Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (20 page)

According to the owners of the Turkuaz bookshop, who thought I was writing fiction, my fourth clue was ‘The Oldest Sacred Building'. When I rang Eugenio Geniale he said, ‘If you're not writing your autobiography you're up to something very dodgy,' and I thought he was going to hang up on me. The Holy Church of St John the Baptist, which was the oldest sacred building in the city, built in the fifth century, had been open for worship for 1,000 years and was re-baptized as the İmrahor Mosque. Now I could wait calmly and with pleasure for 12 May, satisfied that Selçuk Altun would be just a little more perplexed after every round.

The Ä°mrahor Mosque

I was quite expecting some new eccentricity from my uncle when he invited me to dinner at the Pidos Pizzeria. In the reams of paper he brought along there were forty thought-provoking street names chosen from 48,000 locations in the index of the
Istanbul Atlas
. While we were drinking coffees on-the-house he was dreaming of the socio-cultural safaris he would follow from the names he put in a bag from which Ä°z would choose twenty. To avoid upsetting the quiet mystery of these streets, he would take arty photographs of them. To struggle free from her own quagmire, Ä°z would turn her days in the media merry-go-round of business and politics into a cartoon novel headed
The Final Downfall of the Naive Mystic
. The chief managers of the Sultan's stables were called
Ä°mrahor
. On the eve of the
Ä°mrahor
project I met a dopey banker for a business lunch at the Four Seasons and was delighted to see in a strategic corner of the restaurant, my father's friend Judith the pianist and her bibliophile husband Tunç Uluğ. I rose to greet them, sure the elegant couple wouldn't ask me when I intended to get married, but noticing they were sharing a table with Selçuk Altun and his wife, I beat a hasty retreat. He might have been calculating whether he had crammed his fourth clue into the easiest hole as he was eating his risotto. On the way to Çamlıca I couldn't bear the idea that he might use İz and Adil Kasnak as a tool and a hitman.

Somehow my father had never been able to include Samatya in his world, the one district, he said, whose name had never changed since the founding of Byzantium. I noticed that even cars driving along the depressing streets took care not to blow their horns. Apart from a few religious buildings scattered at intervals on both sides of the road, there was the pleasing sight of an abandoned Greek kiosk and an Ottoman mansion with a balcony. I couldn't help stopping to eat
tulumba
, the cake soaked in syrup, in the Rumeli cakeshop and asked the whereabouts of the Ä°mrahor Mosque. On an election poster by the road alongside the mosque which trailed along like a superannuated museum on its last legs, I wasn't surprised to see, as well as an Armenian young man, a committee of elderly mustachioed candidates. The high-walled building opposite, which resembled a medieval tower, was converted to a mosque in 1486 by a sultan's charismatic master of the royal stables.

The swarthy youngster saw me waiting passively at the gate of the building whose registration number was 193891, and swaggered over to tell me that the museum was officially closed and I could visit only by permission from some head office. I wasn't deterred. Believing my tolerant companion wouldn't mind, I took a good look at the enormous fig tree that spread across the courtyard and at the other huge trees whose names I didn't know. Beginning at the south wing I followed the henna-coloured bricks of a powerful wall, and saw with pleasure the west wing embellished with the names of heroes from the eastern provinces, opposite a park with red-tiled paths that matched the colour of the secluded museum. Groups of women were seated at separate tables, veiled or in low-cut dresses as though it was spring. A bunch of pensioners dozed in the shade or stared vacantly around like finalists in a competition for the most tragi-comic face. I recalled sad photographs in the
Istanbul Encyclopedia from Yesterday to Today
of the remains of the obscure museum on the verge of turning into a rubbish dump. Like an unfinished Kahn project, the museum with its geometrical floor design as enchanting as a silk carpet was a remarkable monument. It had survived the 1782 fire and the earthquake of 1894, but in 1908 the roof had collapsed under heavy snow and now it would never be repaired. I walked through the main gate feeling uneasily that I was a citizen of a country that didn't even have the sensitivity of an Ottoman stable master.

I pushed my old comb into an inviting crack parallel to the identification plate of the edifice and a piece of cardboard, the size of a matchbox, fell to the ground. As the afternoon ezan began, I picked up a fateful yellow document which consisted of the words ‘HADIM'
⁷
and ‘ATİK'.
⁸

I tried to figure out this fresh clue in the light of the first three. ‘Hadım' and/or ‘Atik' might be the nickname of a pasha who had a monument built to the Ottoman dynasty in his own name. According to the information in two different encyclopedias, Hadım Ali Paşa, head of a religious foundation, was twice appointed Grand Vizier in the time of Sultan Beyazid II, and in contemporary sources was referred to as Atik Ali Paşa. (My father would have said, ‘There can't be a more suitable word than
atik
to describe someone who can rise from pimping to becoming prime minister.') The fifth clue must be the mosque at Çemberlitaş in the Atik Ali Paşa complex of buildings named after its philanthropic donor who converted the Kariye Church to a mosque.

The Atik Ali Paşa Mosque

My uncle's mission was brought to an abrupt end when the locals on the various streets objected to him photographing their children without permission. On the eve of my expedition to Çemberlitaş, he flew to Stockholm to attend the funeral of his only cousin. While travelling he heard news that his contemporary, Bjorn, who had encouraged him on his series of controversial journeys, had died of a heart attack.

‘I feel death prowling round me on every side,' he commented.

