‘Hello,’ he says.
There is mystery attached to it. He takes it into the patch of light spilling from the street lamp to look at it. It is homemade, not printed, written in a hand somehow familiar to him. No pictures – this is a disappointment. He has little time for words. He knows that he is clever, but words can outwit him, can shift before his very eyes.
He stares at it for a few minutes, hardly bothering to puzzle it out, ready to give it up as a bad job. Then a word makes itself familiar to him, as though the light itself has drawn its meaning up out of the page. Chicken. His mouth floods with saliva. He goes to the next word. Walnuts. It is already, thanks to these two words, the most interesting book he has ever come across.
Concentrating intently, frustrated by his own slowness, he puzzles out the rest of it. Paprika – he knows that, the bright powder made from peppers. The words, he begins to realise, describe a larger whole. A dish. Chicken with Walnuts and Paprika. He can imagine it, yes. He closes his eyes and summons the flavours with a great effort of imagination. The tender flesh of the meat, the bitter of the nuts, the sweet smoke of the spice.
The idea of the dish in his head is a kind of pleasurable agony. It is almost as good as eating it. Of course, one does not have the fullness in the belly afterward. But he hardly ever has that anyway, cannot remember a time when he has felt fully sated by what he has been given to eat.
Now the magic of this imagined meal is used up.
He turns the page, to discover the next delight. Chicken – easy, he had the shape of the word in his mind now. Chicken with … he squints at the word. Figs. That is the best time of the year, when the tree in the schoolyard yields its fruit. In the time of worst hunger they had been everything to him. Less filling than bread, but more so than the aubergine skins he had scavenged from the bins. There are two kinds: white and purple. The latter are bigger but the white are finer-flavoured. Tiny, fragrant morsels. They are his favourite. Unfortunately they are the birds’ favourite too. He was almost tearful with frustration, upon leaving lessons, to discover that they had got to so many of them before him. And they were so wasteful. They would eat part of a fruit, and leave the rest hanging upon the branch to dry out or rot. They would scatter half of what they stole upon the ground. He would eat these remains, or collect them in his pockets.
He reads on, his mouth wet with longing, his stomach protesting, his mind filling with impossible fantasies.
Nur
There are difficult negotiations with the linen buyer. ‘Every week I have another woman coming to me with a story like yours, hanım. Great families who have lost everything, fallen on poor times. And all their work is beautiful.’
‘But I came to you first – that must count for something?’
He seems not to have heard. ‘The Russians! They come to me straight from the ships laden with great bundles on their backs: silks from Paris, the finest cashmere shawls. They are such poor wretches now: no homeland, no future. You must count yourself lucky. There are others who are far more unfortunate. We have all lost a great deal.’
It is true. Every day new inhabitants arrive, fleeing the ongoing consequences of the Great War, the revolution in Russia. Dispossessed, desperate. Regular flurries of chaos at the quays: vast carriers arriving with human cargo. Some filtered into the system of Allied camps. Others absorbed by the city, disappearing with little trace. But she hopes that he sees the long look she gives his stall, occupying four times the space it once did; the smartly refurbished sign with its gilt lettering, the beautiful new silver samovar from which he has declined to offer her any tea.
As she leaves the bazaar she sees the Allied soldiers, buying trinkets. It is not enough for them to have occupied this place; they want to take a piece of it back with them. A souvenir. A war trophy. Exotic, but harmless, like a muzzled dancing bear. Her linens will be stowed in trunks, will make the long journey back across the breadth of Europe to decorate sideboards and tables in houses in London and Paris. She likes, in more optimistic moments, to think of this as a colonisation of her own.
Their uniforms are clean but she sees them drenched in blood. How many men have you killed, she asks, silently, of some sunburned boy as he holds a fake lump of amber up to the light with an unconvincingly expert air. And you? – of the fat officer fingering women’s sequinned babouches – did you slaughter my husband, at Gallipoli? My brother, in the unknown wasteland in which we lost him?
She thinks of Kerem, her lost brother, every day. There are reminders of him, everywhere – particularly in the schoolroom where it should be he who stands in front of the pupils, not her. But it is more visceral than that: it exists in her as a deep, specific ache, as though she has lost some invisible but vital part of herself.
With the loss of her husband, it is different. She can go whole days without thinking of Ahmet – and then remember with a guilty start. It is not that she does not care, she has to remind herself. It is that all of it – him, herself as a bride and then briefly as a wife, the night that followed – all seem abstract, intangible as a dream. Once she found herself rooting through the chest of clothes
