Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  Rounding another corner, a shock. A whole street of houses destroyed. He tastes the smoke at the back of his mouth before he understands what it is he is witnessing. He has never seen anything quite like it. Beyond the burned reminders of the walls one can just discern the sorry remains of furniture, old divans, chairs. He stops. One of the shapes – still as all the rest – has a too-organic form; perhaps it is best not to look too closely. It might be, it might not be. People are at least prepared for such eventualities; he has heard that they happen all the time, these fires. The old wooden houses are like tinder boxes. Perhaps this sight becomes less of a shock for those who live in the city because of its ubiquity. But he cannot imagine walking past this with equanimity.

  He hurries forward, head bowed, the knowledge of it within him now like a poison, his mood utterly changed.

  The Traveller

  Mid-afternoon, but already the light beyond the window is beginning to fade. I had a late lunch in the dining car and now find myself alone once more in my cabin with my thoughts. Nothing to do until dinner time except stare down my ‘bed’ with its thin rectangle of foam, promising even more discomfort come morning. A sleep in a proper bed in Venice did something to alleviate the effects of the couchette. But already, after one night on the thin rectangle of foam, my back has begun its protests. I feel bent out of shape … corrugated. It is unfair, really, because it is only through the physical – the disobedience of my body, its various pitiable degradations – that I am reminded I am no longer young.

  The landscape beyond the windows has varied little all day: a never-ending pastoral, a patchwork of fields interrupted by the odd town or village or the blank of a brickwork tunnel. I am sure that in summertime it would be lush and green and surpassingly beautiful but at this time of year the farmland is just tilled soil, unvariegated greyish-brown.

  Now something has drawn my eye back to the scene. A change: something more than the mere diminishment of the light. It is imperceptible at first and I am about to look away when I see it – a tiny flake of white, seeming to hover for a second before the glass before it is sucked into the slipstream of the train. Then at once they are everywhere, dancing before the window like spots of pure light.

  I have never been able to see it as mere weather – not like sun, or rain. Not since a particular day: which might as well have been the first time I ever properly saw snow. It has always seemed to me more like a quantity of magic seeping into the world.

  It is almost completely dark now and the white swarm seems to glow out of it. Time, I think, for an aperitif. I could go to the dining car but somehow there is a greater loneliness in drinking surrounded by strangers than there is in one’s own company.

  I only have one option with me, and it is probably better suited to after dinner, but it will do. I take it from the case, the old pewter flask – seasoned traveller of continents. I pour myself a sparing quantity of the stuff inside and I can almost taste it before I lift it to my lips, the warm smoke of Scottish peat.

  Last night I dreamed about her. For a long time I thought that I hated her for what she had done. For not being strong enough, when I had thought her brave, capable of anything. I thought she had simply given up.

  I say it, trying it out, the one rich syllable of it. My voice sounds so strange, so loud in the silence of my cabin, slightly roughened by the whisky. And it is so long since I have spoken this name.

  Nur

  ‘How is he today?’

  ‘Markedly improved. In fact, better than that – he’s cooking.’

  ‘Cooking?’

  ‘No,’ he says quickly. ‘He isn’t cooking, but he has me doing his bidding, as his proxy if you like.’

  She tries not to smile.

  ‘He told me that his favourite book was one of old recipes.’

  ‘Yes, it is. The cook who used to work for my family, Fatima. They were hers.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He discovered it. We have been cooking the recipes from it since.’

  ‘He told me.’

  It makes her wonder what else the boy has told him. Of her insensible mother, perhaps, or the night-time hours of embroidering … or the fact that sometimes she buys three-day-old bread from the baker’s and soaks it in water to make it edible. Her pride quails as these possibilities present themselves. She reminds herself that she should just be thankful that Kerem had not arrived before the boy’s illness. Children do not always understand the importance of secrecy.

  ‘I have to say,’ he says now, ‘it has been something of a departure from tinned food and coffee.’

  ‘What has he made for you?’

  He tells her.

  ‘I’m afraid you have been poorly used.’

  ‘What do you mean? It was delicious: the men enjoyed it.’

  ‘That was a recipe I told him we could not make, because the ingredients were too expensive. Saffron … I cannot imagine what that must have cost you.’ She is almost proud of the boy’s resourcefulness.

  ‘I got a good price, from the seller.’

  ‘Ah.’ She decides not to humiliate him by asking what he paid. ‘It is incredible,’ she says, ‘I cannot get him to remember the succession of the sultans, or his numbers, but he has committed the recipes, every detail, to his mind.’

  ‘It is how interested one is in the subject – it is the same for all of us. At medical school I could never interest myself in the symptoms of certain tropical diseases: they seemed so far beyond anything I would ever experience. Then, when I began to treat men for them – and new ones besides – I suddenly became an expert.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I cannot think of any other boy his age who can speak another language so fluently. His English is astonishing. It shames me.’

  ‘And French,’ she says, and is immediately embarrassed by her boast.

