Last Letter from Istanbul

Nur

Morning. She feels renewed, the humiliations of the day before have lost their sting. The streets are still empty enough at this hour that they can stride through them quickly. She enjoys the pull and stretch of her muscles, the sound of her shoes ringing upon the cobblestones. The lesser note of the boy’s feet as he follows behind: two steps to her every one, and even then he struggles to keep up. He is still so small. But he is also, she knows, distracted by the scents that reach them from the bakeries and cafes they pass, his nose aloft in that feline way.

She is aware of the looks. In these narrow streets they pass near enough to see the glimmer of eyes through latticework screens and one woman pulls her shutters closed with an ostentatiously violent clatter. Odd, that it should be the women that seem most outraged by her bared face, by her presence in the street. The older ones are worst of all, understandably. She still feels the sting of their glances. At first they were almost enough to send her running back to the apartment for her veil. Now she steels herself against her own sense of shame. Because for all that the war took from her – and it was more than she ever thought she would have to give – there is this one thing that it gifted her. Her city. And she is not ready to give it up. The liberation of walking these streets that have always been her home and yet for so long have been beyond the limits of her knowledge.

She is not alone; much of a generation has joined her. Barriers shifted, dissolved entirely. Young women who had remained hidden indoors behind filigree screens ventured out into the streets. They appeared bare-faced. They took on the work of men – her grandmother is still outraged by the appearance of trouser-clad female street sweepers.

The boy is dawdling.

‘Come on, hurry up – we’re going to be late.’

She sees what has caught his attention; the same sight that she has been avoiding looking at. A group of French officers, in their blue uniforms, smoking their cigarettes and lounging against an old tree that has forced its way out of the cobblestones.

Children, she has noticed, are disloyally fascinated by the soldiers. Now, with building horror, she sees one of the men drop his cigarette, stub it out with a smartly polished boot, and come toward them.

‘Hello,’ he says, to the boy, in French. From the crowds passing them Nur feels a low hum of disapproval, levelled as much at her as at the man, as though they assume she must have done something to encourage him. And with it there is a certain sense of shame, as though she really has.

‘I have a little son like you, at home,’ he says now. ‘Do you know what he likes best?’ He does not wait to see if the boy has understood. ‘Caramels! Would you like one?’ He fishes a gold-wrapped sweet from his pocket.

‘No, thank you—’ But Nur is too late, the boy has already taken one.

‘I hope,’ the man’s eyes go to Nur’s uncovered face now, and remain there, ‘that you tell your mother how beautiful she is every day.’

She seizes the boy’s hand, and marches him away from the officers as fast as she can, without a backward glance. Ribald laughter follows them.

When they have put a little distance between themselves and the officers she puts out her hand. ‘Spit it out.’

‘But—’

‘Do it, please.’ She knows what a cruelty it is to take food from a child like him. But the French officers are still watching, and this is a point of principle.

With an expression of profoundest agony, the boy does as she says. She throws it down, and within seconds a street cat has emerged from somewhere to sniff at it.

Now she feels as though a layer of skin has been removed, not merely a thin gauze of material. The city now seems to thwart her at every turn: the cobblestones turn her ankles, the crowds press against her. She has become clumsy and conspicuous.

She understands that she is an object of curiosity for such men, who have come expecting veiled forms. She knows that they see her – her hair covered but her face exposed, wandering about the city as she chooses – and make suppositions. She tries to remind herself that it must not matter. To wait until a day when one might not be reminded with every step of one’s difference might mean waiting for a hundred years. More.

The Boy

He can still taste the buttered sugar of the sweet, shards of it hidden in the small crevices between his teeth. Lucky that he managed to swallow half of it before she made him spit out the rest. He still hurts from the loss. He knew that he had no choice, though. There had been a dangerous look in her eye. She had already changed into her schoolteacher self.

Nur hanım is different at school. She seems to grow by about a foot. She transforms into a new, more powerful version of herself, like a very subtle shape-shifting djinn. He can nearly forget the version of her that burns almost every meal she cooks, and sometimes sings out of tune while she cleans the apartment. Who sometimes, rather like Enver, spends a rare free hour staring out of the window toward the Bosphorus, silent, insensible to anything around her. He can almost forget, too, that they live in the same apartment together. That sometimes at home, as though she can’t help herself, she reaches down and strokes a hand through his hair, or bends and enfolds him in a tight embrace. She does not give him preferential treatment in the classroom. Often he thinks that it is the opposite, that she makes a point of telling him off for talking or daydreaming much more than she does the other children. He would never dare say this to her, though.

