by Lucy Foley
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 Now it is several decades out of date, too large, frayed at the cuffs and collar in a soft fuzz of thread.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.
She eats a morsel of fig, savours the rich sweet juice. The first fruits of the season are always a revelation of flavour.
Beneath the murmur of voices around the table comes a sound, faint at first, carried across to them from the other side of the water like strange thunder. And then growing, seeming to swell in the silence as a fire feeds upon air. Whatever it is, it is loud. Few sounds reach them from the city here. Here they are protected. Even before they have understood what the sound is there is an ominousness in its insistence. It has silenced all talk. They are hardly breathing, so intently are they listening.
They come for the new recruits with drums too. A marching band, the flag held high. It is – yes – rather exciting. Her grandmother, always an aficionado of pomp and circumstance, is delighted. They watch Kerem leave with this grand train, blushing at all the fuss being made for him. A schoolteacher turned soldier: such a strange idea! The crowd sings the old song. For the first time Nur hears the words properly: ‘Oh wounded ones I am coming to take your place and my heart is crying because I am leaving my beloved ones …’
She goes to see him the next day as the recruits leave the building in Sirkeci for a temporary camp on the Black Sea. He has the eyes of a sleepwalker. He smiles at her, but he hardly seems to see her. She wonders if it all feels as unreal to him as it does to her.
‘You’ll come home soon,’ she tells him. ‘They have said it will be over quickly.’ This is true. But then there had been a time, too, when they thought that he would not be called up at all. They came for the older age groups first – many of them veteran soldiers, battle hardened. The same drums of war. The Bekçi Baba – the warden – calling out his summons in the streets: ‘Men born between 1880 and 1885 must report to the recruitment centre within a day. Who fails to do so will suffer the consequences of the law.’
Now they have come for those of her brother’s age – the youngest group. But it will not be a proper war, everyone says.
‘They say,’ she tells Kerem, ‘that it will be over by Eid al-Adha, in the autumn.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I know. I’ll come home with some stories to tell. I suppose I have always wanted to travel a little.’
There is an unreality to it all, at first, that makes it feel rather exciting, almost romantic. Brave Young Men will go to war and return transformed: Heroes of the Empire.
So when her grandmother asks, later: ‘Did he look handsome in his uniform?’ it seems only right to nod and say that he had looked very smart indeed. ‘And his boots,’ her mother adds, ‘did they look up to much?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Nur says. ‘Excellent quality.’ She has always hated lying – she is bad at it. The truth is that he had been wearing his own clothes, his own insubstantial city shoes. The only thing that was correct in the description she gave them was that he had been carrying his bag, stitched by her mother and filled with food, woollen socks and gloves, clean underthings.
When she imagines him at the very end – which she cannot stop herself doing – she sees him wearing these pitifully inadequate clothes, those thin-soled shoes. The shoes of a schoolteacher. A gentle, genteel man in a world utterly hostile to him.
The Prisoner
When they found him he had been cradling Babek as though he were his own dead child. The officer in charge had informed him, graciously, that he would not write this up in his official report: it was not quite seemly. What he would write was that Babek had: ‘died in proud service of his country, a hero of the Empire’. There: that would be something for his wife and children.
On that train south he had caught sight of himself in the glass and seen how the cold had disfigured him into someone he did not recognise. He had grown so thin that his skull seemed to be only loosely covered by a thin layer of skin: his near-death writ large upon his body. But there was more than this: his eyes had changed. Perhaps it was just the reflection, but he thought he saw in them a new absence, something that the place had taken from him and might not give back. It frightened him, the sense of distance he felt looking at this stranger. Where was the man he had been? The cold seemed to have killed some invisible part of him as efficiently as it had destroyed visible flesh: the ends of his toes, the pads of his fingers, the scabrous patches on his face, and even the tip of his nose – black as a mark of punctuation, the cold’s little joke. That young schoolteacher, who seemed now like a person he might once have briefly met.
The Red Crescent medical officer who treated him had seen worse cases, though.
‘Worse how?’
‘Oh. Well – the ones who have lost whole limbs, of course. And then there are the ones who die. You’ll be all right.’
He wondered what this meant, exactly. He got his answer quickly enough: it meant that he was whole enough to join a new regiment in the south, below Lake Van. Here, their principal enemy was no longer the Russians.
It was quite simple, his new commanding officer explained. The Armenians had betrayed them. Now they had to leave Ottoman lands. There were two options. They had to be encouraged to go, leaving their villages after collecting the possessions and food they would need for the journey eastwards, toward Mesopotamia, or they had to be forced.
