Last Letter from Istanbul
Page 19
‘What sort of acts?’
‘The sort that show the occupier that we are not afraid, that we have not been cowed yet. The sort that reminds him what it is to live in fear of his enemy.’
George
He has been in a suite at the hotel, treating a Very High Up for a nasty bout of enteritis. On his way downstairs he decides to stop in at the bar for an aperitif. In the early evening the Pera Palace bar crackles with intrigue and – unmistakably – sex. Also the mingled scent of Italian cigars, Turkish cigarettes, English pipes. If Constantinople seems to contain the world in all its heterogeneity, then here is a distillation of the world’s seediness and glamour.
As he enters he sees four Italian officers at one table, gossiping like old women. At the next sits a Greek Orthodox priest, black-robed, luxuriously white-bearded, taking tea with two elegant women in beautifully tailored Parisian suits. Just beyond them, on the carpet, is a dark, reddish stain. Fainter now than it was when the blood was first spilled. It has been diluted, by the ministrations of some poor member of staff, from a puce exclamation to a rusty insinuation.
Bill saw it; he had been having a nightcap here when it happened. One minute the man was sipping his drink, he said. The next, calm as you like, another man – suited, bespectacled, ordinary in every degree save for the fact that his outstretched arm had ended in a handgun – had walked up and shot him. Dead. Clean, in the centre of the forehead, so there could be no mistake about it. The lack of fuss. Despite, or perhaps because of, four years of war. Bill said that some in the room hadn’t even started at the retort of the gun, and had barely glanced in the direction of the fallen man. He had been a Bolshevik spy, they claimed. The other man was a once lofty White Russian. Or … had it been the other way around? George had heard both versions of the story.
‘Afterward he disappeared, like smoke.’ Perhaps, George thought, being so unremarkable, he had merely taken off his spectacles, flung his gun beneath the nearest armchair (it was found there, later) and sat down to order himself a drink. Perhaps he is here at this very moment. Stranger things, here, might be believed.
In this very salon, no doubt, there are men becoming rich, some from the very pockets of the refugees who arrive at the Tophane quay. The idea that they sell – a new life, a fresh beginning, an existence free from poverty and persecution – as irresistible as it is false.
‘Monroe – I thought it was you.’
He glances behind him to see Calvert. He goes over, takes a seat. Calvert, he notices, is most of the way through a bottle of very fine white wine, and beginning to show the effects of the alcohol so markedly that George suspects it may not be his first. He checks his watch – six p.m.
‘Goodness, man – what is this in aid of?’
‘Nothing.’ There are two livid spots of colour on the man’s cheeks. ‘Damned nothing. But I say, Monroe, it does gall … when a man makes a smart gesture and has it refused.’
George looks about the bar. He finds the culprits quickly enough; there are so few women here, and these are the only two, somehow, that seem eligible. ‘Don’t look at them.’ Calvert sinks a little lower in his seat. ‘I do not want them to think I care a fig for their poor manners.’
George covers his mouth and coughs. Behind the shield of his hand, he grins.
Perhaps Calvert sees him. He is sharper than George remembers to give him credit for, even after the good part of a bottle of wine.
‘But you don’t have these problems,’ he says, his tone ominously light. ‘Do you, old chap?’
‘Calvert, as ever I fear you are too subtle for me. What can you mean?’
‘They say one of them comes to visit you at the house. A woman. A Turk.’
‘Who told you that?’ Not Bill, he thinks, please. He would not have thought that Bill, even with his disapproval of the arrangement, would stoop so low as telling a man like Calvert.
‘Rawlings. You remember – you treated him.’
‘I remember his pipe. My ward still smells of it.’
‘Well, we’re in the same digs now. Sly old fox, I said. Wouldn’t have thought you were the sort, Munroe.’
‘It is not at all like that. Rawlings, typically, has got entirely the wrong idea about something that should be extremely clear.’
‘He said it was extremely clear.’
