“An old tekke.” The man swung his nose left and right. “There’s a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They’ve only been there ten years or so, but the building’s very old, if that’s what you mean.”
The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.
“That,” said Yashim, smiling, “is exactly what I mean.”
The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said: “What do you make of all these murders, then?”
It was Yashim’s turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.
“Murders?”
“The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone’s talking about them.”
“Oh, yes. What do you think?”
“I only think…what everyone says. It’s something big, isn’t it? Something about to happen.” He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. “I keep rats.”
“Rats.”
“Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they’re clever, and they don’t mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.
“I’ve got three. They’ve been acting strangely these last few days. Don’t want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don’t want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too.”
Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked: “What is it? What do they feel?”
The man shook his head.
“I don’t know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I said, something’s happening and we don’t know what. Here you are, the tekke.”
Yashim looked round in surprise. He had passed the low, win-dowless box earlier. It looked like a warehouse or a store-room.
“Are you sure?”
The man nodded briskly. “There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in the evenings. Good luck.” He waved the string bag. “Got to pick up some food for the rats,” he explained.
Yashim gave him a weak smile.
Then he knocked hard on the double doors.
[ 84 ]
Yes, Karagozi.” The man continued to smile gently.
So this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in their bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the market, and what they could squeeze from it.
There was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain, whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.
“The walls were decorated?”
The tekkemaster inclined his head.
“Very beautifully done.”
“But—what, sacrilegious?”
“To our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to return to the old purity of the tekke.”
“I see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It wasn’t the original idea?”
The tekkemaster looked thoughtful.
“I do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not to commemorate.”
Yashim looked up at the coffered ceiling.
“Interlude? I don’t quite understand.”
“Forgive me,” the tekkemaster said humbly. “I have not made myself clear, so perhaps you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more space: so we gave it over to them. Recent events,” he added, with the usual cir—cumspection, “allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were covered, as you see.”
Yashim turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.
“You mean, this tekke was built by your order? It wasn’t originally a Karagozi foundation at all?”
The man smiled and shook his head.
“No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is open will be closed.”
Five minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.
Palewski’s map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke correctly—for the time it was drawn up. The Karagozi hadn’t built it, though: it wasn’t one of the original four tekkes.
But the principle had to be right.
Yashim thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.
He pictured it in his mind’s eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress against the weathered stonework of the walls.
The tekke was there. It had to be there.
[ 85 ]
Half an hour later Yashim approached the square up a long, straight alley from the south.
Straight ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley, he had a clear view of the splendid cypress where earlier he’d stood talking with the old men.
From where he stood, five hundred yards back, he could see what he couldn’t see before. He could see over the top of the tree.
Just behind its slender tip, in solitary semi-ruined splendour, a Byzantine tower rose from the massive city walls.
The Kerkoporta. The little gate.
Not many Stambouliots learned the story of the Conquest of 1453 in any detail. It was ancient history, almost four hundred years old. It had been the fulfilment of destiny, and the how, or why, of its successful capture from the defending Greeks was a matter of little interest or relevance to people living in Turkish Istanbul in the nineteenth century.
Only two sorts of people had maintained their interest, and told the story to whoever wanted to listen.
The Janissaries, with pride.
The Phanariots, with regret—though whether that regret was perfectly genuine, Yashim had never quite been able to decide. For the Greek merchant princes of the Phanar, when all was said and done, had made their fortunes under Ottoman rule.
Yashim could remember exactly where he’d been when he first heard, in detail, the story of the Turkish Conquest. The Mavrocordato mansion, in the upper Phanar district, was the grandest, gloomiest palace on its street. Locked away behind high walls, and built in a style of high rococo, it was the headquarters of a sprawling family operation which extended to the principalities of the Danube and the godowns of Trabzon, taking in titles civil and ecclesiastical on the way. The Mavrocordatos had produced over the centuries scholars and emperors, boyar overlords and admirals of the fleet, rogues, saints and beautiful daughters. They were fantastically rich, dazzlingly well connected, and dangerously well informed.
There had been seven of them around a table, and Yashim. Their faces expressed many different things—humour and bitterness, dread or jealousy, complacency and contempt: but there had been one lovely face, too, he still saw sometimes in his dreams, whose glance said more. Only the eyes were the same, blue and brooding; Yashim had understood then why the Turks feared the blue eye.