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Last Letter from Istanbul

Page 25

by Lucy Foley


  He does look. The wing of the house is a blackened, sodden mess, as though a giant hand had scooped a great cavity out of the property. The few timbers that remain, forlornly intact, look like the ribs of some giant, charred animal corpse. A desultory steam rises from it. There is a strange illumination now, and he turns and realises that this is because dawn is now upon them: the sky above them looming pink and gold, as though it, now, is aflame. He looks about, to thank their Turkish helpers. He finds that they have all gone, almost as though they never were.

  She stares about her, white-faced, at the wreckage of the ward. When she looks at him she glances quickly away again, but then this is hardly a surprise. Half of his face is covered in white gauze, which does not quite conceal all the ragged edges of the burn. Pure acetic acid, that had been kept in a vial beside the quinine, and used for the treatment of infection. It ate into the soft flesh of the cheek, and he will bear the scar of it forever. He was lucky to keep the eye. Finally, his first war wound.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I forget what it must be to see it like this, your home.’

  For several minutes she is silent. She circles the detritus, as one appalled but unable to look away.

  ‘I imagine you will want to take the boy home. As I am sure you are aware, the fire impressed itself upon him deeply. I do not think he is quite himself.’

  She had gone to the boy, and held him. No words had been exchanged. There had been such tenderness that he had felt he must look away, even leave the room. It had been a tenderness of a very particular, almost sacred nature. He had thought, before, that it could only be found between a mother and her child.

  She looks up back at him with the blank eyes of a sleepwalker. Gradually her gaze seems to find focus. ‘All of them survived? Your patients?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She seems to sag a little with relief. Her face contorts. She seems to be working herself up to something.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The man. The one they found this morning—’

  ‘The arsonist? Yes. They caught him as he was trying to escape, though of course he will no doubt claim otherwise.’

  ‘He is my brother.’

  ‘Your—’ He stops, confused. Because he cannot think of anything else he says, ‘I thought – forgive me – that your brother was thought dead.’

  She opens her mouth as though to speak, and closes it again, as though thinking better of it. Finally, she says, ‘We did not know until recently. He was held in a Russian camp. He returned to us several months ago.’

  He feels betrayed. All this time, when she has been coming here, she has not trusted him enough to tell him. Then he catches himself. But of course she had not trusted him; how could he have expected more?

  Her brother. Thoughts chase themselves around his mind. There is one that is almost too terrible to approach, but it must be said. ‘Did you know that he planned to do this?’

  At this she steps forward. For a second he actually thinks she might be about to strike him. ‘You think I would have known,’ she says, caught somewhere between entreaty and outrage, ‘and not tried to stop him, or warn you? With the boy there? How could you even ask such a question of me?’

  ‘I do not know.’ Everything seems different, now, nothing certain. Because there has been a deception, or at least a concealment. She never spoke of the return of her brother, and suddenly this seems to him like an odd omission.

  ‘You cannot think that of me. I have been afraid of him. Perhaps I should have seen … but I could not have imagined this. It is … as though we did not get the same person back. The war did something to him. He went to it when he was so young. He had not had the chance to become himself—’ She stops, then begins again. ‘If my mother lost him again … if we lost him again – for her, for all of us, it would be …’ The language fails her; she seems unable to find a word bleak enough. Her posture is rigid, like a soldier standing to attention. He sees that her eyes are dry. There is something honest and naked in the appeal.

  And yet. An incident of this nature only serves to remind one that there are clear sides, that there are still enemies. She is not on the same side as he: does it not stand to reason that she is on the other?

  He draws himself up. ‘He attempted to burn down a hospital,’ he says. ‘With twenty-six men in it, most too weak to escape on their own. With a child in it. They could all have died.’

  ‘I know. I cannot believe it. But I do not believe he could have meant it,’ she goes on, in a rush, not allowing him time to refute her words. ‘I know him. He loves … symbols. I think he wanted to do something symbolic. I do not believe he would actually have wanted all of them to die.’

  She cannot see it, he thinks. She is blinded by the all-powerful subjectivity of her love. Perhaps she should be allowed to protect this illusion, if nothing else. But he cannot stop himself from saying, ‘If it were to be a symbol, why a hospital? Why not a military barracks? Because he was certain of those inside not being able to save themselves? To fight back?’

  ‘Because it was our house. I imagine he thought it was … not his right, but something almost like a duty.’

  He remembers the figure glimpsed in the furious light cast by the flames, blank-eyed, still as a fox. He meant it.

  He summons his resolve. ‘I do not think I understand. What exactly is it that you are trying to suggest I do?’

  ‘No one was killed.’ Does she really believe that it is this that makes the difference?

  ‘They were not spared on his account. He left it to burn. If he had had his way, every person in that building would have been burned too.’

  ‘I am sure, now – seeing what he could have done – that he feels remorse.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’

  ‘Because this is not the man he is. He is a good person, a kind man, a schoolteacher’ – he scoffs at this – ‘and because I know him.’

