The Sultan of Byzantium (17 page)

Waiting in the courtyard, the team was in an anxious state. I’d already telegraphed the bad news with a head-shake as they swept towards me. On Askaris’ face was that upset expression common to teachers whose students have failed their mid-terms. I said, patting him on the shoulder, ‘We’ll come back tomorrow, but I don’t think my luck will improve.’ Pappas kept his eyes on the ground and looked like he was trying not to smile. I tried to lighten the mood by grabbing his beard in both hands and saying, ‘Hey Theo, did you ask Nomo to disqualify me in my grandfather’s home town?’

After lunch in Trabzon I decided we should drive up the coast and return by way of Artvin, on the Georgian border. I planned to use this Eastern Black Sea excursion to pull myself together. I would review my notes when we returned. But first I wanted to drop by the hotel to freshen up and get rid of my briefcase. When I opened the door to my room and saw the small purple envelope on the night stand, my heart skipped a beat. To my shock and surprise, the purple square was inside! Stashing the envelope in my briefcase, I rushed back down to the team waiting in the lobby. I told them what had happened. We all decided to keep it a secret from hotel management, considering the possible risks. To assess the seriousness of the situation I took the silver box from my briefcase and placed the square in the third slot. There was a click and ten seconds later, in the opposite rectangle, the words popped up, ‘Palace of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, Iznik.’

Was this a royal joke or a trap? I turned to Askaris and said, ‘I won’t go to Iznik, nor even Izmit, until I speak with Nomo.’ It made me nervous to see him exchange meaningful glances with Kalligas. Scolding both of them, I said, ‘I don’t know who you should call, Askaris, Nomo or your master; but I know well that I want some kind of answer right now!’ The horse-faced man clutched his cell phone and walked away from us in order – probably – to talk to one of his superiors. He obtained a reply that somebody would get back to me in an hour. We climbed into a rented van and turned toward Artvin. Just as we hit Hopa we got a call, and Askaris told the driver to pull over. He got out and spoke on his phone briefly. He looked relaxed when he came back.

‘Excellency, they’re asking you to continue. Unfortunately no further information was given to me to pass along to you.’

Seeing my lip curl, he felt the need to go on.

‘Excellency, will you permit me to offer a brief explanation of my own?’

‘If you leave out the phony answer you got from the phone and compress it into forty words, all right.’

‘Excellency, this is my personal evaluation. In my opinion, you’ve been put through a test of character. If you wished, you could have hidden the fact that the envelope was left in your room and you could have taken us all back to Sumela and pretended to find the purple square there. Nobody could have claimed that you’d done wrong. But at the cost of being disqualified, you disclosed the truth.’

‘Askaris, you’ve already said enough. Do you even believe what you’re saying? My reasons to drop out of this game are stronger than those I have to stay in. But I’ll stay, maybe just because I refuse to walk out in the middle of an exam. And maybe too because I wouldn’t mind seeing Iznik.’

I relaxed on our return journey. The mystery of the envelope would be revealed, I supposed, either in due time or by way of a leak from Nomo. When I noticed the team also relaxing, I said, ‘Friends, I want you to hear a poem by Karacaoğlan, who happens to be the greatest poet – past, present, or future – this soil has produced. Askaris will translate it into English, then Kalligas into Greek. And Pappas will summarize what he’s understood. Whoever screws up will find himself in the Black Sea.’

One issue that vexed me in elementary school was the failure of the seasons to keep up with the calendar. For me it was a scandal that in the northern hemisphere winters did not begin on December 1 and end on February 28. When I made the mistake of asking my grandmother the reason for this, the reply was, ‘These things are decided by the Almighty, not by the calendar.’

In our neighborhood, according to Eugenio, the four seasons consisted of yesterday, today, daytime and night time. Anybody cooking up a theory like this would have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Galatian, of course. But I knew that with this line of thought he wanted to put me in the mood for an exam. And that’s exactly how I started to tackle riddles and puzzles, with myself as my own rival and judge. If our winds had gone nervously slaloming around, I wouldn’t have liked December. But when I was a child, that muttering wind used to be my number two confidant. Naturally I didn’t admit it openly, as Tristan would have been envious. In one of the dreams that I hid from everybody the mother of all winds was the sea and their father was the shadow. The jealous shadow was the love child of the sun and the moon. He repeatedly abandoned the sea, yet he wouldn’t let the wind stay with her either. Yes, they were immortal as long as the sun continued to rise.

