Altai: A Novel (26 page)

3.

The old man was fishing, sitting on the jetty holding his fishing-rod. He turned round when he heard our footsteps.

“Are they biting?” Nasi asked.

“Not at all,” Ismail replied. The bucket beside him was indeed empty. He moved it to let us sit down.

“I’m happy to see you in good health,” Nasi said, dangling his legs in the dark water.

“It’s a day of peace,” the German replied. “Yesterday I shed a burden. I’ve carried it on my back for many years, and now at last I’ve set it down.”

“What burden are you talking about?”

“The story of my life. I’ve finished writing it.”

“Will we be able to read it?” asked Nasi.

“I haven’t yet decided what to do with it,” the old man said. “I met a sage in Mokha; he came from the mountains in the north of India. He talked to me of sacred drawings made in colored sand. It takes hours, even days to draw them, then the wind blows them away and not a trace is left. Perhaps my book is like those drawings.”

We sat there, absorbed in the tranquility of evening, observed by the gulls that poked about in the sand or floated on the water. The sun had already lowered above the Old City, and its glare no longer hurt the eyes. It was hot, but the evening was starting to take the depths of things away and to lengthen their shadows. Ours stretched thinly behind us, like the shadows of marsh birds.

“How is the war going?” Ismail asked, breaking the silence.

“Slowly,” said Nasi. “Venetian pride is a hard nut to crack, and I admit that I underestimated it. They’re still fighting, in hope that the Christian fleet will arrive soon.”

Ismail said nothing. He stared at the spot where his line entered the water.

“The pope has achieved his aim,” Nasi went on. “A holy alliance, as in the days of the Crusades. You know him as well as I do. Pope Ghislieri was Carafa’s best pupil. One of those enemies with whom negotiation is impossible. We can only defeat him.”

“You mean the Turks must do it in your place.”

Nasi sighed and shook his head.

“It won’t always be like that. In my kingdom the Jews will be able to create their own fates and defend themselves, once and for all, against the dangers of the world.”

Ismail’s tone grew slightly harsher. “With what weapons, João?”

“The most phenomenal in existence: English artillery. England will supply us with cannons in exchange for a trade base in the Mediterranean. Then we won’t need the Turks anymore.”

The old man didn’t conceal his surprise. “He who plays on two tables runs a double risk.”

“You and I have always taken risks,” Nasi replied. “Listen to me: Who better than the Jews, who have been persecuted forever, can welcome the persecuted people from all over Europe? The kingdom of Cyprus will be able to give asylum to refugees, to free spirits, to victims of the Inquisition. It won’t matter what their creed is, as long as they are willing to build our shared house. Tolerance and harmony will be the foundation of the New Zion.”

“I have been to the New Zion,” Ismail replied. “I have seen the prophets of the Kingdom at work.”

“Are you comparing me to them? To the madmen of Münster?” Nasi dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. A startled gull took flight, settling a little way off.

“Not with them,” Ismail replied. “To myself in those days.”

“We’re living in different times now,” Nasi said, “and I’m not looking for the apocalypse. Gracia understood, and that’s why she wrote to you. That’s why I’m here. Manuel is leaving for Cyprus with a message for Lala Mustafa. I want you to go with him. You used to go hunting with the general. He respects you.”

Ismail’s mouth shaped itself into a grin. Perhaps he was thinking of Nasi’s words, of his relationship with Lala Mustafa or his former life in Constantinople. We would never persuade him like this. I decided to tell him what I thought.

“You won’t find the answer you’re looking for by staying here.”

The two men turned and suddenly seemed to remember that I was there. I got up, stepping over them both.

“My mother’s last wish was that I should grow up a good Jew. I rebelled against that for all of my life, until I became the opposite, a gadfly to my people. And yet here I am. Perhaps it was meant to be; perhaps I was fated to take such a long and tortuous detour. God’s plan is unfathomable. We cannot know in advance what random events will make us what we are, or know if the means that we choose will turn out to be the right ones. What I do know is that big things are happening. Cyprus is the most ambitious plan that a Jew has ever come up with, and I’m fed up sitting here and waiting . . .” I aimed a finger at the old man. “Your defeats don’t mean that there’s no point trying again. You can choose to be useful to a cause again or to stay here trying to catch fish.”

