A Dead Man in Istanbul

by Michael Pearce

  People were beginning to go in. At the big fountain and the taps in the courtyard men were rolling up their trousers and washing their feet before praying.

  Felicity touched him on the shoulder and pointed up at the minarets.

  ‘Count them; there are six. That’s unusual. There are normally only two or four but the Sultans wanted this to be special. But then it was pointed out that the shrine of the Ka’aba in Mecca had only six and that to have six here was presumptuous. The Sultan had to pay for another one to be added in Mecca.’

  There was still some time to go before prayers actually started so they went in, leaving their shoes with the doorkeeper and slipping their feet into big leather slippers provided for the use of infidels.

  There were no pews or benches. One prayed on the ground, on the magnificent carpets spread over rush matting. They seemed to stretch away for acres. Men were already coming in and finding their spots. As they did so they bowed to the ground. Over to the left, in a separate enclosure, were the women, bowed black humps.

  Felicity pointed to the great dome above covered with the blue tiles that gave the mosque its familiar name. In the darkness they gave off a luminous blue glow.

  ‘Some people don’t like them,’ whispered Felicity, ‘but if you keep looking at them they sort of grow on you.’

  Seymour kept looking. After a while the blue glow seemed all around him. So, too, unfortunately, despite the washing, was the smell of feet.

  An elderly man came up and tapped Felicity angrily on the arm. He gestured towards the women’s enclosure. Felicity half made to go there but then changed her mind and left the mosque.

  ‘They don’t usually mind,’ she said, when they got outside, ‘not if you’ve got your head and face covered. That man must be one of the more conservative ones.’

  They went back afterwards to Felicity’s apartment. She boarded in a pension on the lower slopes of Pera Hill, between the Pera and the Grande Rue. It was a district through which Seymour had passed regularly on his descents from the Embassy and he had never given it much attention, beyond noting that it was a poor part of town, with low, wooden houses, narrow cobbled streets full of refuse and dogs, and full, too, of children. He had not expected to find a place in it like the pension.

  It was set back off the road in a small, quaint, old-fashioned courtyard, with a surprisingly ornate fountain set in a kind of little house, all intricate stonework, and with a low wall round it, on which, said Felicity, people rested their buckets. All the houses round the courtyard had balconies and vines grew over them and hung thickly to the ground. On one of them a woman was standing, a Greek woman, dressed in black but with her face free, looking out over the courtyard sombrely like some Medea.

  She waved to Felicity and Felicity waved back.

  ‘Madame Tsakatellis,’ she said. ‘She looks after me like a mother. A Greek mother, rather strict. But, somehow, out here I don’t mind that.’

  Felicity had an apartment on the first floor which gave on to one of the balconies and later in the evening Seymour went out on to it and looked down into the courtyard. The moon had come out and in the courtyard it was as bright as day. The fountain seemed almost silvery.

  As he looked at it, something moved behind it. It didn’t move again and Seymour was puzzled. He stepped back into the shadow so that he would not be seen, and after a while there was a movement again behind the fountain. A figure came out from behind it and stood for a moment. Then it moved away.

  Seymour went back into the room. He didn’t know whether to speak of it to Felicity; however he did.

  Felicity was matter-of-fact.

  ‘Probably a man having a pee,’ she said.

  However, she promised she would speak of it to Madame Tsakatellis.

  ‘It’s the balcony,’ he said. ‘I’m a policeman and policeman notice such things. If someone wanted to, they could get in.’

  ‘I’ve been here for over two years,’ said Felicity, ‘and I’ve always felt safe. And I like the balcony.’’

  Yes, I know, but –’

  He was going to say that Cunningham and Lalagé Kassim had probably felt safe, too, but stopped himself.

  ‘Things might be changing.’ he said.

  ‘And in any case I’ve got a gun,’ said Felicity. ‘Peter gave it me.’

  She fetched it and showed it to him. It was a small revolver.