After his last duty to his favourite cousin, he would set out on a safari to the ten most outrageous striptease clubs in Europe, the playground of male beauties. İz, meanwhile, had postponed her comic novel project when she was offered a job as journalist-editor for a weekly magazine. In her first article for them, which she wrote under the pseudonym Baltazar Satırbaşı, she satirized those mediocre writers who considered themselves great authors when their superficial books became bestsellers.

I was trying to decipher the book of miscellaneous collages called
Suicide Bridge
by Iain Sinclair. I had bought the book because of these lines:

I understand now your passion to face the West. It is the passion for the extinction of yourself and the knowledge of the triumph of your own will in your body's extinction. But in the great periods, when man was great, he faced East.

As I walked past the Constantine Column, a casualty of restoration, erected in the fourth century by the Emperor Constantine, I deeply lamented Kıztaşı, the Maiden Stone. Surrounded by walls, the mosque's cemetery consisted of a plain tomb and artistic worn-out gravestones covered with wire mesh. I had seen similar precautions taken in zoos to protect the wild animals from human harassment. As soon as I passed through the main gate with a silent prayer, I seemed to have slipped down a time tunnel into the sixteenth century. I felt at ease in the calm and harmonious environment, half-closing my eyes in the midst of the five domes of the Atik Ali Paşa Mosque and all that belonged to it. The way people were wrapped in immediate silence as they entered the three gates into the spacious courtyard was impressive. I couldn't help hearing the inviting sound of the fountain opposite the mosque entrance. I walked respectfully across the courtyard to the fountain and saw the notice above, ‘Please Do Not Take Large Canfuls of Water.' (But my stomach turned when I saw the label stuck where it was most visible, ‘Pest Extermination Service'.) Reading the sign over the workshop door by the fountain, ‘Apprentice Diamond-setter Wanted', I wondered what qualifications were required and how the surrounding studios of silver-workers could operate without making a sound.

As I viewed the mosque's façade of cut sandstone, I noticed four attached buildings to the left of the courtyard. It was interesting to see cobblers and grocery-stores creating income for the mosque complex under the old buildings rented out to silver wholesalers. Were the construction date and the architect of this geometrically simple and architecturally attractive monument deliberately kept unclear? A notice was stuck to the giant cylindrical columns in front of the main gate, ‘Please Do Not Touch The Columns.' I remained poking my head through the door of the monumental building. Feeling subconsciously guilty because I knew only one basic prayer, I was startled too by an atmosphere of sublimity that was 500 years old. As one who doesn't evade his property tax and is incapable of planning anything wicked, I wondered why I should feel such a spiritual pressure. ‘I doubt the therapeutic value of praying five times a day,' my sceptical father used to grumble.

I moved to a mound of earth as big as a child's grave in the centre of the courtyard. With my index finger I pulled out a tiny roll of paper from a tube connected to a sapling as thick as my thumb. On it was written:

The Lecturer and Judge
Gave His Own Name to the Fountain He Built
To Give Joy to the Soul of His Daughter
Who Died Eighteen Years Before Him.

I bought two books on Istanbul's public fountains.
Su Güzeli
(Water Beauty), illustrated with colour photographs, was published by the Municipality of Istanbul. I was sure that reading through the life-stories of 143 public fountains and discovering the last rendezvous would give me emotional indigestion. Instead of struggling with too many clues, some of them insoluble, I had to come to terms with these journeys. A few steps down any street could reveal different worlds; a journey of ten minutes could go back 1,000 years. I was finding serenity in these unique worlds, reluctant to share my dreams with my real life. If the last clue could find my father's vulgar psychopath killer, I knew I must deliver him to the police by means of Adil Kasnak. But the real problem was to trap paranoid Selçuk Altun, who was enjoying directing the whole drama from behind the scenes. My only chance to checkmate this repulsive chess-player who was moving me back and forth through the city was to find an unexpected weak point in his last clue. I was eager to see İz's face when I caught him redhanded, and figured out his rôle in the plot and just how much it was to his advantage. I knew that if I failed, that secretive man would abuse me in one of his hastily scribbled novels (if my mother were in my place, wouldn't she first convince my father's killer to get rid of Altun, then have the killer gunned down by her new hitman?).

I concentrated on the nostalgic photographs of
Su Güzeli
, knowing every page would make me sad. I could almost see how these ruined fountains, neglected treasures, would illuminate their surroundings once their façades were restored. I began to absorb these miniature monuments with the grand names, paragraph by paragraph, to the music of Pat Metheny. By the time I reached the Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Fountain, I had digested the whole book.

It dawned on me that I would find the fatal clue at the end of the book in the section on the fountains in Üsküdar. The only Water Beauty engraved by the important orientalist artists, Eugene Flandin and W. H. Bartlett, was the Sadeddin Efendi Fountain, and I looked longingly at the engravings, but sadly at the warning lesson of the tragi-comic photographs. The identifying entry in the book reads as follows:

It lies on the right side of the street that leads to Tunusbağı, following the angle of the Karacaahmet tomb. It was built in 1741 (
AH
1154) by Sadeddin Efendi, son of Kazasker Feyzullah Efendi, and grandson of Şeyhülislam Hodja Sadeddin Efendi – who wrote
Tacü' t-Tevarih
(The Domain of Islam) – to bless the soul of his dying daughter Zübeyde. Sadeddin Efendi was a lecturer; during his post as a mullah in Egypt he acted as judge in Mecca and Istanbul and died in 1759. He lies in an open tomb behind the fountain ...