I nodded to Nasi follow me. It was the first time I’d told him what to do, and he obeyed me, albeit reluctantly. He walked behind me, resigned, and then Ismail’s voice rang out in the evening air. “Have you thought of gifts?”

Nasi looked as if he’d been caught off guard, then stopped and replied, “Swords for the officers, silver spurs, harnesses for the horses . . .”

I saw Ismail shaking his head. “Something special for Lala Mustafa. He’s a vain old man.” Nasi thought for a few seconds, then his face brightened. “I’ve got exactly what he needs.”

Ismail left his rod where it was. He picked up his stick and joined us. “Sieges are aggravating things, Signor Cardoso, I am aware of that. You won’t like what you see.”

“I’m not going there for pleasure,” I replied.

The old man muttered something, then set off toward the houses.

4.

We plowed the waves fast and alone, during those July days. Nasi had put the flagship of his merchant fleet at our disposal, a
mahona
with an elegant, sinuous line, under the command of a Greek from the Peloponnese. When the wind swelled the sails and impelled the ship along, it seemed to ride the top of a great crest that rose and fell. When the wind subsided, the oarsmen took over. Their coordinated movements, the ancient gestures of pulling, rising, falling and pulling again, meant that we never lost speed. One way or another, the keel sliced the waves like a knife blade, heading south. The crew consisted entirely of
marioli
, salaried volunteers. No slaves or conscripts on a Jew’s ship.

We carried a personal letter from Yossef Nasi and gifts for Lala Mustafa Pasha.
Fazte hermano kon el Guerko fin a pasas el ponte.
Become a brother of the Devil until the danger has passed. That was what Nasi had said to me as he handed me the gifts for the general, the man who had been Selim’s tutor and who, unlike Selim, had been on the battlefield for months, amid the flying cannonballs, even though he was the same age as Ismail al-Mokhawi.

During the day we lived on deck, cooked by the sun like herrings set out to dry. At night the stars covered the sky to the horizon.

Hafiz and Mukhtar observed everything with worried eyes: the dark beauty of the sea, the clouds that passed above the mainmast, the flight of the gulls. Ali beguiled the time by roasting and grinding coffee beans, which he then brewed with cinnamon and cardamom. At other times he recited long prayers, or once more honed the blade of his scimitar, producing lugubrious sounds.

Ismail was the one least affected by the rigors of the journey. I struggled to believe that a short time previously he had been in danger of dying. The sea seemed to reinvigorate him and make him even harder than before. He was taciturn, and his friends respected his silence. One afternoon, on the quarterdeck, as he was looking out over the sea, I asked him whether in his long life he had ever been a sailor as well.

“No,” he replied. “But I did trade in the northern seas. Plowing the sea is like crossing the desert. They are free spaces, open to a multitude of possibilities.”

“And yet without the prospect of a landfall we would merely be drifting,” I objected, but I received no reply.

One evening, almost at the end of the voyage, I realized that I hadn’t exchanged a word with a living soul all day. The sun was setting slowly, red in the sky. The men who weren’t at the oars stopped to pray. It was the captain himself who led the worship on the deck, reciting the Koran. Hafiz and Mukhtar joined the others, along with Ali. The few Christians, a little apart from the rest, made the sign of the cross.

I joined Ismail behind the curtain, a place to which he had withdrawn a little while before. I found him naked to the waist, busy greasing his pistols. Drops of sweat shone on his chest, which was covered with white hairs, and on his belly, crisscrossed with scars. On his right forearm I noticed a strip of swollen flesh, perhaps a burn. Around his neck he wore a pendant; it looked like a pierced coin.

“Are you skilled with weapons?” I asked.

From a little trunk at his side he took a short sword in a leather sheath. He handed it to me. “Take this. Keep it under your jacket; no one will see it.” He unsheathed the weapon, a handy, light dagger. The metal visibly bore the marks of time, but the blade had been recently sharpened.

