Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [9]
Four carriage drivers, huddling by the entrance of the coffeehouse to avoid the rain, were looking at the photograph. The noise of the backgammon and rummikub games in full swing in the coffeehouse was drowned out by occasional thunder; sporadic lightning illuminated the horses on their sorrowful watch. Finally, an old driver piped up, “I know this house. It’s where that foreigner stays. Toward Maden.” The other drivers agreed, conceding those fateful words like the performers in an ancient tragedy. One offered a cigarette to another, and the third threw me a furtive glance before stepping into the coffeehouse. “Let me take you there,” said the old driver.
It was almost dark. We were rattling along a road under clouds blanketing the sky in increasingly darker shades of gray. There in the green, dark forest, I thought each and every one of the mansions, rising like ancient temples with their pointy towers there beyond the large gardens along the shore, must be the house where I was to meet Nigel. The dull lights of Sedef Island were visible now. We and the weary horses continued down the forest path, which was lit by a dirty yellow light. The waves crashing against the shore, the screams of the seagulls, and a dog howling from afar were the only sounds to be heard. Except for the rhythmic pattern of the hooves flowing like a cover of fog into the hills. There was so little left of the hullabaloo of summer; the lustrous, colorful begonias had faded to the color of earth. The yellow leaves of the plane trees blanketed the asphalt and the gardens of the barren mansions, their paint swelling and cracking, covered in wild ivy. Büyükada would wait motionlessly like a cursed, angry, abandoned old man, wrinkled with loneliness, until the spring, when the voluntary exiles escaping the chaos of Istanbul returned. The carriage ride felt as long and exhausting as my entire prison sentence.
I had reached the very pinnacle of my desire to face Nigel and avenge my loved ones he had slaughtered.
“Get off here and walk up that trail. The horses can’t go down there in this weather,” the old driver said.
The moment I opened the door, the lights went out. I took a few more steps into the pitch black. Nigel appeared. He was just in front of me. We were facing off, like two gunslingers. Then, another Nigel appeared out of the darkness. Then another. Then others. Each one was doing and saying something different. When I listened closely, I understood that the rambling narratives were the last words of my loved ones. Each Nigel was repeating, deadpan, the last words of another soul mate of mine.
“You have improved your technique,” I said in a growl.
As the voices of those eleven Nigels faded away, the Nigel in the middle, just in front of me, took a few weighty steps, as if underwater, and spoke: “I improved not only my technique, but the content of the show as well. Seeing as we’re speaking the same language now …”
“If you mean Turkish, fine, but you and I couldn’t possibly have another language in common,” I said.
“We share something else. No matter how much you may deny it, we are both keepers of the secrets of the fire, its purifying effects, its uncanny allure, its geometry. But this is the only knowledge its keeper can’t convey. If you watch the fire very closely, you see that it’s telling you something. You’re mesmerized, and gradually the fire starts conversing with you. You crack the mystery, but can’t teach it to anyone else. You are the keeper of a message so profound and poetic that it has