The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  But marriages were the preoccupation, and in the Pasha’s household, at this moment, there existed the delightful problem of settling Ahmet with a wife. He was twenty-three, so of more than marriageable age; he was handsome, he belonged to an ancient family, and would inherit wealth. From the “aunts’” point of view, something should be done at once.

  Now in Turkey in those days there was no such thing as “boy meets girl”—it was the one thing that neither boy nor girl ever did. Officially a man never set eyes on his wife until the wedding-day. Marriages were “arranged,” and the old women loved to have a hand in the arranging.

  Three days after Fanny’s arrival at the Pasha’s, a delightful creature called Nilüfer came to spend the day. She was a remote cousin, whose family lived during the summer in a yali on the further side of the Bosphorus, near that deliciously-named place The Sweet Waters of Asia, from which she came across in a very smart private caïque. She was about sixteen, slender and very lovely, with immense velvety-soft eyes under high delicate brows that had none of the concentration of Féridé’s—a gentle thing, dreamy, almost languid, rather silent and rather shy; in her very fashionable French clothes, with her slow graceful movements, she was the greatest possible contrast to Fanny and Féridé, a fact that was frequently pointed out, to Féridé’s disadvantage, by Mdlle Marthe and Dil Feripé. Nilüfer for her part was very fond of Féridé; Fanny she regarded almost with awe, as one might a strange little animal from another continent. Nilüfer was too old to join in such childish ploys as hide-and-seek in the koru, but she played and sang, and on that particular day she was introduced to the Falcon song, and at once sang it, playing her own accompaniment with accomplished grace.

  The possibility of making a marriage between this beautiful girl and Ahmet had of course occurred to both families; Réfiyé Hanim had discussed it with the Pasha and, discreetly, with Mdlle Marthe. But they had decided to make no move for the moment, till Ahmet should have finished at the College and Nilüfer should be seventeen; time enough then, Réfiyé Hanim considered. Naturally Ahmet and Nilüfer knew all about one another, but equally naturally they had never met face to face. However on this particular occasion one of the “aunts,” Sitaré by name, a very old woman with a mole on the side of her nose, perhaps stirred up by the romantic song, perhaps by the aspect of the girl in the first flush of her beauty, could no longer control her match-making propensities. After the song she spoke of Ahmet, and how beautifully he sang it, how splendid he now looked; and later, seizing her chance when Nilüfer had gone to Féridé’s room to tidy up, she slipped in, full of mystery, and showed her a photograph of Ahmet in all the glory of his cadet’s uniform: the braided double-breasted tunic almost to the knee, the fez, the white-gloved hands resting on the sword—and insinuated, not very subtly, that this would indeed be a young man to marry. Féridé, with her usual impetuosity, dashed in in search of something while this was going on, and at once realised what old Sitaré was up to; she said nothing at the time, but carried Nilüfer off to the balcony to have tea. But later, when her cousin had gone, and she and her grandmother were taking their evening stroll in the garden she said—“Niné, is something being arranged about Nilüfer and Ahmet?”

  “Certainly not—not yet; she is still too young,” said Réfiyé Hanim, much surprised. “What put that idea into your head?”

  “Oh, I saw Sitaré showing her his photograph, and I thought that must mean that a marriage was being arranged,” said Féridé, who was quite familiar with these matters.

  “No—it is not. And do you not talk of it—to anyone,” said the old lady firmly, but without losing her accustomed calm. She went on to speak about the flowers. But she was secretly very much annoyed. Sitaré was the oldest, the silliest, and the most irresponsible of the “aunts”; she had done very wrong; photographs should never be shown till an actual betrothal was in question. After dinner she must be spoken to.

  But Réfiyé Hanim did not after all speak to Sitaré that night. On that same Monday afternoon at the end of June Ahmet had come to see his father; they sat together in the Pasha’s study, conversing with urbane enjoyment, when Osman, the servant who went daily to Bebek to fetch the afternoon paper brought it in: the Tercümani Hakikat: The Pasha bade him put it on the table. The man cleared his throat. “Pasham [My Pasha] there is news.”

