Petrified

by Barbara Nadel

  But then if that were so, why weren’t more people disordered and deranged? Why wasn’t he? After all, as an Ottoman he was as much a member of a minority group as the Jew Melih Akdeniz? No, one could only take difference so far – after that it was all down to personal agency, and to what fate threw out towards you.

  The gypsy, who was swathed from head to foot in metres of almost transparent gold and purple chiffon, watched him through a filter of the smoke from her cigar. She was standing in front of the gateway to the artist’s garden, the one through which İkmen and Suleyman had run in order to get to the dead Akdeniz and the luminescent bodies of his children. She appeared to be waiting for someone, although quite who that might be in what was an entirely deserted street he couldn’t imagine. It certainly wasn’t him. Women, however lovely, were not on his agenda at the present time. He still had to make another appointment for tests with Krikor Sarkissian and the problem remained about how and when he was going to tell Zelfa about Masha and what he had done with her. How stupid it all seemed now, stupid and weak and ultimately destructive too. Masha was dead, killed almost certainly by the man who was now possibly planning to exert his malignant influence over the city as never before, Valery Rostov. Suleyman himself could have hepatitis, be HIV positive – almost anything. And then there was still the issue about who had told Rostov about his private life. Someone, so Metin İskender felt, in the department, someone close and well hidden from view . . .

  Now, metaphorically, out of his box, Rostov would have to be dealt with. Maybe when those tests on the body of ‘Tatiana’ came through? But then maybe not. Suleyman brushed some of the sweat that had gathered on his forehead away from his eyes and then lit a cigarette. If Rostov could buy people in the department then he could buy other people at the Forensic Institute too. But then did that particular aspect of the case matter anyway? Some very bad gangsters were currently awaiting trial for the possession of guns and drugs. People like Vronsky were known killers. That he was out of circulation had to be good. And yet the thought that possibly he, Suleyman, and his colleagues had actually helped Rostov to gain more power still rankled. Rostov was, and would remain, unfinished business, until, that is, Suleyman himself chose to deal with him. That would, he knew, have to come one fine day. And in his heart of hearts, Suleyman knew that his revenge could and would take only one form.

  As he watched the gypsy turn to smile at a young man who was now huffing and puffing his way up the hill, Mehmet Suleyman wondered how long it might take him to plan and execute Rostov’s death without pointing the finger of suspicion at himself. The perfect crime was, of course, a largely illusory concept but then people like Rostov got away with murder all the time . . .

  The young man, on seeing first the gypsy and then Suleyman, reddened. This was, the latter reasoned, his cue to leave Balat and go and have a serious and difficult conversation with his wife. He did not, after all, have any interest in embarrassing the young man. By her sensual demeanour and her provocative clothes, the gypsy was obviously signalling that her appearance on the young man’s route home was no accident. It was also quite apparent that she hadn’t intercepted him in order to just offer him conversation and tea. And indeed, as he turned away from the couple to make his way back down to the shores of the Golden Horn, he heard the moist sound of their kissing.

  So young Hikmet Yıldız was being seduced by a gypsy. Suleyman smiled. That was good. She was beautiful, the boy was young and it was a hot, sultry afternoon. The sex could go on for hours. Maybe one day he and his wife would do such things again. But then if they didn’t there was always his hatred to get him through the sticky ennui-filled summer afternoons to come. One is never, he thought, alone with thoughts of death . . .

  Because he knew that his daughter Hulya and her boyfriend, Berekiah, would still be at his apartment with his grieving wife, İkmen took the opportunity to go and see Berekiah’s father. And although he knew that Balthazar Cohen wouldn’t be alone, he was also aware of the fact that his old colleague’s wife, Estelle, was essentially on his side. It was she who let him into the apartment and who disappeared quickly once she had settled her guest, who hadn’t actually spoken to her husband for some months, opposite what remained of Balthazar.

