by Rhys Hughes
Ears assailed by the clashings (which were surely coming from an adjacent room) Lawrence moved forward stealthily and prodded the bundle with his foot. Instantly it erupted, arms and feet appearing from unlikely holes, face beaming and nodding, the whole mass rising upwards to tower above Lawrence and then to bend forward to half his height as the strange figure scraped a deep bow, snorting smoke from its flared nostrils, blinking sly eyes and clapping delighted hands. ‘Merhaba, my friend! Nasilsiniz? But of course you are well! Cheeks burned the colour of mountain rubies. What else can we expect? This is your first time in Turkey? Konya is very beautiful, very quiet. Not touristy place. You are from England? I have a brother in England.’
Instantly, Lawrence relaxed. Confronted with the usual patter of carpet sellers, he was able to slide into his role without having to worry about any ethics other than those of business. ‘I may be interested in buying a carpet. Then again, maybe not. Shall I tell you what I am looking for, to save time and trouble? Many dark colours, much feeling, something from the heart.’
‘But of course!’ The figure swept Lawrence along to a seat arranged along one far wall of the tiny shop. There was always a certain ritual to be indulged when discussing business in a Turkish shop. Little glasses of black tea, cigarettes, all the adjuncts of the psychological game that so often disturbed callow visitors from Northern Europe. But Lawrence considered himself a hardened traveller, a haggler in the ranks of the best of them, not susceptible to the emotional blackmail and tricks of an experienced trader. He seated himself gracefully, while his host brewed tea and stretched his round face in false smiles that were far too large and lunar for credibility.
When tea and awkward small-talk had been safely deposited in the gutter of past time, the process of examining the carpets and kilims began. Lawrence’s host—who had given his own name as Mehmet—laid out a selection in front of Lawrence and gleefully explained the meanings of the patterns and designs. ‘I am not merely a shopkeeper. I am a textile designer. Seven years of study in Istanbul. Very dedicated team make my designs. Vegetable dyes only. Very best quality.’ And with a flourish he cast a rug in front of Lawrence and pointed to the abstract shapes that floated across the wool and silk. ‘Perdition design. One of my own. Very good price for you. Very good price. You are my special friend.’
Lawrence sighed. He had been the special friend of every dealer in every town he had even merely paused to visit. It was a situation that could be enjoyed, given the right attitude, but it could also be very tedious. He reached into his top pocket, removed his pair of reading glasses, held them close to his face, made a great show of scratching his chin and wrinkling his brow, bent forward for a closer look, replaced the glasses and shook his head. ‘I just don’t like this one,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t move me.’ It was, in fact, a very attractive carpet, but to admit as much would be tantamount to unbolting the locks of his mind and letting all and sundry filch ideas from his weary and bruised cranium. So he scowled: ‘No.’
Mehmet instantly cast the rug into a corner and pulled out another from an enormous pile by his elbow. ‘Very old one, this one. Thirty years old. Damnation design. One of my best. Good price. Konya not touristy place. In Bodrum or Ürgüp you would pay five times the price for quality such as this. Hayir? But this is my price!’ And the wily dealer produced a pocket calculator from one of the many folds of his shapeless robe and held it up. ‘In dollars, of course.’ But when Lawrence shook his head again, he tapped out a new string of numbers. ‘This is what I will do for you. Very special friend.’
Lawrence studied the new, lower price and gritted his teeth. ‘I’m just not interested in that particular one. The price is fine, the design is good. It’s just that there’s no feeling. Do you understand what I’m saying? Show me something with darker colours, a darker purpose behind the creation. I want to see a carpet that was sweated over, a carpet threaded with the nerves of the very soul.’
Mehmet regarded him warily and a strange light came into his eyes. ‘And you are a gâvur?’ He appeared to be convulsed by some silent hilarity. He hopped from one foot to another. ‘Then look at this one. Behold the hues, as dark as the tomb-cloaks of the Mevlevi. A dark soul knitted this one, like a Fate knitting doom. One of my most powerful designs. Eblis himself would tremble!’ He threw out the carpet with a single undulating motion. The carpet seemed to sink into the floor as it landed, rather than resting on top of it. Lawrence blinked. The oleaginous surface of the rug was swimming with sickly sigils and geometric shapes that rose and fell like dying fish in an ocean of black scum.
