Copyright

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Lost and Found Books Ltd 2018

Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Jacket photographs © Stefka Pavlova/Arcangel Images (boy); Shutterstock.com (letters and landscape).

Lucy Foley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008169077

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008169091

Version: 2019-05-02

Dedication

To Al, always my first reader.

I love you.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Victorious Allies in Constantinople!

Part One

Nur

The Traveller

The Boy

Nur

George

The Boy

The Prisoner

The Traveller

Nur

The Boy

Nur

George

Nur

The Prisoner

George

Nur

The Prisoner

The Boy

Nur

George

The Boy

The Prisoner

The Traveller

The Boy

Nur

George

The Boy

Nur

Part Two

The Prisoner

Nur

George

The Traveller

The Boy

Nur

George

The Prisoner

Nur

George

Nur

The Prisoner

Nur

Nur

The Prisoner

The Traveller

Nur

George

Nur

George

Nur

The Prisoner

George

Nur

George

The Traveller

Nur

George

Snow

The Boy

The Prisoner

Nur

The Traveller

Nur

Spring

Nur

George

The Prisoner

Nur

George

The Boy

Nur

Acts of Destabilisation

George

The Prisoner

George

The Prisoner

George

Nur

George

Nur

Nur

Together

George

Then

Nur

George

The Prisoner

The Traveller

Nur

The Traveller

A Note on Names

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

Discover More from Lucy Foley

About the Author

Also by Lucy Foley

About the Publisher

VICTORIOUS ALLIES IN CONSTANTINOPLE!

Today, November 13, 1918, the Occupation of Constantinople began. The vanquished Ottoman Empire, which ill-advisedly threw its lot in with the German campaign, must now yield to a victorious Allied force.

British ships entered the famed Golden Horn, having travelled through the Dardanelles on Tuesday – passing right by the fateful beaches of the infamous battle of Gallipoli three years ago. A disaster for Allied forces, perhaps, but also for the then victorious Ottoman army. It was upon these same beaches that it spent the flower of its youth, a loss from which it would never recover.

Reaching the famous Golden Horn, forces numbering nearly 3,000 British, some 500 French, and 500 Italian soldiers landed immediately and occupied military barracks, hotels, houses, Italian and French schools, and hospitals. There these men will remain until the Allied administrative machine can be set up and the requisitioning of private homes begins, and order can be restored to this war-beleaguered city. These men will not return to their families like the vast majority of their soldierly compatriots. Instead they will remain thousands of miles from home in execution of this noble endeavour.

THE ENEMY ENTERS STAMBOUL

Today, November 13, 1918, enemy ships arrived in our great city, flower of our Empire. This move by the so-called Allies is in express contradiction to promises that they would not seek an occupation of Ottoman lands. Fortunately the Ottoman people have long ago learned to doubt the word of our Western European counterparts.

Men, women and children observed the advancing ships from the banks of our beloved Golden Horn, sorrow in their hearts. Some of those men had fought a valiant battle in 1915 against the ‘Allies’ on the shores of Gallipoli, losing many comrades in the process but emerging from the conflagration with victory and great honour. To see their vanquished enemy follow them here, ready to lay claim to their city and requisition their homes if the fancy should take them, is the greatest imaginable indignity.

PART ONE

CONSTANTINOPLE
1921
THREE YEARS OF ALLIED OCCUPATION
Nur

Early morning. In a room above the dockyards of the Bosphorus, a woman sleeps. Her hair, a long black skein of it, has tangled itself about her in the rough seas of the night. She forgot to tie it back as she usually does. Too tired. Above her head an arm is flung in a bodily abandon never shown by day. Her fingers splay, her palm open as though in supplication.

Quiet, save for the self-important ticking of a clock: a dark wood, rather brutish affair. MADE IN ENGLAND. It is conspicuous, perhaps, because there is so little furniture in the room beside it and the low divan with its sleeping human cargo. There was furniture: one can still see the darker impressions upon the floor which the sunlight has not yet been able to fade. Of rugs, too, far finer than the rather workaday affair that remains. Kilim from Anatolia, soumak from Persia.

The sun is coming. It crests over the sward of green on the opposite bank of the Bosphorus, and smooths itself across the water like so much spread butter. Now it touches Europe. In the space of a few minutes it has spanned two continents; a daily miracle. It gilds the ugly mechanical detritus of the docks. It reaches the room with its sleeper. In the fetid air another small miracle occurs: the suspended layer of dust becomes a dancing mass of fine gold particles.

No matter how frequently this apartment is cleaned, the dust remains. It may be to do with the age of the building, or the fact that it is entirely made from wood that over the years has weathered days of rain, broiling heat, frost and snow. Has shrunk and grown and warped and breathed, active as the living thing it once was.

Now the light has slunk up onto the bedclothes, finds sleeping toes beneath a funnel of material. A pattern of embroidered pomegranate, inexpertly but vividly done. The colours are almost a match for the real fruits that will ripen on the trees in a garden across the water. The red seeds of the split fruits become a pattern, marching along the border of the quilt; gold thread forms the fibrous strands between them.

Now the light reaches the tangled strands of hair. In the shade they appeared black – now they reveal themselves as various shades of brown, caught in places as bright as that gold thread. The light gathers itself for the final occupation: advancing up the neck, the fine bones of the jaw, the slightly open mouth, the prow of the nose, the eyelids …

Nur wakes. Pink light. She opens her eyes. White. She sits up, groggy, wipes her mouth. A restless night’s sleep. What woke her, in the small hours? A bad dream. She cannot recall the details now. The more she grasps at them the faster they sink, like creatures burrowing into sand. She is left only with the feeling of it, a lingering unease. More unsettling, this not-knowing. She rises, looks at the day. Across the flat rooftops she can just make out the water, a coruscation of light. She will shake this feeling from her by breakfast, she is certain. For what can there be to upset one on a morning like this?

Oh. A pause. Something is missing. Now it happens to her, as it does every morning. The remembering of all that has changed. She feels the knowledge resettle itself upon her shoulders – familiar, almost reassuringly so. For at least now she has found it again, knows the weight of it. It is far worse than the invention of any mere bad dream.

In the next room, someone is making coffee. The scent of it is like the day itself; intimations of warmth and comfort. She can hear the particular musical note of the copper pot as it strikes the stove. She thrusts her feet into her worn babouches, shuffles out into the corridor. Leaning up, chin just clearing the top of the stove where the pot exhales a dangerous plume of steam, is a small figure. The boy. He looks up at her, caught between pride and guilt. Then he smiles.

She cannot quite bring herself to be angry with him. The boy is like a different child from that of two years ago. Often, in that time, she would find him in the mornings lying upon his back with his eyes open, and wonder if they had ever closed, or if he had merely spent the night watching a projection of horrors upon the ceiling. He began to eat, at least. But there was something mechanical in it, the way he took the food and chewed, and swallowed, and opened his mouth for the next bite. It was a keeping alive, the pure instinct of an organism.

For a long while there had been no glimmer of the boy he had been. She wondered if that child had sunk completely from view – never to return. There were things that could change a person absolutely. And in childhood one was more malleable, more impressionable; the change might be all the more devastating.

She takes her cup up onto the flat roof of the building. This is her secret place; she does not think any of the other inhabitants of the apartment block know of it. Here the day cannot touch her yet. She is mistress of it. The morning is clear, still cool. But there is the promise of heat. The water is eloquent. There is a shimmer of warmth on the horizon, too, the clouds massing above are saffron-coloured.

She takes a sip of coffee. He has made it well, far better than her grandmother, who thinks herself above the making of coffee and always burns it.

The day is still as a painting. It is hard to imagine that down there is movement, chaos. But she can hear it: the waking sounds of the streets, the call of the milk seller, the faraway shouts of stevedores on the quay, the fishermen beginning to hawk the catch of the day. From a short distance away the rattle and whine of a tram. From the nearby district of Pera, some two hundred yards to the west, there comes the thin wail of a violin – relic of a night’s revelries.

Before, she never considered this area, Tophane, as somewhere one might live. It was a nowhere – an afterthought, clinging to the coattails of the great city, a place where the different neighbourhoods inevitably met up with one another, their great streets coming together like so many loose ends of string.