  Although the great earthquake of 1999 had only robbed Balthazar of his legs from the knees downwards, his body as a whole had shrunk considerably since that time. Lack of exercise, as well as a disregard for food and strong addictions to both painkillers and tobacco had rendered him small, bitter and ill. However, İkmen knew from Berekiah that there was at least the possibility for change on the horizon because Balthazar had, apparently, agreed to try prosthetic limbs. Not that he had come to speak about such limbs now, although he did use this topic in order to open up conversation with this man who had flatly refused to speak to him for some months.

  ‘I’m told they’ll hurt,’ he said in answer to İkmen’s question about the limbs, ‘but then—’

  ‘You’re a strong man,’ İkmen put in, ‘you’re tough.’

  Cohen turned to look at İkmen with hard eyes. ‘I will never approve of a marriage between your daughter and my son,’ he said bluntly, ‘so you might as well leave now.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen shrugged, ‘that’s true. But they’re going to do it anyway.’

  ‘And you are going to give them your blessing, Çetin Bey.’

  ‘Yes.’ İkmen watched as Balthazar lit a cigarette and then lit one of his own. ‘I can’t think of any young man I would rather have join my family than Berekiah.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  İkmen smiled. ‘My wife is at bottom a realist, Balthazar,’ he said. ‘She sees, as I do, the very genuine love that exists between our children, even if she cannot actually approve of it.’

  Estelle Cohen came into the room bearing glasses of tea for the two men. Her husband eyed her suspiciously as she placed his glass down beside him.

  ‘And you?’ he said harshly as her face drew level with his own. ‘What do you think about your son and this man’s daughter?’

  Estelle first looked across at İkmen before replying.

  ‘I think that love is a rare thing and that one must grasp it tightly before it passes,’ she said.

  ‘So five hundred years of Jewish life in this city means nothing to you?’

  Estelle, her mind as it always did when this subject arose, flew back across the years to her old life in Balat and that shining Turkish boy who had once kissed her. Ersin.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I think that I love my son more . . .’

  ‘Then if you love him so much, why don’t you stop him?’ Balthazar fixed his wife with a harsh gaze. ‘Look what goes on in Israel. Jews and Muslims always at each other’s throats! Look at how Jews are still, even now, thrown out of countries like Iraq and Iran, Muslim countries where we are hated.’

  ‘And look at how safe we are here, Balthazar!’ his wife responded passionately. ‘Look at how our synagogues are protected! Look at how we come and we go from this country as we please! Look at the reality of how none of the things you have mentioned apply to where we are!’

  ‘Yes, but that can change!’ Balthazar spat. ‘My uncle went to South America because he—’

  Estelle flung her arms up into the air. ‘That was decades ago!’ she cried. ‘Jews went from all over the world to South America at that time! There were opportunities in those countries – for a while – until people started to realise how many Nazis lived over there! Until the most appalling people came to power in places like Chile and Argentina!’

  ‘Yes, and we’re going to have an election here soon, aren’t we?’ Balthazar said as he puffed furiously on his cigarette. ‘And so how do we know who is going to govern us? Maybe fundamentalist Muslims? Who knows?’

  ‘Yes, right, who knows?’

  ‘Agreed. But if our new government does enact Sharia law then what about couples like Berekiah and Hulya? What do you think people will think of them? What will happen
to them? What will happen to their children?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Estelle now close to tears, sat down. ‘I don’t know.’

  İkmen, who had been listening carefully to everything that had been said, leaned forward and looked at both the Cohens with a grave expression on his face.

  ‘And neither do I know,’ he said. ‘No one does. The world could be at war in a few months’ time if some are to be believed. Wherever one is in the world, the fact is that regimes and opinions can change. We have to accept that as a possibility, but what we don’t have to do is like it or approve of it.’ He sighed. ‘I know that marriage like this can cause problems for people. But these problems are often caused not by the couple but by others who wish to put obstacles in their way and raise barriers of difference up in their minds.’