  ‘Because you know him, or because you cannot see past your love for him?’

  ‘I am asking you to give him a second chance.’

  ‘Even if I wanted to, there is nothing I can do for him now. His fate is not my decision. They have him.’ His own use of ‘They’ gives him pause. It creates a distance – one that seems to him vaguely unpatriotic, and which he is not sure whether or not he intended.

  ‘There will be a trial?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will be there as a witness.’

  He sees now, clearly, what it is that she is asking of him. He had suspected it, but to hear it aloud is another matter. That she has the nerve to suggest it, to him, standing here maimed by her brother’s crime, astounds him. And, knowing the little of her that he does, it shows him how desperate she must be.

  ‘You cannot think …’ he lowers his voice, ‘you cannot ask me to lie about what I saw.’

  ‘I am not asking you to lie,’ she says, quickly. ‘I am asking – I suppose I wanted to know – how certain you can be of what you saw.’

  He thinks back to the night. Already it has about it the surreal atmosphere of something dreamed. Or, rather, a story told to him rather than something he experienced firsthand. He finds the figure, within this memory, and he is perhaps the only clear point in it, the one element without blurred edges. And yet there is something uncanny about it, the closer he looks. The pale face, the blank eyes, the animal poise of him. The figure now appears not quite human – too poised, too clear: more like the idea of a perpetrator than anything real. He had seemed almost like part of the fire itself, an agent of chaos. He cannot imagine how an ordinary man, in the light of day, in the banality of a courtroom, will match up to him.

  He shakes his head, to clear it. ‘I have to be honest about what I saw,’ he says. ‘Surely you understand that?’

  She remains silent, expressionless. Somehow, despite everything, he feels that she has retained the high ground in the exchange.

  ‘You should not have come. You should not have asked this of me.


  He sees movement beneath the mask she has made of her features, some spasm of pain. He sees, briefly, the control she must be exerting upon herself. He closes his mind against the thought.

  The Prisoner

  He is afraid.

  How?

  He is afraid of himself.

  When he had lit that match it had ceased to become his, like a giant beast escaping the leash. But all of the death, that was his.

  He has tried to close his mind to it. But the images come, still, as he lies in his temporary cell. He wakes half-suffocated by the smoke that seeps from his dreams.

  He tries to weep. For those who must have been killed. For himself. And for the others, the ones before, the faces that visit him in dreams.

  But his eyes are dry. All tears have been scorched from him.

  George

  The temporary court is convened in an empty school building. The room in which proceedings will take place, presumably, was once where assemblies of the children took place. He thinks, inevitably, of her.

  She took the boy that morning. Whatever understanding, whatever tentative accord there has been between the three of them has been severed. It might have always been so, when the boy was no longer his patient, but the fire has made it irrevocable. The building has been very quiet without the child, without her visits, as though something more than what the fire took has been burned away. But in every book upon the shelf, in the coffee pot upon the stove, in the fall of blossoming wisteria which somehow escaped the conflagration – for God’s sake, even in his own gramophone – he sees them. He is trying not to consider the fact that he may never see either of them again.

  Without looking, he knows when the prisoner has been brought in; a hush falls over the company. Somewhere behind him is the agent of that night of chaos and he is suddenly fearful. Because that figure had not been quite real to him and now he is about to be confronted by what felt to him as much a projection of his own mind, an inner darkness, as a human being. He is passing within a few feet of George now, and George watches his back – surprisingly slender, shoulders narrow as a boy’s – as he is led toward the makeshift dock.

  George looks at the young man in the dock. It is him, of course. There is no doubt in his mind. And yet at the same time it is not him; the resemblance seems physical only. On the evening of the fire there had been a particular energy and intensity to him. All of this now is gone. He is diminished. He looks extremely young – how old can he be? Twenty at most? His shoulders are thrown back in a posture of defiance, but this somehow draws attention only to their narrowness, makes him look more like a child defying its elders. He refuses to make eye contact with any person in the room, his gaze fixed upon some point on the wall. The makeshift dock is become an island. The condemnation of the courthouse, silent, seems to surround him like a sea.

  George reminds himself that this man wanted to kill him; to murder his patients. Pity here would be misplaced. And yet he thinks perhaps he has never seen a less threatening figure.

  There is something in the expression that he recognises. He has seen it in the faces of other men. It is born of war. For a medical man it is a frustratingly intangible condition, and yet it is immediately recognisable.

  He understands his strengths as a medic well enough; they are the same that revealed themselves at St Bart’s some eight years previously. He has a particular talent for identifying the early stages of disease, and even for recognising the subtleties of hybrids, or entirely new pestilences. One might say that it is an art as much as a science: there is a certain amount of intuition required, brave leaps of judgement.

  He has never been such a good surgeon: his hands simply do not have the requisite dexterity. One can be taught, to an extent, but there is only so much that practice can achieve. It is equally impossible, as one of his tutors told him, for a poor sculptor to ever become a great one. There is something missing: the evasive magic of talent.

