by Lucy Foley
Then the mother appears from the lower deck, in paroxysms of rage over the waste of the small crust of bread. George is somewhat relieved to be absolved from responsibility, to be able to look away.
As the ferry approaches the city a hush seems to descend over the passengers. Even those who have made this approach many, perhaps hundreds, of times seem awed by the sight. It does look particularly majestic at this hour, with the lights just beginning to come on. The final glow of the day seems to halo the skyline, surrounded by the encircling stain of dusk. He looks at it with eyes glutted with beauty.
The Prisoner
His thoughts have become fixated upon the boy. A pupil from his former days as a schoolteacher: an Armenian child, a figure who seems to have taken his own place in his sister’s affections, who now occupies – along with the English doctor – the house that was once his home. The boy is a representation of all that he has lost, intimately connected with his own misfortune. In some rational part of his mind, he knows that it is absurd. Yet he cannot help what he feels; a deep, violent hatred of this child who is a manifestation, a mockery, of his own fracture.
This hate gives him a kind of power. It provides the focus that his other pitiful attempts have lacked.
Now he begins to feel excitement. The very violence – the audacity – of his idea begins to thrill him even as it frightens him. It is like something growing inside him. One thing that the years of imprisonment gave him: a peculiar focus, an intensity of thought. When a person’s surroundings are so unvaryingly bleak, the inner world gains a new richness and texture in compensation. In certain circumstances it can become more real than that outside. At times he can summon the fact of it so vividly to himself that he believes it has already happened, that the power of his own thoughts has been enough to effect it. He wakes soaked in sweat, his heart hammering in triumph and fear.
This idea is shaped by his experience. In particular, by that cold that on so many occasions almost conquered him – no coincidence, then, that his thoughts should tend in this particular direction. An element in which things are fundamentally changed. An element in which, if one is to believe the myths, something – someone – may be made new.
That military cunning that deserted him in the face of the Russian advance now returns to him. He begins to plot. He needs a boat, and he needs the catalyst, the thing with which he will invoke his chosen element. It is beautifully simple. The craft will be easy; he has only to ask Erfan, whose father is in the boat-making business. The catalyst too: any schoolboy knows how. He is ready.
But the lives.
Necessary?
Necessary, yes. A sacrifice. An example. And part of something beautiful: part of this making new.
But Nur.
She is afraid of him now anyway, he can see it. And she is changed from who she was. She seems to have become hard, angry, fearless. His guilt is tied to the old version of her, the familiar version. She is gone.
But the past.
But what help has the past been to him? In fact, it must be annihilated. It can have no part in the man he is to become, or the country that is to rise out of these ruins.
The English occupiers. The boy, the Armenian boy. Everything that he has lost is the fault of these enemies. His house: colonised. His humanity: the things that were asked of him because of the Armenians’ betrayal, those things that have made it impossible to return to the person he was in his old life. His sister: who now appears to be loyal to these enemies rather than to her own flesh and blood.
Here is the thing he has been searching for: the thing that will go some way to filling the void within. A purpose.
Nur
When Nur visits the hospital the next evening the boy asks the doctor. ‘Have you shown Nur hanım the gramophone yet?’
In spite of herself she is intrigued. She has never seen one before, though her father had, and had described it to her.
And yet the object the doctor shows her is more strange than could ever have been conveyed in words. It has an almost submarine beauty, she thinks: the brass trumpet shaped like a shell. She walks around it, studying it from every angle. The doctor enumerates the parts for her with the precision of a medical man.
‘It’s yours?’
‘I found it in a small village on the Caspian Sea, when we were passing through.’
‘You took it?’ She does not try to keep the censure from her tone.
‘I bought it. Contrary to what you may have heard, the British army are not plunderers. Not as a rule.’
‘How does it work?’
‘I will show you.’
They gather nearer, the three of them. He winds the handle, gives a huff of exertion. Then, with great delicacy, he lifts the small brass arm that extends upwards out of the base.
‘Look below,’ he says.
She obeys.
‘See it? The needle? That’s what tracks the tune.’
‘How?’
‘It is all written, upon this disc.’
She looks hard, but cannot see anything other than concentric circles.
‘I don’t quite understand it either.’
She glances up, and sees his smile. She finds herself returning it.
Now, with infinite care, he moves the arm into place. She sees how elegant his hands are – like a musician or an artist’s – the dextrous curve of the thumb, the tapered pale ovals of his nails; the hands of a doctor.
And then she steps back in shock. Sound is pouring from the thing. She had known that it would, and yet she had not expected it, at least not that it would be like this. The clarity of it – but not merely of one single tune, rather a whole orchestra. She can discern the separate parts, the strings, the wind. Can it be called music? It has all the discordancy of the jazz she has heard flooding out of Pera streets, but it is different again: violins, flutes, the high shrill voice of the piccolo. There is a violence to it. It speaks of things broken apart and reforming, forcing their way up through the old. It speaks of things growing, and things being pulled apart. The old torn asunder. The wonder and terror of the new. It does not try to be liked … it does not want to. It simply is: brave and vulnerable and fierce and strangely beautiful and hideous and, above all, new.
