‘And what do you normally like reading?’ he asks. ‘In your own language?’
‘Recipes.’
George thinks there must have been a misunderstanding in the boy’s translation.
‘Recipes,’ he says, humouring, ‘what sort of recipes?’
The boy looks at him, tolerantly, as though he does not mind dealing with a fool; he has enough time on his hands. ‘For food. Instructions for food.’
‘Oh,’ George says, and, unable to think of anything else to say, ‘why?’
Again, the sense that the child is humouring him. ‘To cook food from.’
‘You cook food?’
‘Yes.’
George has never heard of such a thing. Young boys, according to his sphere of knowledge, are interested in the same pastimes he was as a child: mainly sport – in all its wonderful variety – and animals. Specifically dogs. Perhaps horses.
‘I did not realise that little boys liked cooking,’ he says. ‘I think you must be rather unique. But then of course I am no expert.’
The boy listens frowningly; George senses his concentration as he translates the words. Then he says, ‘Why? You have no little boy of your own?’
‘No,’ George says. ‘I do not have a son.’ The child is still looking at him with that peculiarly bright gaze, which George has only recently come to realise is his own, not the work of the fever. Before it he feels … what is the word? Excoriated. As though a layer of himself had been removed. He thinks of those images produced by the x-radiation machines that reveal the secret inner workings of the self, hidden malignancies. ‘I think,’ he says conclusively, ‘I’ll leave you to your books. You will be tired.’ He leaves the pile beside the bed, turns to go.
‘I could cook for you,’ the boy says. ‘I have learned the recipes. They’re here.’ He taps his forehead, for emphasis.
George thinks of the vast stove downstairs, the one Sister Agnes never lets him near, other than to heat coffee, the odd tin of bully beef. She is justified: these, after all, are the extent of his culinary abilities. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it is very kind of you to offer it. But you are too poorly at the moment to be out of bed.’
It is convenient that it is the case: he doesn’t quite know what he would say if the boy were well enough, such is the eagerness in his expression. And he still isn’t defeated.
‘I can tell you what to buy. You can go to the bazaar.’ In his animation his command of the language seems to become even more fluent. ‘I can teach you, everything.’
George sees that he has argued himself into a corner. It is absurd: this is a hospital, he a doctor, with responsibilities and very little time to call his own. Moreover it is a military hospital; the child should not even be here. He might say all of this, and be done with it. Yet there is a problem. He wants the boy to like him. Mainly for the simple reason that he likes the child. But there is something else: he cannot shake the idea that if he succeeds, he will prove something about himself to himself. Then, perhaps sensing weakness in his hesitation, the boy grins. George is powerless to do anything but nod.
‘All right. Perhaps just once. I have tomorrow morning free. If you tell me the things you need, I can get them.’
He cannot quite believe what he is saying. How the other men would laugh at him if they knew of it.
The bazaar is a labyrinth of roofed alleyways. The clamour inside is subject to odd distortions. Outside it has begun to rain, and the air held within is damp, faintly mist-hung. As one looks about the bright hues seem to bleed, slightly, like watercolour paint. George knows that he is observed as he passes. When he turns, though, the stallholders look away, busying themselves with their piles of goods. He wonders what experience they have had with other British soldiers thus far. He imagines – because it is more likely than the opposite – that there have been abuses of authority. Some of the men seem to be particularly zealous about discovering and stamping out dissent among the local population.
He has decided to walk to the spice bazaar – the Egyptian Spice Bazaar is its proper name – via the Grand Bazaar, which spills into it. There are things he would like to buy here. Tobacco, for example. Perhaps something sweet, too – he has a schoolboy’s taste for sugar. But that particularly British fear of being misunderstood, of making a spectacle of himself, prevents him. The sheer scale of the variety on offer, too. The stalls he passes that are selling tobacco seem to have thirty or more varieties; he would not know where to begin. He finds one that smells about right – not too perfumed, not too acrid (he feels suddenly like the Goldilocks of pipe smokers) – and asks the man for a quantity of the stuff.
Now that he has a bag on his arm, that it is clear that he is here as a buyer – not an enforcer of some Allied law – the other stallholders are encouraged. They come forward, making suggestions. In the jewellery bazaar, men approach him with great furtiveness, casting wary looks about them, and then whip away pieces of unremarkable cloth to reveal jewels of staggering size and brilliance: a great square-cut ruby, lucent sapphires, a round, grass-green emerald set with a coruscation of diamonds. Suddenly he understands the secrecy: the value of some of these pieces must be astronomical.
‘For your wife?’ one man asks, proffering a slim gold bracelet. Then, hedging his bets, ‘Pour votre femme?’ and impressively, ‘Per tua moglie?’
‘No,’ George says, ‘no, thank you.’ He pushes past the man with more force than is perhaps strictly necessary. He is suddenly tired of this place.
Onwards, driven by the surge of
