The Sultan of Byzantium Read Free Page B

visit. I took Hayal to the London Zoo, since she wanted to go – before that I hadn’t even gone to circuses, believing they were a symbol of enslavement. But at the lions’ cage – was I awake or dreaming? – my eyes locked with those of a young lioness. We gazed at each other a long time, then she came to the edge of the cage and bowed her head as if she wanted me to pat it. The rest of her family stood gazing sympathetically at me, like they were waiting for my signal to attack. The other big cats, the tigers and panthers, said hello to me from a distance by wagging their tails. The next month I went again to the zoo and again enjoyed the same rites of hospitality. It occurred to me that these noble cats perhaps recognized a real friend at first sight. I thought of Tristan with great longing. Thanks to Tristan I’d learned the Latin names of hundreds of bird species. When my grandmother refused to buy me an aquarium, I bombarded her with the names of the twenty-seven kinds of shark that lived in our seas. The better I got to know people, the more I respected animals. I always loved children, especially mischievous little girls with runny noses. I used to go to Tünel Square just to hand out change to the child beggars there. My grandmother said, ‘If I don’t will my fortune to the Children’s Charity Foundation I’m afraid you’ll do it for me.’
    For the last six years I’ve been teaching two days a week at Bosphorus University. Last year, when I was promoted to associate professor, my grandmother asked, ‘What does it mean?’
    ‘Well, if professors are generals, then I’m a colonel,’ I said.
    ‘All right,’ she said. ‘In that case, congratulations.’
    I started teaching one day a week at Kadir Has University too, simply because I never felt bored on my walks to that nostalgic building on the Golden Horn. The students, who lose their innocence as soon as they start making money, all call me ‘Hocam’, which means ‘my professor’ and it warms my heart. In my free time I read poetry, study semiology or play chess, and compose Sudoku puzzles. If I happen to go out into the city, I’m appalled at the colossal new skyscrapers. And I feel truly sorry for all those people running around like robots in blue jeans. As I confessed to Tristan, I’m more than ready to work for any honest political leader who could save the country from turning into Boorishstan. Other than that I find no reason to be acquitted of Galata.
    During my first summer vacation while I was at Columbia, I became my grandmother’s neighbor by moving into my mother’s perpetually empty apartment. I furnished it with antiques from old Galata mansions: my desk, my weary armchair, my end tables and the busts on them of my family members. Eugenio, hearing that I’d already introduced the busts to Tristan, said, ‘You’re a one-of-a-kind animist.’ I hung some old maps on the living-room wall in the places vacated by my mother’s library shelves. One of the maps was a 1559 engraving by Sebastian Münster. It was the most exciting object among a treasure trove that one of my grandfathers – not even my grandmother could remember which one – had left behind. The map, which Hayal described as a graphic novel squeezed onto a single sheet of paper, pictured Galata before the Conquest. Everything was in a jumble behind the ancient citadel walls, with our Tower standing erect and powerful beside an aqueduct.
    I collected quite a few old map books with money I squeezed out of my grandmother for school expenses. I took courses in Latin to examine them more thoroughly. All the city names on those maps never failed to be poetic. The ones I focused on, letter by letter, drew me inside their walls. I was taken on exemplary tours; I supposed I was expected to experience what had happened to humanity because of individual mistakes.
    Alberto, whose mother forced him to listen to classical music for half an hour every night because she thought