Nur was not convinced. She could not quite bear the idea that everything she had learned in the long years at the British school would be for nothing. All the languages she might never speak, the history, the arithmetic for which she would have no use … the study of atlases which would now only serve to remind her of all that space she would not have the opportunity to explore, all those places she would never visit. Knowledge stoppered up inside her, with no outlet, rotting like something left in a jar. Or worse, poisoning her from within, infecting that inner life with the taint of disappointed hope.
Difficult to imagine now, that luxury of being bored.
As she makes her way down toward Galata bridge she hears her name called.
She turns. A little way below her on the cobbled slope stands a man: she does not recognise him at first, though there is something familiar.
She looks again. It is her cousin Hüseyin, her mother’s nephew. The most obvious of the changes is the absence of his once luxurious moustaches. Without them he appears younger, more handsome, but his face has lost a certain gravitas. There is more to it than this. His clothes are different, too: the foreign tailoring gives him a different shape. Most of all, he has exchanged a fez for a dark felt affair with a slender brim.
‘You look so different,’ she says. ‘I hardly knew you.’
‘And so do you.’
In her surprise at seeing him, in noting the changes in him, she has forgotten how she herself might appear to him. She is aware now of the cheap cotton gloves with the stain on the thumb, the outdated dress, the worn leather of her shoes, the twice-mended dress. The greater losses, too: which she feels must be written upon her face.
He is a man; there is a brief hope that he will not note these things as a woman might.
‘How have you been keeping?’ he asks. She hears the pity in it, and understands that her hope has been in vain.
‘We have survived.’
‘Your husband?’ A moment while he searches for the name. ‘Enver?’
She shakes her head. ‘Killed. At Gallipoli.’
‘Oh, my dear Nur. A widow, so young. They say they fought very bravely there.’
She has to quash the sudden flood of her anger: what would he know of bravery? ‘So they tell us,’ she says.
‘And Kerem?’
‘We had a note from the War Ministry. Missing, presumed lost: near the Russian border.’
‘So perhaps—’
She cuts him off. ‘That was four years ago. We had little hope at the beginning, now we have none at all.’
His face seems to lose all colour. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘It is not your fault.’ And what she does not say aloud: ‘It is nothing to do with you, in fact. You made certain of that by staying away.’
‘I should have come back.’
She does not know how to reply. Her innate politeness would never allow her to admit that she agrees, that she has judged him for having stayed away.
‘You see,’ he says, ‘it was a little more difficult. My circumstances have changed. I have got married myself. My wife is an American. I must return to her soon.’
A gust of rage has passed through Nur, and for a moment she cannot bring herself to smile, as she knows she should, let alone speak. He has been halfway across the world falling in love, while her brother was dying for his country. There are times at which her emotions come so close to the surface, when she has very little control over them. Finally, she manages to say: ‘I must congratulate you. I suppose you will bring her here to meet us?’
‘Oh … one day. It will be quite a change for her. America is such a new place. It’s so different to here, where everyone lives surrounded by the past. You know, it doesn’t feel as though it has changed at all.’ Perhaps realising what he has said, he gives an awkward little cough.
With an effort she manages to take pity on him. ‘Are you staying long?’
‘I return to New York at the end of the autumn,’ he says. ‘I have come here to sell the house, more than anything else. It seems useless to have such a large property here, merely gathering dust.’
Nur nods. Within her the rage threatens itself again.
‘How is my aunt?’ he asks now. ‘And your father’s mother? We must come and pay a visit.’
‘No,’ Nur says, before she has even thought about a reply.
He looks surprised, a little hurt.
‘My mother is not well, at present,’ she says. And before he can ask, ‘Not in her body – in her mind. From the day Kerem left for war she was not herself. But on the day we had that notice from the Ministry it was as though we lost her for good, too.’ He nods. She sees, almost to her gratification, that his eyes are wet with tears. ‘So I do not think it would be the best time for it.’
He inclines his head. ‘Of course.’
Now would be the time to tell him of their changed circumstances. But she discovers that she cannot do it. Especially in the face of this evident
