The Peace Machine Read online

  Karachiyano Efendi,

  Commonplace arguments only bruise the honour of the weak. The fact of the matter is that I cannot rectify this situation by apologizing to you. Nor would sending you to your maker set things right. You see, apologies cannot instil in a man a robust sense of honour, which in most cases is a characteristic produced at birth. The only solution for you is to be born again of firmer stuff. I would like to kindly request that you awake from your delusions. A matter concerning a defect of birth cannot be solved with a bullet or the blow of a sword.

  Yours truly, Celal Bey

  *

  Arif Bey was perhaps the wealthiest man in Manisa. He had made a fortune exporting the figs, grapes and olives that grew on his estate, shipping them as far afield as France and Italy. A gentleman of fine tastes, he was fond of reading and writing. He was a reserved man, as quiet as they come.

  After losing his wife in a boating accident, he sold off part of his business. When that wild boy came into his life, Arif Bey straightened him out by arranging private lessons for him. Celal was steadfastly loyal to Arif Bey, who had saved him from a bedraggled life of living on the run and working in the slaughterhouse, up to his ears in animal intestines. Until then, Celal had never felt loyal to anyone. Arif Bey’s generosity, which blew into Celal’s life like a gentle breeze, changed all that.

  Thanks to his governesses and the lessons he was given, Celal quickly outlearnt the other children of his age. Encouraged by Arif Bey’s friends from France, he went to high school in Marseille, where he worked at the company’s local branch, learning about the export trade. When Celal had completed his bachelor’s degree with honours, Arif Bey summoned his adoptive son to Istanbul and enrolled him in the newly founded School of Law.

  After settling back into Arif Bey’s mansion in Istanbul, Celal found that he was confronted with a quietude that grew heavier with each passing day. The joy that Celal had brought into Arif Bey’s life pulled the merchant, even if just a little, from the well of melancholy into which he’d fallen, but it didn’t take long for him to plummet back into its depths.

  Still wracked with pain over the loss of his wife, one day at dawn Arif Bey went to the neighbourhood of Bebek. Generously tipping the beardless owner of a rowing boat, he set off by himself, rowing straight towards a mail ship that was approaching the docks in Karaköy. The mail ship may have been old but it wasn’t so decrepit that it couldn’t pulverize the tiny craft in an instant. As Arif Bey was drowning, it occurred to him that perhaps he should have given the owner of the rowing boat a more sizeable tip.

  Devastated by the fact that he’d been unable to console Arif Bey and that he’d lost his adoptive father, Celal dropped out of the School of Law, which he’d been attending solely out of a sense of devotion, and went on living in the mansion, which he now owned, together with two servants.

  As the result of a few unwise investments, Celal lost a large part of his inheritance, but that didn’t quite spell disaster because he still had a means of making money which was, to say the least, anything but ordinary. One day, after sending one of his servants to the Italian consulate to deliver a missive, he sat down at his desk for a light meal and then took a rather ordinary piece of paper from one of the drawers and started writing.

  He was picking up from where he’d left off working on a novel. But this was not your typical novel. It was one of those notoriously popular French erotic books, the kind that was strictly forbidden yet read in secret by students, corporals, generals and parliamentarians alike. They would clandestinely meet up to slip each other the volumes they’d finished reading in exchange for others.

  In France, the police were searching high and low for the author of these novels that depicted the harems of sultans, garrulous nights of drinking at caravanserais, women’s sheer face veils, and gowns that fluttered in the breeze. Their efforts, however, were in vain.

  For nothing the police hauled in and beat up a journalist who wrote about the Eastern Question.

  At the Sorbonne they raided the office of a renowned Orientalist, leaving his library in a state of complete disarray, but it was an exercise in futility.

  They interrogated a naval captain who was infatuated with Istanbul, and while they didn’t learn anything useful they did come upon some unthinkably perverse gadgets at his home.

