Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  ‘The swifts were my favourite, though,’ he tells the boy now. ‘They’re a kind of bird … with a forked tail, like this.’

  In a snatched half hour of idleness he had liked to lie on his back and watch the swifts’ movements. They could move together at will, as one, in perfect synchronicity, through some silent, mysterious knowledge. It moved him, though he could not quite say why. They came here because their ancestors had come, for thousands of years.

  The boy’s eyes are almost closed, he sees. But he thinks that he might still be listening, so he continues, all the same.

  ‘In the evening they came to eat the insects. They were so fast, so precise. Like a needle moving, like this.’ He makes the darting movements with his hands. Then, hardly conscious of what they are doing, his fingers move to the embroidery that has slipped to the end of the bed. The gilt thread is rough against his fingertips. He can see that needle moving too, so fast, so precise.

  The boy is fully asleep now. That is good; he needs to rest. And yet he feels a strange kind of loneliness, left as he is now with his recollections.

  He had envied those swifts. To live in such a state of grace, unhampered by heat or cold, or all the problems that humans created for themselves in the needless complexity of their lives. Animals did not recognise the boundaries between lands – or rather, only the borders created by the seasons, the abundance or scarcity of food. Man had been like that once. Where had it gone so wrong? Long, long before this: before Alexander the Great, perhaps.

  And where did it go wrong for him? His own slide from grace, hidden beneath a cloak of duty? Rather easier to pinpoint. It is going to be even easier to convince himself that he is doing the right thing, the moral thing, now there is a child to look after.

  But the truth remains: Medical Officer George Monroe is, in fact, a coward.

  The Traveller

  From Lausanne to Venice there is a restaurant car. I sit and have a glass of white wine and a meal of tough chicken, slightly raw potatoes and green beans that have been overcooked into limp greyness. I eat as much of it as I can stomach, and promise myself that I will make up for the deprivation when I reach my destination. I can still taste the memory of the food there: that alchemy of sweet and sour, fruit and meat together, the sumptuousness of the oil.

  I take a sip of the wine. It, too, is indifferent – but there is a certain decadence to it, this lunchtime drink, with the splendour of the countryside rushing by. An afternoon sleepiness comes over me: what is it about travelling that makes one so tired? All I have done since this morning is sit. But I did not sleep well last night on my hard foam bed. It was partly the discomfort and the racket of rain on the glass, partly the volume of my own thoughts. There is an emotional density to this journey, a burden I will carry all the way there.

  Around me are pairings or quartets of diners. For the first time I wonder what they make of me. A lonely soul, perhaps, on a solitary journey.

  I know exactly what is necessary to remove the sour aftertaste of the wine. Back in the couchette, I take from my suitcase a wooden box. Upon it is the image of a magnificent building, but faded over the years so that only the faint impressions of the gilded domes remain. The clever sliding mechanism of the lid still works smoothly, however. I draw it back to reveal the plump, sugar-dusted cubes within and allow myself one. I am getting stout: a combination of too much food and increasing age. No sign of the slim young man who had no fear of running to fat.

  I let the sweetness and the delicate perfume fill my mouth before I chew. It is the perfect consistency, yielding, but not too soft, this piece studded with pistachio nuts. For a long time I could only find in England that insulting translation of loukoum, the stuff they call ‘Turkish delight’: food dye, cheap sugar syrup, that overpowering hit of synthetic rose.

  It took me a long time to source loukoum like this, the proper sort, which we could serve to customers with their coffee after a meal. That would be worthy of keeping inside this box.

  The Boy

  Behind his eyelids the swarm of stars remains, like a secret. The doctor gave him liquid from a spoon. It killed the pain, and summoned the stars. No: now the stars are changing shape, breaking apart, elongating. They are becoming small, fast birds with forked tails – thousands of them. They move beneath his eyelids and he watches them, half in awe, half afraid … though he cannot say why.

