The Dervish House Read Online Free PDF Page B

stepped terrain beneath them, flowing around the schoolchildren, the women, old Sibel Hanım labouring up and down the steps. Follow the flock. Avoid near neighbours but try to maintain an equal distance from them. Cohesion, alignment, separation. Three rudimentary rules; the well of complex liquid beauty.

    In the corner of his vision Georgios Ferentinou glimpses the little monkey-bot go helter-skelter across the electricity line and jump to the offending Georgian woman’s balcony. A strange world that boy inhabits , he thinks. A world of whispers, of distant tintinnabulations on the edge of hearing, like angel voices. But is it any stranger than four old Greeks, flotsam adrift for decades in the crash and suck of history, gathering over tea and doughnuts to divine the future?

    And Ariana is back. Almost half a century and she is in Eskiköy. No deal, no play of trades and future outcomes could have predicted that. Ariana is back and nothing is safe now.

    The yalı leans over the salt water, balcony upon balcony. Adnan opens the roof terrace’s wooden shutters. The heat of the morning beats in mingled with coils of cool from the Bosphorus. The current is dark. Adnan has always felt the Bosphorus to be dark, dark as blood, dark as the birth-canal. It feels deep to him, deep and drowning. He knows where this fear comes from; from his father’s boat and the endless sunlit afternoons of a childhood lived on water. This is why his seal of success has always been a place by the edge of the water. It is the lure of the fear, the reminder that everything you have won may be lost in an unconsidered moment. The early sun turns the side of a Russian gas carrier into a wall of light. It is a monster. Adnan Sarioğlu smiles to himself. Gas is power.

    ‘One million two hundred you say?’

    The real estate agent waits by the door. He isn’t even properly awake, but he’s shaved and suited. You have to get up early to sell to the gas lords. A dealer knows a dealer.

    ‘It’s a very sought-after location and, as you can see, you can move straight in. You have your own boat dock and waterside terrace for entertaining.’

    Adnan Sarioğlu shoots some video.

    ‘We’ve had a lot of interest in this property,’ the realtor presses. ‘These old yalıs do go fast.’

    ‘Of course they do,’ says Adnan Sarioğlu. It is not a real yalı, those were all bought up long ago, or are collapsing under the weight of their decaying timbers in forgotten coves along the Bosphorus, or have burned decades since. It is a fake, but a good fake. Turkey is the land of the masterful fake. But it is far far from that hateful little eighth-floor apartment huddling between the roar of the expressway and the blare of the mosque.

    He pans the ceptep across the terrace. Already he is filling the space with skinny Scandinavian furniture. This could be an office. It would just be leather sofas and old Ottoman coffee tables, lifestyle magazines and a killing sound system. He would come in in the morning and summon his avatars to spin around him hauling in spot prices from Baku to Berlin. The big dealers, the Paşas, all work this way; from the boat club, from the gym, from the restaurant. Perfectly weightless. Yes, this is a house to start his dynasty. He can’t afford it. The realtor’s background checks will have disclosed that. But they will have shown that he is the kind of man who could have money, very very much money and that’s the reason the agent has got up in the pre-dawn and showered and shaved and scented and put on his good suit.

    He pans the ceptep across the reach of the waterway. He blinks the zoom in on to the pastel houses along the European shore. Bigger cars, faster boats, deeper docks, further from their neighbours’ shadows. Money and class have always clung to the edge of Europe. He double-takes, pans back. Between the shiny slick twenty-first century yalıs with their low-sloping photosynthetic roofs is a pile of timbers,