  Celal sent the manuscripts he wrote to Jean, a high-school friend who was living in Marseille.

  The French clerk on the mail ship was paid off so he’d overlook the parcels. The books were then sent section by section to five different addresses in Paris, where they were compiled at a printing shop set up expressly for that purpose in the basement of a photography studio. The Assistant Commissioner working at the police station next door didn’t object to the opportunity to use the basement to question prostitutes a few times a week.

  Celal was the secret driving force behind a booming industry. Aside from Jean, no one knew about Celal’s role in the business. When he was a student in Marseille, he had started writing the stories for fun and as a way to earn some spending money. Now, while he didn’t really need the money, he was making a small fortune from the books he wrote. At the time, however, Istanbul was crawling with Sultan Abdulhamid’s spies, so if sizeable amounts of money were sent to a bank account there, someone was inevitably going to catch on. So Jean kept the money in an account in France and sent Celal modest amounts of money that wouldn’t draw the attention of the authorities.

  When Celal had finished writing a scene in which he described how some odalisques managed to rouse the manhood of the harem eunuchs, he looked at his watch. He knew that the French mail ship would still be going through all the rigmarole necessary to leave port. The French weren’t just exporting their fashions and language to the Ottoman Empire, but their procedures and bureaucracy as well. There were so many formalities that they had to stop loading the ship two hours before it was due to depart, because that was how long it took to take care of all the forms, stamps and signatures.

  After finishing another scene involving a eunuch and two odalisques fawning over the sultan’s favourite mistress, Celal folded up the pages and placed them in a large envelope. He had been writing non-stop, and dawn was now breaking. Getting to his feet, he stretched and considered taking a quick nap. When he realized that he only had an hour to deliver the envelope, however, he hurriedly dressed and rushed out. As he quickly walked in the direction of the docks, he thought, “I wonder if it would have been better if the sultan’s mistress had been bowing and scraping before the eunuch?”

  Just as he was passing Kılıç Ali Pasha Mosque, Karachiyano stepped into Celal’s path. At first, Celal didn’t recognize him. It was only when Karachiyano threw a glove at his feet that he recalled who he was. Celal didn’t refrain from showing his displeasure at the persistence of this particular Christian Istanbulite.

  Without batting an eye, Celal picked up the glove and stuffed it into his pocket, and then continued on his way to deliver his story about the odalisques and eunuch to the post office clerk. He picked up the money that had been sent and saw that Jean had shipped him a rather large parcel. While he couldn’t wait to open it, he knew that he couldn’t do so until he got home. Part of the reason why Celal was somewhat obsessed with the pictures that accompanied his novels was the fact that the artist was a woman. Celal sometimes gazed at the pictures, running his fingers over them, and sometimes he scrutinized them with a magnifying glass. He wondered if the artist had included pictures of herself in some of her illustrations. If so, which one was she? For days Celal would be plunged into thought, pondering over the pictures. Celal created the female characters and the artist drew what he imagined. Over time, he started to notice the characters whom he hadn’t described in sufficient detail. That woman, who piqued his interest more than any other, was somehow able to create drawings that filled in the gaps in Celal’s descriptions. And it occurred to Celal that anyone who can do that must always draw their inspiration from themselves. E
ventually Celal started trying to get the artist to draw a portrait of herself. Every story that he sent to France had one character who was described in only the vaguest of terms. He would, for example, leave out a description of a woman’s nipples, and then he would take note of how she had drawn them. Sometimes he would fail to include a description of a woman’s hair, or he would offer only the briefest rendering of a woman’s eyes, lips or hands.

  When the artist joined in the game, Celal raised the stakes. For example, he wrote a scene in which a Circassian odalisque climaxes, but he left the description rather bland. When the illustrated book arrived in the post a month later, he looked through it to see how she had depicted the woman’s climax. He had written scenes in which fear, compassion, betrayal, admiration, disappointment and passion were all roughly sketched out, certain that the author and artist were winking at each other through their work. He had good reason to be more excited about this package than the others. In his last novel he had included a woman who was an artist, so he felt certain that he was going to come face to face with the woman of his imagination.

