The Water Diviner (21 page)

‘I thought I was dreaming. What is it?’

‘Please help! My father!’ Ayshe begs.

Ayshe leads Connor along the low-lit corridor to the French doors that open onto the terrace. There they look towards Ibrahim who stands, swaying, on the very edge of the pitched tiled roof in his dinner suit, bellowing in Turkish at imagined foes in the street two storeys below. The only thing that stops him from toppling head first onto the cobblestones is his tenuous hold on a rusted pipe.

He shakes his fist furiously as he shouts, tottering and swinging out over the street.

‘What have you done to my country, you fat, spoilt buffoons with your thousand wives and syphilis sores?’

Ayshe is desperate. She leans over the balustrade, beseeching Ibrahim in Turkish and holding out her arms towards him. Eyes shut, head thrown back, his daughter’s pleas fail to reach him through the fog of delirium. She turns to Connor.

‘He’s too strong. I beg him – but he’s inside his head.’

It is only a matter of time before her father loses his footing and falls. She watches as Connor assesses the danger. He swings his legs over the terrace rail and steps carefully onto the mossy, terracotta-tiled roof. As he transfers his weight, his boots slip suddenly, immediately dislodging two tiles that skate down the steeply angled incline and plummet to the street below with an ominous crash.

Ayshe grabs Connor’s arm. ‘Be careful! Do not frighten him!’

Looking back at her, Connor seems a little put out by her apparent lack of concern for his welfare. He begins to edge his way carefully towards where Ibrahim teeters, a hair’s-breadth from calamity. The old man continues to rant and rail.

‘What have you done to our city? What have you done to your people?’

‘What’s he saying?’ Connor calls out to Ayshe as he continues to sidle towards the old man.

‘He cries for everything we have lost.’

Her father continues to wail. ‘Caliph of the Faithful, Emperor of the Ottomans! Seize the sword of Osman, restore our fortunes!’

Reaching Ibrahim, Connor gently but firmly takes his arm and says calmly, ‘Why don’t we sit here for a while?’

Ibrahim turns his head and looks deeply into his eyes, uncomprehending. Ayshe watches on with trepidation as Connor carefully seats himself on the tiles and indicates for Ibrahim to join him. The old man looks out across the city and sighs. Bending his knees and guided by Connor, he reaches out behind him and rests his hands on the rooftop, lowering himself down to find a seat beside the Australian.

Once settled, Ibrahim speaks. ‘Yes. Yes. Good. Let us watch the parade together . . .’

This is not the first time Ibrahim’s manic nightscape has been populated by apparitions and phantasms. The pomp and splendour of the Ottoman court fill the streets in his mind’s eye with a triumphal march. ‘How magnificent . . .’

Ibrahim turns to Connor and his daughter with tears in his eyes.

‘We shall not see the like of this again.’

After coaxing him back onto the terrace and into the house, Connor helps Ayshe escort Ibrahim to his room. While she settles her father to bed, Connor waits outside, sitting on the steps at the top of the landing. He tells himself she may need his help again. As he sits there listening to the low murmurs coming from behind the heavy timber door, he wonders at the growing attraction he has for this woman. When he married Lizzie it was for life. He was sure he would never feel this way about anyone else. But he can’t help feeling abandoned, that Lizzie chose to leave him.

And now, the quiet strength and determination of this Turkish woman, her resolve, and her deep love and loyalty for her son and her father, triggers something long buried in Connor’s subconscious.

The door opens quietly and Ayshe steps out into the hallway. She turns to Connor apologetically.

‘He had a great mind once. My father was a physician at the Sultan’s court.’ She pauses, lost in memories.

Looking up, they lock eyes. Connor feels his heart leap.

‘I thank you for your help, Mr Connor.’

‘Joshua, please.’

‘Thank you, then, Joshua.’ She turns to leave.

‘Wait, I have something of yours.’ Connor strides down the hall. Opening his door, he scans the room, spying Art’s diary on the bedspread where it slipped from his chest when Ayshe woke him. The journal falls open at the spot where he had placed the photograph Orhan gave him before he left for Chanak.

When he returns, Ayshe has found a seat on the top step of the stairway where she leans wearily against the timber balustrade. Connor hands her the photo.

‘Orhan asked me to look for your husband at Gallipoli.’

Smiling sadly, Ayshe gazes closely at it.

‘I hate this photograph. Turgut is a musician – never a soldier. What did they think he would do – waltz them to death?’

‘How long were you married?’

‘I am married – ten years . . . My mother had arranged for me to marry someone else but my father fought her.’ She laughs. ‘He told her: “Why would we want our daughter to be as miserable as we are?” and she agreed.’

Ayshe looks into the distance. ‘It is not easy to marry for love here.’ She smiles resignedly. ‘Maybe my mother was right – Turgut was mad. Bills up to the roof not paid, music all hours, parties, lazy friends – oh, but how I miss the chaos.’

Connor takes a seat on a step further down the staircase, leaning his strong back against the wall with his legs bent and feet resting against the balustrade.

‘I wish my mother had arranged my marriage for me.’

‘You did not love your wife?’

‘I adored Lizzie. But I was so bad at courting. So clumsy. It took forever.’ He recalls his awkward attempts at attracting Lizzie’s attention. Widely recognised as one of the district’s best catches, she had no shortage of suitors. He could never quite understand why she chose him.

‘Everything I said would offend her. My tongue would stick to the roof of my mouth. I think she only married me out of impatience.’

‘But it was happy?’

