Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  Nur

  Nur goes to the hospital to bring the boy home. It is against her better judgement, but there was something in the way Kerem spoke to her that frightened her. It had been … yes, something like a threat.

  She is making her way past the cloud pine in the garden when a strange creature emerges through the rose bushes in front of her.

  She stares at it for a couple of seconds, trying to make sense of the sight. It is one of the strays, the old ginger tom, but he seems to have something caught about his neck – a great collar of material. He must have become tangled in it. She should try to take it off him. She approaches him. He watches warily but does not back away, as if to show her that he is not afraid.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ She turns to see the doctor, approaching from the house. ‘He’s not in a very good mood at the moment.’

  ‘He has something caught about his neck.’

  ‘I put it there.’

  ‘But why?’ She is ready to be offended. She never particularly liked the animal, he seemed a bully; there were terrible night-time fights of which she was certain he was the perpetrator. But this seems a strange and wanton cruelty to inflict upon any animal.

  ‘If you look at his hind leg – there on the left, just above the hip.’

  ‘The fur is gone.’

  ‘Yes, I had to shave it for him. He had a wound – it was a messy cut. So I stitched it, applied iodine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ he shrugs. ‘I suppose because I can. I saw it, and knew that I could do something for him.’

  There is no boast in the way he says it. It is as though he thinks it is the most simple thing in the world. She has to admit that there is a grace to this attitude. How many men in his position, she thinks, would have done the same thing? One in twenty? A hundred?

  She is also thinking that it is exactly the sort of thing her father would have done. There was the donkey he had brought back with him from a trip to the countryside, which he had rescued because it had outlasted its usefulness to the farmer and was going to be killed. It had eaten every single rose from the garden, and knocked her grandmother’s favourite statue from its plinth, and once come into the house and left a steaming pile of dung on one of the most precious rugs, but they had kept it until it died a few years later.

  ‘A human,’ the doctor says now, ‘knows that when they have a wound stitched it is in their best interests. If they are told to leave it alone, to heal, they will. An animal has no such understanding. Hence the collar, otherwise he would have torn all of the stitches back out with his teeth and made the thing far worse. He saw it as a violation, even though I gave him a little Novocaine as an anaesthetic. It was one of the hardest suturing tasks I have ever had to do.’

  He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a wrist covered by lacerations, just beginning to heal to pale pink.

  ‘You could have caught rabies.’

  ‘I know. Or tetanus. You would think a medical man might know better. What can I say? I am a fool.’

  ‘You are not like most Englishmen.’ She did not quite mean to say it out loud.

  ‘In what respect?’

  She supposes she meant that he seems to lack the English occupiers’ cold formality, their assumed superiority. Of course she cannot say any of this.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, that may be because I am not English. I’m a Scot. There are many of my countrymen who would demand blood for such a mistake.’

  ‘I see.’ As though it would make a difference to her, as though she might see him more kindly in the light of this new knowledge.

  He smiles. He is somehow different today, but she cannot decide exactly how. It is a minute or so before she understands that it is because he is wearing neither a uniform or his doctor’s coat: rather what appear to be his own clothes; trousers, braces, shirt sleeves. He appears younger: somehow more and less himself. This is the private man. She feels oddly as though she has glimpsed him in a state of undress. The formality of his clothing has thus far provided a certain definition to all of their exchanges. It has made it easier, too, to see him as one of a type: the khaki-clad Englishman, soaked to the top of his fair head in the invisible blood of her countrymen. Well, her imagination will simply have to work harder, that is all.

  It helps, too, to think of Kerem, watching them from somewhere. It is not unlikely that he has followed her again, to make sure she delivers on her promise. It throws new scrutiny upon her every action. What would he make of this amicable scene: the doctor in this new, casual incarnation?

  Now the cat approaches George, and butts his ugly head against his shin. She is amazed at the affection, she would never have thought it possible of the creature.

  ‘I call him the Red Terror. He has become a friend. I like to think that he, too, understands what it is to have been in a war.’ And then quickly, ‘I should perhaps not make light of it.’ When she remains silent. ‘You lost someone.’

  ‘My husband,’ she hesitates. And my brother, she thinks.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was not by your hand.’ She realises that she doesn’t absolutely know this to be true.

  ‘No. My role was to tend the wounded,’ he says, as if he guesses it and wants to dispel this possibility, ‘and the sick. As many sick as wounded – perhaps more.’ He seems to be asking something of her, some acknowledgement of his innocence in Enver’s fate.

  She finds that she cannot give it.

  Now the cat, newly tame, it seems, nudges her leg. She looks down, grateful for the interruption.

  ‘I feed him scraps. When I first found him he looked like a collection of twigs with some oilcloth draped over him.’

  A sudden memory comes to her. A small boy foraging for scraps in the school’s refuse.

  He nods, solemnly, and she finds it impossible to suspect him of guile. And then, ‘I will take you to the boy.’

  ‘Actually, I have come to take him home.’

