She finds that she cannot give it.
Now the cat, newly tame, it seems, nudges her leg. She looks down, grateful for the interruption.
‘I feed him scraps. When I first found him he looked like a collection of twigs with some oilcloth draped over him.’
A sudden memory comes to her. A small boy foraging for scraps in the school’s refuse.
He nods, solemnly, and she finds it impossible to suspect him of guile. And then, ‘I will take you to the boy.’
‘Actually, I have come to take him home.’
He frowns. ‘No. As I explained before, that cannot happen for some time. He needs to be here.’
‘We can care for him at home.’
‘You cannot give him the care he needs. You cannot prevent a relapse – which is likely.’
‘You were … very kind to treat him. I am grateful. But he should not be here.’
He sighs. ‘May I remind you that it was you who brought him here?’
‘I was desperate. I did not know what else to do. I thought he was going to die.’
‘And now I tell you that he may still die. If he had not been treated here, his life would have been in danger. If he is moved from here, now, his life will be in danger.’
‘But it is not right. I cannot imagine your army would allow it.’
Something changes in his expression.
‘They have not allowed it?’
‘There have been—’ he coughs, ‘words exchanged. But I explained exactly what I am saying to you now. We would have the death of a child, an innocent, on our conscience. But for you it is so much more than that.’ He is scrutinising her face. ‘I thought you understood all of this.’
His eyes are pale grey, she sees.
‘I do.’
‘Then why this insistence, when you know that it is bad for the child?’
‘Because it should not be like this. We cannot be …’ she searches for the word. ‘Friends’ seems an embarrassing overstatement; again she thinks of Kerem, watching from some hidden place, ‘… acquaintances. We aren’t simply people of different nationalities living side by side: in this city we understand that arrangement, at least.’ She feels the anger rise in her. ‘But it is different with you. You have occupied us. And before that, you were our enemy.’
She hesitates. Why not? she thinks. It might help him to understand. And so she tells him of the day the English planes came. She does not spare him any detail besides that of her own injury, her own loss, the secret blood that came when she was at home. When she has finished there is a long silence. She thinks – hopes – that she has shocked him.
When he speaks, it is in an undertone. ‘I did not know of this. I can only think … that it was a mistake.’
‘It was no mistake. They came low enough to see our faces, to see who we were. That we were ordinary men and women, not soldiers.’
He does not challenge her again. But then he says, quietly, ‘In war, people do terrible things. I will tell you this because I think you can stomach it.’
‘I do not think—’
‘We were in the desert, it was near fifty degrees centigrade: the most inhospitable place you can imagine. It could be forty miles or more between watering places, more. We were prepared for it, but we were suffering. And then, one day, we saw something that I thought was a hallucination at first, a mirage. A great stream of people. Hundreds of them.’
‘What sort of people?’
‘Not soldiers. No one, actually, who could have been a soldier. Old men and women. There were children dying, there, then, from heatstroke, malnutrition, exhaustion upon the path.’
‘But why?’
‘We couldn’t understand much of what they told us. But it seemed they had all been forced to leave in a hurry, with no chance to prepare themselves. They were woefully lacking in supplies. Luckier ones rode mules, or cows, the animals salt-crusted in old sweat. But some walked in shoes that were falling apart. Some in bare feet. Do you know what happens to your skin when you walk on sand at that temperature?’
She does not think she wants to hear much more, but he continues, relentlessly. ‘We tried to give them aid, food, water, where possible – but many of them were too far gone for help. There was an elderly man. He had fallen, in the dust. I tried to get him to stand up, but he could not. I think, actually, that a kind of peace had come over him. He asked me to go to his bag and retrieve a purse of money. This he was to distribute among those who he felt most needed it. Unfortunately, what they needed wasn’t money but shelter, water, food.’
‘Who did this to them?’ Even as she says it she has a horrible premonition.
‘We couldn’t be absolutely certain. But we did discover that these, the ones we saw, were the lucky ones. A little further along that road we came across … other sights. I will not describe those to you. One thing that we did learn is that they were Armenians. Later, I heard similar tales. Retribution, apparently. But they were ordinary people: just like those you saw in the marketplace. How much do you think they really had to do with it?’
She cannot speak to answer him. She thinks of the boy, an innocent. She thinks of other innocents, like him, but without the chance that has saved him, perhaps, from a terrible fate. She feels sick: not merely in her body, but in some profounder part of herself. Still she does not want to believe in it, but she is already thinking of the thing Hüseyin had alluded to; how somehow he had seemed to hear of this too. She is thinking, and trying not to think, of the boy. What
