The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (14 page)

‘It is as you said of Shahriyar and I said of Walter-there must be a wonderful pleasure for some people in being other people’s fates and destinies. Perhaps it gave them the illusion that their own fates too were in their own hands–’

‘Perhaps,’ said Orhan. ‘Perhaps life mattered less to them, their own or anyone else’s.’

‘Do you really think they thought that?’

‘No,’ said Orhan, looking round the empty maze of hidden rooms and secret places. ‘No, not really. We like to say that. They believed in a future life. We can’t imagine that.’

Showing her round Istanbul, nevertheless, Orhan became more Turkish. Before the great gold throne of Murat III studded with emeralds, and cushioned in gold and white silk, he said,

‘We were a nomadic people. We came over the steppes from Mongolia, from China. Our thrones are portable treasures, our throne-rooms resemble tents, we put our skill into small things, daggers and bowls and cups.’ She remembered the rhythms of his recitation of the poem of the red horsemen.

•  •  •

In the Haghia Sophia she had her third encounter with Fate, or with something. Haghia Sophia is a confusing place, echoing and empty, hugely domed and architecturally uncertain, despite its vast and imposing space: it has been church and mosque and modern museum; it has minarets and patches, ghosts, of ruined gold mosaics of Byzantine emperors and the Christian mother and child. The emperor Justinian built it from eclectic materials, collecting pillars and ornaments from temples in Greece and Egypt, including pillars from the temple of the Goddess in Ephesus. It could feel-Gillian had expected it to feel-like a meeting-place of cultures, of East and West, the Christian Church and Islam, but it did not. It felt like an empty exhausted barn, exhausted by battle and pillage and religious rage. Whatever had been there had gone, had fled long ago, Gillian felt, and Orhan too showed no emotion, but returned to his European academic self, pointing out the meanings of the mosaics and talking of his own new thoughts about the absurdities of the theories of Marcuse which had been all the rage in the sixties, when they began to teach. ‘There is a curious pillar here,’ he said vaguely, ‘somewhere or other, with a hole of some sort, where people wish, you might like to see that, if I can find it. The stone is worn away by people touching it, I forget what it does, but you might like to see it.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Gillian.

‘They put a brass casing round the magic stone to preserve it,’ said Orhan. ‘But the pilgrims have worn it away, they have eaten into the pillar just with touching, through the brass and the stone. Now where is it, I should be able to find it. It is like wearing away with waterdrops, wearing away with faith, I find that quite interesting, I wish I could remember what it
does,
’

When they came to it, there was a family already clustered round it, a Pakistani father and his wife and two daughters, richly beautiful in saris, one pink and gold, one peacock and flame, one blue and silver. They had found the pillar with the hole and its brass casing, and the three women were clustered round it, stroking, putting their hands in and out, chattering like subdued birds. The father, dignified in his black coat, approached Orhan, and asked if he spoke English. Orhan said yes, and was asked to help translate an account of the pillar from a French-Turkish guidebook.

Whilst he did this, the three women, in their fluttering silk, turned laughing to Gillian Perholt, and stretched out three soft hands with gold bangles on their wrists, pulling her by her sleeve, by her hand, towards the pillar, laughing softly. They patted Dr Perholt’s shoulders, they put arms around her and pushed and pulled, smiling and laughing, they took her hand in theirs with strong, wiry grips and inserted it into the hole, showing her in mime what she must do, turn her hand in the hole, touching the inside rim, round, round, round, three times. She pulled back instinctively, out of an English hygienic horror of something so much touched by so many, and out of a more primitive fear, of something clammy, and moist, and nasty in the dark inside. But the women insisted; they were surprisingly forceful. There was liquid of some kind in there, some pool of something in the stem of the pillar. Dr Perholt’s skin crawled and the women laughed, and Orhan recited the story of the pillar in English to the other man. Apparently, he said, it had been touched by Saint Gregory Thaumaturge, the Miracle-Worker, he had put his power into it. The water inside the pillar was efficacious for diseases of vision and for fertility. The women laughed more loudly, clustering round Dr Perholt. The father told Orhan how he had made pilgrimage to all the holy shrines of Islam; he had travelled far and seen much. He supposed Orhan, too, had made pilgrimages. Orhan nodded, grave and non-committal; he was interested. The West was evil, said the respectable black-coated pilgrim. Evil, decadent, and sliding into darkness. But power was arising. There would be a jihad. True religion would bring the cleansing sword and destroy the filth and greed and corruption of the dying West, and a religious world would be established in its ashes; these things were not only possible, they were already happening. The seeds were sown, the sparks were set, the field of spears would spring up, the fire would consume. This was what he said, this paterfamilias, standing in Haghia Sophia, whose stones had run with blood, whose cavernous spaces had been piled high with corpses, whose spirit had died, Gillian Perholt felt, but maybe felt because she could not feel the new spirit, which spoke to this family, and in them filled her with fear. Orhan, she saw, was in some way enjoying himself. He prolonged the conversation, nodding gravely, inserting mild questions – ‘you have seen signs, mn?’-making no move to change his interlocutor’s impression that he was a good Muslim, in a mosque.

