Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

‘But if I were to have,’ the patient takes a breath, ‘relations with the same partner …’

  ‘Unless she is being treated too, then no, it will not help matters.’

  ‘She says it cannot be from her. But she’s the only one …’ He coughs. The next words are strangled by embarrassment. ‘She’s the only one … ever.’

  ‘I think in that case,’ George says, ‘you best desist.’

  ‘But I love her. And she – says – she loves me.’

  And how many others has she promised the same to? He doesn’t say it. This poor dupe has been punished enough.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘She was a Russian princess, before the Reds came!’

  ‘Was she, indeed? Goodness.’ And yet being an ex-Russian princess, it seems, is no immunisation against the herpes virus.

  The patient leaves, clutching his prescription. George is amused by his insistence upon the former rank of the woman, as though this might make his unfortunate circumstances seem somehow less sordid.

  Then he remembers that he is in no position to judge. The familiar shame visits him. The smile leaves his face.

  The Boy

  He sits in a patch of sun on the stone steps of the apartment building, playing with the stray cat he has befriended. It has beautiful eyes, large and palest green, ringed with black as though it were wearing kohl eye makeup. On occasions he has seen it angry and frightened, doubled to twice its size, eyes staring, breath hissing. For something so small it makes a rather impressive display. But when it is very happy, as now, it treads the air with its paws like a baker kneading bread, and flaunts its white stomach as though it hadn’t a care in the world. Its favourite thing is for him to stroke the soft triangle of its chin, its sensitive whiskery cheeks.

  He is so intent upon it that he does not hear Nur hanım return. As she passes him he starts guiltily. He should be reading one of his schoolbooks, not the book of food, which is open before him. When she does not say anything about this he knows that something is wrong. He looks up at her. It is not that she has been crying. He would be more likely to see this whole city topple into the Bosphorus than he would to see Nur hanım weep. But her face frightens him all the same because it is like a mask.

  ‘Nur hanım,’ he asks, quietly. ‘Are you all right?’

  She looks down at him, but he has the strange impression that she is not actually seeing him. ‘Yes,’ she says, rather crossly. ‘Of course.’

  When she steps inside she pulls the door shut with such ferocity that it jumps back open again with a clang. The cat springs to its feet in fright, lets out a warning hiss. He thinks how much easier animals are to understand, how much more eloquent and truthful they are with mere actions than humans with all their words.

  Five years earlier

  The Prisoner

  The Russian front. The edges of the Empire; a place of ice and snow. The snow was like a living thing, or many living things; a swarm. It sought the mouth, the eyes – any opening in which it could take up residence. The flakes were the size and weight of feathers. If he stood still his feet were covered in seconds.

  It muffled sound. It stole the senses. It knew something that they did not. They spoke in whispers; they felt that they were being watched by someone immune to it, who laughed at their struggles as if from behind a pane of glass. They spooked at shadows, recoiling from the forms of their own men emerging through the curtain of white.

  When he looked up there was only a vortex of the same, and he saw that it did not come straight down but in a vast spiral. For a few moments he was not looking up but hanging above – dangling by his ankles above an abyss. He stumbled, and almost fell.

  It might have been beautiful, except for the fact that it was terrifying.

  He at least had seen snow, even if it had been nothing like this. What he had thought was winter, the occasional dusting of white over Constantinople, the cold wind that blew in from the Black Sea, seemed to him now as nothing more than an artist’s impression of the season. But there were men here from the southernmost parts of the Empire who had never seen it at all, to whom it had been a thing of myth.

  They had lost a man to the snow: it had swallowed him whole. One moment he had been there, bringing up the rear, the next he had disappeared. He was an Armenian, recruited from a nearby village. He of all of them should have known the conditions, the lie of the land. But it had clearly proved too much even for him.

  Some of the men had not liked him much; you couldn’t trust the Armenians, they liked to say, they weren’t true Ottomans. Still they searched the snowdrifts, digging in packed, freezing depths. You wouldn’t wish such an end on anyone. And then to be discovered, pitiful, when the snow finally melted. But new drifts formed even as they dug. They were forced to move on, tramping through the fresh fallen white and each trying not to think of the man buried beneath it somewhere. If a man like that had succumbed, what chance did they have?

  The idea came to him that they had been sent here to die.

  It was said their enemy, the Russians, had fur-lined boots, thick greatcoats, astrakhan caps. Some of his fellow men, soldiers of the Mighty Ottoman Army, wore sandals. Some wore nothing at all: exposed flesh was dying, turning black. He was lucky to have kept his, thin-soled city shoes that they were.

  To keep his mind off the cold he thought of home. He would summon to himself the memory of spring days beside the Bosphorus, light glancing from the water, the loud celebrations of the birds. The new warmth upon his face, the scent of things growing; the precise scent of the colour green. Then the drone of summer, a lazy spell cast by the heat, the city hazed with gold. He tried to remember the feeling of this. It was impossible to believe that there could have been such a thing as too hot: though he remembered his mother saying it, often, spending her days sheltered in the shaded cool of the sofa, emerging only with the respite of dusk. Colour, too, seemed an outlandish idea. Here was only the white of the snow and the grey of men’s faces and the black of their hair and occasionally the bluish tinge they got around their mouths and fingertips when things were bad with them. He remembered: the purple of a fig, split open. The rust-red sheet of his mother’s hair.

