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Istanbul, explaining that he was preparing a secret book for Our Sultan and

that he wanted my help. He’d heard that for a period while in Tabriz, I made

books for Ottoman pashas, provincial governors and Istanbulites. What I did

then was to use the money advanced by clients who’d placed manuscript

orders in Istanbul to locate miniaturists and calligraphers who were frustrated

by the wars and the presence of Ottoman soldiers, but hadn’t yet left for

Kazvin or another Persian city, and it was these masters—complaining of

poverty and neglect—whom I commissioned to inscribe, illustrate and bind

the pages of the manuscripts I would then send back to Istanbul. If it weren’t

for the love of illustrating and fine books that my Enishte instilled in me

during my youth, I could have never involved myself in such pursuits.

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At the market end of the street, where at one time my Enishte had lived, I

found the barber, a master by trade, in his shop among the same mirrors,

straight razors, pitchers of water and soap brushes. I caught his eye, but I’m

not sure he recognized me. It delighted me to see that the head-washing basin,

which hung by a chain from the ceiling, still traced the same old arc, swinging

back and forth as he filled it with hot water.

Some of the neighborhoods and streets I’d frequented in my youth had

disappeared in ashes and smoke, replaced by burnt ruins where stray dogs

congregated and where mad transients frightened the local children. In other

areas razed by fire, large affluent houses had been built, and I was astonished

by their extravagance, by windows of the most expensive Venetian stained

glass, and by lavish two-story residences with bay windows suspended above

high walls.

As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the

time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred

drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for

the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my

childhood. Had my late mother seen the day when she’d have to spend three

silver pieces for a dozen eggs, she’d say, “We ought to leave before the chickens

grow so spoiled they shit on us instead of the ground.” But I knew the

problem of devalued money was the same everywhere. It was rumored that

Flemish and Venetian merchant ships were filled with chests of counterfeit

coin. At the royal mint, where five hundred coins were once minted from a

hundred drachmas of silver, now, owing to the endless warring with the

Persians, eight hundred coins were minted from the same amount. When

Janissaries discovered that the coins they’d been paid actually floated in the

Golden Horn like the dried beans that fell from the vegetable-sellers pier, they

rioted, besieging Our Sultan’s palace as if it were an enemy fortress.

A cleric by the name of Nusret, who preached at the Bayazid Mosque and

claimed to be descended from Our Glorious Prophet Muhammad, had made a

name for himself during this period of immorality, inflation, crime and theft.

This hoja, who was from the small town of Erzurum, attributed the

catastrophes that had befallen Istanbul in the last ten years—including the

Bah?ekap? and Kazanj?lar district fires, the plagues that claimed tens of

thousands, the endless wars with the Persians at a cost of countless lives, as

well as the loss of small Ottoman fortresses in the West to Christians in

revolt—to our having strayed from the path of the Prophet, to disregard for

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the strictures of the Glorious Koran, to the tolerance toward Christians, to the

open sale of wine and to the playing of musical instruments in dervish houses.

The pickle seller who passionately informed me about the cleric from

Erzurum said that the counterfeit coins—the new ducats, the fake florins

stamped with lions and the Ottoman coins with their ever-decreasing silver

content—that flooded the markets and bazaars, just like the Circassians,

Abkhazians, Mingarians, Bosnians, Georgians and Armenians who filled the

streets, were dragging us toward an absolute degradation from which it would

be difficult to escape. I was told that scoundrels and rebels were gathering in

coffeehouses and proselytizing until dawn; that destitute men of dubious

character, opium-addicted madmen and followers of the outlawed Kalenderi

dervish sect, claiming to be on Allah’s path, would spend their nights in

dervish houses dancing to music, piercing themselves with skewers and

engaging in all manner of depravity, before brutally fucking each other and any

boys they could find.

I didn’t know whether it was the melodious sound of a lute that compelled

me to follow, or if in the muddle of my memories and desires, I could simply

no longer endure the virulent pickle seller, and seized upon the music as a way

out of the conversation. I do, however, know this: When you love a city and

have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets

to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy,

perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you’ll discover your

legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite

promontories.

This was how I happened to leave the Farrier’s Market and ended up

watching the snow as it fell into the Golden Horn from a spot beside the

Süleymaniye Mosque: Snow had already begun to accumulate on the rooftops

facing north and on sections of the dome exposed to the northeasterly breeze.

An approaching ship, whose sails were being lowered, greeted me with a

flutter of canvas. The color of its sails matched the leaden and foggy hue of the

surface of the Golden Horn. The cypress and plane trees, the rooftops, the

heartache of dusk, the sounds coming from the neighborhood below, the calls

of hawkers and the cries of children playing in mosque courtyards mingled in

my head and announced emphatically that, hereafter, I wouldn’t be able to

live anywhere but in their city. I had the sensation that my beloved’s face,

which had escaped me for years, might suddenly appear to me.

I began to walk down the hill and melded into the crowds. After the

evening prayer was called, I filled my stomach at a liver shop. In the empty

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shop, I listened carefully to the owner, who fondly watched me eat each bite as

if he were feeding a cat. Taking his cue and following his directions, I found

myself turning down one of the narrow alleys behind the slave market—well

after the streets had become dark—and located the coffeehouse.