His family came everywhere with him, said the pilgrim. They like to see new places. And she, does she speak English?

It was clear that Gillian had been taken for a quiet Muslim wife. She had been standing two paces behind Orhan as he cast about for the magic pillar. Orhan replied gravely:

‘She
is
English. She is a visiting professor. An eminent visiting professor.’

Orhan, a child of Atatürk’s new world, was enjoying himself. Atatürk had emancipated women. Leyla Serin and Leyla Doruk were also his children, powerful people, thinking teachers. Orhan liked drama, and he had made a nice little revelatory clash. The Pakistani gentleman was not happy. He and Gillian looked at each other, both, she thought, remembering things he had said a moment ago about London being a sewer of decay and the Commonwealth a dead body, putrefying and shrivelling away to nothing. She could not meet the Pakistani’s eye; she was English and embarrassed for him. He could not meet her eye. She was a woman, and should not have been there, with a man who was not her husband, in a museum that was also a mosque. He gathered his flock – who still smiled at Gillian, fluttering their elegant fingers in farewell. ‘Hrmph,’ said Orhan. ‘Istanbul is a meeting-place for many cultures. You didn’t like the pillar, Gillian? Your face was very funny, very ladylike.’

‘I don’t like Haghia Sophia,’ said Gillian. ‘I expected to. I like the idea of Sophia, of Wisdom, I like it that she is wise and female, I expected to feel – something – in her church. And there is a wet hole for fertility wishes. In a pillar that might have come from the Temple of Artemis.’

‘Not that pillar, I think,’ said Orhan.

‘If I was a postmodernist punster,’ said Gillian, ‘I would make something of Haghia Sophia. She has got old, she has turned into a Hag. But I can’t, because I respect etymologies, it means holy. “Hag” is my word, a northern word, nothing to do with here.’

‘You have said it now,’ said Orhan. ‘Even if you repudiate it. Lots of American students here do think Hag is Hag. They get excited about Crones.’

‘I don’t,’ said Gillian.

‘No,’ said Orhan, not revealing what he himself thought about hags and crones. ‘We shall go to the Bazaar. Shopping is good for the souls of western women. And eastern. And men like it too.’

It was true that the Grand Bazaar was livelier and brighter than the vast cavern of Haghia Sophia. Here was a warren of arcades, of Aladdin’s caves full of lamps and magical carpets, of silver and brass and gold and pottery and tiles. Here and there behind a shop-front, seated in an armchair at a bench surrounded by dangling lamps and water-shakers from the baths, or sitting cross-legged on a bale of carpets amongst a tent of carpets, Orhan had ex-students who brought cups of Turkish coffee, tulip-shaped glasses of rose tea to Gillian, and displayed their wares. The carpet-seller had written a Ph.D. on
Tristram Shandy
, and now travelled into Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, bringing back carpets on journeys made by camel, by jeep, into the mountains. He showed Gillian pallid kilims in that year’s timid Habitat colours, pale 1930s eau-de-nil and bois-de-rose with a sad null grey. No, said Gillian, no, she wanted richness, the dark bright blues, the crimsons and scarlets, the golds and rusts of the old carpets with their creamy blossoms, their trees full of strange birds and flowers. The West is fickle, said Bulent the carpet-seller, they say they want these insipid colours this year, and the women in India and Iran buy the wool and the silk, and the next year, when the carpets are made, they want something else, black and purple and orange, and the women are ruined, their profit is lost, heaps of carpets lie round and rot. I think you will like this carpet, said Bulent, pouring coffee; it is a wedding carpet, a dowry carpet, to hang on the wall of a nomad’s tent. Here is the tree of life, crimson and black on midnight blue. This you like. Oh yes, said Gillian, seeing the dark woven tree against the yellows and whites of her Primrose Hill room, now hers alone. The woman, whoever she was, had made it strong and complex, flaunting and subtle. I can’t haggle, said Gillian to Orhan, I’m English. You would be surprised, said Orhan, at some English people’s skill in that art. But Bulent is my student, and he will give you a fair price, for love of
Tristram Shandy.
And suddenly Gillian felt well again, full of life and singing with joy, away from the puddle in the pillar and the brooding Hag, hidden away in an Aladdin’s cave made of magic carpets with small delightful human artefacts, an unknown woman’s wedding carpet, sentimental Sterne’s monumental fantasia on life before birth, black-brown coffee poured from a bright copper pan, tasting rich and almost, but not quite, unbearably strong and sweet.

