The enemy kill Ottoman men. He isn’t sure how they feel about Ottoman boys – but then he isn’t really an Ottoman boy, as the old lady is fond of telling him.
The doctor seems kind. He likes birds. But already he has learned that things – and people – are often not what they seem. He will be ready, ready to run if he has to. At least, he will be ready, only after he has had a little more of this strange, bird-strewn sleep …
Nur
It is difficult to ignore the fact that the boy seems like a shadow of his usual self. Today she sits with him for only half an hour before he drifts into sleep. She cannot decide whether she should stay a little longer, in case he wakes again, or leave.
There are noises from the ward on one side, but on the other silence. This door, she knows, leads through to the sofa – once her favourite room in the house. Holding her breath, she gives the door a little push. It is empty.
The walls are covered in hundreds of painted tiles; an indoor painted garden of cypresses, vines, hyacinths, violets, dog roses, cherry blossom, pomegranate flowers. All of which, at various times of the year, could once be found in the real garden without. As the waters of the Bosphorus shift beyond the windows, an interplay of light and shadow occurs within: something more than a mere reflection. More a sympathetic reply – as one dancer might echo, but not match, the movements of a partner.
In the centre of the room is a şadırvan, a marble fountain, with the edges of the bowl scalloped like the inside of a shell. Once the water fell from it in a silver stream. If one sat on the divans that line the room it was almost impossible not to be lulled into a state of tranquillity. The water is stopped now.
There is an austerity in the room today. With the fountain silenced, the walls gleaming frigidly, the atmosphere is that of a beautiful mausoleum. The shadows moving upon the walls seem now like trapped memories.
There is a sound behind her; she turns. It is the English doctor, stepping through the door.
‘This is my favourite room,’ he says.
His possession of it, his choosing of it. She could not speak even if she wanted to, all that could come out, she feels, would be the hard gust of her anger.
He pushes a hand through his hair. ‘I like watching the ships,’ he says, ‘passing up and down the Bosphorus. Imagining where they are travelling to and from. Though most of them, I fear, are full of refugees these days.’
It does not soften her anger, this knowledge that he shares her old pastime. It only makes her own experience seem inauthentic, somehow, less uniquely hers. She is so intent on not hearing him, not letting his words settle upon her, that it is some time before she realises he has stopped talking. He is looking at her, instead, curiously.
‘This is my house.’ She isn’t even certain that she says it aloud or inside her mind – only realises he has heard when he makes a polite cough of surprise, an Englishman’s cough. These English, with their civility – politely colonising half the world.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he says. ‘But I thought—’
‘This is my house. It was my house, my family’s. It was taken from us by our government, and then by you from them. Your army took it.’ She is almost pointing at him. Her use of the second person is no mistake: she wants him to feel the wrong of it. ‘You were not content with merely taking the city; you had to take people’s homes.’
A long silence as he digests this.
‘Well—’ he says, and falters. He seems stunned.
Now she is frightened: she has gone too far. He would have had to have been deaf not to have heard the threat in her tone. She waits, as is her lot as the conquered, to see what he will do with her.
George
Her house. Now he understands. Her face on that first morning, coming to visit the boy. Ah, but before that, too – when he had found her barefoot on the jetty, and Rawlings had thought her mad. She had been paying a visit to her past. Now he has the cipher with which to translate the expression she had worn, stepping inside. Sorrow, curiosity, a kind of hunger.
Now he is confronted with her anger. He had thought Bill ridiculous, talking of that first visit by her as though it were a threat. Now he sees that he has underestimated her. There is something dangerous about her fury. He should reprimand her. But he cannot quite bring himself to do so.
Instead he looks about and through this new lens sees it as a reflection of her. The elegance, the refinement.
How strange it must be to see it so transformed, into a place of white linen and prone male forms, scented with the alkaline tang of the iodine, and the smoke of Lockett’s cigars.
‘I had not considered,’ he says, ‘I was told that it had belonged to a …’ he stops, and thinks better of speaking the word, the one the general had used: traitor. ‘That it belonged to someone the Ottoman government – your government – did not get along with. But I had assumed, I suppose, that they were dead.’
‘My father is dead,’ she says, and at
