The Oracle of Stamboul Read online

  The Bey untented his fingers and poured himself another glass.

  “Would you be able to suggest a tutor for her?”

  James let his eyes wander over the shelves of books at the other end of the library, as if mulling carefully through the matter before he responded.

  “If you like,” he said, “I will take her on myself. Her father was a good man and I owe this at least to his memory.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lieutenant Brashov left camp at dawn, attached his saddle bags to his horse, and rode. For fourteen hours he rode through rain and rivers swollen with dead cows, past soggy field hospitals and sugar beet fields sown with salt. He rode all day and all night through rain like rice poured from a canvas bag, through muddy sodden roads and crossroads deep with clay, unable for most of the journey to see past his horse’s nose. Then, the rain ceased. Without warning, the tear in the sky was stitched and a bright white moon—

  “Miss Cohen.”

  Eleonora looked up from her book. It was Monsieur Karom.

  “Reverend Muehler is downstairs,” he said. “For your lesson. Shall I tell him to meet you in the library?”

  Eleonora nodded and, finishing the passage at hand, shut her bookmark between the pages. She waited for Monsieur Karom to leave before she stood from the armchair and, after glancing at herself in the dressing-table mirror, made her way downstairs. She was not sure what the point of these lessons was, but she had promised Moncef Bey that she would try them for at least a month. Trailing her hand along the cold marble banister, she descended into the antechamber and crossed the room diagonally. When she came to the library, she stood for a long while in its doorway, watching her new tutor page through a book. His back was to the door, so she couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing. Though it was clear he was troubling the bottom rim of his nostril with his thumb.

  “Well, hello,” said the Reverend, when eventually he noticed her. He had a kind and open face punctuated with watery blue eyes the color of late summer. “It is good to see you again, Miss Cohen.”

  There was nothing in particular to dislike about Reverend Muehler. His clothes were clean, his breath smelled of mint, and he spoke without a trace of condescension. Still, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Eleonora could not help but feel that they were engaged at cross-purposes.

  “Please, sit down,” he said, motioning to the chair beside him. “If you like.”

  After hesitating for a moment, Eleonora crossed the room and seated herself in the chair next to him. They were seated at the solid oak table the Bey referred to—for reasons obscure to her, though related most likely to the profession of its previous owner—as the Colonel’s desk.

  “Still not talking?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s going to be difficult for us to read aloud.”

  Eleonora found a sheet of paper in one of the desk drawers and took her pen out of her frock pocket.

  I can listen, she wrote. And I can read.

  “Very well.”

  The Reverend flipped to the fourth page of a battered red-and-gold primer much like the one he had brought to dinner the other night. He began straight away, following beneath the words with his finger.

  “Mensa Mensa Mensam Mensae Mensae Mensa.”

  At the end of the column, he stopped and turned to Eleonora.

  “Did you understand that?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s Latin, the language of Rome, the language of Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and Caesar.”

  She knew who Ovid was, everyone in Constanta did. Caesar was a Roman emperor, and Virgil had written The Aeneid, but she had never heard of Cicero.

  Who is Cicero?

  “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” the Reverend expounded. “Perhaps the greatest orator who ever lived. You and Tully will be spending a good deal of time together in the next few months. My prediction is that you will become the best of friends.”

  According to the schedule he and the Bey had devised, Reverend Muehler came to the house twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays after breakfast. Although she was still wary of him, Eleonora enjoyed her lessons—the conjugation and declension, the steady order of rules piled on rules, the gravel scrape of the Reverend’s voice—and she took to them with ease. She could recall the exact wording of a passage she had read a week before, she followed complex philosophical texts with dogged tenacity, and she saw connections even the Reverend had not considered. Of all her abilities, however, Eleonora’s tutor was most impressed with her facility for learning languages. To her, learning a new language was little more than filling in a series of blanks. Within three weeks of their first lesson, she could read and write rudimentary Latin. Within two months, she was translating long passages of The Aeneid and composing her own rebuttals to Tully. Spurred on by these Latinate successes, the Reverend soon introduced her to ancient Greek, to Aristotle, the Ptolemies, Herodotus, Aeschylus, and St. Augustine.