She looks beyond the quays, to the great sweep of the Bosphorus, spotted with warships. From up here they seem miniature, as though she might sweep them back out to sea with the flat of her hand. Below are represented three of the four languages she has in her possession. A dimly imagined peacetime future of tranquil pursuits – of Paris, London, Rome; the reading of European Literature.

The beginning of the occupation. The storm of their boots against the cobblestones. A hundred eyes observing from behind shutters in what might seem to the uninitiated like an empty street: old women, young women, hating them, fearing them. The gun turrets of the huge ugly ships in the Golden Horn swivelling toward the city’s ancient glories – the Aya Sofia, Süleymaniye, Sultanahmet. A threat unspoken, yet deafening.

Those first nights like a held breath.

And they said there would not be an occupation. They had promised it. The British, the French, the Italians – at the Armistice that ended the Great War. Even those who have never read a newspaper, even those who cannot read at all, know this. Know, now, not to trust them in anything.

The new indignities, stinging like a slap: men ordered to remove the red fezzes they had worn for as long as they could remember. Women leered at, somehow all the more so if they were wearing the veil.

Up here, on the roof, this was where she had sat, hidden from view, as soldiers of the British army marched through the streets below. Snatches of speech floated up:

‘Living like animals …’

and

‘Their women little better than whores, really …’

and

‘A man here can take as many wives as he likes …’

and

‘You might be in luck, Clarkson, if the ladies don’t have a say in it …’

and

‘Just look at the state of this place. No wonder they lost.’

Would they have been so loud, if they had known that they were being listened to and understood? She suspected – and this was the most insulting probability – that they would not have cared. The city was theirs for the taking. They even have their own name for it: Constantinople. This other name is from the realm of officialdom, of mapmakers. İstanbul: that is what people call it. That is how she has always known it, that is the place in which she grew up, familiar, beloved. But the rules are made by others now.

As those men had continued with their insults she had crawled to the edge of the rooftop, making sure to stay hidden from view. She had tilted the cup of coffee she held in her hand, and allowed a few hot drops to fall. The whim of a moment; but they fell as though she had planned her target perfectly. A fat lieutenant, removing his cap for a few seconds to scratch his bald pate. The almost perceptible sizzle as the scalding liquid made contact with the sensitive skin. His howl shrill as one of the street cats.

But those were more courageous days. Murmurings of resistance. Brave words, rebel words: they would undermine them at every turn; they would set fire to their storehouses, they would defy the curfew, they would spit in their faces. But then the indignity became commonplace. A numbness, setting in. The business of living got in the way, that was it. By silent agreement, all seemed to decide that the best form of resistance was not with outward mutiny but to continue as though absolutely nothing had happened. They would defy their enemy by ignoring the presence of khaki in the streets, the armada in the Golden Horn. With the exception of a few, that is, who work in the shadows plotting real destruction and death for the invaders.

Now she looks beyond the Bosphorus, to the opposite shore, to the dark green hillside of another continent. Asia. The few dwellings visible amidst the trees are as intricate and delicate as paper cut-outs. Among them is a white house, more beautiful than all the rest.

She is filled with longing. Familiar, but condensed this morning, as strong as she has ever felt it. Something occurs to her. Why not, she thinks? What possible harm can come of it?

She calls down to the boy, ‘I have to drop some embroideries off with Kemal Bey.’

‘I could come with you?’

‘No.’ She has a second destination in mind for the morning, now, and she must go there alone.

‘But I love it at the bazaar.’

‘Yes, I know you do. But you’re like a cat following a scent there. Last time you wandered as far as the Spice Market before I realised you had disappeared.’ The memory of that moment brings with it a reverberation of the panic she had felt. She shrugs it away. He is here, he is safe, she will not let it happen again. ‘Besides,’ she says, ‘you have some reading to do, I think?’

He casts a longing look through the window at the sunlit streets. ‘It’s so warm outside.’

‘You can read outside, then, in the sun.’

He opens his mouth, meets her gaze, closes it. She is many different things to him now. But at such times, first and foremost, she is his schoolteacher.

GARE D’AUSTERLITZ, PARIS
Almost a lifetime later
The Traveller

Early morning. November. Cold so that the breath steams, blue-cold like a veil drawn over everything. This is one of the first trains out of the station. The place is thronged with people despite the hour. There is already a small queue for newspapers and cigarettes at the tabac kiosk. The platform is already crowded. Good, I like watching people. Above me soar ribs of iron, the vaulted skeleton of some industrial age monster. A lofty, echoing space: temple to speed and efficiency.

There was another station, like this. A long while ago.

There are businessmen in uniform grey, bound for Lausanne, perhaps. At a glance they all appear mould-made, hatted and shod from the same outfitters. Many are reading papers. The latest news: nuclear tests, Russian spy rings, anti-Vietnam demonstrations. All of it the story of the now. I wonder what use they make of me, an oldish man with an even older suitcase. Or what they would make of the pages I hold, so many decades out of date. The two articles, the British and Turkish, are clipped together. I have read them many times; certain phrases are known by rote. Noble endeavour. Greatest imaginable indignity. Somewhere between them, these few terse paragraphs, is the beginning of the story. The key by which a whole life might be understood.

Funny how similar they are, these clippings: though I am sure their writers would have been appalled to know it. Two halves of a whole? The face and its reflection in the mirror – every detail reversed but essentially the same. Or the two poles of a magnet: fated to forever repel.

Us — Them.

East — West.

Somewhere in the middle: me.

Now I watch an elegant couple a few feet away. He is a few years older than she. She wears a powder pink coat, a pale shock against the grey of the businessmen and the day itself. He is in dark blue, as though his outfit is intended to provide a foil to hers, to allow it to take centre stage. They might be newlyweds, I think, off for a honeymoon in the mountains. Or they might be having a liaison; running away. There is something about the way they look at each other that suggests the latter. Snatched and hungry. A memory comes. Not crisp and whole, sharp-focused, to be replayed in the mind like a scene from a film, but consisting mainly of sensation, atmosphere.

I must be staring: the man glances straight at me, and I am caught out. I have seen something that was not meant for me – not meant for anyone other than two co-conspirators.

I prop my suitcase on the bench beside me: the leather worn into paleness at the corners.

I open it, to return the newspaper clippings to their place within. As I do I block the contents from the view of the crowd with my body; a protective instinct. Some of the baggage within, you see, is rather unorthodox. Inside my suitcase alongside my toothbrush, my change of clothes, my shaving accoutrements, I carry fragments of the past. If one of my fellow passengers has caught a glimpse of the contents they might think I am an odd sort of travelling salesman, specialising in antique curios. They might wonder exactly who I would think might have any interest in buying such items. They have no value in and of themselves. Their value as relics, as evidence, however, is infinite. They are clues as to how a brief interlude in the past shaped an entire future. So it seemed only right that I should bring them with me, these talismans, upon this journey.

The train is pulling into the station now. There is the inevitable panicked surge, as if my fellow passengers fear there won’t be space for them, though they hold tickets stamped with seat numbers. I find I am momentarily transfixed. For the first time, I realise what it is that I am doing. I have always been this way, I suppose: acting immediately, considering – regretting – at leisure. But suddenly, now, I am fearful. If I get on that train I sense that my life will change again in a way I cannot anticipate.

A reframing of the story, the same one that was broken off so many years ago, never permitted its proper conclusion. I am suddenly unsure.

The platform around me is emptying. A horn sounds, ominously. I have perhaps thirty seconds.

A hiss of releasing brakes. And then I am hurtling myself toward the train, case rattling behind, before the gaping passengers.

In through the door that the conductor is just pulling closed, into the warm car.

CONSTANTINOPLE
1921
The Boy

From the window he watches Nur hanım leave, rounding the end of the alleyway onto the larger thoroughfare with its thronging crowd. Funny, she always seems to him such a powerful person. But now he sees that compared to other adults she is not large at all. In fact she is dwarfed by many of them, and by the great bag of embroideries at her hip that causes her to stagger slightly beneath its weight. In some complicated way this worries him. He watches her now as though his gaze were a cloak that might keep her from harm, until she is lost to sight.