Sometimes, when the chaos in the classroom reaches its highest pitch, he sees Nur hanım rub her forehead hard with the heel of her hand. Only he knows that this is something she does when she is particularly exasperated. When the old woman, for example, is complaining about how terrible their life is now … how wonderful everything was in the old days. Then she rolls her shoulders back (she does this with the old woman, too), and faces up to the challenge like a street cat readying for a fight. When she next speaks, the children fall silent. Even if she has not raised her voice, which she hardly ever does, and even if they don’t quite understand the words. They know the tone.

Nur

‘Who can tell me what word this is?’ A pause. ‘Enver, I do not believe you will find the answer out of the window.’ The child in question jumps in his seat as though someone has pinched him.

‘Wossis, hanım?’

This from one of the new girls, who wears the same dirty clothes every day.

‘That, Ayla, is a pen.’

‘Oh. Worrus it do?’

‘You write words with it, Ayla. Like this word, here.’

A chasm of ignorance now stretches out in front of her. She puts down the card she has been holding up. ‘We will return to the characters of the alphabet, this morning, instead.’

Perhaps she should not be surprised: the girl comes from one of the poorest neighbourhoods, where to educate a child, and especially a female, is not the norm. But then all of them come from the poorest neighbourhoods.

Some are newly arrived in the city; they have the half-stunned look of recently awakened sleepwalkers. There are Russians from the boats that traversed the Black Sea disgorging human cargo without a backward glance. Girls and boys with the names of queens and kings, speaking exquisite, fluent French, at odds with their street urchin appearance. There are Turks who do not speak Turkish, who have seen the places they had called home dissolved into some new formulation, found themselves foreigners in their own land. There are the local children, like Ayla, who speak in such rough approximations of Turkish, the dialects of their particular neighbourhood, that they might as well be speaking a foreign tongue.

She is not convinced any of them are learning anything: except, perhaps, a kind of tribal order. Who speaks like them, looks like them, and who does not – ergo, who is friend, who is foe. When new pupils arrive she sees the interest of the room reach toward them. A rapid unspoken assessment takes place. Then one group will extend its invitation – swelling their ranks – others their hostility. It takes a brave child to step across these boundaries. It is a microcosm of the war. It unnerves her.

One odd thing: there used to be several Armenian children in the class. Now there is only one. There have been huge movements of people during and after the war, true – and the shifting numbers in her classroom reflect this. But it seems such a uniform disappearance that she cannot help wondering about it.

The school is one of the things that the war gave to Nur. But to celebrate this would be to celebrate Kerem’s fate. She can be impatient with her pupils. The difficulty of it sometimes amazes her.

But Kerem would have been patient.

Nur emphatically does not believe in ghosts. Yet sometimes it is as though she can feel him there in the classroom with her. A half smile, a watchfulness. She has turned, and thought if she only does it fast enough, she might catch him at it.

Her brother is the one that should be teaching now, not lying in an unmarked grave somewhere in the outer wastes of the Empire. A schoolteacher turned soldier – who could really have believed he would survive? Even his name was wrong for a soldier: Kerem – ‘kind’.

‘But there are so many good, respected Muslim schools,’ her mother had said, when, at eighteen, he had told them all of his new role. ‘Kerem. The boys’ school at Galatasaray. Think of that! A man like you! They would welcome you with open arms.’

‘Perhaps.’ He had smiled, in his easy way. ‘But I don’t want to teach there.’ He was a gentle man, that was the thing: but when he felt strongly about something that gentleness belied a surprising strength.

Her father had been rather quiet on the matter. Nur suspects that his ambition for his eldest son had been loftier. ‘You must not neglect your science,’ he had told a twelve-year-old Kerem. ‘It is vital for medicine.’

As for herself? She does not think her father would have had the same reservations. This was one of the contradictions in him. He had sent her to the British school, which had a good standard of teaching. And at home, through his guidance, she had become as well read as her brother. He liked to joke about this, tell her that her intellect shamed them all. But at some point, it seemed, he was content to let her grandmother and mother’s plans for her take over. Sometimes she feels that she has become a half-developed thing, a sort of freak. Too educated to be content with the usual lot of her sex, but not enough to do anything with it. At her most angry she decided that her education had been a pastime for her father, an amusement.

She had forgotten this anger. Too easy to let the dead become perfect, to forget their flaws. It was her father himself who had told her this. ‘When we make the dead saints,’ he had said, ‘they become less real to us. We lose a truth. We lose something of who they were.’

The sound of the children’s laughter. Every head is turned from her toward the back of the room: she sees quickly what has amused them.

‘Enver!’ – sharply. ‘That is for writing with. Not for using upon your face.’ The boy puts the pen down. The expression on his face wavers somewhere between guilt and pride. He has drawn what appear to be a cat’s whiskers on each of his cheeks – with impressive precision, considering he cannot see his own work. She only wishes he approached his letter writing with such care.

