“Baron,” pleaded Memed. “Please! Not while we’re eating breakfast. You know how fragile I feel at this time of the day.”
I could have kissed my uncle. I knew exactly how he felt.
“Does anyone in the house know where Halil has been for the last two days? Nilofer? You’re part of the conspiracy, aren’t you?”
I chose to ignore the provocation. Iskander Pasha was not convinced by the Committee and had been shaken by the affair of the eunuch-general. He had told Halil to be very careful and not to think that the eunuch was either the first or the last person to spy and report on them. It was a father’s concern for his son’s safety, but I felt there was something else as well. His Paris journals had revealed a side of him that had previously escaped my notice. The thought had not occurred to me before, but given the two sides of his emotional character, might there not be a similar dichotomy in the rest of his life?
There was the urbane Iskander Pasha in Istanbul who, dressed in formal clothes, called on the Vizier once a week and floated through the evening effortlessly while banalities were exchanged on the state of the Empire and the health of the Sultan. His face remained expressionless when he was entertaining visiting dignitaries at our house in Istanbul. But the charming smiles and the display of surface calm was a pure deception. This was the same man whose fists were often clenched in pain and anger. The journals were the strongest indication of this, even though he had been a young man at the time.
He was obviously worried that Halil might end up in prison or worse, but he was also irritated at being excluded from the affairs of the Committee, especially as he knew that I was involved. My interest in politics had been limited till the arrival of Selim in our house. The storms of passion he aroused had shaken the very core of my life. I had to rethink many things, both in my inner life and the world outside. These were things I had always taken for granted, such as the conviction that I and no other person would ever be in control of my emotions, and the idea of the Empire as something eternal. Iskander Pasha was looking at me impatiently.
“I’m really not sure, Father. He told Petrossian he might be away for a week or ten days in Istanbul.”
“Politics or pleasure?”
“Neither,” I replied. “Family.”
He laughed. “Are the boys and their mother back from Damascus?”
They were and Halil, who had not seen his twins for several months, had been looking forward to seeing them again. I had always been much closer to Salman emotionally and this was still the case. On a human level and since I was a child, Salman and I had discovered we could discuss anything in the world without any sense of shyness or embarrassment. This feeling had remained, despite his long absence, and had delighted both of us this summer. Some relationships are so deep they can survive anything. I felt ours was one of these.
My relationship with Halil, while affectionate, had always been slightly formal. Ever since they were children, Zeynep and he had been close. This had nothing to do with their having a mother in common. They had always exchanged confidences and there was a temperamental affinity as well. Both of them were much more introvert than Salman and myself. Halil, in particular, could also be very secretive. Take his marriage, for example.
He met Catherine almost twenty years ago at a tea party in Istanbul. The Countess Galfalvy was an old family friend, then in her eighties. She was from an old Greek family and had run away in her youth with an impoverished Hungarian count. She spent her life on his family estate, where they had three rooms to themselves. The meals were shared with the family. Her late husband, Gyorgy, had been a painter. He must have painted over a hundred portraits of her during their life together and in every imaginable pose.
In her youth she had been renowned as one of Istanbul’s great beauties and there had been rumours that the Sultan, too, had expressed an interest. Perhaps that was one reason for her unexpected flight with the Count Galfalvy. They had no children and when the count died, she found the three rooms unbearable and returned to Istanbul with all his paintings. To her amazement, a dealer, who had heard of them from a common friend asked, one day, to see the paintings. He spent several hours inspecting each one separately. He must have been honest, for he offered her a great deal of money for all of them. She kept a few she really liked and accepted his offer.
I remember going to see her with my mother on a few occasions. She lived in a large house which was fifteen minutes away from where we lived. Even in the pleasing winter sun the drapes were always drawn in her house. Perhaps she wanted to recreate the closed atmosphere of the rooms where she had spent fifty years with her count. But she was lonely. She missed the smell of oil on canvas. She began to visit the conservatory and would often invite young art students to have tea with her. If they were from poor families, she helped them financially and if they were from other parts of the Empire, she invited them to stay with her. Catherine Alhadeff was an art student from Cairo. She had been staying with some rather unpleasant friends of her father when she met the old lady at the school. Within a week, Catherine was installed in a very large room on the top floor of the house. There were no drapes and the light was perfect. The sun streamed in most of the year. Catherine was thrilled.
Halil saw her one afternoon when he and his mother went to take tea with the Countess Galfalvy. He was greatly impressed by her and probably her name was entered in his notebook later that day as one of the possible brides for him. Salman had once caught sight of the notebook and swore to me that such a list did exist, but when we teased Halil, he blushed and insisted it was a joke. I’m not so sure. I think the list, whether written or not, was always present in his mind. Catherine glided to the top of the list without even trying.
Halil was the type of person who avoided taking risks, but he was not a good judge of character. He once told me that he never trusted his own instincts because they always let him down. When I questioned him further it emerged that three young officers who he thought were loyal to him had let him down badly.
Zeynep was the first to be told about Catherine. Halil felt she would be the perfect wife for him. He did not want to live with a woman who did nothing the whole day. It would drive him mad. He told his mother, who expressed irritation that he wanted to marry a Christian. This really angered Halil. He informed his mother that if he wished, he would marry a monkey.
Then, to our great disappointment, we discovered that Catherine belonged to an orthodox Shia family. Her name was simply the result of her father’s fondness for a sixteenth-century portrait of Catherine de Medici, which he had bought many years ago from a dealer in Istanbul. The painting was unsigned and Catherine’s father had bought it for a very reasonable price. It was when he showed it to a visiting Venetian merchant that the trouble began. The Venetian was convinced it was a Titian and he was so sure of this that he offered to buy it for a fairly large sum of money. Catherine’s father refused to part with the painting. The knowledge that it might be a Titian served only to strengthen his attachment. He grew more and more obsessed with it and when, after four sons, fortune blessed him with a daughter, he named her Catherine, despite the angry protestations of his wife.
The Countess Galfalvy favoured Halil’s suit and recommended it strongly to Catherine’s parents. Catherine herself appeared to be indifferent. She is supposed to have asked Halil whether he would stop her painting and after he had replied that it was one of the reasons why he wished to marry her, she accepted. She never asked him for other reasons. The owner of the Renaissance painting and his family duly arrived in Istanbul as guests of the Countess. The wedding itself was a modest affair. Only the two families and their close friends had been invited.