The Dervish House (19 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
Recite, yes. Recite. Recite, in the name of God, who made you from a clot of blood.
Unclean oven, trapped cooking, the cigarette smoke absorbed into the wallpaper, unemptied vacuum-cleaner dust-bags. The air fresheners placed by the concierge on window ledges and work surfaces and cisterns add a sickly, death-ward stink. This empty, clattery apartment with the dust thick on the blinds and the floorboards gritty and the dead pigeon souring on the balcony, stinks of single man. There’s a packet of instant tea granules in the sticky kitchen cabinet. Letters and catalogues swept by the openings of the front door against the wall. A peeling patch under the balcony window. A soft dark oval of hair-grease on the bedroom wallpaper, above the ghostly outline of the bed head. The mattress is stained, the toilet brown with lime scale. Grey gum is fused to the kitchen tiles.
Leyla fights a gag reflex.
‘There’s two months’ rent owing,’ the concierge says. He is small, pot-bellied, troglodytic. Leyla thought his subspecies had died out decades ago, the mean-souled, nosy house-snoop. He took a wad of petty cash to lead her and Yaşar into this eighth-floor apartment. The lifts at Kemal House stopped working long before Mehmet Ali’s lease. Residents glowered as they squeezed past on the landings and staircases. Everyone had children and a television blaring in their living room. On the third floor Leyla kicked off her business heels. They were death on the worn concrete risers. ‘Are you friends of his, relatives?’
‘It’s business,’ Leyla says. ‘How long has he been gone?’
‘Since February,’ the concierge says.
‘Is it not customary to wait until someone’s dead before you sell their stuff?’ Leyla asks.
The kapıcı shrugs. ‘Landlord’s decision. He owed. The stuff just about covered the first couple of months. Are you sure you’re not related to him?’
‘Not our problem,’ Yaşar says from the kitchen space.
‘Well, someone owes it.’
‘Do you mind if we have a look round?’ Leyla asks.
The concierge seems not to have heard, casually lighting up a cigarette. Leyla peels twenty euro from her purse. The Istanbul kapıcı’s reputation for venality is in safe hands. A hope too far that it would have been as simple as knocking on the door and Mehmet welcoming them with tea and sweets. Mehmet gone, but his possessions intact and in place would have been even better. This is detective work now and she hasn’t even seen a contract from the viperish Zeliha. Family is the worst employer. Leyla kneels and peers down cracks in the floorboards and under skirting boards, stands on her tiptoes to peer along high shelves, pokes in the corners of wardrobes. An old pair of underpants once used as a duster and cellophane pull-strips from cigarette packets. The floral bouquet of air-freshener is giving her a headache. She’ll have the smell in her head for days. She lifts the lid of the vile toilet cistern.
The other half of this
, Yaşar had said in the Ceylan-Besarani company car, a battered Peugeot citicar stuck permanently in manual due to the autodrive having picked up a virus. He took both hands off the wheel to rummage in his pockets. Leyla grabbed it with her left hand and steered them around the back of a long-distance coach with neat lace curtains. Leyla took the beautiful silver miniature Koran, no bigger than her thumb. Yaşar retook the wheel.
, Yaşar had said in the Ceylan-Besarani company car, a battered Peugeot citicar stuck permanently in manual due to the autodrive having picked up a virus. He took both hands off the wheel to rummage in his pockets. Leyla grabbed it with her left hand and steered them around the back of a long-distance coach with neat lace curtains. Leyla took the beautiful silver miniature Koran, no bigger than her thumb. Yaşar retook the wheel.
‘This is old.’
‘Persian. It’s genuine silver.’
Leyla turned it over and the sense of violation at the naked page, the Holy Koran cut in two, was a reminder that she had not travelled so far from Demre.
‘How does it come to be half a Koran?’
‘There’s a family story in that. Everything’s a family story with us.’
‘Well tell me. I like family stories.’
