Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  ‘It’s a gift. A small one. To say thank you.’ It seems so meagre, suddenly. She is embarrassed: both by its modesty and by the act itself. This is a mistake, she realises; her grandmother has got it wrong. The small twist of paper now seems to have a power, a meaning, that she had not anticipated. She thinks of how she herself would look upon it: an Ottoman woman giving a gift to the occupier. There are still dark looks revered for women who comport themselves in this way, and her grandmother is an expert in the art.

  She thinks, too, of how Kerem would see it. The old version of him might have understood: but not the new. Only a few hours in his company has been enough to teach her that this new brother is a man of hard lines; without compromise.

  Even the doctor seems embarrassed. ‘Ah, thank you,’ he says. His hand feints toward the box, wavers, and then he takes it. There is a contact of skin that both flinch away from; she feels the shock of it, this infringement, pass through her. ‘But you should not have …’ he stops himself. ‘Thank you. It is some time since I received a present.’ He holds it loosely in his hands, as though he might be expected to give it back, she thinks. The pretty painted box looks ridiculous against the khaki of his uniform.

  With his loss of composure, she regains her own. ‘It’s loukoum,’ she says. ‘You have it with coffee – though of course you can eat it however you prefer.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, again, now turning it carefully over in his hands as though it is something precious.

  She becomes aware that the filigreed windows of the old haremlik, now the ward, look out onto where they stand. She is aware that any one of the men in the ward might look out and see them.

  ‘Shall I take you to the patient?’ he asks, as though he has sensed this new unease in her.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The boy is awake, and in more discomfort today – she can see it in his face as soon as she enters the room. She opens the box of rose-scented loukoum she has bought for him, but he only eats one piece. The taste hardly seems to make any impression upon him.

  It frightens her, because it reminds her of the time when he was like this before. Insensible, unresponding. Weeks of it. Eventually, with what feels almost like a physical effort, she manages to wrest a smile from him with a story about her grandmother trying to make coffee, and blaming the stove, the pot, the coffee and even the weather for the unsatisfactory result.

  The smile has cost him, it seems; within a few minutes he is asleep. She looks at him and cannot imagine how she might care any more for him.

  ‘He’s doing well, despite appearances. I had to lower the dose of the morphine, so that it cannot become a habit. He is feeling the pain of it properly for the first time since he fell ill.’

  ‘He seems very tired.’ She catches herself. It sounds like a complaint.

  But he merely inclines his head. ‘He will be. His body has a great deal of work to do.’ A slight smile. ‘But he is recovering from it as well as any patient I have seen.’

  She remembers, suddenly, exactly what he is: an army doctor. Her mind gropes toward what he might have seen – illness, yes, but also blood, death … and then stops fast. It has come too close to what she saw, one terrible day in Mahmut Paşa market. She has not forgotten it.

  ‘I wanted to ask,’ he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Will you come and have some of this …’

  ‘Loukoum.’

  ‘Loukoum with me?’

  ‘Oh,’ she readies herself to decline.

  ‘If I were to insist?’

  ‘Then it is your right,’ she says, under her breath, in Turkish, ‘as the occupier.’ Victory, indeed an entire war, has bought him the ability to insist upon something, and see it done.

  He frowns. ‘Pardon?’ He hasn’t understood, of course. But as though he sees it too he says, quickly, ‘What I mean is that you would do me a very great honour, in sharing it. I have bought a coffee pot, taught myself to make it in the Turkish way.’

  There is something almost pitiable in it. She thinks suddenly of her father. It is almost as though he is here with them, in the same room. ‘Surely, canım,’ he says, ‘you aren’t going to deny a person the companionship of a cup of coffee? Even a sworn enemy deserves as much.’ And so – not without a note of misgiving – she assents.

  He shows her out onto the terrace, and she tries to make herself appear at ease, as though she does not already regret agreeing to it. The invocation of her father is no excuse: he never knew what it was to live like this, beneath the yoke of another people. The fictions we tell ourselves, she thinks, to give credence to our own actions. But there is nothing she can do now that the decision has been made.