It is some time before she realises that she is weeping. The boy is looking between her and the needle, as though fascinated by both. Nur does not think the doctor has seen; his head is bowed, his eyes almost closed. A great relief. She turns away from him, and puts a hand to her face. Her glove comes away half-sodden; she is amazed.
After they have returned the boy to his room, and she has bid him good night, the doctor turns to her and says in a strange rush of words, ‘I wondered if you would dance with me.’
There is a crackling silence, in which his words seem to echo. She is so surprised by his question that she has forgotten to immediately decline. She is reminded of that first day, when he asked her if she would join him for coffee. The shock at the transgression: as though no one had taught him the rules of how it should be, between Occupier and Occupied. But this time, of course, it is something different, so much more.
To his credit he seems almost as shocked by the question as her. He is first to recover his voice. ‘I apologise,’ he says, ‘that was absolutely …’ he is searching for a word, ‘absolutely inappropriate.’
That gives her pause. Inappropriate. It is an interesting choice.
Because, really, what is appropriate about the situation? And by this she is thinking of the wider situation, not their own. This occupation is inappropriate. Unsanctioned. The requisition of homes across the city – some, unlike this one, in which families still live alongside the occupiers. Or the fact that there are some twenty half-clothed men lying in a room that used to be reserved exclusively for women. The colonisation of private, intimate spaces as ordained by states and governments. Or even the fact that a man like her brother – so gentle, a schoolteacher – should have been commanded to go to war and transform himsel
f into a soldier.
All of these things, suddenly, seem so much more inappropriate than the simple act of moving in time to music with a person one has come to see – against the odds – almost as a friend. She thinks, too, of all the people so desperate to disapprove of her, simply because she goes out into the city to earn her living, because she does not cover her face. She remembers the shame of passing those French officers, the way they had seemed to view her presence in the street as a mark of promiscuity, of permissiveness.
It is this memory, most of all, that decides her. If there is one place in which she will not allow the concept of propriety – of inappropriateness – to dominate her actions it is here. Her home.
This is why she shakes her head, and says, ‘No. You are mistaken. I would like to dance.’
The doctor is taken aback. It is as though he never thought she would accept his invitation or – more likely – never quite meant to make it in the first place. It was the music, perhaps, the strange magic of an entire invisible orchestra filling the empty space. The still air in the room now seems like a held breath. Does the house disapprove of her? This house is part of the former way of things, and that world, certainly, would disapprove. But the old world is gone. If, when, the occupation ends, there will be no resumption, no wholesale return to the old ways. That world has fractured. They must find a new way. They must re-inhabit it.
The doctor removes the Stravinsky, and chooses a new record.
‘A waltz,’ he says, and then flushes, as though he has said something indecent. He places the new disc upon the spindle. She thinks she sees his hand tremble in the action. The mechanism itself: the elegant curvature, the burnish of the brass, the dark recess of the horn, seems newly to acquire an eroticism that embarrasses her – that seems so emphatic she cannot believe she had not seen it before. He must see it too.
That half-buried night with her dead husband. The fumbling darkness and then the surprise of a new sensation shameful, voluptuous, complex, insisting on itself through the discomfort. Not quite anything in itself but the shadow of something, the promise of it.
He takes her hand in one of his, places the other above her hip. His touch is so light that if she could not see her fingers in his, against her waist, she might think she had imagined it. And yet for a moment she is pinioned by shame. She thinks of her grandmother. She thinks of Kerem. All certainty has deserted her.
Then the music begins and she steps into it.
George
Ah. Now, here is a problem. He has managed to think of her in terms entirely unrelated to the physical. But now there is scent and warmth and breath, and her hand, in his. The soft indentation of a waist beneath the silky stuff of the dress. Now is the unarguable fact of her, human and … yes, beautiful, yes, desired.
Even if it had not been so long – and all of that fraught in memory with difficulty and guilt – even then he would desire her.
He is a coward. He has ignored this aspect of himself, concealed those other motivations even from his own sight. He is a coward because he asked her to dance, when it should never have happened, and because he will not put a stop to it now, though he should do so immediately and perhaps salvage something from this intact.
He is a coward because he has allowed her to think him good, and noble, and not like others. He has hidden the truth of himself from her.
The Boy
They think that he is asleep. But he knows how to be quiet, as quiet as a cat. He has slunk so silently from his own room and into this one that he might be just another one of the evening shadows gathering in the corners. The music is pouring from the wonderful machine. Nur hanım and the doctor stand very close together and her hand is in his. The two of them move together with the same kind of magic that holds a formation of birds in perfect synchronicity. It is pleasing to watch them, as it is pleasing to watch anything graceful, but he senses that there is also something dangerous in it. He is reminded of that day when Nur hanım had suddenly seemed so small to him, surrounded by the other people in the street, and he had been afraid for her. He is afraid for her now – though, again, he would not be able to explain why.
