Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  The central heating fitters were supposed to have arrived but they hadn’t. The old wood-burning heater, the soba, had already been taken out and everything was ready for the wonderful new gas central heating. However, because other open spaces across the city were beginning to set up their own mini Gezi Park protests, the traffic was so horrendous the fitters couldn’t leave their own district, which was over the Bosphorus in Üsküdar. And Kemal had gone out.

  Fatma İkmen fumed. The boy had gone to Gezi because suddenly it had all become a lot of fun. For some reason she couldn’t understand, and Çetin wasn’t saying, the police had pulled back from the park. As a result even more oddities and malcontents had joined in the protest. Including her youngest son.

  Sometimes Fatma despaired. In spite of the country becoming more religious, her own family just went the opposite way. It had to be because of their father. And yet with Çetin she was always and forever conflicted. Unlike a lot of men, when it came to elections, he didn’t tell her who to vote for. He had to know that she’d always vote for the ruling AK Parti but he’d never asked her, even though he often referred to them as ‘your lot’. When she’d asked him about voting and why he was so uninterested in what she might be doing, he looked at her as if she was insane. He could go on and on about being a democrat and yet she knew that he approved of the Gezi protests, which, in her mind, meant that he was in favour of violent insurrection.

  With Kemal out and no gas fitters on the horizon, Fatma went out. There was a small enclosure where people could pray behind the Aya Sofya and she felt the need to perform her prayers with others.

  Tourists in Sultanahmet Square were rather less evident than usual. In common with everything except Gezi Park and its offshoots and the traffic, the city was quieter than usual. Holding its breath for what might happen next. Because the area was so clear, Fatma raised her head and looked at the sunlight as it shone through the branches of the trees. It was a beautiful day in spite of everything. Then she saw an old face, which made her smile. Hakkı Bey.

  ‘Peace be upon you, Fatma Hanım,’ he said.

  ‘And upon you, Hakkı Bey,’ she replied.

  He was with a tall, middle-aged man who had a toddler, a little boy, in his arms.

  ‘My son, Lokman,’ he said.

  Fatma tilted her head in greeting.

  ‘Visiting from Van with his new wife and children,’ he said. ‘The girl has had three in three years. Imagine! We’re very proud. Madam likes to watch the children play. It makes her feel part of the world.’

  Fatma recalled that Lokma had always been an expressionless man, and now he didn’t disappoint. So what he felt about it was impossible to tell. He had to be in his late fifties, but if he wanted a new family with a new wife, that was fine. It was good to have a lot of children.

  ‘I am very glad for you,’ Fatma said. Then she bade the pair farewell and walked towards the Aya Sofya. Hakkı Bey had looked after the old Greek woman, Anastasia Negroponte, for as long as Fatma could remember. Even when that man had turned up from Germany who said he was her son Yiannis, Hakkı Bey had stayed. Long, long ago there had been a rumour that Hakkı Bey loved Anastasia Negroponte. She’d even heard, just the once, a whispered story about him having killed her husband during the anti-Greek riots of 1955. It was said that Anastasia had seen him stabbing her husband and so Hakkı had had to hit her to silence her. As a result she’d become the vegetable people said she was today. Fatma believed none of it. Hakkı was a good man, a pious man.

  She watched Hakkı, his son and grandson walk in the direction of the Negroponte house. It was such an awful wreck now – odd that, according to Çetin, someone wanted to buy it.

  ‘There is no tunnel,’ İkmen said to Kerim Gürsel. ‘A very articulate priest at the patriarchate told me it was an “urban myth”.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ İkmen said. ‘But most probably, yes. Professor Bozdağ is of the opinion that all is pretty much wrecked and waterlogged underneath Aya Sofya, and we do have earthquakes in this country.’

  They hadn’t spent time together in their office for some while. Kerim had uncomplainingly gone to view two dead babies that had been found in the city, neither of which could have belonged to Ariadne Savva – one had been black, the other too old. But his dark eyes now looked haunted and İkmen knew that he would have to relieve him of that burden. People with babies all over the old city had been required to show their ID cards and answer questions about their infants, and so far that had yielded nothing. The chances of finding the child alive were diminishing.

  ‘Is Dr Savva’s father still in the city, sir?’

  ‘No, he’s gone back to Greece,’ İkmen said. ‘He’ll return when the body is released. He wasn’t comfortable here. Which is understandable.’

  Savva had not been convinced that his daughter’s death didn’t have a racist motive. But he came from Anatolian Greek stock and so it would be difficult for him to imagine a different explanation. So much hatred between the two nations over the centuries had produced a distortion in some people’s minds that always raced to the hated ‘other’ whenever misfortune came. It wasn’t a trait that İkmen shared. He felt fortunate that his father had been an educated man who had abhorred racism of any kind.

  İkmen pushed himself back from his desk, opened the office window and lit a cigarette. In common with at least five other people, as far as he could see, he hung his head out into the warm summer air.

  ‘You live near Gezi Park, Kerim,’ he said. ‘What’s the mood in your area?’

  ‘It was tense when we – the police – were going in. But now it’s, well, it’s almost like a carnival sometimes. People go to Gezi when they leave work. Do you know why the site’s not being cleared, sir?’