Lawrence puffed out his cheeks. ‘Very effective. But will it grow on me? It is not enough to be attracted to a piece of art. The art itself has to expand, warp, transmute into something new. So I say again: will it grow on me?’
‘Ah!’ Mehmet tapped his nose. ‘Now I comprehend you. We are not so different after all, gâvur and devotee. One moment, lütfen. I have just the thing. But you must be warned: this is a special piece and it will require great devotion from you if all is to be well.’ And so, with an expression caught somewhere between consternation and respect, the carpet seller seized him by the wrist and dragged him to one corner of the room. And now Lawrence saw a door with a tiny golden handle that Mehmet promptly opened and ushered him through. At once the clashings and clatterings were exposed for what they were. Lawrence attempted to cover his ears with his hands, but Mehmet did not relax his grip. Indeed, he forced the wrist into further submission with a savage pinch that made Lawrence adopt a shamed expression.
The door led into a low narrow room, inordinately long, that was crammed with looms and flying shuttles. Withered figures, completely devoid of colour, sat at the looms, their fingers moving with an almost mechanical grace. Lawrence regarded their dead eyes and precise jerks with considerable distaste. They had the haunted look of the autistic about them; as if motion were no more a negation of stasis than sleep itself. Lawrence noted that they did not look up; nor did they ever gaze at each other or make the slightest attempt at communication. Lawrence experimented with a nervous laugh, but in the cacophony it was as feeble as the scream of a mosquito ground to powder on any given evening (and how it disgusted him to see his own blood smeared from their bodies as he eased his nights with the heel or newspaper). But there was something more: something that threaded lines of unease between the weave of his curiosity and surprise.
‘Good workers, eh?’ he ventured. ‘But what of village women? Is that not the traditional method? Low wages and ruined eyesight? A vast and massy chain of middlemen all the way from the East to the traveller’s home? Is this some sort of co-operative?’
‘Oh ho, a jest!’ The carpet seller nodded in appreciation and finally released his hold on Lawrence. ‘Co-operative, you say? This is true enough. Co-operate they must, to atone for that time when they did not! Bir dakika! Look at the quality of their work, observe with your own eyes their dedication. Here alone, my friend! They are wedded to their work. You too are married, hayir?’
‘No,’ Lawrence replied. How could he explain that his wife had left him, that she had denied planning permission for the extension he had intended to add to his ego? Camille was doubtless enjoying her own holiday from his selfishness. He felt no guilt, nor sadness, but a crushing realisation that it was all pointless, everything.
He eyed the workers more closely, as Mehmet encompassed the entire troupe with a single wave. Lawrence thought that some of the strange figures looked European, but they were all too shrunken to be certain. They worked in almost perfect synchronism, with nearly identical pauses and moments of incredible velocity. Even odder was the fact that they all seemed engaged in producing tiny squares of carpet that they promptly deposited in piles by their looms.
Mehmet began inspecting these individual pagodas of colour and Lawrence was free to crumple up his face against the appalling noise. In an effort to seek relief, he made his way to one end of the strange room. Here, to his considerable discomfiture
, he discovered another door, bolted and chained this time, but worn through with so many holes that it was a relatively easy matter to determine what was happening on the other side. Pressing his bulging orbit up to one generous crack, he squinted and gasped. This other room was an ill-lit chamber (a single ray of sunlight filtered down from a large rent in the ceiling) containing yet more colourless mordant figures. These figures, however, were invariably malformed. Most lacked hands or feet or limbs entire. Others had no nose to speak of, or were missing eyes, ears and scalps. They moved in slow fitful circles, as isolated within some private universe as the poor creatures on the machines. And those detached limbs bundled up in corners? Did lepers still exist in Turkey?
