With a little shiver of irritation she opens her eyes.
‘Green?’ Nur supplies.
‘Oh clever girl. But how did you guess?’
There is a thud from above them. Someone is up there on the roof.
Her grandmother grimaces. ‘It’s your brother, Nur.’ She does not say his name so often, these days, Nur has noticed. And it is only when she speaks of her grandson that her poise seems to desert her. ‘He smelled of alcohol. The shame of it, Nur!’
‘He has suffered a great deal, Büyükanne.’
‘That’s certainly true. I think he may have the camp madness. Fatima hanım’ – the butcher’s wife – ‘told me of it. Her friend’s nephew came back with it. And he was blinded, too: he is quite a pitiful sight to behold.’ The pity is undermined by an unfortunate hint of Schadenfreude, compounded when she says, ‘Thank goodness, at least, he is still a handsome man.’
Nur cannot quite agree. Because if anything, as he grows healthier in body, that thing that is changed in him seems to strengthen, too.
She goes to find him, up on the roof.
He is sitting hunched in one corner. ‘Kerem?’ she whispers.
The sun is setting somewhere in the west. It is sunk too low to be seen but it has stained the sky with streaks of vermillion fire.
‘Kerem?’
Perhaps he did not see her the first time, because she sees him start. He turns toward her. His expression terrifies her. It is a look of profoundest agony.
She goes to sit beside him.
‘Kerem,’ she says, after a while. ‘While you were in …’ she shies away from saying it: the war. ‘While you were away. Perhaps, if you speak of it …’
‘I cannot.’
‘Not now, maybe. But in the future …’
‘I cannot speak of it, Nur.’
He turns to look at her. There is a plea in his expression, an entreaty, but she cannot interpret it. It is too soon for him, she thinks. There will be other opportunities: he is returned, now. She thinks of the boy, how long it has taken him to recover from his illness. Well, this thing in Kerem is like an illness – though somewhere deep within, not visible to the human eye. They have time, now. That is the thing to remember.
So instead they sit together in silence, as the world around them grows dark.
Later, she finds herself wondering what life would have been like if Enver had not been killed in those first weeks at Gallipoli, if he had returned to her, like Kerem. How would the war have changed him? Her husband did not have Kerem’s gentleness in the first place, after all. Would he, therefore, have fared better … or worse?
She finds the miniature, in her small wooden box of keepsakes. She tries to remember this face attached to a body – but comes up against difficulties. A … scent. How had he smelled? Of tobacco and cologne? She tries to recall flesh and weight and presence.
But whenever she attempts this a strange thing happens in her mind. She does not see the man she married, the man in this miniature. Instead, she sees at first a thin figure, feet and nose too large for the rest of him. An oddly pointed head, fine black hair cut straight across the brow. This is Enver the child, as he once was, the only time at which she might have been able to say she properly knew him.
Her brother had told her of an incident in which Enver tripped and smacked the side of his head hard against a chair. His father had stood over him as his face worked, saying: ‘A real man does not cry, Enver. He thinks what lessons his pain can teach him.’
By the year before the war, he was, according to her grandmother, ‘extremely charming and clever’. This claim had been filtered through Enver’s mother herself, so had to be put under some scrutiny. Nur had also been presented with this miniature. One thing she had to admit was that he had grown into the large nose; it now gave the face a distinguished aspect. But the resemblance to his father was now all too clear. His father, too, had been a handsome man. It lent a new arrogance to the face. She thought she might have been better disposed to him had he lost rather than gained in this respect.
She had had a brief, guilty hope that the declaration of war might put the wedding off. He was in the first of the age groups to be summoned for enlistment. But no, in fact, the ceremony was brought forward. He wanted to go to war a married man. She had wondered whether this was some superstition on his part. It could not be anything to do with her – he had not seen her since girlhood. Later, more pityingly, she wondered if perhaps he had not wanted to die without becoming fully a man.
A wedding bed scattered with sesame seeds to ward off the evil eye. An Armenian tradition, originally, but absorbed into the ways of the city for all to use. The ritual of the bath; the bathhouse itself like a temple to cleanliness. The soaking in fast-flowing water, the rub-down, the pillows of blossoming scented lather. Her hair washed in rosewater, dried, dressed. A white dress, embroidered with green and silver threads. Sitting for two long days in this confection spread about her like sea foam, her vision obscured by the two silver tinsels hanging down from her headdress so that whenever she moved she saw a shower of stars. At one point the boredom, and the odd experience of being stared at