  The Reverend’s lessons produced little change in Eleonora’s external routine, but beneath the surface the waters were warming. She still spent most of her days reading in the armchair next to the bay window, alternating between The Hourglass and books assigned by the Reverend. Still, she refused to speak or leave the house. She found small pleasures, however, in the cantankerous argumentation of the ancients, and a pinch of magic in well-turned prose. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace. A line like that—from Plato’s Phaedrus—would inevitably bring a smile to her lips. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace. She repeated the words over and over again to herself until they were right there with her, the gorgons, grim of aspect, glaring terribly, flowing in on winged steeds.

  As much as she enjoyed her lessons, Eleonora still did not entirely trust the Reverend. There was no one incident that particularly stoked her misgivings. Rather, it was the mass of collected details. He often rescheduled their lessons, saying he had an important meeting that could not be moved. He asked strange questions about the Bey. And, more than once, she found him looking through the drawers of the Colonel’s desk. The episode that permanently solidified Eleonora’s mistrust occurred a few weeks after the Reverend began teaching her Greek. He was nearly an hour late that morning, and when he arrived he seemed distracted. He opened and shut the curtains twice before asking her to begin. Chewing on the tip of a pen, he paced back and forth while she read to herself, her finger following under the words. The swish and stir of his trousers marked the time like an anxious metronome.

  Not long after, some cattle were stolen from Euboea by Autolycus, and Eurytus supposed—

  Eleonora felt the light touch of the Reverend’s hand on her shoulder and she stopped reading.

  “What do you remember about Autolycus?”

  As he shifted his stance, she felt the ruffling brush of his shirt sleeve against her arm. She squinted, holding her finger in place under the line.

  He’s in The Odyssey. Odysseus’s grandfather.

  Staring at the red paisley wallpaper in front of her, she recalled the relevant passage and wrote it out at the bottom of the page.

  And indeed as soon as she began washing her master, she at once knew the scar as one that had been given him by a wild boar when he was hunting on Mount Parnassus with his excellent grandfather Autolycus—who was the most accomplished thief and perjurer in the whole world.

  “Yes, exactly.” The Reverend smiled and, lifting his hand off her shoulder, changed course. “If you don’t mind, I have something new for us today.”

  Reverend Muehler sat down at the Colonel’s desk and, reaching into his bag, removed a small silver tube. Studying the engravings along the top edge, he unlatched it and tapped out a rolled-up piece of paper. He flattened the note in the middle of the desk and secured it at either end with a paperweight. It was covered almost entirely with Greek letters, but the words were not Greek. He did not say where the document came from, nor why it was contained in such an ornate tube.

  “As you can see,�
� said the Reverend, “these letters don’t make words. Not words we can understand, at least. But there’s a pattern, a system. The purpose of the puzzle is to figure out the pattern. That is your lesson for today.”

  Holding her head in her palms, Eleonora stared at the letters. She concentrated as hard as she could, focusing her mind into a single point. This was what she did when she wanted to remember something: a quotation, a grammatical rule, a date, or a new word. She was very good at that, remembering things. Once she captured something in her mind, it never escaped. Figuring out this puzzle, however, was an entirely different undertaking, like learning a new language without a book, like seeing feathers as snow without being told. Exhaling, Eleonora sat up straight and let her mind relax. Instead of focusing on the letters, she let her concentration refract into thousands of tiny rays. She closed her eyes, unclenched her teeth, and let the letters move through the continuous field of light dancing on the insides of her eyelids. Each letter vibrated in its own self as well as the possibility of all other letters, in all the languages she knew. And then there it was: Wednesday at noon. The back of Café Europa.

  She opened her eyes again, to the library and the Reverend with his silver tube. He raised his eyebrows and she wrote out the solution.

  Wednesday at noon. The back of Café Europa.

  “How did you come to that?”

  Is that the correct answer?

