Today, if a young man climbs up a university tower with an automatic rifle and starts spraying passersby, a judge— this is assuming, of course, that the young man has been disarmed and brought to court—will class him as mentally disturbed and lock him up in a mental institution. Yet in essence the behavior of that young man cannot be distinguished from the castration of the royal by-blow as related by Psellus. Nor can it be told apart from the Iranian Imam's butchering tens of thousands of his subjects in order to confirm his version of the will of the Prophet. Or from Dzhugashvili's maxim, uttered in the course of the Great Terror, that "with us, no one is irreplaceable." The common denominator of all these deeds is the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing—i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique.
I am far from asserting that the absence of this concept is a purely Eastern phenomenon; it is not, and that is what's indeed scary. But Western Christianity, along with developing all its ensuing ideas about the world, law, order, the norms of human behavior, and so forth, made the unforgivable error of neglecting, for the sake of its own growth and eventual triumph, the experience supplied by Byzantium. After all, that was a shortcut. Hence all these daily— by now—occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mental illness, religious fanaticism, and whatnot.
27
In Topkapi, the former palace of the sultans, which has been turned into a museum, are now displayed in a special chamber the objects, most sacred to every Muslim's heart, associated with the life of the Prophet. Exquisitely encrusted caskets preserve the Prophet's tooth, locks from the Prophet's head. Visitors are asked to be quiet, to keep their voices down. All about hang swords of all kinds, daggers, the moldering pelt of some animal bearing the discernible letters of the Prophet's missive to some real historical character, along with other sacred texts. Contemplating these, one feels like thanking fate for one's ignorance of the language. For me, I thought, Russian will do. In the center of the room, inside a gold-rimmed cube of glass, lies a dark-bro^ object, which I was unable to identify without the assistance of the label. This, in bronze inlay, read, in Turkish and English, "Impress of the Prophet's footprint." Size 18 shoe minimum, I thought as I stared at the exhibit. And then I shuddered: Yeti!
28
Byzantium was renamed Constantinople during Constantine's lifetime, if I am not mistaken. So far as simplicity of vowels and consonants goes, the new name was presumably more popular among the Seljuk Turks than Byzantium had been. But Istanbul also sounds reasonably Turkish—to the Russian ear, at any rate. The fact is, however, that Istanbul is a Greek name, deriving, as any guidebook will teU you, from the Greek stin poli, which means simply town. Stin? Poli? A Russian ear? Who here hears whom? Here, where bardak (brothel in Russian) means glass, where durak (fool) means stop. Bir bardak —one glass of tea; otobiis duragi—a bus stop. Good thing "otobiis," at least, is only half Greek.
29
For anyone suffering from shortness of breath, there's nothing to do here—unless he hires a taxi for the day. For anyone coming to Istanbul from the West, the city is remarkably cheap. With the price converted into dollars, marks, or francs, several things here actually cost nothing at all. Those shoeshiners again, for example, or tea. It's an odd sensation to watch human activity that has no monetary expression: it cannot be evaluated. It feels like a sort of heaven, an Ur-world; it's probably this otherworldliness that constitutes that celebrated "fascination" of the East for the northern Scrooge.
Ah, this battle cry of the graying blonde: "Bargain!"
Doesn't it sound guttural, too, even to an English ear? And, ah, this "Isn't that cute, dearie?" in a minimum of three European languages, and the rustle of worthless banknotes under the scrutiny of dark, apprehensive eyes, otherwise doomed to the TV set's interference and the voluminous family. Ah, this middle age dispatched all over the world by its suburban mantelpieces! And yet, for all its vulgarity and crassness, this quest is markedly more innocent, and of better consequence for the locals, than that of some talkative smart-ass Parisienne, or of the spiritual lumpen fatigued by yoga, Buddhism, or Mao and now digging into the depths of Sufi, Sunni, Shia "secret" Islam, etc. No money changes hands here, of course. Between the actual and the mental bourgeois, one is better off with the fonner.
30
What happened next everybody knows: from out of who knows where appeared the Turks. There seems to be no clear answer to where they actually came from; obviously, a very long way off. What drew them to the shores of the Bosporus is also not terribly clear. Horses, I guess. The Turks—more precisely, tuyrks—were nomads, so we were taught at school. The Bosporus, of course, turned out to be an obstacle, and here, all of a sudden, the Turks made up their minds not to wander back the way they had come but, instead, to settle. All this sounds rather unconvincing, but let's leave it the way we got it. What they wanted from Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul is, at any rate, beyond argument: they wanted to be in Constantinople—i.e., more or less the same thing that Constantine himself wanted. Before the eleventh century, the Turks had no shared symbol. Then it appeared. As we know, it was the crescent.
In Constantinople, however, there were Christians; the city churches were crowned with the cross. The tuyrks'— gradually becoming the Turks'—love affair with Byzantium lasted approximately three centuries. Persistence brought its rewards, and in the fifteenth century the cross surrendered its cupolas to the crescent. The rest is well documented, and there is no need to expand upon it. What is worth noting, however, is the striking similarity between "the way it was" and "the way it became." For the meaning of history lies in the essence of structures, not in the character of decor.
31
The meaning of history! How, in what way, can the pen cope with this aggregation of races, tongues, creeds: with the vegetative—nay, zoological—pace of the crumbling- down of the tower of Babel, at the end of which one fine day, among the teeming ruins, an individual catches himself gazing in terror and alienation at his own hand or at his pro- creative organ, not in Wittgensteinian fashion but possessed, rather, by a sensation that these things don't belong to him at all, that they are but components of some do-it- yourself toy set: details, shards in a kaleidoscope through which it is not the cause that peers at the effect but blind chance squinting at the daylight. Unobscured by the blowing dust.
427 I Flight from Byzantium 32
The difference between spiritual and secular power in Christian Byzantium wasn't terribly striking. Nominally, the Emperor was obliged to take the views of the Patriarch into account, and, indeed, this often happened. On the other hand, the Emperor frequently appointed the Patriarch and on occasion was, or had grounds for supposing himself to be, a superior Christian vis-a-vis the Patriarch. And, of course, we need not mention the concept of the Lord's anointed, which of itself could relieve the Emperor of the necessity of reckoning with anyone's metaphysics at all. This also happened, and, in conjunction with certain mechanical marvels, of which Theophilus was greatly enamored, played a decisive role in the adoption of Eastern Christianity by Rus in the ninth century. (Incidentally, these marvels—the throne ascending into the air, the metal nightingale, the roaring lions of the same material, and so on—were borrowed by the Byzantine ruler, with minor modifications, from his Persian neighbors. )