He makes his way to the white house like one in a dream.
There it is, unchanged. Home.
He can hear the sound of their voices.
The reckoning will come now. Will they see the change in him? Will they know what he has done? This is the first proper test of his new conviction. He summons the words of the new language to himself. Necessity. Righteous. The Future of the Nation. He begins to stride toward the house.
But there is something wrong. It is an animal knowledge at first that tells him this, deeper than thought – like a bad note scented on the air. Then he realises that the voices are wrong. He sees white-clad figures, men, a number of them. He sees khaki green. He hunkers down, out of sight. He catches the words now: a foreign language. He sits and watches and is filled with a terrible new understanding. This latest, worst trespass: the colonisation of his past. The one thing that had been left good and whole. He will find some way to revenge this.
Nur
On her way to deliver her embroideries she stops at Haci Bekir – the best confectionary shop in the city. The scent of powdered sugar makes her mouth water.
This errand is performed, oddly enough, on her grandmother’s instructions. ‘The Englishman has done us a favour, now we must show our gratitude. That is the way of things. Really you should have done this on the first visit, canım. I am surprised at you.’
‘But Büyükanne,’ she had said, ‘he is our enemy. Surely it would look—’
‘I am thinking precisely of how it would look, girl. It is only right. We cannot allow our standards to slip merely because the enemy is boorish and uncivilised and has no sense of decorum. We can show them up by our example: it is the last weapon available to us. And,’ – this part reluctantly – ‘though it no doubt cost him very little, because the enemy may do as he likes, he has shown us a kindness.’
Nur is not convinced that she can quite share her grandmother’s view, but she sees that there might be wisdom in the act.
She was rude to the English doctor; she let her anger get the better of her. She cannot afford to fall from his favour, not with the boy so ill. If she cannot quite bring herself to be civil to him in her speech then a gift is a less complicated way of currying favour.
She steps inside, and asks the man behind the counter for some loukoum, studded with slivers of pistachio. The smallest box, because it is all that she can afford. At least it is beautiful with a painted design of the Aya Sofia. But then as an afterthought, with a slight thrill at her recklessness, she buys another box: rose-scented, her favourite.
She has never actually set foot in the shop before. In the time before, Fatima would procure them. The quantity that she now holds in two twists of gilt-printed paper would seem laughable in comparison to the pounds of the stuff Fatima would return with, to fill the silver bowls throughout the house. They would eat several pieces with every cup of coffee, and spare no thought for the cost. A time of plenty in everything.
Except … in that time she could not have gone to the shop, even had she wanted or needed to, without receiving the inevitable dark looks. And with her face uncovered? Unthinkable. A woman of good family would not behave in such a manner.
She takes one of the sweets from the bag on her way back and holds it in her mouth, savouring the sugared fragrance, before she allows herself to chew it. Here is another observation: when one is not used to having them every day, one tastes the sweetness all the more vividly.
This flavour is of a time, too. Drowsy, lazy hours. Days spooling ahead. Sometimes pleasurably, sometimes filled with ennui, and a strange melancholy. Then time had been meted out in great handfuls. There had been a surfeit; one struggled to use it all up. From the early morning call of the milk seller to the evening one of the yoghurt seller, the hours had seemed to billow out before her, empty.
In that time before, Nur might have done one modestly significant thing with her day. She might have finished a new book or she and her mother might have gone for a drive out to the old walls of the city, or one of the picnic spots beside the Bosphorus. Or attempted to paint the scene from the terrace, which she had never managed to represent to her satisfaction. One could not paint the wind, that was the thing.
There were days when she lay in bed and glanced back over the span of hours and could remember nothing at all taking place … as though she had passed all the time in a dream state, punctuated only by meals, by aimless wanderings in the garden. Or she had spent the day imagining what she would be doing if she had a life in the world beyond – if she were a man, perhaps. A cold understanding would come over her: this was how her whole life would be, meted out in pockets of ennui. When leisure was the thing that took up all of one’s time, it ceased to be easy. It became an art. In the imperial harems the women had become grand masters at it.
It was important to cultivate a rich inner life;
