by Lucy Foley
That sometimes, when she has used a particularly difficult word, in English, she allows a momentary pause before continuing, as though waiting for him to correct her. (He never does – he is not certain that it would be well received, despite the apparent invitation, and besides, her command of the language almost outstrips his own.)
That the gloves she wears are of a very fine-looking lace, but that they seemed to have been mended rather clumsily in several places.
That, on the occasions when she has removed them, the beds of her nails have a bluish – almost violet – tint. A sure sign of poor circulation that he should not, as a medical man, find so charming a detail.
That there are three tiny, dark freckles about one of her eyes – though he can never remember which. Like a constellation. No, like a signature, the mark of a master artist proud of his work. He is surprised at himself. He does not normally give way to such ridiculous notions.
That often when he is speaking she frowns at him. He cannot decide if this is her concentrating upon her translation of his words – which he doubts because she is so proficient – or that she is marshalling her dislike of him, of what he stands for. Which seems the more likely.
That her smile is a hard-won thing, but that when it comes it is unmitigated pleasure, all the better for the difficulty in winning it.
There are many other things beside, too many to enumerate. He feels that he could write a paper on them – far more fluently than a treatise on the strains of Mesapotamian malaria, which he is currently attempting.
Difficult to diagnose a complaint in oneself. Even, or perhaps especially, if one is a man of medicine. The best way is to list the symptoms precisely, dispassionately, and then attempt to look upon them as one might the same in a stranger.
He goes to the cupboard, retrieves the precious flask, and pours himself a sparing quantity. He holds the whisky in his mouth, enjoying the burn of it, the clarity it brings to his thoughts.
If he were to list his symptoms now? Anticipation. Heightened awareness of the self and one’s own shortcomings. Heightened awareness of perfection in another; everything in them appearing fascinating, novel. Increased heart rate. Disturbed dreams. Anxiety. Strange, irrational bouts of euphoria.
He senses that a hundred doctors in the same number would diagnose one complaint. He would do so himself … observing these effects in a stranger. But as for himself? Impossible. It cannot be; he cannot allow it to be. Because, if it is, he is in a great deal of trouble.
Snow
The snow takes the city by surprise; a month ago it had been warm. It sweeps from the north of the Black Sea under clouds of palest lavender. It silences the world. It perfects the streets, blanketing unsightly piles of refuse and dirt. The street cats slink through it furtively, as though not wanting to draw its attention upon them. The stray dogs are suspicious of it, fearful: they growl and whimper – one brave pack leader tries to paw the flakes out of the air.
It is beautiful, otherworldly. In some places, perhaps, it becomes mundane, but not here where it visits rarely. Nur steps out into it, a swift breath in at the cold. She wraps her scarf a little higher about her face, and plunges into the swarm of white.
Kerem watches from a window. At one time he might have seen beauty in it – he can hear the delighted cries of children from the street. As he watches, several small figures emerge, clothes dark against it, wrapped in what appears to be every item they own. They kick at the fresh fallen powder, scoop it up into their arms so it fountains down. He sees Nur stop and talk to them and then he sees or perhaps hears her laughter.
He blinks. Because all he can see are the broken bodies of so many men; freezing hard as stone – but not so hard that the dogs will not be able to tear into them. There is a tightness, high in his chest. He closes his eyes and turns from the glass. He will light a cigarette, and then he will go and speak with his friend in the Eyüp coffeehouse.
The boy watches it, from the window of the house on the Bosphorus, transfixed by how it seems to melt into the water, or to be swallowed by it. There have only been three proper snows in his lifetime; it is a miracle. And how quickly the opposite bank is transforming from dark green to white. He would like to go out into it, but he knows that he will not be allowed. His old self would have run and jumped in it, would have built figures from it.
For the doctor, it is still a miracle. He has not seen snow like this for several years. By the time they arrived at those villages beside the Caspian Sea the snow was old and brackish. To those living there it had long ago become a nuisance, not a novelty. This is like the snow of childhood, blanketing the peaks overnight so that he would wake to a world transformed. The red deer moving through it, suddenly exposed. All of the colour gone. A new, more essential beauty. It seemed possessed of its own light, even after darkness fell. He could see it there glowing out at him, like a secret.
He is in the grip of some uncertain emotion.
‘Would you like to go outside?’
He has his answer before the boy has even spoken.
‘Sister Agnes, I’m taking him out. Could you fetch me some blankets?’
She widens her eyes at him: what madness is this?
He ignores the look.
It is colder than he has expected: the wind funnelled in across the water feels as though it comes straight from Siberia.
‘Are you warm enough?’
‘Yes.’ It comes muffled from beneath a layer of blanket.
‘We don’t have to stay out here for long.’
It is slow progress; there are already several inches of cover and the wheelchair is unwieldy, even with the small weight within it. In a few minutes, in spite of the cold, George is damp with sweat.
He remembers something, from childhood.
‘Look up, into it falling.’
‘I cannot.’
