Five years earlier
The Prisoner
The Russian front. The edges of the Empire; a place of ice and snow. The snow was like a living thing, or many living things; a swarm. It sought the mouth, the eyes – any opening in which it could take up residence. The flakes were the size and weight of feathers. If he stood still his feet were covered in seconds.
It muffled sound. It stole the senses. It knew something that they did not. They spoke in whispers; they felt that they were being watched by someone immune to it, who laughed at their struggles as if from behind a pane of glass. They spooked at shadows, recoiling from the forms of their own men emerging through the curtain of white.
When he looked up there was only a vortex of the same, and he saw that it did not come straight down but in a vast spiral. For a few moments he was not looking up but hanging above – dangling by his ankles above an abyss. He stumbled, and almost fell.
It might have been beautiful, except for the fact that it was terrifying.
He at least had seen snow, even if it had been nothing like this. What he had thought was winter, the occasional dusting of white over Constantinople, the cold wind that blew in from the Black Sea, seemed to him now as nothing more than an artist’s impression of the season. But there were men here from the southernmost parts of the Empire who had never seen it at all, to whom it had been a thing of myth.
They had lost a man to the snow: it had swallowed him whole. One moment he had been there, bringing up the rear, the next he had disappeared. He was an Armenian, recruited from a nearby village. He of all of them should have known the conditions, the lie of the land. But it had clearly proved too much even for him.
Some of the men had not liked him much; you couldn’t trust the Armenians, they liked to say, they weren’t true Ottomans. Still they searched the snowdrifts, digging in packed, freezing depths. You wouldn’t wish such an end on anyone. And then to be discovered, pitiful, when the snow finally melted. But new drifts formed even as they dug. They were forced to move on, tramping through the fresh fallen white and each trying not to think of the man buried beneath it somewhere. If a man like that had succumbed, what chance did they have?
The idea came to him that they had been sent here to die.
It was said their enemy, the Russians, had fur-lined boots, thick greatcoats, astrakhan caps. Some of his fellow men, soldiers of the Mighty Ottoman Army, wore sandals. Some wore nothing at all: exposed flesh was dying, turning black. He was lucky to have kept his, thin-soled city shoes that they were.
To keep his mind off the cold he thought of home. He would summon to himself the memory of spring days beside the Bosphorus, light glancing from the water, the loud celebrations of the birds. The new warmth upon his face, the scent of things growing; the precise scent of the colour green. Then the drone of summer, a lazy spell cast by the heat, the city hazed with gold. He tried to remember the feeling of this. It was impossible to believe that there could have been such a thing as too hot: though he remembered his mother saying it, often, spending her days sheltered in the shaded cool of the sofa, emerging only with the respite of dusk. Colour, too, seemed an outlandish idea. Here was only the white of the snow and the grey of men’s faces and the black of their hair and occasionally the bluish tinge they got around their mouths and fingertips when things were bad with them. He remembered: the purple of a fig, split open. The rust-red sheet of his mother’s hair.
He had to believe he would return home, to that place of colour and warmth. There he had done the thing he had always felt himself born to do: to teach. The small satisfactions of his day: the walk to the school through the cobbled streets, his bag of books heavy on his arm. As he walked he would plan the day, the lessons, anticipate anything that might arrive; the miniature crises that occurred in a classroom populated by the very poor, by children who hardly spoke the language. The pleasure of knowing that something had been learned, despite all the odds.
How naive he had been to assume that his life would always be like this, that he would do the same thing until he grew old. A life in which he had never known fear, the particular taste of it in his throat. The joke of a man like him pretending to be a soldier.
There seemed to have been no consideration of how they might feed themselves properly – it seemed they were expected to live entirely on bazlama bread. Before the war it had been delicious; eaten with honey and butter, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee. He had not known how little taste it had on its own. Baked on sheets of iron in the villages, it was stuffed into sacks, loaded onto donkeys and brought to the front. By the time it reached them it had frozen. To warm it you had to put it beneath your jacket, against the skin, under the arms. You saw men shaking it from their sleeves, scrabbling on the ground for lost morsels. The colder they became, the more difficult it was to unfreeze the stuff.
‘If I could warm it between the thighs of a beautiful woman,’ Babek said. ‘That would be better than the finest honey.’ The other men had jostled him, groaned in mingled disgust and appreciation, and felt warmed by their shared laughter. Babek grinned; he enjoyed a
