Last Letter from Istanbul

Nur had pushed the boy behind her, but had not had time to prevent one of the men stumbling into her, catching her hard on the shoulder. Involuntarily she had shoved back with both hands, merely trying to keep him from knocking her down. He had toppled and briefly tried to right himself before his momentum had got the better of him, sending him crashing backward to the ground. She had stood there stunned by the act, by her sudden, unexpected power. His fellow soldiers had been beside themselves with glee – laughing and pointing, slurring insults at him where he sat in the pool of his spilled beer. Then the fallen one had looked up, and she had seen that the shock had sobered him; that his expression was pure menace. She had humiliated him, she understood this look to mean, and she would pay.

She had turned to the boy. ‘Run.’

They had fled back down the way they had come, through the cobbled streets. The men had pursued them for a while, alternately laughing and shouting orders. But the men were drunk, and she knew the streets better – knew a secret shortcut through a series of interconnecting alleyways that would take them back to the tram stop.

They had escaped, but she still has a queasy fear of one of them recognising her in the street one day and demanding retribution. If she were arrested, what would become of them all … the boy, her mother, her grandmother? She looks at them all now, and decides it is not worth thinking about.

As the sky beyond the windows loses the last of its light, she heats a basin of water on the stove and begins to wash her mother’s hair. She has a bar of soap scented with Damascene rose that she keeps for this purpose. The aroma is famed for its ability to soothe and heal. It reminds her of her mother, too. The woman she used to be – who would ask the girls to crush the petals into her skin and hair before her bath, who wore pure attar oil dabbed behind her ears. Who wore gowns of pink silk and read French novels.

From the corner, her grandmother speaks. ‘You won’t get anything out of her. Worse than an infant today.’

‘She has suffered so much, Büyükanne.’

‘So have we all, girl.’

Her mother stopped speaking on the day they had word from the front: Missing, presumed lost. They knew as well as anyone that the notice meant dead. Her brother survived only within the bureaucratic chaos that meant the exact circumstances of his death were not yet clear. Sometimes, in the early days, Nur had allowed herself to believe that he was alive. There were rumours of Ottoman men being taken as prisoners of war. If she did not feel his death, might it not be real?

Now she sees that this was just a fiction she had created to delay pain. She did not feel his death because they had been denied the absolute certainty of it: that was the cruellest thing of all.

From somewhere beneath them comes the eerie, distorted wail of an infant. The walls might be made of thick card, not stone. Above and below can be heard, with peculiar domestic intimacy, the sounds of other lives. Most of the time the voices are indistinct, as though they are travelling through water.

Her mother’s eyes have closed. If one were to look briefly she might appear to be in a state of bliss. But her breath comes too quickly. Beneath the purplish lids there is restless movement, as though projected there is a play of images that only she can see. Nur has some inkling of what those scenes may be. They are the same that wake her mother at night, from which even in her sleep she is not safe.

She is trying not to think about how much more hair there used to be. Her fingers discover absences, patches of bare scalp where whole sections seem to have vanished. She sluices warm water, creates a silky white lather. She inhales, exhales, hears the hitch of her breath and tries to smooth it. She understands the importance of remaining calm. Knows how powerfully the fingertips, those tiny repositories of sensation, can convey emotion. She tries instead to convey only her tenderness, her love.

She fills another cup of water to rinse away the foam. The colour has changed, too. It used to be a magnificent colour: somewhere between brown and red. A great sweep of it, with the shine of metal. Depending upon the quality of the light it would gleam bronze or copper. Now it does not reflect anything at all. This, of course, may be merely to do with age. A cruelty, yes, but a natural one that comes to all. And yet it happened so quickly – in less than a year.

She tips the water. There is a small sound as the water drenches her mother’s scalp, which could be a sigh of pleasure or pain.

‘Is it all right for you, Anne?’ But there is only silence.

