The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  “Well, my dear, try it by all means,” the Doctor said mildly. “I imagine they are still pretty anglophobe—after all it was we who beat them in the first place, and then we stalled them at Chanak, when the others ratted. Still, I gather from young Grant that this fellow Orhan Bey, Féridé’s husband, is pretty near the throne, as you might say; he will know whether it’s possible or not. I must say I should like to see old Asaf Pasha again, very much. I wonder if the old lady is still alive? She must be a great age by now if she is. Yes, my dear, write to Féridé, and see what comes of it.”

  That letter reached the yali while Féridé was still there, and what came of it was two warm invitations, one from the Pasha to Dr. Pierce, inviting him and his niece to stay on the Bosphorus, and another from Féridé pressing Fanny and her Uncle to visit her and Orhan at Ankara, “and to stay with us for weeks and weeks!” “Oh, it is incredible to think that we shall be together again,” Féridé wrote. “Do you realise that it will be eleven years this summer since I dragged Dil Feripé down to the quay to say adieu? Oh my Two Eyes, I am already so full of impatience and curiosity! As for my Father, he is joyful at the prospect of having your Uncle’s company again—and to Nine, I know, it will be the greatest pleasure to see you.”

  But Réfiyé Hanim never did see Fanny again. She died in April, just two months before the Pierces were due to arrive. She died very quietly and peacefully, sitting as usual on her divan under the window; in the middle of a conversation with the Pasha and Mdlle Marthe she suddenly put a hand to her breast, saying—“Oh, what a curious pain.” The next moment she was dead.

  Féridé hastened down to Istanbul when she received the news to be with her father. Orhan followed later to attend the Mevlut, a sort of memorial service which usually takes place forty days after the actual death. It is given in a mosque, unless the house is large enough to accommodate all the mourners—which the yali of course was—and is a very beautiful and dignified ceremony. The Mevlut itself really consists of a poem in very clear simple XlVth century Turkish describing the birth, life and death of the Prophet Mohammed; when well chanted it is extremely moving to listen to. On the day of the Mevlut for Réfiyé Hanim all the relations and friends of the family, summoned by a formal invitation very like a French faire part, assembled in the great stone-floored room with the fountain where Féridé’s marriage had taken place: the women, all veiled, were seated according to their age and rank; the men, wearing their fezzes, stood. (In the old-style Turkey the wearing of the fez was a mark of respect; to be bare-headed especially in the presence of women, was a deep discourtesy.) When all the company were assembled the Hodja entered, in a black robe and an immaculate white turban, accompanied by six young Hafiz, or professional reciters of the Koran, chosen for the beauty of their voices, who proceeded to chant the lovely archaic words—a gold incense-burner, standing on a special table, filled the air with a sharp aromatic fragrance. The chant was followed by one or two hymns, in which the company joined; the name of the dead person was cited, and a prayer was said—on this occasion the names of Ahmet and his baby son were spoken also.

  When the recitative, prayers, and hymns were over Dil Feripé came in, followed by Ayshé and two or three maids in rich dresses; their silk aprons were full of bonbons, Rahat Locoum (Turkish Delight) and other sweets, done up in cornucopias; they sprinkled rose-water from heavy wrought-silver bottles over the hands of the guests, and then handed to each a cornucopia of the traditional ceremonial sweet-meats. The maids were all weeping, of course; at such a moment it would have been almost an impiety not to shed tears, and in any case they had all loved and revered Réfiyé Hanim, and these were her final obsequies. Féridé, seated in her correct place among the ladies, glanced round the big low-ceilinged room—she could not help comparing this scene with the last time she had been in the sofa, on the occasion of her marriage. There had been weeping then too, but of joyful tears, and diamond brooches in dozens had been pinned by the givers on the bosom of her dress. It was very different today—Niné was dead, darling understanding supporting Niné; and she felt, quite truly, that with her grandmother a whole epoch had died.

