Last Letter from Istanbul. Lucy Foley
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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.
‘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.
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