Choking back his questions, Lawrence turned towards Mehmet, who was rummaging through one of the absurd piles of textiles, finally emerging with a tiny piece of cloth, no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Clutching this prize, he led Lawrence back the way they had come and closed the door. ‘I think that we can guess at each other’s motives. You have made a pilgrimage of sorts, even if you are not yet aware of this fact. A golden cord has led you from your own country to mine, and all the trinket-scimitars sold in antique shops throughout the land have failed to sever it. Here, in Konya, the end of the cord lies knotted to my very tongue. I cannot lie.’ And he thrust out the said organ, as if to add emphasis to his rather sullen metaphor.
Lawrence measured his words carefully. ‘This is a joke?’ The lines that creased his brow were longer than the threads of the rug that Mehmet was holding up before him. And yet there was no denying that this was an exceptionally beautiful piece of work. ‘If this is a sample then show me the real thing and have done with it.’
Mehmet seemed offended. He eyed Lawrence soberly and replaced the pipe between his thin lips. When he spoke again, from the corner of his mouth, his words were augmented by a faint whistle: some of the syllables were entering the stem of the pipe and emerging from the Ottoman bowl as subtle notes. It was an effect as unnerving and yet human as any ney cut by the light of a sinister moon. ‘Now you play games with me, hayir? First you claim to be a special visitor, one of the select few. And now you feign ignorance.’
It slowly dawned on Lawrence that he had unwittingly stumbled into a peculiar, and not entirely unwelcome, situation. This dealer obviously assumed he knew more than he did. Perhaps he had, while making innocent conversation, said something that Mehmet had mistaken for a deliberate attempt to mould some arcane contact. Lawrence decided to forge ahead, to see where bluff would take him; to what heights of novel experience the magic carpet of pretence could carry him, smug smile and all.
‘Forgive me. But I had to be cautious. You are right, of course. It is a magnificent piece, and just the thing I have been searching for. Possibly my quest is now at an end. I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.’
‘Ha!’ The carpet seller resumed his earlier vivacity. ‘How can you persist with your false doubts now? Look at the way the pattern writhes! From what subterranean abyss was this form and matter glimpsed, you ask? How far along the ladder of the milky way, that dips down below our imaginations? Uzak! It is best not to know, hayir? And all this for a pittance. See!’ And once again he took out his pocket calculator and tapped a series of numbers, holding the result up to Lawrence.
Lawrence felt a sudden, burning need to be free of this Mehmet and his disconcerting shop. Almost unbidden, his hand reached for his wallet, took hold of the notes and pressed them into the carpet seller’s palm. He could think of nothing to say, so merely repeated his earlier inanity: ‘Will it grow on me?’
‘You can be sure of that.’ Mehmet scraped his lowest bow yet and dusted the floor with the crown of his head. He handed the small square to Lawrence who, embarrassed, folded it into his pocket. ‘A foot for a foot! It has been a pleasure doing business with you. Tesekkür ederim. There are too few of us left, you understand. Now perhaps I can interest you in a selection of fine pots from my very own workshop? And then brass and copper ornaments? I have chambers where the best crystals are cut into designs that will caress your soul. . . .’ He made his way to the middle of the room and now Lawrence saw a trapdoor set into the floor. Indeed, as he looked around, Lawrence became aware that the room, which he had assumed was a singular entity, was replete with dozens of little doors, entrances and exits, set into the walls, floor and ceiling. There scarcely seemed to be an area that was not a means of access to somewhere else.
Mehmet grappled with the trapdoor, heaving it up with a jocular curse. ‘Just through here lies my pottery and its workers. Very best quality. Good price for my special friend.’ He had turned his rippling back on Lawrence. Gripped in the warp of fear’s own loom, Lawrence forgot all about magic carpets of bluff, gaped for a moment in abject terror and then, legs spinning ludicrously, ears still filled with the demonic noise of the eldritch workers, took himself and his more modest purchase out into the oily mists of the wider city.
***
The flight back had been a smooth legato, following the sun as it set over a blanket of clouds as large as a celestial carpet; a carpet rolled out for a visiting deity to recline on, puffing on the nargile of some distant volcano. Lawrence had found it all so much more pleasant than he had anticipated. There had been no turbulence and few crying babies. And he had sat next to a charming girl, eyes bright with the honey of her adventures and amorous trysts. He had even fulfilled a childhood ambition: asking and receiving permission to visit the flight-deck for a brief chat with the moustachioed Captain and a wonderful view of the landscapes below, the passing jets flashing their lights at them in merry recognition.