The truth is that the interruption to her thoughts was a relief. An unexpected boon of this work – it leaves very little time for reflection.

George

He has the rest of the day to himself. Bill, his second-in-command, is in charge of things at the hospital. The afternoon spreads before him like the vista of the city as the ferry approaches, gleaming with promise.

The press of bodies at the Tophane quay is another world from the quiet Asian shore of the Bosphorus, though the two are only a few hundred metres apart. Out of the women’s cabin pours forth a stream of veiled women, some clutching babies or leading children who stumble on their short legs down the gangplank. The crowd on the quay is so thick that it is hard to see how any of those alighting will be able to press their way through – and everyone appears to be intent on moving in a different direction. Somehow they all manage to thread a path through. On his way he is offered bread, coffee, fresh figs, lemonade from a gorgeously wrought brass urn that the seller carries upon his back. At first he feels helpless, jostled and henpecked, his ears ringing. Then he begins to enjoy it. The solitude of the Bosphorus is a fine thing, but there is also space for one’s thoughts to grow too loud. Here they are drowned out by the volume of the business of living.

It is the most hectic place he has ever been in his life. Apart from the front, perhaps – but that was different, a no-place, and there it was a different sort of chaos.

But from afar, the city appears the opposite. A scene of perfect serenity. In the early morning light, viewed from the jetty of the hospital, it seems to be made entirely of white marble, gleaming expansively. The minarets rise above in their etiolated elegance, cloud-piercing. It appears a city sleeping beneath a spell.

He romanticises it, of course, like all those who have come before him with their dreams of the Orient. In doing so, though he is yet to learn exactly how, he does a disservice. He consigns it to some semi-mythical, unpopulated realm. And in doing so he discounts its current inhabitants, modern and war-wrung, trying to continue with the business of living. The woman in the garden, for example … what thought has he of her?

But that first sight of it, in 1918. Standing on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth as it muscled its way along the Golden Horn, with the great gun turret rotating toward shore in case some member of the watching crowd had ‘any ideas’. All of them, even the rowdiest of his fellow soldiers, had been stunned before the wonder of it. It was suddenly inconceivable that they were arriving to occupy this great and beautiful place, more ancient than any of them could imagine. In that moment it had dwarfed them, taken possession of them. They were an inconsequential footnote in a tale begun millennia ago, in which armies far greater than they had come and conquered and been vanquished in their turn.

Now their numbers contribute to the chaos of the streets. To the black robes of Greek priests, the red fezzes of the Ottomans, the silk-veiled women, the brown jackets of the street sellers, the long mustard habits of the toll collectors on the bridge at Galata, are added Italian, British, American khaki, French blue. In the first few weeks they appeared parade-ready, these soldiers. And some of them had paraded, about the whole of the city – up the steep hill of Galata and Pera, across the bridge to Scutari. Impressive formations before the Byzantine splendour of the Aya Sofia, the eternal grace of the Blue Mosque. This was an attempt to display strength, dominion. Silent crowds of the vanquished had gathered to watch. But had there not, he wondered, been something slightly ludicrous in it?

He takes the tram to Galata, walks over the bridge to the part of the city they call Stamboul. Here the majority of the Muslim population lives. Here are all the choicest wonders of architecture, glories of the ancient world. There sits the jewel of Byzantium, the Aya Sofia, towering above the surrounding streets, rust-red in the morning light. Facing it, challenging its beauty: Sultanahmet, pride of the conquering Ottomans with its gorgeous array of gilt-tipped domes. A short distance away is the Topkapi palace: home to four centuries of sultans. It appears innocuous from this distance, veiled by tall, old trees … but at one time this was the nucleus of great love stories, of empire-threatening feuds, scandals that supplanted dynasties. And few places can be so shrouded in myth as the imperial harem, where once scores of women lived out their lives in blue-tiled rooms. If there is such a thing as the spirit of a city, it might reside there.

This is the realm of the French occupation, pale blue uniforms weave among the crowds. In British-held Pera the streets have a European feel: a blocky stone grandeur, wrought-iron, modern boulevards that might almost have been designed by Paris’ Haussmann. A municipal grandeur. This might be another city entirely. Here everything is built on a more delicate scale: houses of filigree wood, and the spires of mosques rising from the rooftops like lace-spindles. This is the city of which great men – and the occasional woman – have written, with which they have fallen in love. Here the streets seem to follow little logic, and look so alike that it can take several minutes before he realises that he is not quite where he thought he was. He has now a flimsy idea of the territory immediately beside the waterfront, based upon particular coffee shops and certain architectural features – green shutters, a building painted the unlikely pink of a sunset, a balcony of exquisitely detailed wrought-iron leaves.

