The Janissary Tree

[ 68 ]

The morning dawned bright. On the street, Stambouliots congratulated one another on the re-appearance of good weather, and expressed the hope that the gloom which had settled over the city in the last week might finally be lifted. Optimists declared that the spate of murders seemed to have come to an end, proving that the message from the imams had worked. Pessimists predicted more fog ahead. Only the fatalists, who in Istanbul number hundreds of thousands, merely shrugged their shoulders and said that, like fire and earthquake, God’s will would be done.

Yashim made his way down early to the cafe on Kara Davut. The proprietor noticed that he was limping, and without a word offered him a cushioned divan off the pavement where he could still enjoy watching the doings on the street. When he had brought the coffees, Yashim asked: “Is there anyone who could take a message for me, and fetch an answer? I’d ask your son, but it’s pretty far.”

He gave the address. The cafe proprietor frowned and turned down his mouth.

“It is time,” he said gruffly. “Mehmed can go. Eh, hey! Mehmed!”

A little boy of about eight or nine bounced out of the back of the shop at his father’s shout. He bowed solemnly and stood looking at Yashim with his big brown eyes, rubbing one foot against his other leg.

Yashim gave him a purse, and carefully explained where to go. He told him about the old lady behind the lattice. “You should knock. When she answers, present my compliments. Give her the money, and tell her these are…expenses—for the lady Preen, in room eight. Whatever she says, don’t be frightened. Remember what you are told.”

The boy nodded and darted through the door, where a small crowd had gathered to watch a dervish perform his dance on the street. Yashim saw the boy dive unhesitatingly between the folds of their cloaks, and so away, down the street. A funeral errand, he thought; the father would not be pleased.

“A good boy,” he said, guiltily. “You should be proud.”

The father gave a noncommittal wag of his head and started polishing glasses with a cloth.

Yashim took a sip of coffee and turned to watch the performance in the street.

The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the cafe, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler dances of the seeker after truth, a stylised rendition of Ignorance searching for the Way.

He put up a hand to rub his eyes and gave an involuntary yelp. He’d forgotten the bruising.

A fire-station. Another tower. His exploration of the files in the Imperial Archives had been inconclusive, to say the least. The references to fire-towers had been too scanty to work on: they did not signify anything either way. All you could say was that fire-towers existed; Galata, Beyazit. Everyone knew that. Perhaps he’d been reading in the wrong book.

If only he could get hold of that helpful young Sudanese. Ibou.

He’d gone looking for evidence of a fourth tower. He hadn’t found any.

Perhaps there wasn’t one.

What if the fourth location wasn’t a tower at all?

But if there wasn’t a tower, what was he looking for?

The second verse of the Karagozi poem came to his mind.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They seek.

Well, here he was. Unknowing, searching. And the refrain?

Teach them.

All well and good, he thought, but teach them what? Enlightenment? Of course, it would be that. But it meant nothing to him. As the poem said, he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. He could go round in circles like this for ever.

So who were these other people, the people who were supposed to teach? Teachers, simply. Imams, for example, dinning the Koran into their restless little charges with the cane. Ferenghi gunnery instructors, perhaps, trying to explain the rules of mathematics to a fresh-faced batch of recruits. And at the medreses, the schools attached to city mosques, clever boys learned the rudiments of logic, rhetoric and Arabic.

Outside on the pavement the dervish had finished his dance. He pulled a cap from his belt and passed through the cafe, soliciting alms. To everyone who gave him something, he put out a hand and murmured a blessing. Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw the proprietor watching with folded arms. He had no doubt that had the man been a simple beggar he would have shooed him away, maybe with a coin, but a dervish—no, the babas had to be given respect because they showed people the way. The path to a higher truth.

The dervish were teachers of higher truths.

The Karagozi, also, were teachers of their Way.

Yashim hunched his shoulders, trying to concentrate.

He’d had that verse in his head, recently. Unknowing they seek. Teach them. And he had said—or perhaps it was just a thought—that he must be a slow learner.

Where was it? He had an impression that he had, after all, learned something then. He had thought of that verse, and heard something useful. But the time and place eluded him.

He shut his eyes. In his mind he groped for an answer.

A slow learner. Where had he thought that before?

His mind was blank.

He had guessed that there were four towers. Old Palmuk, the fire-watcher, had denied it.

Then he remembered. It wasn’t the old man; it was the other one, Orhan. It was Orhan who had told him about the towers as they stood on the parapet of the Galata Tower, in the fog. He’d described the tower that was lost, and how they raised the Beyazit Tower to compensate. The old tower had burnt, he’d said: along with the tekke. A tekke, like the one downstairs.

So both towers had been furnished with a Karagozi tekke. He couldn’t yet be sure about the fire-tower at Beyazit, but a tekke was certainly where the truth was taught, as the Karagozi perceived it. Unknowing they seek. Teach them. And the tekkes in the fire-towers were, coincidentally, the earliest tekkes in the city.

“I’ve had the whole thing back to front,” Yashim announced. He stood up abruptly and saw a dervish blinking, smiling, putting out his cap for alms. The dervish’s cap swam under his nose.

Yashim walked out.

The dervish stretched out both his arms in blessing. In his cap he had seen a whole silver sequin.