  “Yes,” said the Reverend, chewing his bottom lip. “I believe it is. But more important is how you came to it.”

  You take the number associated with each of the Greek letters. Alpha is one; beta is two; gamma is three; delta is four. Then you subtract two, then transpose the new number into the Arabic alphabet.

  “Exactly!”

  He paused for a moment to confirm her solution, then rolled up the note and slipped it back into the document holder. Standing, he said that he was sorry but they would have to cut their lesson short. He would make it up to her on Thursday, he said, and left.

  The Reverend’s lessons provided Eleonora with a loose scaffolding for her days, though in total the lessons and the work he assigned did not comprise more than a dozen or so hours per week. Aside from the lessons, Eleonora was free to spend her time as she chose. Most days she chose to sit quietly in her room with a book. With the arrival of summer, however, the languid lengthening of days and the steady return of migratory birds along the Bosporus, she became more and more curious about her surroundings. Although she had no desire to leave the Bey’s house, the smell of budding apricots increased the boldness of her forays through its corridors and empty rooms. One Wednesday afternoon near the beginning of June, she was struck by a sudden desire to explore the women’s wing, which, according to the Bey, had not been used for many years. Marking her place in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, she made her way downstairs and took a left at the bottom of the staircase. At the end of the main hall—past the library, the drawing room, and a music room she had discovered a few weeks earlier—Eleonora found herself at the entrance to the women’s quarters, a tall and narrow door engraved with interlocking hexagons.

  The door opened onto a dim foyer embalmed with cobwebs and dust. A towering gauzy room scattered with unused furniture and the tattered remains of pink satin pillows, the antechamber of the women’s quarters had a dusty, forgotten air that overcame her even as she stood in the doorway. Sneezing, she took a step into the room and closed the door behind her. Again she sneezed. Haunted by a half dozen or so furniture-size lumps covered with white canvas sheets, the room had two proper doors, one behind her and one directly in front of her. Aside from these portals, Eleonora also noticed a narrow staircase running crisscross up the back wall. It led, as far as she could tell, to a small doorway floating just beneath the ceiling. She had no idea where the door might lead, what she might discover behind it—but wasn’t that the purpose of exploring?

  Inhaling the stale air, Eleonora crossed the foyer and mounted the wooden stairs creaking with each step. She gripped the handrail for support. At the top of the stairs she tried the door handle and it gave easily into a dark corridor running flush against the inside of the wall. From where she stood, Eleonora could make out little more than a veil of dust and a family of mice scurrying across the baseboards. She wiped her forehead and took a few cautious steps into the corridor. In the distance, she could make out a mottled patch of light. With her arms in front of her face, she headed toward the light, ducking under beams and stopping every few steps to brush the cobwebs out of her hair.

  The light, she discovered, was streaming into the corridor through a latticework screen much like those on the windows of the Bey’s carriage. She put her face to the screen. There, laid out below her like a theater stage, were the bookshelves, globes, and reading tables of the library. As she later learned, such corridors were common in Stamboul. Designed so that the ladies of the house could observe social gatherings without compromising their honor, they were built into most of the grand old mansions along the Bosporus. However, when Eleonora first discovered the corridor, it was as if she had found the trapdoor to another world, her own private box from which she could observe every room in the house.

  She might have turned back if she had not just then felt a current of cool air cutting through the darkness. Running her knuckles along the bare wooden planks that lined the walls of the corridors, she continued on, toward the source of the breeze. She passed above the dining room and the antechamber, where she spotted Mrs. Damakan dusting the banister of the staircase. Eleonora paused and watched the old handmaid make her way up the stairs, then back down. Wiping her hands every so often on the front of her smock, Mrs. Damakan finished the banister, then made her way counterclockwise around the perimeter of the room, the economy of her movements at once graceful and efficient. Even after Mrs. Damakan left the antechamber, Eleonora continued to watch her absence, now amid the settling dust. Then she moved on, toward the source of the current. At the corner of the house, beside where she figured her own bedroom must be, the corridor turned sharply and broke off in the direction of the kitchen. Leading down from this junction was a narrow wooden staircase. Eleonora could not be entirely sure, but it seemed as if the breeze was coming from the bottom of these stairs.

