The Sultan of Byzantium Read Free Page A

chance to scold him. I endured their soulless house for a week, then took a train up to Adelaide. Just because its name was Ararat, I stopped off at a remote station in the outback for two days. From Sydney I flew to Alexandria, my last stop. There I wandered among the places where Cavafy had once sequestered himself reciting his last poems like a long prayer.
    It was mid-autumn when I returned to Istanbul, where I was thoroughly bored by an old high school friend’s wedding. The cheap wine they served gave me a headache in the bargain. On the way home I sank down on a bench in front of the Tower and chatted with the kids hanging out there, whose families were migrants from eastern Anatolia. They weren’t impressed when I ticked off the names of the small towns and smaller villages they’d all come from. I rose, hoping to sober up by strolling the silent and deserted streets in the pleasant evening. I began walking in the direction of the thin wind that was blowing towards me. The street, so narrow a bicycle could barely get down it, was a source of annoyance. A little way into it I saw a girl of seven or eight crying in front of a half-abandoned building with a single light burning on the third floor. She wore a one-size-too-small sweatshirt and sweatpants and no shoes. She was shivering. I couldn’t keep from thinking that her teardrops were prettier than pearls. Moved, I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her. The dark olive-eyed girl was Devran Abi’s daughter Hayal. Her father had often brought her to his café when she was a baby. She was a sweet girl. I remembered how she would run to me and wrap her arms around my leg whenever she saw me. Devran had died of cancer, may he rest in peace, when I was in New York. His widow then married an old friend of his whom Devran had considered of dubious character. Now Hayal told me that her mother had died in hospital two days earlier, and her stepfather had put her out of the house.
    I knew there would be no answer, but I rang the worthless bastard’s doorbell all the same. I turned to the shivering girl and said, ‘Come and stay with us tonight. You’ll be rid of that drunk, God willing, by tomorrow.’ With that I picked her up and hoisted her on my back. She cried until she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. The tick-tock of her little heart and the warmth of her body were too much for me; tears came to my eyes. I was a well-regarded idle man who hadn’t yet done any good deeds for anyone. My mother received the surprise as she was watching TV.
    ‘Akile,’ I said, ‘this princess is my new sister.’
    The next day Iskender Abi and I buried Hayal’s mother. In exchange for a bit of money the stepfather turned the child over to me and left Galata for good.
    Hayal was as sturdy as her father. She overcame her trauma with a little help from a psychologist and grew into a smart and charming young girl. She’s a student now at the Austrian High School; she wants to be a doctor. She parts her hair in the middle because I like it like that. She calls my grandmother ‘Haji Grandma’, and my mother, ‘Mama Akile’, She goes with Haji Grandma to my grandfather’s grave, to the spa in Gönen, and to visit her sister in Artvin. Is it a rule that an old annoying custom should haunt you from the cradle? Since older brothers are supposed to marry first, Hayal is convinced, in view of my confirmed bachelorhood, that her turn will never come. ‘Mama Akile,’ she likes to complain, ‘I’ll never have a chance to get married.’
     
    *
    I spent my four years in London as a postgraduate living in an apartment near to the British Museum. I could walk from there to the university in fifteen minutes. From the front the brick building looked like it was built by Lego. Only after I moved in did I notice a plaque in the lobby commemorating the fact that the Nobelist Bertrand Russell had lived there. During one of her religious holidays my mother came with Hayal to