  “Oh, is there? Let us see,” said Ahmet lazily, stretching out his hand for the paper; he glanced at it, casually, and read that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, had been assassinated the previous day at Sarajevo.

  “My Father! Look at this!” he exclaimed, and handed the paper over.

  The Pasha read it, and frowned.

  “What does this mean?” the young man asked.

  The Pasha continued to frown. “At the moment, it means an assassination,” he said. “But what it may mean, God the All Powerful alone knows.”

  Later the two men went upstairs to dinner; by mutual agreement they said nothing of the news either in the salon, among the flowers, the chiffon-veiled heads and lacy blouses of that feminine world, or while the whole family sat at the long table in the dim richness of the dining-room, waited on by the tall Circassian maids, eating the abundant and delicious Turkish food: the hot vegetables cooked in butter, the cold vegetables served with oil, the pilaf, the mountains of fresh salad. Sitaré, the rather gaga old thing, recounted that Nilüfer had been there, and started some coy remarks—only to be suppressed with the utmost elegance by Réfiyé Hanim. After coffee on the balcony Ahmet had to leave; the Pasha gave his mother his arm in to the salon, Mdlle Marthe and the rest faded out, and Fanny and Féridé, obedient to something almost imperceptible in the atmosphere, took themselves off too. Then Asaf Murad Zadé told his mother the news.

  She asked the question that Ahmet had asked—“My son, what does this mean?”

  Gloomily, he gave her much the same reply—“Ané, I don’t know.”

  For some days it seemed to mean nothing very much. Life flowed on at the yali. On July the 8th the Pasha received a telegram from Dr. Pierce—“Much regret delayed here unavoidably but Fanny can return pension at any time.” It was sent from Erzerum.

  The Pasha showed it to his mother. Féridé was there, and danced about “Oh, lovely! Let me see it with my own eyes, Baba-djim!” She took it from her father. “Oh, but she can stay, can’t she? Why should she go to that horrid pension? I want her.”

  “Of course she can stay, if your Grandmother agrees,” said the Pasha.

  “Then I shall go and tell her. Niné does agree, don’t you, Niné-djim?” But at the door, across the wide space of the Savonnerie carpet, she turned back.

  “You see the Doctor did go to Erzerum, Baba-djim,” Féridé said, and ran out.

  When she had gone—“He can’t have heard,” the Pasha murmured, half to himself.

  “About the assassination?” Réfiyé Hanim asked.

  “Yes, about the assassination. It may precipitate matters.”

  But because she had been thinking so much about the sort of matters that the Archduke’s murder might precipitate, Réfiyé Hanim forgot all about her intended rebuke to Sitaré.

  In fact Dr. Pierce, though he sent the telegram from Erzerum, had gone further. The egregious Mirza Ali Temel had not come down to Trebizond according to promise, so the Doctor took horses and rode up to Erzerum; this was slightly quicker than by carriage, especially over the Kop Pass. There he spent a day or so in examining the manuscripts; but there he also heard that a man at Kars, away to the east in Trans-Caucasian Russia, had other scripts, of the deepest interest. So of course he went on after them. Like all prudent people in those days, he never went to Turkey without a Russian visa on his passport—and in those blessed faraway days, let it be remembered, it was only for Turkey and Russia that European travellers required passports at all.

  Dr. Pierce had been coming to Turkey for close on twenty years, and spoke the language as fluently as his own; in his pursuit of
the songs and tales and proverbs of the people he made a practice of conversing with all sorts and conditions of men, and could adapt his idiom to theirs; and partly with a view to getting their confidence, on his journeys in the interior he usually travelled in a fez, so that his foreign status was not immediately noticeable. Officials in towns who saw his papers of course always knew that he was an Englishman; but in casual contacts on the road or in hans (roadside inns) he frequently passed for a Turk, a thing he found very convenient. It was the custom in those days for travellers going the same way to journey in convoy, and to beguile their time in conversation. On his road eastwards from Erzerum, to Hasan Kale and on to the Russian frontier post at Karaurgan, where he would pick up the light railway to Kars, Dr. Pierce again decided to ride; the weather was hot, but he did not mind that, and Selim, the teamster he had engaged at Trebizond, rather unexpectedly agreed to make the further trip, and at a reasonable price—moreover he was fussing a little about Fanny, and wanted to save all the time he could.

