Looking for shelter from the rain I discover a small but rather grand cafe, the interior gleaming with gilt and velvet. It seems an overpriced bauble, but perhaps at least authentically so: the date on the menu passed to me by a surly waiter reads 1720.
The doors release a fug of steam. I am shown to a red plush banquette in one of the gilt-and-mirror salons. Behind me is a trompe l’œil scene of a ravishing damozel: pale rounded shoulders and dark regard, black hair falling the length of her nude back to her waist. She reminds me a little of paintings I have seen of women of the ‘Orient’: lurid French and English fantasies of reclining women, surrounded by fruits and attendants, a sense of inaction and surfeit. I wonder what one Ottoman woman in particular would have made of such a representation. She would not have liked it, I know this much. I think perhaps it is the impression of languor, of idleness, that might have angered her most. She was never idle. She did not understand what it was to give up on anything.
I see the waiter’s eyes snag on the suitcase, as though he is deciding whether or not he can bring himself to serve the owner of such a decrepit object. I was afraid of leaving it at the hotel. This may seem absurd: who would attempt to steal such a woeful piece of luggage? Still, to me the value of the contents means that it was not a risk worth taking.
When he has departed as quickly as his patent Oxfords will carry him, I open the bag and remove the next item. It is a first edition. A profound Sèvres blue with a gold embossed filigree pattern: a rather nice match to the gilt-and-pastel splendour of the cafe itself. I read it a long, long time ago: so much so that the story, in my mind, has become a little hazy. It had begun to bleed into other memories assimilated from that time. I am no longer quite sure whether, for example, it was the book’s protagonist who travelled the Mesapotamian desert and climbed the Persian mountains, and once stayed in a town beside the Caspian Sea and saw a White Russian Army officer shoot his own reflection in a mirror, because all was lost. And whether he once lay upon his back outside his tent and watched the birds and longed for their grace and freedom. It is sometimes difficult to be certain what from that time is a fiction and what is real. My memory is not as it was. So much has happened in between.
My coffee comes, short and strong, with a delicate rime of brownish foam. I take a sip and it is perfect; only the Italians understand coffee like the Turkish, in my opinion. But Turkish is my favourite.
I open the front cover. A distinctive scent, still trapped in these pages: smoke.
Just inside the cover is a colourful chart of the world, according to which this train journey is only a thumbnail in length. And there, written in elegant blue ink, unmistakable, is her name.
Nur
‘How is he today?’
‘Much improved – you will see that for yourself. He’s more talkative, interested in everything.’
Nur is somewhat thrown by this. It doesn’t sound quite like the description of the little boy she knows. It sounds more like the child she knew before the war.
For a long time, after the terrible day, there had been no glimmer of the boy he had been. She wondered if that child had sunk completely from view – never to return. There were things that could change a person absolutely. And in childhood one was more malleable, more impressionable in character and mind; the change might be all the more devastating.
She read to him, in Turkish and English. He listened, she thought, but without expression. She kept finding some previously unnoticed horror in the pages. Death and violence had hidden in these books without her seeing them properly before. There were whole passages that had to be discounted and stories ended up making little sense, though it did not seem to register upon him.
She was fairly certain that she was the only person alive who cared about his fate. It was her duty to safeguard that fate, however inexpertly she did it.
‘We’ve been playing dominoes,’ the doctor says, surprising her out of her thoughts. ‘I taught him. It’s not a difficult game, but I’m still impressed by how he has taken to it. He’s very quick.’
‘I know.’
‘Should I not have done so?’
‘No. Of course you must do as you like. He is in your care.’
Her own emotions, clearly, have been more visible than she thought. When the doctor speaks like this she feels an indistinct apprehension. It is like the coffee, of the last visit. It is the idea of boundaries being crossed, the complication of relations, that makes her uncomfortable. She understands that she should be grateful to him for keeping the boy entertained. And yet he is still her enemy.
The enemy wears a uniform, he is fair-haired, he speaks with the same accent. And yet she cannot make that figure coalesce with the man before her, rocking slightly on his heels, a little sunburned across cheek and brow, running a hand through his hair to make it stand on
