by Lucy Foley
So instead they sit together in silence, as the world around them grows dark.
Later, she finds herself wondering what life would have been like if Enver had not been killed in those first weeks at Gallipoli, if he had returned to her, like Kerem. How would the war have changed him? Her husband did not have Kerem’s gentleness in the first place, after all. Would he, therefore, have fared better … or worse?
She finds the miniature, in her small wooden box of keepsakes. She tries to remember this face attached to a body – but comes up against difficulties. A … scent. How had he smelled? Of tobacco and cologne? She tries to recall flesh and weight and presence.
But whenever she attempts this a strange thing happens in her mind. She does not see the man she married, the man in this miniature. Instead, she sees at first a thin figure, feet and nose too large for the rest of him. An oddly pointed head, fine black hair cut straight across the brow. This is Enver the child, as he once was, the only time at which she might have been able to say she properly knew him.
Her brother had told her of an incident in which Enver tripped and smacked the side of his head hard against a chair. His father had stood over him as his face worked, saying: ‘A real man does not cry, Enver. He thinks what lessons his pain can teach him.’
By the year before the war, he was, according to her grandmother, ‘extremely charming and clever’. This claim had been filtered through Enver’s mother herself, so had to be put under some scrutiny. Nur had also been presented with this miniature. One thing she had to admit was that he had grown into the large nose; it now gave the face a distinguished aspect. But the resemblance to his father was now all too clear. His father, too, had been a handsome man. It lent a new arrogance to the face. She thought she might have been better disposed to him had he lost rather than gained in this respect.
She had had a brief, guilty hope that the declaration of war might put the wedding off. He was in the first of the age groups to be summoned for enlistment. But no, in fact, the ceremony was brought forward. He wanted to go to war a married man. She had wondered whether this was some superstition on his part. It could not be anything to do with her – he had not seen her since girlhood. Later, more pityingly, she wondered if perhaps he had not wanted to die without becoming fully a man.
A wedding bed scattered with sesame seeds to ward off the evil eye. An Armenian tradition, originally, but absorbed into the ways of the city for all to use. The ritual of the bath; the bathhouse itself like a temple to cleanliness. The soaking in fast-flowing water, the rub-down, the pillows of blossoming scented lather. Her hair washed in rosewater, dried, dressed. A white dress, embroidered with green and silver threads. Sitting for two long days in this confection spread about her like sea foam, her vision obscured by the two silver tinsels hanging down from her headdress so that whenever she moved she saw a shower of stars. At one point the boredom, and the odd experience of being stared at by so many strangers, had seemed suddenly hilarious. She had begun to grin, and found it difficult to stop her shoulders shaking, no matter how hard she fixed her attention upon a crack in the tiles at her feet. Her grandmother had given her a look that could have turned flesh to stone. A bride should be retiring, silent, modest.
Him stooping to lift the veil to look at her for a couple of minutes. His face oddly expressionless: what did he see in her? She was so distracted by the experience that she forgot to look at him, to take in his features – the changes in the boy she had once known. It only occurred to her later that it might have been the same for him.
She had not had time to discover how the life between boyhood and manhood had shaped him. He had been kind enough; but many husbands are in the first weeks of marriage.
Did he love her? Did she love him? The thought was laughable: they had known each other for such a short time. The only sort of love she knew was that of her family, and that was a thing of history and blood, forged and complicated across a lifetime, knotted and detailed and multicoloured as a kilim rug.
He had desired her: she had seen it on the nights when they had been together. She had felt the power that she wielded over him. But it was not a real power, not like that commanded by men: it was a fleeting conjuring.
What of her desire? His was worn upon his body, there was no mistaking it. Perhaps a woman’s was a more changeable, elusive thing. She has read of it in books, has learned of its power. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, the wife of Shah Zaman in One Thousand and One Nights – all of them driven rather wild by it. And yet books are not always the most trustworthy teacher. Do they speak of the universal experience, or its extremes? This was not the sort of thing she could ever have spoken to her father about, no matter their rigorous discussions of other literary themes.
Her mother, her grandmother: unthinkable. If one had a sister, perhaps then. She did not think she had felt it. On those nights there had been something. A brief, purely sensory pleasure, like the stroking of the tender underside of the arm, or the hair. But the discomfort had always outweighed it. Perhaps, with time, she could have felt it. With knowing him better. But they had not had that time.
He died almost instantly. There had been a letter from one of the men in his company at Gallipoli, too, ‘to the widow of Enver’. She wondered if he had shared her name with them at all, or kept it to himself like a secret. Her sadness surprised her. She mourned – not him, exactly – but the man she had never had a chance to know. Even the description of his death carried a distance. It was a panacea, a sop for grieving wives and daughters and sisters to cherish like a keepsake.
He died bravely for the Empire, with a smile upon his face.
The Prisoner
In the dark apartment he turns onto his side and coughs like an old man, spits bile onto the floorboards.
