Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  He draws it toward him. ‘That the onion should be cooked.’

  ‘I see—’

  But now he has the momentum, ‘… and the rice should be mixed with the nuts and oil first … and the cabbage should only be simmered until tender.’

  Both look toward the pot containing the cabbage, where the water has acquired an unhealthy yellow foam.

  ‘Ah.’ In a different voice, a general acknowledging the wisdom of an inferior, she says, ‘Shall we begin again?’

  The Prisoner

  They were suffering, the Armenians. At the beginning they had railed against the soldiers, pleaded with them. Now they didn’t have the energy to resist. They were, on the whole, silent, save for the occasional low, almost animal moan of discomfort – shocked and then exhausted into accepting their fate.

  But some of them could not keep up. They kept stumbling over their own feet. The shoes many of them wore had only been good for a day of walking. Now half of the group walked on the burning ground on their bare soles. They were poor country people, of course, that was part of it. Perhaps they did not have good shoes. But it might also have been the thing he had suspected: that none of them had really believed in what was happening to them. They had not properly prepared themselves.

  In those first days they seemed to treat it as a misunderstanding that might at any second be realised, that the whole thing would be called off. They would be allowed to return home. Home was all they knew. He had very little knowledge of this south-eastern part of the Empire, other than the names of towns – Mosul, Kirkuk – and rivers – the Tigris, the Euphrates – learned from a map. But he had more than these people, for whom the next village, a day on the back of a mule, might have been the farthest they had ever travelled. They had been walking for three weeks now. Or was it four? He had long ago lost track of the days.

  One might almost feel sorry for them. But you could not think like that about an order. And these were traitors … murderers. By association, of course. And the fact was: they, the officers, were suffering too. Their feet were blistered and swollen, too, their bellies were empty, their eyes also blinded by the bright, scorched, unending wastes over which they travelled. So when the stragglers at the back began to lag behind, to fall down, they became less and less patient. They weren’t allowed to lie down in the dirt and cry out with their pain, they had no one from whom they could beg mercy. So it became easy not to care for these stragglers, indeed, to begin to blame them. Their moans were merely another physical affliction: worse than the rest of it, somehow. And then it became clear how easily the problem could be dealt with; unlike the other afflictions over which they had no control.

  A bullet, carefully aimed, where the spine met the skull. Then more silence: not just from the one who had been silenced forever but from all of them, silence of shock and fear.

  At first it was only the most brutal among them who did the silencing. The ones whose hatred was a deep, established thing. At first you merely observed. And then you realised that to observe and say nothing was as bad as being complicit, even worse. So you became complicit.

  There was a woman whose bare feet were so badly blistered that she could hardly walk. She kept falling down. She had two children, a very small boy and a slightly older girl: she had carried them most of the way. She tried to crawl instead of walk. One of the soldiers prodded her with his bayonet, ordered her to stand.

  At one point they came across the Tigris, moving sluggishly through the boiling land. Suddenly, the woman with the blistered feet veered off toward it. There was a moment of stunned silence.

  ‘Hey!’ the superior shouted to him. ‘Stop her!’

  ‘I think she wants to cool her feet.’

  ‘Don’t we all? And she’s not: she’s going to jump in. Look! What are you waiting for – go!’

  He went after her. Suddenly, perhaps in anticipation of the water, she was moving quickly. A grotesque drunk man’s stagger on her broken feet.

  ‘Come back!’ he shouted. She paid him no heed.

  ‘She cannot get away,’ the officer shouted after him. ‘All must be accounted for.’

  ‘Stop!’ he called to her. ‘I order you to stop!’

  Still, no response. It was as though she could not hear him, perhaps she was beyond hearing. If anything she picked up speed – still running with that odd, lopsided, staggering gait, dragging her children who were stumbling, struggling to keep up.

  ‘Stop!’

  She continued to run.

  It was the action of a moment, without thought. He raised his gun and aimed for that spot at the back of the neck and fired and the front of her head exploded outwards.

