Children, she has noticed, are disloyally fascinated by the soldiers. Now, with building horror, she sees one of the men drop his cigarette, stub it out with a smartly polished boot, and come toward them.
‘Hello,’ he says, to the boy, in French. From the crowds passing them Nur feels a low hum of disapproval, levelled as much at her as at the man, as though they assume she must have done something to encourage him. And with it there is a certain sense of shame, as though she really has.
‘I have a little son like you, at home,’ he says now. ‘Do you know what he likes best?’ He does not wait to see if the boy has understood. ‘Caramels! Would you like one?’ He fishes a gold-wrapped sweet from his pocket.
‘No, thank you—’ But Nur is too late, the boy has already taken one.
‘I hope,’ the man’s eyes go to Nur’s uncovered face now, and remain there, ‘that you tell your mother how beautiful she is every day.’
She seizes the boy’s hand, and marches him away from the officers as fast as she can, without a backward glance. Ribald laughter follows them.
When they have put a little distance between themselves and the officers she puts out her hand. ‘Spit it out.’
‘But—’
‘Do it, please.’ She knows what a cruelty it is to take food from a child like him. But the French officers are still watching, and this is a point of principle.
With an expression of profoundest agony, the boy does as she says. She throws it down, and within seconds a street cat has emerged from somewhere to sniff at it.
Now she feels as though a layer of skin has been removed, not merely a thin gauze of material. The city now seems to thwart her at every turn: the cobblestones turn her ankles, the crowds press against her. She has become clumsy and conspicuous.
She understands that she is an object of curiosity for such men, who have come expecting veiled forms. She knows that they see her – her hair covered but her face exposed, wandering about the city as she chooses – and make suppositions. She tries to remind herself that it must not matter. To wait until a day when one might not be reminded with every step of one’s difference might mean waiting for a hundred years. More.
The Boy
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.
Nur
‘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