He knows exactly what he will do now, and it does not involve reading his schoolbooks.

He is hungry all the time. When the war came the city forgot how to feed the people that lived in it. Once food was everywhere. A different smell around every street corner: the sweet yeast of simits, piled high and studded with seeds, the brine of stuffed mussels cooked on a brazier, of fried mackerel stuffed into rolls of bread, the aroma of burned sugar drifting from the open door of a pastane, even the savoury, insubordinate tang of boiled sheep’s heads.

Sometimes it was enough to merely breathe in these scents, so powerful that if one came close enough it was almost like tasting them. Sometimes one found it necessary to part with a few emergency piastres – only to be used in the case of direst need – and share a warm simit with one’s friends on the way to school.

The pride with which the sellers displayed their wares: fresh-shelled almonds arranged by the bademci – the almond seller – upon a shimmering cake of ice; the sour green plums, that one could only eat for twenty days of the year, carefully arranged in small paper bags. A towering pyramid of plump tomatoes, smelling and tasting of the sun itself.

When the war came, these vanished. Not at once. In the first weeks there was just a little less. The street food went first, fading from the city like the detail from an old painting. Then the bakeries. In the beginning the bread was a day old. Then a week, then two weeks. Then it disappeared altogether.

In the burned place he did not eat for three days. He stayed in the dark, and waited for it to take him. When she found him he could not have walked out of there on his own – he hadn’t the energy to lift his head from the floor. Now it is like the hunger has found its way deep inside him, has put down roots. Even now, when there is more to eat, even now it remains. Even after he has eaten it is there, gnawing at his insides. He thinks about food constantly; he dreams of it.

The other women are in the other room: the old one, and the one who never speaks. From beneath the door comes the scent of tobacco. It smells of burned things. It speaks of the time before. He will not think of that. The important thing is that they are busy. This leaves him free to explore the kitchen.

These searches are never particularly rewarding. An old onion, perhaps, aged to softness. Eaten like an apple. The memory of it in the mouth had the exact odour of a man’s sweat. Or perhaps a heel of bread, with a white-green bloom of mould. Cobwebs, too, if it has fallen into some hard-to-reach place from which only an arm as thin as his can extract it.

But now, reaching further into the dark recess than ever before, his fingers brush a new object. He draws it out, mildly curious. A book. This is not of any particular interest; it cannot be eaten. Books are school, and difficulty. In its favour, though, is the fact that it had been discovered by him alone.

‘Hello,’ he says.

There is mystery attached to it. He takes it into the patch of light spilling from the street lamp to look at it. It is homemade, not printed, written in a hand somehow familiar to him. No pictures – this is a disappointment. He has little time for words. He knows that he is clever, but words can outwit him, can shift before his very eyes.

He stares at it for a few minutes, hardly bothering to puzzle it out, ready to give it up as a bad job. Then a word makes itself familiar to him, as though the light itself has drawn its meaning up out of the page. Chicken. His mouth floods with saliva. He goes to the next word. Walnuts. It is already, thanks to these two words, the most interesting book he has ever come across.

Concentrating intently, frustrated by his own slowness, he puzzles out the rest of it. Paprika – he knows that, the bright powder made from peppers. The words, he begins to realise, describe a larger whole. A dish. Chicken with Walnuts and Paprika. He can imagine it, yes. He closes his eyes and summons the flavours with a great effort of imagination. The tender flesh of the meat, the bitter of the nuts, the sweet smoke of the spice.

The idea of the dish in his head is a kind of pleasurable agony. It is almost as good as eating it. Of course, one does not have the fullness in the belly afterward. But he hardly ever has that anyway, cannot remember a time when he has felt fully sated by what he has been given to eat.

Now the magic of this imagined meal is used up.

He turns the page, to discover the next delight. Chicken – easy, he had the shape of the word in his mind now. Chicken with … he squints at the word. Figs. That is the best time of the year, when the tree in the schoolyard yields its fruit. In the time of worst hunger they had been everything to him. Less filling than bread, but more so than the aubergine skins he had scavenged from the bins. There are two kinds: white and purple. The latter are bigger but the white are finer-flavoured. Tiny, fragrant morsels. They are his favourite. Unfortunately they are the birds’ favourite too. He was almost tearful with frustration, upon leaving lessons, to discover that they had got to so many of them before him. And they were so wasteful. They would eat part of a fruit, and leave the rest hanging upon the branch to dry out or rot. They would scatter half of what they stole upon the ground. He would eat these remains, or collect them in his pockets.

He reads on, his mouth wet with longing, his stomach protesting, his mind filling with impossible fantasies.

Nur

There are difficult negotiations with the linen buyer. ‘Every week I have another woman coming to me with a story like yours, hanım. Great families who have lost everything, fallen on poor times. And all their work is beautiful.’

‘But I came to you first – that must count for something?’

He seems not to have heard. ‘The Russians! They come to me straight from the ships laden with great bundles on their backs: silks from Paris, the finest cashmere shawls. They are such poor wretches now: no homeland, no future. You must count yourself lucky. There are others who are far more unfortunate. We have all lost a great deal.’

It is true. Every day new inhabitants arrive, fleeing the ongoing consequences of the Great War, the revolution in Russia. Dispossessed, desperate. Regular flurries of chaos at the quays: vast carriers arriving with human cargo. Some filtered into the system of Allied camps. Others absorbed by the city, disappearing with little trace. But she hopes that he sees the long look she gives his stall, occupying four times the space it once did; the smartly refurbished sign with its gilt lettering, the beautiful new silver samovar from which he has declined to offer her any tea.

As she leaves the bazaar she sees the Allied soldiers, buying trinkets. It is not enough for them to have occupied this place; they want to take a piece of it back with them. A souvenir. A war trophy. Exotic, but harmless, like a muzzled dancing bear. Her linens will be stowed in trunks, will make the long journey back across the breadth of Europe to decorate sideboards and tables in houses in London and Paris. She likes, in more optimistic moments, to think of this as a colonisation of her own.

Their uniforms are clean but she sees them drenched in blood. How many men have you killed, she asks, silently, of some sunburned boy as he holds a fake lump of amber up to the light with an unconvincingly expert air. And you? – of the fat officer fingering women’s sequinned babouches – did you slaughter my husband, at Gallipoli? My brother, in the unknown wasteland in which we lost him?

She thinks of Kerem, her lost brother, every day. There are reminders of him, everywhere – particularly in the schoolroom where it should be he who stands in front of the pupils, not her. But it is more visceral than that: it exists in her as a deep, specific ache, as though she has lost some invisible but vital part of herself.

With the loss of her husband, it is different. She can go whole days without thinking of Ahmet – and then remember with a guilty start. It is not that she does not care, she has to remind herself. It is that all of it – him, herself as a bride and then briefly as a wife, the night that followed – all seem abstract, intangible as a dream. Once she found herself rooting through the chest of clothes in the apartment, desperate to find her wedding outfit. She thought the sight of it might make her feel the grief she was supposed to feel. Because she grieves him only as she might the loss of a stranger. But then that was what he had been – even in those two weeks as husband and wife before he left for the front. When she thinks of Ahmet she thinks, with genuine sadness: how terrible for his mother. What a waste of young life. She does not think of it, not at first, in relation to herself. What sort of a widow does that make her?

On the ferry back she stays on past the stop at Tophane where she would normally disembark for home. As they cross the great channel of the Bosphorus she watches the shore of Asia approach and feels her skin prickle like someone about to commit a crime. Upon the opposite bank, growing visible now, is the white house.

She should not do this. She knows no good can come of it. A destructive thing. This instinct of hers, however, has overwhelmed reason.

The worst thing was that they took it, and did not use it. The final insult, to leave it gathering dust, like the skeleton of one denied the burial rites.

Her father – in his whimsical way – once described the house as a woman who had lain down beside the water for a rest that had become endless slumber. This idea, as with certain things heard in childhood, ignited in her mind. Even now she cannot help but see the sleeper, the cluster of trees that form her wild dark hair, the small jetty her hand trailing through the water. Nur feels, looking at her, a sense of betrayal. What luxury might it have been, to have slept through all of this without the least concern? She feels the same way about the stray cats she feeds. When she sees the tortoiseshell tom stretch himself out on the sun-kindled tiles of the roof opposite she knows that she is witnessing a contentment that for any human, especially one living here, would be impossible to obtain.

