Sample

From BYZANTIUM

From where he watched it on the short stool outside his front door, the neighborhood continued crumbling away in an utterly charmless manner. He, Mustafa, did not recognize it as charmless — he was immune to such observations — but any visitor from Europe or America or even other districts of Istanbul would have. There is such a thing as charming decrepitude, found in the rot of once-elegant wooden beams, in the cracks of stone walls sprouting with whatever green things have made their way into them, in Italianate ochre that has grown dusty or in brick that has been exposed by weather and time, but here there was none of that. Maybe it was that the choice of paint had been bad from the beginning and now looked worse or that the houses were mostly cement, or that one thing after the next had been grafted on to them — the iron bars over their windows painted in the same sickly hues or the new door that was nothing like the old door and seemed like a mistake rather than an improvement.

Mustafa, who noted none of this, was instead intent upon a pair of loping boys in tracksuits as they came up the street, the otherwise somnolent air broken by the cry of a gypsy woman from the window of the house on the corner of the alley at the foot of the hill. Mustafa peered over the three-inch-tall tea glass which he had now refilled half-a-dozen times from the aluminum double-stacked kettle that was ever on the burner, with an expression not disapproving but simply watchful. The woman in the window, whose voice came in a series of loud squawks, was calling for something or other from the corner bakkal. The one boy obliged, and the other stayed outside and lit a cigarette. The side of the house was a shade of green like an Islamic tomb, its wooden slats plastered over years ago. He wasn’t sure how long they had been there, and in the lineage of squatters who had occupied the house, it was hard to say when one family had left and another had taken its place, like a soup that had new ingredients added each day but was never drained to the bottom, so that it was unclear what was old soup and what was new. The one thing he could be certain of is that it had never belonged to any of them.

Mustafa had not had much to do since he retired. His wife was gone. His daughter was grown and married. His son, who still lived at home, had taken over the master bedroom with his wife and put his father in the small room at the back. Mustafa had the distinct sensation that they were counting the days until he was gone. He was only sixty, though, and still spry. He puttered about with machines, built the odd jam cupboard or shoe rack that his daughter-in-law requested and otherwise kept to himself. This business of the house, though, ate at him. There were houses all over Istanbul that stood empty or were occupied with squatters, falling into further and further disrepair, unhelped by the non-owners who would not put a penny into them regardless of how long they had lived there. The houses belonged to someone — Greeks, most likely, who had been pushed out in the nationalist uprising of the fifties and never returned — but where these owners were was a mystery. Then there was the house next door to it, where the Armenian lived. His mistress, long gone, had been one of the inheritors, but he had remained, the last remnant of the final generation of Christians whose neighborhood it had once been. Mustafa, who was not of the neighborhood himself but had married into it, did not feel his late wife’s nostalgia for them. Still, the Armenian was quiet and clean, and that was enough for Mustafa to prefer him to the occupants next door. He knew that the moment the Armenian’s house was empty, they would swarm upon it, no owner present to stop them, and then their numbers would double so that they could fill it the way they had filled the first house, and it would all amount to more squawks from the window, more garbage on the street and more of the unsavory visitors who came at night and raised a ruckus.

And that is when the news came. The bakkal, who rarely left his post, strode over with a purposeful look. “No one has seen the old man in three days,” he said. Mustafa perked up at once. “I’m thinking of trying the door, but I don’t want to do it alone. I know what I’m going to find, and I don’t want anyone to suspect me.” Mustafa nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street, stroking his mustache with his other hand, contemplating the significance of what had almost surely happened.

They began with a series of knocks and then ringing the doorbell with no answer to either. They spoke his name aloud a few times, again with no answer. They fiddled with the lock for a bit, itself jury-rigged to begin with, until they got it open. Inside was a smell one finds in a house where an old person has lived for a long time undisturbed. The two men passed a massive mahogany buffet table laid with white doilies and several framed photographs of family members, all from decades ago, and then began up the stairs. They poked their heads first into the small bedroom at the back of the house and then into the large one at the front. There, in the middle of the bed, covered with a thin blanket up to his chin, surrounded by more photographs, more pieces of dark wooden furniture and more doilies — items that had been infused with memory and meaning until just days ago but now stood lifeless — was the old man.