  As he approached the mansion, the afternoon call to prayer was echoing through the streets. When he got to his room, he ripped open the package and started flipping through the pages. He found the illustration he was looking for at the back of the book. The drawing depicted an artist’s studio. A woman was lying sprawled out on a canvas that had fallen to the floor and a man had his face buried between her legs. The woman was looking out of the drawing, as if gazing into Celal’s eyes. Minutes went by, and they gazed at each other. Celal climaxed.

  When Celal got up a few hours later he was feeling groggy. He left the copy of his latest book—which, as usual, he had written under the pseudonym Şerif Efendi—on the bed and sat down at his desk. He opened a thickly bound tome he had picked up from his office and found the page that his friend, a lawyer, had marked. Out loud he read the decree of Yako Sami, a member of the Ionian Court of First Instance:

  “Duelling contravenes the fundamentals of our religious law. The body belongs to the earth, and the soul belongs to God the Almighty. Hence the body shall not be made to suffer death until so decreed by the Powers Above. Any order that condemns the body to death contravenes the principles of religion and hence is haram.”

  Celal knew most of this already, but it set his mind at ease to see that a scholar had expressed the claim so concisely. He lingered on one sentence in particular: “Hence the body shall not be made to suffer death…” To allow oneself to be killed was the equivalent of suicide, and so duelling itself was a form of suicide. And since suicide was forbidden by Islam, duelling was also forbidden. Therefore it seemed to stand that no one, least of all Karachiyano, could proclaim a duel and thereby force a Muslim to sin in the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. If the duel were to involve two non-Muslims, well that would be a different matter. Perhaps the police or the courts could turn a blind eye. Celal thought, “But what would happen if the duel involved a Muslim? No, it simply wouldn’t be tolerated.” He flipped through some more pages, seeking arguments that would further strengthen his case. Even though he knew his argument was sound, he went through his bookshelves to find a philosophical and moral defence for his position. After going through book after book, he came across a pamphlet written by İsmail Hakkı Bey from the province of Milas. As he read through the pamphlet, Celal jotted down some notes:

  “Do the insults and injustices that precipitate a duel represent circumstances that perforce lead to the death or killing of a person? These insults and injustices are, for the most part, unclear in nature. It is often said that honour demands blood. But what honour is this? We have seen that honour consists in not heeding such matters and paying heed to oneself. A sense of honour steeped in morality rises above the claims of others. So in the full sense, the act of securing my honour can only be carried out by me; no one else can exalt, disparage or eradicate it. Only I can disparage it with my mistakes and exalt it with my innate competence. If I err in my acts, a duel will not set them right; by taking part in a duel, I will only add injustice to an iniquity, and my sullied honour will not be cleansed.”

  An article titled “Duelling: One-On-One Combat” in the journal Penman further supported Celal’s position:

  “The tradition thus mentioned is a carry-over from the forefathers of the inhabitants of Germania, a remnant of their nomadic lifestyle and ignorance. In times of yore, the peoples of Europe were bereft of any form of judiciary process or governance and hence they resorted to duelling to settle disputes between people when they arose.”

  Celal penned a lengthy letter to Karachiyano which spelt out every reason why duelling was not a viable solution. He had never felt such passion before, not even when he was writing about the odalisques in his novel.

  As Karachiyano would see that evening when he received the twenty-five-page letter, duelling simply was not an option. First of all, it went against the principles of Islam. Secondly, it is impossible for one person to sully the honour of another. Third, there were other ways to settle disputes. In the end, Celal challenged his adversary to a wrestling match.

  “If you accept my proposal, we can thus satisfy your desire and engage in corps-à-corps combat while not indulging in behaviour that would run counter to my beliefs. The first man to be pinned to the ground shall vow to leave the city and keep his promise.”

