He smells the spices before he sees them. Then they appear before him in bright, impossible cones: mustard yellow, red, umber, greenish brown. Smaller piles of dried rosebuds, so perfectly pink, so tiny and well-shaped that they look hardly real. Herbs: thyme and rosemary … and – he hazards a guess, bending near – lavender? No, something else. A foreign musk, lacking that astringent perfume. Tumbles of roots in varying degrees of size and gnarliness. The scent is almost overpowering. The tempered sweetness of aniseed, the warmth of cinnamon, the Christmas pudding spice of nutmeg, the tang of ginger cake. And with these aromas, evanescent, shifting, he catches threads of memory – lost before he can fully examine them.
He looks at his list. Rosewater and saffron, ginger root, cinnamon bark. He has little idea what any of these look like, though he may know some of their flavours. Luckily the stallholders seem to know the names of their spices in English – perhaps in every language, for he hears another conversing in halting French. Some of the items on the list are surprisingly expensive. Of course, having no idea of the market price for such things is hardly a powerful position to negotiate from. Yet he feels oddly satisfied at his success in procuring them. Looking at them – flower stamens, a water made from petals, a twisted tuber, the bark of a tree – he cannot imagine how they will be translated into something edible. He begins to wonder if he has been had for a fool.
He leaves through another entrance and is propelled, blinking, in the newly sunlit air. It might be a different day. Here is an absolute contrast with the chaotic former frenzy of the market. He is suddenly alone, in a street in which the shadows fall blue and dappled, cool as a glass of iced water. Where did the people go? This street has no shops, only a row of shuttered-looking houses. That distinctive Ottoman style, tall and elegant, with an embroidered look to the wood and the upper floor projected precariously above the lower.
There is the sound of water, echoing upon stone – turning the next bend he happens upon a fountain sending out a confident plume of water into a stone trough from a great bronze spout. At the far end is a tiny, black-cloaked figure. An elderly woman, extending one time-clawed foot into the green depths, bending down to wash it. When she has departed he too stoops to the plume of water and cups a hand, sluices the fine layer of perspiration from his face. It is very cold, moss-scented, drawn from some secret underground place. A Roman aqueduct perhaps – they had their way with water. Though they stole it from the Greeks, who were here before. It could be thousands of years old. Or it could be only decades. Impossible to say: everything this city, this place of myth and history, can cloak itself in borrowed age and renown.
Rounding another corner, a shock. A whole street of houses destroyed. He tastes the smoke at the back of his mouth before he understands what it is he is witnessing. He has never seen anything quite like it. Beyond the burned reminders of the walls one can just discern the sorry remains of furniture, old divans, chairs. He stops. One of the shapes – still as all the rest – has a too-organic form; perhaps it is best not to look too closely. It might be, it might not be. People are at least prepared for such eventualities; he has heard that they happen all the time, these fires. The old wooden houses are like tinder boxes. Perhaps this sight becomes less of a shock for those who live in the city because of its ubiquity. But he cannot imagine walking past this with equanimity.
He hurries forward, head bowed, the knowledge of it within him now like a poison, his mood utterly changed.
The Traveller
Mid-afternoon, but already the light beyond the window is beginning to fade. I had a late lunch in the dining car and now find myself alone once more in my cabin with my thoughts. Nothing to do until dinner time except stare down my ‘bed’ with its thin rectangle of foam, promising even more discomfort come morning. A sleep in a proper bed in Venice did something to alleviate the effects of the couchette. But already, after one night on the thin rectangle of foam, my back has begun its protests. I feel bent out of shape … corrugated. It is unfair, really, because it is only through the physical – the disobedience of my body, its various pitiable degradations – that I am reminded I am no longer young.
The landscape beyond the windows has varied little all day: a never-ending pastoral, a patchwork of fields interrupted by the odd town or village or the blank of a brickwork tunnel. I am sure that in summertime it would be lush and green and surpassingly beautiful but at this time of year the farmland is just tilled soil, unvariegated greyish-brown.
Now something has drawn my eye back to the scene. A change: something more than the mere diminishment of the light. It is imperceptible at first and I am about to look away when I see it – a tiny flake of white, seeming to hover for a second before the glass before it is sucked into the slipstream of
