Both of them are silent now. As he works the bad thoughts, the pain, recede into the background. He concentrates absolutely on the task at hand. The new but not unfamiliar rhythm of it. He knows it, like a secret language. It exists already in his hands. The satisfaction of watching them become something, all these separate things. All because he wills them to be more than they are. The meat turning from pink to golden, the sauce coating it with a glossy, perfumed sheen. The sweet, the savoury, intermingling.
It is the beginning of an obsession – or, rather, the evolution of one. With Nur hanım’s help he works his way through the book, through the recipes, that is, with ingredients that are not impossible to source in the city now. He learns that the cooking itself is one thing, there is the pleasure in his growing skill, in the confidence of his hands. But there is also the reaction, the pleasure of seeing his creations enjoyed. Sometimes, Nur hanım invites the neighbours from the rest of the building to enjoy the food. Only a short while ago he would have felt a kind of despair at the idea of being forced to share. Now there is only a pride. It is a different sort of fullness. His hunger, the hunger that could not be sated, begins to diminish.
Nur
The boy is a quicker, more innately adept student than she. Her hands, so clever in other ways – writing a letter, embroidering linen – are clumsy and inarticulate in the kitchen. He has a natural understanding of flavour, too. She has to work harder at it. She is impatient, too: she has no time for the dishes that require long cooking – he approaches them with a kind of reverence. While the absence of a particular ingredient has her throwing up her hands in defeat, he is able to improvise. He begins to suggest adaptations, improvements. Wouldn’t this taste better stippled with the warmth of some dried chilli? Perhaps mint, with its sharper note, would be a more faithful accompaniment than parsley, which is lost in the dish? She watched and marvels at him, this boy who so recently seemed to have forgotten how to spell his own name, as he annotates the pages with his childish, newly confident hand. It is a humbling thing to observe his discovery of this new part of himself.
Taste, she discovers, has the same memory-invoking powers as scent. Without quite realising it, she is recreating the flavours of her youth.
A morsel of borek – a modest enough confection of pastry and cheese – can taste simultaneously of love, death, loss.A spoonful of imam bayildi, aubergines simmered to velvet tenderness in tomato, oil and spices, brings tears to her eyes. She can taste in it a particular winter night: the first snow in the city. Cold air seeping through gaps in old wood, pressing its frozen breath against the thin panes of glass. They huddled close around the table. Beyond the window the snow fell thick, silent as a secret. Then Fatima had produced this dish, each spoonful kindling warmth in the belly. The cold had seemed to retreat by a degree. The candlelight now seemed to contain a specific, golden heat. The scene beyond the windows became more remote, more magical.
She had been thirteen. There had still been the childish excitement, the thought of the fresh-fallen whiteness that would await her the next morning – but tempered, too, by the awareness of approaching adulthood. A time when one would need to be seemly, decorous. How many more snows would she see before this? It might be only one. It did not come every year: this strange miracle.
But tomorrow she and her little brother could have a snowball fight. She knew, though, that he would aim to miss. Sometimes he was too gentle for his own good.
That all of this, this concentration of memory, could be unleashed by such humble ingredients, such innocuous preparations … it is a kind of sorcery.
So much of the old life is gone – never to be recaptured. The house, the fine things, all are beyond her reach now. But food, even at its most extravagant, is an economical refinement.
For the boy, it is different. It does not have the same taint. For him she suspects it may be a way of forgetting. So he plunges forward, an adventurer, all excitement. She trails after him cautiously, wincing at shadows, knowing they may expand into further deep chasms of memory.
George
There are thirty beds in the ward, fifteen currently occupied. Several of them, poor beggars, are practically insensible with malaria – one very bad. A syphilis case – too much time spent in Pera brothels. Two dysentery. And one man, seconded to the Allied fire brigade, so badly burned on one side that he has the look of being partially skinned, with the muscle exposed raw and livid pink. He was trapped beneath the fallen spar of a flaming building – a wonder, really, that he survived at all.
There are cases that no amount of fortitude can improve; their fate is already sealed. But for those borderline
