Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  Both of them are silent now. As he works the bad thoughts, the pain, recede into the background. He concentrates absolutely on the task at hand. The new but not unfamiliar rhythm of it. He knows it, like a secret language. It exists already in his hands. The satisfaction of watching them become something, all these separate things. All because he wills them to be more than they are. The meat turning from pink to golden, the sauce coating it with a glossy, perfumed sheen. The sweet, the savoury, intermingling.

  It is the beginning of an obsession – or, rather, the evolution of one. With Nur hanım’s help he works his way through the book, through the recipes, that is, with ingredients that are not impossible to source in the city now. He learns that the cooking itself is one thing, there is the pleasure in his growing skill, in the confidence of his hands. But there is also the reaction, the pleasure of seeing his creations enjoyed. Sometimes, Nur hanım invites the neighbours from the rest of the building to enjoy the food. Only a short while ago he would have felt a kind of despair at the idea of being forced to share. Now there is only a pride. It is a different sort of fullness. His hunger, the hunger that could not be sated, begins to diminish.

  Nur

  The boy is a quicker, more innately adept student than she. Her hands, so clever in other ways – writing a letter, embroidering linen – are clumsy and inarticulate in the kitchen. He has a natural understanding of flavour, too. She has to work harder at it. She is impatient, too: she has no time for the dishes that require long cooking – he approaches them with a kind of reverence. While the absence of a particular ingredient has her throwing up her hands in defeat, he is able to improvise. He begins to suggest adaptations, improvements. Wouldn’t this taste better stippled with the warmth of some dried chilli? Perhaps mint, with its sharper note, would be a more faithful accompaniment than parsley, which is lost in the dish? She watched and marvels at him, this boy who so recently seemed to have forgotten how to spell his own name, as he annotates the pages with his childish, newly confident hand. It is a humbling thing to observe his discovery of this new part of himself.

  Taste, she discovers, has the same memory-invoking powers as scent. Without quite realising it, she is recreating the flavours of her youth.

  A morsel of borek – a modest enough confection of pastry and cheese – can taste simultaneously of love, death, loss.A spoonful of imam bayildi, aubergines simmered to velvet tenderness in tomato, oil and spices, brings tears to her eyes. She can taste in it a particular winter night: the first snow in the city. Cold air seeping through gaps in old wood, pressing its frozen breath against the thin panes of glass. They huddled close around the table. Beyond the window the snow fell thick, silent as a secret. Then Fatima had produced this dish, each spoonful kindling warmth in the belly. The cold had seemed to retreat by a degree. The candlelight now seemed to contain a specific, golden heat. The scene beyond the windows became more remote, more magical.

  She had been thirteen. There had still been the childish excitement, the thought of the fresh-fallen whiteness that would await her the next morning – but tempered, too, by the awareness of approaching adulthood. A time when one would need to be seemly, decorous. How many more snows would she see before this? It might be only one. It did not come every year: this strange miracle.

  But tomorrow she and her little brother could have a snowball fight. She knew, though, that he would aim to miss. Sometimes he was too gentle for his own good.

  That all of this, this concentration of memory, could be unleashed by such humble ingredients, such innocuous preparations … it is a kind of sorcery.

  So much of the old life is gone – never to be recaptured. The house, the fine things, all are beyond her reach now. But food, even at its most extravagant, is an economical refinement.

  For the boy, it is different. It does not have the same taint. For him she suspects it may be a way of forgetting. So he plunges forward, an adventurer, all excitement. She trails after him cautiously, wincing at shadows, knowing they may expand into further deep chasms of memory.

  George

  There are thirty beds in the ward, fifteen currently occupied. Several of them, poor beggars, are practically insensible with malaria – one very bad. A syphilis case – too much time spent in Pera brothels. Two dysentery. And one man, seconded to the Allied fire brigade, so badly burned on one side that he has the look of being partially skinned, with the muscle exposed raw and livid pink. He was trapped beneath the fallen spar of a flaming building – a wonder, really, that he survived at all.

  There are cases that no amount of fortitude can improve; their fate is already sealed. But for those borderline states, when the patient hovers on that thin precipice between life and death, sheer will can make the difference. George knows this, because he has seen it time and again. The struggle, or the acceptance. There is no shame in either, contrary to what many believe.

  The burned man, Lockett, spends most days sitting up in bed smoking a cigar and reading the foreign newspapers that George procures for him. He looks as relaxed as a man can look, and if one approaches him from the right side, one might wonder what such a robust-looking character was doing in a hospital bed. The other side is a different tale, a battlefield of dressings that give him the appearance of being held together with sticking plaster. This is practically the case. It is still not certain that he will live. An infection would finish him. There is the unseen, too. A rattle in the lungs: time will tell whether they are damaged beyond all repair.

  ‘How are you this morning, Lockett?’

  ‘All right, doctor. Was wondering if I could get a bit more of that good old Scottish stuff.’

