An adopted city was always held to a lower standard, but even by that standard Istanbul had been rough on him. Driven from a city of mosques by artillery, he had found his first consolation in the mosques of the Ottomans, where he could be alone. There was the Mihrimah near the Roman walls in the north, which was being renovated at that time and which was covered with scaffolds. One of Sinan’s less-known masterpieces, it had been built for a princess of that same name and its marvels were entire walls made of windows. Even at dusk it was intense with light. It was a place in which to think about music, in which to dream his compositions; afterward he walked to the Kariye Church a few streets away where the Christian mosaics furnished the same inspiration. During the first winter, days of solitude could be spun out between these two places, his compositions coming and going inside his head while he never found the time to write them down. And it often felt to him that snow fell every day, though it couldn’t have.
Through musical connections he found work tutoring the children of Turkish families, and several times a week he took a bus up to Ulus or Etiler or Bebek and entered houses filled with carpets on the quiet lanes that overlooked the Bosphorus where his pupils lived and where he taught them how to sing or how to play the flute. None of them had talent, and none of them improved. But as they failed to improve their parents came to the conclusion that the fault was his, and that he was not really a proper teacher. So one by one they let him go, without explaining why. He took a room near Kadirga Limani in Sultanahmet, a street of bakeries and sut sahlep vendors. The tenements nearby, above the railway lines, were filled with Africans and Syrians, and these were the alleys whose names he still knew by heart: Hemesehri, Alisan, Ismail Sefa. Those were his places of idleness and sorrow. Here he reflected that once he had wanted to be a master of the qanun; a composer, a teacher, or even eventually a professor in Paris teaching Arabic music. But it was dust now. Some of his fellow students from Aleppo had also fled to Istanbul, and together they went to the soirées of master Weiss who had taught them all in their destroyed city. Weiss had also removed himself to Istanbul to continue his career, and he could be seen on windy nights in the streets around Galata in flowing robes, a man of towering beauty and Sufic estrangement. Once a month Weiss played for his friends in an apartment right next to the Galata tower, and there Faoud sat in the background with other students and re-found the world that had once been his. The enchantment of the group. When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music. But he always left alone and without speaking to anyone. It was enough to listen to the master from a distance and to be close to the ghosts that connected him to home. But time passed, and it worked against him.
Whereas he had at first hoped to save enough to get a decent room, with the passing of months he gave up that hope and fell into grander but more impractical ones. Exodus and escape, flight to Europe. In the spring he drifted to the cafes at Ortakoy under the bridge, where the better-educated Syrians shared their coffees and conspired, three men per cup. There was only a Turkish friend of his father’s who looked over him, arranging his tutoring from afar, while using him as ruthlessly as he could. His name was Mert and he worked in the tea business, but with fingers in matters less open to the light of day. But this man had always remained obscure to him. Faoud never was able to learn much Turkish, and his patron never invited him into his social circles, so his ostracism remained permanent. They used to go to tea together at the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel on the Bosphorus and reminisce about Faoud’s father, since the two older men had known each other in Damascus. They had made money together, but Mert would not reveal how they had done it. There was merely a sense of obligation toward the son on his part. So they would chat and evade harder truths, and Faoud would watch the Russian tankers making their way to the Dardanelles as they had tea and wonder how he could escape on the same sea. It was to this enigmatic and unpleasant man that, in the end, he confided his all-too-common desire.
He could have stayed much longer if he had found the means. But there was no work and his family had finally gone bankrupt after losing all its assets. He was now just a ghost among ghosts. The Syrians begging in the street along Istiqlal had become unpopular, the war changed form, and the borders had taken on different meanings. The exiles began to be rounded up and taken to a new detention center, which he himself never saw. So then one day you wake and you know that your time is up, that God is no longer watching over you, and the Merts of this world can no longer save you any more than music can. Yet he could have stayed as a ghost. It was just that he no longer had much in common with the other Syrians and there was no one to talk to besides the other scattered music students, his now-homeless peers. He sometimes saw them at the mosques, and they shared a tea afterward, but it was conversation purely for its own sake. Many of them thought of him as a spoiled rich boy who had deserved his comeuppance; he looked at them as people with whom he shared a regrettable accident of origin.
But then what did Adonis, their shared poet, say about his own dead brother?
He was the god of love as long as I lived.
What will love do if I too am gone?
—
When he woke he decided at once to run a bath to civilize himself again. In the marital bathroom their toiletries, unlike the provisions of the kitchen, were intact and he wallowed in the bath for an hour washing his hair, his nails, his impoverished skin. It was a long-overdue purification. Not the baths of Istanbul, not the hammam of Sultan Ahmet, but enough. Refreshed and powdered, he went in a bathrobe down to the kitchen. Fetching the service-station provisions he had bought the day before, he made a pot of coffee and a light breakfast of bread and cheese.