‘Well then I can only say that he has chosen to see precisely what he wanted to see.’
‘I should say that whatever you tell me, Munroe, I’m fairly certain I’m not going to be convinced.’
He wishes that he did not feel the need to explain himself to a man like Calvert. He tells himself that it is not merely a matter of pride. A man like Calvert could prove dangerous.
‘She came to me because her son needed treatment – very urgently, one of the worst cases of cerebral malaria I have seen since Mesapotamia. I had little choice other than to treat the child. It is what I do.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she is … how did Rawlings put it? A “looker”?’
‘I had not noticed.’ Even to his own ears, even though he means it – or at least thinks he means it – it does not ring true.
When he leaves the bar he feels an urgent need for a cigarette. His hands are clumsy with the tobacco, the papers, he makes a mess of the first and has to give up on it. He is quite literally shaking with anger. Partly at Calvert – though mainly at himself. He should not have stooped to trying to explain himself. That is what it is: damaged pride. Not, definitely not, because Calvert’s questions came too close to a truth he has worked hard not to acknowledge.
Nur
‘An utter disgrace,’ her grandmother is saying. ‘Gül hanım, you know, from downstairs, tells me that there are Ottoman women taking their refreshments in the Pera Palace hotel these days, surrounded by the most unsavoury elements. And,’ – a scandalised undertone – ‘one hears of even worse. One hears the most despicable rumours. They say there are those who have married the occupiers. Women from the very oldest families.’
They may not be mere rumours. On perhaps three or four occasions, Nur has seen an Ottoman woman walking with a foreign officer. The first time she saw it she stared for so long and so hard that the woman must have felt her gaze: she looked across at Nur with something like defiance, and Nur was first to drop her eyes. Walking through the old quarter of Fatih, where some of the most illustrious families have lived for centuries, she sees a French officer watering a flowerbed. A woman leans from the shutters above, calling out instructions: a little more for the yellow tulips, which were particularly thirsty. She watches them, realising as she does that what she feels is a sense of trespass, a quiet outrage. Yes: she disapproves.
She had thought little would shock her, in this new reality – in which transgression is now the normal state of affairs. Yet this does. What do these alliances mean? Are they born of convenience, of pragmatism? Matches here have frequently been made on the basis of little more. Yet these, across language, culture, religion, are something new. They are occurring in full defiance of belief, too: a Muslim woman is forbidden from marrying a man of another religion. True, for one from a background such as Nur’s this would not necessarily prove an obstacle: her family has never been particularly strict about such dictates of the faith. Her father and mother drank wine, none of them save her long-dead grandfather have ever fully observed Ramazan.
How might her life – all of their lives – be different, bettered, if she were to do the same? It would not be so difficult. On every excursion through the busier parts of town she has felt herself observed by the foreign men as an object of curiosity, even of desire. They would have access to better food, better living arrangements; they might even reclaim the old house. She is certain that her mother’s condition might be improved by a return to her beloved home. Surely it would be worth being despised for such gains? When she thinks of it like this it seems almost a kind of selfishness that she has not sought out such an arrangement.
And yet
she could no more do so than she could walk into one of the new Pera establishments and offer herself up for a more nakedly transactional agreement. She knows that it is not her grandmother’s inevitable wrath that would prevent her – or not just, though it is a convenient excuse. It is her own pride.
George
The boy has the book open in front of him.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘I understand the pictures better than the words. There are many I do not know.’
‘Of course. But I am impressed that you can read any of it. Where did you learn your English?’
‘Nur hanım.’
He finds it odd, the way the boy refers to his mother like this. An Ottoman tradition, perhaps, just as the fact that there are no surnames. ‘Of course. She is a school-teacher?’
‘Yes. Though there are not as many lessons now. Most of the pupils have left.’
‘Ah. Well, I am sorry to hear it.’ He is; he cannot imagine her, somehow, as a person who would enjoy idleness.
‘Now she embroiders linens. For money.’