  He frowns. ‘No. As I explained before, that cannot happen for some time. He needs to be here.’

  ‘We can care for him at home.’

  ‘You cannot give him the care he needs. You cannot prevent a relapse – which is likely.’

  ‘You were … very kind to treat him. I am grateful. But he should not be here.’

  He sighs. ‘May I remind you that it was you who brought him here?’

  ‘I was desperate. I did not know what else to do. I thought he was going to die.’

  ‘And now I tell you that he may still die. If he had not been treated here, his life would have been in danger. If he is moved from here, now, his life will be in danger.’

  ‘But it is not right. I cannot imagine your army would allow it.’

  Something changes in his expression.

  ‘They have not allowed it?’

  ‘There have been—’ he coughs, ‘words exchanged. But I explained exactly what I am saying to you now. We would have the death of a child, an innocent, on our conscience. But for you it is so much more than that.’ He is scrutinising her face. ‘I thought you understood all of this.’

  His eyes are pale grey, she sees.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then why this insistence, when you know that it is bad for the child?’

  ‘Because it should not be like this. We cannot be …’ she searches for the word. ‘Friends’ seems an embarrassing overstatement; again she thinks of Kerem, watching from some hidden place, ‘… acquaintances. We aren’t simply people of different nationalities living side by side: in this city we understand that arrangement, at least.’ She feels the anger rise in her. ‘But it is different with you. You have occupied us. And before that, you were our enemy.’

  She hesitates. Why not? she thinks. It might help him to understand. And so she tells him of the day the English planes came. She does not spare him any detail besides that of her own injury, her own loss, the secret blood that came when she was at home. Whe
n she has finished there is a long silence. She thinks – hopes – that she has shocked him.

  When he speaks, it is in an undertone. ‘I did not know of this. I can only think … that it was a mistake.’

  ‘It was no mistake. They came low enough to see our faces, to see who we were. That we were ordinary men and women, not soldiers.’

  He does not challenge her again. But then he says, quietly, ‘In war, people do terrible things. I will tell you this because I think you can stomach it.’

  ‘I do not think—’

  ‘We were in the desert, it was near fifty degrees centigrade: the most inhospitable place you can imagine. It could be forty miles or more between watering places, more. We were prepared for it, but we were suffering. And then, one day, we saw something that I thought was a hallucination at first, a mirage. A great stream of people. Hundreds of them.’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘Not soldiers. No one, actually, who could have been a soldier. Old men and women. There were children dying, there, then, from heatstroke, malnutrition, exhaustion upon the path.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘We couldn’t understand much of what they told us. But it seemed they had all been forced to leave in a hurry, with no chance to prepare themselves. They were woefully lacking in supplies. Luckier ones rode mules, or cows, the animals salt-crusted in old sweat. But some walked in shoes that were falling apart. Some in bare feet. Do you know what happens to your skin when you walk on sand at that temperature?’

  She does not think she wants to hear much more, but he continues, relentlessly. ‘We tried to give them aid, food, water, where possible – but many of them were too far gone for help. There was an elderly man. He had fallen, in the dust. I tried to get him to stand up, but he could not. I think, actually, that a kind of peace had come over him. He asked me to go to his bag and retrieve a purse of money. This he was to distribute among those who he felt most needed it. Unfortunately, what they needed wasn’t money but shelter, water, food.’

  ‘Who did this to them?’ Even as she says it she has a horrible premonition.

  ‘We couldn’t be absolutely certain. But we did discover that these, the ones we saw, were the lucky ones. A little further along that road we came across … other sights. I will not describe those to you. One thing that we did learn is that they were Armenians. Later, I heard similar tales. Retribution, apparently. But they were ordinary people: just like those you saw in the marketplace. How much do you think they really had to do with it?’

  She cannot speak to answer him. She thinks of the boy, an innocent. She thinks of other innocents, like him, but without the chance that has saved him, perhaps, from a terrible fate. She feels sick: not merely in her body, but in some profounder part of herself. Still she does not want to believe in it, but she is already thinking of the thing Hüseyin had alluded to; how somehow he had seemed to hear of this too. She is thinking, and trying not to think, of the boy. What his fate might have been, if things had been only slightly different. She thinks of that one allusion Kerem had made to the things he had had to do. Necessary, he called them. And the change in him. But surely not.

  ‘In the midst of war,’ he says, ‘I think that people believe they have become part of something greater than themselves. But often they have become something less. Less human. They become part of a machine; and a machine has no morality. I do not speak about any particular army when I say this.’ He lowers his voice. ‘I could be court-martialled for saying this, but I have little doubt that there have been atrocities committed by all sides. Now we have to relearn how to see one another as people.’

  It reminds her of something, she reaches for it. The Persian poet, Rumi. He wrote of seeing each other across states, of seeing them for who they are. Actually: seeing was not the precise word he had used. It was loving.