Nur
That night she wakes from strange dreams. The unconscious world of them so lucid that the real one seems thin by comparison. But as with so many dreams they are elusive. She cannot summon them to herself logically, or in any complete form. She is left only with a feeling. She would rather forget this too.
She presses a hand to her face and finds it hot. As she does she feels, more vividly than she does her own, the sensation of another’s fingers. As she rises from beneath the sheet she remembers the weight of a body. Not a suffocation, a longed-for weight. No, she reminds herself: longed-for only within the realm of the dream. And more: the warmth and tenderness of skin. Of breath, of blood beneath the skin, of lips, of hair. There is a rhythm to these images, they seem to chase one another through her memory without end, a serpent swallowing its own tail.
The bedroom, of course, is empty. And yet at the same time it is strange to find herself alone.
She knows that these are not real memories. They are not of the husband she hardly knew, and lost.
Nur sits, and waits for the shame. It is something of a surprise when it does not come.
Now, in this unguarded hour, her mind feints toward the impossible: plays with it, turns it over, teases it out. And in doing so there are brief inversions by which it ceases to appear impossible. It is madness to think like this. There has been no spoken understanding between them. Yet at times it feels as though there has been something both less and more than that.
In the early morning she takes a ferry to her secret place. Amidst the cemetery at Eyüp, among the figs and cypresses – life and death – time seems to stand still. The city is very far away here. There is a melancholy, as there must be in such a place. But also peace. In the avenues among the tombs the light is green and ancient. The old white marble is tinged by it.
Some of the graves are hundreds of years old, the stones seem to sag with the effort of such a long stretch standing upright. Names now are obscured by time; all those who once remembered them are long gone, too. This is the real death, perhaps, when one is gone entirely from living memory.
But here one is close to the past. Sometimes, here, she feels if she reached out her hand she might brush away the thin veil that separates the now from the then.
The fig leaves, as she moves past them, release their scent. It is her favourite smell. She takes a folded leaf and crushes it to her wrist to release the meagre sap, just to keep the fragrance with her a little longer.
A grey cat follows her out from behind a tombstone, mewling. He has a white smear across one eye, comic, as though he has rubbed his face in paint. She bends down to him. His coat is surprisingly silken for a stray: there is a pride, she thinks, in the way he cleans himself, meticulous, with that rough pink tongue. Only his once-white paws, now permanently grey, are a testament to a life spent trotting about the refuse and dust of the city’s streets.
Now he stops, delicate nose aloft, and goes absolutely still. She wonders what has spooked him. Another cat, probably.
They have terrible fights at night, the city’s cats. Fights that sound as though they go almost to the death, so loud and anguished are the cries. But she has never seen any of them with anything much worse than a scratch. They are wise animals, they know how to keep themselves alive. A bad wound would fester, could prove fatal. The important thing is not to invite the danger in the first place. Everyone could learn from them. She could learn from them.
She bends and he allows her to caress his ears, the delicate bones in the side of his face. His eyes close in brief bliss, he presses his skull with surprising force into her hand. Then he pulls away, stretches first front-then hindquarters, watches a leaf skitter across the ground, momentarily alert, settles himself on the patch of dirt immediately before him, closes his eyes. To be an animal, she thinks: to go about one’s
business as always and eat and sleep and be content. Nur takes another step. It must be just the wrong movement, she yelps with pain. The cat opens one quick amber eye, searching the ground for the small prey that might have made the sound. Disappointed, he shuts it again.
She bends and massages the ankle bone. The pain reminds her of another stumble. A dropped book, an English soldier. Scottish, she reminds herself. A Scottish doctor. That was what started it all, of course. Most unhelpful of him to make himself agreeable – firstly by his act of gallantry in picking up her book, and second by not embarrassing her on the jetty. It was so much simpler when she could hate them all universally, absolutely.
She pulls a fig from the branch above her, and knows because of the force with which she has to tug that it is not ready. It is far too early. A sticky sap spills itself onto her forearm. She bites into it, and the taste is as bland as she deserves, the unripe sourness puckering her lips. But the promise of what could be is there, in the fragrance of it. She casts it away.
She takes the long ferry home to Tophane. Rounding the nub of the headland she can just make out the white shape of Maiden’s Tower. Kız Kulesi, a small, lonely edifice rising from the sea two hundred yards or so from the Asian shore. The story is one of those fables so well known to Nur that it might almost be part of her own family history. And yet she still remembers the first time she heard it. They had been passing by in the kayık, on their way home, and her grandmother had pointed it out to her.
‘Can you see it?’
‘Yes,’ Nur had replied. ‘But it isn’t a very big tower.’ Not like the one in Galata, built by the Italians who had once been here. From which you could see the whole city laid out before you, right to the ancient walls. And beyond: the distant dark humps of the Princes’ Islands, the vertebrae of a sea-serpent’s spine, slumbering in their blanket of mist. She doubted that one could see much at all from this small, squat edifice, and surely that was the very purpose of the tower?