Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  ‘Ah,’ her grandmother said. ‘But that is because it was only made to fit one person, you see. And it wasn’t so much about looking out as keeping in. I think you are old enough to hear it.’

  A sultan built it for his daughter, the legend had it, to protect her from the fate he had dreamed befalling her: the deathly bite of a snake. By forcing her to live in the tower, protected from harm by the water and the guardianship of her ladies, he believed he could keep her from this terrible destiny. But she was foolish, in the way young women are apt to be, and she had longings, to which young women are also susceptible. The tower kept her safe, but it also provided a perfect vantage point from which to see all she was missing out on. The lights of the great city, in which thousands loved and lived, following out their destinies in happy ignorance, without fear. The boats coming and going, laden with exotic cargo and lucky passengers bound for places she would never see. And above, the great blue reach of the sky, where birds wheeled free.

  One day, a little craft passed laden with fruits. The girl could have asked for anything she wanted and it would have been delivered to her: the sultan was determined that his daughter would want for nothing. All he asked was that anything entering the tower was thoroughly checked first. But that, naturally, removed much of the pleasure from things. The sultan’s daughter would watch as loaves of bread were pulled into pieces small enough that there could be no chance of anything remaining concealed within, as oranges were peeled and pitted and split into segments presented on a white plate and then given first to one of the ladies to test, as dates were de-stoned and quartered and mashed to a pulp. Everything reduced to less than the sum of its parts. Nothing completely hers, because of the fingers that would have touched it and searched it and taken all the magic from it.

  When this fruit-laden boat passed almost silently beneath the window, the girl watched it with longing. She saw the jewel-red pomegranates, the piles of ripe yellow pears, flushed with the sun’s kiss, the dusky spillage of purple grapes. And then she saw the boatman, and he was yet more beautiful than any of his wares. So when, seeing her half-hanging out of her window, he called to her, and asked her – did she want anything? – how could she not answer him? (Speech with strangers was also forbidden by her father, as though the words themselves might drip poison into her ears.)

  ‘The grapes,’ she said, because suddenly she could almost taste them: the bitter skin splitting to yield untold sweetness. Each would be a substitute, she thought, for a boatman’s kiss.

  ‘How will I get them to you, effendi?’ the boatman called.

  She thought. She had to be quick, or one of her women would come and she would be found out. She found a long silk scarf, and lowered this to him.

  ‘Tie them in there,’ she said. ‘And you may keep the scarf afterward, as payment.’

  Of course – because this is how things work in fairy tales – the sultan’s daughter didn’t have the chance to enjoy her grapes, or to fall in love with the boatman. As she lifted the fragrant bunch to her mouth a snake uncoiled itself and delivered the deathly bite. It was her fate, waiting for her. There was nothing that she could have done.

  It is impossible, Nur knows this. She would be cast out. In another place, time, perhaps. If it had been before the war, or a century after its passing. If there had been no war. But then such thoughts have no meaning; and no succour.

  Her cousin Hüseyin has transcended a boundary – but it is a very different thing for him. He is a man, living abroad. She is a woman who has lived in an occupied city, who lost her husband and her own unborn child at the hands of the enemy. She has lived here while they have insulted Ottoman men and women, arrested and even killed them; whilst they have made the city their playground. She would not merely be cast out from her home, from her people, she would be cast out from herself.

  Not for the first time she wishes she had never set eyes upon the man.

  Acts of Destabilisation

  The darkest hour of the night. There is still faint noise from the city. But here there is almost absolute quiet broken only by tiny musical disturbances in the water, the secret movements of fish.

  A figure detaches itself from the shadows, like something cut from the fabric of the night itself, moving with incredible speed across the grass. Then a small catch of sound, a tiny plume of light.

  The fire begins with surprising hesitance, for something of such latent power. The wood is old, loose-grained, friable, which should help with the burning. But it is also damp from the sea air: the accumulated moisture of two centuries. If anything were to save it now, this might be it.

  More alcohol.

  With something almost like a concentrated effort of will, the fire gathers itself. Pale flames begin to lick at the wood, with some discernment, like a chef tasting a new dish for the carte. They move languorously at first – in no particular hurry now that the decision has been made, the balance tipped.

  Then something changes. A gust of wind from exactly the right direction, perhaps. Now the flames become voracious, insatiable, and faster, faster, snickering up the old beams, gathering strength from nothing – from the very air. Now it is growing loud. There are great exhalations of heat, smaller gasps and cackles, a low, snickering sound that is, perhaps, most terrible of all.

  The night is lit up with it.

  The still black waters reflect the spectacle, so that they, too, seem to have caught light like oil. And he sees himself in the reflection too, a faceless figure surrounded by flame, the agent of all the destruction.

  It is terrible, magnificent. A shame, really, that none is here to appreciate it. Save for he who soaked the wood, in preparations that were almost tenderly attentive, in alcohol. He who lit the match, and watched it catch, and willed it on, trembling a little with fear and excitement and then the new sense of his own impotence, because it has so quickly gone beyond the limits of his control.

  Before, wielding the starter, he had held all the power. Now it has been taken from him, has grown far larger than him.