  ‘Which makes him more impressive than any adult Englishman. The strangest thing,’ he says, ‘I found a whole cache of children’s books in English and French here. They were yours?’

  ‘Yes.’ She finds that she cannot say any more; there is some obstruction in her throat. Silences have strange power. Some draw people together, like co-conspirators. This one, though, seems to pull something open between them, and each is perhaps a little embarrassed by the familiarity of the last few minutes. They have become strangers again.

  ‘You could come and eat with us here, one evening.’

  She suspects that he has only said it to fill the silence, to salvage the accord of a few moments before. ‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’

  ‘I apologise,’ he says, perhaps only now seeing the impropriety of the invitation. ‘I should not have asked it.’

  She cannot help wondering whether he would ever have asked one of his countrywomen such a thing. An invitation to a supper of soldiers. She reminds herself that it is meant as a gesture of friendship.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ she says, ‘I have to cook for my mother, and grandmother. Both of them are even worse cooks than I. But I thank you for the invitation.’

  ‘I should not have made it.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But I know it was well meant. And I admit that I have come to miss his cooking.’

  ‘I do not doubt it. I enjoy his company, too. It is so different to the men – you know they moan a great deal more than he. He is a wonderful child, your son.’

  He has used the word before, and she has not corrected him. She has – yes – liked the sound of it. But suddenly it seems a deception.

  ‘I have not been honest with you. Perhaps it does not matter either way. But I feel I should tell you the truth.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He is not my son.’

  Survival trumps education. Nur had understood this from the first days of the war. She had been left with a class of six or so pupils, because the children came and went depending upon the situation at home or in the city itself.

  Some of her pupils, the girls in particular, were
kept at home – embroidering linens, selling goods in the streets. Some of them, the families of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, had simply gone. Often without any warning: in times like these people did not politely call upon one, explain that Konstantin or Maria would no longer be attending. They did not write notes. They disappeared as though they had never been.

  Only one pupil would be there unfailingly. The day after the bombing in Mahmut Paşa, it had been just the two of them in the classroom. He was quick, and naughty. He had a particular affinity for language, English, French, Latin. She was fond of him, despite herself. He was also listless. She suspected, as the war went on, that this was due to lack of food.

  He was the son of two Armenians. The father a barber who her father had sometimes visited, the wife a very talented seamstress, who adjusted clothes for her mother and grandmother. But it seemed that during the war they had fallen on hard times. There was less call for non-essential luxuries, such as the skill of a tailor. There was less call for the services of an Armenian barber – partly because so many men had gone to war, and because some were boycotting the Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews: saying they were secretly celebrating every victory of the enemy. The apartment they had moved into, according to the butcher’s wife downstairs (one of her grandmother’s new circle of informants), used to belong to an Armenian family.

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Oh, no one knows. They seemed pleasant enough to me – though I know others disapproved of them. But I suppose it’s only right, since the war.’

  Her grandmother had nodded, sagely – though Nur suspected she was as ignorant as herself as to exactly what the woman meant. She never showed her ignorance, though: to do so was an admission of weakness. She was like the sultans who had wanted to seem all-knowing, all-powerful.

  ‘Why?’ Nur asked the butcher’s wife. She did not have the same reservations. ‘Why is it only right, since the war?’

  ‘Well.’ The woman had seemed momentarily lost for words. ‘Well. Because they are the enemy now, of course.’ Then, apparently bored, she had segued into some tale about one of their other neighbours berating her husband in the small hours of the morning and how it was ‘really too shameful’ – both the noise, and the fact that the man just seemed to accept it. But he was clearly a weak sort – he would have been the right age to go to war, had it not been for some dubious story about a problem with his heart.

  ‘But why?’ Nur had persisted.

  ‘Why what? I can’t presume to know the reason for a man’s unmanliness. Perhaps he was at the breast too long as a child.’

  ‘No: why are they now our enemies, the Armenians?’

  The woman had given a little shiver of irritation. Nur was reminded of the phase she had gone through as a child: a game of replying to every answer with another question. Her mother had worn the same expression of exasperation as the butcher’s wife.

  ‘They’re traitors,’ the woman said – baldly. ‘That’s all I know of it, but I do know that it’s true. Everyone knows it’ – as though Nur had spent the last few years living under a rock – ‘everyone knows that it’s true.’ A cross glance at Nur. ‘My Mehmet knows more about it, of course: he goes to the coffeehouse, he hears all about it there. The stories men bring home from the front.’

  Nur was almost tempted to ask why her Mehmet, who seemed perfectly strong and capable and the right sort of age, had not gone to the front either. She stopped herself: she knew that she would not like herself if she asked it.

  Later she thought of her nurse, Sara, who had been Armenian. She had been a second mother to Nur – quite literally, in the first weeks of her life, when she had been her wet nurse, as was common in families like hers. Even while Nur had been fascinated by her strangeness – the fact that she did not fast at Ramazan, or was allowed to drink wine (though she never did), and wore her hair uncovered – she had loved her as though she were family. Impossible to think of someone like Sara as the enemy, just as impossible as to think it of the Armenian children at the school. She had seen allusions to ‘Armenian treachery’ in the newspapers but had been able to dismiss them. They seemed as likely as the pieces on our ‘all-conquering army’. To hear a woman like the butcher’s wife talk of it as an established fact: that was a different matter.