  His little troop, on the very first day, found itself joining forces with a much larger one—that of six Turks, very decent, substantial sort of men, mounted on good beasts; he asked no questions, but took them for merchants. Selim, however, with the inquisitive free-masonry of his kind, soon found out, and told his master, where they came from—from Istanbul, on the boat before the Doctor’s own. But almost at once Dr. Pierce was struck by something slightly odd about their behaviour. The usual thing when a party of travellers arrived at a han was for them all to go in and eat together. His new companions didn’t do this—at least all of them did not. Two or three might, but the others went off by themselves; sometimes to another han, if there were two. Then he noticed that in almost every village they passed through, three or four farmers or well-to-do peasants were hanging about, apparently waiting for his merchant friends, and one of more would dismount and talk with them; constantly he saw them make notes in small books, and money changed hands. But there was something a little odd, a little secretive, about the way it was done—and if they were merchants, they carried no samples; moreover they seemed to be buying, not selling, for it was they who handed over the money.

  “Selim,” Dr. Pierce asked his teamster at last, “who are these men? And what do they buy?”

  “Effendim, it is my belief that they buy grain.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Effendim, I do not know.”

  Dr. Pierce was puzzled. Beyond Erzerum seemed a remote place to be buying grain for Istanbul—the cost of transport would be immense; there were grain-lands much nearer the capital, and lying along the Taurus Railway. H’m—it was rather peculiar.

  Some distance short of Karaurgan, lying in its gloomy glen, the six men left the main highway and took a side road; they bade Dr. Pierce a hearty farewell. He expected it to be a final one. He crossed the frontier with only the normal amount of delay and inquisition that attended all dealings with Russia, but his hopes of going on by the light railway to Kars were dashed—a landslide had blocked it a few days before. He had to get fresh animals and another teamster, all of which took time; late as it was, he set out that same evening—the days were long, and he rode on to a small han which he only reached after dark, indeed so late that they had to knock the landlord up. He slept in the usual small wooden-floored upstairs room; as always, the animals were housed immediately below in a vast stable, and he was disturbed at an early hour by the stampings and snortings attendant on a party’s setting out. Looking out of his small square window, to his immense surprise he saw the six merchants again all ready for the road, standing bargaining—one can never mistake the gestures of Turks at a bargain— with some farmers in the early sunlight, immediately beneath. As before, they made notes in little books, and then handed over money— but now, as the Doctor could actually see with his own eyes, Russian money.

  Now this was really extraordinary. And how had they sneaked across the frontier, and why? Dr. Pierce, casual as he usually was about everything but matters of scholarship, felt that he must find out what was going on. In this part of the Russian Empire (as the Pasha had told Réfiyé Hanim on the evening of Javid Bey’s visit) the bulk of the population was Turkish by race and language, and it would be easy enough for Turkish merchants to do deals with the local farmers. But why, he asked himself as he dressed in his little cubicle, should Turks from Istanbul be buying grain in Trans-Caucasian Russia? And thereupon the Doctor, that most improbable person for such activities, determined to do a little detective work. He overhauled the men again before nightfall, and they eventually rode into Kars together; he made a point of putting up at the same inn. But postponing his pursuit of the scripts, next day he hung on the heels of his fellow-travellers, marked down the men with whom they conversed, and later contrived to get into conversation with some of them himself. Turks are all past masters at the art of withholding information, but he thought these men in Kars unusually reticent, almost nervous. However eventually he got hold of one very old man (who suffered from a tremendous stammer), lured him to a café, and at last persuaded him to talk. “We shall hold the grain,” the old fellow stammered, leaning his turbaned head confidentially across the table, “till our troops come. Then they will eat it—they will be sure of bread.”

  Dr. Pierce was startled nearly out of his wits. “And when,” he asked the old man, “will our troops be coming here?”

