Last Letter from Istanbul

by Lucy Foley

  A very English school. The dismay of greyish meat, boiled to stubborn tastelessness; khaki-coloured vegetables spouting lukewarm water. A lumpish beige-coloured rice pudding with an optimistic exclamation of raspberry jam. What I wouldn’t have done then for a little bag filled with spices and salt; a concoction that made anything palatable. This sorry fare tasted as bad as a clod of earth taken from the rain-sluiced sports field beyond the refectory window. But when you have known hunger – not the schoolboy meaning of ‘starving’ but the real thing – you do not refuse a single bite of anything. And there was also one small, embarrassing hope. Perhaps if I ate this food for long enough I would become like the other boys around me. My difference from them would be less visible.

  But I could remember fresh almonds piled atop a cake of ice, the white flesh creamy and sweet. Figs, eaten straight from the trees, the nectar beading through the skin and sticky against the palms.

  This book arrived on my eighteenth birthday. I told him I did not want it: that life, the old country, was part of the past now, a past from which I wanted to separate myself.

  ‘I understand your anger, but it is ill-placed. It was never her fault.’

  ‘She gave me up.’

  ‘She believed that she was saving your life. She may well have done so, for all we know.’ He smiled, then. ‘And her loss was my gain.’

  ‘She did not love me enough.’

  ‘She loved you too much.’

  I must have looked unconvinced by this argument. He went away, and returned with a sheaf of old newspapers. ‘Part of me wishes that you never had to read these,’ he said. ‘But if it helps you to understand, then I think it may be necessary.’

  I could not see how some miserable articles could help me do this. But then I began to read. About the Armenians: my people, though I had never thought of them as such. I learned of women and children forced to leave their homes carrying their worldly goods upon their backs to walk across a desert on their bare feet. I learned of villages and neighbourhoods set alight. Of unimaginable sights. A hillside of discarded, broken bodies, denuded and pitiful. Bloated corpses in a stream. Thousands of bones discovered beneath a thin layer of sand. I learned of the attempted annihilation of a people, a way of life: what had once been my people, my way of life. I learned that the little boy found in a burned building, who travelled alone across the entire breadth of Europe in a railway carriage – from one who loved him, to another who would love him – was one of the luckiest ones.

  And he showed me a letter. I recognised the hand, because it was like my own. Its sender, after all, was the one who taught me to write in the first place.

  I looked at him.

  ‘I show you all of this,’ he said, ‘not to cause more anger, or upset. It is because I want you to see that there were many sides in that war: not just two. There were elements that cannot be understood or explained even now, even knowing that in war terrible things happen, that people act in ways that cannot be understood.

  ‘She did it because she loved you. Can you see it now? If she had loved you a little less, and herself a little more, she would not have let you go.’

  At the time, I was too caught up in my own distress and confusion – and also far too young – to consider what it must have been like for him. To get that letter, with its entreaty. To have to decide how he would answer it, this plea from the woman who had been so much to him. It must have changed his life. He was still a fairly young man, with a sick wife and now a small, traumatised boy to look after.

  The loss was something he wore upon his person. Even if you had not known his story, I think, you would have seen it on him. You would have thought: here is a man grieving for something. But then of course in those days, that was nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone was grieving for something.

  I could at least see that he was a different man to the one I had known in the old place. There he had been more vivid: ruddied by the sun, full of humour. The man who met me on the platform seemed diminished. I assumed this was England at first. I felt myself shrinking as I got off that train and stepped into the yawning greyness of that vast old English station, the grey English day beyond, the cold tight about me as though it were trying to press me into the shape of its choosing. But I don’t think it was that, looking back. It wasn’t because of what he had returned to. It was because of all that he had left behind.

  Later, something else would occur to me. If it were not for me, the promise he made to keep me safe, he might yet have gone back to her.

  I have wandered the streets of this city so many times in my mind that it is hard to believe they are quite real, that this is not all merely the work of my imagination. But there are changes: cars, more people … more speed. In the distance a bristle of skyscrapers that dwarf the minarets of the Blue Mosque, and yet are somehow held in thrall by it. The future still has a long way to go here to match up with the past.

  Halfway across the wide and tranquil channel of water, on the juddering passenger ferry, I realise that my hand has found the tobacco tin within my bag and is holding it tight. It provides a strange comfort.

  I see, with a shock, a dark-haired woman on the terrace: a young woman, reading. I feel a powerful sense of trespass. As I approach, picking my way along the path that leads to the front of the house, I see her look up, put away her book, stand up.

