The great wide sweep of the Bosphorus is all serenity. Hard to imagine that a fearsome crosswise current stirs beneath the surface. The men have been warned about it: to take care when swimming. They say a man drowned here, just beyond the stately beauty of Arnavutköy village, trying to save a child. Did the child survive? George feels an important need to know.
On the horizon appears an apparition: a flock of white geese. No – sharpening into focus: a flotilla of sails. They draw nearer silently, inexorably. From a distance the kayıks appear unmanned, so many Mary Celestes. Then George can make out the men sitting within them, can hear the commotion of them, the chatter and shouts. Fishermen, returning with the dawn catch from the Black Sea.
He is reminded now of something the burn victim, Nicholls, told him. He insisted that it had happened to a friend of his, but it is so fantastic a story that he cannot believe it to be anything other than apocryphal.
Not so long ago, the patient said, two rather surprised fishermen netted a live bear in the waters of the Golden Horn. There was a – relatively – logical explanation for it. A group of British soldiers, Rawling’s friend included, had bought a bear from an entertainer in Stamboul, and taken it to their barracks in Pera. The story was that it had discovered the regiment’s beer supplies, which one suspected was less accidental than professed. It had escaped its new owners and gone carousing alone in the streets. Like many humans, it had been filled with a mistaken idea of its own skill and agility, and had climbed onto a railing beside the channel, to walk along it in the manner of a tightrope artist. A six-hundred-pound, inebriated bear does not make the best gymnast. It had been very lucky that the fishermen had decided to set out earlier than their fellows, in the hopes of scoring the catch of the day. That had certainly been achieved.
It is a funny story, but it is also further evidence of the state of the men. He has seen it in the Pera nightclubs: the behaviour growing ever more outrageous. They are growing bored now, restive, glutted with the idea of themselves as conquering heroes and homesick for England. It makes for a rather volatile combination.
On either side of the water the land sheers up, densely forested: it has a muscular beauty. Near to the waterfront the elegant wooden houses cluster, some three storeys high, exquisite with fretwork and the white and green tracery of jasmine. The breeze comes to them over the water laden with its perfume. In the street one finds this scent often, usually before seeing the white flowers clustering around a door, massing across ancient stone. It provides a welcome balm to the odour of refuse ripening in the heat: a caress to follow an insult.
Some of the waterside houses have small balconies. On one stands a figure – far off, but the long skirts reveal that she is female. As they draw closer George sees that she is veiled. When the ferry passes she retreats indoors. He is certain that all the Ottoman warmongers must have lived in the clamour of the great city, not here, with nothing but the sounds of the birds and the water. Only thoughts of peace could exist here. Some are less well-cared-for. The greyish-brown of the old wood is exposed beneath the paint, splintering away from the frame. Balconies loll drunkenly. The houses here are made all the more melancholy by the vestiges of their former beauty. A hush seems to hang over them, a pall of history.
‘Çay! Çay! Kahve! Kahve!’ One of the ferry-hands makes a slow circuit of the passengers, offering tea and coffee, the round sesame-studded simit breads that they sell in hot piles on the street. Suddenly every one of them is famished: they order confusedly. Just as the drinks are handed to them the ferry makes an unfortunate lurch: Howarth deposits the hot contents of his cup into his crotch with an oath that George is glad probably won’t be translated by any of their fellow passengers. For a minute or so they are all laughing too hard to be of much help to him; finally Bill leans across to proffer his napkin.
They disembark at the last stop before the channel widens into the haze of the Black Sea. The stop is a small fishing village; a straggle of houses and a couple of simple wooden jetties for moorings. Above here, Bill tells them learnedly, is the Byzantine fortress.
They climb out of the place, upwards, with the heat building until it begins to feel suffocating. The cool of that first hour on the ferry is hard to imagine now. The scent of the hot vegetation rises about them. A small gecko runs out across George’s foot – anticipating a snake, he jumps back. The other men laugh at him. They climb until his clothes stick to him with sweat. They have all become soft, he realises; they have not had this much exertion since the war itself.
Suddenly Bill gives a shout. They follow his arm and see ahead of them, up the path, great gun emplacements pointed toward the sea. As they look closer, they see that the surrounding hillside all about has been pockmarked by shells, huge chunks of ground torn up, the grasses only just beginning to cover them. Closer still, and they see the Turkish script at the base of the emplacements: the stars and crescents stamped into the stone.
‘I didn’t know we bombed the Bosphorus.’
‘Not just the Bosphorus, doc,’ Howarth tells him, cheerily. ‘The city, too.’
George thinks of the crowds milling daily over bridges and
