These Lions Have Wings

By J. S. Kessler

Set in Istanbul in the late 1990s, These Lions Have Wings tells the story of Michael (or Mikail) Arslanoğlu as he grapples with the events that unfold between his mother’s engagement and her remarriage and how those events came to play a part in what may or may not have occurred at the wedding. In the process, Michael must navigate through the layered history of the city, of his family, and of his own heart as he becomes involved with two very different men who both will play a part in the possible tragedy at the wedding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304680976

Book preview

These Lions Have Wings

These Lions Have Wings

by

J. S. Kessler

Copyright © 2013, J. S. Kessler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

J. S. Kessler

2004-2005

Say Istanbul and a seagull comes to mind

Half-silver and half-foam, half-fish and half-bird.

Say Istanbul and a fable comes to mind,

The old wives’ tale that we have all heard.

– Bedri Rahmi Eyuboğlu

Note on Pronunciation

In the pages that follow, the reader will encounter a number of Turkish words, names, and phrases.  Modern Turkish uses the Latin alphabet and is quite phonetic.  Most letters are pronounced as they are in English, with the following notable exceptions:

c = ‘j’ as in jam

ç = ‘ch’ as in church

g = always hard, as in game

ğ = a soft glide that lengthens the preceding vowel (never begins a word)

I/ı = short ‘u’, as in sun

İ/i = short ‘i’, as in machine

ö = similar to the French ‘eu’

ş = ‘sh’ as in ship

ü = as in German, or similar to ‘ui’ in suit.

23 April 1999

The jelly-dervishes, translucent white skirts upended to the full moon, have returned in their early spring migration.  Spinning, spinning along the coastal road circumventing Arnavutköy, spinning between gently rocking fishing skiffs and plastic bags (illusions of jelly-sheikhs, these).  The oil-slicked Bosphorus has been transformed into a mottled prayer.  Their stinging tentacles are lifted to heaven or dangle towards hell.  Their recitations are lost beneath the lapping waves as row upon row they bash against the concrete banking.  Where they whirl from, I cannot say.  They simply appear en masse intermittently through the year, unannounced and following a different calendar, neither solar nor lunar.  Perhaps one based on jelly-time.  I notice that, as always in their topsy-turvy ceremony, they have all lost their brown tombstone hats.  Sunk, I assume, in the bottom murk of the strait.

There are no other spectators to this jelly-dance in this late-early hour following the last stumblings home of bar-crawlers descending from Taksim and Cihangir.  The time: those last moments before the blasting of the morning call to prayer.  This road, arching along the Bosphorus, will in a few hours be choked with traffic, but for the moment is largely empty.  A few feet away, a limping short-haired dog, its color indistinct in the obfuscatory gloom, rummages through a broken bag of trash.  A few empty taxis speed by.  They pause, almost, at the sight of my black shadow standing on the breakwater.  But seeing my still, rigid frame, peering in slack-jawed stupidity into the blank water surface, the drivers pass without so much as a honk.  A beggar, or homeless, they think.  They and the dog do not understand that I see martyrs’ faces among the jelly-dervishes.  Faces smiling sad, oily smiles.

I reach into my pocket and pull out Gabriel’s gift.  They feel heavier this morning.  I drop them, a pair of metal angel wings, into the black waters, dispersing the invertebrate mystics and breaking those martyr smiles into small ripplings.  The wings, I imagine, will fly on the currents out to the Bosphorus’ center.

An unlit Russian tanker, heading to the Marmara Sea and out to the Aegean and Mediterranean, on to Middle Eastern ports, slides by.  It accepts my offering.  Those small wings crushed to the iron hull.

I slump onto the nearest bench, wrapping my windbreaker tight against my night bruised throat, lifting my knees to my chin.  I had wanted to throw myself into the whirling, along with Gabriel’s wings, to drown myself in the ecstatic jelly-service.  But cowardice punched a firm fist against my chest, almost knocking me, splayed armed and legged, onto the cold concrete.  A whisper – Azrail, perhaps – tells me I have witnessed too much, that I cannot escape to the bottom of the Bosphorus.  Not yet.  The whisper commands:  tell the story.  Explain why you see martyr faces among the jellyfish.