Her eyes never leave the house. As the ferry shudders its way toward the dock of the station she is certain that she catches a movement in one of the downstairs windows. This is impossible, of course – it must have been a reflection. It has remained empty, useless, all this time. Still, the animal part of her mind has been worried by it, and she finds herself watching for more movement. She thinks it was in the haremlik, the women’s quarters, the domain over which her grandmother presided like a queen. Well. There are so many memories confined in there that perhaps she really did see some flicker of the past.

As she alights, she feels exposed on the quay, imagining how she might appear to someone who knows her, what they would guess of her mission. That they might pity her – that is the worst of it. Far worse, certainly, than the censure they had shown previously. Her dead father’s innocence has been all but proven by the fact that the occupiers have done nothing to recognise or reward the family. What more did they have to lose to prove their support for the cause? A son lost, a daughter widowed … what more had to be sacrificed before they were considered free of suspicion?

For the first time in a long while she rather longs for her veil, for the shield of it. She keeps her head lowered, and at the same time detests her own cowardice. There is nothing shameful in what she is doing, only a little sad.

The path to the house, the private one through the trees and bushes immediately beside the water, has been exposed. Nur would have thought the thicket would have closed itself around it by now in an impenetrable tangle. In fact, had some self-preserving part of her hoped that she would be forced to turn back at this point? Now she must continue with the thing, see it through.

Here, too, are unexpected assaults of memory: scents of wild fig, olive, blue mint, bracken, mingling with the brine of the water. A pressure in her chest, a knot of tears that will not be shed, that cannot be relieved.

There is less magic in it up close than viewed from the water. Now visible are the places where the white paint is beginning to peel from the old grey wood beneath, how the elderly balconies sag with the weight of more than a century, that in the eaves of the roof are the fragile remains of birds’ nests from years gone by. Yet these flaws, for Nur, are as tenderly observed as those in the face of a loved one.

She is close enough now that she can hear the effect of the water in the boathouse, the strange echoes: the gargle and slap. The accompaniment to hours sitting on the little jetty reading a book, casting a line out to catch fish as her father had taught her – she was better at it than her brother. When she did land one, however small and spiny, Fatima would take great care to serve it at the next meal, transformed with lemon and parsley and tender cooking over fragrant wood. As a child she had sat on that platform with her ankles and feet submerged in the water, instantly cooling on a hot day. She is caught by the idea of it, it grows inside her. There is no one here to see. She makes her way down the stone steps, onto the wood of the platform, lowers herself until she is sitting, slips off her shoes and extends her bared feet into the water.

Sometimes, now, the old life seems as remote as one read about in a book. But this afternoon it seems very close at hand, an assault of memory. If she refuses to look at the great grey warships marshalled further downstream she can almost persuade herself that she is sitting here suspended in her past.

How old is she? She thinks. She is in control of this fantasy, she can choose. Twelve. The time before anything became complicated. Before talk of marriage, or propriety, before illness and death. She has just climbed a tree … it has left her hands and feet sticky with sap. She will wash them, here, in the waters of the Bosphorus before she casts out her fishing line.

The older women will be sitting in the women’s quarters, the haremlik, after a lunch of several courses. Perhaps they have friends visiting them from the city, in Parisian gowns that sit oddly with their veils. Or perhaps they have come from further afield, from Anatolia, traditional in loose silks, their fingernails stained with red dye. By now they will be deep in gossip. Or perhaps they have summoned a female miradju to entertain them all with tall tales. Most of these professional storytellers rely upon a carefully honed set of stories, most known fairly well to their listeners, yet still pleasing because of the unique style and flourishes of the teller. But the very best of them can invent narrative upon the spot, conjuring people and places straight from the imagination.

Once Nur told her mother that her greatest ambition was to become one of these women – and received a lecture on the importance of knowing one’s class. These women were still salespeople – no better than the simit sellers or the rag women – even if their currency was words.

Footsteps, behind her. Her father, come to join her in her fishing. Or perhaps he has brought with him the backgammon set, inlaid with ebony, ivory and mother-of-pearl. She turns.

Behind her, at the top of the steps, stands a man in a white robe, a pipe dangling precariously from his open mouth. A lit match burns unattended in his hand, forgotten in his surprise.

‘By Jove,’ he says, stepping quickly backward. And then, as the flame from the match climbs high enough to lick his fingers, ‘Ouch!’

An Englishman, half-dressed, here on the Asian side of the water. None of this makes any sense to Nur: she thought, hoped, that they were confined to Pera. He stares, she stares back. They are like two street cats, she thinks, watching one another warily.

‘By Jove,’ he says again, under his breath, as though the important thing is to say something – that by doing so he will wrest some control over the situation. Nur is standing, attempting to retrieve her slippers with furtive movements of her feet. She risks another quick glance. She has never seen an Englishman – indeed any man – dressed in such an outfit. It is a longish, very loose, very thin white shirt; if she were to allow herself to look properly she would realise that it does not quite preserve his modesty.

‘Well,’ he says fiercely, ‘what the devil are you doing here?’ He has made his pitch for the upper hand, she realises. ‘You don’t understand me, do you?’ His pride has marshalled itself. ‘This is private land. Private. Be gone with you …’ He raises an arm, imperious, points in the direction of the path. ‘Shoo!’

‘I suppose I might ask you the same question.’

He takes a step back.

She has learned this, especially in that time since the occupation began: to wield language, her command of it, as an instrument of power.

He shifts onto his other foot – and for a moment he seems to teeter. The surprise seems to have taken all the force out of him. He looks rather pale, she thinks, even for a pallid Englishman – there is a frailty that she had failed to see before, distracted by his odd attire and her surprise.

Now another figure is approaching, from the house. He is properly dressed, in British army khaki. Her stomach clenches. It is now that she becomes aware that she is effectively trapped on the jetty: these men on one side of her, the water on the other. She will stand her ground; she has done nothing wrong, after all.

There is something familiar about him, this other man. He, too, seems to be experiencing some struggle of recognition. He frowns. His eyes travel from her face to her bare feet, and back again. ‘It’s you. The woman with the books.’

Yes, she does recognise him. Not the face so much as the voice. But she will not give him the satisfaction of admitting it; in refusing she will retain the upper hand. ‘I do not know what you refer to.’

He frowns. ‘You don’t remember? Just two weeks ago … past the Galata bridge. I’m sure it was you. You dropped …’ a pause, then, in triumph, ‘a red notebook!’

A week ago. She was late, on her way to the school. There were painful negotiations with the linen buyer, who tried to convince her that the trade had reached saturation, and he could only offer a third of the usual price. She had to go through the whole charade; to turn on her heel and march away from him before he called her back. This had wasted a good quarter of an hour that she did not have spare.

She could imagine chaos in the classroom already – it seems to unfold even when her back has been turned for a minute, even now there are so few of them. Nur rather loves them for it. But now dread visions appeared before her: desks overturned, ink spilled.

She could not go fast enough. The cobblestones in that part of town are lethal, especially if one is in a hurry. Every third step seemed to be an awkward one, sending her pitching forward as though she might fall. She had felt a building irritation. There was nothing to direct it at other than the men who had laid these uneven stones at some unknown time in the past. But it grew, to a low-level anger at this city in general. Where everything and everyone seemed suddenly world-weary, broken. There was too much history here, too many lives and ages layered one over the top of another. How could one ever hope to grow, to move forward, with this ever-present, melancholy, hot-breathed closeness of the past?

She heard footsteps behind her.

‘Excuse me?’ In English.

Nur kept her gaze down, hurried her pace. Another misstep; her ankle turned on itself, an arrow of pain lancing up.

‘Bakar mısınız?’

She hesitated, surprised by the Turkish, clumsy though it was. In her moment of hesitation, he had caught up with her.

‘You dropped this.’

