Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  ‘We’ve been playing dominoes,’ the doctor says, surprising her out of her thoughts. ‘I taught him. It’s not a difficult game, but I’m still impressed by how he has taken to it. He’s very quick.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Should I not have done so?’

  ‘No. Of course you must do as you like. He is in your care.’

  Her own emotions, clearly, have been more visible than she thought. When the doctor speaks like this she feels an indistinct apprehension. It is like the coffee, of the last visit. It is the idea of boundaries being crossed, the complication of relations, that makes her uncomfortable. She understands that she should be grateful to him for keeping the boy entertained. And yet he is still her enemy.

  The enemy wears a uniform, he is fair-haired, he speaks with the same accent. And yet she cannot make that figure coalesce with the man before her, rocking slightly on his heels, a little sunburned across cheek and brow, running a hand through his hair to make it stand on end.

  Away from this place, she can. She can imagine any number of things, in fact: that his agreement to treat the boy is merely another assertion of superiority. She can convince herself he will use this favour for leverage in some manner. She thinks of her brother – incarcerated for four years in a British jail. Something inside Kerem is broken. And whatever it was that caused it happened in the war, or perhaps in that very jail, at the hands of Englishmen like this.

  Away from this place she can convince herself that she must remove the boy from his care immediately, no matter the consequences. Because for her to even look at an Englishman – let alone speak to him, drink coffee with him – makes her a traitor to her own family.

  And yet confronted by the reality of the doctor, this infuriating affability, she finds that she cannot hold onto her convictions with the same vigour. It would make it so much easier, she thinks, if he could be a little less pleasant. If he could provide her with something to dislike that she could feed and water until it grew into hatred.

  He has said something, she realises. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘He tells me that you play backgammon.’

  ‘Not now. I used to play with my father.’

  ‘How does he know about it?’

  Because he knows about everything, Nur thinks – he misses nothing. Sometimes she wishes he were just a little less observant. ‘I have a set in the house. It was one of the things I took from here when we left. I should have sold it, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘No one wanted it? I’m surprised.’

  ‘No, I suppose I mean that I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t sell it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He leads her through to the boy. She sees that he is sitting up in bed, and that he is eating: a plate of eggs, with the softest white bread, the sort that is impossible to find in the city now. There is a new fullness in his face. He looks almost better than he did before the illness. He looks like a different child. He has not noticed her yet: he is too intent upon his breakfast.

  She glances at the doctor and finds that he is watching her. It seems that he sees everything. That whilst this transformation should make her happy, she feels instead an urgent sadness.

  ‘I need to step outside,’ she whispers to the doctor, stiffly. ‘I apologise.’

  She looks toward the sweep of the Bosphorus, changeable by the hour and yet in the essentials unchanged. Her breath returns gradually to its rhythm, the central calm restoring. It has passed. She would like a mirror, to see how visibly this thing has marked itself upon her face, but perhaps it is a good thing that she cannot see herself.

  A selfish sadness, she thinks. It should not matter to her that she herself has been unable to enact this change in the boy – only that someone has, and that he is so much improved for it.

  The door opens.

  ‘I don’t mean to intrude …’ he steps carefully. ‘I wanted to check if there was a problem.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It was a surprise, to see him looking so well. I am – very happy.’ It sounds like a lie, which is absurd.

  ‘I have to congratulate you,’ he says. ‘He is a clever child, but he has been taught excellently, too.’

  She does not want this kindness. She feels its power to destabilise.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, as coldly as she is able. Then, unable to help herself. ‘I have not seen such bread in this city since before the war.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  She almost says the thing she has been thinking: I supposed that if one has occupied a place, one has access to the very best of everything. Her sense of preservation prevents her.

  He is watching her, frowning, as though trying to decipher her expression. She will not allow it. She makes her face a mask.

  ‘I will take you back to him,’ he says.

  ‘If you do not mind, I would like to speak to him alone.’

  ‘Of course.’ He inclines his head. If he is insulted he makes pains not to show it.

  This is how it should be; the coffee was a mistake – or, rather, the recognition of a debt owed. A singular instance, not to be repeated.

  She sits down beside the boy and takes his hand – warm, faintly clammy.

  ‘I hear you’ve been learning to play a game?’

  ‘It’s called dominoes,’ he says, patiently. ‘I’m good at them. I’ve beaten George four times out of six.’

  ‘George?’ She is confused by the name. Then she understands – the doctor. So, he and the boy are using first names. Again the sense of trespass.

  ‘Your friend.’

  ‘My friend?’ She reminds herself that he is only a child, he cannot understand fully. Still, his interpretation profoundly worries her.

  ‘The doctor is not a bad man … so far as his kind go,’ she says. ‘But he is certainly not my friend; he is not your friend. He is our enemy.’

  ‘The war is over now.’