  He felt something inside him fracture.

  Later he would know it. That was the moment. Despite everything he might still have returned to him, the man he used to be, before that. After it, there could be no way back. And that was before the bullets began to run out, and became a precious commodity. Other means had to be found. The butts of rifles. A large enough rock. His bare hands.

  Some of them went mad with what they had done. Often they were the ones who committed the worst acts. A kind of frenzy overtook them. It was a dislocation of the self. You could almost hear it. But though the thing inside him had fractured, he did not go mad. He envied them, because there was a kind of refuge in their madness, a lack of culpability. And sometimes he envied the dead more than the mad because they were blameless; now, if they had committed crimes then at least they had paid for them with their own blood. He envied Babek, who he had pitied, because he had never been asked to sacrifice this much. He had died without this burden upon him, without ever discovering the extent of his own potential depravity, without ever knowing what evil might exist within himself.

  One night he staggered out of camp. He was thinking of that river, the Tigris, only a few miles away.

  He had the half-formed idea of washing himself until all of it came off. And then diving in, though he had never been a strong swimmer, and letting it carry him away somewhere … to a place of peace.

  He walked on his broken schoolteacher’s shoes for hours, but he did not find the water. So he walked further, into the night. He realised dimly that he must have missed the river, might indeed have been walking in the wrong direction entirely. But he could not stop. He walked until the first pink-tinged fingertips of dawn began to creep beneath the curtain of the night.

  He only stopped walking when he heard the shout: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’

  He had not discovered the river but he had found the enemy. The British, at the grisly end of their Mesapotamian campaign. Tired and sick and ready for retreat – and certainly not expecting anything like this, this unexpected boon. An enemy soldier practically offering himself up to be taken as a prisoner of war.

  Anyone would think the fellow had gone completely mad.

  The Traveller

  I remember an almost impossible place, where you could walk over a bridge and hear fifteen different languages spoken at once; where you could cross between two continents in the time it took to eat a warm simit, to smoke a single cigarette.

  I read of it obsessively in books. I discovered swathes of history. Byzantium: a great, sophisticated, democratic metropolis when most of England, which thought of itself as so ancient and civilised, had been little more than a collection of mud huts. The Romans had come and made it the new, eastern jewel of their empire. The emperor had loved it more than Rome, and had given it his name: Constantine. He had made it a place of pomp and splendour, colonnades and bathhouses and statues. Which would be crushed to rubble by the victorious Mehmet the Conqueror and his army. The Ottomans. Who would in their turn build structures of incomparable beauty: mosques with airy, burnished domes, minarets so delicate they looked as though they would not be able to stand the weight of the clouds they seemed to hold aloft.

  And yet I did not find within these pages the truth of the place I was looking for. That city was a living place, full of creature
s: stray cats sleeping in the midday sun; dogs roaming the streets, as gnarled and characterful in appearance as the old men who sat watching them. A sudden confetti of doves alighting in a garden beside the Bosphorus.

  A city full of scents, too. Some of them bad: mackerel left out too long upon the quay; the unwashed bodies of people who had arrived upon huge ships and had no proper place to lay their heads. The smell of burned things, the peculiar odour of an entire life gone up in an evil greasy smoke: books and bedding and furniture and house and worse. But good scents, too: warm savoury fig leaves and jasmine flowers – tiny white stars against old stone – and the brine of the sea and the toasting of bread and the burned caramel of coffee and the pure sugar cloud that floated through the open door of a confectioner’s shop.

  I wake and for several moments do not know where I am. A ship, I think – the listing motion, the feeling of confinement. Then I discover my surroundings: the dense foam cushion of the couchette beneath me, the small shard of dusty light beneath the window blind. I pull the cord, roll it up.

