by Rasha Adly
But Sherif, unlike the other members of that crowd, managed to make the decision to shake off its anxiety, anger, and tedium. To leave such a world was like stepping out of a dream to fall headlong into cruel reality. The first step to leaving it was dissolving his business interests with his partners. The financial loss was devastating, but he had made a decision and there was no going back.
A few months before his decision, something had happened that had affected him deeply, and fueled the fires of his unease. He traveled a great deal for the company in order to assess the worth of historical and ancient sites for purchase and refurbishment as hotels. The company had recently put in bids for various properties in Britain, France, and Greece, as well as in Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. His current trip, to a place called Konya, was not the first time he had visited Turkey, for he had been there several times and was very fond of it. He loved everything about the country: the climate, the geography, the history, the streets, the architecture, and the friendly people. Whenever he felt he needed a change of scene, it was the first place he would go. Although he was a regular at the Bosporus Hilton, which commanded a breathtaking view of the river it was named after, in Turkey he felt he could escape the pressure of social status and walk through the narrow streets and alleyways, his mind at ease at last.
9
When his flight landed in Konya Airport, Sherif closed his book and got ready to disembark. He took a taxi and gave the driver the name of his hotel. The weather was chilly, but a golden glow of sunlight reflected off the buildings and the trees, giving them a friendly warmth. The city was historic, its buildings and mosques reflecting its prominence as a twelfth- and thirteenth-century capital, despite some modern buildings and Western-style restaurants and cafés; however, its most striking feature was the tall Islamic gravestones with sun symbols and men’s headgear carved into the tops, planted all around the city in a circle as though embracing it, casting shadows of grief and melancholy.
His Turkish wasn’t up to much, despite his repeated visits: he had not even managed to pick up a few words to help him shop and communicate with taxi drivers. It was difficult, therefore, to ask the driver about the tall turbans carved into the gravestones. He remained silent until they arrived at the hotel, its modern façade incongruous in such an ancient city. There was a line of tourists in front of a large mosque, extending all the way into the middle of the street. The driver helped him carry his bags to reception and Sherif tipped him several extra liras in thanks. “Here’s my number if you need a lift anywhere,” said the driver, handing him a business card.
Check-in was accomplished quickly, and he asked the receptionist to have a cup of Turkish coffee brought up to his room. The balcony looked directly onto the mosque, offering a grand view. He stood there, momentarily mesmerized by its arresting beauty, until the waiter arrived with the coffee. “What’s that mosque called?” he asked.
The waiter smiled proudly with the reflected glory of the magnificent building that his country boasted. “It’s the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, Kanunî Sultan Süleyman.”
It was not the first time he had seen an opulent mosque in his travels to various Turkish cities, but this was by far the most marvelous and certainly lived up to the sultan’s title, ‘the Magnificent.’ Despite the fine Turkish coffee, he found himself tired and lay down on the bed, closing his eyes.
He was startled from his nap by the ringing of his phone. It was a local number, not an international one: it could only be Borhan Bey, the client from whom his company wanted to purchase a house. He spoke to the gentleman, who wanted to meet in an hour, and agreed although he was in desperate need of sleep. “Oh, well,” he said to himself, “it’s not as if there’s any nightlife in the city. Might as well avoid napping in the afternoon so as to get a good night’s rest.” Sherif had never contented himself with what meets the eye, always eager to know the story behind historical cities, so he pulled up Konya on his iPad. In a few seconds, several sites came up purporting to offer details about the city he was visiting for a scant three days.
Borhan met him in the lobby of the hotel and introduced himself, shaking his hand and greeting him warmly like an old friend as was the Turkish custom. He was a squat, portly man of just over fifty, with graying hair and a ruddy and fine-featured face. “You must be starving!” he declared. “Let’s go to lunch first.”