  On the first evenings, to help with the pain – and because he liked the man – George had given him generous draughts of his precious single malt. Now he wonders if it had been a mistake.

  ‘Lockett, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Well, you can’t blame a fellow for trying.’

  He had refused to take any morphine for the discomfort, once he came to, saying he had seen ‘too many go down a bad road with that stuff’. To George’s dwindling supplies of Highland gold, however, he has no such objection.

  ‘A coffee, perhaps?’

  ‘Is it that filthy local stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Though I’ve actually started to think it superior.’

  ‘You’ve been here too long, doc. You’re going native. But … oh, go on, why not? It isn’t as though a chap has any other options, is it?’ He peers ruefully up at George, one eye lidded with intact, pale skin, the other ringed with raw red. If there is a message of entreaty in this look, George chooses not to receive it.

  He climbs down to the kitchen on the floor below. Here is a huge Ottoman stove, enamelled in sky blue, for even the most mundane items in this house have a claim to beauty. It is a formidable, unfamiliar thing with several ovens and six hot plates. Here, presumably, magnificent spreads were once prepared. It seems the sort of house in which such feasts would have been eaten. George has only dared to make coffee upon the smallest plate … though, if truth be told, his culinary skill does not extend much further. He bought a small copper pot from the great bazaar in Stamboul – and the coffee, too, following his nose to a stall where men ground the new-roasted beans before one’s eyes, packaging it into plump, fragrant parcels.

  He measures out the fine grounds, a few spoonfuls of sugar, pours in the water. He isn’t absolutely certain he has the method right yet. Every time he stops for a cup on the street he scrutinises the particular blend of flavours and decides how he will better his own recipe. This is how his mind works. He is not creative in any sense, but he can analyse and improve. It has served him well as a medical man; has helped him refine the optimum dosage of quinine without eating into precious, limited supply, to discover the most effective tourniquet for a newly severed limb. He pours two cups of the stuff, watches the brown foam rise to the surface.

  Lockett gives his a dubious sniff, places it beside him
to cool. George takes the first hot sip. This first mouthful is still something of a shock, the taste like a distillation of earth with only the sweetness of the sugar to make it bearable. Then he begins to savour it.

  ‘How did you get this then? Stuck here with us strays?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m an MO – that’s what I do.’

  ‘No, I mean Constant’ of course’ – the soldiers’ abbreviation. ‘Couldn’t believe it when I got shipped off here. Thought I was on my way home.’

  George sips – too much – scalds his tongue. ‘I volunteered, actually.’

  ‘You volunteered?’ Lockett frowns up at him. ‘Are you mad, doc? What was it … the money?’

  ‘I suppose it was. Or something like that.’

  Not a complete lie. The money was an attraction, but it was not much more than he could have made with a new placement in England, from the comfort of his own home. But then there had been the challenge of setting up and running his own hospital – that had beckoned to him. So, too, the revelation of proper beds and almost-adequate resources after so many years beneath canvas, eking out supplies.

  And yet, if he were to be honest with himself, none of these was quite the reason.

  That afternoon, Sister comes to tell him that the man with yellow fever – the doomed case – has died. Will he come and take a look, to verify? And then, really, in this heat, the body …

  He goes into the ward to see. The fellow lies there, his eyes rolled back into his head. This might mean – thankfully, perhaps – that he was in the grip of delirium while he died. While George was exploring the city, this man was slipping from life. There was nothing more they could have done for him. The rest was the body’s work, whether it had enough fight in it.

  The man volunteered to come out here, like George. He remembers their conversation now: the man half in the grip of fever, with a too-bright light behind the eyes. He had wanted to see a little more of the world, before settling down for good. It is no greater or lesser tragedy than any of the deaths George has witnessed. But perhaps there is an added poignancy, in the fellow eluding death in the conflagration, only to die here in otherwise benign circumstances.

  His family will not have been prepared for it. Undoubtedly, since the war spared him, they may have decided that he had luck on his side: a common enough fallacy.

  George looks again at the figure on the bed. The strangeness of this experience has not left him, not since that day at medical college in Edinburgh, when they were first let into the room with no less than thirty cadavers – old and young, fat and thin, male and female – but all alike in one terrible respect. Far more akin in death than they would ever have been in life. The idea that these forms had once been living, breathing, thinking, loving. It seemed so … unlikely. The experience became even more uncanny, he would discover, when you had actually known the person. In the dissection room, that day, he had become an atheist.

  He walks out into the garden of the hospital. The heat has slipped from its daily peak, the air is heavy with the scent of warm fig leaves. The afternoon has taken on the bluish tint beneath which it will slip, imperceptibly at first – and then suddenly, all at once – into evening. The Bosphorus, drowsy, purplish, only faintly stirring, ranges before him across to the Asian shore. Not such a bad place to die, he thinks: at the meeting of continents, in the cradle of civilisations, beneath this infinite sky. So different to the sky at home, hemmed and softened by cloud. The cemetery is in a good spot, too. They had to bury some of the first prisoners of war handed back to them: the most malnourished, the most diseased. The family will have somewhere to visit.