  She took hold of the banister with her free hand and made her way carefully down the stairs to a room with a small iron door bolted into the wall. Not much taller than herself and only about twice as wide, the door was rusted orange around the bolts and frosted with a layer of dust. It was rather warm to the touch and looked as if it hadn’t been opened in a long while. The source of the breeze, she saw, was a crack between the frame of the door and the wood of the house—a result, she supposed, of the house settling into its foundation. There was a small sliver of daylight streaming through the crack, and the smell of hay pervaded the space around it. Glancing back over her shoulder, Eleonora knocked at the center of the door. It made a deep, hollow sound, like a large bell. She put her ear to it, but aside from the echo of her own knock, she couldn’t hear anything. Eleonora stood for a long while with her hand on the door handle before deciding not to venture through, into what she imagined was the Bey’s stables. That was enough exploring for one day, she told herself as she scurried back up the stairs and retraced her steps along the corridor. Indeed, it was more than enough for one day.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summer slipped into Stamboul under the cover of a midday shower. It took up residence near the foundations of the Galata Bridge and drifted through the city like a stray dog. Ducking in and out of alleyways, the new season made itself felt in the tenacity of fruit flies buzzing about a pyramid of figs, in the increasingly confident tone of the muezzin, and the growing petulance of shopkeepers in the produce market. Summer could be found in the sticky smell of cherry sherbet, in roast squab, and in rotting loquats. Like a freshly tanned hide pulled tighter and tighter, each day was imperceptibly longer than the previous, each morning earlier, and the sun stronger. Trees b
udded, bloomed, and gave fruit, while the straits were busy with migratory birds. Wave upon wave of hawk, stork, swallow, and cormorant flocked up the Bosporus on their way to old breeding grounds in Europe.

  Gazing out on those languid straits, Eleonora watched a cast of white-collared falcons ride unseen gusts of warm air like bumps in the road. She saw a swoop of black kites steer between the domes of the Süleymaniye Mosque and a siege of snake-necked purple herons spread their wings wide as the caïques below. That morning, in the back recesses of the Bey’s library, she had discovered a calfskin-bound copy of William Swainson’s On the Natural History and Classification of Birds. Matching his lithographs to what she saw out the window, she was able to identify the falcons, the kites, and the herons as well as a convocation of white-tailed eagles and a lone peregrine falcon with a seabird in its talons.

  As the sun softened and dipped into the trees behind Üsküdar, Eleonora saw a flash of amethyst at the corner of her eye, and a purple hoopoe with a crown of white-striped feathers landed on her windowsill. The bird cocked its head to the left as if indicating a point of interest, and she watched her flock come into view around the bend of the Golden Horn. As they steered toward her, looping and darting through the orange-gray sky, Eleonora felt something give inside her, like an ice floe breaking up. When she opened the window, the scout flew off to join its brethren.

  Pushing a strand of hair from her eyes, she rested her elbows on the windowsill and watched the dusk unfold beneath her. That evening, the city felt charged with the energy of a new purpose. Instead of flagging with the sun, as it usually did, the boat traffic seemed to rise, and the passengers appeared anxious to get where they were going. She noticed a team of men stringing what looked like lanterns between the minarets of the New Mosque. And a series of barges docked along the Beşiktaş Pier. By the time the bottom of the sun touched the horizon, the city was empty. The Bosporus was shorn of boat traffic and the roads empty of carriage. The hawkers were quiet; the only sound she heard was the steady bleating of a lamb tied up outside the Beşiktaş Mosque. Then, as the last light of day escaped beneath the curve of the horizon, just as the sun disappeared, a cannon blast rang out from the vicinity of Topkapi Palace. Eleonora fell to the floor in fright and, struggling under her desk, covered her head with her hands. If there were more cannon shots, if there was a war, she wanted to be as safe as possible.