He then led Sherif out to the hotel garage where his BMW waited, and turned on the air conditioning despite the pleasant weather. He stopped in a commercial area outside a restaurant which, Borhan told Sherif, was the oldest in the city, and served the traditional cuisine Konya was famous for, most prominently etli bamya, dried okra soup. He would not permit Sherif to order for himself, but told the waiter, “Two etli bamya, two bread with meat, two çiğ köfte,” which turned out to be lettuce leaves stuffed with spicy raw meatballs. “All traditional Turkish dishes,” he smiled cheerfully at Sherif after the waiter had left.
The restaurant was old, high-ceilinged, and furnished in an old-fashioned style; it seemed not to have been renovated since the day it had opened. There were wooden tables covered in white plastic sheeting and rattan chairs; the overhead neon lights glared palely, and a ceiling fan rotated monotonously, circulating the air and the delicious smells of cooking throughout the interior. A window displaying the dishes on offer stretched horizontally across the wall, behind which the fat cook was working. On the walls were displayed several photographs of the restaurant owner with his most famous guests: a framed photo of Kemal Atatürk and one of a whirling dervish performing in his white skirt. Traditional Turkish music filled the restaurant.
Their orders arrived. Borhan dug in with gusto. “Turkish cuisine is the oldest in the world, you know,” he boasted between mouthfuls, “and I daresay the finest. We’ve kept to our traditional recipes.”
Sherif nodded politely.
“We Turks love a good meal. You won’t find us chasing after Italian restaurants and American-style food the way it is in other parts of the world.”
Borhan’s appetite for talking was as good as his appetite for food. Sherif just smiled, nodded at the appropriate junctures, and otherwise let his client chatter happily on.
Looking up, he found himself staring again at the photograph of the dervish. He could almost see him whirling—no, it wasn’t an illusion. The man was dancing, actually whirling. Sherif blinked his eyes and stared. Borhan, noticing, asked in concern, “Something the matter?”
Suddenly, the dervish stopped whirling. Sherif must have been more tired than he realized, or else it was the man’s endless chatter that had him seeing things.
After the meal, Borhan drove Sherif into the old quarter, coming to a halt outside an imposing wooden doorway. Sherif had noticed that although most of the houses in the area were historic, the vast majority of them sported signs emblazoned with the word ‘HOTEL.’ Konya, he knew, was full of old buildings that had been restored and reopened as hotels. The new generation of tourists preferred places like this to luxury hotels. He felt uncomfortable telling Borhan that his company was one of the foremost to profit from this new tourism trend.
Borhan unlocked the door with a large, rusty wooden key that let out a piercing squeak as it turned in the ancient lock. The house they stepped into was wooden, surrounded by a large, neglected garden. It was as silent as a graveyard inside, with a cold, depressing atmosphere that made Sherif shiver. He buttoned up the top button of his woolen jacket. “This house was built hundreds of years ago,” Borhan boomed, shattering the silence, “by one of my ancestors. He built it to live in with his family. He was a teacher and also the imam of a Sufi order; later, he set a part of the house aside for a madrasa, a school for religious instruction, and a tikiya, or guest house, for his dervishes and followers. You know that was common for a lot of imams of that time.”
He guided Sherif from room to room and corridor to corridor, showing him around the house. It was divided into two: the haramlek, or
women’s quarters, set aside for the imam’s family and his womenfolk, with its own staircase and entrance; and the salamlek, or men’s quarters, part of which was devoted to the guest house and its visitors. “Here we are,” the man said, pointing to the rows of rooms: classrooms, meditation rooms, and the one they walked into, the sama‘ khana, a type of auditorium or listening room. It was a spacious chamber layered with Persian carpets that seemed untouched by time and Ottoman couches set all around. Hanging from the ceiling was a chandelier composed entirely of brass candelabras. In one corner was a collection of reed flutes and tambours, clearly exactly as they had been set down by the last hand that had played them. “This is the sama‘ khana, where all the singing and dancing took place.”
