The Oracle of Stamboul Read online

  “Eleonora.”

  Yakob was silent for a moment, staring into the bowl of his pipe.

  “I have mentioned her,” he said. “But I haven’t told you anything about her.”

  James took a sip of port and raised his eyebrows.

  “Eleonora is—” Yakob paused, looking down at his hands. “If you met her you would know right away. You might call her a genius, or a savant. I don’t know what the right word is to describe her.”

  Reverend Muehler leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He had encountered a number of supposedly extraordinary children over the course of his career, children who had learned to read early, could perform difficult sums in their heads, or took easily to foreign languages. The subject was of some interest, both professional and personal, and he had often considered compiling a compendium of savants throughout history. However, the majority of the children he had encountered were not geniuses, at least not in the mold of Bentham, Mendelssohn, or Mill.

  “You said before that you entered university at the age of sixteen?”

  “Yes,” said James. “Just shy of my seventeenth birthday.”

  “I believe that with the proper training and direction, Eleonora might be able to enter university in two years, maybe three. Not that I would want her to, but I believe she could.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She turned eight in August.”

  “That would be astonishing.”

  James trusted his bunk mate, he was an honest man with little pretense or pride, but it was difficult not to be skeptical of such claims. They spoke for a long while about Eleonora’s many achievements, the lessons Yakob had devised for her, and Ruxandra’s concerns about the child’s future as well as her fears of how the townspeople would react if they knew the full extent of Eleonora’s powers. James did his best to support his friend, but as much as he wanted to believe him, he couldn’t help but express some skepticism. Every time he did, Yakob would take a long puff on his pipe and shake his head.

  “If only you could meet her,” he said. “You would know in a moment.”

  Chapter Six

  Pressed in on either side by a scratchy velvet darkness, her knees collapsed and arms folded into useless flippers, Eleonora stared into the blackness, unable to make out even the walls of the trunk she was trapped inside. Somewhere in the depths of the ship, the clack and groan of a steam engine rose, bellowed, and fell like a restless giant snoring in its cave. The paste between her lips tasted of stomach acid and coal dust. A needling cramp blossomed beneath her shoulder blade. And her thigh muscles fluttered anxiously, as if there were butterflies trapped under the skin. Wiggling her fingers, Eleonora felt a new cramp fan out from her shoulder. She closed her eyes against the pain and swallowed a greasy taste of bile. She had not eaten since noon the day before and her provisions were out of reach behind the cross of her ankles. If she could maneuver herself into a new position, she would be able to ease the cramp in her back, and it was possible she might find herself within an arm’s length of the provisions. Exhaling, she squirmed her left arm out from under her rib cage and canted her shoulder into the empty space left behind. From this new position, however, the best she could do was a desperate lurch into an even more awkward arrangement. At the end of it all, she was fortunate to be able to squirm back to her original fetal pose.

  This was not how she had imagined her journey, not at all. Though what exactly she had imagined she couldn’t recall. As much as she had thought through the various and minute details of her plan, as many times as she checked and double-checked her list, Eleonora had never truly considered what it meant to shut oneself inside a trunk. When she had thought about it at all, she had always imagined that time would pass quickly, that, like the tedious parts of a novel, she could skim through the journey and arrive no worse for the wear in Stamboul. This, of course, was not the case. If anything, time moved more slowly, dragging its hooves like a weary pack horse forced to travel long days at the edge of its strength. If her estimations were correct, she had been in the trunk for a bit more than seven hours. In the grand scheme of one’s life, seven hours was not a particularly long period of time, but these seven hours felt like a week of years.