Inside, it was crowded and warm. The storyteller, the likes of whom I had

seen in Tabriz and in Persian cities and who was known thereabouts as a

“curtain-caller,” was perched on a raised platform beside the wood-burning

stove. He had unfolded and hung before the crowd a picture, the figure of a

dog drawn on rough paper hastily but with a certain elegance. He was giving

voice to the dog, and pointing, from time to time, at the drawing.

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I AM A DOG

As you can doubtless tell, dear friends, my canines are so long and pointed

they barely fit into my mouth. I know this gives me a menacing appearance,

but it pleases me. Noticing the size of my teeth, a butcher once had the gall to

say, “My God, that’s no dog at all, it’s a wild boar!”

I bit him so hard on the leg that my canines sank right through his fatty

flesh to the hardness of his thighbone. For a dog, you see, nothing is as

satisfying as sinking his teeth into his miserable enemy in a fit of instinctual

wrath. When such an opportunity presents itself, that is, when my victim, who

deserves to be bitten, stupidly and unknowingly passes by, my teeth twinge

and ache in anticipation, my head spins with longing and without even

meaning to, I emit a hair-raising growl.

I’m a dog, and because you humans are less rational beasts than I, you’re

telling yourselves, “Dogs don’t talk.” Nevertheless, you seem to believe a story

in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn’t possibly know.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a faraway land, a brash cleric from a

provincial town arrived at one of the largest mosques in a capital city; all right,

let’s call it the Bayazid Mosque. It’d be appropriate to withhold his name, so

let’s refer to him as “Husret Hoja.” But why should I cover up anything more:

This man was one boneheaded cleric. He made up for the modesty of his

intellect with the power of his tongue, God bless it. Each Friday, he so

animated his congregation, so moved them to tears that some would cry until

they fainted or dried up and withered away. Don’t get me wrong, unlike other

clerics with the gift of preaching, he himself didn’t weep. On the contrary,

while everyone else cried, he intensified his oration without a blink as if to

chastise the congregation. In all probability, the gardeners, royal pages, halva

makers, riffraff and clerics like himself became his lackeys because they

enjoyed the tongue lashing. Well, this man was no dog after all, no sir, he was

a human being—to be human is to err—and before those enthralled crowds,

he lost himself when he saw that intimidating throngs of people was as

pleasurable as bringing them to tears. When he understood that there was

much more bread to be made in this new venture, he went over the top and

had the nerve to say the following:

“The sole reason for rising prices, plague and military defeat lies in our

forgetting the Islam of the time of our Glorious Prophet and falling sway to

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falsehoods. Was the Prophet’s birth epic read in memory of the dead back

then? Was the fortieth-day ceremony performed, where sweets like halva and

fried dough are offered to honor the dead? When Muhammad lived, was the

Glorious Koran recited melodically, like a song? Were the prayers called

haughtily and pompously to show how close one’s Arabic was to an Arab’s?

Was there such a thing as reciting the call to prayer coyly, with the flourish of

a man imitating a woman? Today, people plead before gravesites, begging for

amends. They hope for the intervention of the dead on their behalf. They visit

the tombs of saints and worship at graves like pagans before pieces of stone.

They tie votive pieces of cloth everywhere, and make promises of sacrifice in

return for atonement. Were there dervish sectarians who spread such beliefs in

Muhammad’s time? Ibn Arabi, the intellectual mentor of these sectarians,

became a sinner by swearing that the infidel Pharaoh had died a believer.

These dervishes, the Mevlevis, the Halvetis, the Kalenderis and those who sing

the Koran to musical accompaniment or justify dancing with children and

juveniles by saying ”we pray together anyway, why not?“ are all kaffirs. Dervish

lodges ought to be destroyed, their foundations excavated to a depth of seven

ells and the collected earth cast into the sea. Only then might ritual prayers be

performed there again.”

I heard tell that this Husret Hoja, taking matters even further, declared with

spittle flying from his mouth, “Ah, my devoted believers! The drinking of

coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee

because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he

understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil’s ruse. Coffeehouses are

places where pleasure-seekers and wealthy gadabouts sit knee-to-knee,

involving themselves in all sorts of vulgar behavior; in fact, even before the

dervish houses are closed, coffeehouses ought to be banned. Do the poor have

enough money to drink coffee? Men frequent these places, become besotted

with coffee and lose control of their mental faculties to the point that they

actually listen to and believe what dogs and mongrels have to say. But those

who curse me and our religion, it is they who are the true mongrels.”

With your permission, I’d like to respond to this last comment by the

esteemed cleric. Of course, it is common knowledge that hajis, hojas, clerics,

and preachers despise us dogs. In my opinion, the whole matter concerns our

revered Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, who cut off a

piece of his robe upon which a cat lay sleeping rather than wake the beast. By

pointing out this affection shown to the cat, which has incidentally been

denied to us dogs, and due to our eternal feud with this feline beast, which

even the stupidest of men recognizes as an ingrate, people have tried to

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intimate that the Prophet himself disliked dogs. They’re convinced that we’ll

defile those who have performed ritual ablutions, and the result of this

erroneous and slanderous belief is that we’ve been barred from mosques for

centuries and have suffered beatings in their courtyards from broomstick-

wielding caretakers.

Allow me to remind you of “The Cave,” the most beautiful of the Koran’s

chapters. I’m reminding you not because I suspect there may be those who

never read the Koran among us in this good coffeehouse, but because I want

to refresh your memories: This chapter recounts the story of the seven youths

who grow tired of living among pagans and take refuge in a cave where they