I shall never forget that day, which I spent dazed and bewildered in a throng of nearly twenty women, young and old (and just as many children), dressed in extravagant headdresses, petticoats, gowns of white silk, and low-cut lace blouses whose sleeves billowed down to their wrists, finishing with ornaments and gently undulating lace fringes. Although the house looked infinite from the outside, the people inside it lived virtually on top of one another. And for all the domestic confusion, there was no denying that we were in distinguished company. Abdüsselam’s first wife was a close relative of the bey of Tunis and a direct descendent of the Serif line. His second wife was an elegant Circassian who had served in the Ottoman palace and was said to have once been intimate with Sultan Abdülhamid. The wife of one of Abdüsselam’s many brothers was from the eminent Hidiv family, and the wife of another was the daughter of the warlord of a far-flung Caucasian tribe. If the brides were not daughters of famous field marshals or grand viziers, they were granddaughters of Albanian beys. Fearing that under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid a family so disordered might give rise to gossip and endless paranoia, Abdüsselam succeeded in marrying one of his brother’s daughters to an agent who was highly praised by the sultan himself. This honored individual was a secretary to the Council of State, of which Abdüsselam was also a member; thus the agent was able to keep a close eye on Abdüsselam Bey, both at home and at work. People who knew them took great delight in watching Abdüsselam and Ferhat Bey, his brother’s son-in-law, travel together to and from the Council of State in their rubber-wheeled phaeton. The strange thing about it was that while the above-mentioned relation felt oppressed by his obligation to spy on a man he truly loved and considered something of a benefactor, Abdüsselam Bey was more than pleased with this friendship of forced circumstances, for Abdüsselam Bey was the sort of man who would scream “fire!” if left alone for more than an hour—the sort of man who always sat next to the only other passenger on a trolley or, if it was empty, hovered over the conductor.
I became much more intimate with Abdüsselam during the Armistice years, from 1919 to 1922. Although he had grown rather old by then, his memory was more or less intact. When he reminisced about the old days, he would remember Ferhat Bey’s timid demeanor and burst out laughing. After I returned from military service, Abdüsselam took pity on me for being alone—both my mother and my father had passed away. Having welcomed me into the small home in Beyazıt where he then lived with his youngest daughter, he arranged for me to marry a young girl they had raised there. And so, yes, my first wife, the mother of Zehra and Ahmet, had grown up in his villa.
Abdüsselam Bey’s villa carried on in the same way until the declaration of the reinstated constitution. To give you an idea of the colorful crew that populated the villa and the expenses it accrued, suffice to say that the neighborhood’s sweetshop, butcher, and two grocery stores survived pretty much on the villa alone. The lion’s share of the pharmacist Aristidi Efendi’s revenue came from the residence as well. Following the Declaration of Independence, the villa began slowly to dissolve, a decline that in some aspects echoed that of the Ottoman Empire. First there was the fall of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, eastern Thrace, and northern Africa, whereupon Abdüsselam’s brothers and their wives departed; this was followed by the Balkan Wars, when the younger men and their wives also abandoned the estate. Toward the end, only the spying Ferhat Bey and a few of his children remained. Ferhat Bey and Abdüsselam lived together until the end, harnessed to each other like the swarthy steeds of Hungarian and British blood that pulled their rubber-wheeled phaeton to the Council of State every morning and back home in the evening. In the end conversation between the two men went no further than recitals of the weekly reports on life in the villa that Ferhat Bey submitted to Sultan Abdülhamid.
Though these bulletins flushed Abdüsselam Bey’s face a deep crimson, with each week they revealed to him a new aspect of the ancient villa’s inner world, transporting him back to the time when fortune still smiled on him, when he was still young, rich, and virile—the master of a household arranged just to his liking, where no one language held sway for long, strong personalities jostled for space, and life was infused with the warmth of humankind.
