Ten-year-old Ertugrul Osman was present in Lausanne on July 24, 1923, when the treaty which divided up the Ottoman Empire was signed, officially bringing to an end more than six centuries of Turkish rule across three continents.
It was at l'Hôtel Cecil in the city where the victorious Allies handed out ancient territory like chunks of meat, with Osman shunted into a back room as the bargaining took place. At any rate, the boy would have struggled to understand the streams of exchanged French, Japanese, Romanian, Greek et al.
He could just about grasp that something important - no, more than important; with a ten-year-old's vocabulary lacking the superlatives to reach it - was happening, but the details were too complex, and ran through his skull and out through his ears again, even when he was inclined to try to take them in.
Yes, he was aware that what he had called home for a decade was about to change; the names of places and their boundaries wiped away like chalk from a board. The traces would remain, for a time, but in fifty years or a hundred, all manner of occurrences - atrocious and heroic alike - would be attributed to the long-dead Ottomans and their expunged lands, with only a handful of people concerned enough to defend or oppose the prevailing view anyway.
Beyond that, though, and the injustice of the whole thing, Ertugrul would have admitted to being bored, puzzled, and desperate for something to distract him. He could have taken it upon himself to sneak into the hotel garden, but for one whose whole life had been a dream anyway, it was appropriate that he thought about doing so without ever acting on the whim.
The garden of the mind was sharper and more full of adventure than the garden of a Swiss hotel could ever be. There are two kinds of people, realised Osman: those who proceed to the garden even when their state is disintegrating, and feel disappointed with what they find there; and those who make a better, purely mental, garden, and re-create an empire within it.
