Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  They disembark at the last stop before the channel widens into the haze of the Black Sea. The stop is a small fishing village; a straggle of houses and a couple of simple wooden jetties for moorings. Above here, Bill tells them learnedly, is the Byzantine fortress.

  They climb out of the place, upwards, with the heat building until it begins to feel suffocating. The cool of that first hour on the ferry is hard to imagine now. The scent of the hot vegetation rises about them. A small gecko runs out across George’s foot – anticipating a snake, he jumps back. The other men laugh at him. They climb until his clothes stick to him with sweat. They have all become soft, he realises; they have not had this much exertion since the war itself.

  Suddenly Bill gives a shout. They follow his arm and see ahead of them, up the path, great gun emplacements pointed toward the sea. As they look closer, they see that the surrounding hillside all about has been pockmarked by shells, huge chunks of ground torn up, the grasses only just beginning to cover them. Closer still, and they see the Turkish script at the base of the emplacements: the stars and crescents stamped into the stone.

  ‘I didn’t know we bombed the Bosphorus.’

  ‘Not just the Bosphorus, doc,’ Howarth tells him, cheerily. ‘The city, too.’

  George thinks of the crowds milling daily over bridges and in marketplaces, funnelled through the thin cobbled streets at the heart of the city, and feels a little sick.

  They descend by a different path to a rocky beach. As they near the water, all of them, by some unspoken agreement, begin to unfasten shoes and roll off socks. All, that is, except for Bill, who decides to remove everything he is wearing. He stands there, scrawny and pale, with a bib of red where the sun has caught him above his shirt collar, and everything above his collarbone an entirely different colour to all below, proud as an emperor. This is enough to make them laugh. But even more so when a small kayık with three figures in it – three women – appears round the nub of the headland.

  Instantly Bill is transformed into a cringing, shrinking figure, hopping across the sharp stones to cower behind a screen of rocks which are not quite up to the task. No one thinks to tell him that while most of him is hidden the entirety of his white backside emerges above the rocks like a strange beached sea-creature. Perhaps even if they wanted to they could not form the words: they are beside themselves. George cannot remember the last time he laughed quite like this – stomach clenched in an almost-agony, gasping for breath. Every time he thinks he has recovered himself the images will return: the scurry across the hot beach, the coquettish emergence of Bill’s white bottom.

  The kayık has disappeared from view – it never did come near enough for there to be any real danger of embarrassment. Now they wade into the water and remove their clothes surreptitiously, piling them on a large flat rock that emerges in a dry shelf. It is mercifully cold, despite the heat of the day; a preparation is still required before the plunge. They become schoolboys for a time, splashing and jostling – teasing Bill until the joke has been fully used up, as though it is some precious rationed commodity from which they must take every morsel. Then, little by little, each enters his own private realm.

  George turns onto his back and sculls a little way away from the group. The sky above him is vast. It is a strange tension of opposites: his body held in the water’s cold grip, his face warmed by the sun. From the shore, faint but distinct, comes the scent of pine and herb. Heaven, he thinks, would be something rather like this – at least in his book. After this thought, inevitably, comes a small splash of guilt. But he has to strain, almost, to feel it. Home seems so far away – and somehow hardly real, as dreamlike a place as Constantinople would have seemed had he tried to fathom its existence back in London.

  ‘Gawd,’ Briggs says, scattering these thoughts like a pebble pitched into a shoal of fish. ‘I’m starved.’

  ‘You always are.’

  ‘A tapeworm, probably …’

  ‘Take that back, you scoundrel. I have a healthy appetite, that’s all. A man’s appetite. And the food here: all that spice. Like trying to eat something splashed with a woman’s parfum. Give me … roast beef and potatoes, no flavouring but gravy.’

  ‘Fish pie.’

  ‘Kidneys in brown butter.’

  Groans of agony and pleasure.

  They want to go home, George thinks. They’ve stayed on, what … for an adventure? A chance to see more of the world? A little extra in the pay packet? They don’t have any vestige of this thing that exists within him. The desire to stay. Or, to call it by its proper name, the fear of return.

  On the journey back, Bill makes his thoughts on the new patient’s arrival clear. This is a hospital for officers of the British army, not for small Turkish boys.

  George is circumspect enough to know that he might have felt the same if the situation had been reversed.

  ‘I could not refuse.’

  ‘No,’ Bill said. ‘But you should explain now that you will need to move him. The Red Cross are taking in refugees, locals – they would take him.’

  George respects Bill too much to think of reminding him that he is of an inferior rank. More than this, he knows that Bill is right. ‘I need to keep him at least until we can be certain he is clear from danger.’

  ‘Because every time you let her into the hospital you expose us to more risk. What if, one day, she decides to bring a gun with her? She – yes – a woman, could kill most of the men in the ward before we had time to stop her. How do you know that it hasn’t been her plan all along? That the child isn’t merely a ruse?’

  George is irritated. ‘You are starting to sound rather paranoid, Bill. Perhaps you’ve had too much sun.’

  ‘I think perhaps you are the one who has been dazzled, Monroe.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, exactly?’