Give me time.  Let me breathe.  There it is, the call to prayer.  The first light of dawn.

I’ll tell the story; just give me this moment.

The Place

The place, or setting, is important to the story I will tell:

When you look from a bird’s-eye view, there are no borders.  What you see, with absolute clarity, is a beautiful monster consuming the banks of the Bosphorus, devouring in enormous swallows Asia Minor and Thracian Europe; a beautiful monster that lords over the world’s crossroads.

You see İstanbul.

Admittedly, with the age of flight, not so many travelers and traders use İstanbul as a way-station between Rome and China, or need to use it as a staging point for any other east-west journey.  But it remains, if only symbolically, the center of the world.  By its very geography it balances (at times, uneasily) the two halves of the world, east and west, which were (so limitingly so) proposed by the ancient geographers of the west.  (But by what reference point can one make this claim, when the earth is spherical, unmarked by cartographic divisions?)  It is the only city resting on two continents.

İstanbul.  This city has been known by many names.  Before the conquest of 1453, it was known as Constantinople.  And even during the Ottoman years it was officially Konstaniyye (though the city was, in common parlance, İstanbul from the time Mehmet Fatih breached the walls).  Before Emperor Constantine’s arrival it was Byzantium.  A name the city lent, graciously, to the entire territory of the eastern Roman Empire.  And before the name Byzantium – no one really knows.  That the spot was settled long before it entered the annals of history, however, is not debated.  This tongue of land is the most logical spot on earth, I feel, on which to gather for safety and for domination.

No one knows what İstanbul means, really.  One fanciful suggestion is that it was a corruption of Islambul, a place full of Islam (not a few Ottoman poets referred to the city as such).  But that seems farfetched.  Another more likely possibility: that it comes from the Greek stin polis, in the city or to the city, as it needed no other name to identify it as the city.  I like, actually, that there is no clear origin to the name.  Names should be obscure; they should evoke mysteries.

From far above, the bird’s-eye-view again, one can see the brilliance of the city’s location.  The ancient urban core was centered on the tip of a peninsula framed by Europe to the west, the snaking inlet of the Golden Horn to the north, the relatively wide expanse of the Marmara Sea to the south, and the mouth of the Bosphorus to the east.  The land connection, demarcated by walls originally constructed by the Byzantines and Romans, further fortified by Ottomans, was easily defensible, facing into the rolling plains of Thrace – an enemy would have announced their presence long in advance of any assault.  The other sides, all bodies of water, formed even better protection.  The Golden Horn, the smallest of these, could be defended by light sea craft and, as the last Byzantine Emperor attempted, by a long, heavy chain.  (But Sultan Mehmet Fatih was unconventional.  He flooded the bay with Ottoman men-of-war from the northern shore of the Golden Horn, carrying them in a train overland for many miles.  The Greeks must have been flabbergasted.)

But beyond its protected location, what a magnificent point from which to control an empire!  Guarding the Bosphorus gives the city the power to control all traffic to and from the Black Sea (and thus the vast, rich steppes of the Eurasian heartland) and the Aegean (and by extension, of course, the entire lake of the Mediterranean and the surrounding lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa).  This city was at the heart of the world.  It tied the threads of the Silk Roads into a strategic knot.  It was the prize of empires (but made these empires its own prize.)

I never really understood why Atatürk, after he managed to carve out the territory that now calls itself Turkey, moved the capital to Ankara (at the time, little more than a shepherd’s village).  I know the official explanation: he wanted to make the new Turkish capital the near geographic center of the newborn state.  In the drawn-out collapse of the Ottoman Empire, İstanbul had been left on the far-western fringes, no longer resting in the heart of the Turkish realm.  I even know the claim that he, Father-of-the-Turks, was trying to distance the Turkish nation from its decadent, Islamic and Ottoman past, wanting to build up a city that was genuinely Turkish in character, unmarred by centuries of pre-Turkish rule or the Islamic stamp of the hybrid Ottoman state.  But surely he knew he was going to fail.  Ankara, for all its quiet charm, is still almost a backwater, primarily an administrative and diplomatic enclave situated on a hill overlooking the empty Anatolian plains.  İstanbul remained, and remains, the soul of the country.  It may be on the far edge of modern Turkey, guarding that last bone of European territory thrown to the Turks, but İstanbul was never simply the city of whoever had conquered it, a city to be embraced or discarded according to the whims of human victors.