  He had to believe he would return home, to that place of colour and warmth. There he had done the thing he had always felt himself born to do: to teach. The small satisfactions of his day: the walk to the school through the cobbled streets, his bag of books heavy on his arm. As he walked he would plan the day, the lessons, anticipate anything that might arrive; the miniature crises that occurred in a classroom populated by the very poor, by children who hardly spoke the language. The pleasure of knowing that something had been learned, despite all the odds.

  How naive he had been to assume that his life would always be like this, that he would do the same thing until he grew old. A life in which he had never known fear, the particular taste of it in his throat. The joke of a man like him pretending to be a soldier.

  There seemed to have been no consideration of how they might feed themselves properly – it seemed they were expected to live entirely on bazlama bread. Before the war it had been delicious; eaten with honey and butter, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee. He had not known how little taste it had on its own. Baked on sheets of iron in the villages, it was stuffed into sacks, loaded onto donkeys and brought to the front. By the time it reached them it had frozen. To warm it you had to put it beneath your jacket, against the skin, under the arms. You saw men shaking it from their sleeves, scrabbling on the ground for lost morsels. The colder they became, the more difficult it was to unfreeze the stuff.

  ‘If I could warm it between the thighs of a beautiful woman,’ Babek said. ‘That would be better than the finest honey.’ The other men had jostled him, groaned in mingled disgust and appreciation, and felt warmed by their shared laughter. Babek grinned; he enjoyed a crowd. ‘But a man’s unwashed armpit – even if it is my own unwashed armpit … that has to be the worst seasoning imaginable.’
/>   Babek was his friend. They met in the enlistment centre at the beginning of the war. None there were soldiers by training. Just ordinary men selected by the bad luck of their birth dates, ready to be forged into heroes. Babek had turned to him as they waited in line. As a barber, he said, all his experience had been about how not to injure someone, how not to spill their blood, and here he was about to learn how to kill a man. It wasn’t a very funny joke. But he heard the tremor of fear in the barber’s voice, fear that matched his own, and knew the bravery it took to make it at such a time.

  They were opposites – Babek was the clown while he knew he was seen by others as too serious. He was nineteen, Babek was thirty, and seemed older. As though he had seen the world and everything in it and had not been particularly impressed by any of it: though found enough humour in it to get by. But he knew that there was greater depth to Babek. He might seem foolish, happy-go-lucky, but there was that bravery, too.

  Once, when they were being taught how to fire the ancient rifles the army had provided, Babek had been caught in the shoulder by a glancing bullet, knocked to the ground with a huff of surprise, nothing more. All of them stood mute, watching as the wound bloomed with red. It was the first sign of blood any of them had seen. Perhaps it was just the shock that had kept him from crying out. But after that day, everyone who had been there had a new veneration for him, the thin, awkward man who managed to escape ridicule simply by being the first to laugh at himself.

  Babek had a wife. For all his ribaldry about other women, it was she he talked of constantly – though not to the other men, in case they thought him soft. And children: two little boys and a baby on the way when he left. If it was a girl, they had decided, they would call her Perihan – a name like a flower, or a princess from the old days. His wife had the most beautiful hands, he said, she moved them like white birds when she talked. Even before he lifted the veil to look at her face for the first time he saw those eloquent hands and he knew.

  They had come to see him off at the sidings of the railway track – his wife invisible beneath a charshaf and veil, the boys dressed like miniature men in their best clothes and fezzes. They waved handkerchiefs. They had looked particularly small and helpless down there beneath the bank, seen through a cloud of steam from the train, dwarfed by the great machine as it thundered above them on its way to war. Perhaps Babek had felt this too, because he had suddenly looked uncharacteristically sombre and his eyes had gleamed wetly.

  ‘I wish they had not come,’ Babek said, as though to himself. ‘It would have been better if they had not come.’

  Once upon a time, in another world, he himself had been a schoolteacher. He had imagined a small life for himself. Not the one his parents had hoped for him: he was not made for the world of government, or medicine. But perhaps this life could be great in its own way, even heroic. What better gift than that of knowledge? For the rich learning was just an embellishment, another asset among many others. For the poor, it could represent the promise of a different life.

  But that was another life, as remote as if it had happened to another man. He had once known the children in his class so well that he understood each of their idiosyncrasies as well as he did his own. How Kemal began to swing one leg before he was tired, how Arianna looked at a stain on the ceiling when asked a question, as though she would read the answer there, how Enver spent most of every class looking out of the window, which was infuriating, but if challenged could recite the whole lesson word-for-word. Now he could hardly remember what any of them looked like. They were slipping from him, he was untethered from that life. His world had shrunk to this white void, driven only by hunger and fear, the animal instinct to survive. And this was what they said it meant to be a hero.