Five years earlier

The Prisoner

Their enemy, at the very entrance to their camp. The Russians had come for them, through the snow. Silently, cloaked in whiteness. Then they were everywhere, and death came all at once. Death came in pellets of metal that could travel the whole way through a body, and break it all up inside. Men were killed opening their mouths to speak, or scratching themselves, or putting both hands inside their jackets to warm them, or bending to fasten a shoe, or squatting to defecate against a tree. Some died even before they had time to shout, some of them with screams that outlived them. And some were dying slowly, with whimpers of fear and pain. They fell and the snow covered them. He had not known that death in the name of a noble cause, in the name of everything one stood for, could still be so ugly. So small, so pitiful.

He shouted to Babek to fall, to pretend to be hit. He lay down, and waited for the snow to cover him as they made their advance. He felt the cold enter him like a sword. He realised it might have been better to have been shot, because now he would merely freeze to death – and it would be slow.

He lay for an hour; perhaps several. But time had frozen too.

Beside him, on either side, stretched a phalanx of corpses. Bodies that would soon be hardly recognisable as such, skin turned hard as stone. The Russians had brought dogs, and some of them had begun to feast. He could hear them, a little way off, fighting over the spoils. There was more than enough to go around.

Babek lay somewhere close by. He thought that he could still hear the rattle of his breathing, but it was difficult to be certain.

The enemy came now, following the dogs. He could hear voices, the creak of the snow beneath their boots. Their boots lined with fur. This was the Russians’ element. They were men of ice and snow.

He felt the weight of the dead man beside him disappear as the corpse was hoisted into the air and carried to some unknown place. Then they came for him, prodded at him with a rifle. He felt the sting of the bayonet’s blade against his skin, but he did not cry out.

He could hear them talking; but he could not understand the words. He supposed they were gloating over their victory. And then he heard; unmistakable, a voice speaking in a language he understood. A heavy Russian accent, but the words were clear enough.

‘You’ve done well. You will be rewarded for this.’

Another voice, accented, but not Russian. ‘Thank you.’

He opened one eye. And he saw, he was sure that he saw, the same Armenian who they had thought lost to the snow.

When the Russians had finally left he dragged Babek into the shelter of one of the tents. They would wait here for the reinforcements to find them. He had to believe that they would come; and come soon – he wasn’t sure that either of them had long left.

Every so often, Babek would let out a low moan. It wasn’t a human sound. And he lay where he had been dragged; his limbs at odd angles.

He was not sure whether Babek could hear him, but it seemed important to keep talking. He could feel sleep pressing in, promising a respite from the cold which had found its way into him, deeper than it ever had before. He was lucid enough to know what this meant. It did not matter that he had somehow escaped being wounded – the cold would kill him with just as little mercy as the flesh-rupturing path of a bullet. So he talked: of home, of their return. It would not do to dwell on the things both of them had seen: the feasting dogs; the indignity of the bodies left out without a proper burial – when a Muslim man should be interred as quickly as possible. Even if he had the energy and strength left to do it he could not have buried them all. He would not think, either, of the treachery of the Armenian, the man who had been in their midst, and eaten with them, and drunk tea with them, and promised to help them. And for whose body they had searched in the snow, mourning the loss of one of their own. So instead he talked of the city they both loved; the orange blossom in spring, the first tiny bright green leaves on the fig trees, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and warm baked bread.

He tried to remember what it was to be warm. He talked to Babek of a summer’s trip to the Princes’ Islands. A secret beach he knew where the water was so clear that you could still see the bottom even when it was as deep as a house was tall. And then the feeling of the hot sand beneath your back, the sun drying the damp from your skin with the tenderness of a lover’s caress. Sand with tiny pieces of broken shell, pink as a fingernail, the inside of your lip. He was so cold now that it was difficult to form each word – each had to be forced out on a little huff of breath, so that he almost felt he could see the letters in the freezing cloud as it left his mouth – but he thought he did the job well enough. If only he could feel the meaning of the words, though. Please, he thought, if this is really how it ends for me … let me feel that tender warmth one last time.

He tried now to think of his sister and his mother and grandmother. He had thought that if it came to it, if he found himself on a precipice, all he would need to do would be to think of them, and he would be able to keep himself going. He had not realised how difficult it would be not to die.

