How old are dreams?
I see him on his knees, bent double. “Magister! Get up, for the love of God.” I take him by the shoulders and try to lift him up. He is a leaden statue and I have to lift him. I try my best; I put one knee on the ground and try to turn him, to look him in the face.
There is no face. The features are meaningless.
I shout, get back to my feet, and my eyes seek the horizon that is now running toward us.
It will engulf us. It will drive us into the deepest of holes, the one that we call hell. Inside the flesh, inside the heart, a bitter place, intact after years, after a century, after a millennium, after all the time in which we have been drifting, paper boats, prey to the wind.
I’m sitting in front of a skeleton. It has a snake in its mouth, between its white jaws, and a rat is running around on the cap of its skull. Beneath the bones of its right arm, between the shoulder and the ribcage, it holds a guitar. It laughs. It jokes. It gesticulates with the bones of its other hand, it looks as if it has been delivering a speech for a long time. It tells me about its causes. It invites me to a wild party of death.
Ismail opens his eyes, looks around in the candlelight. Instead of his legs and torso, he sees layers of cloth. His body has disappeared; a merchant must have bought it in exchange for these coarse wool blankets.
He doesn’t know what’s happening. A man’s dark face casts a shadow over his own.
Ismail lets himself drift back. Visions of angels, of djinns spilling from the earth in the form of distorted men and demons. Then his body returns, the empty skin filling like a sausage case being stuffed with mince, or as if someone were blowing into it. From his pelvis to his feet, his legs are constantly moving, his ribs opening and closing; his breathing is difficult; his limbs a willow’s shaken by a raging storm.
I’m thirsty!
This is his voice. It is not from within his prostrate body that he can hear it. But it is his, he recognizes it.
Seventy palms, twelve springs. It is here that the weary Israelites took courage.
“I’m thirsty!”
It is his mouth, the one that is shouting. He sees it in the fragment of mirror, the one he brought with him from Yemen so that he would recognize himself at the end of the journey. The mirror hangs in the air, then falls like a snowflake.
The oasis of Elim. The people of Israel had their hunger assuaged by manna.
“I’m thirsty.”
Ali holds the water to the old man’s mouth, steadies his head as Hafiz finishes the prayer.
And when our signs are rehearsed to them with evidences their only argument is to say, “Bring our fathers, if ye speak the truth.”
Mukhtar is unable to sit still, filled with childish excitement. The Sufi’s face spreads into a tremulous smile as his eyes fill with tears. “You’ve come back, old man! God is great!”
Confused, Ismail asks where he is. “You were on the edge of the other world, and I was dejected because your infidel body would go on suffering, and suffering far worse, in Gehenna. But God, the Patient and the Eternal, must have other plans for you. And for us who follow you.”
The old man’s voice is thin but clear. “For how long. .”
“Three days, Ismail, just like in Elim. Three days of fever and delirium. Hafiz has been reciting the Book all that time. Whenever you went to sleep, I was afraid it would be forever.”
“I dreamed of a rainbow. .”
“Now eat, old man. And thank God, a thousand times for each one of his names.”
Part Three. Mağusa, 21 Safar 978–23 Rajab 979 (July 25, 1570–December 11, 1571)
1
As we awaited information about the fleet, fresh news came in from Italy. After months of difficult negotiations, Pope Pius V had persuaded Philip of Spain to join forces with La Serenissima, to face up to the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean. The pontiff had contributed a dozen galleys, and the three Christian fleets had chased and waited for one another for weeks, from Zara to Corfu, from Otranto to Messina, finally meeting in Candia, whence they had set off together on the big expedition.
“Yes, but they aren’t heading straight for Cyprus. Our whole fleet is there. You’ll see, they’ll strike in Dalmatia first, or in Negroponte.”
I spent my days in the port and outside the Arsenal, waiting for firsthand news, aware that the distance was already making “news” old. Until that moment, in my job, I had always gathered information in the cities, where every event can be discovered in only a few hours. Now, though, I was interested in a world that seemed to dwell somewhere in the future, ten or twenty days on, the traveling time that separated me from Cyprus, and even more from the Adriatic.
In Constantinople two topics held the floor wherever more than three people came together: the makeup of the enemy fleet, and its chief aim. Everyone was convinced that the Christians had more ships than the Sultan. It was rumored that there were almost two hundred galleys and about a dozen galleasses. As to their target, a fortune-teller from Abkhazia told the wife of Muezzinzade Pasha that the Franks would strike at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and in the barbershops they were already studying a way to transport Orban the Hungarian’s huge bombard across the strait.
Then, the same day, it was announced that Venice and her allies had thrust into the Dodecanese, making straight for Cyprus, but when they reached Castelrosso they turned back, after learning that Nicosia had already fallen.
The troops of Lala Mustafa Pasha had entered the Cypriot town after a furious attack on the bastions I had told them about, the ones that Savorgnan hadn’t been able to reinforce. Nasi proposed to toast this news with the finest wine.
It was the eighth day of Rabi’at Thani in the year 978. Two hours after morning prayer, the occupation was complete. The great cathedral in Nicosia was stripped of bones and relics and turned into a mosque.
“I don’t understand these Christians. They say that churches are the house of God, and then they fill them up with bones and dried-up corpses.”
In Galata, fights broke out between Franks of various nations who accused each other of the failure of the Christian fleet. For a long time the kahvehanes were full of tales of the atrocities committed in Nicosia, and the comments on those tales: “They’re complaining that the pigs had their throats slit, but they’re the ones who eat those filthy creatures.”
The news traveled via dispatch riders, by beacon signal, on the wings of messenger pigeons, from the mouths of the returning wounded. Everyone seemed to have a friend, a relative or an acquaintance who had just returned from Cyprus. As I sifted what I overheard, even the vox populi finally came up with important details.
That was how I picked up the rumor of a Venetian reprisal. The peasants of the village of Lefkara had converted to Islam and placed themselves under the protection of the Sultan. The Christians had burst in at night, massacred the inhabitants and set fire to their houses. “Fanatics. Mad infidel fanatics,” I thought for a while. If Venice could still punish people on Cypriot soil, it meant that taking the island from them would be harder than we’d thought.
Yet the Sultan’s troops were already gathering around Famagusta. Mağusa, as the Turks call it: three miles of walls circled by a big trench. Apart from a single bastion, its system of defense was antiquated, no match for the new siege artillery. From the vantage point of Palazzo Belvedere, the fortress looked like a thin shell, which I imagined poised between a present full of expectations and a huge, radiant, tremendous future.