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Last Letter from Istanbul

Page 27

by Lucy Foley


  He almost choked on his glass of beer. He assumed she was having her little joke with him – he smiled to show that he wasn’t a fool. But she did not return the smile.

  ‘After our affaire,’ she managed to pronounce it with the French inflection, which somehow made it a thing of romance and tragedy, ‘I realised I was in a spot of trouble. I did not want to bother you about it, until I could discover whether or not certain measures had been successful.’ She indicated the new fullness of her figure. ‘I think perhaps I do not need to say more. No doubt you guessed at my condition as soon as I entered the room, and you saw how fat I have become.’

  ‘No,’ George said, and heard the strangeness in his voice. ‘No, I did not.’

  They were married in a matter of days, with only a friend of hers as a witness, who seemed to look at him with a mixture of humour, contempt and pity. But it wasn’t terrible, he reasoned. True, they did not know one another well. He could not be absolutely certain that they would like one another better if they knew one another more. But he did admire her. And there was the – for want of a better word – sexual bond between them. There were marriages agreed on less. Besides, he might be killed at the front. In which case it could not matter greatly anyway.

  In the two weeks before he was posted home for good she lost the child. He returned to find a woman who bore no resemblance to the one he had married. She was desperate with grief, transformed by it. He saw suddenly someone who was not all poise and seduction, someone who needed love.

  He was extremely sorry for her, and for himself – though he had not even been sure before that he welcomed the news of the child, the responsibility that would be his when he returned home. As a man of medicine he was able to understand the critical changes that had taken place, how they had caused her to lose the child and why it was that she would most likely never conceive again. What all of his learning could not teach him was how he might help her. He tried taking her out to dinner, to the theatre, to a holiday beside the sea. He tried merely sitting with her, talking to her. But none of it seemed to have any effect. She was unreachable; catatonic with her loss. Something in her had been broken, but it was beyond his reach – beyond the understanding of his science. He saw as never before how little they knew one another; that really, despite the intimacy they had shared and the vows they had made, they were complete strangers. He became almost obsessed by the idea that if he only knew her better, he might have held the key to her recovery. And then there was his suspicion that what she really needed was love; and this was the one thing he was fairly certain he could not give her.

  Then her parents visited, and insisted that she came to live with them for a time; he did not object. There had been ‘problems’ before, he understood from them; episodes of hysteria in her youth. They had not wanted to worry him before now. He did not object, either, when they suggested that she might be better looked after in one of the kinder institutions available for women like her, who had apparently gone beyond the reach of their family.

  When he learned a week later of an opportunity back in the Near East, a hospital in the newly occupied Ottoman city, he approximately convinced himself that it was his duty to go.

  So he volunteered, yes: but could anyone say that his presence here has not been valuable, even essential?

  No one questioned his motives for return, that was the thing. No one knew of it, here – save for a discreet few.

  So here he has been seen as a good man, even a heroic man. Never a coward, or a scoundrel. Only he has known the truth.

  Nur

  Nur looks down the Bosphorus toward the Black Sea, from which an early autumn mist is approaching, thick as smoke.

  He has turned to her; she can see the pale shape of his face at the edge of her vision. She thinks there might be something pleading in his expression.

  Finally, with some effort, she turns, rising to an awareness of the sound of his voice like a swimmer surfacing from underwater.

  ‘It does not matter,’ she says. There is a coldness in her head, it has entered her words. She knows what it is: it is an anaesthetic, against the pain. She is grateful for it. It allows her to speak in a tone of someone discussing some regrettable – but slight – faux pas. ‘There has been nothing to be ashamed of.’

  She will not think of the warmth of a palm against her cheek. Of the contract of it, the promise in flesh.

  ‘Nur,’ he says, ‘I have to explain.’

  George

  ‘I do not love her.’

  ‘You married her.’

  ‘Yes. But—’

  ‘You made a promise to her.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘Then you must go back.’

  He realises what this is, with a new, terrifying clarity. This is the moment upon which a whole life turns. He will return to it, time and again, over the years. It will be with him until the end of his days. He must get it right. He has a vision of himself as a drowning man with his hands tied, unable to save himself.

  ‘’I mistook it – with Grace, for something else … something more. I did not have this to compare it with.’

  She says nothing.

  ‘There is something, isn’t there? Tell me that you know there is something.’ And by something, of course, he means: everything.

  What would he say to her if he could throw off the strictures and conditioning of a lifetime?

  He would say so much. He would say just this: love.

  She does not agree, or refute it. Now there is only a kind of pity in her expression: for him, for herself.

  ‘This has not been real,’ she says. ‘None of this. It is that which has made it seem possible, if only for a short time. Even before you told me, I knew it. It is absurd to pretend otherwise.’

  ‘I do not believe that.’

  It is true that he has thought of this place as an escape. His time here has existed in provisional, fantastic space – cloaked in a semblance of duty but free from real responsibility. It has been circumscribed by the knowledge of the inevitable return. But what he feels for her might be the only real thing he has felt in his life.

