No one is coming. They have forgotten him. There are things he knows, terrible things, but that he cannot look at, not now, not ever.
But now he hears it. Someone calling his name. He opens his eyes. It takes a moment to understand where he is.
Even when she found him, she had been calm. Her voice had soothed him. For the first time he sees her frightened.
‘Where is the pain?’ she says, loudly, almost harshly. ‘Show me. Here? And here?’ She presses a hand against his forehead, snatches it away just as quickly. Then, with a hitch in her voice, ‘I am going to get help. Do you understand?’
Nur
‘It must be something he ate,’ her grandmother decides. And then, with unusual tenderness, ‘It is my fault, I cooked with him.’
Yet he ate very little at supper: Nur was surprised by his lack of appetite. She had almost mentioned it, but decided to let it pass.
Now she remembers the time she discovered him digging for roots in the school’s small garden, eating his discoveries indiscriminately. She had dragged him up by his armpits: didn’t he understand that he could poison himself?
Could he have done such a thing again? Not now, surely … but then with his fondness for food, his eagerness to experiment? If he has poisoned himself it will only get worse, she should take him to see someone, immediately. Now that she has decided she feels a new calm, almost a coldness. They need a doctor.
‘I’m going out,’ she tells her grandmother who – inexplicably – is now offering the boy a puff on one of her ‘restorative’ cigarettes, and looking faintly cross when he shakes his head.
She’ll go to Mustafa Bey, her father’s old friend: one of the kindest men, and most knowledgable. He only lives a few streets away – he too has fallen upon shortened times.
‘No,’ her grandmother says, scandalised. ‘You cannot go out at this time. Send for …’ she seems to grasp for a few moments for a name, a fragment from the past. Defeated, remembering where she is, she lapses into a silent consent.
‘I’ll be careful.’
‘You will wear a veil.’ Her grandmother stands.
‘Büyükanne, I don’t—’
‘It is one thing for you to be walking the streets bare-faced in the day, even if it is one thing I heartily disapprove of. It is another for you to go out at night. It makes a certain impression, Nur, on a particular sort of person. I will not have you in danger.’
There are times when it is better not to argue.
Behind the veil the dim-lit streets become the shifting landscape of a dream. It is quiet with the particular intensity of the deepest hours of the night, and despite her purpose and urgency, Nur is unnerved. She cannot think of a time in her whole life in this teeming city when she has been so alone. The cobbles sheen with rain, slick and perilous underfoot. A sound comes, a note of utter desolation. It is only the yowling of a cat – but, disembodied, it has a strange power. It is like a distillation of the hour itself.
When she reaches Mustafa Bey’s house, she is struck by the certainty that no one is inside. All of the houses are shut up for the night, of course, but this one, she feels, has the particular blankness of an empty building. All the same, she knocks on the door – what else can she do? When no answer comes, she knocks harder – using both fists.
From the house next door, from behind the obscuring screen of a keyf, comes a woman’s voice. ‘What are you doing out there? Don’t you know people are trying to sleep?’
Nur recognises the voice. It is the widow who visits her mother and grandmother to share neighbourhood gossip.
‘It’s me,’ she calls, ‘Nur.’
‘Little Nur. But what are you doing, out at this hour?’
‘I’m looking for Mustafa Bey.’
‘Well, you won’t find him here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, you haven’t heard?’ The delight in being the first to impart the news. ‘He and his wife have gone to Damascus, to live with their relatives there. Last week. After their Irfan died, you understand … the city holds too many memories.’
So she hurries on to the Red Crescent hospital near the quays, but even before she arrives she can hear the chaos, can see a crowd of the sick and injured waiting in the street outside. The new arrivals in the city: there are too many of them for the city to cope. Some are so ill that they are lying in the street, barely sensible.
She tries to think, but her mind is clouded by panic. She looks behind her, to the night-time glimmer of the Bosphorus. The ferries are still running. She knows, suddenly, where she must go.
George
He opens his eyes, and finds himself in a darkness as absolute as when they were closed. The sound – he thinks it might have been gunfire in the dream – resolves itself into an urgent knocking. He fumbles with the lamp, fingers clumsy, goes pyjama-clad to the door. Sister