  ‘No. That’s political and I keep well away from that. But I’m puzzled as to why the government hasn’t pushed it. The Prime Minister is due to leave for North Africa in a few days and I should imagine he’d want the problem cleared up before he goes. But what do I know?’

  He was so disillusioned with politics. To his way of thinking, although Turkey had got richer it had lost much of its soul to profit and shopping. When the five-hundred-year-old gypsy quarter of Sulukule had been demolished to make way for a housing estate he’d felt it like a wound. Not only had his old friend Gonca’s family lived there but he’d wandered those historic streets as a boy. Seeing the gypsies leave had made him weep.

  İkmen’s phone rang. He put his cigarette out on the window sill and answered it.

  ‘İkmen.’

  ‘Çetin Bey, it is Hakkı,’ a breathless voice said. ‘I have just returned to Madam’s and Ahmet Öden is outside the house. He’s alone, just sitting in his car. He’s not meant to be here. It’s making Yiannis very agitated.’

  İkmen put his head in his hands. This situation, quite separate from his current investigation, was going to run on until, he feared, Öden got his way. ‘Has he spoken to anyone in the house? In person or on the phone?’

  ‘No,’ Hakkı said. ‘He’s just sitting, looking at the house.’

  ‘Doing nothing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hakkı Bey, if he’s not doing anything there’s not much I can do,’ İkmen said. ‘There are no traffic restrictions, as you know, and so he has a perfect right to sit in his car doing nothing for as long as he likes.’

  ‘But it’s intimidation!’

  ‘If you interpret it that way.’

  ‘How else, given what’s gone before, can we interpret it, Çetin Bey?’

  ‘I agree, intimidation is the most likely motive,’ İkmen said. ‘But his defence to that will be that he just wanted to sit in his car and enjoy the sunshine. Hakkı Bey, he is playing mind games with you and it is unpleasant, but if you want to defeat him then you have to remain calm.’

  ‘I fear Yiannis will collapse. Every minute he’s looking out of the window at the car, drinking and smoking himself into an early grave.
Madam will not survive if anything happens to him.’

  İkmen accepted that he had no choice. ‘OK, Hakkı Bey, I will come out as soon as I can. But it will be as an act of solidarity rather than anything else. I won’t confront or even speak to Ahmet Öden. Standing on shaky legal ground with someone like him and his lawyers is not a healthy place to be. I’ll come, we’ll talk, I’ll try to calm Yiannis down and then I will go.’

  ‘I know you do this, Çetin Bey, when you are so busy and—’

  ‘Let’s just see if my visit can give Öden something to think about,’ İkmen said. ‘You don’t know what he’s doing. Now he won’t know what you’re up to.’

  ‘But why is it a game, Çetin Bey?’ Hakkı asked. ‘This place is a home. Why has it become someone’s sport?’

  ‘Because it’s worth more money than we have ever seen in our lives,’ İkmen said. Then he put the phone down.

  Kerim looked at him questioningly.

  ‘We should go back to the sphendone and see if anything more has been found in there,’ İkmen said. ‘And then we’ll make a little detour.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘That house I told you about, the Negroponte place. Apparently the developer who wants it is indulging in a little light-hearted intimidation. And so I think we should go and spoil his fun.’

  The sound of the drill made Ömer wince. Knowing that he wasn’t going to have dental treatment himself didn’t make him feel better. He’d only ever had one filling in his life but that had been when he’d been very young and it had hurt. What also didn’t help was the way patients in the waiting room kept looking at trashy magazines, throwing them aside and then biting their lips.

  ‘Sergeant Mungun?’

  He looked up. It was a nurse and half her face was covered by a surgical mask. A man at her side scuttled round her, holding the side of his face.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr İnçi will see you now,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

  Ömer got shakily to his feet and followed her down a short corridor to a treatment room that looked rather more like something from a Star Trek film than a dentist’s surgery. The old practice he had visited in Mardin had been behind a butcher’s shop and had smelt of meat and looked like a torture chamber. But then this was one of Beyoğlu’s foremost practices, right on İstiklal Caddesi.

  A stout woman, who had been bending over a stack of papers when he entered, turned and said, ‘So what can we do to help the police?’

  She was about fifty, rather plain and, Ömer felt, a little hostile.

  ‘As I explained to your receptionist on the phone, I’ve come here because I understand that this is an old, family practice,’ Ömer said. ‘Here since the 1950s.’

  ‘Yes. We are a dynasty of dentists. My father and my grandfather, now me,’ she said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘I’m trying to trace the identity of a body we found in this area recently—’

  ‘The one in the Lise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’ He felt she thawed slightly, particularly when she offered him a seat. ‘That’s all it’s about?’

  Had she been afraid that he was going to ask her to do something to help the police break up Gezi, maybe? It was just a guess, but she didn’t look as if she was the sort of person who would be entirely in favour of the current administration.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how can I help?’ she asked.

  ‘The body we found dates from the mid-1950s,’ he said. ‘What’s unusual about it is that it’s had complicated dentistry, especially for that time. Crowns and bridges.’