  Within this blindness of snow one became very aware of the internal world. Of the rhythm of the heart in the chest. The beat of blood in the ears. But the extremities no longer seemed his own. His numbed feet felt … not like feet, but something else, two thin jeweller’s razors upon which the full weight of his body could not possibly balance. They did not want to obey him. Beneath the snow was compacted into ice, and with every few yards gained he seemed to slip back several more. The fury of the snow. It felt a personal fury, vindictive. It whipped the cheeks like a lash and he began to long for the time when his face, too, would cease to feel.

  A few days into the offensive Babek had begun to look unwell. He had always been thin, no matter how much he ate, and there had been so little food at the front. All of them had lost weight, but he had had none to lose in the first place. His lips had begun to turn bluish, the nail-beds of his bare hands. His breath rattled when he talked or even breathed, as though something had come loose inside his chest.

  When he made his jokes now they did not always make sense … the words were disordered as though something in his mind was not connecting properly. He would never say this to Babek, though, because he did not want to frighten him, and because he did not want to give a voice to his own fear. So when Babek finished one of his nonsensical jokes, and waited with that expectant look – this at least was familiar – he laughed just as hard as he ever had. Harder, probably. If Babek suspected any fakery in this he did not mention it.

  One man in the company – a southerner – had lost his genitalia to frostbite after relieving himself against a tree. He had died some short while later. A mercy, some said. But what message to bring back to his mother? The standard, of course: He died with a smile upon his face, in proud service of the Empire.

  Some of the men were huge brutes, farmers and fishermen with skin like leather and corded muscles in their arms. They towered over him. And they were already half-broken. When he stood next to them in his mind’s eye he saw not a man, but a small boy, gripping his bayonet with hands too small to reach, emerging from a uniform ten sizes too big to fit.

  Suddenly a new sound, a hiss of air. At first he believed it was some new intensification of the snow. Then the man beside him fell, a little yelp of surprise. He looked down. The peculiar beauty of the colour in the white, spreading fast like ink upon tissue. Such a very true red, almost the red of the Ottoman flag itself. He envied the man his expression of absolute peace. By the time he had understood that he should call for help, and could summon the words with which to do it – he had not spoken for hours, days it seemed – it was far too late. The enemy had come for them.

  The Traveller

  As we leave the shelter of the station the rain begins, as though it has been waiting for us. Some say rain spoils everything. I say it depends on the position of the beholder. Now, as water spreads itself in filmy sheets against the glass, the austere train carriage is transformed into a hallowed space; sanctuary from the onslaught without. The light seems to change in defiance of the bleakness, to kindle; the winter-pallid faces about me gain new colour. Beyond the glass the drear suburbs and the formidable distant shadows of the banlieues – the backstage of Paris – acquire the romance of a watercolour.

  I prop the suitcase on the couchette next to me. From the cushioning of a scarf I unwrap a photograph in a tin frame. I have looked at it so many times through the years, trying to understand the sequence of events that changed everything, that changed my life.

  A building, surrounded by dark trees. It is slightly out of focus, lending the house a blurred, provisional appearance so that it does not appear made of wood and stone but something evanescent, a structure of vapour and light. It looks more like the idea of a house, a phantasm that has alighted on the bank and is making up its mind as to whether it should stay. But I recall tangible things. Painted tiles, a stone fountain, fine objects, white linen, voices echoing in high-ceilinged rooms. Hard to believe … that for a short span of time it was something like a home to me.

  I bring the photograph so close to my face that my breath steams the shielding pane of glass, hoping to catch some evidence of life within. For the merest fraction of a moment I think I have seen something in the lower row of windows: a small
face, looking out at me. But it must have been merely the creation of a hopeful imagination. When I look again the windows are blank-eyed and dark, withholding their secrets.

  Nur

  Morning. She feels renewed, the humiliations of the day before have lost their sting. The streets are still empty enough at this hour that they can stride through them quickly. She enjoys the pull and stretch of her muscles, the sound of her shoes ringing upon the cobblestones. The lesser note of the boy’s feet as he follows behind: two steps to her every one, and even then he struggles to keep up. He is still so small. But he is also, she knows, distracted by the scents that reach them from the bakeries and cafes they pass, his nose aloft in that feline way.

  She is aware of the looks. In these narrow streets they pass near enough to see the glimmer of eyes through latticework screens and one woman pulls her shutters closed with an ostentatiously violent clatter. Odd, that it should be the women that seem most outraged by her bared face, by her presence in the street. The older ones are worst of all, understandably. She still feels the sting of their glances. At first they were almost enough to send her running back to the apartment for her veil. Now she steels herself against her own sense of shame. Because for all that the war took from her – and it was more than she ever thought she would have to give – there is this one thing that it gifted her. Her city. And she is not ready to give it up. The liberation of walking these streets that have always been her home and yet for so long have been beyond the limits of her knowledge.

  She is not alone; much of a generation has joined her. Barriers shifted, dissolved entirely. Young women who had remained hidden indoors behind filigree screens ventured out into the streets. They appeared bare-faced. They took on the work of men – her grandmother is still outraged by the appearance of trouser-clad female street sweepers.