  ‘But our city is occupied by their army. Do you understand? He is an Englishman, and you are an Ottoman boy.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  This gives her brief pause. She has never heard him refer to himself in this way, had not thought the distinction mattered to him – because it has not signified anything to her. It once mattered to her grandmother, of course, as it does to so many. The war made people see one another differently, that was the thing. She thinks, and then tries not to think, of the terrible acts Hüseyin spoke of. It cannot be true. A war changes people, yes, but it does not turn them into animals.

  ‘Next time,’ she says, ‘when he asks you to play dominoes, tell him that you would prefer to read.’ And before he can protest, ‘Look, I’ve brought you a new book.’ It is a collection of fairy tales, some of her favourites. ‘I loved these when I was young.’

  He does not look absolutely convinced.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  With heedless childish honesty, he says, ‘I have other books already. I have the recipe book, and George’ – that name again – ‘has been reading to me from this.’

  She looks at it. Around the World in Eighty Days. It was her favourite, as a child. She would imagine herself as a female version of the hero, circumnavigating the globe. How simple and attainable that dream had seemed in childhood, before the restrictions and complications that came with adulthood, with war.

  ‘It’s wonderful – oh, it’s about …’

  ‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know what it’s about.’ He looks faintly hurt. But then, she thinks, he has hurt her, and in this moment it doesn’t seem to matter that he is a child and she a grown woman. And it is her own copy of the book. She recognises the jacket: powder blue with the title picked out in gold embossed letters. Inside the jacket her name is written, in the childish hand of a decade ago. Not a gift from the doctor at all, then, but an appropriation. An occupation. A city, a house and now, it seems, a childhood.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Of course you must finish that, first. It will help with your English.’

  The words are cold and hard a
s pebbles in her mouth. She is not unaware of the contradiction: she has told him to steer clear of the Englishman, but continue the endeavour to learn his language. The alternative would be to admit that those years of lessons, all her work, has been in vain.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. He takes the book of fairy tales from her and, with an unlearned, childish grace, says, ‘I’m sure I will enjoy these, too.’

  She feels her anger ebb.

  ‘Perhaps you could teach me to play dominoes.’

  George

  She comes to tell him that she is leaving. He realises that he is disappointed – he has hardly had a chance to speak to her this time, other than the odd conversation about the bread. For a second then there had been that expression again, the one she had worn on the jetty, or when he had stooped to retrieve her book. As though – he is fairly certain of this – she rather wanted to spit at his feet like the little boy before the Aya Sofia.

  The visit to her son has been good for her. Sensing something like a new lightness in her, he wants to keep her talking, to make her linger. Grasping for a subject, he says, ‘I wanted to ask you to explain what these rooms were used for, when you lived here. I suspected, for instance, that the ward was a women’s room.’

  The stare that he is met with makes him feel all the impertinence of the question. For a moment he thinks that she is not going to deign to answer him.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, finally. ‘It was.’

  ‘I can see that it must seem very strange—’

  ‘And that room,’ she indicates the place where the boy lies, her tone unmistakably dangerous now, ‘was my father’s study. And through there is the room in which my grandmother smoked her cigarettes … that, with the fountain, is where I once deposited some goldfish that I had bought in secret at the bazaar; my father was angry with me. And behind us is the room in which my father died, and on the opposite side of the house is the room in which my brother and I were born. And this, here: this is where we first heard the drums of war, over supper, the last time were were all together as a family. Is that enough for you? Or must you have more still?’

  He knows that he should not allow her to get away with this last challenge. Locals have been arrested for less. She seems to be waiting for him to act, almost curious to see what the repercussion will be.

  ‘You should not speak to me like that,’ he says. ‘I cannot allow it.’

  ‘I apologise.’ And yet there is no hint of remorse in her tone.

  But he cannot make himself feel the outrage that he knows he should. Mainly because her own outrage, at seeing her house colonised like this, can only seem reasonable to him. And though it was all said in accusation, he now has a picture before him that he feels privileged to glimpse. Of this building as a living place: domestic joy and tragedy, all the mess and splendour of life.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I accept your apology.’ At this the mutinous look returns to her expression again. She is usually so careful, but at this moment he could imagine her as the saboteur Bill suspects her of being. He does not want her to say something regrettable, now, that will force him to act. So he says, ‘And I apologise too. I should not have asked you to speak of that time. I understand that it must have caused you pain.’

  She closes her eyes. When she opens them again she looks directly at him and nods. ‘Thank you.’

  A strange pause occurs, now. There is an unexpected frankness in it; he realises that this may be the first time they have looked at each other properly. Usually she keeps her eyes averted from his face, as though there is something objectionable in it: which he supposes, as the face of the enemy, there must be. This look seems to redress the balance. In it, they become equals.

  He watches her go, from behind the shutters, where she will not be able to turn and see him; he feels a voyeur. She moves quickly, as though the lawn is a no-man’s land in which it is unsafe to linger.

  She has come nearly every day. And he is glad of it. He enjoys her company in spite of the hostility. For so long he has had the company of men: men who talk and think in the same way as one another; who all come from something like the same background. Her company is more than a refreshment; it is a challenge. It shakes the complacency from him. The thought in itself is a surprise. As a doctor, and as someone who has become fond of the boy, he wishes him a quick recovery. But he does not regret that, while the child remains, he will have other opportunities to talk to her.