She turned. She saw, on looking up, a khaki form, the vague oval of a face. This was all her glance allowed time for; she could not have said with absolute certainty that there had also been eyes, a nose, a mouth. Because the thing about the foreign soldiers is that one does everything one can to avoid looking at them. Not to pretend that they don’t exist; that would be impossible. After three years of occupation they have come to seem as much a part of the city as the thousands of stray dogs that roam its streets. Just like those dogs they have made it their own; taken possession, taken liberties. But one avoids looking at them to avoid trouble. From a man a too-long glance might seem a threat; many have been thrown into Allied prisons on smaller pretexts. From a woman, it might seem an invitation.

She took the thing he was holding out to her, though to do so seemed in itself like a weakness. His fingers brushed hers, an accident, and she snatched her hand. It was her red notebook, the one in which she plans out her lessons. She pushed it beneath her arm with the others, turned, walked away.

She realised after ten more steps that she had not thanked him. Well, she thought. One small act of defiance for the vanquished.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was me.’ If he is expecting her to thank him, he will have a long wait.

He smiles. She thinks how much she would like to hit him, or spit at his feet. ‘How is your ankle?’ he asks.

‘There is nothing wrong with my ankle.’ She hears the edge in her voice. Careful, must not push it too far. He is smiling, but these invaders can turn in an instant. And yet she refuses to show that she is afraid of him, especially here, in this place. ‘Why are you here?’ she asks.

‘This is a hospital,’ he says. ‘I am the doctor here. This man, Lieutenant Rawlings, is one of my patients.’ Then, almost to himself, ‘Who should not be out here, in fact.’ He turns to the robed figure. ‘Why are you out, Rawlings?’

‘I came here to smoke my pipe. Can’t have the damn thing inside – Sister Agnes complains about it.’

‘Well, I would return post haste if I were you, or you will have to answer to her. I think she will find this a worse crime.’

The man seems about to retort, then thinks better of it. Flushing, he extinguishes the pipe and begins an unsteady retreat toward the property. But she sees that he does not enter – he remains on the edge of vision as a silent audience.

‘I’m sorry for the lack of courtesy.’ The doctor’s voice is gentler. ‘We don’t have many visitors here, as you see.’

She knows that this is British dissemble. Some sort of explanation is still required, he is waiting for her to make it. She would not know how to do it even if she felt he deserved one. Instead, she asks, ‘This is a hospital?’

‘Yes. It was a house, originally, the owners have since left.’ Something occurs to him. ‘Perhaps you knew them?’

‘No.’ He is still waiting, she knows, for her explanation. There is nothing threatening in his voice or manner, but then the threat is sewn into the very uniform he wears.

‘I have family,’ she says, ‘a little further down this shore. I knew of the path, I thought I would come this way, along the water.’

He frowns. She is fairly sure he is not convinced. And yet she suspects that his courtesy will not allow him to call her out in the lie.

‘Do you know why this house was abandoned? What happened to the owners? I only ask because it feels as though they did not leave long ago.’

‘I never knew them.’ She draws herself together. ‘If you will excuse me …’ She steps toward him. It is the closest she has ever been to one of them, and she feels the clench of fear again in her stomach.

For the first time he seems to realise that he is blocking her path back to dry land. He steps aside.

She walks slowly back the way she came, not caring that he will think it odd; that if her tale were true she should be walking in the other direction, past the house, not back in the direction of the ferry terminal. Her hands are trembling; she clenches them into fists.

Behind her she hears: ‘Well, that was all rather confounding—’

‘What I’m more confounded by, Rawlings, is why you are still outside.’

It could be worse, she supposes. It could have been turned into a barracks, or a nightclub like those that have sprung up in Pera, the European district. A hospital is at least less shameful than that. But her home has been colonised. All of their memories, the intimate, private life of the family. She feels the loss of it a second time. And that smiling Englishman, with his quizzical politeness. Somehow it would have been better, almost less insulting, if he had spoken to her with the abrupt rudeness of the other man.

Her mind fills with fantasies. She sees herself lunging toward him as he moved aside for her on the jetty. Pushing out with both hands … him toppling backward into the Bosphorus. His imagined surprise is a delicious thing; the indignity of his fall.

She could have run back toward the ferry … before he or that invalid had time to act.

She catches herself. She knows that she could never have done it. Her mother and grandmother, the boy, the school: there is simply too much at stake. Still, it cannot hurt to imagine. The realm of fantasy, at least, is one that cannot be occupied.

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.

I prop the suitcase on the couchette next to me. From the cushioning of a scarf I unwrap a photograph in a tin frame. I have looked at it so many times through the years, trying to understand the sequence of events that changed everything, that changed my life.

A building, surrounded by dark trees. It is slightly out of focus, lending the house a blurred, provisional appearance so that it does not appear made of wood and stone but something evanescent, a structure of vapour and light. It looks more like the idea of a house, a phantasm that has alighted on the bank and is making up its mind as to whether it should stay. But I recall tangible things. Painted tiles, a stone fountain, fine objects, white linen, voices echoing in high-ceilinged rooms. Hard to believe … that for a short span of time it was something like a home to me.

I bring the photograph so close to my face that my breath steams the shielding pane of glass, hoping to catch some evidence of life within. For the merest fraction of a moment I think I have seen something in the lower row of windows: a small face, looking out at me. But it must have been merely the creation of a hopeful imagination. When I look again the windows are blank-eyed and dark, withholding their secrets.

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.

Nur had pushed the boy behind her, but had not had time to prevent one of the men stumbling into her, catching her hard on the shoulder. Involuntarily she had shoved back with both hands, merely trying to keep him from knocking her down. He had toppled and briefly tried to right himself before his momentum had got the better of him, sending him crashing backward to the ground. She had stood there stunned by the act, by her sudden, unexpected power. His fellow soldiers had been beside themselves with glee – laughing and pointing, slurring insults at him where he sat in the pool of his spilled beer. Then the fallen one had looked up, and she had seen that the shock had sobered him; that his expression was pure menace. She had humiliated him, she understood this look to mean, and she would pay.

She had turned to the boy. ‘Run.’

They had fled back down the way they had come, through the cobbled streets. The men had pursued them for a while, alternately laughing and shouting orders. But the men were drunk, and she knew the streets better – knew a secret shortcut through a series of interconnecting alleyways that would take them back to the tram stop.

They had escaped, but she still has a queasy fear of one of them recognising her in the street one day and demanding retribution. If she were arrested, what would become of them all … the boy, her mother, her grandmother? She looks at them all now, and decides it is not worth thinking about.

As the sky beyond the windows loses the last of its light, she heats a basin of water on the stove and begins to wash her mother’s hair. She has a bar of soap scented with Damascene rose that she keeps for this purpose. The aroma is famed for its ability to soothe and heal. It reminds her of her mother, too. The woman she used to be – who would ask the girls to crush the petals into her skin and hair before her bath, who wore pure attar oil dabbed behind her ears. Who wore gowns of pink silk and read French novels.

From the corner, her grandmother speaks. ‘You won’t get anything out of her. Worse than an infant today.’

‘She has suffered so much, Büyükanne.’

‘So have we all, girl.’

Her mother stopped speaking on the day they had word from the front: Missing, presumed lost. They knew as well as anyone that the notice meant dead. Her brother survived only within the bureaucratic chaos that meant the exact circumstances of his death were not yet clear. Sometimes, in the early days, Nur had allowed herself to believe that he was alive. There were rumours of Ottoman men being taken as prisoners of war. If she did not feel his death, might it not be real?

Now she sees that this was just a fiction she had created to delay pain. She did not feel his death because they had been denied the absolute certainty of it: that was the cruellest thing of all.

From somewhere beneath them comes the eerie, distorted wail of an infant. The walls might be made of thick card, not stone. Above and below can be heard, with peculiar domestic intimacy, the sounds of other lives. Most of the time the voices are indistinct, as though they are travelling through water.

Her mother’s eyes have closed. If one were to look briefly she might appear to be in a state of bliss. But her breath comes too quickly. Beneath the purplish lids there is restless movement, as though projected there is a play of images that only she can see. Nur has some inkling of what those scenes may be. They are the same that wake her mother at night, from which even in her sleep she is not safe.