  ‘Crowns and bridges have been around for a long time for those who can afford them,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. This man had to have had money to be able to have his teeth so well maintained,’ Ömer said. ‘From this we deduce he wasn’t a vagrant or a person of low status. And yet we’re struggling to identify him.’

  ‘What about the anti-Greek riots of 1955?’

  She just came out with it and Ömer was a little shocked.

  ‘My father hid as many as he could find in here,’ she said. ‘Then he and my grandfather stood in the doorway with pistols raised.’

  ‘Oh, that was very—’

  ‘They were brave men and they did the right thing and I’m proud of them,’ she said.

  Was it just Ömer’s imagination or did Dr İnçi raise her head a little higher as she spoke?

  ‘Well, I have some X-rays and photographs of what remains of this man’s teeth and dental work,’ Ömer said. He took an envelope out of his pocket.

  ‘I can look, but—’

  ‘I don’t know whether you have kept dental records from so long ago, but because I know this is a family business I’m hoping there may be a chance.’

  She put her hand out for the envelope and he gave it to her. She looked at the photographs and put the X-rays up on her light box. For what seemed like a long time, she was silent. Then she said, ‘We do have some old records. But from the 1950s I really don’t know. My father was in the habit of keeping very detailed accounts of work he performed that was either difficult or unusual in any way. As I said, if you could pay, even in the fifties you could get crowns and bridges fitted. But this was a poor country then and so those who had such work done would have been few. What about the Greeks?’

  ‘You mean the people who died in 1955?’

  ‘Who were murdered, yes.’

  ‘They were all accounted for,’ he said. ‘This body may well be Greek but we don’t think that he was killed in the riots of 1955.’

  ‘Maybe his family didn’t report him.’

  ‘Maybe. But those events have been well documented,’ he said. ‘Dr İnçi, this man died violently, and although it is unlikely we will be able to bring his killer to justice after all this time, if we can give him a name at least we will be able to know where to bury him.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said. ‘But it will take time. Some records are kept here, upstairs, and others at our summer house in Tarabiya. I can’t give you any idea how long this may take.’

  ‘I understand. And I appreciate it.’

  She smiled, which made her look quite attractive.

  When he left, she took Ömer’s hand and shook it. Her grip was firm and dry, like a man’s.

  Peri had had lahmacun for breakfast and now she was eating some honeyed figs which had been given to her by a transsexual who called herself Madonna. Music was playing, the sun was shining, the man lying on the grass next to her was reading James Joyce and Iris was smoking a cigarette and talking to a group of gay boys. If this was protest then it was all rather pleasant. But should it be?

  Peri looked at her watch and realised that her shift for that day would start in forty-five minutes. Surely rather than lying about in the sunshine she should be tending to her patients? The hospital had taken her excuse for the previous day without question but if she didn’t turn up again there could be problems. Besides, her patients, rich or otherwise, were sick and they needed her. Peri stood up. Her uniform was filthy and smoke dried, but she had another one in her locker and if she moved herself she would have time for a shower before the start of her shift.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Peri looked down at Iris. ‘To work.’

  ‘To work? I thought you’d made your decision to join the protest.’

  ‘I have. I did. But at the moment there’s nothing to do,’ Peri said.

  ‘Yeah. But the police could come back any time. The prime ministerial trip’s in only a couple of days. We could be under attack any minute.’

  ‘Then I’ll come back,’ Peri said. ‘But at the moment there’s nothing going on here and my patients need me.’

  Iris shrugged, said, ‘Whatever,’ and then returned to her conversation.

  Peri walked out of the park towards İstanbul’s German Hospital.

  ‘It’s over fifty years since I was in this house,’ İkmen said. He wanted to c
ontinue and say that it hadn’t changed a bit – unless you included the degradation of almost everything about it. But he didn’t.

  Hakkı said, ‘I told Madam you were coming and she insisted on seeing you.’

  ‘I’d be delighted to see her.’

  ‘But alone, Çetin Bey,’ the old man continued. ‘Not your er, your . . .’ He looked at Kerim Gürsel.

  ‘I’ll go and sit in the kitchen if you like,’ Kerim said.

  It had been an uncomfortable morning with the crime scene officers in the sphendone. With the help of the Archaeological Museum they were investigating the further reaches of the cavities underneath the Hippodrome, looking for possible clues and maybe even more bodies. It was a good place to hide a body or two, out of sight and difficult to access. Many of the rooms and other cavities were almost completely collapsed and so one had to crouch for much of the time. Then there was the water, which had seeped in to almost every part of the building except the area where the body had been found.

  ‘No, no, no,’ the old man said. ‘Yiannis will entertain you in the salon.’

  As if on cue, Yiannis Negroponte appeared. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to follow me, officer . . .’

  ‘Gürsel.’

  ‘We have home-made lemonade and iced tea,’ Yiannis said.

  Hakkı led İkmen up the wide, mirrored staircase he had once run up and down with his brother when they were children while his mother read Madam Anastasia’s cards out in the garden. Now he was trudging up the same, if more worn, staircase, to get to the old woman’s bedroom.