  She had discovered the boy going through the kitchen refuse at the school, looking for scraps of food. He had a small pile of his treasures beside him: potato peelings, the rough outer layers of onions, the skins of aubergines. When questioned, the story came out. He carried a little bag about with him in his pocket. In it were salt and pepper, a little powdered chilli. With these he could make anything palatable. Roots, or grass, or meat several days past its best: the chilli would disguise the greenish hue, too, if one was squeamish. This vegetable detritus was a comparable luxury. He told her all of this with a note of unmistakable triumph, as though proud of his resourcefulness.

  The next day she had brought in some of their bread for him – furtively, because if she was caught she would have had some difficult explanations to make to her mother and grandmother; they had hardly enough to feed themselves. This had continued for some weeks. She had been pleased to see that her gifts seemed to be having some effect: that he seemed to have lost the look of a child marked out for death. She made sure that he ate the food she brought in front of her, because she suspected otherwise that he would take it home to share with his family. This was all very well, perhaps. But it was he who was her responsibility, and he was a six-year-old boy. One had to assume that his parents would be better able to take care of themselves.

  One day he had not come in to school. She had not worried immediately. But when three days had passed, with no sign, she began to be uneasy.

  She knew where he lived. Samatya, the Armenian quarter of the city since Byzantine times, in Stamboul – on the other side of the Golden Horn. She did not know exactly where, but it was a close community, smaller and even more tight-knit since the earthquake in the last century that had forced so many to leave. His parents had been well-known for a time; hopefully someone would be able to tell her of their fate. She wandered through the neighbourhood and realised that her confidence might have been misplaced: there were so few people in the streets. Hunger did this, and fear.

  Turning a corner she had come across a terrible, too-familiar sight: several streets’ worth of houses razed by fire. A greasy smoke still rose listlessly from the rubble. Later, she could not be sure exactly why, but she had a sudden certainty that here was the reason for the boy’s absence. She had wandered through the ruined place, calling his name. She did not really believe that any use would come of it. But as she had passed one of the buildings on the outskirts of the catastrophe, one which had been only half-consumed by the inferno – so that the theatre-set impression of rooms remained – she had heard a noise. A small, high cry, through one of the blown-out windows. She had assumed that it was a stray cat: Constantinople had always been full of them, and they were at that time more than ever the lords of the street, the only ones who did not seem cowed by the change in the city. Then it came again, and this time there was a different, human quality to it.

  Steeling herself against what she might find, she had made her way in through the empty doorframe. She had stopped short, realising her mistake. No one could remain in here. There was only death; she could smell it. A thick fog of grey soot hung suspended in the air, she felt it enveloping her. Remnants of blackened furniture stuck up in places like used matchsticks. The stench was almost overpowering. She was about to leave when the sound came again, and she looked into the dark to see a shape. A child, crouched like an animal, his eyes and teeth seeming to glow from his soot-smeared face. He looked like an entirely different boy at first, it was impossible to recognise him through the dirt. But that was not all there was to it: something had departed him. Or, she thought later, something had entered him. A new darkness, a virus of grief. It would be a long time before she saw anything of the boy he had
been before.

  There were rumours that the fire had not been an accident. That it had been set to teach a lesson; by those who believed – like the butcher’s wife – that the Armenians were an enemy within. She would not allow herself to believe it. Not this. No one could have meant this.

  She discovered, later, that he had spent three days in the house, three days with the burned bodies of his parents. She had seen them but only as unthinkable shapes; her mind had not allowed them to be anything else. Even when she knew what they were, for certain, she had been unable to match them to the kind couple she had known. The small man with his quick smile, and his wife, whose laughter came so easily, so generously.

  She had picked the boy up in her arms – he did not resist – and carried him from the house like an infant. He was almost as light as one. She had walked with him like this all the way home.

  George

  He remembers the scene beyond the bazaar, the ruined houses. Despite all that he has seen, he shudders.

  He had been so certain that the boy was hers. She had been married before the war, it made sense. But it was more than that: her tenderness with the boy. He thinks of how, when he had told her of the boy’s condition, her hand had gone to her abdomen. He wonders at it.

  He wonders, too, why she has not corrected him before. Did she think, perhaps, that he would not have offered his help so quickly if he had not believed the child to be hers? Would it have made a difference? He would like to think not. Except that he is not absolutely sure. The truth of his motives, as with so many of one’s most significant actions, remains inscrutable even to himself.

  Did she think that in some way he would judge her, would think less of her?

  The truth is that it is quite the opposite.

  She has come every day. Each time he has noticed, learned, something new in her.

  That she is a baffling, complex, mixture of confidence and hesitance, anger and equanimity.