In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads. Stanley Stewart
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by the gangway with the second mate, hoping to learn more about this ship which now contained such a large proportion of my publisher’s advance. In spite of his dour appearance, he seemed eager to talk. He spoke the casual staccato English of ships.
‘Did you get receipt?’ he asked.
I showed him my beer mat. He nodded. Beer mats were obviously accepted currency on the Mikhail Lomonosov.
‘You can’t trust anyone on this ship,’ he said. He leaned forward to spit over the rail. ‘This is my last voyage. I can’t take it any more. Do you know how many times I make this trip? Sevastopol, Istanbul. Istanbul, Sevastopol.’
I told him I had no idea.
‘Four hundred forty-seven,’ he said. ‘It is no life. This is my last voyage. Four hundred forty-seven. It’s enough, I think. It’s making me crazy. If I don’t get off this ship, I will kill someone.’
I took what comfort I could from the fact that he had ruled out murder as a career option.
A bell rang twice from somewhere within the ship, and he turned to go. ‘We sail at six o’clock, Monday evening. Don’t be late.’
The following day, a Sunday, I went to morning mass at Our Lady of the Mongols. I felt a few prayers for the voyage wouldn’t go amiss. When I arrived the service had already begun but Father Alexandros broke off in mid-chant to usher me personally into a seat. As I looked uneasily about the church I realized why I had got the special treatment. I was the congregation. It is a measure of the decline of this ancient church here in its Patriarchal city that the only worshipper it could muster on a warm spring Sunday was a lone Irish Presbyterian.
There is not a lot to do in Presbyterian services except doze off in your pew while a flushed preacher warns of the fire and brimstone that awaits you just the other side of retirement. A couple of hymns, the collection plate, and we all went home. For Presbyterians even a common Anglican mass was a complicated affair involving a disturbing degree of participation – responses, collective prayer, not to mention the endless standing and kneeling at unpredictable moments. Now suddenly I was the crucial component of the most arcane ritual that the Christian church has to offer, here in the last remnant of Byzantium.
The only other people present were a neanderthal-looking altar boy who kept peering out at me through a door in the iconostasis as if he had never seen a congregation before and an elderly cantor, a cadaverous figure in a black robe. With a scythe and a grin the cantor could have doubled as the Grim Reaper. He stood to one side at a lectern chanting interminable passages in ancient Greek in a thin beautiful voice. In the pauses where the congregation were obviously meant to respond, he looked across at me from beneath lowered lids. I looked at the floor or examined the dome with a critical intensity. Amen was the only word I understood and whenever I heard it I joined in heartily to make up for all the important stuff I must have been leaving out. Otherwise I signalled my involvement by throwing in as many signs of the cross as I could manage – not exactly a Presbyterian thing, but I had seen people do this in films.
Later in the courtyard the Grim Reaper took his leave with a slow funereal nod while Father Alexandros and I lingered to have coffee with Nadia, the Syrian caretaker, as if it was already an established ritual between us.
I didn’t allude to the fact that there had been no congregation. It was like some dysfunction that one politely ignored. With the same courtesy Alexandros didn’t mention my own lamentable performance as an Orthodox worshipper.
‘How long will you stay in Istanbul?’ Alexandros asked.
‘I leave tomorrow.’
‘Do you fly back to London?’
‘No, I am going on to Outer Mongolia,’ I said, as if it formed part of some natural tour of the region. As I listed the stages of my route – across the Black Sea, then overland across the Crimea, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – he tried to disguise his shock behind a polite clerical façade.
He put his empty cup down on the ledge between us. ‘And what do you hope to find in Mongolia?’ he asked. Despite his best efforts, I felt a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.
I expanded on the fascination of nomads, speaking rather too fast, overdoing the enthusiasm as I tried to convince him. I might have been speaking about the dark side of the moon. Alexandros was the epitome of the polished metropolitan figure: a Greek, a man of the city from the race that had created the city state, a man whose ancestors may have inhabited this city, one of the world’s oldest and greatest, since before the birth of Christ. He seemed to shudder involuntarily at the notion of nomads, people who lived in tents, people who built nothing. Confronted by his civilized sophistication, I was struggling to convince even myself that the Mongolians were not barbarians who had taken a historical wrong turn when they decided to stick to sheep rather than join the ranks of the committed settlers determined to create something that would outlast their own lifetime.
‘I have little opportunity to travel,’ he said at last.
He looked up at the old church. ‘I must look after Mouchliotissa. If we don’t keep the church alive, the Turks will take it from us. When the church disappears there will be nothing left of Constantinople, or of us.’
It was the irresistible tug of the city, the lasso of his own identity moored among these ancient stones.
When Friar William was invited to preach in Haghia Sophia on Palm Sunday of 1253, the great church was already very old. Built in the 530s by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, it belongs to the architectural tradition of the Roman basilica, and thus indirectly to the pagan world of the Greek temple.
The brilliance of Haghia Sophia is the transition from the earthbound exterior to the soaring lightness of its interior. From the outside the great church is monumental and brooding, the original form much confused with buttresses and minarets added after the Turkish conquest when it began a new career as a mosque. Inside it takes flight. It is transfiguration in architecture. You may run your hands over the massive outer walls, a millennium and a half, stained and crumbling beneath your fingers, but the ethereal magic of the nave is less palpable. The air is gold- and rust-coloured, like some exhalation of the old mosaics and the red marble. Moted columns of light fall from the high windows onto the wide expanses of the floor. The walls, the columns, the distant vaults, might have been weightless; the great dome, Procopius wrote over fourteen centuries ago, seems to be suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Robert Byron compared the old basilica to St Peter’s in Rome. Haghia Sophia is a church to God, he wrote, St Peter’s merely ‘a salon for his agents’.
It is a daunting place to begin a journey to the nomadic steppes. I spent hours in Haghia Sophia wandering the upper galleries beneath the conch vaults gazing down into the great canyon of the nave. I had come to see it as my world and I lingered here as a kind of farewell. As the slanting afternoon light crept through the galleries, amid lengthening shadows, I listened to the crescendo of the great city outside as its inhabitants began their journeys home. In the golden embrace of Haghia Sophia, I suddenly saw the journey to Mongolia as a Byzantine might have done, a journey into emptiness, into some fearful void. I understood the ambitions and the richness of cities. The desire to carve the aspirations of the human heart into some permanent form was central to my own world. In Haghia Sophia that impulse had produced sublime transcendance.
On this day at the beginning of June, on the other side of Asia, the Mongolians would be packing up and moving to summer pastures, leaving nothing to mark their passage but the shadows on the spring grass where their tents had stood.
At the docks my fellow passengers, a queue of burly figures beneath amorphous sacks, were making their up the gangway of the Mikhail Lomonosov like newsreel refugees.
Below in the cabin the resident onions had been cleared away leaving a faint astringent odour and a litter of red skins. The accommodation master appeared with my