His sister is changed beyond all recognition too. A widow now. No, but that is not the most significant difference. She is altered in almost every respect. All her old softness is gone. In the absence of the men, she has taken all responsibility upon herself. Even now, upon his return, she does not seem ready to yield it up to him. She goes out into the streets with her face uncovered, she teaches at his school.
He feels betrayed when he thinks of her there. He suspects that if he were his former self, perhaps, he would thank her for it – for continuing his work after he was thought gone. But he cannot do it, cannot feel it. All he can do is resent her her vocation, her busy, exhausting life.
He catches himself. He: a schoolteacher, now? The thought is absurd.
He has tried to find employment. But has no one told him about the influx of Russians with their impeccable manners, their attractive air of tragedy? Or the Turkish refugees ousted from lands that are now being called Greek? The restauranteur, the coffee shop owner – even the oil-smeared chief stevedore on the quays – look upon his wasted form, and pallor warily, as though it might be something catching. Little do they know that before them stands a war hero: a man with ten times the strength of will they possess, who has seen and done things they cannot imagine. He is filled with an urge to scream it at them, these small men who pity him. His hatred for them almost surpasses his hatred of the enemy. To these people he is part of the past; as much of an embarrassment as the eunuchs who walk the city’s streets. Once these figures had held the invisible reins of power in the sultan’s court – they had been purveyors of messages and gossip, the grand masters of intrigue. Now they are viewed as part of the old Empire: outmoded, vaguely shameful, a reminder of archaic ideals. And just as they are immediately recognised in the street by their soft bulk, their hairlessness, his wasted form marks him out as one of those few who returned from hell. It is more convenient to forget men like him ever existed.
For all his deprivations in the prison camp he had something there that he seems to lack now. Purpose. There, with the officer’s help, he had been able to see it all so clearly. Now the old doubts are returning, beginning to plague him. At night he tries to stave off sleep, because when he does faces
visit him: terrible images that he had thought he had managed to escape. Sometimes, when he does sleep, he finds himself waking drenched in sweat; sometimes he wakes crying out. On the first night this happened, Nur came to him, and asked him what she could do for him. He hates the pity in her expression; in some moments he can believe that he hates her. She thinks that she has had a hard life since the war began: she has no conception of the things that have been asked of him, the invisible parts of himself that he has been forced to sacrifice.
Now he sleeps on the roof. He claims that it is because he likes the hard surface, for sleeping. The truth is that the proximity of those who knew and loved the old version of himself is almost unbearable.
Upon one tawdry wall hangs a portrait of himself that his mother had commissioned a few months before he left for the front. In this portrait of himself: hatted, straight-backed, faintly moustached (the days before he could grow facial hair in earnest) is represented an image that he could no more return to than if he had lost both of his legs. They have kept it there to taunt him, to torture him. He reminds himself how much better he is now; how much stronger, how necessary were the things he has done: all things that he thought he knew for certain when he was inside the camp. But it is more difficult than it was before. Most of all when he sees the way his sister looks at him, as though she suspects the thing that is fundamentally changed about him. As though she fears him.
Well, she has a secret too. He has noticed that she is gone from the house for hours at a time, often returning only when it is growing dark. She cannot have been at the school for all this time, he has realised, or delivering linens at the bazaar. There is something else that is occupying her time, though no mention of it is made.
So he follows her. Across the channel of the Bosphorus on the ferry – concealed in the crowd, head lowered, so that she will not spot him: though those around him do, moving a little further away from him as if he carries a disease. Even if he had not taken such precautions he does not think she would notice him: she appears lost to her own thoughts, her eyes trained upon the approaching bank.
There is only one place where she could be going – and yet this makes no sense. He has seen the enemy there, with his own eyes. But he watches, and follows, and hides and waits. And there he witnesses her betrayal.
The Traveller
In Italy the colours of buildings have changed subtly: now there is burnt sienna, orange-red, shutters painted deep green. Even the gloomiest suburbs have a certain romance to them for the foreigner; because they are different and strange in subtle ways.
At the next table sit the couple I glimpsed on the platform in Paris; she of the pale pink coat. Undiscouraged by the terrible main course they have ordered the equally awful pudding: a cream and sponge confection in glass saucers. They feed this to each other from the spoon, seemingly with no awareness of its lack of culinary merit. Their gaze slides, rarely, to the scene beyond the windows – but nowhere else. Nothing seems to dim their excitement for this journey, for each other; it is like watching children – a voluptuous delight. I do not resent them, though the sight gives me an ache. It does not come to all, what they have. For some of us it beckons, but remains forever out of reach: an impossible promise.
As we approach Milan the sky is palest gold, the trees intricate black cut-outs against it. I have always thought that Milan has much more in common with the cities of Austria and Switzerland than it does with those of the south of the country. It is a sober, cooler place; it rains often. Bisected by fast roads and the rattle of trams; seamed with money. The passengers who embark are almost exclusively well-dressed. The women are fur-clad, exquisitely shod. But perhaps the men are chicer still: they wear their suits with a panache that is out of the reach of any Englishman and pastel-coloured scarves of softest wool. But I remember a time when it seemed that an Italian man wore one thing only: a uniform of khaki green serge, just like any Englishman.
