‘But—’
‘For someone like me, such a thing is in the blood. You, perhaps, would not understand. You are not a woman, nor are you properly a Turk. But we have been making these things since the beginning of time. To use someone else’s instructions would be an embarrassment.’
He lets her join him. What else can he do?
He quickly sees, to his horror, that she is not doing anything as the recipe says it should be done.
‘Of course,’ she tells him as she begins to boil a huge quantity of rice, which the book says should be mixed first with the nuts and oil, ‘I have never actually made this dish myself. In the past’ – her beloved past – ‘we had a woman who did this sort of thing for us.’
‘The book—’
‘But that does not matter,’ she insists, ‘such things are beyond practice. They belong to a different, deeper kind of understanding.’
The room has filled with the refuse-stink of the cabbage. He is certain that it is cooked far beyond the tenderness demanded by the recipe. The leaves have lost any hint of green, and seem to be fast approaching brown. But he is too afraid to tell her. The rice, too, appears overcooked. And there is so much of it: far more than will be needed to fill the leaves. Nur hanım will not be happy, she despises waste.
It is only when she takes the onion that he has so carefully filleted and chopped, and begins to mix it – raw – into the rice that he feels compelled to break his silence.
‘But,’ he says, ‘the onion is not cooked.’
‘Well,’ she says, and takes a breath, as though she is about to issue one of her proclamations. Then she seems to waver. For the first time, she looks a little unsure. ‘What does it say, there, in that book?’
He draws it toward him. ‘That the onion should be cooked.’
‘I see—’
But now he has the momentum, ‘… and the rice should be mixed with the nuts and oil first … and the cabbage should only be simmered until tender.’
Both look toward the pot containing the cabbage, where the water has acquired an unhealthy yellow foam.
‘Ah.’ In a different voice, a general acknowledging the wisdom of an inferior, she says, ‘Shall we begin again?’
The Prisoner
They were suffering, the Armenians. At the beginning they had railed against the soldiers, pleaded with them. Now they didn’t have the energy to resist. They were, on the whole, silent, save for the occasional low, almost animal moan of discomfort – shocked and then exhausted into accepting their fate.
But some of them could not keep up. They kept stumbling over their own feet. The shoes many of them wore had only been good for a day of walking. Now half of the group walked on the burning ground on their bare soles. They were poor country people, of course, that was part of it. Perhaps they did not have good shoes. But it might also have been the thing he had suspected: that none of them had really believed in what was happening to them. They had not properly prepared themselves.
In those first days they seemed to treat it as a misunderstanding that might at any second be realised, that the whole thing would be called off. They would be allowed to return home. Home was all they knew. He had very little knowledge of this south-eastern part of the Empire, other than the names of towns – Mosul, Kirkuk – and rivers – the Tigris, the Euphrates – learned from a map. But he had more than these people, for whom the next village, a day on the back of a mule, might have been the farthest they had ever travelled. They had been walking for three weeks now. Or was it four? He had long ago lost track of the days.
One might almost feel sorry for them. But you could not think like that about an order. And these were traitors … murderers. By association, of course. And the fact was: they, the officers, were suffering too. Their feet were blistered and swollen, too, their bellies were empty, their eyes also blinded by the bright, scorched, unending wastes over which they travelled. So when the stragglers at the back began to lag behind, to fall down, they became less and less patient. They weren’t allowed to lie down in the dirt and cry out with their pain, they had no one from whom they could beg mercy. So it became easy not to care for these stragglers, indeed, to begin to blame them. Their moans were merely another physical affliction: worse than the rest of it, somehow. And then it became clear how easily the problem could be dealt with; unlike the other afflictions over which they had no control.
A bullet, carefully aimed, where the spine met the skull. Then more silence: not just from the one who had been silenced forever but from all of them, silence of shock and fear.
At first it was only the most brutal among them who did the silencing. The ones whose hatred was a deep, established thing. At first you merely observed. And then you realised that to observe and say nothing was as bad as being complicit, even worse. So you became complicit.
There was a woman whose bare feet were so badly blistered that she could hardly walk. She kept falling down. She had two children, a very small boy and a slightly older girl: she had carried them most of the way. She tried to crawl instead of walk. One of the soldiers prodded her with his bayonet, ordered her to stand.
At one point they came across the Tigris, moving sluggishly through the boiling land. Suddenly, the woman with the blistered feet veered off toward it. There was a moment of stunned silence.
‘Hey!’ the superior shouted to him. ‘Stop her!’
‘I think she wants