  The doctor has grey eyes. He is about the same age as the boy’s father was, but he is much taller. He does not wear this height like a threat. And yet the man – the doctor – is English. The boy knows some English, he learned it at school. The enemy are English. He knows this, and Nur knows this. He wonders how she could have forgotten. Perhaps because she was so frightened. But he cannot help wondering again if this is her way of getting rid of him. Perhaps the old woman complained, because he criticised her cooking. He doesn’t want to believe it, but enough terrible things have happened to him in his short life already that he knows anything is possible.

  The enemy kill Ottoman men. He isn’t sure how they feel about Ottoman boys – but then he isn’t really an Ottoman boy, as the old lady is fond of telling him.

  The doctor seems kind. He likes birds. But already he has learned that things – and people – are often not what they seem. He will be ready, ready to run if he has to. At least, he will be ready, only after he has had a little more of this strange, bird-strewn sleep …

  Nur

  It is difficult to ignore the fact that the boy seems like a shadow of his usual self. Today she sits with him for only half an hour before he drifts into sleep. She cannot decide whether she should stay a little longer, in case he wakes again, or leave.

  There are noises from the ward on one side, but on the other silence. This door, she knows, leads through to the sofa – once her favourite room in the house. Holding her breath, she gives the door a little push. It is empty.

  The walls are covered in hundreds of painted tiles; an indoor painted garden of cypresses, vines, hyacinths, violets, dog roses, cherry blossom, pomegranate flowers. All of which, at various times of the year, could once be found in the real garden without. As the waters of the Bosphorus shift beyond the windows, an interplay of light and shadow occurs within: something more than a mere reflection. More a sympathetic reply – as one dancer might echo, but not match, the movements of a partner.

  In the centre of the room is a şadırvan, a marble fountain, with the edges of the bowl scalloped like the inside of a shell. Once the water fell from it in a silver stream. If one sat on the divans that line the room it was almost impossible not to be lulled into a state of tranquillity. The water is stopped now.

  There is an austerity in the room today. With the fountain silenced, the walls gleaming frigidly, the atmosphere is that of a beautiful mausoleum. The shadows moving upon the walls seem now like trapped memories.

  There is a sound behind her; she turns. It is the English doctor, stepping through the door.

  ‘This is my favourite room,’ he says.

  His possession of it, his choosing of it. She could not speak even if she wanted to, all that could come out, she feels, would be the hard gust of her anger.

  He pushes a hand through his hair. ‘I like watching the ships,’ he says, ‘passing up and down the Bosphorus. Imagining where they are travelling to and from. Though most of them, I fear, are full of refugees these days.’

  It does not soften her anger, this knowledge that he shares her old pastime. It only makes her own experience seem inauthentic, somehow, less uniquely hers. She is so intent on not hearing him, not letting his words settle upon her, that it is some time before she realises he has stopped talking. He is looking at her, instead, curiously.

  ‘This is my house.’ She isn’t even certain that she says it aloud or inside her mind – only realises he has heard when he makes a polite cough of surprise, an Englishman’s cough. These English, with their civility – politely colonising half the world.

  ‘I beg you
r pardon,’ he says. ‘But I thought—’

  ‘This is my house. It was my house, my family’s. It was taken from us by our government, and then by you from them. Your army took it.’ She is almost pointing at him. Her use of the second person is no mistake: she wants him to feel the wrong of it. ‘You were not content with merely taking the city; you had to take people’s homes.’

  A long silence as he digests this.

  ‘Well—’ he says, and falters. He seems stunned.

  Now she is frightened: she has gone too far. He would have had to have been deaf not to have heard the threat in her tone. She waits, as is her lot as the conquered, to see what he will do with her.

  George

  Her house. Now he understands. Her face on that first morning, coming to visit the boy. Ah, but before that, too – when he had found her barefoot on the jetty, and Rawlings had thought her mad. She had been paying a visit to her past. Now he has the cipher with which to translate the expression she had worn, stepping inside. Sorrow, curiosity, a kind of hunger.

