Last Letter from Istanbul

George

Medical Officer George Monroe watches the woman leave, picking her way along the path – surprisingly sure-footed in her long skirts. She seems a melancholy figure, but this may be nothing more than the effect of the dark clothing, and the way she holds herself against the breeze from the water.

‘Touched in the head,’ Rawlings says, authoritatively, ‘if you ask me. Found her looking as though she were about to throw herself into the Bosphorus.’

This seems a little rich coming from the man who, in the grip of a fever, asked George to bring him ‘a glass of the tawny ’05. Generously poured. And tell Smythson I’d like my usual spot by the fire.’

George feels that, actually, she had seemed as sane as any of them. With the Allied officers all gone a little wild from the heat and new freedoms and too long spent away from home, the locals sometimes seem the only ones with some connection to reality; getting on with the business of their lives.

But what on earth was she doing here?

He was not convinced by her explanation; he suspects that she is not someone used to lying. He entertains briefly, and dismisses, the idea of sabotage or espionage. A less threatening figure – a woman bathing her feet, for goodness’ sake – he cannot imagine.

A week ago. He had just been to the barber, making his way back through the streets toward the bridge. One of the figures coming toward him had been moving faster than the rest; his eye had followed it instinctively. And then, as he saw her clearly, with curiosity. There are far fewer women than men on the streets, for one thing, and this one was running. Attempting to, at least – hampered by long skirts, the cobblestones, a teetering pile of books. He watched, half-amused, half-intrigued and also with a wincing certainty that calamity was about to follow.

He had seen something fall.

When he had handed her the book she had looked at him with something close to hatred. Despite himself, he had rather respected her for it.

How odd to see the same woman twice in the space of a week … in this vast city. Yet he is beginning to understand that there are recurring motifs within this place, encounters that, at times, can make it feel more like a village. Some of the faces within it are already familiar to him: the sellers of mackerel sandwiches along the quay, the men who man the ferries, a certain French officer who seems to have the same taste for Turkish coffee as he.

He is not a superstitious man – his only belief is in the essential chaos of things. And yet he feels oddly certain that he will see her again.

The new site for the British military hospital in Constantinople is not the most convenient, but it is a peaceful spot, and will prove useful if there is a need for quarantine. It is not really part of the city at all – the wild sprawl of trees and bush behind the grounds seem desperate to swallow it and reacquaint themselves with the water. It was a case of needs must, however. A large, well-ventilated space was required, and this house was what was available: requisitioned from the Turkish authorities. Besides, it is a vast improvement upon a tent in the desert: those months during the Mesapotamian campaign. Where new flies clustered in wounds even as you swept the old ones away. Where temperatures rose to unholy, unbearable levels, even beneath the canvas, and where with no warning a gust of sand might blow in to cover everything, riming the nostrils and open mouths of men too ill to be sensible of the indignity of the invasion.

All his initial reservations about the position of the house – not built for the purpose, too far from the centre to be practical – faded at the sight of it. It is the loveliest building he thinks he has seen on the Bosphorus. It is not the largest, nor is it the most ornate. But there is a matchless elegance in the situation, in the graceful white poise of it, the dark, melancholy cypresses rising about it as though shielding it.

He has wondered how it came to be vacant. On first setting foot inside he had the uneasy impression that the former occupant had only just left – that he might return at any instant for something forgotten. There was a fine dust over everything, a pall of it hanging in the air. Evidently, it had not been occupied for some time. But much seemed to have been left, in the careless manner of one who did not know he was departing for good. Here, everywhere, were tokens of a life lived in all its chaos and elegance. In lanterns sat the half-burned stumps of candles; a heavy painted vase contained the brown exoskeletons of hyacinth blossoms. An encircling garden in which the work of a human hand is still evident: jasmine trained along a painted trellis, just beginning to run wild, shrub roses in crescent-shaped borders, a vegetable garden where huge yellow squashes rot uselessly and monstrous asparagus ferns dance in the breeze. From the bough of one of the fig trees hangs a swing seat. And centre of it all, the monarch to the court, is a grand old pomegranate tree. Most of the fruits have been split open by the birds or by the sheer force of their open unplucked ripeness. A few remaining seeds glisten within, promising a late treasure.

On the first day, when he was overseeing the placement of the hospital beds, he was certain that he could detect the sound of an infant crying outside: a thin wail, rising and falling. Unnerved by the sound, he followed it into the garden and discovered the seat creaking mournfully back and forth on its hinges in the wind. Almost as though – an uncanny thought – someone had only just vacated it.

George is a pragmatist, an atheist. Yet he found himself unable to quash the idea of spirits left behind.