She is trying not to think about how much more hair there used to be. Her fingers discover absences, patches of bare scalp where whole sections seem to have vanished. She sluices warm water, creates a silky white lather. She inhales, exhales, hears the hitch of her breath and tries to smooth it. She understands the importance of remaining calm. Knows how powerfully the fingertips, those tiny repositories of sensation, can convey emotion. She tries instead to convey only her tenderness, her love.

She fills another cup of water to rinse away the foam. The colour has changed, too. It used to be a magnificent colour: somewhere between brown and red. A great sweep of it, with the shine of metal. Depending upon the quality of the light it would gleam bronze or copper. Now it does not reflect anything at all. This, of course, may be merely to do with age. A cruelty, yes, but a natural one that comes to all. And yet it happened so quickly – in less than a year.

She tips the water. There is a small sound as the water drenches her mother’s scalp, which could be a sigh of pleasure or pain.

‘Is it all right for you, Anne?’ But there is only silence.

Five years earlier
The Prisoner

Their enemy, at the very entrance to their camp. The Russians had come for them, through the snow. Silently, cloaked in whiteness. Then they were everywhere, and death came all at once. Death came in pellets of metal that could travel the whole way through a body, and break it all up inside. Men were killed opening their mouths to speak, or scratching themselves, or putting both hands inside their jackets to warm them, or bending to fasten a shoe, or squatting to defecate against a tree. Some died even before they had time to shout, some of them with screams that outlived them. And some were dying slowly, with whimpers of fear and pain. They fell and the snow covered them. He had not known that death in the name of a noble cause, in the name of everything one stood for, could still be so ugly. So small, so pitiful.

He shouted to Babek to fall, to pretend to be hit. He lay down, and waited for the snow to cover him as they made their advance. He felt the cold enter him like a sword. He realised it might have been better to have been shot, because now he would merely freeze to death – and it would be slow.

He lay for an hour; perhaps several. But time had frozen too.

Beside him, on either side, stretched a phalanx of corpses. Bodies that would soon be hardly recognisable as such, skin turned hard as stone. The Russians had brought dogs, and some of them had begun to feast. He could hear them, a little way off, fighting over the spoils. There was more than enough to go around.

Babek lay somewhere close by. He thought that he could still hear the rattle of his breathing, but it was difficult to be certain.

The enemy came now, following the dogs. He could hear voices, the creak of the snow beneath their boots. Their boots lined with fur. This was the Russians’ element. They were men of ice and snow.

He felt the weight of the dead man beside him disappear as the corpse was hoisted into the air and carried to some unknown place. Then they came for him, prodded at him with a rifle. He felt the sting of the bayonet’s blade against his skin, but he did not cry out.

He could hear them talking; but he could not understand the words. He supposed they were gloating over their victory. And then he heard; unmistakable, a voice speaking in a language he understood. A heavy Russian accent, but the words were clear enough.

‘You’ve done well. You will be rewarded for this.’

Another voice, accented, but not Russian. ‘Thank you.’

He opened one eye. And he saw, he was sure that he saw, the same Armenian who they had thought lost to the snow.

When the Russians had finally left he dragged Babek into the shelter of one of the tents. They would wait here for the reinforcements to find them. He had to believe that they would come; and come soon – he wasn’t sure that either of them had long left.

Every so often, Babek would let out a low moan. It wasn’t a human sound. And he lay where he had been dragged; his limbs at odd angles.

He was not sure whether Babek could hear him, but it seemed important to keep talking. He could feel sleep pressing in, promising a respite from the cold which had found its way into him, deeper than it ever had before. He was lucid enough to know what this meant. It did not matter that he had somehow escaped being wounded – the cold would kill him with just as little mercy as the flesh-rupturing path of a bullet. So he talked: of home, of their return. It would not do to dwell on the things both of them had seen: the feasting dogs; the indignity of the bodies left out without a proper burial – when a Muslim man should be interred as quickly as possible. Even if he had the energy and strength left to do it he could not have buried them all. He would not think, either, of the treachery of the Armenian, the man who had been in their midst, and eaten with them, and drunk tea with them, and promised to help them. And for whose body they had searched in the snow, mourning the loss of one of their own. So instead he talked of the city they both loved; the orange blossom in spring, the first tiny bright green leaves on the fig trees, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and warm baked bread.

He tried to remember what it was to be warm. He talked to Babek of a summer’s trip to the Princes’ Islands. A secret beach he knew where the water was so clear that you could still see the bottom even when it was as deep as a house was tall. And then the feeling of the hot sand beneath your back, the sun drying the damp from your skin with the tenderness of a lover’s caress. Sand with tiny pieces of broken shell, pink as a fingernail, the inside of your lip. He was so cold now that it was difficult to form each word – each had to be forced out on a little huff of breath, so that he almost felt he could see the letters in the freezing cloud as it left his mouth – but he thought he did the job well enough. If only he could feel the meaning of the words, though. Please, he thought, if this is really how it ends for me … let me feel that tender warmth one last time.

He tried now to think of his sister and his mother and grandmother. He had thought that if it came to it, if he found himself on a precipice, all he would need to do would be to think of them, and he would be able to keep himself going. He had not realised how difficult it would be not to die.

His friend’s moans had ceased now. It was some relief. Perhaps the pain had lessened, slightly.

‘Your wife, Babek. Think of how proud she’ll be to have a war hero for a husband.’

Would his own family be proud? They would be relieved, certainly, to see him home. He tried to summon their faces to him but found that he could not do it. The cold seemed to have worked its way inside his head.

‘They’ll come for us soon. It cannot be too long. We’ll be taken home.’

That word. It seemed to encapsulate everything that was good; everything that was the opposite of this place. His cheeks stung; the tears freezing upon the skin.

Time had become fluid, elusive. It seemed that they had been here for many days, many nights. But when it began to grow dark he realised that it could only have been a few hours. The loss of the light made him feel more alone. He reminded himself that Babek was with him. He looked over at his friend. Babek was sleeping now, his chin upon his chest. He looked almost comical, like a broken doll, his limbs splayed. He wondered how long he had been talking to himself, taking comfort from the mere idea of a conversation. He saw that the jacket that he had lent to Babek – because he needed it far more – had fallen open. Feeling rather like his mother – how she had fussed over them when they were little – he leant down and pulled the lapels up so it covered him properly.

He continued to talk to Babek, even though his friend slept, because it was a way of keeping awake himself, and one of them had to be conscious in case reinforcements came for them – or the Russians came back.

A little while later, as it was growing dark, something occurred to him. It was too horrible to contemplate properly, so he shunted the idea away. But it clung to him, to the edges of thought. And finally he looked over at his friend, looked properly this time, and saw that he was dead.

George

This evening he, Bill, his fellow medical officer, and Calvert, an officer they met in Baku, are having dinner in a new Pera restaurant. Russian: all the new restaurants seem to be, set up by the more fortunate of the refugees who have fled across the Black Sea from Lenin’s Revolution.

At night the city becomes more than ever a place of two distinct halves. Stamboul slumbers early while the lights of Pera, just across the Golden Horn, seem to burn brightest in the smallest, darkest hours of the morning. Here the meyhanes and jazz clubs fill with Allied soldiers and naval officers. And there are also those other establishments which choose not to outwardly proclaim the sort of entertainment offered. They do not need to; their renown is spread quickly, secretly, among those who have a taste for such things.

Inside the restaurant is a fug of smoke and steam, a clamour of voices and crockery. Beneath it all, not loud enough to do anything other than add to the racket, comes the thin wail of a violin. The man playing it has one of the most tragic faces George has ever seen, and he wonders whether he was chosen specifically for this, rather than his indifferent skill with the instrument. The maître d’hôtel meets them, sweeps them to their table in the other corner of the room.

Calvert is not impressed. ‘The French always get the best seats,’ he says, darkly, indicating a table several rows across where three blue-uniformed figures sit smoking and laughing. There exists among the so-called Allied forces an atmosphere of mutual distrust.

‘What’s so special about that table?’ Bill asks.

