‘When did you leave?’
‘During the war. We were given a day to leave. We took the things that were the lightest, and the most valuable. The rest we left.’
‘You must take them now. I will help you.’
‘No.’
‘You do not want them?’
‘No.’
He struggles to understand. ‘Because …?’
‘We have no room for them. You have seen where I live.’
Yet he does not think she has quite told him the truth. ‘You could sell them.’
‘Some foreign books, some English paintings? No one wants such things. Not for anything more than a few piastres, at least, and I am not willing to sell them for that.’
He thinks perhaps he has pressed her harder than he should, but he cannot help himself. ‘It seems a brave thing to do, then, to leave them in a deserted house, where any thief might have helped themselves.’
She takes a breath. ‘I left them here,’ she says, ‘because with them, we remain. And one day we will return.’
He nods. Now he understands.
‘It is our home. It does not change because we no longer live here.’
‘Of course not.’ He agrees because it seems necessary, but he is not sure he can quite see the truth of it. There is something pitiful in the attempt to leave a mark of ownership upon the house in this way. These things have seemed to him like the possessions of someone dead. Even now, knowing that they belong to her, that feeling remains. They have the cold, finite quality of artefacts on display in a museum.
As he sees it, all they seem to do is emphasise the loss of it – the disappearance of the life that was once here. He had felt that sense of trespass before, when the house was anonymous, when for all he knew its inhabitants were dead or gone far away. He cannot imagine what it must be to see your family home colonised by the enemy and with it every memory created within its walls. He has always been able to think of his work almost entirely as a force for good, set apart from the politics of war. Now, for the first time ever, perhaps, he is oddly unsure.
The Prisoner
He expected a throng. A cheering crowd. He is not alone; they have all believed it. They have waited for it through the strange, interminable journey. Every one of the men on board is up on deck for this moment. They are the long-lost war heroes.
Three years have passed since the end of the war. Four since the British captured him, by that river, in hell. The monotony of incarceration, of desert heat, of other bodies in close proximity. No word from the outside world: as though the world had forgotten them. And yet he has been grateful, in an odd way, for these years. They have given him the time to relearn everything that happened. To reforge himself.
Finally they are home.
The city, beautiful as ever, is slumbering beneath a warm autumn morning. But it seems too quiet. Like a place slumbering beneath a spell. No crowds. Only a smattering of khaki-clad British on the quay to receive them. From this distance the British soldiers are tiny figures, dwarfed by the hull. And yet their upturned gazes seem to absorb the ship, to take possession of it. It is theirs.
A little further off stand a smattering of locals, but they do not cheer or wave. They look up at the ship and its cargo in silence, as though staring at a phantasm, some strange mirage from the past.
It is late afternoon before anything happens. Finally, four officers board the ship: two British, two Ottomans. One man calls out to the Ottoman officers: ‘You may not recognise us, but we are your brothers.’ They avoid catching his eye.
In contrast with these two men, red-fezzed, immaculately uniformed, they can see how much they have all changed. They have not had the yardstick for comparison, until now they have only had one another. And they are all pitiful: sunburned, emaciated, though perhaps most of all those who have been blinded, and stare about with milky unseeing eyes, who cannot even see their beloved city; struck down as they have been with the mysterious disease for which no cause or cure could be found.
They are allowed from the ship, finally, if they can provide an address in the city. For a few moments he is struck dumb. The words will not come to him, only the idea of a place. Water, calm, trees. It seems impossible, now, an idyll – like somewhere glimpsed in a picture book. The version of himself that lived in that place is very far away now, too. The officer waits, eyebrows raised. When finally he produces it, from some hidden well of memory, the man hardly seems convinced. But he is allowed from the ship.
In the streets people glance at him and look quickly away, some flinch involuntarily with shock. He catches a glimpse of himself in a gilt mirror outside a stall and sees a haunt-eyed spectre. He looks like a wretch, a beggar. He reminds himself of all that he has done, all that he has sacrificed. I am not to be pitied, he tells them silently. I am to be thanked, praised … but not pitied.
He knows what he is. He is an embarrassment to them. They would rather not see him in their streets. He is like one of the stray dogs. Not so long ago, the Mayor of Constantinople ordered the removal of every one of the animals, which had been inhabitants of the city for as long as anyone could remember. Some eighty thousand of them were rounded up and taken on boats to the most inhospitable of the Princes’ Islands, Hayırsızada, a sharp spine of rock rising from the Marmara Sea. Most of the dogs had died of