  I tell her who I am looking for. The old language is sticky and unwieldy in my mouth. My adopted tongue has almost suffocated it. But she seems to understand.

  ‘She’s inside.’

  ‘Oh.’ I feel a thrill of something almost like fear. ‘You are her daughter?’

  She laughs. ‘Hopefully I do not seem quite that old.’

  I realise my mistake. She can only be thirty years old. But for the first time I realise, really understand, what this means. The person I have really been expecting to see is the woman I remember, exactly as I last saw her, who would have been a similar age, I suppose, to this stranger.

  ‘I was a pupil of hers,’ she says. ‘A long time ago. Now I work as a translator, for a publisher here. But when I heard that she was ill I came to look after her. I owe her a great deal.’

  ‘So was I: a pupil. Even longer ago. I think I may owe her even more.’

  She gives me a long, appraising look. ‘I think I know who you are.’

  We step inside. My first thought is that it is smaller than I remembered. Not a palace, after all. It seems very empty, too: the long room that had once been filled with beds, prone forms, the bustle of nurses. But this is a house in which memory is. In which they – all of them, all who have been here – seem only to be in the next room. Not ghosts so much as echoes, ancient reverberations of the stone.

  ‘I should warn you. She is no longer quite herself.’

  The room is the one in which he lay for all those months: that boy who both is and isn’t myself. One of the smallest in this large house, perhaps, but with the best view of the Bosphorus.

  The figure upon the divan is unrecognisable to me. I do not know what I had expected: the same eyes, perhaps, or the same quick, clever hands – even if the rest had changed. But the eyes are closed, and the hands folded upon the bedspread are unfathomably aged, clawed and spotted. I could far more easily believe that this is the old woman I knew all those years ago. So grand and proud, who terrified me into ruining a dish of stuffed cabbages; such a memory haunts a chef forever. But logic tells me that of course she is long departed. These, then, are the changes that time has wrought. I should not be surprised. For what resemblance do I bear, plump and grey, slightly balding, to the small quick boy who lay here not so long ago?

  I know that it is her; that must be enough. But she looks so still: a saint upon a bier. I have to watch, carefully, for the gentle rise and fall of the sheet.

  If I had only come a little earlier …

  But it would never have happened. I would never have done so of my own accord. It had to be him; with his undeniable request. His comm
and. And there is no purpose in dwelling upon such things. Life is not symmetry, or pattern, however much we try to see these within it, in the stories we tell of it. It is ragged, misshapen, endlessly frustrating. But perhaps there is beauty in that too.

  They loved me. This I know.

  I reach for her hand, then pause. I feel an imposter, an uninvited guest. But then these are the hands that I reached for stumbling along cobbled streets, that felt for the fever upon my brow, that smoothed a sheet, that rumpled hair. That carried me from a burned house, into a new life.

  I take her hand.

  It is surprisingly warm, though I cannot tell if this is the blood beneath the skin, or simply borrowed from the diamond of winter sunlight that has fallen from the open window. Just through the window I see the pomegranate tree. It is bare-boughed, dead-looking. But I know this winter deception. In spring miniature brown-green leaves will appear from the dry branches, as startling as if they had grown from stone. Then the fruits: small as an English rosehip first, then green as apples. Finally, they will burgeon into ripe red globes, fall to the ground with a muted explosion that no one hears. Except, perhaps, the birds. Then it will seem that all the birds in the city – indeed, the whole of Turkey – have gathered here to feast. The garden will become a carnival of sound, a chaos of wings.

  There is a kind of sanctity in the silence in the room that I am fearful to shatter. Then from the water comes the loud, rude sound of a ship’s horn, shattering it. It is like the starting klaxon: the permission that I have unknowingly sought.

  I tell her of the boy’s journey. The train, the strangers, the mountains. The terrifying crossing of the grey sea. The arrival in the great old English city. The enemy city: now home. The man waiting to greet him. Smaller, somehow, without his military khaki. I tell her of the school in the English countryside – the teachers who could have learned from her. I tell her of the restaurant. I do not tell her of the woman, the invalid wife, who even a small boy could see had something broken inside her.

  I cannot tell whether I cause pleasure, or pain, or indeed whether I am heard at all.

  ‘I understand,’ I say, ‘what you did.’

  I look out again, through the trees toward the water, a silver irradiation.

  What can never be known for certain is how much danger I would have been in if I had stayed. By most accounts, the genocide – the name they found for it – ended around the time the new state rose from the ashes of the Empire. I might have been one of the lucky few. But that was not a risk, in her love for me, that she was willing to take.