‘I see.’ He knows little of this woman, but for some reason the image of her sitting for painstaking hours over an embroidery is an incongruous one. He cannot imagine her being still. He sees that the book of fairy tales she brought the boy has remained unopened on the bedside and feels an unexpected pang.
‘And what do you normally like reading?’ he asks. ‘In your own language?’
‘Recipes.’
George thinks there must have been a misunderstanding in the boy’s translation.
‘Recipes,’ he says, humouring, ‘what sort of recipes?’
The boy looks at him, tolerantly, as though he does not mind dealing with a fool; he has enough time on his hands. ‘For food. Instructions for food.’
‘Oh,’ George says, and, unable to think of anything else to say, ‘why?’
Again, the sense that the child is humouring him. ‘To cook food from.’
‘You cook food?’
‘Yes.’
George has never heard of such a thing. Young boys, according to his sphere of knowledge, are interested in the same pastimes he was as a child: mainly sport – in all its wonderful variety – and animals. Specifically dogs. Perhaps horses.
‘I did not realise that little boys liked cooking,’ he says. ‘I think you must be rather unique. But then of course I am no expert.’
The boy listens frowningly; George senses his concentration as he translates the words. Then he says, ‘Why? You have no little boy of your own?’
‘No,’ George says. ‘I do not have a son.’ The child is still looking at him with that peculiarly bright gaze, which George has only recently come to realise is his own, not the work of the fever. Before it he feels … what is the word? Excoriated. As though a layer of himself had been removed. He thinks of those images produced by the x-radiation machines that reveal the secret inner workings of the self, hidden malignancies. ‘I think,’ he says conclusively, ‘I’ll leave you to your books. You will be tired.’ He leaves the pile beside the bed, turns to go.
‘I could cook for you,’ the boy says. ‘I have learned the recipes. They’re here.’ He taps his forehead, for emphasis.
George thinks of the vast stove downstairs, the one Sister Agnes never lets him near, other than to heat coffee, the odd tin of bully beef. She is justified: these, after all, are the extent of his culinary abilities. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it is very kind of you to offer it. But you are too poorly at the moment to be out of bed.’
It is convenient that it is the case: he doesn’t quite know what he would say if the boy were well enough, such is the eagerness in his expression. And he still isn’t defeated.
‘I can tell you what to buy. You can go to the bazaar.’ In his animation his command of the language seems to become even more fluent. ‘I can teach you, everything.’
George sees that he has argued himself into a corner. It is absurd: this is a hospital, he a doctor, with responsibilities and very little time to call his own. Moreover it is a military hospital; the child should not even be here. He might say all of this, and be done with it. Yet there is a problem. He wants the boy to like him. Mainly for the simple reason that he likes the child. But there is something else: he cannot shake the idea that if he succeeds, he will prove something about himself to himself. Then, perhaps sensing weakness in his hesitation, the boy grins. George is powerless to do anything but nod.
‘All right. Perhaps just once. I have tomorrow morning free. If you tell me the things you need, I can get them.’
He cannot quite believe what he is saying. How the other men would laugh at him if they knew of it.
The bazaar is a labyrinth of roofed alleyways. The clamour inside is subject to odd distortions. Outside it has begun to rain, and the air held within is damp, faintly mist-hung. As one looks about the bright hues seem to bleed, slightly, like watercolour paint. George knows that he is observed as he passes. When he turns, though, the stallholders look away, busying themselves with their piles of goods. He wonders what experience they have had with other British soldiers thus far. He imagines – because it is more likely than the opposite – that there have been abuses of authority. Some of the men seem to be particularly zealous about discovering and stamping out dissent among the local population.
He has decided to walk to the spice bazaar – the Egyptian Spice Bazaar is its proper name – via the Grand Bazaar, which spills into it. There are things he would like to buy here. Tobacco, for example. Perhaps something sweet, too – he has a schoolboy’s taste for sugar. But that particularly British fear of being misunderstood, of making a spectacle of himself, prevents him. The sheer scale of the variety on offer, too. The stalls he passes that are selling tobacco seem to have thirty or more varieties; he would not know where to begin. He finds one that smells about right – not too perfumed, not too acrid (he feels suddenly like the Goldilocks of pipe smokers) – and asks the man for a quantity of the stuff.
