“Welcome me? As far as I’m concerned, you’re here to surrender!”
“Even an old man like me can see that it isn’t a white flag that’s flying from the bey’s palace; it’s the Sultan’s banner. And if it has returned to its place, it certainly isn’t thanks to the governor.”
With a sudden impulse of rage, the admiral turned round and ordered his men to load their arquebuses and have their bows at the ready.
The youths behind the old man brought their hands to their belts, as if to untie their robes. A moment later, every one was holding a pistol and, in the other hand, a whip of big metal strips as long as a man. Behind them, at the same moment, a hundred blades emerged from their scabbards.
The admiral drew his sword and put himself almost nose to nose with the old man. “Thank Yossef Nasi,” he said between his teeth. “If it weren’t for the fact that you represent him, I would make you repent for not fighting when it was time.”
He took two steps back and raised the arm gripping his weapon. “Step aside, now!” he shouted. At a nod from the old man, the crowd divided in two and allowed the troops that had come from Constantinople to enter the city.
The uniforms filed past, accompanied only by eddies of sand and the sound of slippers on the beaten earth.
[. .]
Night fell and the men of Mokha gathered to sing, smoke and tell stories, in the dusty space in front of the warehouses of Yossef Nasi, Lord of Tiberias, Duke of Naxos and the Seven Islands. The cups passed from hand to hand, full of kishir, the infusion prepared by boiling dry husks of coffee beans and cardamom seeds. In a city famous throughout the Empire for its kahve, the black liquid was reserved for the early morning, to clear the head of dreams or to make them emerge more clearly from the mind’s torpor. Only the Sufi mystics drank it at any time of day, and Ismail, who frequented their monastery, had adopted the habit, every time he had to think.
The celebrations were taking place right under his window, but the old man had preferred the company of the letter that had just arrived. It was written in Flemish, forcing him to reread entire passages to be sure that he had grasped their meaning. The deep voice of the storyteller outside slipped in between one sentence and the next.
Born in far-off mountains, a river passed through many regions before at last it reached the desert sands. It tried to overcome the sands, but the further it tried to go, the more lost its waters became.
The old man got to his feet with the sheet of paper in his hand, in the hope that walking might help him to concentrate, but his knee, swollen with arthritis, forced him to hobble to other thoughts.
Summer is coming, he said to himself with his hand gripping his kneecap, the damp summer of Mokha. He blamed the place and the season, but he knew all too well that the hand of time would crush him in the end. Summer or winter, even in the most wholesome corner of the empire. But before that moment came, there was still life, there were still the obsessive memories and all those plans that had come to nothing.
It was then that a hidden voice murmured:
“If you rush in your usual way, the desert won’t allow you to cross it. You will only be able to disappear or turn into a pool.”
Gracia’s letter wasn’t the usual one, the one that arrived punctually every year, along with Yossef’s ships loaded with fabrics and wood. It contained no lengthy reflections on the meaning of things, accounts of a thousand activities, ritual questions and others that were more heartfelt. The only common elements were the signature and the language of Antwerp. Otherwise, all the questions were condensed into a single request: Come back, as soon as possible. The news, too, had shriveled to a few words: I am ill, I am dying.
“The wind crosses the desert; the river can do the same, if it allows the wind to carry it.”
Yossef, too, sent him letters every year. The surface of his words said: I miss you, I crave your wisdom, you would be more useful by my side, as in the old days. But the plea had become less and less heartfelt and the rhetoric more and more careless. Ismail ran his eyes over the pages; he wasn’t really reading. He accepted the gifts that came with the letters; he handed them around. The true message that came to him from Istanbul was very clear. The City of Coffee was the right place for him.
But Gracia’s invitation had been heartfelt, passionate, like his desire to hold her once more and comply with her last wishes.
Then the river sent its vapors up toward the welcoming arms of the wind, which lifted them and carried them to the east, letting them fall once more as snow on the peak. .
The noisy voices that had served as a ground bass to the story grew until they drowned it out, then suddenly fell silent. A shout in Turkish interrupted the storyteller.
“Go back to your houses, admiral’s orders. No gatherings after sunset.”
Protests were heard in Arabic, curses, clumsy attempts to negotiate in the language of the soldiers. From the tone of the voices, Ismail understood that nothing untoward was going to happen. Not this evening.
He thought again of the words of the story. It was a Sufi parable, one he had heard many times, in many different variations, and he knew the ending: When the thaws came, the snow melted and the river became itself once more.
That had been his life, for many years. Allowing himself to be carried beyond the sands by the wind, and starting over when the rains came. Now he no longer feared being transformed into a marsh, and giving water to the desert seemed to him as noble as running between one’s banks and irrigating the plain. Or perhaps that was what he liked to believe, whereas in fact his hearing had failed and his ears were no longer capable of hearing the voice of the wind.
Be that as it might, he could not return to Istanbul immediately, and it wasn’t only the monsoon that kept him from doing so. He folded the letter again and began to undress for bed. The sands of Mokha were still in need of water.