The Dervish House by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online

fake,’ Ayşe continues. ‘If I can see it, my buyers can see it. They know at least as much as I do. These are collectors, aficionados, investors, people who purely love religious art, who love nothing else. They may not care where or how I get a piece. They care very much that it’s genuine. The moment they hear I’m selling fakes, they go to Antalya Fine Arts or the Salyan Gallery.’

    Topaloğlu’s humiliation deepens. He is cheap little pedlar with the soul of a carpet seller , Ayşe thinks. Abdurrahman recommended him to Ayşe as a man who could get Isfahan miniatures. She will have to have a word with Abdurrahman Bey.

    ‘I may have to reconsider our business relationship.’

    He’s pale now. Hafize, the gallery assistant, eavesdropper and interferer in concerns not hers, dips in and haughtily sweeps away his tea glass on her tray. She’s wearing the headscarf again. Ayşe will have to have a word with her. She’s become bolder in her flaunting of it since the tarikat, the Islamic study group, began meetings in the old kitchen quarters. Ayşe’s seen how the young men look at her as she locks the gallery shutter of an evening. They want her and her idolatrous images out. Let them try. The Erkoçs have good connections and deep purses.

    ‘What else have you got?’ Ayşe asks.

    Topaloğlu sets out miniatures like fortune-telling cards. He has donkey teeth, yellow plates of enamel. They make Ayşe feel ill. She bends over the miniatures laid out on the table in the private viewing room and clicks down the magnifier lens in her ceptep eyepiece.

    ‘These are genuine,’ Topaloğlu says.

    But very poor , Ayşe thinks, scanning the brushwork, the framing, the fine detail of the backgrounds. In the Isfahan and Topkapı schools, miniatures were the work of many hands. Each artist had his specialization and spent all his life perfecting it. There were masters of roses, of cloudscapes, of rocks, there were maestros who never painted anything but tile work. These are obvious apprentice pieces. The contrast between the exquisitely drawn figures and the crude backgrounds is glaring. The fine eye, the minuscule detail has not yet emerged. The great miniaturists, anonymous all of them but for their style, could paint a trellis, a window screen, a tiled wall, with a single hair. These are production line works for volumes of Sufi poetry, the kind which minor paşas and beys bought by the shelf to impress their inferiors.

    ‘Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Is that it? What’s in the shoe box?’

    Topaloğlu has been keeping it by his side, half hidden under the flap of his jacket. A Nike box, a style from five years back, Ayşe notes. At least he is wearing proper gentlemen’s shoes for this meeting, decently polished. Shoes speak loud, in Ayşe’s experience.

    ‘Just a few what you might call trinkets.’

    ‘Show me.’ Ayşe does not wait for Topaloğlu to open the box; she snatches off the lid. Inside there is indeed a rattle of junk; Armenian crosses, Orthodox censers, a couple of verdigrised Koran covers. Grand Bazaar tourist tat. Amidst the tarnished brass, glints of silver. Miniature Korans. Ayşe greedily lays them out in a row along the table. The recessed ceiling bulbs strike brilliants from the thumb-sized silver cases.

    ‘These I’m interested in.’

    ‘They’re twenty euro pilgrim curios,’ Topaloğlu says.

    ‘To you, Mr Topaloğlu. To me, and to the people who collect them, they’re stories.’ She taps the cover of a twentieth-century electroplate silver case, the crystal magnifier an eye, a good-luck boncuk charm. ‘A boy goes off to military service. Despite her best efforts his mother can’t get him into a soft option like the jandarmeri or the tourist police, so gives him a Holy Koran. Keep the word of God close and God will keep you folded into his breast.’ An early nineteenth-century gold shell case, exquisitely filigreed. ‘A merchant from Konya, after years building up his