Calvert raises one fair eyebrow. He points to the place beyond the table. There, George sees now, sits a rudimentary wooden structure with a platform a few feet from the ground. ‘It’s closer to the stage. They’ll be able to see right up the skirts.’

He looks round for the maître d’hôtel.

‘Do you know,’ George says to Bill, ‘I completely forgot to tell you. The strangest thing happened yesterday.’ He describes the woman on the jetty. Already the idea of her is like something not quite real, a fragment of a dream.

Bill frowns. ‘You should report that.’

‘Why?’

‘Could be espionage. There are resistance groups, you know. The Teşkilât-i Mahsusa, the Karakol. You heard about the fire at the French barracks at Rami?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, all of the Algerian soldiers escaped miraculously unharmed. It’s thought that they were in cahoots with the Turkish resistance.’

‘I thought of all that – briefly. But I don’t believe it was for a second. A solitary woman, for goodness’ sake, washing her feet.’

‘Still, you should make a formal note of it. She’d be the perfect choice to scope it, because we wouldn’t suspect her. At the very least it’s British property. She trespassed.’

‘Mmm.’ He is rather wishing he hadn’t said anything. He knows already that he will make no such report. He wonders whether, given the opportunity, Bill would also tell him to turn in the little boy who spat on his shoes.

They are brought chilled glasses of that Russian spirit, which tastes to George like a distillation of nothingness, a void. But it goes well with the food. Particularly caviar, which he ate for the first time in that godforsaken place on the shores of the Caspian Sea, bubbles of salt bursting upon the tongue, a concentration of the sea itself, at once delicious and slightly repellent. But isn’t that the same, he thinks, for all tastes deemed refined? The sourness of champagne, the bitter of coffee, the fleshy gobbet of the oyster. Does one enjoy them as much for their taste as for one’s ability to overcome this brief repulsion, even fear?

Calvert sucks back an oyster, drains his glass of vodka, and turns to him.

‘What are you still doing here, Monroe?’

‘What do you mean? This restaurant? Do you know, I’m really not sure …’

Calvert draws back his lips in an approximation of a smile. ‘No, that isn’t what I meant. I understood that you got offered home, some time ago.’

‘I did.’

‘Well, why …’

‘I suppose I felt that I could be more useful here.’

‘Your sense of duty, was it?’

George looks at him, sharply, but can find no obvious trace of sarcasm. ‘Yes. Something to that effect.’

He does not like Calvert. He realises this with a sudden clarity. Even his face is somehow unlikeable. It has a peculiar fineness of feature: the nose small and neat, the chin delicately carved, the lips full as a girl’s, with a sharp cupid bow. It is these lips, perhaps, that tilt the whole effect into a prettiness that doesn’t quite work. And yet he prides himself upon them, George knows. One might even say that he wields them. It is a face that one cannot quite trust.

Now Calvert leans across the table and says in a conspirator’s murmur, ‘They have the best girls here. All bonafide White Russians – nothing lower than a countess, I assure you. Running from the Red Bolshevik devils.’ His breath is tainted metallic by the spirit.

George casts an eye about the room, at the waitresses in question. They are all pretty, youngish, simpering. Not especially remarkable in any way … or so it seems to him. Perhaps one requires the fine gown and jewels to appear really aristocratic. But then what, exactly, is the difference between these and any other women? If the last few years have shown him anything, it is the mutability of all things. If entire cities – countries – can be denatured in so short a space of time, the odds of any human remaining essentially unchanged seem poor.

But clearly Calvert finds something fascinating in them, he watches them like a fox. Perhaps it is the fall itself that interests him. That he, the scion of shopkeepers – albeit extremely successful ones, as he is wont to remind them – might bed a destitute princess of Russia. The waitress comes over to them, ready for their next order. And George sees, with a small frisson of horror, that in the second before she switches on her smile – an electric flash – her eyes are expressionless as a corpse’s.

He thinks again of the woman on the jetty. There had been nothing blank in the look she had given him. It had been a glance to singe the nostril hairs.

‘Penny for them?’ Bill is peering into his face. ‘You’re smiling like a loon.’

‘Pardon? Oh – nothing in particular.’

‘Well. Better get back here quickly; the show is about to start.’

A man has stepped up onto the platform, the compère. He wears an outfit that might once have been rather grand: a frock coat, pale blue, gold-trimmed, matching trousers. Now it is several decades out of date, too large, frayed at the cuffs and collar in a soft fuzz of thread.

‘Where on earth do you think he found such an article?’ Bill murmurs. ‘You’d think they could do a little better, with this place being so popular.’

Calvert seems irritated, as though a slight on the club is one upon his taste; it was he who suggested the place. ‘It’s called The Turgenev,’ he says, waspishly, ‘it is meant to be old-fashioned. A glimpse of Old Russia – the Russia that saw off Napoleon.’

‘Ah.’ Bill seems unconvinced.

Fortunately they are all distracted by the announcement of the first performer. The song she breaks into is shrill as the violin, foreign to the ear as vodka on the palate. It is just an entrée, this musical interlude, for the courses to follow: the white thighs beneath silk petticoats.

‘I’m going home with her. No, no – her.’

George looks over at him. ‘I thought you had a wife, Calvert.’

Calvert’s skin is so fair that the flush is instant. Difficult to tell, though, whether he is more embarrassed or angry. ‘What exactly is that supposed to mean?’

George isn’t exactly sure why he said it. There is hardly much novelty in Calvert’s attitude. And who is George to cast judgement? Best to smooth the situation quickly. ‘Sorry old chap, didn’t mean to offend.’

Calvert nods, curtly. He doesn’t speak for the rest of the act. Bill tries to catch George’s eye, but he avoids him. The truth is, he is tired. He remembers poor Hatton and his herpes. He thinks he may have seen as much near-nudity in the months of being in this city as he has in his whole medical career, and as much adultery as an East End madame.

If this gives the impression that he is absolutely above it, it is misleading.

He has not always been immune to such intoxications.

Soft skin, perfume, a warm body against his. Being made to feel one was the most interesting man in the room.

No, he was not immune at all.

Nur

When Nur sees the boy reading a book, she almost doubts her own eyesight. All of her efforts to interest him in learning thus far have been thwarted, she has given up any hope. Now this small miracle. He is so engrossed in it he does not even hear her approach.

‘What is that?’

He starts in surprise, looks about, furtively. ‘I – found it.’

She peers at it more closely and recognises it: the book of recipes, long forgotten. Now she understands the furtiveness. ‘You found it in the kitchen, I think.’ She has discovered him there, foraging, on a number of occasions. She has not yet had the heart to chastise him for it. ‘I haven’t seen that for a very long time. May I look?’

He parts with it with some reluctance.

It is the book of recipes that Fatima had her transcribe, when Nur told her they would have to let her go. Her hand almost aches with the memory of the task. She has not opened it since. At a time when bread had been hard to come by, let alone anything else, what would have been the point? The paper has yellowed, lending it the appearance of something far older. It is like a relic from another age. Not altogether untrue; those days seem long ago.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen you so interested in a book. And this is just recipes, lists of ingredients.’ But then she recalls his preoccupation with food, the way he never quite seems to be full, and thinks that perhaps, after all, she does understand.

‘Which is your favourite?’

The boy takes the book from her, leafs through the pages with a practised air. He finds the one, taps the page. She reads. Circassian chicken with honey and figs. There is a pull of feeling associated with this particular recipe, but she cannot understand it at first. The memory eludes her.

She puts the book down. He grasps for it, immediately.

In the first years of war those with their own chickens did rather well for themselves. As fresh meat disappeared from the butchers’, vast sums were exchanged for the birds, sometimes fine linens, furniture, jewellery. They were literally worth their weight in gold. Then came the days when no one would part with them for any sum, however outrageous. They had become priceless. And then fresh meat became something that belonged to the past. Perhaps one bird would be kept – and jealously guarded – for its eggs. By then, to eat it would have been a terrible extravagance.

She leaves the boy to his reading, goes back into the apartment. As she crosses the threshold she has it. She last ate the dish on the evening the drums of war had started. The memory hits her full-force.