  The old man looked infinitely sly, and jerked a gnarled thumb meaningfully over his shoulder, eastwards. “When we begin to deal with them!” he muttered, and broke into an aged cackling laugh.

  Dr. Pierce was greatly disturbed. If this year’s harvest was being bought up, and for that purpose, it meant something very grave indeed. The Pasha’s urgent enquiries about the two Turkish battleships building in the Tyne flashed into his mind. No wonder they wanted them ready quickly! But he could hardly believe his stammering old acquaintance —and yet he seemed too old and too silly to invent such a lie. The Doctor now went with all speed to seek out the Kars manuscripts, only to find, as so often happens in the Near East, that it was all a false alarm—they had been removed from Kars to Si vas some time before. Normally he would have been exasperated—now he was almost relieved. If there was any truth in this story, the sooner he was back on the right side of the frontier the better. The railway being still impassable, he returned on horseback to Erzerum, where for the first time on his journey he took the trouble to look at a paper, and learned of the assassination of the Archduke. Still, Serbia and Austria!—what on earth had they to do with Turkey and Russia? None the less, he made rapid stages down to Trebizond, where he caught a boat that was on the point of sailing; on July the 17th she entered the Bosphorus.

  As the ship steamed down between those familiar shores a particular worry rose up in the Doctor’s mind, prompted by the sight of the burnt-out ruins of the British Summer Embassy at Therapia, among its beautiful trees. Ought he to go and tell someone about this grain business? Dr. Pierce did not much frequent Embassy circles, and what little he knew of them he did not greatly care for; there always seemed to be a great many very smart clever young men, who intimidated him— if he were to go now with this story they would, he feared, snub him. But as the boat swept on down the narrow blue waters, past the tall grey frontage of Madame Kaftanoglou’s, past the vast lovely façade of the Pasha’s yali, he realised that he ought to go. Very well, better get it over; and on landing at Istanbul he took a ferry straight back to Therapia, where the Chancery still carried on in another building during the summer months.

  It all happened, at first, as he had expected, only worse. He was still wearing the fez in which he usually travelled, not his old Panama, so the first kavass that he encountered at the door—splendid in his long blue coat, brass buttons, and sword slung from a belt of gold braid—took him for a Turk, and was not very civil to him. (A lamentable habit, this, of indigenous Embassy employees to their co-nationals, and one by no means confined to British diplomatic estab
lishments.) Dr. Pierce, provoked beyond endurance, lambasted the man in his own tongue, though in a low voice, with a wealth of invective that astonished him; then he started to speak English. Now the head kavass appeared, faultlessly polite, and asked in excellent English whom he wished to see? Any member of the staff, said Dr. Pierce, bringing out a card. He was led into a small featureless waiting-room; a pause ensued. (In those days Embassy waiting-rooms did not, as they do now, flower like parterres with the literary productions of the British Council—there was one very old copy of the Illustrated London News and two still older copies of Punch.) Finally a young man of the sort Dr. Pierce so rightly dreaded appeared, holding his card, and asked, in tones of neutral politeness, in what way he could be of service to him?

  Dr. Pierce, nervous anyhow, and upset by his encounter with the kavass, made rather a bad job of his recital. He had just come back from Erzerum and Kars, he began. “Oh yes?” said the young man— who had only arrived in Istanbul a few weeks before, and did not yet carry the map of Asia Minor in his head; he had only a very vague idea of where Erzerum was, and had never heard of Kars. Dr. Pierce struggled on: there was a lot of grain-buying going on up there—by Turks, he said, with considerable emphasis; Turks were buying grain in Kars! “Ah yes,” said the young man; “an early harvest this year, I suppose?” He was still thinking in terms of the late harvests of Northern Europe.

  “No, it’s a normal season,” said Dr. Pierce shortly, beginning to think the young man must be half-witted—“But the point is, the buyers aren’t taking it out—it’s being held there.” And he fixed the young man with an emphatic eye.

  “Oh really?” said the young man, who had no idea what ought to happen to Turkish grain when bought, but saw no point in mentioning it—“And who is holding it?”