His friend’s moans had ceased now. It was some relief. Perhaps the pain had lessened, slightly.

‘Your wife, Babek. Think of how proud she’ll be to have a war hero for a husband.’

Would his own family be proud? They would be relieved, certainly, to see him home. He tried to summon their faces to him but found that he could not do it. The cold seemed to have worked its way inside his head.

‘They’ll come for us soon. It cannot be too long. We’ll be taken home.’

That word. It seemed to encapsulate everything that was good; everything that was the opposite of this place. His cheeks stung; the tears freezing upon the skin.

Time had become fluid, elusive. It seemed that they had been here for many days, many nights. But when it began to grow dark he realised that it could only have been a few hours. The loss of the light made him feel more alone. He reminded himself that Babek was with him. He looked over at his friend. Babek was sleeping now, his chin upon his chest. He looked almost comical, like a broken doll, his limbs splayed. He wondered how long he had been talking to himself, taking comfort from the mere idea of a conversation. He saw that the jacket that he had lent to Babek – because he needed it far more – had fallen open. Feeling rather like his mother – how she had fussed over them when they were little – he leant down and pulled the lapels up so it covered him properly.

He continued to talk to Babek, even though his friend slept, because it was a way of keeping awake himself, and one of them had to be conscious in case reinforcements came for them – or the Russians came back.

A little while later, as it was growing dark, something occurred to him. It was too horrible to contemplate properly, so he shunted the idea away. But it clung to him, to the edges of thought. And finally he looked over at his friend, looked properly this time, and saw that he was dead.

George

This evening he, Bill, his fellow medical officer, and Calvert, an officer they met in Baku, are having dinner in a new Pera restaurant. Russian: all the new restaurants seem to be, set up by the more fortunate of the refugees who have fled across the Black Sea from Lenin’s Revolution.

At night the city becomes more than ever a place of two distinct halves. Stamboul slumbers early while the lights of Pera, just across the Golden Horn, seem to burn brightest in the smallest, darkest hours of the morning. Here the meyhanes and jazz clubs fill with Allied soldiers and naval officers. And there are also those other establishments which choose not to outwardly proclaim the sort of entertainment offered. They do not need to; their renown is spread quickly, secretly, among those who have a taste for such things.

Inside the restaurant is a fug of smoke and steam, a clamour of voices and crockery. Beneath it all, not loud enough to do anything other than add to the racket, comes the thin wail of a violin. The man playing it has one of the most tragic faces George has ever seen, and he wonders whether he was chosen specifically for this, rather than his indifferent skill with the instrument. The maître d’hôtel meets them, sweeps them to their table in the other corner of the room.

Calvert is not impressed. ‘The French always get the best seats,’ he says, darkly, indicating a table several rows across where three blue-uniformed figures sit smoking and laughing. There exists among the so-called Allied forces an atmosphere of mutual distrust.

‘What’s so special about that table?’ Bill asks.

Calvert raises one fair eyebrow. He points to the place beyond the table. There, George sees now, sits a rudimentary wooden structure with a platform a few feet from the ground. ‘It’s closer to the stage. They’ll be able to see right up the skirts.’

He looks round for the maître d’hôtel.

‘Do you know,’ George says to Bill, ‘I completely forgot to tell you. The strangest thing happened yesterday.’ He describes the woman on the jetty. Already the idea of her is like something not quite real, a fragment of a dream.

Bill frowns. ‘You should report that.’

‘Why?’

‘Could be espionage. There are resistance groups, you know. The Teşkilât-i Mahsusa, the Karakol. You heard about the fire at the French barracks at Rami?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, all of the Algerian soldiers escaped miraculously unharmed. It’s thought that they were in cahoots with the Turkish resistance.’

‘I thought of all that – briefly. But I don’t believe it was for a second. A solitary woman, for goodness’ sake, washing her feet.’

‘Still, you should make a formal note of it. She’d be the perfect choice to scope it, because we wouldn’t suspect her. At the very least it’s British property. She trespassed.’

