Him stooping to lift the veil to look at her for a couple of minutes. His face oddly expressionless: what did he see in her? She was so distracted by the experience that she forgot to look at him, to take in his features – the changes in the boy she had once known. It only occurred to her later that it might have been the same for him.
She had not had time to discover how the life between boyhood and manhood had shaped him. He had been kind enough; but many husbands are in the first weeks of marriage.
Did he love her? Did she love him? The thought was laughable: they had known each other for such a short time. The only sort of love she knew was that of her family, and that was a thing of history and blood, forged and complicated across a lifetime, knotted and detailed and multicoloured as a kilim rug.
He had desired her: she had seen it on the nights when they had been together. She had felt the power that she wielded over him. But it was not a real power, not like that commanded by men: it was a fleeting conjuring.
What of her desire? His was worn upon his body, there was no mistaking it. Perhaps a woman’s was a more changeable, elusive thing. She has read of it in books, has learned of its power. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, the wife of Shah Zaman in One Thousand and One Nights – all of them driven rather wild by it. And yet books are not always the most trustworthy teacher. Do they speak of the universal experience, or its extremes? This was not the sort of thing she could ever have spoken to her father about, no matter their rigorous discussions of other literary themes.
Her mother, her grandmother: unthinkable. If one had a sister, perhaps then. She did not think she had felt it. On those nights there had been something. A brief, purely sensory pleasure, like the stroking of the tender underside of the arm, or the hair. But the discomfort had always outweighed it. Perhaps, with time, she could have felt it. With knowing him better. But they had not had that time.
He died almost instantly. There had been a letter from one of the men in his company at Gallipoli, too, ‘to the widow of Enver’. She wondered if he had shared her name with them at all, or kept it to himself like a secret. Her sadness surprised her. She mourned – not him, exactly – but the man she had never had a chance to know. Even the description of his death carried a distance. It was a panacea, a sop for grieving wives and daughters and sisters to cherish like a keepsake.
He died bravely for the Empire, with a smile upon his face.
The Prisoner
In the dark apartment he turns onto his side and coughs like an old man, spits bile onto the floorboards.
His sister is changed beyond all recognition too. A widow now. No, but that is not the most significant difference. She is altered in almost every respect. All her old softness is gone. In the absence of the men, she has taken all responsibility upon herself. Even now, upon his return, she does not seem ready to yield it up to him. She goes out into the streets with her face uncovered, she teaches at his school.
He feels betrayed when he thinks of her there. He suspects that if he were his former self, perhaps, he would thank her for it – for continuing his work after he was thought gone. But he cannot do it, cannot feel it. All he can do is resent her her vocation, her busy, exhausting life.
He catches himself. He: a schoolteacher, now? The thought is absurd.
He has tried to find employment. But has no one told him about the influx of Russians with their impeccable manners, their attractive air of tragedy? Or the Turkish refugees ousted from lands that are now being called Greek? The restauranteur, the coffee shop owner – even the oil-smeared chief stevedore on the quays – look upon his wasted form, and pallor warily, as though it might be something catching. Little do they know that before them stands a war hero: a man with ten times the strength of will they possess, who has seen and done things they cannot imagine. He is filled with an urge to scream it at them, these small men who pity him. His hatred for them almost surpasses his hatred of the enemy. To these people he is part of the past; as much of an embarrassment as the eunuchs who walk the city’s streets. Once these figures had held the invisible reins of power in the sultan’s court – they had been purveyors of messages and gossip, the grand masters of intrigue. Now they are viewed as part of the old Empire: outmoded, vaguely shameful, a reminder of archaic ideals. And just as they are immediately recognised in the street by their soft bulk, their hairlessness, his wasted form marks him out as one of those few who returned from hell. It is more convenient to forget men like him ever existed.
For all his deprivations in the prison camp he had something there that he seems to lack now. Purpose. There, with the officer’s help, he had been able to see it all so clearly. Now the old doubts are returning, beginning to plague him. At night he tries to stave off sleep, because when he does faces visit him: terrible images that he had
