Perhaps she only lost consciousness for several seconds, but by the time she opened her eyes the world had changed. There seemed to be a curious stillness. Quiet, too, but that was perhaps the note in her ears, a shrill mind-bound scream of shock, that drowned out all else. As she sat up the pain in her jaw had finally arrived – pain that made her feel furious, though she could not say at who. She could not remember who to blame for it.
Curious: there was a horse, a mere few feet away, sleeping in the street. Had anyone else seen it? She looked about, to find the owner. There he was. Sitting awkwardly, legs out in front of him. He seemed curiously sanguine. Did he not mind? Then she discerned the fact that half his head was missing, realised that he would not be minding anything at all. Beyond him other forms, remnants of forms. The eye snagged upon them even as it tried not to see. The line drawn by death had ended just before the place where she had fallen. If she had walked here a little faster, or left a little earlier, or turned to run with a little more hesitation, she would not be here to dimly notice the blood soaking into the muslin of her headscarf, the pain between her hips that would have made her cry out if she had been able to make a sound.
When the scream in her mind had finally lessened – it did not stop properly for days – she heard the sirens of the ambulances. When they ran out of space, trucks, mules, lemonade sellers’ carts. The dead, who would not know the indignity of it, piled high, to be collected when lives had been saved.
She had got up on her feet, and had walked home, though there had been a pain at the very centre of her which made it difficult.
At the door her mother had screamed, and screamed. Nur had been amazed that she had somehow been able to hear and echo the noise in her head. It was only when she undressed that she understood that she was covered in blood; most of it not her own. But when she stripped to her undergarments she found more blood, dark and clotted, much thicker than the rest. This, unmistakably, was her own. Finally, but too late, certain things made sense to her: changes she had noticed in her person. She had wondered. But it was only now that she discovered for certain, in this moment of loss, that she had been going to have a child.
She heard later that the planes had been trying to bomb the War Office. This was what people said because it was not quite believable that they could have been aiming for a marketplace of unguarded civilians. Nur knows nothing of the machines, does not know how exactly they find a target.
But she was there. Saw how close they came; saw the intent in them.
Nur
Her grandmother is in one of her sulks this evening. Nur feels it as soon as she enters the room.
‘What is it, Büyükanne?’
Her grandmother gestures, with one hand, her rings flashing magnificently. (Nur has long ago given up on persuading her to sell these baubles.) ‘This horrid apartment. This dust and gloom.’
Nur feels an apology form on her lips, and swallows it just in time. There are other things to feel guilty about, perhaps, but not this.
‘I was beautiful, once. Did you know that?’
‘Yes, Büyükanne. Of course you were. You are beautiful now.’
‘Oh, stop it, you naughty girl! I don’t stand in for flattery.’ She bats her hand. But her mood has lightened by a degree. ‘Have I ever told you of the moonlight picnic we had once, at the Sweet Waters of Europe?’
Nur pretends to think. ‘No, Büyükanne. I don’t believe you have.’ She knows the story so well she might have been there herself. It has the vibrancy of one of her own memories.
Wrapped in silks, veiled in yashmaks, the women sit in long kayıks, attended by many pairs of oarsmen. Other crafts follow in a winding procession, some packed with musicians to serenade them. Young men follow in their own kayıks, try to glimpse the famous beauties. They will be disappointed; the women are scrupulously covered. The boats themselves are decorated with fabulously ornate cloths: silk, embroidered with fishes picked out in real silver and gold thread. When the moonlight catches them, fracturing off the water, they really seem to swim.
And there is her grandmother, in the first of the kayıks. Upon her feet she wears slippers of the softest white chamois leather. They are the sort of shoes that tell any onlooker an immediate story: here is a young woman who never has to step in dirt.
An exquisite ruby ring upon the slender little finger of her left hand, but no more adornment in the way of jewellery. She does not need anything further yet – that is something to be saved for old age, when lost brilliance in the self can be compensated for in a dazzle of gems.
‘And a single-flounced dress of Chinese mulberry silk,’ her grandmother is saying. Her eyes are closed. She, like Nur, is watching the party make its stately process