  She and Orhan stayed on at the yali for several days after the Mevlut, and during that time Asaf Pasha got on better with his son-in-law than he had ever done before. Orhan could no longer be considered as merely a brilliant and enthusiastic, but quite unimportant young man; he was now the trusted lieutenant of the President of the Republic and what he said counted. The old Pasha, with his strong political and social sense, fully realised this, and treated his son-in-law with quite a new respect—they met almost on an equality. Moreover in the campaigns against the Greeks they had an endless subject for conversation; and even more than Féridé Orhan could put the old gentleman au fait with the political scene in the new capital, give him, very discreetly, still more enthralling tit-bits to retail at the Cercle de l’Orient.

  And of Ahmet they talked for hours on end. Turks love talking for hours on end anyhow—conversation there is still both a delightful occupation, and a recognised art: if it is tête-à-tête, so much the better. Painful as the subject was, Asaf Pasha could never hear enough of that action—of the layout, the terrain, the importance of the gully as a supply-line, and therefore of the small tepé which protected it; of Ahmet’s ride along the space between the two firing-lines, and of the rout of the Greek machine-gunners. In the brilliantly-patterned, brilliandy-coloured study, where in 1914 Dr. Pierce had so admired the piece of Izzet’s calligraphy—which had now joined many others on the walls—Orhan, on the very same table in the window, drew diagrams of the battlefield over which the old gendeman bent absorbed. “And Kemal Pasha said— ‘Oh, my dear Ahmet!* And he really said—1 wish I had not sent him’?” —he would ask, over and over again, trying to console himself for the death of his only son by these words of the new leader; then he would go to his big European desk and get out the letter from Mustafa Kemal, and show it to his son-in-law—“See, here is what he wrote to me. Read it.” He did that at least six times—grief and désœuvrement had made a very old man of the Pasha.

  This was something which worried Féridé a good deal when she and Orhan had to return to Ankara in June—Kemal Pasha could spare his A.D.C. no longer, but it disturbed her to leave her father alone. It was a comforting thought that Fanny and Dr. Pierce would be at the yali in a fortnight; they would keep the old man company, and distract his thoughts. But—“Oh, how I should like to be here with Fanny!” she exclaimed on the last evening, as they sat in the salon, which seemed strangely empty without Réflyé Hanim’s figure in the corner under the window. “It would be so delightful to go over all the old places with her. What games we used to have, up in the koru, away from Dil Feripé.”

  “You were very wild children,” Mdlle Marthe said.

  “Yes, dear Marthe; I am sure we were perfect torments to you!” She smiled in recollection of the fun of being a torment. “I wonder so much what Fanny will be like now,” she said then.

  To her immense surprise the Pasha replied to this speculation. “I am sure you will find her a very sensible, well-mannered woman,” he said with conviction.

  “Baba! What makes you say that?” she exclaimed.

  “Because she was a very sensible, well-mannered child—and as you bend the twig, so the bough grows,” he replied.

  Marthe put in her oar. “Ah yes, your dear Grandmother said the same. She often spoke of Fanny on the last weeks; she looked forward so much to seeing her again.” She wiped her eyes.

  “Did she really, dear Marthe?”

  “To me also,” the Pasha put in, “your grandmother spoke much latterly of Fanny. She had a great affection for her, and went back often in recollection to that last summer when she stayed here with us. Ah” —he grunted—“Our last summer of peace and happiness, and the established order.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the middle of July, 1925, Fanny and Dr. Pierce came up to stay with Féridé. Ankara was already
a very different place from the city into which Féridé and Nilüfer had driven from Inebolu five years before. A big hotel, the Ankara Palace, had been run up near the Assembly Building on the way to the station—which was no longer alternately a sea of mud or dust, but quite a respectable road; streets and boulevards, planted with acacias, were being laid out along the valley below the citadel hill; the Government departments functioned in buildings of some sort, instead of each in a single room. A capital was gradually coming into being, albeit in a most bleak and uncompromising place; the foreign Embassies and Legations now kept one or more officials in Ankara to transact business—they lived mostly in the gaunt newly-built hotel, while their new Embassy buildings were going up on the sites which Mustafa Kemal had given them—as he had told Féridé he would, at dinner at Çankaya nearly two years before.