  At first, she had been overcome with apprehension, worried that she would be caught, that she would sneeze or cough or swallow and her father or Ruxandra would discover her. Eventually, however, she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she remembered she was being loaded into the luggage compartment of a hackney carriage and jolted down the hill. After waiting for a long while in what she assumed was a customs inspection line, Eleonora felt the luggage compartment open. There was a shaft of light coming through the crack in the lid, and she thought she heard her father’s voice. A bustle of men crowded about the carriage, and the trunk was passed from hand to hand like a sandbag. Her father’s luggage must have been among the last on board, because, soon after she was loaded, the hull closed with a creak of iron chains, the engine sprang to life, and the ship puffed away from the harbor. It was only at this point that Eleonora allowed herself to exhale and take stock of her circumstances. The first part of her plan had been an unmitigated success, but now here she was, trapped, a cramp blooming across her back, and hunger bubbling into her mouth like lava.

  “Hello?” she called out, her voice scratching against the top of her throat. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  It was no use. There was no one there and, even if there had been, they wouldn’t be able to hear her over the growl of the engine. She kicked hard once against the base of the trunk, partly in frustration and partly in the wild hope that she might kick her way out. Although the wood held true, something fell out of Eleonora’s front pocket in the jerk and thrust of her kick. She wriggled her arm out from under herself and ran her thumb along the edge of the object. It was the bookmark, one of the few personal effects her mother had taken with her from Bucharest to Constanta, or at least one of the few that remained. A thin piece of oak carved with overlapping hexagons, it seemed to possess an inner light, to pierce almost through the darkness. Eleonora imagined her mother absently twirling her hair around the bookmark as she reread a favorite passage in The Hourglass. Twirling it herself between thumb and forefinger, Eleonora remembered the scene in which the elder Mrs. Holvert escaped from her great-uncle’s prison by picking her handcuffs with a hairpin clenched between her teeth.

  It was worth a try, if only because there was nothing else left. Bending her wrist in on itself like a chicken, Eleonora pressed her chin to her chest and bit down. With the clench of her teeth and the guiding tip of her tongue, she was able to maneuver the bookmark with surprising dexterity. After a few minutes, she succeeded in slipping it through the crack between the lid and the body of the trunk. Eyes tight in concentration, she ran it back and forth along the length of the groove until it caught purchase on the locking mechanism and, with the release of a spring, the lid gave way.

  With the bookmark still between her teeth, Eleonora sat up blinking in the dim coal-dusted luggage room. By the distant flicker of the furnace, she could see the outline of her own trunk and a handful of others around her fading into a grainy black. She could make out shapes but not colors, smells but not their source. With some effort, she stepped out onto the warm metal floor, stretched her arms over her head, and bent forward to touch her toes. She worried the epicenter of her cramp with the knuckle of her thumb and, quivering, rolled out her neck. When she was fully stretched, Eleonora sat down on a nearby trunk. Fishing out her sack of provisions, she began to eat, handing bread ends and cheese rinds into her mouth like a hungry raccoon.

  As her eyes began to adjust to the sooty darkness of the hull, she saw that she was surrounded by a metropolis of luggage, row upon row of trunks, crates, and baggage lit only by the glow of the furnace. Surveying the ruined landscape, she searched for indications of which trunks might be hiding sardines and crackers, dried cherries, walnuts, or minced meat. In one sitting,
she had eaten more than half of her provisions, and still her stomach persisted. Surely none of these people whose names were written on the luggage would object to giving a starving child a small portion of their food. Using the bookmark as a pick, Eleonora went trunk to trunk, jimmying those locks she could and moving on from those she could not, rummaging through clothes, books, jewelry, and perfume in search of sustenance. She found a set of fancy engraved stationery, crystal glassware, the clockwork of an enormous timepiece, and a portmanteau stuffed full with love letters, but she found nothing to eat.