  He could not stop it even if he wanted to. Does he want to? No. No, he doesn’t.

  Not even now, confronted by the reality of it – far more magnificent and terrible than he ever imagined when it lit up his dreams?

  He could still help them. He could warn them. It would still be a fantastic act of rebellion, a symbol. But life would not be sacrificed.

  No, too late, impossible. But he could try.

  George

  It is a scent from earliest memory. It carries upon it a season. George is ready for it, tired of the heat, ready for the softness of it, the richer colours. Wood, dried by summer sun, wood and resin, burning up. A scent of sweetness and warmth. How strange, though, he cannot remember how he came to be here, in the English countryside, in autumn.

  How did he return? No … he cannot remember.

  Constantinople, the Bosphorus, a swim in turquoise waters, a sick little boy, a woman named Nur – these are the things he remembers.

  He opens his eyes. A dream. No, not entirely a dream: the woodsmoke remains. The dark is thick as soup. But at the furthest reaches of his vision there is a strange illumination, an inconsistent flickering. He cannot think what it could be, beyond the idea that too much of his dream has bled into life – that he has been left with some retinal imprint of it. The scent of it, too, in his nostrils. The taste of it, filling his mouth with bitterness.

  His thoughts are full of sleep, he has to struggle toward clarity like a man wading through a bog. It has to be the dream, because there is no other explanation. It is far too dark, far too late, for someone to be having a bonfire.

  It is another minute before he heeds the animal part of his mind, that centre of pure instinct, that is sounding the alarm.

  By now he can feel the heat of it, pressing in, forcing the cold air of the room into retreat. Still, he clutches at the hope that he is mistaken. The alternative is too terrible.

  He stumbles outside. The building is on
fire. He stands for a moment blinking before the billowing sail of heat, his vision blurring, disbelieving.

  As he looks, he sees one of the shadows detach itself from the mass of dark, running. At first he thinks it is someone come to help, is about to beckon them, and ask them to join the line. Then he realises that the figure is not running toward him; is making instead for the cover of the trees behind the house.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouts. ‘You! Stop there!’

  The man falters, and turns. George is certain that he did not mean to do this, that the reaction was an involuntary one. He will castigate himself for it later, no doubt. In turning he has allowed George a full look at him. Lit by flames, the pale oval of his face – young, dark-featured – is as clearly visible as it would be in daylight. George is certain that he has not seen him before. At the same time, though, there is a certain familiarity. In this moment he does not have the space within his thoughts to begin to explain it. Perhaps it will come. He is certain now that the fire was no accident; that here is its cause. Too late, he remembers to make chase. His legs are clumsy; the other moved with an animal agility. The ground seems purposefully to obstruct him, twice his ankle turns over almost upon itself, sending a raw pain up his leg. Still, he keeps going, plunges into the dark thicket. Only now does he see that it is utterly useless. The arsonist could be crouched behind some tree, above him in the branches, or far gone from here. He could even be lying quietly a few feet away on the earth, shrouded in dark – and George would never know. There is no purpose in running, now.

  It is still some way from the ward. But it seems to be blossoming at an incredible speed. He stumbles back inside. Three figures, white-clad, seem to shimmer out of the darkness of the rest of the house: Bill and two of the Sisters, in their nightclothes. They gape at him, still half-asleep, mirroring his own disbelief.

  ‘The patients,’ he says to them. ‘We have to move them out onto the grass.’ His voice is calmer than it should be. ‘We need to make them safe. Then stop the fire.’

  They nod at him. He would like to shake them – they seem stupefied by the horror of it – forgetting that he had been exactly the same; has had those crucial few moments more with the reality of it. Finally they seem to light into action.

  The patients are awake – those who are sensible to the catastrophe, at least – and alarmed. Some of those who are able have already fled outside and are now returning, rather shame-faced, to help with the transport of the bedridden.

  It is the boy that George sees, goes to, first. He has shrunk himself into a foetal curl, his hands covering his head, his legs drawn up. When George goes to him, calls his name, he is insensible with fear.

  He does the only thing he can: lifts him and the bedclothes in an awkward bundle into his arms – the small cargo within the sheets unyielding, rigid – and carries him outside. He is remembering the boy’s parents.

  ‘I am carrying you to safety,’ he says. ‘It isn’t a big fire, but we need to make sure that everyone is far away from it.’

  Even as he says it he hears the roar of it, and feels the heat lick the back of his neck like the breath of a dragon.

  He places the child, in his bedclothes, on the dew-wet grass. ‘It will be all right,’ he says. ‘It will all be all right.’ No answer comes. With a sudden thrill of fear he bends close to the covered face. He is breathing: shallowly, very fast. He would like more time to comfort the child, but there may not be enough time for all of it as it is.

  One of the yellow fever patients is so deeply in the depths of the fever that he seems not to know what is happening: he asks for an iced water, very politely. George almost envies him his state of ignorance. The patients who are most far gone are the hardest to manoeuvre; they are dead weights, impossibly heavy, limbs lolling unhelpfully from the stretcher. But this is not the first time George and Bill have had to do it; memories surface from the time before. Of course, some of those were, in fact, dead.

