by Lucy Foley
When she reaches Mustafa Bey’s house, she is struck by the certainty that no one is inside. All of the houses are shut up for the night, of course, but this one, she feels, has the particular blankness of an empty building. All the same, she knocks on the door – what else can she do? When no answer comes, she knocks harder – using both fists.
From the house next door, from behind the obscuring screen of a keyf, comes a woman’s voice. ‘What are you doing out there? Don’t you know people are trying to sleep?’
Nur recognises the voice. It is the widow who visits her mother and grandmother to share neighbourhood gossip.
‘It’s me,’ she calls, ‘Nur.’
‘Little Nur. But what are you doing, out at this hour?’
‘I’m looking for Mustafa Bey.’
‘Well, you won’t find him here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, you haven’t heard?’ The delight in being the first to impart the news. ‘He and his wife have gone to Damascus, to live with their relatives there. Last week. After their Irfan died, you understand … the city holds too many memories.’
So she hurries on to the Red Crescent hospital near the quays, but even before she arrives she can hear the chaos, can see a crowd of the sick and injured waiting in the street outside. The new arrivals in the city: there are too many of them for the city to cope. Some are so ill that they are lying in the street, barely sensible.
She tries to think, but her mind is clouded by panic. She looks behind her, to the night-time glimmer of the Bosphorus. The ferries are still running. She knows, suddenly, where she must go.
George
He opens his eyes, and finds himself in a darkness as absolute as when they were closed. The sound – he thinks it might have been gunfire in the dream – resolves itself into an urgent knocking. He fumbles with the lamp, fingers clumsy, goes pyjama-clad to the door. Sister Agnes is on the other side; she half-falls into the room. Her look, as she surveys him, suggests that she had hitherto expected a doctor to be immaculately presented at all times, fully dressed and ready for duty.
‘One of the patients?’
‘Someone here to see you.’ A faint note of scandal. ‘An Ottoman. A woman.’
He dresses quickly, wondering what on earth this can all be about. A Turkish woman, here? And at this time of night?
In the hallway is a slim, veiled figure. In the uncertain light from the lantern she appears rather ghoulish; he feels a small thrill of disquiet. She lifts her veil.
‘You.’ He recognises her instantly – but he cannot make any sense of her presence here.
She comes towards him like a wraith, white-faced. ‘I need your help.’
He is surprised by the meagreness of her lodgings. Neither neighbourhood or house seems to match her: the fine bearing, the fluency and intelligence of her speech. Nor the regal poise of the old woman, who looks at him as she might a grocery boy and who wears several rings inlaid with what appear to be vast emeralds and yellow diamonds.
When he sees these baubles, utterly incongruous with the dingy room, he thinks he understands.
He bends over the boy, and there is an intake of breath from the old woman, as though he were a vampire about to drink the child’s blood. When he’d arrived, the boy was retching a thin stream of bile. But in the last few minutes his eyes have rolled back into his head. George thinks he has an idea of the complaint. He just needs to make certain. He touches a hand to the forehead. It is boiling hot, his hand comes away slick with sweat.
There is a scream – and then a hard blow catches him on the back of his head: such a surprise that he stumbles, almost pitching forward across the prone child. He turns, and finds the old woman looking back at him with menace in her eyes.
‘Büyükanne! Bunu yapma! Stop that!’ The woman, Nur, turns to him. ‘I’m so sorry. She does not understand. She sees only an enemy.’
He rubs the back of his head. He feels a little stunned. Quite incredible, that there should be such power in one of those frail old hands. She keeps the hand aloft, threateningly. Her expression tells him that she will not hesitate to strike again.
Keeping a wary eye upon her, he speaks to the younger woman.
‘I’m fairly certain that it is malaria. The fever, the vomiting, it all makes sense.’
‘What can be done?’
‘Quinine, rest, fluids.’ He looks her in the eye. ‘I have to warn you. Your son is in a precarious state. You must prepare yourself for the fact that he may not recover.’
Her mouth is a thin line, and her hand is at her throat. He can see the struggle, her fear and grief. But she merely nods.
‘And he will have to come with me. To the hospital.’
Now she is unable to hold her silence. ‘He cannot remain here? I can watch over him.’
‘No. I cannot ensure that he will receive adequate treatment if he is here. He needs to be observed constantly. Even the slightest change, invisible to one who is not a doctor, could be fatal.’
He is purposefully brutal, he needs her to understand that there is no argument against his taking the boy with him, now. He has been here before with worried mothers.
She nods, and he is impressed again by her self-possession. ‘Then you must do it.’
The Boy
The man who takes him from Nur is very tall, and his face is in shadow, and he speaks in a foreign language. He does recognise some of these words. But the pain and confusion is too great for him to decipher them.
The next thing he remembers: being lifted, carried. The great expanse of water, black as a concentration of the night itself. He has seen fishermen throwing catch thought too small, or diseased, back into the waves. Perhaps this will happen to him.