  Eventually, she came upon a line of five wooden crates, aloof from the rest of the luggage in a far corner of the hull. Each was as tall as Eleonora herself and stamped in gold with a calligraphic seal. In spite of their nobility, or perhaps because of it, the crates had no locks or bolts. Their only fortification was a wooden latch and pin. The first crate she opened was filled with books, novels mainly, written in French, German, and English. Glancing over the titles, she closed the lid and moved on. They may be of interest later, but now she wanted food. The second crate was filled with Crimean rose water, and the third stacked full of caviar, smoked fish, and herring, hundreds of red and golden tins stamped with a few words of Russian or a picture of a fish. Looking over her shoulder, Eleonora removed one of the tins from the top row and, twisting off its lid, revealed a sheet of glistening black spheres. She touched the fish eggs suspiciously with the tip of her pinkie and brought it to her lips. Her nose tensed in revulsion. The pungent, salty flavor was not what she had hoped for, but it was food. In less than an hour, Eleonora consumed an entire bottle of rose water and three tins of the caviar, scooping hand after hand into her mouth until she was drunk with roe.

  She made her bed that night with the thick pile of a Shushan carpet and a bolt of velvet. Laying her head on a folded-up corner of the carpet, she pulled the velvet around her shoulders, closed her eyes, and began to drift. Her mind swam with fear and doubt, but as scared as she was, as much as she questioned the wisdom of her decision to run away, Eleonora was also very tired. As the grumbling of her stomach subsided and the furnace settled into a steady pulse, her mind slipped into that warm, salty ocean of sleep: white caps and waves, gulls gliding overhead, and, every so often, a distant glimpse of land. As she drifted further, the sea became a country road: a lonely cow regurgitating weeds, the occasional stone cottage, a stand of cypress trees, and, beyond that, vast tracts of yellow-green farmland. Soon the cottages turned to villages, the villages to cities, and the cities grew taller, with wide boulevards, crystal domes, and night gardens redolent of roses and jasmine.

  In the belly of the ship, Eleonora lost all track of time. The sway of the waves and sporadic coughing sputter of the furnace were her only indications it was passing at all. She slept when she was tired, ate when she was hungry, and relieved herself in a vacant corner of the hull like some feral animal trapped in a basement. In time, her eyes adjusted to the dim, sooty light of the furnace and, although she was attacked every so often by fits of coughing, she became accustomed to the coal dust. More than once she pulled a book down from the Sultan’s crate and tried to read, but the words blurred and fled across the page, allowing no more than a paragraph or so before she was overcome with a debilitating headache. With reading impossible, no sun, and no chores, Eleonora occupied herself by looking through other passengers’ luggage, thinking back over her favorite books, and wondering, like David Copperfield, whether she would turn out to be the hero of her own life or if that station would be held by someone else.

  Eleonora did not know that the ship was to stop twice before Stamboul, and so, when the engine slowed that first time and a horn blew above deck, her heart lurched. Had it been a week already? To be safe, she stashed her bed in the trunk and scrambled behind the Sultan’s crates. With a snap and creak, the hull door began to open. It was midday and sunlight cut deep through the widening crack, the light pouring into her cave like a barrage of flaming arrows. She stifled a sneeze as a trio of stevedores began loading and unloading trunks from the front of the hull. As they were bringing in the last of the baggage to be loaded, one of them sniffed at the air and barked a few words over his shoulder. His companion barked back and laughed. Although she didn’t understand what they said, the sound of their voices made her pulse flutter in her neck.

  As the great door closed, the hold water rushing out and iron chains clanking precariously, one of Eleonora’s hoopoes flapped into the hull. She saw the bird only for a moment, out of the corner of her eye, but there was no mistaking that it was a member of her flock. It circled the hull once and departed just as the door clanged shut. When the ship pulled out again to sea, Eleonora found that the bird had left a gift for her, an orange, placed perfectly in the middle of her trunk. Complete with stem and leaves, it glowed in the bowl of her hands like a tiny sun. For a long while she just held it, letting its warmth flow through to her extremities. With this fruit in her hands, she knew her flock was with her still. They had left their roost in Constanta to follow her across the sea, to watch over her in her journey. When she became hungry, Eleonora peeled and ate the orange, section by section, savoring the explosion of each juicy corpuscle between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