  They are lacking in the fitness they once had, the endurance born of hard marching, but they remember the right holds, the way to use the weight rather than fight it, the strange staggering dance of the feet over rough ground.

  How could he not have foreseen this? That being across the water, in this lonely place, would cut them off absolutely from the help of the fire brigades. No, he knows why. Precisely because he somehow could not have imagined such a thing happening, in an isolated building beside the city’s greatest source of water. It flashes across his mind – the strangeness of it. He cannot imagine what could have caused it. But there is no time to think about it, not now. It has reached the ward.

  The last patient has been dragged onto the lawn, far enough – for now – from harm. Life has been preserved; this is the most important thing. But the equipment: the precious, carefully guarded supplies of quinine and morphine, these are all now at risk. They must work now to kill the fire, before it can do more damage.

  The smoke swallows him, it fills his mouth and nose, steals all the breath from him. He backs away, retching and coughing. It is impossible. But gradually he remembers what he knows of fire. He presses the front of his nightshirt over his mouth, hunkers down upon his hands and knees, and crawls into it, beneath it, like an animal. In the fierce hot dark he gropes for the bottles and vials. Some have broken in the heat already, his fingers find jagged edges. But several are intact, and he thrusts them into the front of his nightshirt. Then there is an explosion right before his face: the violence of it stuns him. The skin of his face and ear feels as though it is consuming itself. He staggers back, hunkered on all fours, gasping with pain. He needs water, but he does not have water. He does not have time to do anything other than attempt to save himself. With a great effort he begins to crawl. His lungs feel as though they have been filled with incandescent coals, and it feels as though someone is forcing the same coals against his cheek and ear. He realises, dimly, that he may not make the distance. Now sensation is fragmenting: he is beginning to be confused, confused by the pain and the smoke as to which direction he should be moving in – it begins to seem that it might as easily be up or down as forward or backward, left or right. In the lucid part of his mind he enumerates his symptoms, almost calmly. The confusion, the agony of his face, the burning airlessness in his chest, the gradual disintegration of his faculties.

  The Prisoner

  He climbs into the kayık, fumbles for the oars. They are somehow more unwieldy than before – he cannot seem to make them obey him. He knows what the main obstacle is, that his hands are trembling almost too much to grip them properly.

  The man saw him. He knows it. Will not do to think about that. It is done. It cannot be helped, now. Ah – but what possessed him to turn back? To have thought for a second that he might be able to reverse the thing he had done, or try to warn those inside. The shame is not in the act, he tells himself now, the shame is in that moment of doubt. It is only a problem if he gets caught. The man has never seen him before, and if he never sees him again, there will be no crisis. Stay hidden, out of sight, it will be easy enough.

  He begins to row. Perhaps it is some aspect of the current, heretofore unknown to him, but there seems to be more resistance against the bow. The oars make more noise – before all had seemed silent, effortless. Everything is slower, clumsier. He reminds himself that it is only a little way. The difficult part of it is done.

  He tries not to imagine Nur’s face. She will know, as soon as she hears about the fire. His mother and grandmother are too blinded by their love for him to suspect him of any such thing. But Nur is different – her love is exactly the thing that will make her see.

  ‘Who goes there?’

  He stops rowing, hunkers low. Goes as still as he is able, though it is impossible to stop himself from trembling. He tries to think himself into the blackness, to dissolve into it, but the surface of his skin seems almost to shimmer with his guilt. Then the wobbling beam of a torch. When he feels the light enter his eyes, he knows that the game is up.


  George

  Just as he has decided to close his eyes, to rest a while, he feels himself seized, dragged bodily, into cooler air. His face is drenched in water.

  Bill hunkers down above him. ‘I thought you were a dead man. You bloody fool. You and your quinine. I can tell you now, before you look in a mirror, you’ve paid quite a price for it.’

  For several minutes he lies, half-insensible, before returning to himself. Then he looks up, sees the blaze. The sight terrifies him. There are six of them against this, and he, getting shakily to his feet, is as weak as a cat.

  No: there are a few more, the more able-bodied of the patients are offering their help. And then a strange sight. New figures are emerging. Ten perhaps, in total. Some of them women, wearing veils that catch and snicker in the warm air sent up from the flames. Several men, most of them elderly. A few youths – even a couple of children. All carry receptacles.

  A line is formed, stretching from the blaze to the Bosphorus. The containers – saucepans, buckets, even a large coffee pot – travel between them, filled with water. Each individual dousing seems a pitiful effort, doomed to failure. But after the first couple of efforts he does not stop to regard the effect, or even to catch his breath, because the next full bucket is always waiting for him.

  He works without thought. Even the agony of his face and lungs is a faintly realised thing. He has become a machine, no, a part of a machine.

  At some indiscernible point, the balance shifts. A stemming, a diminishing, has occurred. The fact of it spurs them on. Then comes the moment when he reaches for the bucket, and finds that it isn’t there.

  ‘Look.’ He turns, finds that it has been Bill beside him all along; he hadn’t even realised. ‘I think we’ve done it.’