‘One of the patients?’
‘Someone here to see you.’ A faint note of scandal. ‘An Ottoman. A woman.’
He dresses quickly, wondering what on earth this can all be about. A Turkish woman, here? And at this time of night?
In the hallway is a slim, veiled figure. In the uncertain light from the lantern she appears rather ghoulish; he feels a small thrill of disquiet. She lifts her veil.
‘You.’ He recognises her instantly – but he cannot make any sense of her presence here.
She comes towards him like a wraith, white-faced. ‘I need your help.’
He is surprised by the meagreness of her lodgings. Neither neighbourhood or house seems to match her: the fine bearing, the fluency and intelligence of her speech. Nor the regal poise of the old woman, who looks at him as she might a grocery boy and who wears several rings inlaid with what appear to be vast emeralds and yellow diamonds.
When he sees these baubles, utterly incongruous with the dingy room, he thinks he understands.
He bends over the boy, and there is an intake of breath from the old woman, as though he were a vampire about to drink the child’s blood. When he’d arrived, the boy was retching a thin stream of bile. But in the last few minutes his eyes have rolled back into his head. George thinks he has an idea of the complaint. He just needs to make certain. He touches a hand to the forehead. It is boiling hot, his hand comes away slick with sweat.
There is a scream – and then a hard blow catches him on the back of his head: such a surprise that he stumbles, almost pitching forward across the prone child. He turns, and finds the old woman looking back at him with menace in her eyes.
‘Büyükanne! Bunu yapma! Stop that!’ The woman, Nur, turns to him. ‘I’m so sorry. She does not understand. She sees only an enemy.’
He rubs the back of his head. He feels a little stunned. Quite incredible, that there should be such power in one of those frail old hands. She keeps the hand aloft, threateningly. Her expression tells him that she will not hesitate to strike again.
Keeping a wary eye upon her, he speaks to the younger woman.
‘I’m fairly certain that it is malaria. The fever, the vomiting, it all makes sense.’
‘What can be done?’
‘Quinine, rest, fluids.’ He looks her in the eye. ‘I have to warn you. Your son is in a precarious state. You must prepare yourself for the fact that he may not recover.’
Her mouth is a thin line, and her hand is at her throat. He can see the struggle, her fear and grief. But she merely nods.
‘And he will have to come with me. To the hospital.’
Now she is unable to hold her silence. ‘He cannot remain here? I can watch over him.’
‘No. I cannot ensure that he will receive adequate treatment if he is here. He needs to be observed constantly. Even the slightest change, invisible to one who is not a doctor, could be fatal.’
He is purposefully brutal, he needs her to understand that there is no argument against his taking the boy with him, now. He has been here before with worried mothers.
She nods, and he is impressed again by her self-possession. ‘Then you must do it.’
The Boy
The man who takes him from Nur is very tall, and his face is in shadow, and he speaks in a foreign language. He does recognise some of these words. But the pain and confusion is too great for him to decipher them.
The next thing he remembers: being lifted, carried. The great expanse of water, black as a concentration of the night itself. He has seen fishermen throwing catch thought too small, or diseased, back into the waves. Perhaps this will happen to him.
The crossing: a swarm of stars above, clusters of brilliance that seem to shift and sway. Every movement of the boat is pain, but he clenches himself against it and thinks only of the stars. Somewhere behind them – beyond them – he knows that his mother and father are watching. If they are waiting for him on the other side it will not be so bad.
Then he is being carried again, and leaves are brushing his face and the sky is obscured. Nur hanım is gone, she has given him to the foreign stranger.
He understands. He has made too much trouble for her. She is giving him up. He cannot help crying out in fear and loss. He knows he will be ashamed of this later: crying out like a baby!
Nur
Back at the apartment, in the secret dark of the kitchen, Nur sits down upon a chair and stares at a spot before her; seeing nothing. She feels the pressure of tears, but the ability to find this release – the talent – long ago deserted her. When she is finally returned to herself she discovers that her hands are clasped about her lower abdomen, as though there were still something there to protect.
The infinite variety of loss. When one has lost little, one cannot understand this. One thinks the thing must be of a type, only varying in scale and quality. She has become an expert. A connoisseur.
Her father, emphatically lost. A grave to visit, at Eyüp. Her mother, lost in all but her physical self. A brother, lying broken in some forgotten waste of the Empire: the loneliness of the body; too horrible to think of.
Her secret loss. A gain discovered only after the knowledge of its losing, when the blood came. A terrifying quantity; the death of an unknown part of herself. How to begin to grieve it?
Now a new loss has presented itself, if only as a possibility. She does