  He has placed some rather ugly chairs out here, a small wrought-iron table. But as she sits she reluctantly sees the genius in it: the elevation here provides the perfect view out onto the Bosphorus, framed by the hanging fronds of wisteria. It both amazes and annoys her that none of them, in the whole long years of living here, thought to do the same.

  She steels herself to look about at the garden she knows so well. The last vestiges of petals cling to the roses in the flowerbeds. Curious, she sees, that someone has been weeding: the soil appears freshly turned. Someone must be looking after it, though not as attentively as they might; otherwise the dead roses would have been picked before they could scatter themselves. In the days of living here, they had been arranged throughout the house in huge bouquets, so that for two months the air was scented with them.

  The pomegranate tree is painful to look at: the waste of it, the ripe fruits left unpicked. Holes in the skins gape through the bright centres where the birds have clearly taken their fill of the seeds within. If she were braver, she would ask him for a couple to take home, or she would simply smuggle them out. She knows that she will not: she is too hamstrung by her own sense of propriety.

  A creak, and she turns to see the doors opening; the nurse emerges, carrying a tray. The doctor follows behind. Nur does not think she mistakes the reprimand in the woman’s look; it is not wholly unlike her grandmother’s. If she were in any doubt as to whether she has done the right thing in accepting his invitation, now she has her answer.

  ‘She doesn’t let me carry the tray,’ the doctor tells her, sitting, once the nurse has gone. He is a tall man, and upon the small seat his knee comes too close to her own. She swings hers away. ‘She tells me I’ll drop it. Thank goodness she at least lets me perform the operations.’

  The loukoum have been placed upon a small plate: the one she ate from as a child, she sees with a small shock, with its border of red running chickens. In the middle the sweets look almost obscenely pink and succulent. He pours out the coffee in a steady stream. She can smell the quality of it; the best kind. She has not had coffee like this in years.

  Suddenly there is a loud commotion beside them, and his hand wavers, spilling coffee into the saucer.

  ‘Damn.’ And then, quickly, repentant, ‘Sorry. I have grown so used to the company of soldiers.’

  She is hardly listening; she is distracted by the same disturbance that caused his slip. Several sheets of furled white paper have just appeared to blow into the garden. She blinks, and sees them for what they really are.

  ‘They must have been pets,’ the doctor says, cleaning a cup with a napkin, passing it to her. She waits until he has placed it on the table before her, his hands back at work pouring the next cup, before she reaches for it. ‘But they’re half-wild now—’And then he stops and seems to remember.

  ‘They were,’ she says. ‘They were my mother’s doves.’

  He seems to be deciding whether to speak, to allude again to her loss. She is relieved when he seems to think better of it. Instead they watch the birds together in silence.

  They are certainly not the same fat, snowy creatures they once were. Their plumage is marred by stains, their forms leaner. They watch the table, with its bounty of loukoum, with a sharp interest that reminds her of the seagulls that fly in from th
e Sea of Marmara, pestering the mackerel sellers on the quays. Once, they would have flown to her mother’s hands. Now they keep a wary distance, probing the wet ground for grubs a few metres away. And then she watches as they discover the pomegranate tree; begin tearing at the red globes with their beaks. She tries not to resent them their feast.

  She sips her coffee – because the quicker she drinks it the faster this awkward encounter will be done with – and burns her tongue. At the same time she is surprised: he has managed to make it almost perfectly, though it is a little too sugared for her taste.

  ‘Please,’ he says, ‘do not be too kind with me. What do you make of it?’

  ‘It is well made. Perhaps a little too weak, a little too sweet.’

  He nods, absorbing this.

  ‘I am sorry, that was impolite.’

  ‘No, no … otherwise how do I improve?’ He smiles.

  It is the smile that returns her to herself. For a few minutes she had forgotten precisely whom she is sitting with.

  It is such a delicate balance. She must be cordial enough with this man that he continues to treat the boy. She does not think he is the sort of man to behave heartlessly. And she finds it difficult to associate the figure before her with the blood-soaked enemy of her imagination. But she must never forget her hatred; it is the last powerful thing left to the conquered.