The ward has been set up in the largest room: painted pistachio-green and hung with still life scenes: dusky grapes spilling from a platter; fat peaches with the delicate fur gorgeously rendered. They make the mouth water. There were times in the Mesapotamian desert when he would dream of fresh things like these – though his dreams were perhaps more humble. A head of lettuce. Taking the whole thing in his hands, biting into it as one might an apple and feeling it cold and wet on his tongue: the antithesis of all the desert was. If he could have this one experience, he felt, he could put up with any number of deprivations.

This room has a feminine feel to it: the colours, maybe. He knows little about Ottoman life, but has learned this one thing: that in many houses, grand or meagre, there is often an area reserved exclusively for the use of the women. A sense of trespass. He knows that if he were able to vocalise this sensation he would be laughed at. This is the way of things, how it has been since the dawn of man. There is no such thing as trespass for the victorious. All before them, conquered, has become their own. To say otherwise would be almost a form of treason.

In the streets his attire makes him indistinguishable from the rest, for better or worse. He has seen how the people here react to the different uniforms, that they respond worst of all to British khaki. There are liberties taken. But some soldiers, many, regard this as only their right.

Is it not the worst sort of shame, to be ashamed of one’s own people?

A knock on the door of the study. It is a young sub-lieutenant, Hatton. Even after four years of war and nearly three of occupation, he still looks like a boy. The fair smudge of moustache is perhaps intended to bely this; it does not. He is rather red in the face. Fleetingly George wonders if this is the problem; sunburn. He saw terrible cases on the desert marches, shade several hours away, the skin blistering and peeling away in layers.

‘Good day, Hatton. How may I help?’

There is no answer at first. But as the sub-lieutenant stands before George the colour seems to intensify. He shifts his weight between his feet. Ah. George has a sudden premonition of the complaint.

Hatton fastens his trousers.

‘We cannot cure it, I’m afraid,’ George explains, ‘but we can manage it.’

‘But if I were to have,’ the patient takes a breath, ‘relations with the same partner …’

‘Unless she is being treated too, then no, it will not help matters.’

‘She says it cannot be from her. But she’s the only one …’ He coughs. The next words are strangled by embarrassment. ‘She’s the only one … ever.’

‘I think in that case,’ George says, ‘you best desist.’

‘But I love her. And she – says – she loves me.’

And how many others has she promised the same to? He doesn’t say it. This poor dupe has been punished enough.

‘What is her name?’

‘She was a Russian princess, before the Reds came!’

‘Was she, indeed? Goodness.’ And yet being an ex-Russian princess, it seems, is no immunisation against the herpes virus.

The patient leaves, clutching his prescription. George is amused by his insistence upon the former rank of the woman, as though this might make his unfortunate circumstances seem somehow less sordid.

Then he remembers that he is in no position to judge. The familiar shame visits him. The smile leaves his face.

The Boy

He sits in a patch of sun on the stone steps of the apartment building, playing with the stray cat he has befriended. It has beautiful eyes, large and palest green, ringed with black as though it were wearing kohl eye makeup. On occasions he has seen it angry and frightened, doubled to twice its size, eyes staring, breath hissing. For something so small it makes a rather impressive display. But when it is very happy, as now, it treads the air with its paws like a baker kneading bread, and flaunts its white stomach as though it hadn’t a care in the world. Its favourite thing is for him to stroke the soft triangle of its chin, its sensitive whiskery cheeks.

He is so intent upon it that he does not hear Nur hanım return. As she passes him he starts guiltily. He should be reading one of his schoolbooks, not the book of food, which is open before him. When she does not say anything about this he knows that something is wrong. He looks up at her. It is not that she has been crying. He would be more likely to see this whole city topple into the Bosphorus than he would to see Nur hanım weep. But her face frightens him all the same because it is like a mask.

‘Nur hanım,’ he asks, quietly. ‘Are you all right?’

She looks down at him, but he has the strange impression that she is not actually seeing him. ‘Yes,’ she says, rather crossly. ‘Of course.’

When she steps inside she pulls the door shut with such ferocity that it jumps back open again with a clang. The cat springs to its feet in fright, lets out a warning hiss. He thinks how much easier animals are to understand, how much more eloquent and truthful they are with mere actions than humans with all their words.

Five years earlier

The Prisoner

The Russian front. The edges of the Empire; a place of ice and snow. The snow was like a living thing, or many living things; a swarm. It sought the mouth, the eyes – any opening in which it could take up residence. The flakes were the size and weight of feathers. If he stood still his feet were covered in seconds.

It muffled sound. It stole the senses. It knew something that they did not. They spoke in whispers; they felt that they were being watched by someone immune to it, who laughed at their struggles as if from behind a pane of glass. They spooked at shadows, recoiling from the forms of their own men emerging through the curtain of white.

When he looked up there was only a vortex of the same, and he saw that it did not come straight down but in a vast spiral. For a few moments he was not looking up but hanging above – dangling by his ankles above an abyss. He stumbled, and almost fell.