İstanbul does the conquering, asserting its pre-eminence in the world no matter where it falls on the arbitrary political maps of a given era.  It conquers hearts, too.  It never leaves you, no matter how little or much time you spend within its spreading embrace.

It is little wonder that Mother wished to return.  It is little wonder that it is here I feel most at home.

Spring 1998

I

As with the setting, the time is important.  To understand last night, one must understand its roots.  My brothers, teasingly, refer to me as Historian.  Indeed, not so long ago I had aspirations of becoming a genuine historian.  Maybe they are right.  Perhaps I am still a historian of sorts, always wanting to find the antecedents, the threads of a given story; always wanting to know the when and where.  But I do think I must begin with the beginning – for our purposes a year ago – although, as I will likely do, I may draw upon the more distant past.  Even from TBI: Time Before İstanbul  (as Gabriel and I call our time in New York). Yes, a year ago, April 1998.  It’s important.  That’s when she told us.  And when I met Hüseyin.  Ali came soon after.

*

Nine saints-in-training entered the octagonal space, entombed, at first, in heavy woolen capes, enshrouded in white skirts, memorialized by tall fezzes.   They threw off their capes, their course temporality, at the signal of the imam, as breathy music-chant and lute- and saz-strumming mounted from an adjoining chamber.  The nine dervishes spun, white flowers, heads tilted and arms unfolding from their bodies, directing hands to heaven and earth, whirling in measured circles around the imam, never colliding, reaching inward and upward from this material world, then collapsing upon themselves, slowly-slowly, retracting arms, folding their hands across their chest to bow before their guide.  Their first round of prayer.  The chanters, too, returned to this plane, quiet, waiting for the next stage.

Then the nine young initiates began to blossom once more, in a celestial circling of circles, their personal orbits hinged on one black boot, a root to earth, propelled around the central gravity of the wizened imam as planets around a sun, rising, in ever lengthening revolutions, towards the final veil to be stripped away from the face of God, when human distinction would be lost in an ocean of One-ness, pure Being, a simple drop amidst a drowning, uniform sea.  A cycle to be repeated four times.

I felt a tearing of the soul.  And yet I could not keep my eyes off him.  One of the nine, a tall young man, fair, with an unruly mass of Cretan red hair and new beard (startling on his boyish face, though I guessed him to be in his mid twenties).  His eyes, green as I remembered them, were rolled back into his skull as he whirled in prayer, eerie white orbs snaked with red, glistening like fever.  Sweat sprayed from his extended hands.  With each cycle of revolutions, pausing to give homage to the imam, he traveled further away, approaching the Ultimate that each of the nine dervishes sought.   I could see, even then, novice off the street, that he was almost there, just a single thread of silk binding him to our world.  I wanted at that moment, and many times later, to scream out: ‘Come back!’, to prevent him from snapping that delicate lifeline, to keep him, selfishly, away from perfect union with God.  But I refrained, and continued to do so, watching, too intent on his face to be lifted by the intake, deep inhale-exhale, of chant and wild strings, bloody fingers, jerking heads, white flowers spinning, so unlike the symbols of earthly death they purported to be.  I knew somehow I would follow, join him in that circle, flashes of Father’s whirling dance from long ago in America (that other world!) haunting, but not overcoming, this new beauty.

He, Hüseyin, had been standing in the tekke doorway, a deeply embroidered prayer cap pushed down upon that coppery hair.  Tall, I’ve said, his length emphasized by a long bluish sweater over jeans.  A well-worn rosary, thirty-three green quartz beads to be counted three times, forward-backward, towards the ninety-nine attributes of God, flipped expertly between his fine white fingers.  I had simply been escaping, finding myself in the back streets of the hinterland between the neighborhoods of Fatih and Karagümrük, those bastions of Islamic piety in the Old City, which were never visited, indeed avoided at all costs, by Mother’s family and their sort.  I did not know why that place.  Propelled by a desire to flee from Mother’s news, my feet had taken me to a bus, which disembarked at the ferry docks in Kadıköy; a ferry carried me across the mouth of the Bosphorus to Seraglio Point, to a tram from Eminönü traversing through the heart of the Old City, dropping me at the Byzantine wall, a psychological world away from my family.