  Nearer at hand a flock of tiny birds moves as one, like blown leaves. I wonder what it is I am trying to gain from this. I feel a movement, faint but unmistakable, beneath my fingers. And one of the small, gnarled hands – lifted slowly, as though it is a very great weight – comes to rest over my own. The warmth is from the skin, after all.

  I have come back here for him, at his behest. He left no room for dissent. He knew that if he did not ask me to make this journey, did not make it impossible for me to refuse, I would not have had the courage on my own.

  I want to tell her about him. I want to tell her about the relics, the things he kept from that time: our shared inheritance. The hours he would spend in his study in silent contemplation of that photograph, this house, with the attitude of a man at prayer. But I do not want to cause her pain.

  ‘Nur,’ I say, instead: her name at once foreign and familiar. ‘I have brought him back.’

  I leave her, now. I step through the doors that lead outside, I step down onto the stone jetty. I take the painted tin from my pocket.

  It had to be love.

  A man, and especially a man like him, the man who became my father, does not ask for his final remains to be delivered to a place he knew so long ago upon the basis of a whim, a fond memory.

  I raise my hand. The Bosphorus waits beneath me. Patient, eternal, curious. It has come from the Black Sea. It will find its way, now, out to the Sea of Marmara, to those mysterious islands where once he swam in water clear as air.

  I let go.

  A Note on Names

  If you know a little about Istanbul’s history, you might be aware that at the time of this novel’s setting, the city was, in Western European parlance and in some official Ottoman usage, known as Constantinople. You’ll see the British characters in the book refer to it as such. Istanbul was its official designation after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, and other countries were exhorted to refer to it as such. The name, however, was not by any means new. It had been used in common parlance before and during the Ottoman Empire. In fact, etymologically, the name ‘İstanbul’ can be translated to literally mean ‘the city’ or ‘in the city’ from the Greek phrase, στην Πóλη.

  This perhaps gives you an idea of its huge importance as a metropolis throughout the ages: it was the city – no need to refer to it as anything else! Nur and her family would almost undoubtedly have referred to it as İstanbul.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to editor extraordinaire Kim Young, Charlotte Brabbin, Ann Bissell, Hannah O’Brien, Isabel Coburn, Emma Pickard, Rebecca McNamara, Rhian McKay, Charlotte Webb, Niccolò de Bianchi and the wider team at HarperCollins for the great passion and skill you have shown in the publication of all my books. An exciting few years await!

  To Cath Summerhayes, my fabulous agent (and Cath’s wonderful mum – one of this book’s first readers!), Katie McGowan, Irene Magrelli and all at Curtis Brown.

  To my darling mum, for accompanying me on my research trip, clambering through ruined buildings with me in forty-degree heat and drinking cocktails on a rooftop above the city into the small hours!

  To my beloved dad, who read this book very early on and proclaimed it his favourite yet!

  To my family and friends, for your incredible ongoing support – for buying copies, reading them (!) and sharing the love.

  To the Imperial War Museum, for its excellent archives, wherein I discovered diaries and letters from men billeted to the city during the occupation and glimpsed the human stories behind official accounts.

  To Gül Hürgel, for showing me your Istanbul – including a magical night-time picnic in Maçka Park!

  In many ways my life has been rather like a record of the lost and found.

  Perhaps all lives are like that …

  ‘A glamorous, seductively immersive read’ Sunday Times

  ‘Epic’ Woman and Home

  ‘Striking debut’ Grazia

  Click here to buy now 978-0-00-757534-3

  ‘The perfect summer read … Gorgeously compelling’ Good Housekeeping

  ‘Full of mystery and long-reaching shadows of the past … richly drawn and compelling’ Rosanna Ley

  Click here to buy now 978-0-00-757538-1

  About the Author

  Lucy Foley divides her time between the UK and the Middle East – much of this novel was written in a garden in Tehran – and she also spends the year travelling around the world for research and inspiration.

  Lucy studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities and then worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry, during which time she also wrote her debut novel, The Book of Lost and Found. Lucy now writes full-time and is currently working on her next book.

  /LucyFoleyAuthor

  @lucyfoleytweets

  @lucyfoleyauthor

  Also by Lucy Foley

  The Book of Lost and Found

  The Invitation

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollins.ca

  Ind
ia

  HarperCollins India

  A 75, Sector 57

  Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India

  http://www.harpercollins.co.in

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  http://www.harpercollins.com