The smell of incense was rising. Sherif’s ears caught the melancholy wail of a reed flute, growing gradually louder and louder. The dervish was there again, whirling and spinning all around the room. His skirt wafted a perfume that struck Sherif in the face. He turned lightly around, his speed breathtaking. Sherif’s head spun, but this time it was worse: he flung himself down on one of the couches, straining to stare harder and harder at the whirling specter. In the blink of an eye, their eyes met. The man’s eyes were sharp, powerful, piercing. They seemed to bore into Sherif’s soul. He trembled. “I need to go,” he stammered to Borhan Bey.
As they walked out, Sherif’s eyes fell upon an oil painting hanging on the wall, of a number of dervishes in costume and tall felt turbans, whirling all around a man bearing the hallmarks of dignity and grandeur. Sherif froze, staring at it. It was the dervish whom he had seen moments ago, the same one whose image he had seen on the restaurant wall. His eyes were sunken, dark around the edges as though adorned with kohl, and topped with thick, furrowed eyebrows. They were the same eyes he had just looked into. Their gaze pierced his very depths, as though the man in the picture was aiming the arrows of his glances at Sherif and only him. He stared at the picture so long that the man noticed his interest in it. “That’s my great-grandfather, the imam of the Sufi order and the owner of this guest house, with some of his followers and dervishes.”
“Tell me, Mr. Borhan,” Sherif breathed. “Why do you want to sell the house?”
Borhan chuckled. “As you see, because it’s locked up, and no one’s using it.”
“Why didn’t you try to make use of it? Turn it into a hotel perhaps, or open it up to tourists, or rent it out?”
“There are a great many of us heirs to the place,” Borhan explained, “and each of us wants to do something different with it. That’s why we settled on selling it. As you see, it’s in poor condition and will cost a lot to renovate.”
Sherif was on his way out when Borhan called out, “Wait! There’s a basement as well. My grandfather’s buried in there with his family and some of his most faithful followers. It’s a nice mausoleum down there. . . .”
Sherif stared. “You bury your dead here?”
“Yes. It’s tradition. The imam and his followers are buried in the same spot.”
Sherif shook his head. “I don’t think I need to view any mausoleums. Let’s just go.”
On the way home, Borhan took to chattering about the value of the property and its unique location, but Sherif was not really with him.
10
Sherif lay down in the bed, the full moon lighting up his room from behind the glass of the window with a lovely silvery light. He fell asleep for a few hours, waking up to the sound of the dawn call to prayer. The muezzin’s voice gave him some measure of peace, with his repetitions of “al-Salatu khayran min al-nawm,” prayer is better than sleep. He had given up praying a long time ago, but now the phrase preoccupied him. He felt a sudden need to pray. He went out onto the balcony and saw several men hurrying to the mosque. He dressed and joined them.
In the large courtyard of the mosque was a fountain of white marble with brass taps for those who wanted to perform ablutions. He placed his hand beneath the cold water and slapped his face with it—once, twice, three times, not so much washing his face as slapping himself awake, slapping away the veil over his eyes to see life from a new perspective.
The inside of the mosque was an architectural masterpiece. Giant chandeliers hung from the ceilings; its walls were inlaid with shining marble and adorned with Qur’anic verses in beautiful calligraphy. The faithful arranged themselves in rows, shoulder to shoulder: a dervish’s headgear could be seen toward one of the front rows, taller than all present. After prayers, Sherif again glimpsed the man with the tall headgear. It was the same whirling dervish. Yes, it was he, the man from the oil painting on the restaurant wall, and the painting on the wall of the house. But how could he be here? It must be just an uncanny resemblance; the two men were centuries apart. Unable to resist his curiosity, Sherif went up to him. “Excuse me, but have we met?”
He couldn’t help noticing that the man had an extraordinarily bright complexion that seemed to be glowing. The light was not just coming from the man’s face: it was a glow that haloed him. He inclined his head slightly. “You must have seen me with the eyes of your heart.”