  Perhaps Bill decides that he has made his point, or perhaps he remembers that George outranks him. Because now he says, placatory, ‘I understand that you feel a duty of care. But afterward?’

  ‘I will consider the Red Cross.’

  This is the first time he can remember lying to Bill. They have shared more than most brothers. He has told the man his fears. They have wept together. George has even shared with him his personal burden of guilt. And about that Bill – though he perhaps did not understand, or approve – kept his counsel.

  Why the lie? Why the certainty?

  It is due partly to the child, he knows, the responsibility he feels for this young patient. It has awoken something latent in him. And it is due partly to her, the mother. Perhaps if she had fallen to her knees and begged and wept, it would in fact have been different. It is her fortitude that compels him to do this thing for her.

  Nur

  In the small hours of the night she wakes to hear a tapping downstairs – so quiet that at first she dismisses it as a percussion of the wind. But it persists, soft, but too regular to be any fluke. Someone is outside. Her first thought is of the boy, the doctor; something is wrong. She dresses, and hurries down, opens the heavy door as quietly as she is able. She is so surprised by the sight of the figure on the other side that at first she cannot make sense of it. She steps back, goes automatically to close the door again, believing it must be an apparition, some figment of her dream carried over into life. This is not the first time she has thought she has seen him … in the streets of the city, boarding a ferry, through a window. But he has always eluded her before; whenever he has come close enough for her to see his features they have resolved themselves into those of a stranger and her mistake has been evident. She has accepted that all she has seen is an imprint of memory, a ghost. But now he is near enough that there can be no mistake; she can see the mole on his cheek, the double fold of the eyelid of his right eye that does not quite match the left.

  He puts out a hand, holds the door.

  ‘It’s me, Nur.’ The voice is his and yet not his – there is a new, raw quality to it. ‘Let me in, quickly. I don’t want to draw any m
ore attention to myself than I have to.’

  She steps back without saying a word, still half certain that if she speaks it will all become real, he will disappear back into memory. But he follows her in, a presence coherent enough to move the air.

  Now, in the lantern light, she is surprised that she recognised him at all. He looks like a beggar, worse than the ragged Russian White Army officers seen on street corners. His hair is matted, it does not look like human hair at all, but the rough bristles of an ill-kept mule. There is more grey in it than black. In each cheek there is a crease, a worn fold. There are black patches upon his cheekbones, as though the skin there has died, or is in the process of rotting away. His lips are scabbed, ulcerated, as though they have decided to part ways with his face. Oddly enough, these changes in him persuade her that he is no apparition. Because, if he were, he would surely appear as his old self, whole, the one known to her.

  Her little brother.

  She risks speech. ‘But where—’

  He makes a motion for her to be silent, pulls the door closed behind him. He moves like an animal. Just above the stink of sweat and unwashed flesh she detects the metallic odour of alcohol, the anise tang of raki.

  ‘I went to the old house first.’ His voice has been changed too, is low, harsh, and it too speaks of pain. There is nothing of the old affection in it. It will come, she decides, one cannot expect it yet. Now she realises that they have not even embraced yet, have not exchanged the expected words of love. They will come.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘In hell. There were men there, Nur, at the house. Englishmen—’

  ‘We thought you had been killed.’

  ‘I think perhaps I was. Or something like it.’ There is a rattle in his voice that seems to come from somewhere deep in his lungs.

  Now the stifled joy rises in her. ‘They said missing in action. But we couldn’t let ourselves believe it. So many were really dead. Missing came to mean—’

  He has raised a hand to silence her again, as though he has been continuing a separate conversation in his own mind.

  ‘I have been in the desert. A prisoner of the British army: the same one that has taken over our city.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘For four years. They did not think to let us come home when the war ended. They let us rot in there for another three years after the Armistice was signed.’

  ‘Oh, Kerem …’

  ‘The people here looked at me in the streets like I was an animal. They backed away from me; small children pointed at me. Is that how we welcome our war heroes? I have done things … things that should be asked of no human being: but necessary things, for the good of all. And this is how I am received.’

  ‘What things, Kerem?’

  Even as she asks it she isn’t entirely sure that she wants to know. He does not hear her, or he chooses not to – either way she cannot help feeling relieved that he doesn’t answer.

  She would like to embrace him but she senses that he would not allow it.

  ‘I have maggots in my feet, Nur, fleas in my hair. I am disgusting, yes: I can see that you think it, just as the people in the street thought it. But this is what they made of me.’

  ‘We will get you clean. You are home now, Kerem.’

  Perhaps he does not hear or feel the tenderness in her voice; he shows no sign of it. Instead, he says: ‘This is not my home. This is a hovel.’

  She frowns to bring him into focus, trying to overlay this new character, this stranger, upon the image of the former. He is different in almost every respect. She cannot believe the changes in him. He was so mild before; allowing others to make decisions on his behalf. But this must always have been in him, mustn’t it, written in secret somewhere? This latent fire.