  At the front one had to be something of a jack of all trades. One morning might present fifty cases of cholera, or a man losing his lifeblood through the stump of his severed leg. Perhaps a badly infected boil, ready to release its poison into the bloodstream, or a blight of dysentery that could fell a whole squadron. Though at least these afflictions were tangible, visible, and could be treated practically. If one did everything according to an established set of criteria – and the patient was not beyond help – there were fair odds on saving a man. What George found more difficult were the invisible, internal afflictions; those that took up residence in the mind. It did something to all of them, but it did something more to some.

  The first time he came across it was in 1915, at the aid post at Anzac. Scores of wounded had been lying upon stretchers awaiting treatment. He had been kneeling in one corner attending to an injured man when a shell had exploded in the midst of the station. Many of those on the stretchers were killed instantly, where they lay. But the man he had been attending had been relatively unharmed, beyond the injuries he had already sustained. And yet … George would think later that it was like something had broken inside him, some hidden part of the mechanism. A tiny but essential cog, already loosened, rattled out of place. Everything on the surface remained intact, so that one could not see the fault until the thing tried to work. His mouth had opened and closed as though he were trying to talk, but no sound had come out. There was nothing physically wrong with the throat as far as George could ascertain: only seconds before, the man had been talking.

  It had been more unnerving, somehow, than the grisliest injury. George had slapped him, hard, across the cheek in an effort to shock sense into him; it had had no effect. There was no process for such an injury – that was the thing. He had grown frustrated with the man, had shouted at him. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, old man. Come on. Talk.’ Later he had been given up as a bad job.

  Later than that, in a moment of singularly lucid calculation, the chap had put a pistol to his head and blown his brains out.

  There is only one symptom, and it is in the eyes. Oh yes, he sees it now.

  At first the prisoner is silent, as though stunned – or perhaps it is an attitude of defiance. But beneath the repeated, violent questioning something in him seems to collapse.

  Finally, through the translator, he begins to talk. He denies everything. But the fact of his talking is in itself a weakness, a yielding, one step nearer to a confession. The crowd feel this, George senses them scenting blood.

  — What had he been doing that evening, at that hour, if not up to no good?

  He had been attempting a night-fish, the translator explains for him, with a lantern. He has a household to feed; they must understand.

  A pause is left, just long enough for the absurdity of this answer to sink in.

  — But of course it would make sense that you should have to go fishing at night. As you are so busy during your days meeting members of the Karakol at the coffeehouse?

  — I meet with my friends. Can a man not have friends?

  The pugnaciousness only seems to delight his interrogator.

  — You must admit that you have an interesting, and rather specific, choice in friends.

  It goes on like this, and George feels the sympathies of the room harden further against the defendant. There is something like excitement in it, too, he feels – several times an order for quiet has to be barked. If they had their way he senses there would be jeering, heckling. He wonders what these upstanding gentlemen would say if one told them how much they have in common with a group of Russian peasants observing a bear-baiting.

  He can find no entertainment in it. He alone, save perhaps the arsonist himself, knows exactly what is at stake. He only wants it all to be over.

  Nur

  It would have to be now, of all mornings, that her mother should decide to regain some of her lucidity.

  ‘Where is Kerem?’ she asks her daughter, as Nur combs the thin skein of hair before the mirror. ‘I wanted him to accompany me
for a drive to the city walls.’

  Not quite lucid, then, Nur thinks. Enough, though, that Nur has to lie to her, which she had not been prepared for.

  ‘He has gone out early,’ she says. ‘And he came back late last night – after you were asleep.’

  She sees a shiver of suspicion in her mother’s gaze, before her eyes lose their clarity.

  ‘Well. We must make sure to have something nice for him to eat when he returns. Tell Fatima to go to Mahmut Paşa.’

  Her grandmother is silent, as though the roles have been reversed. She may have heard what was said when the Turkish police came to the apartment and informed Nur – some intimating sympathies with the prisoner – of what had transpired. If not, she suspects something. For the first time, Nur thinks, she looks truly old.

  George

  ‘It is not him.’

  There is a collective intake of breath. George does not blame them: he is surprised even at himself. He did not know until a second before he spoke that this was going to be his answer.

  Until then he had believed exactly what he had told her; that he could not do it, because of all that was at stake.

  — I suppose you mean that you do not recognise him.

  He can hear the relief. Ah yes. Not the same thing at all as a total rebuttal. It can be overcome.

  — Considering the circumstances, the danger in which you found yourself, it is hardly surprising.

  The way back is offered up to him. And perhaps he could now retreat, and allow them this possibility. He has not gone so far yet that the decision cannot be reversed. It isn’t really a decision after all, when one considers it, only the impulse of a moment. But he knows within his own mind that there is no turning back; it is done now.

  ‘No,’ he says, and clears his throat, so that there can be no mistaking his next words. ‘This is not the man I saw that night. I do not recognise him because it was not him.’

  There is a long silence.

 

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