The coach ride from Gatwick had been depressing in comparison. Weak tea and poorly-made sandwiches, a truculent driver and an endless stream of traffic that was like a scream had combined to make him feel decidedly petulant. He was relieved to leave the motorway and to pass through the outskirts of his home town. He took a taxi to his house and did not tip the driver. The house seemed reluctant to admit him back, almost as if it had forgotten who he was. Through the grimy back window, he saw how the sad little garden had withered and died, the enormous sunflower drooping like a hanged man.
On his doormat he had found his waiting mail, a selection of bills and unsolicited insurance propositions. There had also been a single personal letter; a message from Camille to the effect that she was coming back in the near future for a single visit, before leaving again forever. She wanted to take something away with her, a personal item of his to remember him by. This was not because she still loved him, or indeed ever had, but because life with him had only been extremely annoying ninety-seven percent of the time. She wanted to remember that other three percent: the boating trip to the Isle of Wight.
Lawrence felt neutral about this prospect. He quickly put it out of his mind and settled back into work, his colleagues welcoming his return and descending on him like the blade of a paper guillotine on fingertips. This was a week spent reviewing his recent holiday. Not a great success, he decided; no love affairs himself and too much time wasted in carpet shops rather than in the Taurus mountains. He recalled Konya with a shudder; nasty, grimy sort of place, full of shoeshine boys and rusty samovars. Possibly Antalya had been the highlight of his trip. The saffron he had bought had turned out to be turmeric, but the raki was good stuff. He sunk his doubts, like misty islands, into the milky sea of intoxication.
Searching through his pockets, perhaps rummaging for the more prosaic detritus of his trip, he came across the little square of carpet. He snorted a laugh and took it to his spacious lounge, a room rosy with the glow of an open fire and the polished bare boards that creaked with homely delight to the lightest of footfalls. He laid the absurd miniature rug in the centre of the room and regarded it with a critical eye. It looked incredibly pathetic among the oak bookcases and enormous stone hearth; a lost toy. He practised sitting on it; his generous rump totally obscured all signs of the thing. This was a great joke, he decided; but one a
t his expense. He grew miserable, and then angry and considered the option of hurling it onto the fire.
That night he was troubled by strange dreams. Mehmet came to him down an enormous corridor bristling with tiny doors that opened out onto varied and abstract dreamworlds. The carpet seller held up his pocket calculator to Lawrence and nodded a head swollen to pumpkin size, teeth the same hue as his oil-black hair. Somewhere beyond, a camel bell tinkled like a frosty planet struck by a comet. Lawrence tried to shield his face, in his dream, but Mehmet’s sombre chuckle still came through to him. When next he dared to look, he saw a myriad of strange figures peering at him from the many doorways: vast faces, infinitely sad countenances, blue eyes like distant stars.
Lawrence awoke, sweating profusely from every pore. The bedsheets and pillow were sodden with his fear. He sat up, still shaking, partly relieved and partly bemused. He made his way to the bathroom, where lashings of cold water reassured him of the permanence of reality. When he returned to the bedroom and adjusted the crumpled pillow, he discovered a piece of folded paper beneath. He furrowed his brow and held it up. It was an invoice, marked simply with a single sum: $100. It was as if some malignant tooth fairy had turned entrepreneur, for what purpose he could not imagine. He dressed hurriedly and set his short-term destination as the kitchen and the coffee-pot.
Passing through the lounge on his way to the cordless kettle, he stopped and blinked thrice. The tiny carpet had disappeared and been replaced with another identical in every way save size; this carpet was exactly twice as big. It was a metamorphosis so startling, and yet so mundane, that Lawrence decided merely to ignore it and continue on his way. He stepped over the enigma, reached the kitchen and switched the kettle on. As he was waiting for it to boil, he realised that he was still clutching the mysterious invoice in his hand. He studied it again and then everything came clear.