The crossing: a swarm of stars above, clusters of brilliance that seem to shift and sway. Every movement of the boat is pain, but he clenches himself against it and thinks only of the stars. Somewhere behind them – beyond them – he knows that his mother and father are watching. If they are waiting for him on the other side it will not be so bad.
Then he is being carried again, and leaves are brushing his face and the sky is obscured. Nur hanım is gone, she has given him to the foreign stranger.
He understands. He has made too much trouble for her. She is giving him up. He cannot help crying out in fear and loss. He knows he will be ashamed of this later: crying out like a baby!
Nur
Back at the apartment, in the secret dark of the kitchen, Nur sits down upon a chair and stares at a spot before her; seeing nothing. She feels the pressure of tears, but the ability to find this release – the talent – long ago deserted her. When she is finally returned to herself she discovers that her hands are clasped about her lower abdomen, as though there were still something there to protect.
The infinite variety of loss. When one has lost little, one cannot understand this. One thinks the thing must be of a type, only varying in scale and quality. She has become an expert. A connoisseur.
Her father, emphatically lost. A grave to visit, at Eyüp. Her mother, lost in all but her physical self. A brother, lying broken in some forgotten waste of the Empire: the loneliness of the body; too horrible to think of.
Her secret loss. A gain discovered only after the knowledge of its losing, when the blood came. A terrifying quantity; the death of an unknown part of herself. How to begin to grieve it?
Now a new loss has presented itself, if only as a possibility. She does not know, seeing this new one appear, if she can contain another within her. Because each grief is not something to be experienced and overcome, like a severe but finite bout of illness. She has learned this. It is absorbed into the self, it becomes a part of the self. A change occurs; mysterious, intangible, but definite. The person is altered forever by it.
PART TWO
* * *
The Prisoner
‘I noticed that you do not sleep. Sometimes at night you cry out.’
He glanced over to where the speaker was
sitting. The man did not look quite like the other prisoners. After so long in this British prison camp in the Egyptian desert, with poor food, disease rife, blistering heat and perhaps worst of all a monotony of existence that ate at the soul, many of the men had acquired the look of the walking dead.
And yet this man, though thin, his cheeks drawn, had something almost elegant about him. Unlike most of them he had not long ago decided to neglect his appearance. His hair was carefully combed, his cheeks freshly shaven, his moustache newly waxed. He had a gleam in his eye that could be described either as enlightened … or, less kindly, fanatical. This in itself was a novelty. So many of the men’s eyes were cloudy with boredom or hunger or the beginnings of the blindness that had blighted so many of them: a condition that even their captors did not seem to have intended, or to understand.
He thought: what could be the harm in talking of it, in such a place? For so long it had been stoppered up inside him, poisoning him from within.
‘I have done terrible things. Evil things.’
‘And what are they?’ The man, though only ten or so years his senior, had an almost fatherly air.
He hesitated.
‘However bad they may be, I am certain I may have heard worse.’
As he admitted them, those deeds that he could actually bring himself to talk of, he found that he could hardly believe in them … that if he had not actually been there himself to witness them, to commit them, he would think that they had to be unspeakable lies. But he could feel them in him; a deep sickness, deeper than flesh and bone, a poison that would destroy him from within.
Finally the man put up a hand. ‘It is enough. I know what it is you speak of.’
‘You too were involved?’
The man did not appear to have heard him. ‘But at a time like this what is important is how one may justify the act.’
‘I’m not sure that there can be any—’
The man stopped him with a brief motion of his hand. There was an innate authority in the gesture, an assumption that he would be obeyed, and the idea came to him that this prisoner had been no ordinary soldier before his capture.
‘For too long this Empire has been a sick, tired, lumbering thing. Those differences that once made us strong are now destroying us: when something is so fractured it cannot be efficient, or strong. To move forward, we need to be whole, uniform. Our differences are weaknesses because they represent a conflict of interest. Do you see?’
‘I’m not certain.’
‘War means doing terrible things for a just, even noble, cause. The smallest boy knows this. Every army has killed traitors of its cause. What happened to the Armenians was yet another tragic, but necessary, by-product of the war. There is no virtue in tormenting yourself.’
That night he lay in his cot, thinking of what the officer had told him. For months he had thought of himself as something less than human, denatured by the hideousness of his acts. But now he had been presented with a new possibility: that these acts were not merely justifiable, but perhaps even worthy of praise.
It would explain everything; it would make it all condonable. But that was too easy. He could not believe in it: could he? He wished that he could. If he could he might be able to find some relief. The thing that had seemed so senseless, a random flowering of evil – inside himself as much as without – might acquire meaning and definition. He might even be able to sleep again; to stop fantasising about ways to end the play of horror within his mind.
It was a seductive possibility. It was as though a mirror had been held up to him in which everything was reversed. In which he was not a monster but a hero; in which his acts were not cowardly but courageous. Acts that an ordinary man might not have had the strength of character to commit.
But it could not be true. Could it?
