I have never been able to see it as mere weather – not like sun, or rain. Not since a particular day: which might as well have been the first time I ever properly saw snow. It has always seemed to me more like a quantity of magic seeping into the world.
It is almost completely dark now and the white swarm seems to glow out of it. Time, I think, for an aperitif. I could go to the dining car but somehow there is a greater loneliness in drinking surrounded by strangers than there is in one’s own company.
I only have one option with me, and it is probably better suited to after dinner, but it will do. I take it from the case, the old pewter flask – seasoned traveller of continents. I pour myself a sparing quantity of the stuff inside and I can almost taste it before I lift it to my lips, the warm smoke of Scottish peat.
Last night I dreamed about her. For a long time I thought that I hated her for what she had done. For not being strong enough, when I had thought her brave, capable of anything. I thought she had simply given up.
I say it, trying it out, the one rich syllable of it. My voice sounds so strange, so loud in the silence of my cabin, slightly roughened by the whisky. And it is so long since I have spoken this name.
Nur
‘How is he today?’
‘Markedly improved. In fact, better than that – he’s cooking.’
‘Cooking?’
‘No,’ he says quickly. ‘He isn’t cooking, but he has me doing his bidding, as his proxy if you like.’
She tries not to smile.
‘He told me that his favourite book was one of old recipes.’
‘Yes, it is. The cook who used to work for my family, Fatima. They were hers.’
‘I see.’
‘He discovered it. We have been cooking the recipes from it since.’
‘He told me.’
It makes her wonder what else the boy has told him. Of her insensible mother, perhaps, or the night-time hours of embroidering … or the fact that sometimes she buys three-day-old bread from the baker’s and soaks it in water to make it edible. Her pride quails as these possibilities present themselves. She reminds herself that she should just be thankful that Kerem had not arrived before the boy’s illness. Children do not always understand the importance of secrecy.
‘I have to say,’ he says now, ‘it has been something of a departure from tinned food and coffee.’
‘What has he made for you?’
He tells her.
‘I’m afraid you have been poorly used.’
‘What do you mean? It was delicious: the men enjoyed it.’
‘That was a recipe I told him we could not make, because the ingredients were too expensive. Saffron … I cannot imagine what that must have cost you.’ She is almost proud of the boy’s resourcefulness.
‘I got a good price, from the seller.’
‘Ah.’ She decides not to humiliate him by asking what he paid. ‘It is incredible,’ she says, ‘I cannot get him to remember the succession of the sultans, or his numbers, but he has committed the recipes, every detail, to his mind.’
‘It is how interested one is in the subject – it is the same for all of us. At medical school I could never interest myself in the symptoms of certain tropical diseases: they seemed so far beyond anything I would ever experience. Then, when I began to treat men for them – and new ones besides – I suddenly became an expert.’
‘Of course.’
‘But I cannot think of any other boy his age who can speak another language so fluently. His English is astonishing. It shames me.’
‘And French,’ she says, and is immediately embarrassed by her boast.
‘Which makes him more impressive than any adult Englishman. The strangest thing,’ he says, ‘I found a whole cache of children’s books in English and French here. They were yours?’
‘Yes.’ She finds that she cannot say any more; there is some obstruction in her throat. Silences have strange power. Some draw people together, like co-conspirators. This one, though, seems to pull something open between them, and each is perhaps a little embarrassed by the familiarity of the last few minutes. They have become strangers again.
‘You could come and eat with us here, one evening.’
She suspects that he has only said it to fill the silence, to salvage the accord of a few moments before. ‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’
‘I apologise,’ he says, perhaps only now seeing the impropriety of the invitation. ‘I should not have asked it.’
She cannot help wondering whether he would ever have asked one of his countrywomen such a thing. An invitation to a supper of soldiers. She reminds herself that it is meant as a gesture of friendship.
‘Unfortunately,’ she says, ‘I have to cook for my mother, and grandmother. Both of them are even worse cooks than I. But I thank you for the invitation.’
‘I should not have made it.’
‘Perhaps not. But I know it was well meant. And I admit that I have come to miss his cooking.’
‘I do not doubt it. I enjoy his company, too. It is so different to the men – you know they moan a great deal more than he. He is a wonderful child, your son.’
He has used the word before, and she has not corrected him. She has – yes – liked the sound of it. But suddenly it seems a deception.
‘I have not been honest with you. Perhaps it does not matter either way. But I feel I should tell you the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He is not my son.’
Survival trumps education. Nur had understood this from the first days of the war. She had been left with a class of six or so pupils, because the children came and went depending upon the situation at home or in the city itself.
Some of her pupils, the girls in particular, were kept at home – embroidering