Winds were the carrier pigeons of time. They took messages from lakes to deserts, from forests to mountains and, most important of all, from one ancient building to another. As I descended from Galata to Eugenio’s museum-like house my mind was buzzing with these things. The Tower looked a little disappointed because I hadn’t got close to any buildings older than it on my journey.

‘Well, Reverend,’ I said, sidling up to it. ‘Things aren’t how you think. I’m in the middle of a test made up of six questions. The first two were so easy they were a joke, and on the third they forced me to cheat.’

I objected to being put through a stress test, if that was what Nomo had in mind. To get away from it all, I declared December a month-long holiday. The team’s response was something between joy and surprise. I would devote my time until the end of the year exclusively to my hobbies and the town prostitutes.

*

On the night of December 8 I was enjoying a pleasant tiredness after Hayal’s birthday party. ‘You’re the best big brother in the world and you deserve the best girl on earth!’ my sister had squealed as she embraced me upon seeing the Chopard wristwatch I’d bought her. My own stoic inability to feel euphoric was always a humorous contrast to her exuberance. I remembered the night I’d found Hayal, half-naked and crying on the street, and carried her home on my back. The olive-eyed girl had become my daughter and sister both and helped me retain my self-respect. I felt an inner glow as I gave her a hug. And to maintain that warmth I could think of nothing better than a vodka on ice.

Before climbing into bed with Michael Palmer’s
Collected Poems
, whose cover featured two lions about to cry, I checked my e-mail. Dr Mistral Sapuntzoglu was inviting me to a talk that she would give at the American Research Institute in Turkey on 12.12.08 in the evening.

ARIT was founded by a consortium of a dozen American universities. Its respectable library held 12,000 volumes in English on Byzantium. More than the half-hearted promise I’d given to Dr Sapuntzoglu, it was this library that drew me to ARIT before the appointed hour. The modest mansion in Arnavutköy, without a view of the Bosphorus, was probably the legacy of either an inefficient or unfortunate Ottoman bureaucrat. I spent forty minutes in the quiet library on the top floor and felt relieved to find no notes from my father in any of the forty books I scanned. Boredom struck as soon as I pulled
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
off the shelf, so I went down to the lecture room. There were seventeen minutes to go before the talk. About fifty people stood around in small groups chatting and waiting. The male-dominated, middle-aged audience darted surreptitious glances at the young blonde woman in front of the lectern whenever they got the chance. She was conversing with a bearded foreigner and Selçuk Altun. I was still in the phase of surprise when Eugenio’s old friend beckoned me over with an insistent gesture.

In his bookish English he said, ‘Evidently you’ve already met Misty, in Mistra of all places. This kind of pleasant coincidence only happens in novels. And you still continue to insist on poetry.’

As I listened to him ramble on about how he had worked with the speaker’s uncle at the London office of an international corporation and how their friendship went back to the 1970s, I studied Mistral Sapuntzoglu with new interest. Apparently the blonde woman who’d assisted my research in Mistra had blue eyes and a pert nose. Her high forehead was a sign of intelligence, according to my grandmother. When I joined the conversation I saw that she was not in fact a cold Scandinavian beauty. She was self-confident and relaxed, like somebody from the Mediterranean. I figured that men put up with her conceited ways because of her beauty. Me, I never did like those ‘Grace Kelly’ types. I planned to sit in the back and sneak out at the second paragraph.

The bearded American academic who could tell jokes in perfect Turkish must have been the head of the Institute. It was an annoyance when he invited me to join their small group at a fish restaurant after Mistral’s talk. He only smiled at my lame and panic-stricken excuse. Just at that moment Selçuk Altun came out with his statement: ‘Just so you know, Misty wants to see some of the neighborhood Byzantine churches during her two weeks of research in Istanbul. I know you carried out a similar expedition not long ago, and besides, you have some spare time. I already told her, in your name, that you would be glad to show her around.’ It was odd that this writer, whose works I never read, was manipulating me as if I were one of his characters. But I couldn’t say no. Smiling at the speaker, about whose talk I had no curiosity whatever, I said, ‘Well, I owe Doctor Sapuntzoglu a favor.’ I took a seat in the back of the room close to the door and prepared to listen to how wonderfully one of my ancestors, Manuel II, performed as an emperor.