  He makes himself a cigarette. For a man with no religion, this is something of a ritual. He lights it, draws on it, and with the first exhalation expels the thing into the air. It has worked in far more trying times than this.

  The Boy

  The older lady frightens him. She reminds him of what he has learned of the sultans of history. Some of them were not averse to drowning little boys in order to make sure, for example, that their sons became rulers. But perhaps sometimes they did it just for a whim, when things got boring in the imperial harem. Nur hanım did not teach them this at school, but small boys have ways of learning things. They put them in sacks, he knows, like unwanted kittens. The old woman has no son, and no throne to protect – but he is not absolutely sure that he wouldn’t put it past her. She seems to live in history, too: she talks more often of the past than she does of the now. In her presence he slows his steps, lowers his voice. She is to him unfathomably old. To him Nur hanım is old – and yet this lady is infinitely more so.

  He does not think she likes him very much. He has heard himself referred to by her as ‘the boy’. Only ten days ago she discovered him playing with some small animals of green stone that were, apparently, extremely rare and precious. The trunk of the elephant had, unfortunately, parted ways with the body. There would probably not be significant qualms about the drowning. He is most nervous when they are alone in the apartment together, like today.

  He has decided to make stuffed cabbage leaves: a new recipe from the book. He and Nur are meant to be making these together. She does not like him using the stove. But she is delivering her embroideries to the seller at the bazaar, and it is raining heavily outside, so there will be no one playing in the street. The morning stretches interminably before him in the way that hours do when one is young and has so many of them left to use up.

  A careful perusal of the recipe has told him that he will not need to use the stove too much. Most of this is in the preparation. Besides, it always seems to be Nur who burns herself against the handle of a pot, or scalds herself with steam – not him. He begins to set out his ingredients: the rice, the onions, the cabbages, the nuts and raisins, the olive oil. He has climbed onto the stool, and is just preparing the pot for the cabbage when he hears something that makes his skin prickle with fear.

  ‘What are you doing, boy?’

  He turns and sees her in the archway. One hand leans her weight heavily upon her cane, the other holds aloft one of her cigarettes. The mingled scent of these and the oud that she wears at throat and wrists is uniquely hers.

  ‘I – I’m cooking, hanım.’

  ‘At the stove?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She raises an eyebrow. He braces himself for the reprimand. To his surprise, it does not come. She blows out a thin stream of smoke.

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Lahana dolması, hanım.’

  ‘Ah. They are my favourite. I suppose you were making them for me?’

  Nur hanım has always been rigorous on the importance of telling the truth. ‘No.’

  Her eyebrows come together. He feels that despite his best efforts he may not have said the right thing.

  ‘And how are you making them?’

  He shows her the book.

  ‘Oh.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, one does not require a book for such a recipe. Such things are simply known.’

  He watches as she unties the scarf from about her neck, and begins to remove the dazzling rings from her fingers. He has an uneasy premonition. If he were not standing on the stool, he would take a step back.

  ‘Are you frightened of me, boy?’

  He wavers. This time he is determined to get it right. ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ She moves forward. The cane is forgotten, resting against the wall. When she wills it, it seems, she is rather steady upon her feet. ‘I am going to help you make them.’ She shakes her sleeves back from her wrists. ‘Needless to say we will not be using a recipe book.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘For someone like me, such a thing is in the blood. You, perhaps, would not understand. You are not a woman, nor are you properly a Turk. But we have been making these things since the beginning of time. To use someone else’s instructions would be an embarrassment.’

  He lets her join him. What else can he do?

  He quickly sees, to his horror,
that she is not doing anything as the recipe says it should be done.

  ‘Of course,’ she tells him as she begins to boil a huge quantity of rice, which the book says should be mixed first with the nuts and oil, ‘I have never actually made this dish myself. In the past’ – her beloved past – ‘we had a woman who did this sort of thing for us.’

  ‘The book—’

  ‘But that does not matter,’ she insists, ‘such things are beyond practice. They belong to a different, deeper kind of understanding.’

  The room has filled with the refuse-stink of the cabbage. He is certain that it is cooked far beyond the tenderness demanded by the recipe. The leaves have lost any hint of green, and seem to be fast approaching brown. But he is too afraid to tell her. The rice, too, appears overcooked. And there is so much of it: far more than will be needed to fill the leaves. Nur hanım will not be happy, she despises waste.

  It is only when she takes the onion that he has so carefully filleted and chopped, and begins to mix it – raw – into the rice that he feels compelled to break his silence.

  ‘But,’ he says, ‘the onion is not cooked.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, and takes a breath, as though she is about to issue one of her proclamations. Then she seems to waver. For the first time, she looks a little unsure. ‘What does it say, there, in that book?’