  Now he is confronted with her anger. He had thought Bill ridiculous, talking of that first visit by her as though it were a threat. Now he sees that he has underestimated her. There is something dangerous about her fury. He should reprimand her. But he cannot quite bring himself to do so.

  Instead he looks about and through this new lens sees it as a reflection of her. The elegance, the refinement.

  How strange it must be to see it so transformed, into a place of white linen and prone male forms, scented with the alkaline tang of the iodine, and the smoke of Lockett’s cigars.

  ‘I had not considered,’ he says, ‘I was told that it had belonged to a …’ he stops, and thinks better of speaking the word, the one the general had used: traitor. ‘That it belonged to someone the Ottoman government – your government – did not get along with. But I had assumed, I suppose, that they were dead.’

  ‘My father is dead,’ she says, and at his expression, ‘illness, not by their hand, although …’ She stops herself, and lapses into silence, lost to some private inner reckoning.

  ‘When did you leave?’

  ‘During the war. We were given a day to leave. We took the things that were the lightest, and the most valuable. The rest we left.’

  ‘You must take them now. I will help you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do not want them?’

  ‘No.’

  He struggles to understand. ‘Because …?’

  ‘We have no room for them. You have seen where I live.’

  Yet he does not think she has quite told him the truth. ‘You could sell them.’

  ‘Some foreign books, some English paintings? No one wants such things. Not for anything more than a few piastres, at least, and I am not willing to sell them for that.’

  He thinks perhaps he has pressed her harder than he should, but he cannot help himself. ‘It seems a brave thing to do, then, to leave them in a deserted house, where any thief might have helped themselves.’

  She takes a breath. ‘I left them here,’ she says, ‘because with them, we remain. And one day we will return.’

  He nods. Now he understands.

  ‘It is our home. It does not change because we no longer live here.’

  ‘Of course not.’ He agrees because it seems necessary, but he is not sure he can quite see the truth of it. There is something pitiful in the attempt to leave a mark of ownership upon the house in this way. These things have seemed to him like the possessions of someone dead. Even now, knowing that they belong to her, that feeling remains. They have the cold, finite quality of artefacts on display in a museum.

  As he sees it, all they seem to do is emphasise the loss of it – the disappearance of the life that was once here. He had felt that sense of trespass before, when the house was anonymous, when for all he knew its inhabitants were dead or gone far away. He cannot imagine what it must be to see your family home colonised by the enemy and with it every memory created within its walls. He has always been able to think of his work almost entirely as a force for good, set apart from the politics of war. Now, for the first time ever, perhaps, he is oddly unsure.

  The Prisoner

  He expected a throng. A cheering crowd. He is not alone; they have all believed it. They have waited for it through the strange, interminable journey. Every one of the men on board is up on deck for this moment. They are the long-lost war heroes.

  Three years have passed since the end of the war. Four since the British captured him, by that river, in hell. The monotony of incarceration, of desert heat, of other bodies in close proximity. No word from the outside world: as though the world had forgotten them. And yet he has been grateful, in an odd way, for these years. They have given him the time to relearn everything that happened. To reforge himself.

  Finally they are home.

  The city, beautiful as ever, is slumbering beneath a warm autumn morning. But it seems too quiet. Like a place slumbering beneath a spell. No crowds. Only a smattering of khaki-clad British on the quay to receive them. From this distance the British soldiers are tiny figures, dwarfed by the hull. And yet their upturned gazes seem to absorb the ship, to take possession of it. It is theirs.

  A little further off stand a smattering of locals, but they do not cheer or wave. They look up at the ship and its cargo in silence, as though staring at a phantasm, some strange mirage from the past.

  It is late afternoon before anything happens. Finally, four officers board the ship: two British, two Ottomans. One man calls out to the Ottoman officers: ‘You may not recognise us, but we are your brothers.’ They avoid catching his eye.