The boy, he sees, is so tightly swaddled that he is fixed into position, face forward.
‘All right. Look, I’ll help you.’ With no small effort he tilts the heavy chair back towards him on its wheels, so that the child is facing the sky.
Above them they watch the unwinding vortex of snow like a falling constellation, a fragmenting nebula. The few bare branches are black veins, equally strange. The boy opens his mouth, and catches a flake upon his tongue. George knows the taste of it – the taste of nothing, and yet with a flavour all of its own, metal and something sweet. His eyes burn. Though it may be nothing more than the bitter air.
At some point he catches movement from the corner of his eye, and turns to see a figure approaching through the veil of white. She might be unidentifiable, wrapped so comprehensively in shawls, but he knows from something in the movement that it is her. The rush of joy he feels on seeing her takes him by surprise. It is that which one might feel upon the unexpected arrival of an old friend; even a loved one.
He raises a hand. He doesn’t call out – he isn’t sure whether she will be able to hear him from this distance and somehow the words won’t form themselves anyway. It is as though something has winded him.
She comes closer, stepping carefully. When she is near he sees that the snow light has changed her eyes; they look not dark but almost silver.
‘What are you doing?’
‘He wanted to see the snow.’
There is a lightness between them, he feels it. It is something new, almost like friendship. It is the magic of the snow, the strangeness of it.
‘It looks more as though you were both eating it.’
From somewhere in the folds of her cloak she produces a small package, wrapped in brown paper.
‘I bought these for him.’
She hands it to him. He takes it; it is warm. For a moment he thinks it is the warmth of her, the warmth beneath her cloak. He feels something new go through him and looks hard at the package in case it is visible on his face.
‘Chestnuts,’ she says. ‘The street sellers are roasting them on every corner. He likes them.’ And then, an a
fterthought: ‘And perhaps you will have some, too.’
‘Thank you.’
There follows a reckoning silence. Neither of them seems quite certain of how to proceed. And then something rather unexpected happens: a shock of wet and cold hits him square in the face. He splutters, flummoxed and angered by the assault. For a confused moment he thinks that she has thrown it at him. Then he understands: one of the branches above has released its weight of snow onto him, a direct hit. The boy is laughing in delight. Even she has allowed herself a smile. As he sees the thing as they must have done, he begins to laugh too.
The Boy
He watches Nur hanım. She is different, somehow. She looks the same – apart from an extra layer of clothing against the cold, perhaps – but she wears the new thing on her like an invisible cloak that warms her in some secret way. He thinks he knows what has caused this change in her. It is the doctor. He realises that he has never thought of an adult needing a friend in the way a small boy might. He would never have thought it of Nur hanım, especially, because she has always seemed so strong. And she has never had a friend, as far as he can think, in her life. But now she is smiling, and her whole face looks different: less tired, less old.
She told him, all that time ago, that the doctor was not a friend: that he is the enemy. She seems to have forgotten this.
There is something else, too: that he is too young to interpret but not to notice. He can feel it, like a change in the atmosphere, like the scent of a new season. It is in glances, in words: but beneath the words. Something powerful, perhaps dangerous. Do they know it, too? He isn’t certain. He knows, too, that he cannot speak of it to Nur. Not just because he does not know how to put it into words, but because he does not think she would like him asking.
The Prisoner
Acts of destabilisation. That is the phrase to remember. Do not let them become too comfortable.
‘They have to live here like everyone else,’ the officer says. ‘If their existence becomes a little less secure, they will be that much less effective at the business of occupation.’
This is where they are powerful. Not in the way of an army – in an open show of might. Rather as agents of uncertainty and fear. However universal an occupation, it cannot be all-seeing.
He is involved in a number of smaller subversions. Some of these are raids on the artillery stores of the Allies, the weapons to be passed along a chain that will eventually see them in Ankara, with the rebel government. Some are caught in similar acts.
On his return from the coffeehouse, late at night, he happens across a British soldier drunk upon the quay. The man is bending down to vomit into the Bosphorus. The gold epaulettes upon his shoulders mark him out as an officer of high rank.
And these are the men to whom we are supposed to relinquish our city, who have made what was ours their own. The shame of it.
He acts almost before he has decided he is going to do it, the impulse of a moment: a hand shot out to catch the man in the small of his back. Only a tiny amount of force. But this is all it takes to send the officer toppling forward. The man enters the water with hardly a sound, as though he had never been there. The surface appears almost undisturbed.
Within: is there not a small ripple of disquiet at the deed? Yes, in spite of himself and all he has learned. Because this death must be nothing to him. After all, he has killed innocents and those deaths were necessary. He must believe that, or be destroyed. This man, on the other hand, was himself a killer. He must celebrate it for what it is: a triumph over his enemy.
But two days later, the news in the coffeehouse is that, by some miracle, the man survived. That they are searching for the perpetrator. There have been executions for much less. Is he afraid? He does not know what that means, any more. For a couple of days, he remains at the apartment – though he is almost certain that the man could not have seen him, and even if he had was too drunk to remember his features.