  She stands, makes her excuses. When he has gone inside she turns and leaves through the garden. Here, in full view of the windows should anyone choose to look out, she pulls six pomegranates from the tree, almost more than she can hold. The feral doves squawk in indignation. The fruits are so ripe that the juice seeps from them, staining the palms of her hands like blood. They are hers. She smiles. They will taste even better for the circumstances of their procurement.

  No, she has not forgotten.

  The day the English planes came to Mahmut Paşa, she had been on her way to try and find bread. The place she normally went to had not had any for days. The city’s biggest marketplace seemed as good a hope as any. Inconveniently in these last weeks she had seemed hungrier than ever, her body turned traitor on her.

  Three shapes, travelling at incredible speed, like shards of thrown metal. The noise had come a breath later, and it was this noise that made sense of the shapes, gave them scope and dimension. She was riveted where she stood. They grew from the sky, they seemed to be trying to land. She was not yet afraid; she gaped at the spectacle like a child at Ramazan fireworks.

  When someone shouted, ‘English planes!’ all she could think was … but how absurd. Unthinkable: England was thousands of miles from here, a continent’s breadth away. But when people had begun running toward her, away from the marketplace, she too had turned and attempted to run. No singular decision of her own, rather some herd instinct. She had only taken three quick steps when she was thrown forward by the air itself, landing without even the time for her body to react, even to put out her hands. The side of her jaw and her hip had hit the pavement together, and the shock of it exploded through her skeleton. A brief carnival of colour behind the eyes; then nothing at all.

  Perhaps she only lost consciousness for several seconds, but by the time she opened her eyes the world had changed. There seemed to be a curious stillness. Quiet, too, but that was perhaps the note in her ears, a shrill mind-bound scream of shock, that drowned out all else. As she sat up the pain in her jaw had finally arrived – pain that made her feel furious, though she could not say at who. She could not remember who to blame for it.

  Curious: there was a horse, a mere few feet away, sleeping in the street. Had anyone else seen it? She looked about, to find the owner. There he was. Sitting awkwardly, legs out in front of him. He seemed curiously sanguine. Did he not mind? Then she discerned the fact that half his head was missing, realised that he would not be minding anything at all. Beyond him other forms, remnants of forms. The eye snagged upon them even as it tried not to see. The line drawn by death had ended just before the place where she had fallen. If she had walked here a little faster, or left a little earlier, or turned to run with a little more hesitation, she would not be here to dimly notice the blood soaking into the muslin of her headscarf, the pain between her hips that would have made her cry out if she had been able to make a sound.

  When the scream in her mind had finally lessened – it did not stop properly for days – she heard the sirens of the ambulances. When they ran out of space, trucks, mules, lemonade sellers’ carts. The dead, who would not know the indignity of it, piled high, to be collected when lives had been saved.

  She had got up on her feet, and had walked home, though there had been a pain at the very centre of her which made it difficult.

  At the door her mother had screamed, and screamed. Nur had been amazed that she had somehow been able to hear and echo the noise in her head. It was only when she undressed that she understood that she was covered in blood; most of it not her own. But when she stripped to her undergarments she found more blood, dark and clotted, much thicker than the rest. This, unmistakably, was her own. Finally, but too late, certain things made sense to her: changes she had noticed in her person. She had wondered. But it was only now that she discovered for certain, in this moment of loss, that she had been going to have a child.

  She heard later that the planes had been trying to bomb the War Office. This was what people said because it was not quite believable that they could have been aiming for a marketplace of unguarded civilians. Nur knows nothing of the machines, does not know how exactly they find a target.

  But she was there. Saw how close they came; saw the intent in them.

  Nur

  Her grandmother is in one of her sulks this evening. Nur feels it as soon as she enters the room.

  ‘What is it, Büyükanne?’

  Her grandmother gestures, with one hand, her rings flashing magnificently. (Nur has long ago given up on persuading her to sell these baubles.) ‘This horrid apartment. This dust and gloom.’