This was unfamiliar territory for me.  Crowded with black veiled women and bearded men, the feared Middle East of İstanbul, whispered of with fear by good secular Kemalists.  I knew I looked the alien.  These black veiled women and bearded men, however, did not betray a single curious glance.  As if I were invisible.

But Hüseyin saw me.  He motioned for me to follow him inside, into the mystics’ worship house (illegal, officially, but disguised as a foundation for Historical Sufi Music, as stated by the bronze plaque on its gate; living tradition masquerading as museum).   I would never have imagined crossing such a threshold again, not since Father’s death.  But I could not but follow this young Sufi, handsome and Grecian, into his world, to sit mesmerized on the sidelines of the sema room as dervishes, Hüseyin among them, spun their prayers.

As I watched, enraptured, I thought, or rather felt: this is real.

*

At Uncle’s place, that morning, I had thought: this is unreal.  Mother, sitting calmly at the head of the breakfast table with a newspaper in hand – her three sons, her mousy brother, her niece Zeynep were arrayed around the table’s other edges, each concentrating on their olives and white cheese – had let out a soft ahem, laid down her paper and announced that: after much consideration and thought she had, yes, decided it was about time, you know eighteen years had passed since Celalettin had died and she’d moved to İstanbul, three little ones in tow, yes, it was about time she remarried.  She had accepted the proposal of Yezit Toprak.  She continued: ‘I know, I know this is perhaps a shock, but I do hope, yes, I do hope that you will be happy for me and support me, won’t you?’

Uncle had exclaimed: ‘Ayşe!  You know I would support you in anything. But are you certain?  I mean this man, Yezit?’

Mother: ‘Yes, dear Mehmet, yes.  I know you don’t quite trust him, but he’s a good man, yes.’

Uncle: ‘When is this all to take place?’

Mother: ‘Oh, we are not in a hurry.  We set the date for a year from now, next April.’

The rest of us stared in freeze-frame at her.  I glanced to my brothers, Gabriel first, then İsrafil, and could not, unusually, know their thoughts.  Gabriel at last broke his momentary suspension, throwing down his fork and, theatrically as is his wont, stormed – that’s the only word for it– out of the room.  Dear İsrafil, always a more accommodating spirit, slipped quietly from the table, Zeynep close at heel.  Those inseparable two.  I was the last.

I said: ‘Congratulations, Mother.’  And left her with, I believe, a small tear in her eye.

Mother’s transformation, witnessed more by Gabriel and me than by İsrafil (as we are older and remember the TBI, those years with Father back in the US) seemed so odd to us.  From a covered woman married to an American Muslim convert to the present corporate woman-warrior, establishing her uncovered self in the ranks of her older brother’s financial world with savvy – a savvy before which fat, wealthy men with good housewives cowered, but which also evoked desire.  She had, in short order, become a senior partner in Arslan Financial, running offices from the financial district of Maslak to branches spread across Turkey’s Anatolian interior, in Ankara, Bursa, İzmir, numerous smaller cities.  She freed Uncle of many of his board duties, allowing him to sequester himself in his libraries or to fraternize with his poet and writer trophies (his hobby, as he was unable to write a creative word himself).  Gabriel and I knew she even had political aspirations, but we had never worried about her – as she always had seemed to worry about us – till she touched that man, the politico Yezit, whom Uncle had brought home one night for dinner earlier that spring.

It was at the beginning of March, I believe.  I remember that first meal.  At the corner of the table, Mother faced Yezit across a bottle of rakı and an array of mezes prepared by our cook, each ignoring the cluster of young men, her sons, at the other end of the table, while they waged battle over and around stuffed leeks, chilled eggplant, and shepherd’s salad.