  In contrast with these two men, red-fezzed, immaculately uniformed, they can see how much they have all changed. They have not had the yardstick for comparison, until now they have only had one another. And they are all pitiful: sunburned, emaciated, though perhaps most of all those who have been blinded, and stare about with milky unseeing eyes, who cannot even see their beloved city; struck down as they have been with the mysterious disease for which no cause or cure could be found.

  They are allowed from the ship, finally, if they can provide an address in the city. For a few moments he is struck dumb. The words will not come to him, only the idea of a place. Water, calm, trees. It seems impossible, now, an idyll – like somewhere glimpsed in a picture book. The version of himself that lived in that place is very far away now, too. The officer waits, eyebrows raised. When finally he produces it, from some hidden well of memory, the man hardly seems convinced. But he is allowed from the ship.

  In the streets people glance at him and look quickly away, some flinch involuntarily with shock. He catches a glimpse of himself in a gilt mirror outside a stall and sees a haunt-eyed spectre. He looks like a wretch, a beggar. He reminds himself of all that he has done, all that he has sacrificed. I am not to be pitied, he tells them silently. I am to be thanked, praised … but not pitied.

  He knows what he is. He is an embarrassment to them. They would rather not see him in their streets. He is like one of the stray dogs. Not so long ago, the Mayor of Constantinople ordered the removal of every one of the animals, which had been inhabitants of the city for as long as anyone could remember. Some eighty thousand of them were rounded up and taken on boats to the most inhospitable of the Princes’ Islands, Hayırsızada, a sharp spine of rock rising from the Marmara Sea. Most of the dogs had died of thirst and starvation – some had even drowned trying to swim the distance to the boats that had abandoned them. Those few that did not die had lived off the seagulls they managed to catch – and each other. In the end these survivors were brought back, returned to the streets where they now lived as a reproach to the city’s mistake. This is he: a bitter reminder, a source of shame.

  He makes his way to the white house like one in a dream.

  There it is, unchanged. Home.

  He can hear the sound of their voices.

  The reckoning will come now. Will they see the ch
ange in him? Will they know what he has done? This is the first proper test of his new conviction. He summons the words of the new language to himself. Necessity. Righteous. The Future of the Nation. He begins to stride toward the house.

  But there is something wrong. It is an animal knowledge at first that tells him this, deeper than thought – like a bad note scented on the air. Then he realises that the voices are wrong. He sees white-clad figures, men, a number of them. He sees khaki green. He hunkers down, out of sight. He catches the words now: a foreign language. He sits and watches and is filled with a terrible new understanding. This latest, worst trespass: the colonisation of his past. The one thing that had been left good and whole. He will find some way to revenge this.

  Nur

  On her way to deliver her embroideries she stops at Haci Bekir – the best confectionary shop in the city. The scent of powdered sugar makes her mouth water.

  This errand is performed, oddly enough, on her grandmother’s instructions. ‘The Englishman has done us a favour, now we must show our gratitude. That is the way of things. Really you should have done this on the first visit, canım. I am surprised at you.’

  ‘But Büyükanne,’ she had said, ‘he is our enemy. Surely it would look—’

  ‘I am thinking precisely of how it would look, girl. It is only right. We cannot allow our standards to slip merely because the enemy is boorish and uncivilised and has no sense of decorum. We can show them up by our example: it is the last weapon available to us. And,’ – this part reluctantly – ‘though it no doubt cost him very little, because the enemy may do as he likes, he has shown us a kindness.’

  Nur is not convinced that she can quite share her grandmother’s view, but she sees that there might be wisdom in the act.

  She was rude to the English doctor; she let her anger get the better of her. She cannot afford to fall from his favour, not with the boy so ill. If she cannot quite bring herself to be civil to him in her speech then a gift is a less complicated way of currying favour.