Venice, at dusk. For such a jewel of history and art the station is a surprisingly tawdry place. It has begun to rain, and I can see small clusters of umbrella-hawkers touting their wares. This is where the honeymoon couple disembark. He carries the three cases, elegant monogrammed affairs. There is something almost old-fashioned about them, especially beside the lank-haired, paisley-clad twenty-year-olds who can be only a decade younger.
They are just before me. I watch as they are swallowed by the crowd and feel a strange sorrow at the loss of them, never to be seen again.
I have booked a hotel here for the night to break the journey, and Venice is roughly the midpoint, if one takes into account the ferry from London. I am ready for a respite. My body aches as though I have travelled the entire distance on foot.
It is raining when I exit the station, raining as I leave my hotel – where my room is not quite ready for me – and make my way along the edges of the smaller canals toward St Mark’s Square. People hurry by beneath umbrellas; their faces wear this weather as a personal affront. The canals are swollen, precarious. Everything seems made of water; the city looks like a painting in which the colours are beginning to run.
As I look up at the famous basilica a shift occurs. The many fluted domes and elegant, filigree spires suddenly make it appear not like a Christian place of worship but rather the temple to another great faith. For a moment it feels as though I might not be in this Italian city at all, but already arrived at my destination. I know that the Silk Road came to an end here: bringing with it from the East silk, yes, but also foodstuffs, language and, it now appears, buildings. In a way, I think, this church is what I have been trying to do with the restaurant on a humbler scale. It is a reconstruction, a translation, of a remembered, faraway place.
Looking for shelter from the rain I discover a small but rather grand cafe, the interior gleaming with gilt and velvet. It seems an overpriced bauble, but perhaps at least authentically so: the date on the menu passed to me by a surly waiter reads 1720.
The doors release a fug of steam. I am shown to a red plush banquette in one of the gilt-and-mirror salons. Behind me is a trompe l’œil scene of a ravishing damozel: pale rounded shoulders and dark regard, black hair falling the length of her nude back to her waist. She reminds me a little of paintings I have seen of women of the ‘Orient’: lurid French and English fantasies of reclining women, surrounded by fruits and attendants, a sense of inaction and surfeit. I wonder what one Ottoman woman in particular would have made of such a representation. She would not have liked it, I know this much. I think perhaps it is the impression of languor, of idleness, that might have angered her most. She was never idle. She did not understand what it was to give up on anything.
I see the waiter’s eyes snag on the suitcase, as though he is deciding whether or not he can bring himself to serve the owner of such a decrepit object. I was afraid of leaving it at the hotel. This may seem absurd: who would attempt to steal such a woeful piece of luggage? Still, to me the value of the contents means that it was not a risk worth taking.
When he has departed as quickly as his patent Oxfords will carry him, I open the bag and remove the next item. It is a first edition. A profound Sèvres blue with a gold embossed filigree pattern: a rather nice match to the gilt-and-pastel splendour of the cafe itself. I read it a long, long time ago: so much so that the story, in my mind, has become a little hazy. It had begun to bleed into other memories assimilated from that time. I am no longer quite sure whether, for example, it was the book’s protagonist who travelled the Mesapotamian desert and climbed the Persian mountains, and once stayed in a town beside the Caspian Sea and saw a White Russian Army officer shoot his own reflection in a mirror, because all was lost. And whether he once lay upon his back outside his tent and watched the birds and longed for their grace and freedom. It is sometimes difficult to be certain what from that time is a fiction and what is real. My memory is not as it was. So much has happened in between.
My coffee comes, short and strong, with a delicate rime of brownish foam. I take
a sip and it is perfect; only the Italians understand coffee like the Turkish, in my opinion. But Turkish is my favourite.
I open the front cover. A distinctive scent, still trapped in these pages: smoke.
Just inside the cover is a colourful chart of the world, according to which this train journey is only a thumbnail in length. And there, written in elegant blue ink, unmistakable, is her name.
Nur
‘How is he today?’
‘Much improved – you will see that for yourself. He’s more talkative, interested in everything.’
Nur is somewhat thrown by this. It doesn’t sound quite like the description of the little boy she knows. It sounds more like the child she knew before the war.
For a long time, after the terrible day, there had been no glimmer of the boy he had been. She wondered if that child had sunk completely from view – never to return. There were things that could change a person absolutely. And in childhood one was more malleable, more impressionable in character and mind; the change might be all the more devastating.
She read to him, in Turkish and English. He listened, she thought, but without expression. She kept finding some previously unnoticed horror in the pages. Death and violence had hidden in these books without her seeing them properly before. There were whole passages that had to be discounted and stories ended up making little sense, though it did not seem to register upon him.
She was fairly certain that she was the only person alive who cared about his fate. It was her duty to safeguard that fate, however inexpertly she did it.