Now that he has a bag on his arm, that it is clear that he is here as a buyer – not an enforcer of some Allied law – the other stallholders are encouraged. They come forward, making suggestions. In the jewellery bazaar, men approach him with great furtiveness, casting wary looks about them, and then whip away pieces of unremarkable cloth to reveal jewels of staggering size and brilliance: a great square-cut ruby, lucent sapphires, a round, grass-green emerald set with a coruscation of diamonds. Suddenly he understands the secrecy: the value of some of these pieces must be astronomical.
‘For your wife?’ one man asks, proffering a slim gold bracelet. Then, hedging his bets, ‘Pour votre femme?’ and impressively, ‘Per tua moglie?’
‘No,’ George says, ‘no, thank you.’ He pushes past the man with more force than is perhaps strictly necessary. He is suddenly tired of this place.
Onwards, driven by the surge of the crowd. Onwards, abandoning any pretence at knowing his route now, accepting that he is truly lost. He strides through these unknown streets and past unfamiliar faces like an automaton with one purpose: to keep moving forward. The crowd demands it, the streets too. He passes two women with their veils thrown back from their faces. One gives him a frank, appraising, amused look. And then suddenly he is out in the open air. By some accident he has found his way into the streets between the two bazaars.
He smells the spices before he sees them. Then they appear before him in bright, impossible cones: mustard yellow, red, umber, greenish brown. Smaller piles of dried rosebuds, so perfectly pink, so tiny and well-shaped that they look hardly real. Herbs: thyme and rosemary … and – he hazards a guess, bending near – lavender? No, something else. A foreign musk, lacking that astringent perfume. Tumbles of roots in varying degrees of size and gnarliness. The scent is almost overpowering. The tempered sweetness of aniseed, the warmth of cinnamon, the Christmas pudding spice of nutmeg, the tang of ginger cake. And with these aromas, evanescent, shifting, he catches threads of memory – lost before he
can fully examine them.
He looks at his list. Rosewater and saffron, ginger root, cinnamon bark. He has little idea what any of these look like, though he may know some of their flavours. Luckily the stallholders seem to know the names of their spices in English – perhaps in every language, for he hears another conversing in halting French. Some of the items on the list are surprisingly expensive. Of course, having no idea of the market price for such things is hardly a powerful position to negotiate from. Yet he feels oddly satisfied at his success in procuring them. Looking at them – flower stamens, a water made from petals, a twisted tuber, the bark of a tree – he cannot imagine how they will be translated into something edible. He begins to wonder if he has been had for a fool.
He leaves through another entrance and is propelled, blinking, in the newly sunlit air. It might be a different day. Here is an absolute contrast with the chaotic former frenzy of the market. He is suddenly alone, in a street in which the shadows fall blue and dappled, cool as a glass of iced water. Where did the people go? This street has no shops, only a row of shuttered-looking houses. That distinctive Ottoman style, tall and elegant, with an embroidered look to the wood and the upper floor projected precariously above the lower.
There is the sound of water, echoing upon stone – turning the next bend he happens upon a fountain sending out a confident plume of water into a stone trough from a great bronze spout. At the far end is a tiny, black-cloaked figure. An elderly woman, extending one time-clawed foot into the green depths, bending down to wash it. When she has departed he too stoops to the plume of water and cups a hand, sluices the fine layer of perspiration from his face. It is very cold, moss-scented, drawn from some secret underground place. A Roman aqueduct perhaps – they had their way with water. Though they stole it from the Greeks, who were here before. It could be thousands of years old. Or it could be only decades. Impossible to say: everything this city, this place of myth and history, can cloak itself in borrowed age and renown.