Nur
The lie felt necessary. How could she tell Kerem the truth, so soon, after learning where he has been? This does not help her to feel better about telling it.
She presents the painted box of loukoum to the doctor.
‘It’s a gift. A small one. To say thank you.’ It seems so meagre, suddenly. She is embarrassed: both by its modesty and by the act itself. This is a mistake, she realises; her grandmother has got it wrong. The small twist of paper now seems to have a power, a meaning, that she had not anticipated. She thinks of how she herself would look upon it: an Ottoman woman giving a gift to the occupier. There are still dark looks revered for women who comport themselves in this way, and her grandmother is an expert in the art.
She thinks, too, of how Kerem would see it. The old version of him might have understood: but not the new. Only a few hours in his company has been enough to teach her that this new brother is a man of hard lines; without compromise.
Even the doctor seems embarrassed. ‘Ah, thank you,’ he says. His hand feints toward the box, wavers, and then he takes it. There is a contact of skin that both flinch away from; she feels the shock of it, this infringement, pass through her. ‘But you should not have …’ he stops himself. ‘Thank you. It is some time since I received a present.’ He holds it loosely in his hands, as though he might be expected to give it back, she thinks. The pretty painted box looks ridiculous against the khaki of his uniform.
With his loss of composure, she regains her own. ‘It’s loukoum,’ she says. ‘You have it with coffee – though of course you can eat it however you prefer.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, again, now turning it carefully over in his hands as though it is something precious.
She becomes aware that the filigreed windows of the old haremlik, now the ward, look out onto where they stand. She is aware that any one of the men in the ward might look out and see them.
‘Shall I take you to the patient?’ he asks, as though he has sensed this new unease in her.
‘Yes, please.’
The boy is awake, and in more discomfort today – she can see it in his face as soon as she enters the room. She opens the box of rose-scented loukoum she has bought for him, but he only eats one piece. The taste hardly seems to make any impression upon him.
It frightens her, because it reminds her of the time when he was like this before. Insensible, unresponding. Weeks of it. Eventually, with what feels almost like a physical effort, she manages to wrest a smile from him with a story about her grandmother trying to make coffee, and blaming the stove, the pot, the coffee and even the weather for the unsatisfactory result.
The smile has cost him, it seems; within a few minutes he is asleep. She looks at him and cannot imagine how she might care any more for him.
‘He’s doing well, despite appearances. I had to lower the dose of the morphine, so that it cannot become a habit. He is feeling the pain of it properly for the first time since he fell ill.’
‘He seems very tired.’ She catches herself. It sounds like a complaint.
But he merely inclines his head. ‘He will be. His body has a great deal of work to do.’ A slight smile. ‘But he is recovering from it as well as any patient I have seen.’
She remembers, suddenly, exactly what he is: an army doctor. Her mind gropes toward what he might have seen – illness, yes, but also blood, death … and then stops fast. It has come too close to what she saw, one terrible day in Mahmut Paşa market. She has not forgotten it.
‘I wanted to ask,’ he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Will you come and have some of this …’
‘Loukoum.’
‘Loukoum with me?’
‘Oh,’ she readies herself to decline.
‘If I were to insist?’
‘Then it is your right,’ she says, under her breath, in Turkish, ‘as the occupier.’ Victory, indeed an entire war, has bought him the ability to insist upon something, and see it done.
He frowns. ‘Pardon?’ He hasn’t understood, of course. But as though he sees it too he says, quickly, ‘What I mean is that you would do me a very great honour, in sharing it. I have bought a coffee pot, taught myself to make it in the Turkish way.’
There is something almost pitiable in it. She thinks suddenly of her father. It is almost as though he is here with them, in the same room. ‘Surely, canım,’ he says, ‘you aren’t going to deny a person the companionship of a cup of coffee? Even a sworn enemy deserves as much.’ And so – not without a note of misgiving – she assents.
He shows her out onto the terrace, and she tries to make herself appear at ease, as though she does not already regret agreeing to it. The invocation of her father is no excuse: he never knew what it was to live like this, beneath the yoke of another people. The fictions we tell ourselves, she thinks, to give credence to our own actions. But there is nothing she can do now that the decision has been made.
He has placed some rather ugly chairs out here, a small wrought-iron table. But as she sits she reluctantly sees the genius in it: the elevation here provides the perfect view out onto the Bosphorus, framed by the hanging fronds of wisteria. It both amazes and annoys her that none of them, in the whole long years of living here, thought to do the same.
She steels herself to look about at the garden she knows so well. The last vestiges of
