Читать книгу Last Letter from Istanbul - Lucy Foley - Страница 18

‘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.