  ‘Did he show you how to use it, too?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Besides, we Singleton-Mainwarings are used to guns. We handle them from the cradle. Usually shotguns, of course.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, all right.’

  He went out on to the balcony again and looked down. The courtyard was empty and still.

  Felicity came out and stood beside him.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘that things are changing. At least, Peter thought so. I think that, maybe, is why he gave me the gun. He said that the Ottomans were coming to an end, and that might be a good thing because a lot of things needed to be done. The trouble was that when change started to happen, it might not be possible to control it. It would probably crack, he said, along old faults. The old tensions would come again, Greeks versus Turks. Turks versus everybody.

  ‘He said that to Madame Tsakatellis, too. I heard them talking one day. “You think you’re safe,” he said, “just because you’ve been here for a long time. But a lot of things are buried in Istanbul and one day the graves will open.

  ‘“You never get rid of the past. No war ever ends, and the Greeks will always be fighting the Turks and the Christians will always be launching Crusades. Those who know no history are doomed to repeat it.”

  ‘Well, I was quite impressed. I’d never heard him talk like that before. So seriously. But, of course, you could never trust Peter. The next moment he looked at me and winked.

  ‘“Mind you,” he said, “it can work the other way, too. If you know history, you can use it. That’s why I’m swimming the Dardanelles.”’

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning, early, Felicity took him to Abydos, or Abidé, as Mohammed, the porter, had called it, the town from which Leander had allegedly set out to swim the Straits to Hero on the other side. Only it wasn’t a town now but just some mounds and ruins, in which a donkey was grazing, pulling at the weeds growing in the broken walls. Its owner was hoeing a patch between the mounds and he told them that the nearest village, the one from which the small boys had come to vex Mohammed, was further inland, about a couple of miles away but nearer the beach where Cunningham had landed.

  As they drew nearer to it, the stony ground became stony fields, recognizable not by their green or by things growing but by the neatly hoed patches where things might grow. Beyond the fields they could see the houses. They were built out of stone but plastered with mud and had flat roofs on which there were piles of brushwood and onions drying in the sun. Dogs were lying in the shade of the walls, their tongues lolling out.

  In the middle of the village there was a well, around which some women were chatting, while one of them lowered a bucket. Further along the street was a café, where men were playing backgammon on marble-topped tables.

  It was then that Felicity had an idea.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘don’t you leave it to me?’

  As soon as she had said it, Seymour knew that she was right. Woman could talk to woman about woman; man couldn’t.

  ‘You go to the café,’ she said.

  The men looked up as he arrived; not just a stranger but a foreign stranger. They were engrossed in their games, however, and, after a cursory glance, returned to their play. He chose a table and sat down.

  The front of the café was open to the street and the ground before it was littered with melon-rinds dotted with black flies. The flies were inside the café too, covering the tables. The men disregarded them. At first Seymour was troubled by their constant irritation but gradually, as he settled, they settled, too, and both flies and Seymour became somnolent in the overbeari
ng heat.

  The owner of the café brought him tea and a carafe of water. Seymour had asked Felicity about the water but she said that the water in Turkish villages was usually all right.

  He could see Felicity now, talking to the women around the well. After a while, she went away with two of them.

  A man came into the café and stood at the counter talking to the owner. Seymour suddenly realized that he knew him. It was the kaimakam, Mr – what was it Mukhtar had called him? – Evliya.

  The kaimakam recognized him at the same moment and came across to his table.

  ‘Why, Effendi,’ he said, ‘what brings you here?’

  ‘Just looking around,’ said Seymour, ‘and hoping to talk to some small boys.’

  The kaimakam laughed.

  ‘The terjiman has already done that,’ he said.

  ‘So he told me.’

  ‘Was there anything you particularly wanted to know?’

  He spoke quite good English. Although when Seymour and Ponsonby had gone to the mutaserrif’s house in Gelibolu, the talking had been left to Mukhtar, Seymour had been right in assuming that the kaimakam and the mutaserrif spoke English more than they had revealed.