  I am unprepared for the splendour of the view that greets me. When I last looked out all was in darkness, lit by the occasional bright flare of a signal box, the night trundling by. The rain continuing, but as a desultory drizzle, as though it had run out of enthusiasm for the task. Anything could have been beyond the track, but one assumed it was much of the same unremarkable, interminable pastoral.

  Now, the mountains.

  An early morning sky of a billowing softness, nursery blue, with a powder smudge of pink at the horizon. Cloud obscures the lower slopes but the ridge rises out of it, the sun just beginning to find the peaks. They seem less to reflect it than to glow from within like melted metal. They are lethal, beautiful. The quality of the light. The air smells, tastes different too. I open the little flap of a window as far as it will go and drink it in.

  Something has opened in my chest at the sight of the mountains. Difficult to tell in this moment whether it is grief, or joy, or some strange amalgam of the two. My face tightens with cold, and I realise, lifting a hand to it, that my cheeks are wet with tears.

  A journey, almost a lifetime ago. Days of travel … different countries, a whole continent’s worth of them. Speeding me away from that place. Fields and villages and great old gilded cities. Then these mountains. Set apart from the rest, looking down at me impassively. Then I understood quite how far I had come. That I was never going back.

  I decide to go in search of some breakfast. I dress clumsily – the fastening of each button seems to be accompanied by a purposeful lurch of the train that sends me crashing into the couchette or the washstand – and make my way unsteadily through the sleeping carriage. At intervals half-open doors disclose scenes of unwitting intimacy: stirring forms beneath sheets, sleep-rumpled pyjama-clad bodies. The eye is drawn to these revelations even as one tries not to look. I feel a peculiar tenderness for these strangers, there is familiarity in their unguardedness. All of us, I think, share a certain vulnerability on waking: it is always something of a shock.

  I walk the length of the train, through the couchette cars and the second-class carriages in which the passengers doze in strange contortions: I do not envy them their fractured night’s sleep. I discover that there does not appear to be a dining car at all. What a fall from former glory has occurred here, to this train that was once a moving Grand Hotel. With the shutters up throughout the train now the landscape seems to enter the carriage, almost to overwhelm it. It feels more as though we are floating through it than travelling on solid ground. I see businessmen who seem to be making a studied effort not to look out of the windows, as though to be awed by the scenery is really somewhat déclassé. But I see, too, small faces pressed against the glass.

  Back in the couchette, galvanised by coffee and a stale bread roll, I open my suitcase. I lift it out, and lay it upon the bed. It is perhaps two metres in length, but the fabric is so fine that it takes up less room than a paperback when folded. As it unfurls the sunlight catches on gold thread. The hues are ecstatically vivid, despite the age of the piece. It is hand-sewn. The stitching, though neat and tiny, bears the unmistakable evidence of human imperfection. I trace it with a finger. I feel the peculiar intimacy of it, my hand so near to the place where, decades ago, another hand worked its talent into the cloth. Fingers tight about the needle, gripping, piercing.

  Over the years it has travelled with me everywhere, improving every space in which it has been placed. Illicitly loud against regulation linen. Glowing with an almost preternatural brightness from a wall in London, the colours filling the room like light passed through stained glass, bleeding into the grey day outside. And now, the uninspiring Formica and chipboard interior of a train berth: ridiculous splendour, the whole space seeming to shrink and gather about it.

  Threads have come loose and small stains have appeared over time but it has never been washed or mended. I could not bear it. I could not stand the idea that some essence might be removed in the cleaning of it: the spirit of a place, of the person who made it. I could not bear the thought that the sanctity of its creation would be compromised by the work of a stranger.

  It is something tangible. Made by her. Almost a part of her. It is like the relic of magic left in the hands of the narrator at the end of a fairy tale. It means that I did not imagine any of it. It makes her real.