And yet each day, over the weeks that followed, he sought out the officer. He found that merely to hear the man speak was soothing. He was so certain. Another version of events. It might be a fiction but it was a comforting fiction at least. It glittered to him in his dark place.
With enough retellings, it ceased to be merely a story.
Here is something true: it is not difficult to believe in a better version of oneself. A man must be very strong-willed indeed if he is to refuse to accept another’s idea of him as heroic, not monstrous.
Gradually his own memories began to acquire the shimmer of unreality. The things that had happened – that he had done – became like a bad dream. They were a nightmare that pervaded every moment of his waking life, yes, but perhaps not quite so vividly as they once had. Where they had him so firmly in their grip he now found himself able to halt them for a time, to ask questions of them.
What this man offered was an antidote to that poison that had gone deep inside him. He was like a dying man – thinking himself too far gone for help but willing to try anything. So he grasped for it. Of course he did.
A new system of belief. This was what it was. In order to follow it, he had to give himself over to it completely. Like any new convert he had to forget everything he had believed before, to leave behind that weaker, questioning part that would in the end have destroyed him.
He had horrified himself with thoughts of how his family would react, if they knew what he had done. Now he saw that such fears were irrelevant. Ordinary people like his mother, his sister, could never be expected to understand. He had been involved in something that defied comprehension; something much larger than all of them.
Some in the camp had peculiar obsessions. There was an officer who had never played a musical instrument before but became fixated by the idea of making himself a lute. Somehow he even infected a couple of their British captors with his dream. They brought materials for him: a file, plywood, glue. He worked tirelessly in a corner of the sleeping block, which became known as the ‘Egyptian Lunatic Asylum’. His hands became a map of welts and cuts; he had only a penknife to work with. No one really thought the thing would be completed, but perhaps that was no bad thing if it kept him occupied.
Even when – despite all the odds – it was finished, he spent several weeks refining the thing. Smoothing edges, tightening strings, fashioning a plectrum, adding a gergi. Now all were interested, invested in the fate of the lute.
Finally, he had to accept that there was no way in which it could be bettered. His work was done. All celebrated the triumph with him. They gathered about, and asked him to play for them. But he could not play – he was just the maker. A captain who could took over and regaled them with songs from their homeland. The lute maker retreated into a corner with the rest of them and sang along too, with a smile of deepest contentment upon his face.
Within a week, he was dead from dysentery. It was bad luck, some said. At least he had managed to finish his little project. But they all knew the truth of it, really. He had lost his purpose.
What was his purpose?
His was this new system of belief. It had its own language; comprised of words such as necessary, and righteous. Phrases such as: the future of the nation state, the Turkish people. He was not alone. Such phrases were murmured in the camp refectory as the unchanging daily slop was spooned onto their plates, or in the communal washrooms as men rinsed their wasted bodies. These were slogans of pride at a time when dignity had otherwise been lost. For some, as for him, it was a new creed. For others it might have been little more than a mechanism of survival. You lived here either in a state of fervent belief and hope, or you despaired and died. It was as simple as that.
Sometimes, still, in moments of weakness, doubts would creep in. There was perhaps some small part of him that obstinately refused to be convinced. That reminded him, for example, of the Armenian children in his class: of his favourite pupil; that clever, naughty boy who had always had an answer for everything. He would wonder what had become of them, of their families. But he learned to stifle this part. It would endanger the whole construction: if he let it it would destroy it and, in the process, it
would destroy him.
This thing had forged him into someone new. It had been terrible, but in the same way that fire is terrible and yet is used to temper metal, to separate the ore from the baser bedrock, to strengthen and refine.
He understood that now.
Nur
At times this city seems more beautiful than she has ever seen it. Perhaps it is the season; still hot, but the sun of autumn has a maturity and resonance that it lacks at other times of the year. All colour is more vivid beneath it. The sky of late afternoon is so intensely blue it seems almost violet, and the light kindles intimations of gold in old stone. The Bosphorus basks in it, too, performing sedate transformations: from the pale, whitish mauve of early morning, through the deep navy of noon, the evening silver.
The city has revealed itself as a turncoat; it does not care for them, for all they have lost. It will endure after those who live within it now perish. It has continued its existence in tranquility, feeding contentedly from the wellspring of time – even as marauding armies have arrived at its gates ready to waste and conquer, even as fire has rained from the sky. Perhaps this has always been the unspoken agreement between the city and its inhabitants. They are birds resting upon an ancient bough. If the wind blows too hard for them to keep their footing it … well, it cannot be blamed on the tree, can it?
When she arrives at the old house she sees several white-robed figures, two playing a game of chess, the others making suggestions; a couple stand a little way off, smoking pipes.
They are enjoying the shade thrown by the elegant umbrella pine that she used to climb as a child. She can still recall the rough texture of the bark against her bare shins and feet, the perfume of the sap discovered later in sticky clumps in the hair, between fingers and toes. At the sight of them, within her, that familiar kindling of useless fury.