It might have been beautiful, except for the fact that it was terrifying.

He at least had seen snow, even if it had been nothing like this. What he had thought was winter, the occasional dusting of white over Constantinople, the cold wind that blew in from the Black Sea, seemed to him now as nothing more than an artist’s impression of the season. But there were men here from the southernmost parts of the Empire who had never seen it at all, to whom it had been a thing of myth.

They had lost a man to the snow: it had swallowed him whole. One moment he had been there, bringing up the rear, the next he had disappeared. He was an Armenian, recruited from a nearby village. He of all of them should have known the conditions, the lie of the land. But it had clearly proved too much even for him.

Some of the men had not liked him much; you couldn’t trust the Armenians, they liked to say, they weren’t true Ottomans. Still they searched the snowdrifts, digging in packed, freezing depths. You wouldn’t wish such an end on anyone. And then to be discovered, pitiful, when the snow finally melted. But new drifts formed even as they dug. They were forced to move on, tramping through the fresh fallen white and each trying not to think of the man buried beneath it somewhere. If a man like that had succumbed, what chance did they have?

The idea came to him that they had been sent here to die.

It was said their enemy, the Russians, had fur-lined boots, thick greatcoats, astrakhan caps. Some of his fellow men, soldiers of the Mighty Ottoman Army, wore sandals. Some wore nothing at all: exposed flesh was dying, turning black. He was lucky to have kept his, thin-soled city shoes that they were.

To keep his mind off the cold he thought of home. He would summon to himself the memory of spring days beside the Bosphorus, light glancing from the water, the loud celebrations of the birds. The new warmth upon his face, the scent of things growing; the precise scent of the colour green. Then the drone of summer, a lazy spell cast by the heat, the city hazed with gold. He tried to remember the feeling of this. It was impossible to believe that there could have been such a thing as too hot: though he remembered his mother saying it, often, spending her days sheltered in the shaded cool of the sofa, emerging only with the respite of dusk. Colour, too, seemed an outlandish idea. Here was only the white of the snow and the grey of men’s faces and the black of their hair and occasionally the bluish tinge they got around their mouths and fingertips when things were bad with them. He remembered: the purple of a fig, split open. The rust-red sheet of his mother’s hair.

He had to believe he would return home, to that place of colour and warmth. There he had done the thing he had always felt himself born to do: to teach. The small satisfactions of his day: the walk to the school through the cobbled streets, his bag of books heavy on his arm. As he walked he would plan the day, the lessons, anticipate anything that might arrive; the miniature crises that occurred in a classroom populated by the very poor, by children who hardly spoke the language. The pleasure of knowing that something had been learned, despite all the odds.

How naive he had been to assume that his life would always be like this, that he would do the same thing until he grew old. A life in which he had never known fear, the particular taste of it in his throat. The joke of a man like him pretending to be a soldier.

There seemed to have been no consideration of how they might feed themselves properly – it seemed they were expected to live entirely on bazlama bread. Before the war it had been delicious; eaten with honey and butter, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee. He had not known how little taste it had on its own. Baked on sheets of iron in the villages, it was stuffed into sacks, loaded onto donkeys and brought to the front. By the time it reached them it had frozen. To warm it you had to put it beneath your jacket, against the skin, under the arms. You saw men shaking it from their sleeves, scrabbling on the ground for lost morsels. The colder they became, the more difficult it was to unfreeze the stuff.

‘If I could warm it between the thighs of a beautiful woman,’ Babek said. ‘That would be better than the finest honey.’ The other men had jostled him, groaned in mingled disgust and appreciation, and felt warmed by their shared laughter. Babek grinned; he enjoyed a crowd. ‘But a man’s unwashed armpit – even if it is my own unwashed armpit … that has to be the worst seasoning imaginable.’

Babek was his friend. They met in the enlistment centre at the beginning of the war. None there were soldiers by training. Just ordinary men selected by the bad luck of their birth dates, ready to be forged into heroes. Babek had turned to him as they waited in line. As a barber, he said, all his experience had been about how not to injure someone, how not to spill their blood, and here he was about to learn how to kill a man. It wasn’t a very funny joke. But he heard the tremor of fear in the barber’s voice, fear that matched his own, and knew the bravery it took to make it at such a time.

They were opposites – Babek was the clown while he knew he was seen by others as too serious. He was nineteen, Babek was thirty, and seemed older. As though he had seen the world and everything in it and had not been particularly impressed by any of it: though found enough humour in it to get by. But he knew that there was greater depth to Babek. He might seem foolish, happy-go-lucky, but there was that bravery, too.

Once, when they were being taught how to fire the ancient rifles the army had provided, Babek had been caught in the shoulder by a glancing bullet, knocked to the ground with a huff of surprise, nothing more. All of them stood mute, watching as the wound bloomed with red. It was the first sign of blood any of them had seen. Perhaps it was just the shock that had kept him from crying out. But after that day, everyone who had been there had a new veneration for him, the thin, awkward man who managed to escape ridicule simply by being the first to laugh at himself.