  ‘We could not live here: I could not live with the shame. You would never be accepted. We could not live in your country, because I cannot leave.’

  ‘We would find some way.’

  ‘Your guilt would be with you, always. And my shame. I do not know much of your country, but I know enough to be certain that people would not forgive you for what you had done. I do not think you could forgive yourself. It is important for you to know that you are a good man.’

  ‘Not as important as other things.’

  ‘You would become a monster. To others, but more importantly to yourself.’ The force of her logic is suffocating, devastating. She is not finished. ‘We would come to hate each other.’

  His vision is blurred. ‘I will come back.’

  ‘Do not say that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Do not say it, unless you can mean it. I do not think you can. There has been nothing between us of which we should be ashamed. You can go freely, without guilt. You have made no promise to me. So do not do so now.’

  ‘I mean it. I say it, because I mean it.’

  He takes her hand; she does not resist. With one finger he traces a semi-circle in the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.

  ‘I will come back.’

  The Prisoner

  Mustafa Kemal and his army are coming for the city, a nation’s pride will be restored, a new state born from the ashes of the old. The Eyüp coffeehouse plotters will have their triumph over the occupiers. The occupation – a broken promise, a humiliation – will come to an end.

  Despite everything, he has his freedom. But he is still a prisoner. He is not really here, in this city, nor in the prison camp in Egypt. He is back in the desert, seeing the faces that haunt his sleep every night. He has returned to hell. In truth, he has never really left.

  He finishes his letter. It is short,
but it has taken him most of the night. The apartment is quiet, sleeping.

  He leaves it tucked beneath her latest work of embroidery. She will find it: but not too soon. He has not attempted to acquit himself. He has merely tried to get it all down, everything, even those things that should be too horrible to put into words. She has to know the extent of it; the danger. The things that he has done with his own hand – worse even than the fire. He wrote of the things that have happened to innocent, simple, country-living people. To children. In the name of a state growing strong.

  This will not end because the war has ended. This is something older and deeper than that. There are those – I have spoken with them, called them my friends – who believe that if we are to move forward, to discover a new identity for ourselves, we must get rid of the elements that make us weak. Sameness is seen as strength: a unity of culture, belief, ethnicity. Anything that goes against sameness, therefore, is a threat.

  He briefly considered telling her all of it, in person. He imagined asking for her forgiveness. Then he realised that whether she could give it or not was immaterial because he cannot forgive himself.

  But perhaps there will be some venture toward understanding. Some comprehension of what a young man – not really a soldier at all … a schoolteacher – might, in the name of his state, in the name of honour and glory and victory and strength, be asked to do. How much he might be asked to give: an ever-increasing tally that ended with his humanity. Perhaps she will see that everything that has happened since has in some sense been an inevitable consequence of that.

  It is also – thinking of the boy now – a warning.

  You must find some way to make him safe – from people like me.

  A quiet crossing, very early morning. There are no passengers upon the ferry to witness the strange sight of a young man clambering from the deck and lowering himself into the Sea of Marmara – entering the water with hardly a splash. To watch him striking out purposefully toward the island where the dogs had been banished, long ago, because the city no longer had any place for them.

  The çay seller wonders, briefly, what has happened to the fare he was sure had embarked for Tophane and for whom he has now come looking, optimistically bearing his samovar, his tea glasses. The ticket collector wonders it too, but later, only when they have made a full circuit of the various stops and no one has disembarked. But by then there are new passengers climbing aboard, noise and chaos, change to be found and small children to be avoided on the perilous gangplank. And besides, it was very early – he rubs the sleep from his eyes – so he might have imagined it after all. He also considers the rather unsettling possibility that it could have been the brief corporeal appearance of a djinn, a bad spirit. He isn’t a superstitious man, but stranger things have been known to occur in a city as old as this.

  So there is no one to witness the final voyage of the young man, striking out manfully at first toward the distant islands (an impossible distance, even for a good swimmer). And then the pace beginning to slacken as his limbs grow tired, his head held a little lower in the water. The movements growing slower … slower, almost as though the swimmer has given up, as though it has all been planned, as though he had known he would never reach his destination. And unseen: the great, powerful current readying itself to sweep the body out to sea.

  No one to witness that involuntary struggle for air, the brief violence of it. Before the struggle subsides and the lungs are flooded and the eyes close and peace comes, perhaps, at long last.

  The Traveller

  After days of travelling – after interminable hours of unvarying countryside, of tedium and pains and longings for the journey to end, and fearing the end – the city itself comes as a surprise. I am not ready for it. I do not think I would have come back, of my own choosing. But I made a promise. We come first to the Sea of Marmara. Great rusty-hulled freighters in primary colours, either stilled at anchor or too huge and lumbering for one to see their movement. Shoals of smaller craft, sails scimitar-sharp. The light reflecting off the water is too bright – I have to turn away from it every few seconds. But then back to looking, waiting for the first glimpse, blind spots dancing in my vision.

