The Dervish House by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

material goods, finally frees himself from his worldly obligations to undertake the Hac. His concubine gives him a keep-sake. Remember, the world will be waiting.’

    ‘How can you tell it’s a Konya piece?’

    ‘It’s in the Mevlevi style, but it’s not a souvenir from the Rumi pilgrimage - those usually are cheap mass-produced tourist junk. This is altogether a much more fine work. There’s money and devotion here. Once you learn to see, you begin to hear the stories.’ Ayşe rests her finger on tiny silver Koran no larger than a thumb, delicate as a prayer. ‘This is eighteenth-century Persian. But there’s only half a Koran. A Holy Koran, divided?’ She opens the case and sets the little Persian scripture in the palm of her hand. ‘What’s the story there? A promise made, a couple divided, a family at war with itself, a pledge, a contract? You want to know. That’s the market. The Korans, as you say, are trinkets. Stories; people will always buy those.’ Ayşe sets the tiny hemi-Koran back into its case. ‘I’ll take these three. The rest is rubbish. Fifty euro each.’

    ‘I was thinking three hundred would be more appropriate.’

    ‘Did I hear you say that they were only twenty euro pilgrim curios? Two hundred.’

    ‘Cash.’

    ‘Cash.’

    Topaloğlu shakes on two hundred.

    ‘Hafize will arrange payment. You can bring me more of these. Then we’ll see about the miniatures.’

    Topaloğlu almost bares his rural teeth in a smile.

    ‘Good to do business, Mrs Erkoç.’

    Footsteps on the stairs and along the wooden gallery; Hafize’s heels. Modest headscarf and fashion heels. A tap at the door. The look on her face is part puzzlement, part suspicion.

    ‘Madam, a customer.’

    ‘I’ll see him. Could you deal with Mr Topaloğlu? We’ve settled at two hundred euro for these three.’

    ‘Cash,’ Topaloğlu says. Hafize will screw another twenty per cent off the price; her ‘administration fee’. For a young woman with aspirations to respectability, she’s as tough a bargainer as any street seller spreading his knock-off football shirts on the quay at Eminönü.

    From the encircling balcony, Ayşe looks down into the old semahane, the dance-floor where in another age dervishes spun themselves into the ecstasy of God. A man bends over a case of Torahs. The great brass chandelier hides him, but Ayşe catches a ripple of gloss, like oil sheen in an Eskiköy puddle, across his back. Nanoweave fabric. Expensive suit.

    As Ayşe descends the stairs Adnan warbles a video clip on to her ceptep. She glimpses wide Bosphorus, a white boat at a jetty, dipping gulls, a slow pan along the strait to the bridge. A gas tanker passes. So Adnan to let the camera linger on the gas tanker. His palace, his dream, when he closes Turquoise. Still the wrong side of the Bosphorus, Anatolian boy. She needs to get back to Europe.

    ‘I am Ayşe Erkoç.’

    The customer takes her proffered hand. Electronic business cards crackle from palm to palm.

    ‘Haydar Akgün. I was just looking at your Jewish manuscripts. There is some very fine micrography here.’ Moiré patterns, blacker on black, mesh across the fabric of his suit. Silver at his cuffs. Ayşe admires silver. There is restraint in silver.

    ‘It’s actually double micrography. If you look closely you’ll see there is calligraphy within the calligraphy.’

    Akgün bends closer to the page. He blinks up his ceptep. Lasers dance across his eye, drawing a magnified image on the retina. The folio is from a Pentateuch, the panel of lettering set within a decorative frame of twining flower stems, trellises and fantastical heraldic beasts, dragon-headed, serpent tailed. The decoration teases the eye, the look beyond the surface dazzle shows the outlines to be made up of minuscule writing. It is only under magnification that the second level of micrography appears: those letters are in turn made up of chains of smaller writing. Akgün’s eyes