Читать книгу Last Letter from Istanbul - Lucy Foley - Страница 23

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.