  In this way, Celal managed to convince Karachiyano to drop his challenge. In trying to save himself, Celal had invoked the spirit of the day and age: he was Islamicized and Turkified, and as such he was a man of the times. He was not, however, Turkified to the extent that they would wrestle in the classic Turkish style, doused in olive oil, nor was he Europeanized to the extent that they would wrestle on mats. No, they would have a simple wrestling match following the karakucak tradition. They agreed to hold the match two weeks later.

  The dervish lodges dedicated to wrestling had closed down long ago, and the instructors of times past had largely been forgotten. When the Military School was opened, wrestling was abandoned in favour of gymnastics, and traditional wrestlers were forced to eke out a living by taking part in competitions held at fairs in distant rural towns. Celal managed to track down a few wrestlers who had once trained at a lodge in the district of Şişli in Istanbul. He summoned them to the local hammam and, generously tipping the homeless boys working there, requested that the proprietor not disturb them. For days he tussled with the wrestlers at the bathhouse, learning how to fend off the most powerful of moves. Despite years of carousing, he hadn’t lost an ounce of the strength that had once made it possible for him to fell a bull with a single blow. The head of the wrestling lodge had died long ago, but Celal picked up the seasoned wrestlers’ secrets with astonishing speed and his spirits were buoyed by his successes. On the last two days he called musicians to the hammam, including a drummer and player of the shawm. They danced the köroğlu zeybeği and slapped their thighs before rushing in to grapple as the music played. Standing as tall and strong as obelisks on the marble platform in the middle of the bathhouse, which had been greased to make it all the more difficult for them to keep their balance, they eyed their opponents, watching for an opportunity to lunge and take them down. When evening fell, Celal’s servants brought roast chicken, beef rump, Uzbek rice and Bosnian pastries. Some of the wrestlers guzzled iced pitchers of buttermilk ayran while others relaxed with a few strong glasses of raki.

  On the day of the match Celal awoke before dawn feeling sprightly and alert. Heeding the advice of the wrestlers, he had a light breakfast: a few olives, a piece of bread and a glass of water. The day before he had told his driver to pick him up early, and he was waiting outside with the carriage. They immediately set off, first down the cobbled streets of Beyoğlu and then jolting along the narrow lanes towards Baltalimanı Meadow, where they had agreed to meet.

  Karachiyano was already there, waiting beside a carriage similar to Celal’s. He called out to Celal, “Welcome, wre
stler, don your wrestling trousers! But let’s have a smoke first, before settling this matter.” Celal saw that there were two hookah pipes on the ground next to Karachiyano’s carriage.

  “By all means, Karachiyano Efendi. But may I ask the reason why?”

  “Well, we’re not going to have a duel, so we’re both going to come out of this alive. That’s something worthy of a celebration. Before, we were going to battle it out like enemies—now we’re going to spar like comrades. We could even say that this is a gesture of peace. It is said that the natives of America smoke a peace pipe to settle disputes. And a little while from now I might be lying flat on my back on the grass, bidding farewell to this city, so please indulge me and allow me the pleasure of a last smoke with you.”

  The two young men sitting there bare-chested, wearing nothing but their canvas trousers as they puffed away at their water pipes, were likely a strange sight. After a few more puffs, Karachiyano set his hose on the ground and got to his feet, and Celal followed suit. Half-heartedly they went through the routine of slapping their thighs before lunging in for the attack. Every move that Karachiyano made betrayed inexperience. All Celal wanted was to get through the ordeal and go back home, but just as he grabbed his opponent by the back of the neck and heard the man’s bones crack under his grip, hundreds of flies swarmed over him. And not just any flies, but the biting kind. Some landed on his shoulders and feet, while others buzzed in his face, biting his ears and nose. Taking advantage of Celal’s bewilderment, Karachiyano made his move.