  Thus was her life in the hull. Although her most basic needs were accounted for, it was not a pleasant way to live, and Eleonora was often overcome with an unbearable longing for home, for her father, even for Ruxandra. In those moments, she wanted nothing more than to reveal herself, to find her way above deck and collapse into her father’s arms. She knew, however, that if she revealed herself too early, her plan would be ruined. Her father would put off with her at the next port of call, Ruxandra would be telegraphed, and all her preparations, all her suffering, would amount to no more than a few days’ delay. The question, then, was how she would know that the time was right. With no clock or calendar, and only a vague understanding of the ship’s course, she had only her intuition to guide her, only a hazy sense of her position in the world.

  It was the last night of their journey, the night before they were set to dock in Stamboul, when Eleonora decided to reveal herself. She did not know, of course, that the ship would enter the mouth of the Bosporus that morning, but she had sensed a subtle change in the strength of the waves, a flag in the power of the furnace, and not a minute too soon. After seven long days in the hull of the ship, she was dirty, her lungs were filled with coal dust, and she was beginning to develop a pain in her abdomen. Imagining how she must look, she considered trying to clean herself up, to wash herself somehow or fashion a new dress from a bolt of fabric, but there was no soap in the hull and any dress she could fashion would ruin more of her father’s merchandise. She would have to present herself as she was.

  Pulling her hair back, she straightened her dress, tidied up around the trunk, and made her way over the familiar landscape of luggage to the great iron door that led out of the hull. Standing before it, Eleonora ran her fingers over the surface of the metal, its dents like the pockmarks in the door leading up to Mrs. Brashov’s attic. Behind this door lay her father, all manner of food and bedding, hot soup, feather pillows, and the crystal air of the sea. A shiver of anticipation ran down to her fingertips and she paused to steady her breath. This was it. She was more scared than she had expected, scared of her father’s reaction, of being caught before she could find him, of any number of horrible outcomes she couldn’t even imagine, but there was no other choice, no other way out. She inhaled to calm herself. Grasping the doorknob with both hands, she pushed into a damp and vacant hallway, dim by most standards though quite bright compared to the darkness of the hull.

  She rubbed the glare out of her eyes and followed the hallway a few meters to a room filled with buttons, levers, and wheels, all hissing and clacking like a crowded café. As she stood deciding which of the three available doors she should take, Eleonora heard a string of disembodied words float past her, naked and swift as angels. She listened to the voices grow
closer and closer until she could hear them just outside the room.

  “It must be in here somewhere,” said a man’s voice as the door swung open.

  From behind a tangle of pipes, she could make out the profile of two men, one much larger than the other. Their mustaches and turbans cast a crooked shadow on the open door behind them.

  “Where did he say it was?”

  As the second man spoke, Eleonora realized that they were speaking in Turkish. She had only ever heard the language in her lessons with her father, but she found that, with a bit of concentration, she could understand it quite well.

  “He said it was in here.”

  “Where in here?”

  “If I knew, we wouldn’t be looking for it.”

  The first man took a half-step back and lifted the lantern so that it shone across the room.

  “Did you see that?”

  “No.”

  There was a long silence and Eleonora could feel herself trembling, the anticipation of being caught like metal on the back of her tongue.

  “I don’t see anything,” said the first man, turning to leave. “It’s too dark to see anything in here.”

  When she stepped out from behind the pipes, Eleonora was still quivering. If those men had seen her, who knows what trouble she might have found herself in. She took a few moments to catch her pulse, then, counting to thirty, made her way through the door they had taken, presuming they would be going back to the main part of the ship. Passing under a jungle of leaky pipes and soot-blackened lanterns, she found herself eventually in a much brighter hallway. This new hall was lined with carpet, wood paneling, and a row of doors, each of which was stamped with a circular window and a numbered brass plaque. Doors 16 to 30 were all closed. As she made her way down the hall, Eleonora could hear the soft, persistent sounds of sleep, the muttering, snoring, and turning over that mark our fitful journeys through the world of dreams.