Another of Orhan’s students had a little shop in the central square of the market-maze, Iç Bedesten, a shop whose narrow walls were entirely hung with pots, pans, lamps, bottles, leather objects, old tools whose purpose was unguessable, chased daggers and hunting knives, shadow-puppets made of camel skin, perfume flasks, curling tongs.

‘I will give you a present,’ said Orhan. ‘A present to say good-bye.’

(He was leaving the next day for Texas, where a colloquium of narratologists was studying family sagas in Dallas. Gillian had a talk to give at the British Council and three more days in Istanbul.)

‘I will give you the shadow puppets, Karagöz and Hacivat, and here is the magic bird, the Simurgh, and here is a woman involved with a dragon, I think she may be a djinee, with a little winged demon on her shoulders, you might like her.’

The small figures were wrapped carefully in scarlet tissue. Whilst this was happening Gillian poked about on a bench and found a bottle, a very dusty bottle amongst an apparently unsorted pile of new/old things. It was a flask with a high neck, that fitted comfortably into the palms of her hands, and had a glass stopper like a miniature dome. The whole was dark, with a regular whirling pattern of white stripes moving round it. Gillian collected glass paperweights: she liked glass in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth. Blown with human breath in a furnace of fire. As a child she had loved to read of glass balls containing castles and snowstorms, though in reality she had always found these disappointing and had transferred her magical attachment to the weights in which coloured forms and carpets of geometric flowers shone perpetually and could be made to expand and contract as the sphere of glass turned in her fingers in the light. She liked to take a weight back from every journey, if one could be found, and had already bought a Turkish weight, a cone of glass like a witch’s hat, rough to touch, greenish-transparent like ice, with the concentric circles, blue, yellow, white, blue, of the eye which repels the evil eye, at the base.

‘What is this?’ she asked Orhan’s student, Feyyaz.

He took the flask from her, and rubbed at the dust with a finger.

‘I’m not an expert in glass,’ he said. ‘It could be çesm-i bülbül, nightingale’s eye. Or it could be fairly recent Venetian glass. “çesm-i bülbül” means nightingale’s eye. There was a famous Turkish glass workshop at Incirköy-round about 1845, I think – made this famous Turkish glass, with this spiral pattern of opaque blue and white stripes, or red sometimes, I think. I don’t know why it is called eye of the nightingale. Perhaps nightingales have eyes that are transparent and opaque. In this country we were obsessed with nightingales. Our poetry is full of nightingales.’

‘Before pollution,’ said Orhan, ‘before television, everyone came out and walked along the Bosphorus and in all the gardens, to hear the first nightingales of the year. It was very beautiful. Like the Japanese and the cherry blossom. A whole people, walking quietly in the spring weather, listening.’

Feyyaz recited a verse in Turkish and Orhan translated.

Gillian said, ‘I must have this. Because the word and the thing don’t quite match, and I love both of them. But if it is çesm-i bülbül it will be valuable …’

‘It probably isn’t,’ said Feyyaz. ‘It’s probably recent Venetian. Our glassmakers went to Venice in the eighteenth century to learn, and the Venetians helped us to develop the techniques of the nineteenth century. I will sell it to you as if it were Venetian, because you like it, and you may imagine it is çesm-i bülbül and perhaps it will be, is, that is.’