Читать книгу Last Letter from Istanbul - Lucy Foley - Страница 17

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.