Sherif just stared. At the time, he had not known what the man meant, but something stopped his tongue and stilled any further questions. The man’s eyes, black as pebbles, penetrated Sherif’s defenses. In an instant he felt them going deep into him, into his innermost heart. “Follow your heart’s footsteps and release the fetters of the sins that weigh you down. Give your soul room to breathe.”
Sherif opened his mouth to rebuke this impertinent stranger, to say to him, “Who are you to say such things to me?” Instead, he found himself saying, “I’m trying. But it’s hard. Harder than I thought.”
The man smiled. “Nothing is hard.” He laid a gentle hand on Sherif’s shoulder. “Try, and you will succeed.”
His recollection of what happened after that was not very clear. He seemed to blank out for a moment; when he looked around him, there was no one. The man was gone. Sherif looked around in hopes of finding him in some corner or other of the mosque, but there was no trace of him. He hurried outside the mosque, looking left and right, still thinking he might find the man; there was only silence and darkness.
Back in his room, he couldn’t stop thinking. Was what had happened real, or was it a dream? But how could it be a dream when the man’s words still echoed in his ears, when he still could feel the loving touch of his hand on his shoulder, when the scent of his perfume still lingered in his nostrils? Perhaps it was only a dervish who looked like him; but then, why had he suddenly disappeared as though he had never existed?
He dismissed these speculations from his head, focusing instead on the man’s words: “Follow the footsteps of your heart and release the fetters of the sins that weigh you down.” But this advice only led to more labyrinthine avenues of confusion: how could this man have known that he wanted to leave everything behind and start anew?
He had strange dreams that night, but he could remember nothing of them. He breakfasted in the hotel restaurant, and at exactly ten o’clock, Borhan called, telling him he was outside the hotel to take him on a tour of the city as he had promised the previous day.
That morning, Borhan’s greeting was brighter and his demeanor friendlier than it had been the day before. “I hope you slept well?”
“Very well. Except for a few nightmares.”
“Oh,” the man smiled, “that always happens to me after I take a flight to a different country. Change of place and time zones, and all that.”
“Mr. Borhan,” Sherif ventured, “would you mind another visit to your grandfather’s house? I . . . would like to give it another look.”
The man seemed taken aback to hear Sherif’s request; Sherif, after all, had told him yesterday that everything was in order, and that he would commence writing his report. Noticing that he seemed disgruntled, Sherif hastened to reassure him. “Don’t worry. Everything’s still fine. It’s just that there are parts of the house that I didn’t assess carefully enough,
and you know how important it is that my report to the company be complete.”
“Well, I’m at your service, Mr. Sherif. Let’s be on our way.”
He turned the BMW around and they set off. They opened the house to reveal the same perfume: the scent that had filled his nostrils the other day, the dervish’s perfume. “What’s that smell?” Sherif asked carefully. “Do you use a particular incense or freshener in here?”
“I actually can’t smell anything,” Borhan sniffed carefully at the air, turning his head this way and that, “but then again my sense of smell isn’t that acute. I can smell mold and mildew, but that’s all.”
This time, it was Sherif who led Borhan to the listening room. He walked straight up to the dervish’s portrait, standing directly before it and staring to make sure it was the same man he had seen in the mosque the other day. “What is it about this dervish?” asked Sherif.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Borhan said, his pleasant demeanor disappearing and his features tensing. “I’m sorry, what do you mean, ‘what is it about him?’”
More insistent now that he scented a secret, Sherif repeated firmly, “Who is he? What do you know about him?”
“Why are you asking about this particular dervish? Did someone tell you something about him? I know the people of this city, they never stop gossiping and making up lies and creating superstitions and making up stories!”
Sherif planted his feet more firmly on the ground. “Mr. Borhan, let’s be frank. There’s no need to beat around the bush. I’m here to write a report to close a big deal, and we’re going to be paying a lot of money. I’m asking you to be honest with me about everything to do with that dervish.”