Babek had a wife. For all his ribaldry about other women, it was she he talked of constantly – though not to the other men, in case they thought him soft. And children: two little boys and a baby on the way when he left. If it was a girl, they had decided, they would call her Perihan – a name like a flower, or a princess from the old days. His wife had the most beautiful hands, he said, she moved them like white birds when she talked. Even before he lifted the veil to look at her face for the first time he saw those eloquent hands and he knew.

They had come to see him off at the sidings of the railway track – his wife invisible beneath a charshaf and veil, the boys dressed like miniature men in their best clothes and fezzes. They waved handkerchiefs. They had looked particularly small and helpless down there beneath the bank, seen through a cloud of steam from the train, dwarfed by the great machine as it thundered above them on its way to war. Perhaps Babek had felt this too, because he had suddenly looked uncharacteristically sombre and his eyes had gleamed wetly.

‘I wish they had not come,’ Babek said, as though to himself. ‘It would have been better if they had not come.’

Once upon a time, in another world, he himself had been a schoolteacher. He had imagined a small life for himself. Not the one his parents had hoped for him: he was not made for the world of government, or medicine. But perhaps this life could be great in its own way, even heroic. What better gift than that of knowledge? For the rich learning was just an embellishment, another asset among many others. For the poor, it could represent the promise of a different life.

But that was another life, as remote as if it had happened to another man. He had once known the children in his class so well that he understood each of their idiosyncrasies as well as he did his own. How Kemal began to swing one leg before he was tired, how Arianna looked at a stain on the ceiling when asked a question, as though she would read the answer there, how Enver spent most of every class looking out of the window, which was infuriating, but if challenged could recite the whole lesson word-for-word. Now he could hardly remember what any of them looked like. They were slipping from him, he was untethered from that life. His world had shrunk to this white void, driven only by hunger and fear, the animal instinct to survive. And this was what they said it meant to be a hero.

Within this blindness of snow one became very aware of the internal world. Of the rhythm of the heart in the chest. The beat of blood in the ears. But the extremities no longer seemed his own. His numbed feet felt … not like feet, but something else, two thin jeweller’s razors upon which the full weight of his body could not possibly balance. They did not want to obey him. Beneath the snow was compacted into ice, and with every few yards gained he seemed to slip back several more. The fury of the snow. It felt a personal fury, vindictive. It whipped the cheeks like a lash and he began to long for the time when his face, too, would cease to feel.

A few days into the offensive Babek had begun to look unwell. He had always been thin, no matter how much he ate, and there had been so little food at the front. All of them had lost weight, but he had had none to lose in the first place. His lips had begun to turn bluish, the nail-beds of his bare hands. His breath rattled when he talked or even breathed, as though something had come loose inside his chest.

When he made his jokes now they did not always make sense … the words were disordered as though something in his mind was not connecting properly. He would never say this to Babek, though, because he did not want to frighten him, and because he did not want to give a voice to his own fear. So when Babek finished one of his nonsensical jokes, and waited with that expectant look – this at least was familiar – he laughed just as hard as he ever had. Harder, probably. If Babek suspected any fakery in this he did not mention it.

One man in the company – a southerner – had lost his genitalia to frostbite after relieving himself against a tree. He had died some short while later. A mercy, some said. But what message to bring back to his mother? The standard, of course: He died with a smile upon his face, in proud service of the Empire.

Some of the men were huge brutes, farmers and fishermen with skin like leather and corded muscles in their arms. They towered over him. And they were already half-broken. When he stood next to them in his mind’s eye he saw not a man, but a small boy, gripping his bayonet with hands too small to reach, emerging from a uniform ten sizes too big to fit.

Suddenly a new sound, a hiss of air. At first he believed it was some new intensification of the snow. Then the man beside him fell, a little yelp of surprise. He looked down. The peculiar beauty of the colour in the white, spreading fast like ink upon tissue. Such a very true red, almost the red of the Ottoman flag itself. He envied the man his expression of absolute peace. By the time he had understood that he should call for help, and could summon the words with which to do it – he had not spoken for hours, days it seemed – it was far too late. The enemy had come for them.

The Traveller

As we leave the shelter of the station the rain begins, as though it has been waiting for us. Some say rain spoils everything. I say it depends on the position of the beholder. Now, as water spreads itself in filmy sheets against the glass, the austere train carriage is transformed into a hallowed space; sanctuary from the onslaught without. The light seems to change in defiance of the bleakness, to kindle; the winter-pallid faces about me gain new colour. Beyond the glass the drear suburbs and the formidable distant shadows of the banlieues – the backstage of Paris – acquire the romance of a watercolour.