He serves tea. As he balances the tray with the bulbous tea glasses, he spills the tea. His left leg is shorter, arched like a sickle, so when he walks he sways like a boat on choppy sea. I notice his crooked left leg only now. His grey suit is a few sizes too big, crumpled, and wrinkles around his ankles. It looks even older than himself. Threadbare at the elbows and knees, it shrouds his body rather than dresses it. It blurs the details of his physique. As he sets the tray on the table in front of me, I smell tobacco and terpentine, and the dusty scent of old age. His hair is grey, his face wrinkled, his moustache white. But his lopsided smile is boyish, his blue eyes are fresh, sparkling almost. I cannot remember how to say “Thank you” in Turkish. So I bow and mumble “Moteshakkaram”. I speak a little Persian and hope that people in Istanbul, or at least he, Avni, will understand me.
He takes a seat next to me on a shaky chair. It’s a jumbled ensemble of a table and three chairs. Maybe these are valuable antiques, were they restored. But they are splintered and skew like Avni’s leg, and spotted with colors from his atelier, his painter’s workshop in steep, cobbled Siraselviler Street. The sun is baking the city, but here, in front of Avni’s open workshop door, it’s shady and cool. A soft breeze tousles his hair as I feel strands of my hair lift off my head and dance in the air.
I gaze through the open door inside at the painting I want to buy. It’s just a tiny canvas, hardly bigger than a the tray he had carried the tea with, suspended high up on the wall. It is dwarfed by the big frames hanging next to it, or leaning against the wall below. The little painting could be just a coral white stain on an ocean-blue backdrop. Or it could be the shape of a dancing Dervish.
“Mavlana. “ Avni says.
“Mavlana!” I repeat and put my hand on my chest. Mavlana, the whirling Sufi poet. “I love.” Avni must have understood the word “love”, for he nods his head enthusiastically and starts reciting. I don’t understand Turkish, but it must be a poem by Rumi, the Master, Mavlana, as the Turkish call him.
It’s a rhythmic singsong that reflects the mountainous streets of Istanbul, this dizzying web of narrow lanes, uphill, downhill, jammed with cars and buses, crowded with bearded men, high heeled women, and children, with cats and dogs, and filled with laughter and calls for prayer, and with the scents of cumin, of Shisha, and of cat piss. I do not understand the words as Avni proclaims the poem, lifting his arms as if dancing in trance, as if painting on an imaginary canvas, but my heart is filled with peace, enriched. I don’t understand the words, but I understand Avni. And as I look into his wild blue eyes, strangely, I know he understands me.
