The same nurse, wearing the same air of vague disapproval, comes to meet her.
‘I’ll tell the doctor. He may not allow a visit so early. The’ – a fractional pause – ‘patient may not be ready.’
Nur waits, feeling chastised, beneath the silent scrutiny of the white-robed figures.
It is the first time she has entered the house in five years. When her chest begins to burn she realises that she has been holding her breath. The smell of the place is the thing that catches her first. There are new notes: something antiseptic, the nostril-sting of detergent, the unmistakable, indefinable smell of sickness – something stale. But beneath all of this there is the scent of her home. Familiar as a loved one.
The nurse has returned.
‘Follow me.’
She hesitates.
The nurse beckons her forward with an impatient motion.
Nur suspects the woman thinks her a little mad. She imagines that she must look a little mad – particularly when she steps over the threshold, and the act alone summons the sting of tears.
But there is also curiosity. It is immediately clear that the selamlik, visible through the open door off the hallway, is almost untouched. Here the men used to gather: her father and uncles and other guests, later her brothers. She risks a step nearer. She is almost certain that she can still detect the scent of her father’s particular brand of tobacco. The room is full of ghosts.
The haremlik is a different matter. It has been colonised by the living – and the dying. The room that was once the exclusive sanctuary of women is now a sleeping place for foreign men: sick ones, but the enemy nevertheless. It has been renamed, too. This, the nurse explains, leading her briskly through, is ‘the ward’. Temporary beds line both walls. All about her are prone forms, more or less dressed than the robed man she met in the gardens. An expanse of livid flesh draws the eye, though. She cannot help but look, sees a figure who has been very badly burned, resists the involuntary impulse of pity. This man has fresh linen, a Bosphorus breeze through an open window. All the comforts her former home can provide. And he is alive; albeit barely. Her brother, for all she knows, did not even have a funeral shroud.
Beyond the haremlik is the sofa, the masterpiece of the house, with its tiled garden and mosaic floor. She sees that at some point the fountain, visible through the open doors, has ceased to flow. Powered by some miracle of hydraulics fed from the Bosphorus outside, it was her father’s pride. He used to say that the sound of the flowing water was the most peaceful he knew, a mimicry of the great channel just beyond.
All of it is so familiar and so strange. How is it that inanimate wood and stone feel so like some extension of bone and flesh? She moves into the sofa, looks instinctively toward the great windows. There is the view she remembers.
Upon one of the divans in the sofa she sees a pile of books. Herodotus, a couple of English novels. Her father’s books. Enemy hands, enemy eyes have perused them.
‘Hello.’
Nur turns. The English doctor stands in the doorway, a slight frown. She stifles her anger. For the first time she is properly aware of the extraordinary position necessity has left her in. At best, one avoids even being seen by the occupiers. At the very least, one avoids being noticed by them. And she has wandered voluntarily into their midst.
‘He’s a tough little chap,’ he says, leading her through. ‘I’ve heard grown men cry from the pain of it. Not a whimper from your son. He’s had a deal of morphine, so he won’t be himself. But he has been awake today.’
She follows him, silent. The less she says, she thinks, the better. This way he may not see her hatred. And this way she may still be able to look at herself in a mirror and not see a traitor.
The boy is on his own, in what used to be her father’s study: he is a slender white hillock beneath the sheet, only the fine fronds of his dark hair visible above it. Here is another assault of memory: it comes in the scent of old paper and tobacco, which somehow remain years after the source of them has gone. He sits up in bed, looking at her with eyes that have a curious, unnatural brightness.
‘I thought he’d prefer to be in here, you see. Not out in the ward with the men. Though I may have to move him, if there is a need for a quarantine case.’ He looks about at the walls, which bear the pale rectangular reminders of the paintings that once hung there.
‘I think this used to be a study, or perhaps a library. It has that scent to it.’ Curious that he should have noticed it too. ‘This was a house, you see.’
‘Yes,’ Nur says. Here is where my father used to sit and read for hours. Just beyond is the room in which my mother and grandmother and I and my aunts and my cousins drank rose-scented sherbet, and had the luxury of being bored. Afternoons – filled with the murmur of women and the smoke of perfumed cigarettes – that felt as though they would keep happening forever.
‘Nur hanım?’ The form beneath the sheet stirs, a face emerges. His skin is still bleached of colour, but it has lost the yellowish cast.
The doctor helps him to sit, with a care that she decides is nothing more than professional creed, arranging cushions behind him.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
‘Hungry,’ he says, in English.
She laughs – she cannot help it – and at exactly the same time