  If Melih Akdeniz had not been so aware of his own difference, would his ‘art’ have been so very disordered? Had he, by being so extreme, sought to prove something to ‘the Establishment’ that hadn’t needed proving anyway? Although, of course, he had painted and sculpted before, had the disapproval of Eren’s parents provided the final push to tip his unstable psyche over the edge into madness? Fear had made his parents take the decision to hide what they were. But fear of what? Balat was and always had been a safe place for Jewish people to live. Even when the district started to change character . . . But then maybe it was the same fear that Balthazar was exhibiting now, fear of the future, the unknown, shadowed by a past İkmen knew he could barely imagine. After all, as the Greek monk Brother Constantine had told him when they both stood outside Melih’s house and had talked of such things, the Balat Jews had been tortured almost to extinction before they left Spain and Portugal. Maybe that pain was stuck somehow in some primitive area of their brains, a defence mechanism that came into play whenever their solidarity was threatened.

  But İkmen hadn’t come to explore issues allied to the case he had just completed. Relevant or not, the only real fact here was that his daughter and Balthazar’s son were in love and whatever waited for them in the future was as uncertain and nebulous as sea mist. In that they were just like every other couple in the world.

  ‘My brother-in-law Talaat died yesterday,’ İkmen said.

  ‘May your head be alive.’ Estelle murmured the standard response to this news.

  İkmen smiled his reply to her. ‘And so when the mourning period is at an end, I am going to arrange a wedding,’ he said. ‘In spite of death, elections, religion, war and an almost complete lack of money, I am going to give my family, and yours, if you want it, a party.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Because if I don’t they will just live together and really scandalise our wives and because, Balthazar, life must and will go on,’ İkmen said. ‘And although I know in my heart that fate will do whatever it wishes with us in the end, sometimes it’s important to have what you want first and then take the consequences. I’m giving those young people to each other . . .’

  ‘With my blessing,’ Estelle put in softly.

  They both saw the tears begin in the crippled man’s eyes.

  ‘Balthazar . . .’

  ‘And so at the bottom of my life, you take my honour away from me Çetin Bey?’ He looked up furiously into İkmen’s face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! You take my child and . . .’ His tears overwhelmed him, robbing him of speech.

  Estelle, with one eye still on İkmen, went over to her husband and placed her arms around his shoulders. Strangely, in view of the fact that she had effectively defied him, he didn’t resist. Great screaming sobs came out of him then, the result İkmen knew of years of misery that went quite beyond the situation with Berekiah.

  However, misery of this depth should, İkmen knew, only be exhibited to those closest to a person and so, with a small smile at Estelle, he left. He had hoped that Balthazar would willingly come round to his point of view in the way that Fatma had, but then, thinking about it as he walked down the steep streets of Karaköy, he knew that hadn’t really been very realistic. Change, even of the welcome variety, hurt. Maybe over time Balthazar would come round . . .

  But maybe not. What was and had to remain important was the future. Hulya, Berekiah, all of his other children. What was in the past was just that – in the past – important but gone. Old concepts, like old bodies, rotted and dissolved for a reason. He’d watched Fatma let go of Talaat with tears of pain in her deepest heart, but he knew that what she was doing was right. Now that Talaat’s body was buried they could start planning for the wedding. Fatma and his girls would enjoy planning the food and choosing their clothes. As for him, İkmen thought that perhaps he might enjoy getting involved in the organisation of the entertainment. Gypsy musicians and fortune-tellers – just like the old days. İkmen smiled, perhaps he’d go and see Gonca, maybe she’d decorate the apartment for the occasion – with tarot cards and horse tails. Maybe he’d even ask her or one of her relatives to perform spells to prevent war, to protect Bülent and all his young friends too. With people like George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein loose in the world, ordinary boys like his son needed all the protection they could get.

  But all of that was for the future. Now was not the time to go wandering up the hill towards Gonca’s rackety place. If anyone had asked him why it wasn’t the right time, İkmen wouldn’t have been able to answer them. He just knew. Gonca, whether with reality or with dreams, was otherwise engaged. He also knew that whenever he saw her again, she would tell him all about it. İkmen smiled. Neither black nor white, good nor bad, the gypsy was always and shamelessly herself. He liked that about her.

  İkmen walked down the Galata Hill, across the Galata Bridge and up into Sultan Ahmet. The unaccustomed exercise made him puff, and pulled at his muscles, but it reminded him that he was alive, which was good. And as he entered his apartment other live bodies came forward to greet him. Every one of them touched him with affection.