  Nur feels an apology form on her lips, and swallows it just in time. There are other things to feel guilty about, perhaps, but not this.

  ‘I was beautiful, once. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes, Büyükanne. Of course you were. You are beautiful now.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, you naughty girl! I don’t stand in for flattery.’ She bats her hand. But her mood has lightened by a degree. ‘Have I ever told you of the moonlight picnic we had once, at the Sweet Waters of Europe?’

  Nur pretends to think. ‘No, Büyükanne. I don’t believe you have.’ She knows the story so well she might have been there herself. It has the vibrancy of one of her own memories.

  Wrapped in silks, veiled in yashmaks, the women sit in long kayıks, attended by many pairs of oarsmen. Other crafts follow in a winding procession, some packed with musicians to serenade them. Young men follow in their own kayıks, try to glimpse the famous beauties. They will be disappointed; the women are scrupulously covered. The boats themselves are decorated with fabulously ornate cloths: silk, embroidered with fishes picked out in real silver and gold thread. When the moonlight catches them, fracturing off the water, they really seem to swim.

  And there is her grandmother, in the first of the kayıks. Upon her feet she wears slippers of the softest white chamois leather. They are the sort of shoes that tell any onlooker an immediate story: here is a young woman who never has to step in dirt.

  An exquisite ruby ring upon the slender little finger of her left hand, but no more adornment in the way of jewellery. She does not need anything further yet – that is something to be saved for old age, when lost brilliance in the self can be compensated for in a dazzle of gems.

  ‘And a single-flounced dress of Chinese mulberry silk,’ her grandmother is saying. Her eyes are closed. She, like Nur, is watching the party make its stately process toward the bank. ‘And over that a jacket. A salta, that was what it was called. But what colour?’ she seems to falter. ‘I can’t remember. It will come to me. Blue? No,
I never wore it – it washed out my complexion. Red? No … that doesn’t seem right either – I used to have such beautiful red hair.’

  With a little shiver of irritation she opens her eyes.

  ‘Green?’ Nur supplies.

  ‘Oh clever girl. But how did you guess?’

  There is a thud from above them. Someone is up there on the roof.

  Her grandmother grimaces. ‘It’s your brother, Nur.’ She does not say his name so often, these days, Nur has noticed. And it is only when she speaks of her grandson that her poise seems to desert her. ‘He smelled of alcohol. The shame of it, Nur!’

  ‘He has suffered a great deal, Büyükanne.’

  ‘That’s certainly true. I think he may have the camp madness. Fatima hanım’ – the butcher’s wife – ‘told me of it. Her friend’s nephew came back with it. And he was blinded, too: he is quite a pitiful sight to behold.’ The pity is undermined by an unfortunate hint of Schadenfreude, compounded when she says, ‘Thank goodness, at least, he is still a handsome man.’

  Nur cannot quite agree. Because if anything, as he grows healthier in body, that thing that is changed in him seems to strengthen, too.

  She goes to find him, up on the roof.

  He is sitting hunched in one corner. ‘Kerem?’ she whispers.

  The sun is setting somewhere in the west. It is sunk too low to be seen but it has stained the sky with streaks of vermillion fire.

  ‘Kerem?’

  Perhaps he did not see her the first time, because she sees him start. He turns toward her. His expression terrifies her. It is a look of profoundest agony.

  She goes to sit beside him.

  ‘Kerem,’ she says, after a while. ‘While you were in …’ she shies away from saying it: the war. ‘While you were away. Perhaps, if you speak of it …’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Not now, maybe. But in the future …’

  ‘I cannot speak of it, Nur.’

  He turns to look at her. There is a plea in his expression, an entreaty, but she cannot interpret it. It is too soon for him, she thinks. There will be other opportunities: he is returned, now. She thinks of the boy, how long it has taken him to recover from his illness. Well, this thing in Kerem is like an illness – though somewhere deep within, not visible to the human eye. They have time, now. That is the thing to remember.