CHAPTER 31

The Circassian Mistress (1)

It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side and in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which, although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world’s great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come.

At the time of Rustem Bey’s arrival, Istanbul was still the latest living incarnation of Constantinople and Byzantium, whereby names and rulers had changed, but customs, institutions and habits had not. His first plunge into this teeming and colourful chaos was necessarily at the railway station, kindly donated by the Germans (whose Kaiser had proclaimed himself protector of the world’s Muslims) and which was predictably equipped with towers that made it look like a fort.

Infidel Smyrna had been good practice for the ordeal of coping with Istanbul’s extraordinary confusion, but since then Rustem Bey had had to endure the railway journey between the two cities, and he was not in the best of tempers. He possessed little aptitude for Islamic fatalism, so that by the time the train had ground and jolted its laborious way through more mountains than it seemed reasonable for God to have created, and by the time that it had reached Eskişehir, he was already beyond all patience. The train had inexplicably halted for up to two hours at a time, in the full heat of the day, so that perspiration dripped down his forehead and into his eyes, before making its way down to the tips of his moustache and falling into his lap. Four times the train had actually gone backwards for considerable distances. More than once he had been unable to prevent himself from exclaiming, “By God, it would have been quicker to walk!” Once, when the view was so beautiful that it had almost calmed him down, he had put his head out of the window and had collected a large smut in his left eye, projected there with uncanny accuracy by the slipstream. His servants’ concerned dabbing at the sooty water with kerchiefs had added injury to what seemed like the locomotive’s personal insult. Furthermore, despite his efforts to secure private and comfortable seating, the carriages had inexorably filled up until they were bursting at the rivets. Opportunistic travellers congregated at the points where the gradient forced the train to a snail’s pace, and leapt on, often accompanied by goats, babies, rolls of carpet and huge copper pots. At the legitimate stops it seemed that no one got off, but a great many more got on. Outside, the çay-sellers with their prodigious samovars kept up a constant supply of sweet tea, and little boys ran back and forth bearing dusty rings of unleavened bread threaded through a stick.

Rustem Bey found himself crammed into a corner beneath a sweaty heap of the most diverse forms of humanity. On his lap was a birdcage containing two pretty hawfinches of unknown ownership, and between his feet was a mastiff puppy that chewed at the new patent leather of his boots. People were smoking at strange angles so as not to burn the clothes of their neighbours, and the air had grown thick, heavy and blue, the smoke settling in gently wreathing horizontal bands. The passengers, unable to resist the temptation to share each other’s parcels of food and to tell each other the stories of their lives, and their relatives’ lives, and even the lives of those they had never heard of, turned the compartment into a kind of ferocious indoor picnic. A very old long-faced Kurd with hypnotic eyes, a filthy white turban and no teeth, regaled Rustem Bey for three hours with Karagiosiz and Temel stories, in an eastern dialect of which he understood barely one word.

When he arrived in Istanbul therefore, Rustem Bey was in a state of irritable disrepair. Both his eyes were red and stinging, the left much more than the other. His new boots bore small toothmarks, and his nose was itching on account of the birds. His new Stamboul frock coat was dusty and creased, his new crimson fez was impregnated with cigarette ash, his moustache felt like a rodent that had adhered to his upper lip and died, and there were saliva stains on his trousers where the ancient Kurd had dribbled on him, having fallen asleep in an upright position, jammed between a dejected soldier and a crook-backed Jewish tailor. Rustem Bey had become more and more strongly aware that the musty and stale smell that had been tormenting him for several hours was in fact emanating from himself.

As he waited on the platform for his servants to disembark his baggage, Rustem Bey surveyed the press of people and listened to the hubbub, wondering whether in fact he was about to make a complete fool of himself. He was suffering from severe misgivings about the whole project, dimly aware that there was something self-defeating about it, something to which he could not adduce a precise analysis. Nonetheless, he also knew that he was an obstinate man, and that once he had made a decision, he would stick to it. This was why he had never given in to the suspicions aroused by the rumours that Mariora, mother of Polyxeni, had, quite without motive, been the cause of the deaths of all his family. Rumours are the great seducers of reason, but, once he had decided that they were simply malicious gossip such as infect all small towns, he had steadfastly stuck to that decision and had not once allowed himself to be tempted to believe otherwise. He had felt as vindicated as Polyxeni herself when Mariora’s bones turned out to be clean, even though he set no store by such Christian superstition.

At that time there were about 180 khans in Istanbul, endowed by philanthropic Muslims, where one could arrive with one’s own bedroll and sleep in peace in the upper rooms whilst the horses occupied the stables below. Some were famous, such as the Valideh Khan and the Yeni Khan, with their courtyards of trees and fountains, and their fireproof storerooms for merchandise, but even the modest ones were pleasant and clean. They were unfurnished, and were therefore easily swept free of fleas, lice and bedbugs, so that even travellers as demoralised as Rustem Bey could make themselves comfortable and quickly recover their beaux esprits. Rustem Bey directed one of his servants to hire one of the many stray errand boys to lead them to the nearest one, since it was almost dusk, and another of his servants to hire four hamals to transport their luggage. After so many hours of discomfort in the train, he decided not to hire a sedan chair for himself, feeling that a walk would loosen his limbs and do him good. The hamals in those days were Armenians from Lake Van, who had formed themselves into a union in order to monopolise the trade in porterage. These immanitous men were single-handedly capable of carrying pianos uphill on their necks, in the full fire of the sun, with nothing but a cushion by way of assistance. There was a rumour, believed by almost everybody, and widely disseminated by the hamals themselves, that it was only possible to maintain the enormous strength necessary for the job if one lived solely on cucumbers and water, and it was by this means that they discouraged others from taking up the trade.

Thanks to these formidable gentlemen, Rustem Bey was soon installed above a calm courtyard that was washed with the gentle noise of a fountain and the sweet smell of figs. Longing for cleanliness with a desperation that was akin to a thirst in a foundry, he set out for the hamam that was attached to the local mosque, having sent a servant ahead to inform the bath attendants that an important personage was about to arrive, and that this personage did not take kindly to homoerotic suggestions. After having bathed and made certain enquiries of the masseurs at the hamam, he would find a barber to shave away the journey’s stubble, and to massage its horrors out of his neck. Like all barbers, this one entertained him with gossip about the Sultan and his courtiers, and then helpfully informed him that a foolproof way to avoid insect bites for a whole twelve months was to say “Nevruz suyu” on the Persian new year. Rustem Bey raised his eyebrows, the quantity of balderdash presented as indisputable fact never ceasing to amaze him.