  ‘I’d like to hear their account of what happened that night.’

  ‘Easy!’

  The kaimakam snapped his fingers and a boy appeared. Evliya said something to him and he went off. Shortly after he returned with two other small boys.

  Seymour had to put his questions through someone else, which was always unsatisfactory. He was beginning, though, to be able to follow conversation a little, and the clearness of the boys’ voices made it easier.

  They had been playing and they had heard the shot. They had heard shots before – the soldiers sometimes exercised nearby – and had wondered what this was. When they had got to the top of the cliff they had seen the man lying. The water was all red. One sanguinary touch led to another and other details followed which owed more to imagination than observation. The kaimakam grimaced and spoke to them sternly. They merely gazed at him round-eyed and innocent.

  ‘Was there anything else you wanted to know?’ asked the kaimakam, perspiring.

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour. ‘There was mention of a woman.’

  ‘A woman?’ said the kaimakam, puzzled.

  ‘So Mukhtar said.’

  The kaimakam questioned the boys. He seemed dis-satisfied with their replies for he questioned them again, disbelievingly. They appeared to be standing by their story. Eventually the kaimakam turned to Seymour.

  Yes, he said, they claimed that they had seen a woman. After the shooting, some way back on the rocks.

  ‘But these are naughty boys, Effendi. They said – Effendi, I tell you only what they said – they said that she was taking her clothes off.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘That is what they say. I have told them that they are shameless.’

  ‘Sorry, why would she be taking her clothes off?’

  ‘Effendi, I cannot believe that what they say is true. And it is a shameless thing to say. Or even to think. I shall speak to their fathers.’

  ‘She took her clothes off? But then she would have been –’

  ‘Exactly, Effendi!’

  ‘But –’

  ‘It cannot be true, Effendi. No woman in the village would be so shameless.’

  ‘But then – what did she do next?’

  ‘She went behind some rocks and they lost sight of her. They ran, but by the time they had got to a suitable position to see, she was no longer there.’

  One of the boys said something. The kaimakam clipped his ear.

  ‘Effendi, he says that they thought that perhaps there was a man behind the rocks and that she had gone to see him –’

  There was a roar of shock and protest from the puritanical backgammon players. The kaimakam tried to clip ears again but the boys scuttled and ran off behind the houses.

  ‘I am sorry, Effendi, I would not have wished you to hear such things! The young, these days, are shameless.’

  Mortified at this exposure of the state of the nation, the kaimakam waved to the patron, who brought them some more tea. The tea, milkless, which was the way Seymour preferred it, and was probably safer anyway in Turkey, was amber in its tall glass. In front of the café the sunlight wobbled slightly in the intense heat. From the marble tables inside came the constant click of backgammon counters. The sweat ran down Seymour’s bare forearms and gathered beneath his wrists in little pools which evaporated almost as soon as they were formed.

  Seymour, as one policeman to another, asked the kaimakam about his work. It was, said the kaimakam, pretty peaceful here. There were boys and dogs to chase and the occasional case of a drunkard to extricate and pilot home but rarely anything more serious; and then it was usually the terjiman who handled it.

  Seymour said that he seemed fortunate in his terjiman, and the kaimakam agreed. Mukhtar was a pleasant fellow and chased you around only when it was necessary. Not only that, he did most of the work himself, which was not the usual way with terjimans. But then, Mukhtar was not the usual sort of terjiman.

  ‘Bright,’ said the kaimakam, tapping his head significantly. ‘Very bright.’

  And what he was doing in a vilayet like Gelibolu, the kaimakam could not understand. He had come only six months ago and had at once busied himself with the general organization of the place, going into things that no previous terjiman had ever done. And the kaimakam had to admit that he had not just looked at them, he had done something about them, and usually for the better. Mukhtar was one of those modernizers. The kaimakam did not always hold with people like that, they were more trouble than they were worth. Besides, Gelibolu was hardly the place where change was needed. Let sleeping dogs lie, was the way he looked at it; and, reflected Seymour, glancing up the street there were plenty of sleeping dogs around.