  Orhan and Féridé had left their old picturesque but inconvenient quarters up in the citadel, and had taken a house among the vineyards on the slopes below Çankaya, not far from the Kiosk, where Kemal Pasha lived. It was an amusing and rather charming place, whitewashed, with a tiled roof and low cool rooms. Owing to the slope of the hill it was on two different levels—a track, along which a car could drive, led to the lower one, which was occupied by the owner of the house and vineyard; a flight of steps led up to a garden with a fountain, beyond which was the upper house, where Orhan and Féridé lived— long and low, with farm buildings opposite. The whole thing was a delightful mixture of summer villa and farm; the garden at the top of the steps was brilliant with flower-beds, Féridé’s creation; on the other side of the house the rooms opened onto vine-wreathed balconies with a wide view across the valley to the twin hills, speckled with white houses and crowned with the battlements of the old citadel, while in the background rose the sharply-pointed summits of the Hussein Ghazi Dagh— all brilliantly clear in the dry glittering air. Life had become quite civilised, even in Ankara; Féridé had several servants now that the war was a thing of the past, including a tolerable cook and the faithful Fatma; Kezban, weeping loudly, had returned to her husband, to be the Gaiety of his House once more.

  To this new home of her childhood’s friend Fanny came driving in a smart official car on that hot July morning. Orhan had met them at the station, and came with them; she studied him with deep interest, this husband of Féridé’s. Certainly he was very good to look at, so tall, so slight, with his eager intelligent face and his astonishing fairness. His exquisite French was less of a surprise—she expected Turks to talk good French, because Féridé, Ahmet, and Réfiyé Hanim had all done so; but Orhan’s ebullient fluency in the foreign tongue was striking, all the same. In fact he was pleasing altogether: quick, enthusiastic, gay and friendly, with an expansiveness not very usual among Turks of the old régime. Féridé really seemed to have got a husband worthy of her, Fanny decided, as the car left the road to the Kiosk and began to lurch along the rutted dusty track which led off it to their destination. She was in a mood of heightened perceptiveness to everything that morning. From dawn onwards she had crouched at the window of her sleeper, gazing out at the Anatolian landscape—the bare rolling uplands with cream-coloured ranges of mountains rising out of them, mountains which took on unimaginably lovely tones of pink and violet as the sun rose, striking the peaks and casting shadows behind the ridges; at the valley-floors covered with short-stalked wheat, through which rivers wound in white stony beds, set here and there with noble groups of enormous old willows whose foliage, silvery as it was, yet detached itself with an effect of darkness against the prevailing pallor of tone of the whole landscape. How bare it was, how austere, how dignified! Yes, that was the word. And all the way, looking out on this scene, she had imagined Féridé travelling through it on her first journey to Ankara, in that little open victoria—had imagined that journey with an emotional intensity which surprised her herself. What a country through which to travel into the future, the unknown!

  Ankara itself, the new, developing town, had given a jolt to this mood of the morning; the general rawness, the unfinished buildings brisding with scaffolding, the newly-laid roads planted with small wilting trees had no appeal at all. But as they bumped along the track between the vineyards, and the view across towards the citadel hills opened out, Fanny began to re-capture some of the charm which had held her at day-break, and when they pulled up beside the long house with its trellised vines shading the front, and climbed up the steps into Féridé’s bright garden with its small tinkling fountain, the spell of Anatolia bound her again. A few steps along the upper courtyard, and there was Féridé herself at her open door.

  For a couple of seconds the two friends stared at one another in silence, both trying to recognise the past in the present. Fanny saw a very beautiful young woman, poised, graceful, and still taller than her memory’s picture, with a bright scarf twisted through her crisp dark hair; somehow strangely elegant, even in her simple summer frock, and even more strangely dignified, in some subtle way—but the grey eyes, the short nose—yes, it was Féridé! As for Féridé, she saw once again her little Canary, with her yellow head and decided mouth, her small sharp nose and fearless blue eyes, exactly the same as eleven years ago, save for the accomplished neatness of her dark silk travelling dress and small close hat. After that moment’s pause in suspension, she flew at her guest.