In the early morning a small band of British soldiers pound their way through the streets of the neighbourhood, making ‘enquiries’. This, apparently, means ordering half-dressed, barefoot men into the cold street and humiliating them in front of the secret gaze of their neighbours, interrogating them as they shiver on the spot.
‘Nur.’ He goes to rouse her, but sees that she is already awake. ‘They cannot know that I am here.’
He sees the suspicion in her expression; once it would have made an impression upon him, but now he is used to her looking at him like this. It is better, in fact, than the times he catches her watching him secretly, as though trying to work out whether it is really him.
At first he thinks that she is going to refuse. It was foolish – he sees this now – to commit the act so close to home. He would not have wanted to implicate Nur in it, no matter her disloyalty. But she nods her head.
From his position on the roof he hears how they talk to her, the degradation of it. According to the old way of things they should not even be able to demand an audience with the women of the house. He imagines that even if they are aware of this edict they probably take great pleasure in flouting it.
‘No,’ he hears her say, ‘there is no one else here. My brother was lost in the war.’ He hears the tell-tale give in her voice at the lie; but they do not know her like he does – or thought he did. It was not worth it for this, the humiliation of his sister, of the men in the street. The act was petty, ineffectual. In the hours afterward it had plagued him more than it should have done, a burr upon his conscience. He kept seeing it again in his mind, the defenceless – albeit shameful – state of the officer as he had made his move. It had been cowardly, beneath him. That was what had disquieted him, he tells himself, not so much the likely death of the man as the unheroic part he himself had played in it. And then to discover that the man had survived, that the debasing of himself had been for nothing.
So his next act must be significant. It should be meticulously planned in advance, orchestrated with bravery and conviction – not upon the whim of a moment, with all the grandeur of a pickpocket stealing a wallet. It must be something that will draw a line between the man all those years ago, and who he has become. Something that will prove as much to himself as to the enemy.
An idea occurs to him.
It would solve several problems at once.
At first his mind recoils from it.
Then he returns to it. Worries at it, as he might a bad dream that has terrified him.
Nur
Kerem is distracted these days, secretive. He comes home late at night; he has not mentioned the issue of the hospital again. She does not think that this means he has forgiven her: only that he has more pressing matters on his mind. There was this morning, when the British soldiers came. The army has had no presence in their uneventful streets since the very beginning of the occupation. Something of significance had drawn them here.
If it is what she suspects, it is not the cause she objects to, precisely. She is afraid for him – that is the heart of it.
There have been those murmurings of resistance since the beginning of the occupation. There are even rumours that there are women involved. If her situation had been different, if it had not been for her mother, the boy, she might have been tempted to join them herself.
She has no loyalty to the Allies: there is no doubt in that. She is under no illusion that the doctor proves the exception, not the rule – and even then she suspects that he may not be so open and blameless as he seems. She has seen how the nurses at the hospital look at her, his fellow doctor, too: as though she is an imposter. She thinks, too, of the British soldiers who chased her and the boy – a woman and a small child – on the night of the fireworks. She thinks of the things she heard from her rooftop lookout on the first days. Yes, even with her responsibilities at home she might once have been tempted to join the resistors in some small capacity. Before the boy’s illness, before the inevitable compromise that had to be made with her conscience, before a personal tie had t
o be put before national duty. But even if she had joined them she knows that she would have kept some sense of proportion, of self-preservation. This is the thing that she fears her brother lacks. And she realises that her fear, when it comes to Kerem, is not one of not loving, after all. It is one of loving too much.
The Traveller
Bulgaria, Sofia, by morning; the last major stop before my destination. Here a fresh horde of passengers embark and now familiar faces in the carriage are replaced by new. I feel a strange sorrow at the loss. Though we have hardly spoken to one another, a silent accord had been established, as though we have been travelling along this route much longer together. We have all belonged to something.
The thing it took me some time to learn is this: belonging is not a fixed state. You can be told for many years that you belong; that you are a uniform part of a greater whole. That your identity is the same thing as the identity of a nation. Then, one day, you discover that the criteria for membership have changed. Differences are exposed; aspects of your life that you had never understood as different. Suddenly they have become radical, perverse, blasphemous. ‘Look at the way you pray!’ they say. ‘Look at the food you eat, the tongue you speak in, the colour of your skin, the sort of bed you lay your head on … even the sound of your name. You are as different from us – we have only just realised it – as a cat is from a dog. You have been hiding among us, but now we see straight through your deception. Whoever told you that a cat may be friends with a dog? What nonsense! We are sworn, eternal enemies. We have found you out. We will tear you apart.’
I open the suitcase, and take out a small tobacco tin. There is a man in London who imports this variety of tobacco from the old place. For many years it has been delivered in a heavy, compact package smelling powerfully of burned toast, and then decanted into one of several small tins like this. My memories are scented with it, mingled with the chemical tang of a hospital ward.