Yet there was something a little odd about the way Abdüsselam Bey would conjure up his lost world during these recitals losing himself in its immensity before my very eyes. As he listened to Ferhat Bey, his nostalgia would take on a sinister aspect: his eyes sparkling with a strange malice and with a smile that seemed to mock the frailty of humankind, he would launch into stories that only deepened Ferhat Bey’s embarrassment.
One day Abdüsselam Bey, former member of the Council of State, revealed his secret to me:
“My poor son-in-law, the truth is his work made him all too anxious and ashamed. He had absolutely no idea that I submitted my own weekly report on him.”
Around the time I began frequenting Nuri Efendi’s workshop, there were just thirty-seven people still living in Abdüsselam Bey’s villa. Not counting the children, the house was only inhabited by semiretired servants (one of life’s odd reversals), distant relatives of Abdüsselam’s siblings, and aged aunts whose affiliation with the family was debated daily. Abdüsselam was deeply saddened by all this and could not understand how independence—which we had apparently all been longing for in secret—had deprived his home of the cheerful cries of children. He could not understand why his domestic expenses kept rising. As he struggled to make ends meet, Abdüsselam was further confounded by all these distant relatives, whom he found as unreadable as texts whose principle sentences had been effaced or rendered indecipherable; all the same, he still welcomed this absurd crowd with open arms, for fear of ending up alone.
VII
Though Abdüsselam Bey squandered much of his fortune on passing fancies, he was also indulgent of those around him, particularly his nephews. He called to mind those kindly uncles one meets in operettas, those comical creatures who are either quietly brooding or flying off the handle, and who fritter their lives away on little pleasures before suddenly, and outrageously, coming to the rescue of a young relation. Whatever his quirks and idiosyncrasies, they combined to suggest a man of consequence.
Seyit Lutfullah was something else altogether: a ghostly shadow in the void, a mask on loan, a living lie: Imagine the lead actor in a fantastical play who—still wearing his costume and cloaked in his assumed personality—springs off the stage to continue his performance in the crowded city streets. Seyit Lutfullah was such a man. He inspired his little coterie to all kinds of pastimes and passions, taking people who would otherwise have led rather mundane existences and turning their worlds upside down. But with him it was never clear where his strange beneficence ended and his lies began.
He was not from Medina, as most people claimed, nor was he a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. In fact he probably adopted his name somewhere along the way. According to Nuri Efendi, he took the name Seyit, given to descendants of the prophet Muhammad, when he was engaged to a woman during his time in Iraq. But he actually hailed from the province of Baluchistan in Afghanistan. He left his native land when he was still quite young and, after traversing the Orient, arrived at last in Istanbul, where his beautiful and moving recitations of the Koran at the Arab Mosque attracted much attention, which made it possible for him to marry the daughter of a gardener who tended the grounds for a rich family in Emirgân, and even afforded him the opportunity to proselytize at a local mosque. Those who had known him from his first appearance described him as a morally upstanding and rather fanatical exponent of sharia law who, in his sermons and deliberations, would vociferously berate his flock. According to what my father reported, the man prohibited most everything in life save prayer, going so far as to place restrictions on eating, drinking, and sometimes even speaking.
His first stint in Istanbul lasted only three years. Then his wife died, and he resumed his travels, leaving everything behind. He return
ed to Istanbul ten years later, and two years before the reinstatement of the constitution he settled into the ruined medrese. But Seyit Lutfullah was no longer the same. One of his eyes had turned entirely white, his lips were slightly parted, and his body was at the mercy of a tic that left his primary motor functions intact but sent a continuous series of short, awkward, involuntary spasms through his entire body. His left arm swung back and forth, as if he were soothing a sleeping child in a perambulator, and his neck twitched violently, as if he were working out a painful cramp. With his dark and leathery half-paralyzed face, his humpback, his enormous height, and one foot forever dragging behind him, Seyit Lutfullah seemed more evil djinn than human being. He might have been a creature standing guard over treasure at the end of an epic journey. Yet in his youth he’d been considered rather handsome.