‘Mmm.’ He is rather wishing he hadn’t said anything. He knows already that he will make no such report. He wonders whether, given the opportunity, Bill would also tell him to turn in the little boy who spat on his shoes.

They are brought chilled glasses of that Russian spirit, which tastes to George like a distillation of nothingness, a void. But it goes well with the food. Particularly caviar, which he ate for the first time in that godforsaken place on the shores of the Caspian Sea, bubbles of salt bursting upon the tongue, a concentration of the sea itself, at once delicious and slightly repellent. But isn’t that the same, he thinks, for all tastes deemed refined? The sourness of champagne, the bitter of coffee, the fleshy gobbet of the oyster. Does one enjoy them as much for their taste as for one’s ability to overcome this brief repulsion, even fear?

Calvert sucks back an oyster, drains his glass of vodka, and turns to him.

‘What are you still doing here, Monroe?’

‘What do you mean? This restaurant? Do you know, I’m really not sure …’

Calvert draws back his lips in an approximation of a smile. ‘No, that isn’t what I meant. I understood that you got offered home, some time ago.’

‘I did.’

‘Well, why …’

‘I suppose I felt that I could be more useful here.’

‘Your sense of duty, was it?’

George looks at him, sharply, but can find no obvious trace of sarcasm. ‘Yes. Something to that effect.’

He does not like Calvert. He realises this with a sudden clarity. Even his face is somehow unlikeable. It has a peculiar fineness of feature: the nose small and neat, the chin delicately carved, the lips full as a girl’s, with a sharp cupid bow. It is these lips, perhaps, that tilt the whole effect into a prettiness that doesn’t quite work. And yet he prides himself upon them, George knows. One might even say that he wields them. It is a face that one cannot quite trust.

Now Calvert leans across the table and says in a conspirator’s murmur, ‘They have the best girls here. All bonafide White Russians – nothing lower than a countess, I assure you. Running from the Red Bolshevik devils.’ His breath is tainted metallic by the spirit.

George casts an eye about the room, at the waitresses in question. They are all pretty, youngish, simpering. Not especially remarkable in any way … or so it seems to him. Perhaps one requires the fine gown and jewels to appear really aristocratic. But then what, exactly, is the difference between these and any other women? If the last few years have shown him anything, it is the mutability of all things. If entire cities – countries – can be denatured in so short a space of time, the odds of any human remaining essentially unchanged seem poor.

But clearly Calvert finds something fascinating in them, he watches them like a fox. Perhaps it is the fall itself that interests him. That he, the scion of shopkeepers – albeit extremely successful ones, as he is wont to remind them – might bed a destitute princess of Russia. The waitress comes over to them, ready for their next order. And George sees, with a small frisson of horror, that in the second before she switches on her smile – an electric flash – her eyes are expressionless as a corpse’s.

He thinks again of the woman on the jetty. There had been nothing blank in the look she had given him. It had been a glance to singe the nostril hairs.

‘Penny for them?’ Bill is peering into his face. ‘You’re smiling like a loon.’

‘Pardon? Oh – nothing in particular.’

‘Well. Better get back here quickly; the show is about to start.’

A man has stepped up onto the platform, the compère. He wears an outfit that might once have been rather grand: a frock coat, pale blue, gold-trimmed, matching trousers. Now it is several decades out of date, too large, frayed at the cuffs and collar in a soft fuzz of thread.

‘Where on earth do you think he found such an article?’ Bill murmurs. ‘You’d think they could do a little better, with this place being so popular.’

Calvert seems irritated, as though a slight on the club is one upon his taste; it was he who suggested the place. ‘It’s called The Turgenev,’ he says, waspishly, ‘it is meant to be old-fashioned. A glimpse of Old Russia – the Russia that saw off Napoleon.’

‘Ah.’ Bill seems unconvinced.

Fortunately they are all distracted by the announcement of the first performer. The song she breaks into is shrill as the violin, foreign to the ear as vodka on the palate. It is just an entrée, this musical interlude, for the courses to follow: the white thighs beneath silk petticoats.

‘I’m going home with her. No, no – her.’

George looks over at him. ‘I thought you had a wife, Calvert.’

