Читать книгу Last Letter from Istanbul - Lucy Foley - Страница 9

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 Or what they would make of the pages I hold, so many decades out of date.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.