  In this sea are the islands. There, somewhere, is the beach from which the sand came. And which I will not visit, I think, for fear of it having been discovered, peopled, littered, transfigured.

  Perhaps he would have gone back.

  But I am not him. The Scottish doctor who was so unlike me, who no one would ever have mistaken for my father, yet who I learned to love like one.

  Nur

  In the weeks following the departure of the enemy, the liberation of the city, she has a great deal of time for thought.

  There are celebrations. The city is liberated. A new, modern state will be born from the ruins of the old.

  But she is not thinking of this.

  She is not thinking of the other thing, either. She has known loss before. She understands the way in which it will work. It will be absorbed into the self, it will become a part of the self. A change will occur; mysterious, intangible, but definite. The person will be altered forever by it. But she will not think of that yet.

  She is thinking of her brother’s letter. The evil of the deeds described there. Perhaps she would not have believed in it, not really, until then.

  She would have ignored them, those other clues: Hüseyin’s warning, the sight George described in the desert, the children who disappeared from her classroom. Two fires. What was it that Hüseyin had said? That one could be too close to the thing to see it clearly. The idea – that she might have simply continued to overlook these signs, these portents – frightens her.

  But reading Kerem’s confession, written by a man who had no reason to lie, destroyed by what he had done, she finally understands. She sees the full horror of it; she sees the danger. She sees that she does not have a choice.

  Her skills as a correspondent do not match her abilities as a conversationalist. This is not the chief issue. There is also the fact that there is a great deal that cannot be said. They must be consigned to the realm of the impossible.

  There is also the fact that her hand is shaking so violently that she cannot seem to make her fingers grip the pen properly. At times she has to press so hard, to control the shaking, that the pen makes small rips in the paper.

  A first attempt has to be sacrificed, because the ink has run so badly it can no longer be read. The second time, she remembers to press her veil to her face so that she can protect the paper from her grief.

  She finishes thus: I understand that this is a very great and difficult thing I ask of you. I would not ask it unless I believed it to be absolutely necessary. I would not want to ask it. I do so in the knowledge of my own very great personal loss.

  She looks at this last sentence. Thankfully, it begins a new page. She discards it, and begins afresh. I understand that it is undoubtedly impossible. Nevertheless, I await your reply.

  She signs her name.

  This is how one story ends. But where another, possibly, begins.

  The Traveller

  We are nearing Sirkeci station.

  I remember a small boy. The snow falling, transforming the city into the most beautiful, least real, version of itself. The echoing space of the terminus, others milling about, buying tickets. They walk to a small kiosk with a couple of tables, the two of them. A small, domestic scene.

  They might have been mistaken for mother and son.

  Beyond the station entrance the snow continues to fall. Blanketing the city, perfecting it. This is how it appears to a small boy who presses his hot face against the glass as the train departs the station. Already like somewhere not quite real. A place from a dream.

  I open the old suitcase. It was old, this case, back then – when a small boy carried it beneath his arm, its weight unbalancing his stride.

  I find the book, draw it out. It is so fragile that I have had to encase it between two wooden boards. T
he spine is broken so that some of the pages, of their own accord, would otherwise attempt to come loose.

  It is of vital importance to my understanding of myself, and of my past. The contents have been my holy book, my way of belonging. And yet, though I have looked at it often, I have no real need to read the words upon the page. Since I was a very tiny boy I have had all of them committed to memory.

  Every single dish at my restaurant has its origins in these pages. It felt absolutely necessary that this was the case.

  Aubergine, rendered into smoke-flavoured velvet, studded with bright seeds of pomegranate.

  Courgette flowers, evanescently light, with white cheese and honey.

  A salad of chopped herbs, lemon, oil, which is the precise taste of the colour green.

  Pastry so fine it melts into nothing upon the tongue, leaving a delicate sheen of butter and sugar upon the fingers.

  ‘Grandmama’s stuffed cabbages’.

  Chicken simmered with molten, dissolving figs.

  My restaurant is called Stambol. Because that is what we called it, those of us who lived there, those of us to whom it belonged, who belonged to it. Constantinople was for the enemy, who could only understand it by the name that had been given to it by another Western conquerer.

  Sometimes I feel a fraud. I am considered, through Stambol, to be a kind of expert on a place: or at least one specific element of its culture. The truth is that the version of the place as I knew it is now long out of date, a version preserved as though within a glass dome – utterly false. I am about to be confronted with the reality of this.

  Food, for me, has always been a way of belonging. I know that this was what I was really trying to do when I opened the restaurant. It was more than the indulgence of passion and ambition, it was the creation of a place and time, somewhere in which I had once belonged. A resurrection. One critic wrote that he had travelled via the senses to somewhere he had never visited in life. ‘Each forkful,’ he wrote, ‘transported me, bodily, to a place of warmth and light, history and colour.’ This was a coup, especially from a man who tends to prefer starched tablecloths and French precision. But I was envious of him, too. Because try as I might – the most faithful interpretations, the most authentic, best-quality ingredients – I could never quite seem to make that journey myself.

 

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