Nur
‘I know where you have been, sister.’
‘What do you mean?’ She sounds like someone with a secret; she can hear it in her voice.
‘I’ve followed you. You’ve been back to the house, the one that is now filled with the enemy’s men. I saw you go inside. I saw you speaking with one of them.’
She feels a flush creeping up the side of her neck, and puts a hand there to cover it. She laughs, too, to disguise her fear. The sound is unconvincing; it has no humour in it.
‘I don’t see anything to laugh about. What is it that you find amusing?’
‘Nothing. I …’ She falters. ‘What has happened to you, Kerem? Ever since you have been back you have seemed’ – she searches for a word. Angry. Cold. Dangerous. ‘So different.’
‘I might ask you the same question.’
He is looking at her now with something almost like hatred.
She had thought that once Kerem had started to put on weight he might look better, a little more like himself. His cheeks are fuller, his hair is brushed, his various sores are healing. What she had not understood was that the real difference lay in something less tangible, something behind the eyes. The experience of looking at him now is perhaps even more uncanny than it was before. Because, now, in more forgiving light, he looks like the Kerem of before. One might almost believe him unchanged. Until one sees the eyes.
She tells him of the boy, the illness, the necessity. Surely, now, he will understand. But there is that coldness in her stomach again, almost like fear. Absurd: she must not be afraid of her own brother, however much he has changed.
‘Which boy?’
She tells him.
‘The Armenian boy?’
She does not like the way he says this. She does not like the fact that he feels the need to ask it. ‘He was very ill,’ she says, ‘and the English doctor agreed to look at him.’
‘What about Mustafa Bey? Why did you not ask him?’
‘He has gone to Damascus. And the Red Crescent hospital was full. It was the middle of the night – I couldn’t think what else to do.’
‘You went to an English hospital in the middle of the night. For an Armenian child.’
‘It was an emergency – if you had been here, you would know.’
He frowns. ‘If I had been here.’ The way he says it turns her own words into an accusation.
‘That wasn’t what I meant. All I meant was that everything is different here now.’
‘Why did they take the boy? Why would a British hospital – an army hospital – take a stranger in?’
She had been expecting this, and dreading it.
Before she can answer, as judiciously as she can, her grandmother speaks. ‘Nur knows the doctor there. The Englishman.’
‘You know an Englishman?’
‘I do not know him. I met him.’ Quickly, before he can infer anything from this, ‘It was an accident. In the street: I dropped something I was carrying, he picked it up.’
‘The same sort of Englishman,’ he says, conversationally, ‘who killed our men? Who would have tried to kill me, if I had been sent to a different front? Who has butchered our country, who has stolen our capital? You … ah … met him.’
She hates the emphasis, the suggestion of something sordid.
‘Did our men die for nothing?’
‘No, I would not—’
‘Did I nearly die for nothing?’
‘No, Kerem, of course—’
‘Then listen to me now, Nur. You must have nothing more to do with them. You must stop this; now. Otherwise—’
She hears the threat, but it remains unspoken, and somehow more menacing for it.
‘It must stop. Do you understand?’
George
That evening, he has a visit from one Major Harding. ‘There’s been a report that you have a Turkish child here, is that correct?’
‘A report from whom?’
‘Please, Captain, just answer the damned question.’
But George knows the source – or is almost certain that he does. The second lieutenant that he discharged yesterday. Who had questioned every decision George had made with regards to his condition, because he ‘knows a little about the subject myself’ – though on probing this revealed itself to be a year at St Thomas’, after which he had dropped out.
The main problem, George knows, is that his condition had humiliated and pained him. In insisting that the boil had to be lanced, George had become his chief torturer. No grown man wanted to yield up his pride like that – George himself would have had difficulties with it.
He had complained the morning after the boy had been admitted. ‘This is an army hospital,’ George had heard him say to his neighbour in a not-quite undertone. ‘A British army hospital. We cannot be letting every sort in here.’
‘Yes,’ he says, finally, because he sees little purpose in dissembling. ‘A child was brought here in the middle of the night – an emergency.’
‘There are other places for the native population.’
‘What should I have done? Turn away the child? Have an innocent’s death on my conscience – on the conscience, I might add, of the British army?’
‘Your focus should be upon your patients. What if your attention were taken by this Turk child, and you failed to notice the deterioration of one of the other cases?’
George draws himself up. ‘It would not happen. Because, as I am sure you will see upon my record, I am an excellent doctor. I would never endanger the safety of my patients.’
‘Good. Because if it were to come out that you had prioritised the child’s care … well, I think all I need say is that I do not know if there is a
