Spring
It carries with it all the wonder of the new season, the surprise of a magic trick – as though it did not come every year. The leaves upon the trees are the Platonic ideal of green, the original green, from which all other shades are imperfect iterations. On the ground beneath them, a memento mori, lie the desiccated skeletons of their predecessors.
The air smells of things growing. In the middle of the day the sun has the breath of summer in it. For some, this year, the breeze carries the scent of change. Mustafa Kemal’s rebel government at Ankara is putting more pressure upon the Allied occupiers; the tail, some joke, has begun to wag the dog. The Turkish police take their orders from Ankara, now; there are petty squabbles over passports and customs. The Allied commanders receive a courteous note informing them that on April 23rd, parades celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the National Assembly will take place in the city. They agree, and the parades go ahead without incident, because they know the trouble that will result if they do not. In doing so they perhaps acknowledge that they are no longer quite in control.
The street sellers have moved on from chestnuts. Now they offer fresh mussels plucked this morning from the shores of the Black Sea, almonds on ice – buzda badem – so that one tastes all the hidden creamy sweetness of the flesh.
In barracks across town men yearn, as perhaps at no other time of year, for their own lands. For cherry blossom beside the Seine, for strolls across the Downs, for a riot of wildflowers along the Ligurian coast.
For nowhere is the perfection of the season felt so powerfully as at home.
Nur
She and the boy have taken a short walk in the gardens of the house, he stumbling slightly on legs unused to the exercise. The doctor is nowhere to be seen; the nurse let her in to the boy with a sneer of disapproval. She felt this disapproval linger in the very air of the place, so she suggested they go outside. They have come to see the wisteria, newly in bloom, the scent of all her memories of the season. It is one hundred years old, her father told her once: maybe older. It can outlive generations. And yet it is a surprisingly fragile plant, too. Some shock will occur, perhaps even something beyond the gardener’s understanding, and the end will come to it swiftly. It will wither and die and never blossom again. But this morning it is as beautiful as she has ever seen it.
‘Hello.’
The doctor is sitting where she had not seen him, a book in his lap, hidden behind the fall of blossoms.
‘Hello,’ the boy says, and then looks up at her, a silent reprimand for her rudeness.
‘Good morning,’ she says, finally. It is strange. A few months ago there was a new accord forming between them, a lightening. And yet now when she sees him she feels a convulsion of fear behind her ribcage, a constriction in her throat. Everything they say to one another seems newly weighted, a thousand other possible meanings open to interpretation, misunderstanding.
She cannot fully understand this change. It is to do with her grandmother’s warning, perhaps, and also her knowledge of her brother’s new vocation, how it throws her own actions into unflattering, guilty contrast. And yet there is more to it too: an awareness that has nothing to do with anyone else; that is the exposure of some heretofore undiscovered aspect of herself.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ he says. ‘I have the day off, and I’ve been doing some exploring. I discovered the boathouses beneath the house.’
She is suddenly struck by a memory. A story her father once told her.
‘You’re smiling.’
‘Oh.’ She rearranges her features. ‘I was reminded of something.’
‘What?’ The boy is looking up at her. His English has improved, she notices. He will like the story, she thinks: this gives her licence to tell it – as would not be the case if the boy weren’t here. So she tells them, stopping every so often to translate for the boy.
One night her father woke to what he thought was an earthquake. Fine streams of plaster were raining from the ceiling, her father said, the chandeliers were swinging. But it seemed somehow specific to the house, as though it were being shaken in the fist of a giant. So he wondered if a vessel had collided with the shore: only a couple of weeks ago a cargo ship had taken a bend in the channel too narrowly and sheared the entire facade from one of the yalis, leaving the rest intact, the rooms newly denuded. But beyond the windows the world was still and dark, no ship in sight.
It seemed to him that the epicentre of the thing was coming from somewhere underneath him, from the boathouses beneath the kitchen. With some trepidation he went below. There he saw a huge black shape, rising out of the water, thrashing itself about in agony or rage. He could make out the distinctive shape of the sheening body, the fin and tail. It must have followed a shoal of fish in through one of the arched entrances, he realised, and become trapped. As the water flashed from her, silver, she seemed made of moonlight, and her frantic motions appeared like a graceful dance.
Just as he began to formulate a plan she found her escape route, and plunged beneath, back out into the night. The water closed over her seamlessly, hardly a ripple. It was as though it had never happened.
‘And perhaps it never was,’ she says, remembering her father’s love of a good story.
‘A dolphin?’ The boy is staring, wide-eyed. At first she thinks she has frightened him, then she realises it is excitement. She can see that from now
