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A strange world that boy inhabits, he thinks. A world of whispers, of distant tintinnabulations on the edge of hearing, like angel voices. But is it any stranger than four old Greeks, flotsam adrift for decades in the crash and suck of history, gathering over tea and doughnuts to divine the future?
Topaloğlu’s cheeks quiver in embarrassment. Ayşe thinks of them as two slabs of condemned liver. Offal propped apart by a wide, rural moustache.
For others it might be the prestige they could garner, the thrill of control, the money they could make. With Ayşe it was the beauty, that cursive of beauty spiralling through Aramaic and Syriac texts to the demotic Greek of the Oxyrhynchus, the painstakingly squared-off Hebrew of the Tal-mudic scholars of Lisbon and Milan, the divine calligraphy of the Koranic scribes of Baghdad and Fes and learned Granada. It flowed into the organic lines of gospel illumination from monasteries from St Catherine’s to Cluny, in the eternal light of Greek and Armenian icons, through the hair-fine, eye-blinding
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‘You wonder how far down it can go, writing within writing within writing within writing,’ Akgün says. ‘Nanography, perhaps? Do you think it could be like nanotechnology, the smaller it gets, the more powerful it becomes? Are there levels so fine we can’t read them but which have the most profound, subliminal influences?’
This is an echo of the age of miracles in this third decade of the twenty-first century. But if there is one place where a Mellified Man could walk out of magical time, where the fantastical and the mundane routinely come into contact, where the djinn touch toe to earth, it is surely Istanbul.
‘Do you think it’s a conspiracy?’ ‘Mr Durukan, if God is dead then everything is conspiracy.’
This, this is the magic. This is dangerous, like the true magic always is. This is the new terminus of the Silk Road; central Asia’s engineers and nanoware programmers the merchants and caravan masters of the Third Industrial Revolution.
There are the restless Istanbuls of traffics and tracks and tunnels. There are wiry Istanbuls, nervous as a skinned man, of gas and power and data. There are Istanbuls built entirely out of football gossip. For every commodity, for every activity that can be analysed and modelled, there is a city.
Not paying attention enrages Pinar Hanım. She’s not allowed to hit you now everyone’s in the European Union but she wields ostracism, personal hurt and sarcasm like a three-rod nunchuk in a kung fu video.
Decisions he was not conscious of making chipped his life away to leave this splinter of a man. There should have been friends beyond a few old Greeks; there should have been family, there should have been children.
Sometimes you remember that that view from your window, that chink of vista, is of another continent. Sometimes the seasonal winds remind you that that stripe of water that runs through the heart of your city is the unbounded sea. Sometimes you discover that those palisades of clouds along the horizon are mountains.
‘Don’t think. Don’t ask. That will kill you. We have the lives we have and that’s all we can know. We have those lives because of what you had to do. We were young and thought we were invincible and and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up. But don’t ever regret. For a few moments we were the most brilliant stars in the sky.’
This morning Adem Dede Square is blessed. The air is clear and cool and smells fresh as a loaf or a morning newspaper. Every sound is crystalline, distinct; the Istanbul drone opens up into layers and lines and levels. The rumble of traffic, the conversation of radios. Footsteps on staircases. A voice shouting for someone to get a move on. A car engine suddenly bursts into life then settles into a tick-over. The hiss of the gas burners in the rival çayhanes, the moil of boiling kettles. Aydin turning the crisp pages of the morning daily at his stand. The drip of water into the fountain’s
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This is the secret name of God, written across Istanbul in letters too great and yet too small to be comprehended. This is the stir of djinn and rememberings, which are not as different as humans think, in the twilight of Adem Dede Square, outside the old dervish house. This is the turn, this is the whirl, this is the dance that is woven into every particle of the universe. This is the laughter of Hızır the Green Saint. This is Istanbul, Queen of Cities, and she will endure as long as human hearts beat upon the earth.