Seyit Lutfullah attributed his transformation to his battles in the world beyond. By his own account, while preparing most fervently to become a medium to the spirit world, he had stumbled upon a disgruntled group of guardian spirits, and it was they who had left him in this horrific state. When Nuri Efendi spoke of him, he said, “This is just what the holy Koran tells us. Such is the fate of those who meddle with spirits.” But in truth he was hoping to hear the whole lurid story—curiosity being Nuri Efendi’s only real shortcoming—and so he could never quite bring himself to forsake the man who rubbed shoulders with blasphemy.
Almost everyone had an opinion of Seyit Lutfullah. Dismissing him as a charlatan, Aristidi Efendi attributed his physical transformation to either a congenital condition or rampant syphilis. For Abdüsselam Bey’s sake, the pharmacist tried to cure Seyit Lutfullah with various concoctions prepared according to old manuscripts in which he had little faith. While Abdüsselam Bey remained wary of Seyit Lutfullah’s dealings with the spiritual world, he still considered the man a vast repository of ancient lore and hoped the experiments carried out in Aristidi Efendi’s laboratory might help him regain his squandered fortune—a case in point being that he sincerely believed one day they would discover, for indeed it had been promised them, the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. Seyit Lutfullah had long since become a native of Istanbul and had even forgotten his Arabic, but as with Abdüsselam Bey, the old Maghrebi of Tunisia, his ancient superstitions endured.
In those days it was hard not to see Abdüsselam Bey as a gambler with a few cards perennially up his sleeve, poised for the most improbable of exploits.
Convinced that one day they would succeed in making gold, Abdüsselam covered all the costs of Aristidi Efendi’s researches in his secret laboratory, located just behind his pharmacy. But Aristidi Efendi’s approach was different from that of his friends: he believed the project was achievable through the application of modern chemistry alone. Abdüsselam Bey, on the other hand, was eager to try both magic and the questionable chemical formulae Seyit Lutfullah brought to the laboratory.
The truth of the matter is that each of these men was mired in a tireless search for a tunnel that would take him to the other side of the wall he called reality. Did Abdüsselam Bey really believe in Seyit Lutfullah? I cannot say. To my mind, these men acted in response to something more important than mere belief. All three held most fervently that there should be no limit to the concept of the “possible.” Everything existed within a universe in which anything could happen: objects, matter, human beings—all stood on a threshold of infinite potential, waiting for a magic word, prayer, or experiment to transform them in an instant. The flaw these men shared was to mistrust anything they could see with their own eyes or touch with their own hands.
Though he was the most realistic member of this entourage, my ruined father was nevertheless susceptible to its mad schemes, and in Seyit Lutfullah he saw his final hope of bringing his grandfather’s pious mission to fruition. But his partners never really accepted him, for they saw themselves in him; that is to say, they recognized his desperation to sacrifice everything he owned, and this led my father to feel a certain animosity toward them. Even so, Nuri Efendi still repaired my father’s watch for free, and Abdüsselam Bey was always willing to extend a helping hand, while the hunter Nasit Bey’s support for my father was boundless. Deep down, if only intermittently, my father did enjoy the company of these men, and so he never showed his anger; it was with the fury of a man brutally scorned and cast aside that he leveled his ire against Seyit Lutfullah. To my father, Lutfullah was “a miserable dope fiend and a liar.” He wasn’t a medium in contact with guardian spirits, nor did he have anything to do with treasure or the world beyond. The stroke that had turned his face into a heap of ghastly junk was brought about by opium, wild philandering, and a blatant disregard for his health. But in denouncing him as a sloth, a swindler, an adulterer, and a trickster, my father was in fact echoing views Aristidi expressed in more measured terms.
Lutfullah made no secret of his dabbling in opium. For him the drug was not a dangerous pleasure so much as a means to beauty, truth, and exultation or, to use his own vague terminology, “a mystic path.” There was, he said, no way of achieving truth without casting aside reason, and indeed there were many occasions when he would wander about semiconscious. Deep in these fogs, he would ramble on about “the other side of the curtain,” enumerating the delights that awaited us in the world beyond our sight.
