Only one pupil would be there unfailingly. The day after the bombing in Mahmut Paşa, it had been just the two of them in the classroom. He was quick, and naughty. He had a particular affinity for language, English, French, Latin. She was fond of him, despite herself. He was also listless. She suspected, as the war went on, that this was due to lack of food.
He was the son of two Armenians. The father a barber who her father had sometimes visited, the wife a very talented seamstress, who adjusted clothes for her mother and grandmother. But it seemed that during the war they had fallen on hard times. There was less call for non-essential luxuries, such as the skill of a tailor. There was less call for the services of an Armenian barber – partly because so many men had gone to war, and because some were boycotting the Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews: saying they were secretly celebrating every victory of the enemy. The apartment they had moved into, according to the butcher’s wife downstairs (one of her grandmother’s new circle of informants), used to belong to an Armenian family.
‘Where did they go?’
‘Oh, no one knows. They seemed pleasant enough to me – though I know others disapproved of them. But I suppose it’s only right, since the war.’
Her grandmother had nodded, sagely – though Nur suspected she was as ignorant as herself as to exactly what the woman meant. She never showed her ignorance, though: to do so was an admission of weakness. She was like the sultans who had wanted to seem all-knowing, all-powerful.
‘Why?’ Nur asked the butcher’s wife. She did not have the same reservations. ‘Why is it only right, since the war?’
‘Well.’ The woman had seemed momentarily lost for words. ‘Well. Because they are the enemy now, of course.’ Then, apparently bored, she had segued into some tale about one of their other neighbours berating her husband in the small hours of the morning and how it was ‘really too shameful’ – both the noise, and the fact that the man just seemed to accept it. But he was clearly a weak sort – he would have been the right age to go to war, had it not been for some dubious story about a problem with his heart.
‘But why?’ Nur had persisted.
‘Why what? I can’t presume to know the reason for a man’s unmanliness. Perhaps he was at the breast too long as a child.’
‘No: why are they now our enemies, the Armenians?’
The woman had given a little shiver of irritation. Nur was reminded of the phase she had gone through as a child: a game of replying to every answer with another question. Her mother had worn the same expression of exasperation as the butcher’s wife.
‘They’re traitors,’ the woman said – baldly. ‘That’s all I know of it, but I do know that it’s true. Everyone knows it’ – as though Nur had spent the last few years living under a rock – ‘everyone knows that it’s true.’ A cross glance at Nur. ‘My Mehmet knows more about it, of course: he goes to the coffeehouse, he hears all about it there. The stories men bring home from the front.’
Nur was almost tempted to ask why her Mehmet, who seemed perfectly strong and capable and the right sort of age, had not gone to the front either. She stopped herself: she knew that she would not like herself if she asked it.
Later she thought of her nurse, Sara, who had been Armenian. She had been a second mother to Nur – quite literally, in the first weeks of her life, when she had been her wet nurse, as was common in families like hers. Even while Nur had been fascinated by her strangeness – the fact that she did not fast at Ramazan, or was allowed to drink wine (though she never did), and wore her hair uncovered – she had loved her as though she were family. Impossible to think of someone like Sara as the enemy, just as impossible as to think it of the Armenian children at the school. She had seen allusions to ‘Armenian treachery’ in the newspapers but had been able to dismiss them. They seemed as likely as the pieces on our ‘all-conquering army’. To hear a woman like the butcher’s wife talk of it as an established fact: that was a different matter.
She had discovered the boy going through the kitchen refuse at the school, looking for scraps of food. He had a small pile of his treasures beside him: potato peelings, the rough outer layers of onions, the skins of aubergines. When questioned, the story came out. He carried a little bag about with him in his pocket. In it were salt and pepper, a little powdered chilli. With these he could make anything palatable. Roots, or grass, or meat several days past its best: the chilli would disguise the greenish hue, too, if one was squeamish. This vegetable detritus was a comparable luxury. He told her all of this with a note of unmistakable triumph, as though proud of his resourcefulness.
The next day she had brought in some of their bread for him – furtively, because if she was caught she would have had some difficult explanations to make to her mother and grandmother; they had hardly enough to feed themselves. This had continued for some weeks. She had been pleased to see that her gifts seemed to be having some effect: that he seemed to have lost the look of a child marked out for death. She made sure that he ate the food she brought