  ‘I cannot believe it, Kerem. I’m – so happy.’ She isn’t, though she knows that she should feel unmitigated joy. Instead it is something more akin to fear; she is too unnerved by the change in him. But perhaps if she keeps saying it, with enough conviction, it will become true. Besides, he doesn’t seem to have heard her. He stares, blankly, at the portrait of himself hung upon one wall. She wonders what he is thinking, if he is considering this change too.

  Finally, he speaks. ‘It is late now. I’ve travelled a long way. Every part of me is in pain. We can talk properly in the morning.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She cannot sleep. The night sounds visit her: the screech of a cat fight, the haunting call of an owl. She lies, wide-eyed, exhausted but relentlessly awake, and waits for dawn. She cannot shake the feeling that there is a strange presence in the house, that something has come back with him. It does not feel like a homecoming.

  In the morning her mother sits silent in her corner. She does not take her eyes from Kerem, except, occasionally, to glance up at the treasured portrait of him, smiling down at them. Nur cannot begin to guess at what is occurring inside her mind. In some lucid part of it is she recognising him, celebrating his return? Or is she seeing all that is different in him? Is is she trying to reconcile this wasted spectre with the ruddy painted youth upon the wall, who now seems almost to be flaunting his health, his wholeness. When Nur had dared to imagine her brother’s homecoming, in the early time before she resigned herself to his loss, she thought of it as the key that would unlock her mother’s silence, return her to herself. Somehow, she had thought, everything else would be easier to bear with him restored to them. She sees now what a foolish dream that had been. Because in that version he had been a little thinner, a little older, but unmistakably himself.

  Even her grandmother is uncharacteristically quiet. Before she understood that this is what a homecoming might look like, Nur would have expected her to shout the triumph of her grandson’s survival from the rooftop, to summon their neighbours to come and bear witness to the war hero returned. Instead she sits in her chair, twisting the brilliant rings upon her fingers. And unlike Nur’s mother, she hardly looks at Kerem: when she does it is with an expression of bemusement, even pain. Nur has never seen her so discomfited.

  In the light the state of his physical degradation is all the more evident. Nur finds herself emptying most of their weekly supply of yoghurt into a plate in front of him, drizzling it with ladlefuls of honey, several handfuls of nuts – cutting him a third of their weekly loaf and insisting they have plenty. He eats like a starving man – which of course he no doubt is – unaware of his surroundings, of anything at all, until the food is gone. Then he seems to surface. He is more beautiful with the thinness. It almost hurts to look at him.

  There is so much she would like to ask him; about the places and things he has seen. It would be a way of understanding him, the changes that have occurred in him. But she senses there is also much that she is afraid to learn. The greatest change, the one that unnerves her most, is not something external. These physical blights will heal with time. The thing that Nur feels, as only a sister can, is something beneath the skin. She can find no trace here of the gentle brother she knew, the man who only ever wanted to share his learning with others. Someone – something – new and fierce has taken his place. She thinks of the old stories, of djinns who could take any form, including those of humans – those of loved ones. There was often something striking about them that would give them away, though. Some quirk that had not been present in the original … the eyes, often it was that. She understands this now as she never has before. Because there is something different about his eyes: or perhaps behind them.

  She would not admit it to anyone, even if she had anyone to whom she could speak of it. But the truth is this: this man sitting at the table is a stranger. And he frightens her.

  The Prisoner

  To come home and discover this: his family living like paupers. His mother an invalid. She has become a mad old woman. She stares blankly ahead, as though the mind has long ago taken flight of the corporeal self. He sits beside her, tries to coax some sign of animation from her.

  He reaches out a
hand, to touch her arm. She flinches away with such force that the pitcher of water beside her is knocked to the ground with the terrible crash of breaking pottery. The blank-eyed look has briefly given way to one of terror.

  ‘Djinn,’ she hisses, accusingly. ‘Djinn!’ And he knows that she truly believes that she is looking at a demon. He feels a shadow of the old horror creep into the room. He sees a woman beside a river, and other faces, old, and young …

  ‘No,’ he shouts, as she begins to wail. ‘No – Anne, please!’

  Nur rushes into the room. She hunkers down, strokes her mother’s hair, soothes her, murmurs words that are almost like song – a lullaby. She turns and looks at him with unbearable pity. ‘It will take time, Kerem. For her to understand … to come back to herself.’

  He sees that his sister has covered her hair with her veil, as though ready to go out. There is a paper bag in her hands.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She gives a small, involuntary flinch – so small that perhaps only a brother would notice it. He is sure before she even speaks that it will be a lie. ‘To the school. I am teaching there now, Kerem. I am not sure I am as good at it as you, though. The children—’

  ‘And what are you holding?’ He snatches for one of the boxes before she can stop him, prises it open. Inside he sees a box of loukoum.

  ‘For the class,’ she says.

  He lets her go. But he thinks to himself: a tiny box of loukoum. For a whole class of schoolchildren?

  Nur

  The lie felt necessary. How could she tell Kerem the truth, so soon, after learning where he has been? This does not help her to feel better about telling it.

  She presents the painted box of loukoum to the doctor.