  The Boy

  For some time he has carried around in him a kernel of pain, like a hot stone. Normally it sits in his chest, somewhere between his lungs. In the day he can manage it. When his mind is busy, at school. When he is cooking, particularly. But at times, when he is trying to sleep, and finds himself alone in the dark with his thoughts and no distractions, it seems to grow. At these times it feels that it is taking control of him, that it is almost bigger than him. He wonders how it is that his body remembers to breathe or swallow, or any of the other things that keep him alive. Because his head is full with it, his thoughts are blotted out by it. It is no real cause for alarm, then, when the pain grows. It is in his head now, and his stomach, and his limbs ache with it. All of this is new. But still he does not call out to Nur hanım, or to either of the older ladies. Instead he shuts his eyes.

  Incredible heat. From everywhere the sound of screaming and the howls of dogs, ringing feet on the cobblestones. In the street: old men in nightshirts, women staggering about with armfuls of screaming children, their faces horrible with fear. Every so often there is a roar and a whoooooomp and a vast, fiery object falls as though thrown from the sky itself: a fiery timber, a shower of red-hot roof tiles. The sky is as light as day. About him everything is movement – the flames, the running. But he is to stay here hidden from the fire’s sight – understand? – until they return. And he will stay here, for two more days, as the tulumba eventually bring the blaze under control. As the neighbourhood is revealed in its new incarnation: a no-place, a black, matchstick city, disgorging the occasional plume of dark smoke. His only disobedience will be to move back inside when it becomes too cold to remain outdoors.

  No one is coming. They have forgotten him. There are things he knows, terrible things, but that he cannot look at, not now, not ever.

  But now he hears it. Someone calling his name. He opens his eyes. It takes a moment to understand where he is.

  Even when she found him, she had been calm. Her voice had soothed him. For the first time he sees her frightened.

  ‘Where is the pain?’ she says, loudly, almost harshly. ‘Show me. Here? And here?’ She presses a hand against his forehead, snatches it away just as quickly. Then, with a hitch in her voice, ‘I am going to get help. Do you understand?’

  Nur

  ‘It must be something he ate,’ her grandmother decides. And then, with unusual tenderness, ‘It is my fault, I cooked with him.’

  Yet he ate very little at supper: Nur was surprised by his lack of appetite. She had almost mentioned it, but decided to let it pass.

  Now she remembers the time she dis
covered him digging for roots in the school’s small garden, eating his discoveries indiscriminately. She had dragged him up by his armpits: didn’t he understand that he could poison himself?

  Could he have done such a thing again? Not now, surely … but then with his fondness for food, his eagerness to experiment? If he has poisoned himself it will only get worse, she should take him to see someone, immediately. Now that she has decided she feels a new calm, almost a coldness. They need a doctor.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she tells her grandmother who – inexplicably – is now offering the boy a puff on one of her ‘restorative’ cigarettes, and looking faintly cross when he shakes his head.

  She’ll go to Mustafa Bey, her father’s old friend: one of the kindest men, and most knowledgable. He only lives a few streets away – he too has fallen upon shortened times.

  ‘No,’ her grandmother says, scandalised. ‘You cannot go out at this time. Send for …’ she seems to grasp for a few moments for a name, a fragment from the past. Defeated, remembering where she is, she lapses into a silent consent.

  ‘I’ll be careful.’

  ‘You will wear a veil.’ Her grandmother stands.

  ‘Büyükanne, I don’t—’

  ‘It is one thing for you to be walking the streets bare-faced in the day, even if it is one thing I heartily disapprove of. It is another for you to go out at night. It makes a certain impression, Nur, on a particular sort of person. I will not have you in danger.’

  There are times when it is better not to argue.

  Behind the veil the dim-lit streets become the shifting landscape of a dream. It is quiet with the particular intensity of the deepest hours of the night, and despite her purpose and urgency, Nur is unnerved. She cannot think of a time in her whole life in this teeming city when she has been so alone. The cobbles sheen with rain, slick and perilous underfoot. A sound comes, a note of utter desolation. It is only the yowling of a cat – but, disembodied, it has a strange power. It is like a distillation of the hour itself.