‘It goes back to the start of the twentieth century, to the First World War. My great-great-whatever grandfather Abdulkadir - they made us learn his name, like he was a father of the nation or something - got sent to Çanakkale. Çanak Bayırı, the hill where Mustafa Kemal made his name. Even in Istanbul everyone knew it was basically a death sentence. The Koran was an old family heirloom; when she heard that Abdulkadir was going to the front, his mother went to a Jewish jeweller and had him cut it very carefully in half. No Muslim would do that, so the story goes. She gave him the front half and kept the back half. The Holy Koran is one thing, indivisible, and would always seek its other half and bring him home again.’
‘Did he come home? Did he survive?’
‘Oh yes. Great-great Abdulkadir was a born survivor. He worked out pretty quickly that the way to keep your head on your shoulders was to stay well away from Kemal and his death-and-glory boys. He lived to be eighty-eight and dropped dead in the middle of a New Year party.’
‘I think you should be proud of him. I think everyone who was at Çanakkale was a hero.’
‘He was the only one to come back from his unit without a scratch on him.’
‘That’s some Koran.’
‘That’s some self-preservation skills.’
Leyla peeps into the cistern. Nothing wrapped up in six condoms and bubble wrap at the bottom of the cistern. Good. She doesn’t want to have to put her hand into that water. Nothing here at all.
‘Take a look at this.’ Yaşar’s soft call from the kitchen. He has opened a cutlery drawer. The landlord’s house-clearers have even sent the knives and forks to auction but left empty plastic vials. The drawer is full of them. Yaşar opens each drawer. They are all full of plastic vials. Yaşar holds one up between thumb and forefinger.
‘Nano.’
‘You’re sure he’s not a relative?’ the concierge says.
‘He’s not a relative,’ Leyla lies.
‘Good, then I can tell you what I really think. He was not a good man, this Mehmet Ali. All sorts of people here at all hours. Not the sort we want round here - this is a family apartment block. Bulgarians. Bad, the lot of them, Bulgarians. Knife you as soon as look at you. And Georgians and Russians - they are a nation of gangsters. And women. You know the type I mean. And bags, out of the backs of vans. Always buying and selling, buying and selling. And boxes and boxes of empty plastic bottles, tiny little bottles. I know what that means. I went over this place with one of those allergic vacuum cleaners. You know, for people who can’t have dust. I don’t want that stuff getting down between the floorboards, making its way into the wiring and the pipes and all. God help us, what if it got into the vermin?’
‘Hyper-intelligent mutant rats,’ Yaşar says. ‘Cool.’
Nano still scares Leyla Gültaşli. No matter how safe or respectable or ubiquitous it has become, she imagines it crawling inside her, like legends of terrible old mountain men invaded and hollowed out by lice so that they were nothing inside but swarming vileness. She imagines it like ash in the veins, like she has heard people who inject drugs feel; dirty inside. At the college she had always declined it, going bare-brained to exams and assignments even if it disadvantaged her against her focused, sharp, pattern-recognizing course-mates. She weakened under the pressure of the final exams. There was always someone who knew someone who could get the good stuff, the grey stuff, the stuff that really worked. The vial had worked its way up the supply chain, perhaps from this kitchen work-top. It stood on her bedside cabinet, leaking nightmares. The morning of the first exam she had snapped the top and poured the nano, fine and fluid as water, down the toilet. Two flushes to be safe. Let the fish of the Galata Bridge be focused and sharp and recognize patterns they’ve never seen before. She could not bear the thought of dirt and ashes inside her.
‘Do you know who bought all the fixtures?’ Leyla says.
‘You’d have to ask . . . .’
‘. . . the landlord. Can I have his number?’
The concierge shrugs. Leyla peels out another twenty. It’s sole remaining cousin is lonely, nestled in the silk lining. Another note to Zeliha: everything can be done with petty cash.
Leyla slips her shoes off again; the stairs are more treacherous going down than coming up.
‘Yaşar.’ He trots diligently two steps behind. Out of the office he’s a pussy cat. In the office he’s bullish and aggressive. Leyla’s grown up in a house of brothers and knows boys and their incessant competition. Leyla wonders how Yaşar and Aso ever built a working business. It’s not working. That’s why she’s here. Who writes loan agreements on hemi-Korans? ‘Two things. One: I’ve set up a meeting with the European Emerging Technologies Investment Board for this afternoon. They have a fast track scheme, though I’m not sure how fast fast track is.’ She had been up until three this morning, clicking through the Byzantine levels of European funds and bursaries and development loans and start-up funds and Next-Step programmes. She had begged a last-minute cancellation slot on the ceptep on the metro that morning. ‘I’d like Aso to go to that. You’re a brilliant designer but you look and dress like a drummer from a metal band.’