  Nur

  ‘I know where you have been, sister.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She sounds like someone with a secret; she can hear it in her voice.

  ‘I’ve followed you. You’ve been back to the house, the one that is now filled with the enemy’s men. I saw you go inside. I saw you speaking with one of them.’

  She feels a flush creeping up the side of her neck, and puts a hand there to cover it. She laughs, too, to disguise her fear. The sound is unconvincing; it has no humour in it.

  ‘I don’t see anything to laugh about. What is it that you find amusing?’

  ‘Nothing. I …’ She falters. ‘What has happened to you, Kerem? Ever since you have been back you have seemed’ – she searches for a word. Angry. Cold. Dangerous. ‘So different.’

  ‘I might ask you the same question.’

  He is looking at her now with something almost like hatred.

  She had thought that once Kerem had started to put on weight he might look better, a little more like himself. His cheeks are fuller, his hair is brushed, his various sores are healing. What she had not understood was that the real difference lay in something less tangible, something behind the eyes. The experience of looking at him now is perhaps even more uncanny than it was before. Because, now, in more forgiving light, he looks like the Kerem of before. One might almost believe him unchanged. Until one sees the eyes.

  She tells him of the boy, the illness, the necessity. Surely, now, he will understand. But there is that coldness in her stomach again, almost like fear. Absurd: she must not be afraid of her own brother, however much he has changed.

  ‘Which boy?’

  She tells him.

  ‘The Armenian boy?’

  She does not like the way he says this. She does not like the fact that he feels the need to ask it. ‘He was very ill,’ she says, ‘and the English doctor agreed to look at him.’

  ‘What about Mustafa Bey? Why did you not ask him?’

  ‘He has gone to Damascus. And the Red Crescent hospital was full. It was the middle of the night – I couldn’t think what else to do.’

  ‘You went to an English hospital in the middle of the night. For an Armenian child.’

  ‘It was an emergency – if you had been here, you would know.’

  He frowns. ‘If I had been here.’ The way he says it turns her own words into an accusation.

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. All I meant was that everything is different here now.’

  ‘Why did they take the boy? Why would a British hospital – an army hospital – take a stranger in?’

  She had been expecting this, and dreading it.

  Before she can answer, as judiciously as she can, her grandmother speaks. ‘Nur knows the doctor there. The Englishman.’

  ‘You know an Englishman?’

  ‘I do not know him. I met him.’ Quickly, before he can infer anything from this, ‘It was an accident. In the street: I dropped something I was carrying, he picked it up.’

  ‘The same sort of Englishman,’ he says, conversationally, ‘who killed our men? Who would have tried to kill me, if I had been sent to a different front? Who has butchered our country, who has stolen our capital? You … ah … met him.’

  She hates the emphasis, the suggestion of something sordid.

  ‘Did our men die for nothing?’

  ‘No, I would not—’

  ‘Did I nearly die for nothing?’

  ‘No, Kerem, of course—’

  ‘Then listen to me now, Nur. You must have nothing more t
o do with them. You must stop this; now. Otherwise—’

  She hears the threat, but it remains unspoken, and somehow more menacing for it.

  ‘It must stop. Do you understand?’

  George

  That evening, he has a visit from one Major Harding. ‘There’s been a report that you have a Turkish child here, is that correct?’

  ‘A report from whom?’

  ‘Please, Captain, just answer the damned question.’

  But George knows the source – or is almost certain that he does. The second lieutenant that he discharged yesterday. Who had questioned every decision George had made with regards to his condition, because he ‘knows a little about the subject myself’ – though on probing this revealed itself to be a year at St Thomas’, after which he had dropped out.

  The main problem, George knows, is that his condition had humiliated and pained him. In insisting that the boil had to be lanced, George had become his chief torturer. No grown man wanted to yield up his pride like that – George himself would have had difficulties with it.

  He had complained the morning after the boy had been admitted. ‘This is an army hospital,’ George had heard him say to his neighbour in a not-quite undertone. ‘A British army hospital. We cannot be letting every sort in here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, finally, because he sees little purpose in dissembling. ‘A child was brought here in the middle of the night – an emergency.’

  ‘There are other places for the native population.’

  ‘What should I have done? Turn away the child? Have an innocent’s death on my conscience – on the conscience, I might add, of the British army?’

  ‘Your focus should be upon your patients. What if your attention were taken by this Turk child, and you failed to notice the deterioration of one of the other cases?’

  George draws himself up. ‘It would not happen. Because, as I am sure you will see upon my record, I am an excellent doctor. I would never endanger the safety of my patients.’

  ‘Good. Because if it were to come out that you had prioritised the child’s care … well, I think all I need say is that I do not know if there is a specific court-martial for such an offence – it being such a rare thing – but I am sure that one could be created, quickly enough.’