  “La Canaria! Oh, you are just the same as always. Think of it—you are here!” She kissed her, and then turned swiftly to Dr. Pierce, very much the gracious hostess-“Dear Doctor, it is an unimaginable pleasure to see you again, and to receive you in my own house.”

  Dr. Pierce wrung her hand.

  “Well, my dear Féridé Hanim—I must call you that now, I suppose! —it is most awfully good of you to have us here!” He too looked her over. “You’ve grown, do you know?” he said.

  Féridé burst out laughing.

  “Oh, dearest Dr. Pierce, I expect I have—one does grow, you know,” she gurgled. “But how delightful this is! Come in, come in! It is not at all like the yali, you will find,” she added, as she led them indoors:

  It was not—but it was charming all the same. A broad passage ending in glass doors led straight through to the balcony; beyond its green leafy dimness the citadel and the hills, emptied of colour by the fierce sun, stood out pale against the pale sky. A dining-room opened out of the passage on the right, but Féridé took them into the salon opposite— a low room, fairly spacious and also with glass doors, closed now against the heat, with the usual divans round the walls, but some comfortable upholstered armchairs as well; it was full of beautiful things. On her recent journeys down to Istanbul Féridé had brought up many of her own possessions: fine rugs, embroidered hangings for the walls and sofas, cushions, even one or two of the little inlaid tables with their bulgy legs. Fanny pounced on one of these with a cry. “That came from the yali! It used to stand in the little room beyond the salon, near the window, surely, Féridé?”

  “What a memory you have!—yes, it did.”

  Fanny moved to the window and stood looking out at the heated landscape, the sun-bleached slopes, the peasants still hoeing in the vineyards before the noon-day rest. “Oh Féridé, I like it up here; this is a lovely place,” she said.

  “You would not have thought it very lovely when we first came—at least, not our immediate surroundings,” Féridé said with a smile. “It was terribly close and stuffy in the citadel—and oh how it smelt!”

  “Can one see your house from here?” Fanny asked, her little beak still glued to the pane.

  “No—one of the gateways hides it. I will take you to see it though, one day, if you like.”

  “I do like! I must see it. You must show me everything, every room! -and tell me all about it. Oh, how hard I tried to imagine what it was all like while the fighting was going on—you can’t think! We didn’t even know if you were in Ankara or not, at the time!”

  Orhan, who had been seeing to the disposal of the luggage, now came in, followed by a servant with the ine
vitable tiny cups of coffee-modern, European as he might try to be, he addressed himself automatically to the male guest.

  “Doctor, the whole house is at your disposal. We have no haremlik here,” he said, with a certain complacency; “for one thing there is not room, and in any case those customs must die a natural death, now. But I have arranged a small room for you when you wish to work, or read, or be alone. I will show it to you”—and he led him away. Left alone with Féridé, Fanny turned to her and gave her a long examining look.

  “What is it, dji-djim? Are you trying to be sure that it is me?” Féridé asked gaily.

  “Oh, it’s you all right,” the English girl said, slowly. “I was just trying to see what you’d turned into, with all these wars, and being married and everything. But you just are Féridé—thank goodness! It was fearfully important to me to know whether you would be still.”

  “Why, my Two Eyes?” Féridé realised that there was more in this than met the eye. “Come and sit down,” she added, seating herself and touching another chair.

  Rather slowly, Fanny sat down too.

  “I don’t suppose I shall be able to make you understand,” she said. “It’s just that my life in England, apart from Uncle, has always been pretty dull—nice, but dull. My school!—with all those little girls; and then North Oxford, and the women there, and the old old dons. And I always had in the back of my mind you, and the yali, this whole other world. But I was so small when I came away; and I’ve been wondering ever since if it really was as wonderful as I’d thought it, or if it was just my imagination—idealising, because I was trying to escape from the dullness. I didn’t think it was all imagination, but people” (people meant Alec, of course) “implied that it might be. So I had to come back and find out. I wanted to see you again, anyhow—but I wanted to find out as well if all the rest of it—well, if Turkey was true!—was what I’d thought.”