almost a joke not to hear laughter or loud talk on the streets of the most liberated town in the world. It was also strange to have no major structural flaws in the daily flow of life. Back in Stockholm I once more concluded that, if Stockholm was heaven, then my citizens who enjoyed Istanbul’s traffic jams would consider heaven a boring place.

  I stayed in Stockholm for three days this time. Mistral had a crowded daytime schedule and Nedim had left for Kulu with his family. Mistral’s neighbor, Lennart Espmark, a retired librarian, took me to the off-tourist tracks of the town as if he were repaying an old debt. I was too tired to tell him that I owned the books of the Swedish poets Lennart Sjogren and Kjell Espmark. He had a time-share house in Marmaris, where he went with his wife during August, and he couldn’t decide whether Turkish hospitality was a blessing or a curse laid on the Turks. He believed that the hillsides of the city, in which I could discern no disharmony of color or sound, held a special charm, and he wanted me to squeeze my impressions of the place into one sentence before we took leave of one another.

  Mistral was happy with the way I enjoyed the town and her friends, but she noticed my moments of distraction when I was trying to figure out how my match with John Laskaris would conclude. ‘Hey gunslinger,’ she said, ‘are you playing chess with yourself?’ I thought I would be stepping into a trap of my own devising if I asked why she called me ‘gunslinger’. She had to be satisfied with my excuse that the deadline for my research reports was stressing me out. I wanted to make myself believe that I was a character in a novel who gave up his throne to marry his beloved.

  Lennart and his wife were not at home when I knocked on their door to say good-bye. In the IKEA sack I hung on the doorknob was a bottle of cognac and an envelope. In the envelope was my one-sentence impression: ‘When Noah’s Ark comes back, Stockholm, you won’t be able to decide if you’re a port or a passenger!’

  *

  I wasn’t lying when I told Iskender that I wanted to scare somebody and that’s why I wanted to borrow his 7.65 automatic pistol. I was going to threaten John Laskaris and make him take me to his boss. If he refused, I would confiscate his cellphones and wait for that boss to call him. Since I hadn’t risen to the status of the Elect, my only contact with Nomo was through my sworn enemy – a twist worthy of a detective novel. On the evening of June 22 I called Laskaris, who was in Istanbul awaiting me, and told him to meet me in the quarters beneath the Tekfur Palace. In my briefcase I had a length of rope, a pair of scissors and strong tape. My knees were knocking despite the two double cognacs I tossed back. My trembling stopped as I shook Laskaris’s hand for the last time, but a headache sprang up in its place. I sensed symptoms of irritation in this creature, who, with his bulging eyes and beak of a nose, deserved his moniker, ‘The Raven’. He looked like an employee trying to resign before he could be fired. I sat in the armchair at the head of the table, took out my gun, and said, ‘Come and sit next to me and start talking. Tell me everything about the crooked plot you’ve cooked up, your majesty, my dear John Laskaris.’

  Leaving an empty chair between us, he sat down with an impudent smile on his face. I was about to open my mouth again when I felt the cold steel touch of a revolver at the back of my neck. Laskaris laughed. He’d probably been waiting for this moment for fifty years. He laughed until tears ran down his face. Finally he wound down somewhat and stopped to rest, still gasping.

  ‘Aren’t you going to turn around and say hello to your prospective executioner, my dear helpless great-great-great grandson of the ungrateful traitor Michael?’

  ‘Before you turn around, put what’s in your hand on the table,’ said a deep voice behind me, and my blood froze.

  That voice belonged to Iskender. I turned in wonder to see his real face. The person I called ‘Big Brother’ for twenty years and treated as my confidant had not a trace of shame on his face. Instead, he was biting his lip to keep from laughing.

  ‘May God send you to hell
, you thing without a shred of honor,’ I said, and spat in his face. I turned to Laskaris.

  ‘Before you start your own journey to hell, false emperor,’ he said, ‘you’re going to hear more than you wanted to hear.

  ‘After he escaped to Sicily my great-great-great grandfather John IV, the last emperor of the Laskaris dynasty, waited in vain to be restored to the Byzantine throne. The necessary conditions did not occur, however, and he died while still in exile, married to a noble Sicilian woman and the father of a son.

  ‘Official Byzantine historians, who concocted the story that Constantine XI died fighting on the walls, also set down, on orders, that John IV died in exile in Gebze. This way, the possibility of a Laskaris ever obtaining the throne again was totally erased.

  ‘My modern-day grandfather, my maternal Uncle John, and I all worked for Nomo in disguise. We were looking for tangible proof of our rights. I studied history at Cambridge with my uncle’s approval. He had the respect of Nomo, and after university I went to work for him. My Uncle John died of heart failure when he was on the verge of retirement.

  ‘I’ve been with Nomo for forty years. For six years my mission was to handle communications between your grandfather and the organization. Byzantium possessed the finest historical documents of its time. While looking for the proof I needed, I also worked to prevent a competent Palaeologus from coming to power. This part of my mission wasn’t much trouble – your grandfather was an honest man, but not good for much. A dreamer, a hedonist, a parasite. He survived all those “bankruptcies” of the businesses he sank only thanks to Nomo’s salvage efforts. In his sixties, he was persuaded to give up business and move to Galata. Several properties were bought for him so that he could lead a comfortable life in Istanbul.