A question formed on my lips. “Have you killed many men?”

He passed the wick into the barrel of the pistol. “Yes. I won’t say they deserved it; it’s not up to me to judge.” He fell silent for a moment, then added, “And you? Have you ever killed anyone?”

“I was a servant of the state. The executioner got his hands dirty on my behalf.”

My own words produced horrible noises in my mind, the echo of screams mixing with vivid memories: the pain inflicted in Venetian prisons. An altar of torment built for the security of the state. “Do you know what we’re going to find down there, do you really know?”

He didn’t reply. He bent over his weapons again and got on with the business of cleaning them.

The next day, in the light of dawn, we made out the dark line of the coast of Cyprus. Along with the two young Indians, I ran to the starboard side, where we found Ismail, as if he had been there since the night before. Young Hafiz said something in Arabic.

“What did he say?” I asked the old man.

“I’m not sure, but I think he said it looks like a fish.”

“Not a fish,” said Ali, who had just joined us.

The boy mimed the spouting of a whale.

5.

Even before the city was in view, bits of Famagusta came to meet us. Wreckage, charred planks, bottomless barrels. A woman’s dress floated on the waves, along with a threadbare banner riddled with bullet holes. The body and golden wings of the Lion of Saint Mark could still be seen on it. Where the maned head and the book should have been, there was nothing but a gaping hole.

The distant outline of the city walls looked shattered: piles of stone in an arid, desiccated landscape. Clouds of dust rose up in the wind that blew across the land, and there were no trees to contain them. They carried a slow cadence to the ears, like a drum beaten in the center of the earth. It was the Turks firing at the city. Lengths of fortification collapsed, detritus rained down among clouds of sand. Surrounded by siege fortresses higher than the walls, Famagusta was still resisting. Far away, outside the range of the Venetian cannon, the tents and banners of the encampment seemed to be resting in the haze.

We were now close to the shore. We had met several Turkish galleys that were blocking access to the port, which was in turn obstructed by a long chain.

Having passed the port and rounded the little islands that closed it off, we moored in a place called Beach of Gardens, near the southwestern side of the walls. That section of the fortifications was in pitiful condition. The tower had collapsed: More than a building, it looked like a natural formation eroded by thousands of years of water and wind.

As soon as we disembarked, we were struck by the smell of Famagusta. Penetrating, hard to define. It was disgusting even to us, accustomed by now to the stench of the ship. It smelled of gunpowder and rotten wood, pitch and saltpeter. And of corpses, cooked by the sun and ravaged by violent death.

The Beach of Gardens was a barren place. Perhaps before the war it had deserved its name, but now it looked like a desert. The Turks had set up a service port there: a kind of shack, its walls cobbled together from planks and bales of wet cotton, rose behind a fortress; from the fortress, cannons bombarded the Venetian vessels still in the port. I found out later that there were three vessels in all.

An officer of janissaries checked our credentials. He read and reread them with affected attention, stroking his moustache with his left hand, then told an orderly to alert Lala Mustafa Pasha. He turned back to us.

“How many of you are going? You will need an escort to get your bearings in the trenches. The Franks are still firing, just a few broadsides a day. They’re hitting targets further up, toward the encampment.”

“There will be three of us,” I replied. “Accompanied b two crewmen carrying the trunk.”

The officer looked us up and down. “Have a wash first. Lala Mustafa Pasha can’t bear bad smells.” He paused. During that brief silence I heard a sound like a landslide, in the distance, and music. The officer resumed, “That must be one of the reasons for his ill humor.”