‘The fuck . . .’
‘It’ll mean a haircut. And a suit.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Aso goes then. Two: I’d like the chip to the car. You are the worst driver I have ever seen.’
‘You drive?’
‘Of course I drive.’
‘That’s Demre driving. This is Istanbul driving.’
‘Give me the chip.’
No one is driving. The Peugeot has been hauled up onto the back of a big red tow truck emblazoned with salutations and improving religious mottoes. Leyla raps the driver’s door. The driver winds down the window but it’s the passenger who leans over to speak to her.
‘You’re looking for Mehmet Ali.’ The passenger is a bullet-headed, baby-faced man, piggy eyes and pursed lips. His voice is low and sweet. ‘We’re looking for him too.’
‘Who are you? Are you the landlord? I told the kapıcı we’re not related. Give me my car back.’
‘No, I’m not the landlord. Does he owe him money as well? That wouldn’t surprise me. It was the kapıcı messaged me. I’m a former business associate of Mehmet Ali Bey. He does owe me money. It’s quite a sum.’
‘That’s not my business. Give me my car back.’
‘Well, it is your business. I’ve made it your business, in that if you find out where he is you’ll let me know.’
Where is Yaşar? Leyla is too too conscious that she is standing at the side of the truck with her heels in her hand and very few options. Her one advantage is that he doesn’t know that she isn’t looking for Mehmet Ali for money. She isn’t necessarily looking for Mehmet Ali, just his half of a miniature Koran. ‘Deal,’ she says. The bullet-headed man’s baby-face is genuinely surprised but the tow-truck driver hits a button, a winch whines and the Peugeot is lowered off the flat bed. It runs a little way off the ramps before the winch brakes it.
‘I’ll need some way of getting in touch with you,’ Leyla says.
‘I’d prefer not to do that,’ the bullet-headed man says. The driver starts the engine. ‘We’ll keep an eye on you.’
Leyla waits until the red tow-truck has rounded the corner and is out of sight. She turns on Yaşar.
‘Give me the chip. Give me the starter chip. The starter chip.’ He surrenders it meekly. He is genuinely scared, whether of her or the tow-truck incident she can’t say. Leyla is shaking with fear and anger now. She slips in behind the wheel. The heels go in the back. She can drive this heap of scrap barefoot. ‘I’ll drive, you navigate. Family conference. Right now. Having my car kidnapped by thugs is not in my terms and conditions.’
In Kuzguncuk, old wooden Ottoman houses step down the street beneath generous trees. They are painted bold and bright; chrome yellow, ultramarine, crimson and pink. Upper storeys overhang; old men and cats sit in the shade, world-watching. Screens of pierced and painted wood shelter top-floor balconies. Everyone who is sensible enough not to have a job to go to is up there, trying to catch any wind. Old men and cats have never been sensible.
Ayşe goes slowly up between the bright houses. The street is steep, the day is hot, the boots are tight, the cobbles treacherous to heels. The old men look over their glasses at her; someone madder than they. She is looking for a blue house; blue as a cornflower. A city witch lives there; an urbomancer, a psychogeographer. Ayşe loves this neighbourhood, its sheltered green valley pulled around it like a shawl. For a time she had entertained Kuzguncuk as a location for the gallery. The Bosphorus Bridge ran a kilometre to the north, the expressway looped over the ridge at the head of the valley, ferryboats could be glimpsed down through the leaning houses and fairy-light-strewn branches, but none spoiled the perfumed charm of Kuzguncuk. Kuzguncuk’s seclusion was its limitation: she would have sat days on end waiting for the door bell to tinkle. People came to look, to wander, to waste time and chance upon small joys. No one can build a business on serendipity. Eskiköy was grey and dirty and old but it was in the heart of the antiquarian district. For wanderers and meanderers and stumblers-over of trifles, historians of the spirit of place, psychogeographers, Kuzguncuk is perfect.
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