‘Very. Until the boys were lost. In the first year, every week she would head into town – twenty miles – and wait for the train. Just in case. Now I’ve found two of our sons she would be more at peace. It is good to know where they are – they’re not lost or nameless anymore.’ At last Connor had the opportunity to share his exciting news. ‘And I have been told my eldest boy was taken prisoner . . .’

‘So he is alive?’

‘I have no idea. No one else seems to think so.’

‘But you have hope?’

‘Hope is a necessity where I come from. It’s hard country, the Mallee – most of it just dust.’ Connor laughs. ‘My wife used to call me her Mallee Bull. A big, dumb brute – impossible to shift. I believe things when I see them.’

Ayshe gets to her feet. ‘That is good news, then.’ She turns to re-enter her father’s room. ‘Good night, Mr Bull.’

She sits on the end of Ibrahim’s bed, holding the photo in her hand. Ayshe looks at her husband and son and weeps, tears streaming down her cheeks and falling in dark pools on her chiffon gown. Her father twitches and murmurs, his visions continuing to pursue him in sleep.

She knows she no longer has any choice. Steeling herself, she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. Standing, she moves to the head of her father’s bed, bowing to kiss him lightly on the forehead.

Ayshe speaks to him under her breath.

‘I understand why you prefer to be lost in the past, Father. But unfortunately it’s a luxury I can no longer afford. Forgive me.’

H
asan shifts impatiently in a hard timber chair. The anteroom in Topkapi Palace is decorated in gauche and lavish Rococo style, from a time when the Ottoman sultans sought to mimic the gaudiest French and Italian fashions of the day.

For centuries the Turkish rulers have felt compelled to prove their bona fides by outdoing their Continental counterparts. In the early years of the Empire, with incalculable riches flooding into the city along the Silk Road and the spice routes, the opulence of the Ottoman court was without equal. But once the Western European powers rose to prominence, keeping up with the neighbours became a very expensive exercise. Nowadays the sultans seem to spend most of their time successfully frustrating their treasurers and viziers by sapping the public coffers.

Hasan has never understood the fixation Turkish rulers have with being European, when in reality they were and are so much more. Ultimately their vanity has been the undoing of the Empire.

Today he wears his finest tunic, braided trousers, gleaming knee-high boots and a dress sword that rattles against the chair leg whenever he shifts his weight. A cylindrical woollen hat, his
serpuş
, rests on his knee. On his left breast he wears the Harp Madalyasɩ medal for Gallipoli veterans: a silver crescent over a red enamel star. The Germans he fought with nicknamed it the Iron Crescent after their own medal of honour, the Iron Cross. The European compulsion to believe they invented everything mystifies Hasan. Above it hangs an impressive medallion with a seven-pointed star and an enamel centre decorated with Arabic calligraphy. It is the Order of Osmania, one of the Ottoman Empire’s highest honours, but today its significance escapes the low-ranking French and British officers who bustle in and out and eye Hasan with suspicion.

Sultan Mehmed V, a man whose own jacket breast groaned under the weight of self-awarded medals, had bestowed the Order of Osmania on Hasan. He pinned the medal on his tunic, kissed him on both cheeks and headed off to bed feeling poorly. A week later the Sultan died, only months before the war ended. Hasan imagines that Mehmed died of a broken heart, unable to bear the imminent downfall of the Empire.

After half an hour of waiting Hasan is becoming tetchy. Things would be different if Jemal were here. Which is exactly why Hasan elected to come alone. His staff sergeant has many fine qualities but diplomacy and patience are not amongst them. He smiles at the thought of Jemal huffing and bellowing indignantly on his behalf; a raging bull in a bazaar. Yet as his frustration rises, Hasan is beginning to wish he had brought him.

The chanting that seeps in from the street momentarily distracts him. Constantinople’s Christians – half the city’s population is Greek and Russian – are cheering the British soldiers. The Greeks, especially, imagine this is the beginning of the liberation of the city that was once the capital of Greek Byzantium. Heated conversations in
kafeneion
s across Constantinople begin and end with, ‘What do they expect? This city was founded by the Greek king, Byzas – ‘twas all Greece, you know.’

Hasan’s countrymen have taken to the streets in protest. How dare the British dissolve their parliament? How can Sultan Mehmed VI be so chicken-hearted as to allow it? What happened to the man who wields the sword of Allah? His predecessors had honorifics like ‘The Conqueror,’ ‘The Warrior’ or ‘The Thunderbolt.’ Mehmed has the heart of a librarian or an accountant. After Friday prayers, when the city’s disillusioned Turks have had time to stew on the events of the week and their disappointment boils over, Hasan overhears the nicknames they have coined for Mehmed: ‘The Worrier,’ ‘The Puppet’ and ‘The Thundercloud.’ Even in dire times his countrymen have not lost their sense of the absurd.

Nor have they lost their penchant for theatre. Black bolts of fabric are draped from the minarets of the Blue Mosque, mourning the death of young Nationalists hanged by the British for attempting to smuggle arms out of the city. Perhaps the fabric billowing in the breeze signals the hastening death of democracy in Turkey. The despair rises in Hasan’s throat like acid and he can sit no longer. A small group of French officers file into the room and occupy the remaining seats. They look him up and down with smug smiles, whispering with each other behind raised hands and sniggering like schoolboys. When an adjoining door opens and they are ushered in, it is the last straw for Hasan. He yells through the open door.

‘I have an appointment with Admiral Calthorpe. How much more of this must I endure?’

Hasan hears a distant door slam followed by the clatter of boots on marble approaching at speed. Captain Brindley appears at the door in front of Hasan, speaking formally without a hint of sincerity.