From the monotonous introduction by a female academic we learned that Mistral took her PhD at Cambridge after graduating from the University of Stockholm (which would make her about two years younger than me). To warm up the audience Dr Sapuntzoglu said, ‘You can understand from my last name that my father was a Greek man with Anatolian roots. But I can’t do much with the Turkish I learned from him except swear at your forefathers.’ This brought a laugh from the majority. I stayed until the very end of the paper, which was called ‘Manuel II Palaeologus: Statesman of Genius?’ The doctor was not only a good speaker, she had a good command of her subject. She captivated the audience in her third sentence by reading a note that Manuel II wrote about the Mevlevi Sufi order. (I wondered how many of her male students fell in love with her as they listened to her lectures.) While emphasizing the accomplishments of Manuel II as statesman, commander, diplomat, scholar, writer and theologian, she ignored his underhanded treatment of Venice. She spoke about Manuel’s daughter Zampia and her marriage to a respectable Genoese man, and I imagined Sapuntzoglu as the mistress of a semi-potent married professor.

Over the next three days I took Mistral to a total of twenty-two churches or ruins of one kind or another. Trying to keep to a schedule, I picked her up at ARIT in the morning and saw her off to Arnavutköy again in the evening. The first day we visited the churches converted to mosques that I’d explored in the summer. We had help in finding other places on her list from the guide Cevat Mert and various neighborhood informants. Even I got excited when we went looking for the Church of St. George, which was built by Constantine IX as a place to meet his lover and was burned down by his wife Zoe after he died. And the Church of Soteros Philantropos, where Princess Irene took refuge upon her husband’s death. And the Church of Our Lady at Blachernae, where the Blessed Virgin’s garments were kept. Mistral was a woman at peace with herself, who whistled a tune whenever she found the opportunity and never uttered a word without a reason. I carried one of her two bags, performed translation duties, and hosted her at little neighborhood restaurants. I was irritated by the obnoxious stares of thick-headed men wherever we went. I prayed for God to give patience to guys with good-looking girlfriends. Since it was against my nature to flirt, and anyway I didn’t want to cause any misunderstandings, I refrained from asking her any personal questions.

I found Dr Sapuntzoglu’s working style somewhat unusual. She hauled out her Leica and started shooting dozens of pictures as soon as we hit the first church on her list, then furiously scribbled notes with a pen that sported an erotic puppet on its cap. Her pace reminded me of a junior war correspondent; later on I compared her to a doctor administering to a hopeless patient as she ran an expert finger over a wall surface. I attributed her lack of reaction to the texture of sights, sounds, people and color in the vicinity of the churches to her familiarity with such things from rural Greece. There seemed always to be some kind of oriental music in the background at the ancient sites we visited. Whenever those anti-musical melodies rose from the half-open window of a worn-out house or a dilapidated shop or a passing taxi, Miss PhD would wink and shimmy like a belly-dancer.

We said good-bye with the cliché, ‘Let’s get together in Stockholm some time.’ So I was surprised by next morning’s e-mail: Mistral was inviting me to dinner to say good-bye properly. To my response – ’All right, as long as it’s on me’ – she said, ‘I knew that was coming.’ We met at a dimly lit fish restaurant on the Bosphorus. The waiter laughed when she knocked her head on the table three times to underline her embarrassment on remembering that I was a vegetarian. In short, over the course of the dinner, which encompassed a lot of white wine and some custom-made vegetarian
meze
, the formality between us evaporated. She was twelve when her parents divorced and she moved with her Swedish mother from Athens to Stockholm. Her mother went into the tourism business, but died when Mistral was still at university. After that she made up with her father. Perhaps to console her, I told her about my own family drama. She left out her love stories, and she did not show me a picture of her boyfriend.