Calvert’s skin is so fair that the flush is instant. Difficult to tell, though, whether he is more embarrassed or angry. ‘What exactly is that supposed to mean?’

George isn’t exactly sure why he said it. There is hardly much novelty in Calvert’s attitude. And who is George to cast judgement? Best to smooth the situation quickly. ‘Sorry old chap, didn’t mean to offend.’

Calvert nods, curtly. He doesn’t speak for the rest of the act. Bill tries to catch George’s eye, but he avoids him. The truth is, he is tired. He remembers poor Hatton and his herpes. He thinks he may have seen as much near-nudity in the months of being in this city as he has in his whole medical career, and as much adultery as an East End madame.

If this gives the impression that he is absolutely above it, it is misleading.

He has not always been immune to such intoxications.

Soft skin, perfume, a warm body against his. Being made to feel one was the most interesting man in the room.

No, he was not immune at all.

Nur

When Nur sees the boy reading a book, she almost doubts her own eyesight. All of her efforts to interest him in learning thus far have been thwarted, she has given up any hope. Now this small miracle. He is so engrossed in it he does not even hear her approach.

‘What is that?’

He starts in surprise, looks about, furtively. ‘I – found it.’

She peers at it more closely and recognises it: the book of recipes, long forgotten. Now she understands the furtiveness. ‘You found it in the kitchen, I think.’ She has discovered him there, foraging, on a number of occasions. She has not yet had the heart to chastise him for it. ‘I haven’t seen that for a very long time. May I look?’

He parts with it with some reluctance.

It is the book of recipes that Fatima had her transcribe, when Nur told her they would have to let her go. Her hand almost aches with the memory of the task. She has not opened it since. At a time when bread had been hard to come by, let alone anything else, what would have been the point? The paper has yellowed, lending it the appearance of something far older. It is like a relic from another age. Not altogether untrue; those days seem long ago.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen you so interested in a book. And this is just recipes, lists of ingredients.’ But then she recalls his preoccupation with food, the way he never quite seems to be full, and thinks that perhaps, after all, she does understand.

‘Which is your favourite?’

The boy takes the book from her, leafs through the pages with a practised air. He finds the one, taps the page. She reads. Circassian chicken with honey and figs. There is a pull of feeling associated with this particular recipe, but she cannot understand it at first. The memory eludes her.

She puts the book down. He grasps for it, immediately.

In the first years of war those with their own chickens did rather well for themselves. As fresh meat disappeared from the butchers’, vast sums were exchanged for the birds, sometimes fine linens, furniture, jewellery. They were literally worth their weight in gold. Then came the days when no one would part with them for any sum, however outrageous. They had become priceless. And then fresh meat became something that belonged to the past. Perhaps one bird would be kept – and jealously guarded – for its eggs. By then, to eat it would have been a terrible extravagance.

She leaves the boy to his reading, goes back into the apartment. As she crosses the threshold she has it. She last ate the dish on the evening the drums of war had started. The memory hits her full-force.

She is peeling a white fig. They have just eaten the fruits cooked too, with chicken. In the middle of the table is a great platter of them, the room filled with the scent of the leaves. The sky beyond the windows is the dark blue of a late summer night.

They are sedated by the big meal they have just eaten, sitting back in their chairs, drowsy in the candlelight and warmth. It is three weeks before her wedding. She is trying to fix the moment in her mind, because she knows it will be one of the last evenings like this. How many suppers have there been like this? Hundreds? Thousands? The ease of not having to make conversation – though soon her grandmother will light a cigarette and perhaps begin the gossip with which she likes to round off an evening. Or her father, flush from the wine that his religion and his mother frown upon, may decide to make a little speech. He has been particularly affectionate this evening: several times the candlelight has caught the gleam of tears in his eyes. He has talked this evening of love and family, of how special she is to him – of his only daughter, his little rose. Nur thinks she understands … he fears the change as much as she does. She does not know the full truth yet. That this morning he evaluated his symptoms, as objectively as he was able, and realised that he would probably not live to see his daughter wed.