After cleaning ourselves up, we entered the trenches. This was a labyrinth of earthworks and extremely narrow ditches, supported by wooden beams and planks, with storehouses and gun emplacements protected by gabions. The excavations were so deep that a man on horseback could pass along them without being seen from outside, and they twisted at sharp angles, first to the right, then to the left. Every suitable surface was covered with tiny script, most of it in Moorish characters. Perhaps messages to the next shift, or prayers, or curses. The human landscape that we slowly encountered, men who lived in this city of earth and dust, seemed to have been assembled by a madman. A bend, and here were infantrymen quartered in the most wretched conditions, torn and dusty uniforms, a terrified sentry peering through the loopholes. Another bend, and here were smartly dressed soldiers, blue and red uniforms a brave defiance of the soldiers at the tops of the walls. They must have been the next shift, newly arrived. In a roomier section, a group of musicians played warlike tunes dominated by the beating of huge drums. As we passed, the music suddenly got louder, and the wind instruments whinnied out of a kind of challenge, accompanied by crashing cymbals.

Further on, we struggled through the place where the wounded were assembled, many of them in desperate conditions. The stink of spilled guts and clotted blood was unbearable. The groans were a sorrowful, endless murmur. The dead were dragged away by the feet and piled up to wait for burial.

When we emerged at last, far from the walls, the smells were the first thing to change. The stench of men crammed together, but also the smell of wood and cooked food. This was the encampment, tents and fires as far as the eye could see, groups of cooks around huge pots. Lala Mustafa’s tent was distinguished from the others by its size and the number of banners and standards that crowned it. Their letters, embroidered in gold and silver, were dazzling. The sky was a slab of blue.

The general’s residence was protected by circles of sentries, who received the trunk from the hands of Hafiz and Mukhtar. Ismail gestured to them to wait, gesturing also to Ali, whose seraphic air seemed entirely unaffected by the almighty chaos all around us. An officer took charge of Nasi’s letter and brought it inside the tent.

Ismail played nervously with the handle of his stick.

After a short wait, the entrance to the tent opened up and a janissary invited us to step inside. Lala Mustafa was seated on a bronze stool, with the letter in his hands. Standing impassively on either side of him were two huge janissaries. The general invited us to step forward. He was older than I remembered from our audience at the Divan. The months of war must have tested him sorely. Nonetheless, he had the solid, stubborn air of the true man of arms. His voice was cold, formal.

“Nasi Bey’s passion for this venture is such as to send you, his pupil, to pressure me to ensure that Ma
ğ
usa falls as soon as possible.” I was about to reply, but he cut me off, turning instead to Ismail. “But he didn’t send you alone. For a moment I thought my eyes deceived me. But no, here is a man I thought lost on the borders of the empire.” Ismail bowed, and Lala did the same, bringing his fingers to his forehead.

“The years of our hunting parties are a distant memory,” said the general.

“Now you are pursuing rather larger quarry,” Ismail replied.

Lala Mustafa laughed comfortably. “But I haven’t lost my old passion.”

He moved toward a corner of the tent and showed us two hooded hunting falcons on a perch. The general took some scraps of raw meat from a tray. Their beaks snapped and ripped the food to shreds.

“Remarkable specimens,” said Ismail.

“The best. They come from Central Asia. If you wish, I may have the opportunity to let you see them at work.” Then he seemed to remember me. “Show me the gifts, then,” he commanded.

I opened the trunk. “Your entry into Famagusta will mark an important moment in the long tale of your exploits,” I said. “And as you know, it will be an important moment for Yossef Nasi, too.” I took out the front plate of a Milanese cuirass. Blue steel, of the finest quality, on which Nasi had had engraved words from the Muslim Holy Book. The precious object glittered. Lala Mustafa looked at it with interest. He nodded to the two janissaries, who took the cuirass and fitted it on their commander’s chest. He stood straight on his feet, his arms outstretched, as the soldiers fastened the final laces.

“Important, you say. I have lost my son in this venture. But he was a soldier, and he has been rewarded with paradise. Has your mentor perhaps risked anything as precious?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “Yossef Nasi sent me. He asked me to witness the army’s victory on his behalf. My eyes are his eyes.”

The general looked at me with satisfaction, then demanded to be brought a mirror.

“We don’t use steel breastplates,” he said, “but I will gladly wear it to enter Famagusta, as Nasi Bey suggests in his letter.”

He looked at himself for a long time, from various angles. “And don’t worry,” he added, before dismissing us, “I will show you everything from very close up.”