  ‘I do not mean in any way to paint myself as a hero. Believe me … I am not that.’ He gives a short, joyless laugh. ‘Before, when you told me of your husband, I was perhaps not as honest as I might have been. For these few years at least, half of me has been a soldier; has thought as a soldier. I am certain that I was not involved in any way in his death: I was not part of the main offensives. But I have carried a rifle, a knife. I have not used them as much as some. And I did use them, once, when I had to.’ At this she feels the shadow of some unspoken memory pass over their heads. ‘But the other half is a doctor. And it is what we are taught. To save life, no matter who our patient is, with no qualifications. And so you see the problem. You brought the boy to me. I have treated him, and he is my patient now. I urge you in the strongest terms not to remove him from my care.’

  As she makes the journey back to the apartment she is filled with a new resolve. To make Kerem understand, to appeal to the kind, gentle schoolteacher that must remain in some small hidden part of him. In return, to try to understand him, what has made him the man he is now, even if she is not certain she has the stomach for it. Most importantly, to try to remember how to love him.

  The Prisoner

  He hears of a place where others like himself congregate. Men who have given everything to their homeland and returned to find themselves shunned by those they fought for, treated not as heroes but pariahs. It is on the outskirts of the city, in Eyüp: conveniently out of the way enough that it has been overlooked by the occupiers who are wary of any gathering of Ottoman men. They have been known to arrest groups in the cafes along the quays, smoking their narghile pipes, for the mere crime of ‘looking suspicious’.

  Here the hopelessness that he feels, hiding in that tawdry place with his grandmother and insensible mother, while his sister goes out into the city … here it vanishes. Here his experience, as a soldier, as a survivor, is valued. His physical degradation, his wasted limbs, his scabs, his abscesses, are viewed not as something repellent – he is certain that Nur is disgusted by them, though she tries to hide it from him – but as badges of his endurance. And he is certainly not alone in bearing them. If they were visited in the Russian camps variously by hypothermia, frostbite, malaria, the survivors of the English camps in the desert knew heatstroke and starvation. The starvation was the worst, for if men did not die of it alone it found new ways to blight them. Pellagra: a disease with a rather pretty name, the name of a young woman – yet with consequences as ugly as could be imagined. The skin rotting upon the bone. Its sister, trachoma – which made men go blind. His own various scars will fade, perhaps, but these men will never regain their eyesight.

  Mostly the men talk of the past they have shared. They mourn dead friends – so many Babeks – and boast of glorious moments of personal heroism. Or seduction: amorous Russian women in the villages near the prison camps there, whores who refused to take payment from men so virile. Most of these stories are too preposterous to be believed. But no one would think to challenge them. They are the last comfort accorded to their tellers. None of them speaks of the things that happened in East Anatolia, toward the border with Syria; none of them mentions the Armenians. But he thinks that he can see it in some of them; they wear it upon them. When brief mention is made of the names of places – Bitlis, Erzurum, Van – there is an almost palpable tightening of the atmosphere, as though two thirds of the men present are holding their breath.

  Perhaps they are all waiting, like him, for one of them to find the courage to speak of it. But none of them does. How would one even begin to articulate it, after all this time? So it lingers about them, shadows in the corners of the room.

  ‘I hoped that I would one day see you here, old friend.’

  It is the officer from the prison camp. The elegance that had been palpable even in that desperate place is now evident in the neatly pressed clothes, the small gold ring upon his hand, the expensive shine of his leather shoes. ‘The war hero.’

  He looks at the man sharply. Is he being mocked? No – he doesn’t think so.

  ‘I do not feel that way.’

  ‘No. But you must remember that yo
u are.’

  ‘I keep thinking of them. I know that it was all … necessary. But I cannot stop thinking of them – the things that I have done, that I spoke to you of—’

  ‘They must never be spoken of again. These things that were done were to secure the future of our homeland, which we hold more sacred and dear than our very lives. But others will not be able to understand. Our own wives and children will not be able to: because actions that are taken in war are beyond the interpretation of ordinary people. You see that, do you not?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Nevertheless, our work is not finished. The enemy lives in our very city, in our houses, drinks in our coffee shops, leers at our women. You know, I suppose, that some of them are even marrying Ottoman women?’

  He thinks of his sister, the day he followed her, the English officer.

  ‘It is horrible to contemplate. But we must face up to the realities of our circumstances if we are to bring change.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They won’t be here forever. Soon they will pay for every indignity they have made us suffer. An army is coming for them; even now a rebel government is being formed at Ankara. But there is an army working from within, too. This war has not ended quite yet. There is no glory in it, other than one’s own pride in doing a good, and necessary job. Are you interested?’

  ‘What would it involve?’

  ‘Well. Some use words. Several of the men here write for the rebel press for example. You have seen how much they like to talk, how well they use words. But sometimes I think those words conceal a certain lack; that it is all they know how to do. I do not believe some of them even fought in the war at all, or if they did it was with pens and paper, from behind the safety of their desks. Others are the opposite, merely brutes, with no finesse. You and I are different. What we really need are deeds. Acts.’