‘All of the Armenians?’ he asked the officer. ‘Have they all turned against us?’
There had been children in his class who were Armenian – one of his favourite pupils, a small boy – had been Armenian. Then he thought of the man who had betrayed them. He thought of Babek. But these were simple people, weren’t they? Their villages were sleepy, unremarkable places: the bleat of a goat, the wail of an infant, the constant low drone of the heat. Where the most dramatic things that happened was a wild dog running amok in the chicken coop, the occasional modest wedding, the death of an old man. They had lived like this for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of years. These people, surely, knew nothing of grand deceptions. It was unclear whether they even knew much about the war until these men of the Ottoman army had descended into their midst and ordered them to begin packing their bags.
‘To remove the cancer,’ the officer told him. ‘We must remove everything. You think these people wear a uniform, to tell us, helpfully, that they’re the ones to look out for? They’re a little more clever than that. They work in the shadows. That’s what makes them so deadly. But we have the element of surprise now. They have no idea what’s coming for them.’
This was certainly true. The villagers had simply stared at them as they gave them their orders – even after they had been translated into the local dialect. When they had eventually assembled at the muster points – after threats both shouted and administered with the butt of a rifle – many had come empty-handed, without the possessions they had been ordered to collect. It was as though they did not believe any of this could be quite real.
‘But most of these people,’ he said to the commanding officer, ‘the ones we’re actually moving … they seem to be all women, old men, children. Surely we should be looking for young men?’
‘Look – what’s your name? These orders come from the very top. Oh. And you do know the penalty for disobeying a direct order, don’t you?’
He thought of the dogs, feasting on the flesh of men who he had laughed with, and eaten bread with, and who had become almost like the brothers he had never had. That had been because of an Armenian. He thought of Babek’s family dwarfed by the huge war train, the boys dressed up like little men, waiting for their father to return to them: a hero.
They were to take the Armenians further east, to the very edges of the Ottoman Empire, toward the border with Persia. These were their orders; from the highest echelons of the War Office in Constantinople. A ‘rehoming’: this was the term used, apparently. But the area to which they would be moved was known only for its hostility to life: a desert place, a no-place. No one could be expected to make a life there. Yet he could not summon the indignation that he expected to feel, that he might once have felt. It wa
s as though the cold had got deep inside him and frozen any repository of emotion. There was a barrier beyond which he could not go; a numbness.
Besides, Babek had not been given the chance to live. And his old life had been taken from him. He had witnessed events that had changed him, irrevocably. So perhaps it was no unexpected thing that he could not find the empathy he might once have felt. At least these people would be given an opportunity to make a new life, slim though it was. Wasn’t that more than he and Babek and all those other frozen corpses had been allotted?
So he no longer complained, no longer questioned, when they marched into the desert with the elderly and very young, the sick, the unfit, the pregnant mothers and newborn babies.
The Boy
‘I have something for you. Follow me.’
He stands, resenting the loss of the sun and his book, but curious.
Nur hanım leads him into the kitchen. There, on the stone counter a plucked chicken sits, nude and stippled. Beside it, a bowl of plump green figs. The figs on the tree here are over; she must have got them elsewhere. There is more. Excitement quickens in him. A jar half-full of honey, another – he reaches for it, waits for her to stop him. When she doesn’t, he sniffs it. Oil. Onions, firm and glossy gold. Several branches of some fragrant herb.
‘Thyme,’ she says, ‘the recipe asks for it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘I think I should be thanking you. I thought you would cook it for us.’ Her eyes go to the stove, where – not being tall enough to reach – he recently upset a pot of coffee. ‘We will cook it together.’
Nur hanım, who does everything so quickly, is the same with cooking. Though he has never done it before he knows it cannot be rushed. Such a thing requires reverence, patience … even a kind of love. He knows the method as well now as he knows his own name, as one might memorise poetry. Here is the onion to cut into delicate slices, the shape and slenderness of the new moon. He passes it to her and watches how she hacks into it with the knife, as though it has done her some personal injury. When she isn’t looking, he salvages the job himself. When it comes to cooking the slices gently just until they have turned clear she seems to stab at them with the spoon, bullying them over the heat in the skillet until they begin to crisp and brown. Next time, he thinks, he will ask her merely to light the oven for him: the one thing that he cannot do so easily. After a while she allows him to take over. He gives her only the simplest instructions: stripping the leaves from the woody stalks of thyme, washing the figs (which the recipe does not even ask for).