She is peeling a white fig. They have just eaten the fruits cooked too, with chicken. In the middle of the table is a great platter of them, the room filled with the scent of the leaves. The sky beyond the windows is the dark blue of a late summer night.

They are sedated by the big meal they have just eaten, sitting back in their chairs, drowsy in the candlelight and warmth. It is three weeks before her wedding. She is trying to fix the moment in her mind, because she knows it will be one of the last evenings like this. How many suppers have there been like this? Hundreds? Thousands? The ease of not having to make conversation – though soon her grandmother will light a cigarette and perhaps begin the gossip with which she likes to round off an evening. Or her father, flush from the wine that his religion and his mother frown upon, may decide to make a little speech. He has been particularly affectionate this evening: several times the candlelight has caught the gleam of tears in his eyes. He has talked this evening of love and family, of how special she is to him – of his only daughter, his little rose. Nur thinks she understands … he fears the change as much as she does. She does not know the full truth yet. That this morning he evaluated his symptoms, as objectively as he was able, and realised that he would probably not live to see his daughter wed.

She eats a morsel of fig, savours the rich sweet juice. The first fruits of the season are always a revelation of flavour.

Beneath the murmur of voices around the table comes a sound, faint at first, carried across to them from the other side of the water like strange thunder. And then growing, seeming to swell in the silence as a fire feeds upon air. Whatever it is, it is loud. Few sounds reach them from the city here. Here they are protected. Even before they have understood what the sound is there is an ominousness in its insistence. It has silenced all talk. They are hardly breathing, so intently are they listening.

They come for the new recruits with drums too. A marching band, the flag held high. It is – yes – rather exciting. Her grandmother, always an aficionado of pomp and circumstance, is delighted. They watch Kerem leave with this grand train, blushing at all the fuss being made for him. A schoolteacher turned soldier: such a strange idea! The crowd sings the old song. For the first time Nur hears the words properly: ‘Oh wounded ones I am coming to take your place and my heart is crying because I am leaving my beloved ones …’

She goes to see him the next day as the recruits leave the building in Sirkeci for a temporary camp on the Black Sea. He has the eyes of a sleepwalker. He smiles at her, but he hardly seems to see her. She wonders if it all feels as unreal to him as it does to her.

‘You’ll come home soon,’ she tells him. ‘They have said it will be over quickly.’ This is true. But then there had been a time, too, when they thought that he would not be called up at all. They came for the older age groups first – many of them veteran soldiers, battle hardened. The same drums of war. The Bekçi Baba – the warden – calling out his summons in the streets: ‘Men born between 1880 and 1885 must report to the recruitment centre within a day. Who fails to do so will suffer the consequences of the law.’

Now they have come for those of her brother’s age – the youngest group. But it will not be a proper war, everyone says.

‘They say,’ she tells Kerem, ‘that it will be over by Eid al-Adha, in the autumn.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I know. I’ll come home with some stories to tell. I suppose I have always wanted to travel a little.’

There is an unreality to it all, at first, that makes it feel rather exciting, almost romantic. Brave Young Men will go to war and return transformed: Heroes of the Empire.

So when her grandmother asks, later: ‘Did he look handsome in his uniform?’ it seems only right to nod and say that he had looked very smart indeed. ‘And his boots,’ her mother adds, ‘did they look up to much?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Nur says. ‘Excellent quality.’ She has always hated lying – she is bad at it. The truth is that he had been wearing his own clothes, his own insubstantial city shoes. The only thing that was correct in the description she gave them was that he had been carrying his bag, stitched by her mother and filled with food, woollen socks and gloves, clean underthings.

When she imagines him at the very end – which she cannot stop herself doing – she sees him wearing these pitifully inadequate clothes, those thin-soled shoes. The shoes of a schoolteacher. A gentle, genteel man in a world utterly hostile to him.

The Prisoner

When they found him he had been cradling Babek as though he were his own dead child. The officer in charge had informed him, graciously, that he would not write this up in his official report: it was not quite seemly. What he would write was that Babek had: ‘died in proud service of his country, a hero of the Empire’. There: that would be something for his wife and children.

On that train south he had caught sight of himself in the glass and seen how the cold had disfigured him into someone he did not recognise. He had grown so thin that his skull seemed to be only loosely covered by a thin layer of skin: his near-death writ large upon his body. But there was more than this: his eyes had changed. Perhaps it was just the reflection, but he thought he saw in them a new absence, something that the place had taken from him and might not give back. It frightened him, the sense of distance he felt looking at this stranger. Where was the man he had been? The cold seemed to have killed some invisible part of him as efficiently as it had destroyed visible flesh: the ends of his toes, the pads of his fingers, the scabrous patches on his face, and even the tip of his nose – black as a mark of punctuation, the cold’s little joke. That young schoolteacher, who seemed now like a person he might once have briefly met.

The Red Crescent medical officer who treated him had seen worse cases, though.

‘Worse how?’

‘Oh. Well – the ones who have lost whole limbs, of course. And then there are the ones who die. You’ll be all right.’

He wondered what this meant, exactly. He got his answer quickly enough: it meant that he was whole enough to join a new regiment in the south, below Lake Van. Here, their principal enemy was no longer the Russians.

It was quite simple, his new commanding officer explained. The Armenians had betrayed them. Now they had to leave Ottoman lands. There were two options. They had to be encouraged to go, leaving their villages after collecting the possessions and food they would need for the journey eastwards, toward Mesopotamia, or they had to be forced.

‘All of the Armenians?’ he asked the officer. ‘Have they all turned against us?’

There had been children in his class who were Armenian – one of his favourite pupils, a small boy – had been Armenian. Then he thought of the man who had betrayed them. He thought of Babek. But these were simple people, weren’t they? Their villages were sleepy, unremarkable places: the bleat of a goat, the wail of an infant, the constant low drone of the heat. Where the most dramatic things that happened was a wild dog running amok in the chicken coop, the occasional modest wedding, the death of an old man. They had lived like this for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of years. These people, surely, knew nothing of grand deceptions. It was unclear whether they even knew much about the war until these men of the Ottoman army had descended into their midst and ordered them to begin packing their bags.

‘To remove the cancer,’ the officer told him. ‘We must remove everything. You think these people wear a uniform, to tell us, helpfully, that they’re the ones to look out for? They’re a little more clever than that. They work in the shadows. That’s what makes them so deadly. But we have the element of surprise now. They have no idea what’s coming for them.’

This was certainly true. The villagers had simply stared at them as they gave them their orders – even after they had been translated into the local dialect. When they had eventually assembled at the muster points – after threats both shouted and administered with the butt of a rifle – many had come empty-handed, without the possessions they had been ordered to collect. It was as though they did not believe any of this could be quite real.

‘But most of these people,’ he said to the commanding officer, ‘the ones we’re actually moving … they seem to be all women, old men, children. Surely we should be looking for young men?’

‘Look – what’s your name? These orders come from the very top. Oh. And you do know the penalty for disobeying a direct order, don’t you?’

He thought of the dogs, feasting on the flesh of men who he had laughed with, and eaten bread with, and who had become almost like the brothers he had never had. That had been because of an Armenian. He thought of Babek’s family dwarfed by the huge war train, the boys dressed up like little men, waiting for their father to return to them: a hero.

They were to take the Armenians further east, to the very edges of the Ottoman Empire, toward the border with Persia. These were their orders; from the highest echelons of the War Office in Constantinople. A ‘rehoming’: this was the term used, apparently. But the area to which they would be moved was known only for its hostility to life: a desert place, a no-place. No one could be expected to make a life there. Yet he could not summon the indignation that he expected to feel, that he might once have felt. It was as though the cold had got deep inside him and frozen any repository of emotion. There was a barrier beyond which he could not go; a numbness.

Besides, Babek had not been given the chance to live. And his old life had been taken from him. He had witnessed events that had changed him, irrevocably. So perhaps it was no unexpected thing that he could not find the empathy he might once have felt. At least these people would be given an opportunity to make a new life, slim though it was. Wasn’t that more than he and Babek and all those other frozen corpses had been allotted?

So he no longer complained, no longer questioned, when they marched into the desert with the elderly and very young, the sick, the unfit, the pregnant mothers and newborn babies.

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