He has discovered a barber here, in the shadow of the Blue Mosque, who will have one parade-smart for a song. He has a small assistant, eight years old, perhaps – or a malnourished ten – who brings coffee on a clattering tray. George usually tries to slip him a few piastres too.

He sits in the chair now, breathing the distinctive atmosphere of coffee, cologne, sweat. As he watches his jaw appears from beneath the shadow of bristles, starkly denuded, pale where the sun has not reached the skin. The moustache, too, with what seems like a single flick of the man’s wrist. It is something of a shock to see his old face appear; an unexpected reunion with a once-dear acquaintance. As he looks at this old version of himself he feels something within him list sideways. He takes a sip of the coffee, scalds his mouth, chews through the fine sediment of grounds, and feels himself restored to equilibrium.

He has learned to like the coffee here. It is served treacle-thick, heavily sweetened. At the bottom of the cup sits a sediment of fine grounds. The first couple of times he ordered it he chewed his way manfully through them, assuming this was an important, if unpleasant, part of the process. Eventually, the elderly man at the next table took pity upon him and explained, in a performance of gestures, that one stopped as soon as the tongue touched them.

Now he drinks several cups of the stuff a day, accompanied sometimes by one of the small sweetmeats: fine pastry dripping with honey that you have to eat quickly before it trickles down your sleeve.

Sometimes in the cafes he frequents he catches a glimpse of fellow khaki, or French blue. But this is rare – few other soldiers seem to be interested in trying the stuff. When it happens, though, he moves on to the next coffeehouse: a magnet repelled by its like. It is his private ritual, almost a secret one.

He feels … difficult to explain exactly, closest at this time to his real self. Not his wartime or professional self. Merely a man taking a simple pleasure.

Leaving the barber’s, he finds himself in the grand thoroughfare before the Aya Sofia, Baedeker in his hand. He found the book at a market stall, a strange relic of a time recent and yet so far off for everyone in this city, soldiers and civilians aside. He looks up in wonder at the gilded domes and then down at the page, only to see a rush of movement before him. He leaps back on instinct before he can properly understand what has just happened. Unseen until the last second, a little boy has run into his path and spat on the ground at his feet. He looks down, absolutely stunned, at the small gobbet of saliva where it seems to foam in the dust, and then at the boy. The child is tiny, with that pinched look that so many of the youth have here. He is caught as though frozen in the act of running away, almost equally surprised by his own act of defiance. For a moment they stare at one another, both wondering what George is going to do. And then a woman launches herself at the child, shielding him with her arms. ‘Please,’ she cries, looking up at George. ‘Please, forgive.’

There is much George would like to say to her. After the initial affront of the act, it suddenly seems rather amusing. The boy is so small, after all, his bravery quite astonishing. He would like to explain that no harm has been done, that if he had been in the boy’s position, he would hope he would have done the same. In this moment he feels all the frustration, the impotence, of the language barrier between them. ‘It’s all right,’ he says, putting up a hand. ‘It’s all right.’

Nur

Through the open windows come faint strains of music with a foreign flavour: Russian and American imports. It is a relief not to be out on the streets; for the time being this cramped apartment is a place of sanctuary.

One November evening, a couple of years ago, she and the boy had stayed late at the school: she planning the next day’s lessons, he reading at one of the desks. They were travelling home when a series of huge explosions rattled the windows of the tram. All of the passengers crouched low in their seats, bracing against the onslaught. Perhaps some, like she had, had been at Mahmut Paşa the day the English planes came … or had heard stories of it from others, stories steeped in gore.

Then someone had pointed to the sky and they saw it ablaze with coloured light; green, red, gold. It took her a while to recognise that these were fireworks, like those she had seen at Eid Mubarak a lifetime ago. It was some display by the Allies, no doubt – no one else in this city had anything to celebrate. The boy had asked if they could go and watch. Together they had climbed the cobbled streets of Pera to get a better look, past the doors of meyhanes and restaurants. The boy lingered outside these, caught by the faint sounds of revelry within – she tugged him on.

From here it seemed the colours were everywhere, the Golden Horn lighting up with reflected fire. The boy gave a shriek of delight. She had been thrilled at this unexpected show of emotion, this sign, perhaps, of a brief respite from the things that haunted him. She had actually worried that they might remind him of that terrible night. After this re-assurance, she had begun to enjoy the fireworks too.

How democratic they were, for anyone who chose to watch them – though she doubted this had been the intention. They seemed to be lost on their intended audience, in fact, who seemed too absorbed by their business inside the meyhanes. Then without any warning one of the doors had opened and a chaos of khaki-clad bodies had been disgorged into the street in front of them, some clutching spilling glasses of beer.