Listening to him, it was difficult not to believe that the man walked in a world we could not see: among turquoise palaces filled with gold, jewels, and silver-laced tapestries, a world that promised a thousand and one delights. While wandering about that pleasure-filled world, he enjoyed a lover named Aselban, a beautiful creature with whom he frolicked among ever-blooming roses, at the edge of a crystal pool, listening to the rippling of cool waters and the songs of nightingales, taking delight in the fragrances of jasmine and rose as she strummed her baglama beside the harem’s fairest ladies or sat alone at a window, her hands busy with embroidery, ever dreaming of him. Aselban’s hair was darker than night, her skin fairer than jasmine flowers, and even the pheasants swooned with envy at her heavenly sway.
This magnificent creature was madly in love with our friend but, sadly, a union between them was a “philosophical impossibility.” For first Lutfullah had to discover the treasure of the emperor Andronikos, a condition put forward by those who lived in the world beyond—namely Aselban’s mother, father, and violent sister, whose beauty was not inferior to Aselban’s. The treasure itself was merely an illusion created by a magic spell. And of course Lutfullah had no need for such riches, so sure was he that all his desires would be met in the world beyond—provided he met the conditions set by its inhabitants. Once Seyit Lutfullah found the treasure, Aselban would become human, and he would regain his true sunlike countenance. They would live together happily ever after, as just rulers and paragons of grace.
When in low spirits, Seyit Lutfullah could not but despair over the difficulty, even impossibility, of his task, but when his mood lifted—which is to say, when he was thoroughly out of his gourd—he would assure us that he was not the person we saw: the blinding effect of the dazzling beauty of his face rendered it invisible. According to our dear friend, who often slept at Aselban’s feet during his visits to his mysterious retreat, he bore a close resemblance to the oriental princes and Indian rajas that were popular in American films of the time.
“I was out hunting with Aselban the other day, when suddenly a hundred greyhounds were bounding alongside us! Oh, the gazelles we bagged, and the tigers . . . There was one that . . .”
And if the hunter Nasit Bey was in attendance, with his greyhound so decrepit it could barely rouse itself for a hunt, the tales grew longer still.
But when Lutfullah spoke with Abdüsselam Bey, he skipped over the hunts and concentrated on the lively hordes that peopled his world of bliss. In the palace of Aselban’s father there were nearly a thousand children, and up to three times as many close relatives of all ages, forever overflowing with love and worry for
one another, never apart for more than a moment. And when Lutfullah described the orgies that Aselban’s father enjoyed with the forty young concubines who lived at his beck and call, Abdüsselam Bey nearly lost his mind.
Just one thing darkened Lutfullah’s happiness: he could travel to the world beyond only at Aselban’s invitation. When none was forthcoming, he would wander, sometimes for months on end, through our worthless world, as worn as the rags that clothed him, as ruined as the ruin in which he dwelt. Ill-tempered and belligerent, he avoided human society, for he was given to violent bouts of rage that seemed very much like epileptic seizures; these horrifying episodes clearly took a toll on his constitution.
His chest pumping with pride and his mouth spewing foam, he’d sputter a string of strange and indecipherable profanities, inviting damnation upon his enemies, threatening to murder and destroy them with his own grisly hands. “I . . . Ah, yes, I . . . I . . . Does the individual not know who I am? The individual knows not who I am? I shall rain misfortune upon the head of this individual.” Lutfullah’s opponent was always an “individual” or at least addressed in the third person: “Is he aware that I shall burn him to a crisp?”
His rage was like the opium, a kind of divine madness, and in those rages Seyit Lutfullah was himself the master of life and death, his hubris justified by a mad philosophy that claimed to explain both the animate and inanimate worlds. But when his rage subsided, he was overcome by sadness. “The other day my enemies—the ones from the world beyond, of course—they provoked me. I disclosed many secrets. Now the journey will be more difficult. Until further notice they will not allow me to exercise my powers to their full extent!”
My father actually believed in some of these powers.
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