I’m getting to know your men and your veiled women, to catch allusions and double meanings beneath the dirty crust of your Turkish, to imagine dreams and smiles behind the thin linen veils.
As we walked, David Gomez and I, we tried to avoid the most treacherous of the puddles. We left Palazzo Belvedere often, and from Ortaköy we headed southwest. Reaching Galata, we went inside a kahvehane a few steps from the Golden Horn. I treasured the sounds, the smells, the warmth of the place. A new experience for me, afternoons spent in a coffeehouse. I had never devoted myself to idleness. My days had been made of orders, men to follow and interrogate, detailed reports, weapons training. I felt the need to act, but Nasi’s plans required more time than expected. Time spent getting the Sultan drunk, reassuring the Treasurer, discussing matters with the viziers, bringing gifts to the Great Mufti and the most influential imams. So all I had to do was wait, and my curiosity about the thousand faces of the capital was the secret diversion that kept me from dying of boredom.
Even in its cold season, Constantinople knew how to flatter you and lend you affectations. You just had to see the effects of its bustle on Gomez: solid as a tree trunk and well on in years, and yet light in his movements, able with a single step to look like a dancer, like a pen drawing in the air. He walked ahead of me along a street that flowed with torrents and impromptu waterfalls, and his trousers didn’t even seem to get damp.
The voices from the kahvehane came closer. In a minute, I would plunge into the scents and vapors, the music played on flutes and violins, the thousand tongues and dialects of the city. I was getting to know you, Tzarigrad, Konstantinopla, city of the five thousand mosques, of peramas and caïques that carried you from one shore to the other, of people who arrived every day from every corner of the empire, of Jewish businessmen, of Jewish craftsmen, of Jewish merchants dealing in slaves from Russia or the Caucasus, city where I never met a single beggar but saw a thousand sellers of nightingales, city of eskici, strolling rag-and-bone men who defied the wind and rain with barrows filled with rubbish.
Outside the benches were empty. It was still cold. Inside, between windows that framed the gray of the day and walls painted with blue and red motifs, there squatted men of the most varied appearance, origins and ages. Genoese, Jews, Arabs, Frenchmen. . Most numerous of all were the Turks, their heads shaven and topped with the topolan, their slightly yellowed mustaches smelling of yogurt and coffee. They played tavla, sitting facing one another and sipping drinks of every color.
I exchanged a few words with Yassir, an Egyptian who claimed to make majolica. He lived in a street in Galata that abounded in taverns, but hic meliòr ke illic, he announced in a kind of crazed Latin: better in this café than in dives full of janissaries ke solum volunt fornicar cum putas. Yassir talked to me about drinking sprees, brawls that had broken out among soldiers over the aforementioned whores. His face was filled with revulsion.
In a corner at the back, a flautist was playing a sorrowful tune, weaving it into the carpet of voices and noises. Gomez, leaning against a wall, began listening to the tale of a Genoese merchant who had just returned from Persia.
With the entrance of Meddah Masun, the storyteller, everyone fell silent. The son of a Turk and a Circassian, this old man had blue eyes and beneath his turban his locks, though thin, were still fair. There was no one who did not respect Masun; no one was a match for him when it came to recounting the legends of Nasreddin Hoca, the sage who had lived in Anatolia three centuries before, about whom there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of moral tales and funny stories. He told them in a language that was fascinating but obscure to me, mingling words from every country and sometimes turning into pure sound. It was Gomez who translated for me, murmuring in my ear. That afternoon, accompanied by his violinist, Masun had just launched on a story about when Nasreddin, to find a bit of peace and silence, had withdrawn to the desert, and one night. .
“Senyor David, Effendi. .” said a voice behind us.
We turned around. It was a young servant from the Palazzo Belvedere, whose name I had never known. He was panting. He beckoned us to follow him outside.
“What’s happening?” Gomez asked on the threshold.
“Don Yossef asks you to come back to the palace as a matter of urgency,” the young man replied. Then he stopped, confused and thoughtful.
“Go on,” Gomez prompted him, his brow furrowed.
I remember everything about that moment, everything: the cold, damp air, the hubbub coming from inside the café, the boy’s hesitation, my curiosity. .
“So, Effendi. . ‘We’re going to see the giant.’ That was what Don Yossef asked me to say to you. ‘We’re going to see the giant.’ ”
11
Imagine a village in the heart of the Balkans and a little boy called Bajica grazing the family herd. He’s only ten years old, but everyone around knows him, because of his giant stature and his alert mind. So, when the moment of the blood tax arrives, the Ottomans come and find him on the mountains and carry him away, or perhaps it’s his father who points him out to the Sultan’s officials, to spare his intelligent son a future of hunger. Be that as it may, Bajica is brought up by a family of Muslim peasants. He learns the language, converts to Islam and takes the name of Mehmed. At the age of fifteen, when he is sent to Adrianopolis to become a janissary, he is already more than six feet tall. At thirty-seven he commands the imperial guard and three years later he is made the Great Admiral, replacing the legendary Ariadeno Barbarossa, lord of Algiers. He is then appointed governor of Rumelia, the province where he was born and where once again he hugs his mother, who says she recognizes him by a birthmark on his face. At fifty, he is third vizier, then he becomes second; finally, when he is on the brink of sixty, Suleyman the Magnificent appoints him Grand Vizier.
So it is that a Serbian child has become the most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire after Sultan Selim II, one of whose daughters he married. In the course of his incredible rise he led the army against the Hapsburgs, the Shah of Persia and the Tsar. He repressed revolts and thwarted plots. He designed a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and another between the Volga and the Caspian Sea. Now his emissaries keep him in contact with the whole world, from the Moriscos of Spain to the Sultan of Aceh on the island of Sumatra. He speaks Serbian, Turkish, Štokavian, Arabic, Persian, Italian and Latin. He is Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. The Giant. The man who summoned us one winter day to appear before the Divan.
At that time, much about Mehmed Pasha was still unknown to me. But I did know the legend of his destiny, and I couldn’t help comparing it to mine. Both renegades, converts, loyal to those who had given us a new life. Except that I had had to conceal my origins, because the Repubblica Serenissima would never allow them. By contrast, the Great Turk, who in the eyes of the Venetians was a cruel tyrant, had had no difficulty entrusting his empire to a convert. Nasi told me that Sokollu, for his part, maintained excellent relations with his brother, who, thanks to him, had become a patriarch of the Orthodox Church.
With that thought in mind, I climbed into the carriage that awaited us at the Fishmongers’ Gate. In Constantinople, Nasi was one of the very few Jews who were allowed to use carriages or sedan chairs, or even move around on the back of a mule. He owed that privilege to his own influence, which had won him a dispensation from the Sultan. We sat in silence, and soon we arrived at the Seraglio.