  No, Mukhtar was out of place in a vilayet like this one, and the kaimakam didn’t expect him to stay long. He hadn’t been at all surprised when the vali had sent him over to Istanbul to do whatever it was that he was doing there. Mukhtar was an Istanbul sort of man, and, with his contacts with the army, there was, no doubt, a great future ahead of him.

  At the end of the street Seymour saw Felicity. He finished his glass, thanked the kaimakam politely, and said that he must be going. It had been of great interest to him to hear about how colleagues in another country did things and he was most grateful to the kaimakam for his help.

  He joined Felicity and they walked back to the beach where she had moored her boat, and Felicity told how she had got on.

  One of the women that Felicity had gone off with had been the wife of the local mudir, the village headman. She had taken her to her home and offered her, as people usually did in Turkey, said Felicity, tea and cakes. The house had been rather a good one and she had been interested to see inside. It was bigger than most of the ones in the village and, like most big houses of the well-to-do, had been divided into two parts, the salaamlik, where visitors were received, and the haremlik, where the women lived. Felicity had thought she might be taken into the salaamlik, as a superior visitor, despite being a woman, and had been pleased that she had been shown into the more intimate haremlik.

  There had been several small children there and that had given her the opportunity to ask about bigger ones and lead on to the boys who had gone to the boatman’s aid. The mudir’s own son had, in fact, been one of them and he had come back and told the family all about it, in great and gory detail. The wife had been sorry for the dead man, in a country far from his own and from his own family. Who was there here to carry out the rites? She had spoken about this to her husband, but he had said that the man no doubt had friends in the big city, and was probably a Christian, anyway, and that all that was best left to the mutaserrif and none of her business. All the same, she had felt sad, especially when she had seen the body on the donkey, for the kaimakam had called on her husband to provide the donkey.

&nb
sp; The terjiman had brought the donkey back the next day, which was good of him and not the sort of thing that terjimans normally did. This terjiman, though, was very polite and had asked after her children. Her husband had said, though, that the terjiman was not to be trusted, for he had refused the palm-oil when the mudir had gone to him about the road.

  Palm-oil? Road?

  It was customary, said Felicity, to pay the terjiman some palm-oil if you wanted something done. The terjiman would then bide his time and seize the right moment to approach the mutaserrif or vali. That was how things were done in the Ottoman Empire, by intercession and favour, and for favour something had to be paid. But this terjiman had refused to be paid! So the mudir had known there was something wrong with him.

  Road?

  Roads were pretty important in Turkey and roads, like favours, had to be paid for. And who paid for them? The villagers, said Felicity, and on a per-head basis, so that everyone paid equally and a disproportionate burden fell on the poorest. Not surprisingly, the ‘yol parrasi’, the levy for the upkeep and building of roads, was extremely unpopular, particularly as, said Felicity, much of it was, in local phraseology, ‘eaten’, that is, it was believed to go into the pocket of some official rather than being applied for its proper purpose.

  And now here was another thing: the vali had proposed to build a new road just inland from the village. The mudir had, in time-honoured way, sought to have the road diverted so that the village would not have to pay for it, and had offered good palm-oil for that purpose.

  But the terjiman had turned it down! Not only that; he had said that the road could not be diverted, that it was necessary for some new works the Government was planning, and that it had to be exactly where the planners had put it.

  There had been much muttering among the villagers. Indeed, men had said the road would be built over their dead bodies, and had told the terjiman so. ‘So be it,’ the terjiman had said, in an unpleasantly steely way, and the mutters had subsided. He had explained that the road was for the benefit of all and would lead, among other things, to greater prosperity for the village. ‘We’ll believe that when we see it,’ the mudir had said to his wife.