That military cunning that deserted him in the face of the Russian advance now returns to him. He begins to plot. He needs a boat, and he needs the catalyst, the thing with which he will invoke his chosen element. It is beautifully simple. The craft will be easy; he has only to ask Erfan, whose father is in the boat-making business. The catalyst too: any schoolboy knows how. He is ready.
But the lives.
Necessary?
Necessary, yes. A sacrifice. An example. And part of something beautiful: part of this making new.
But Nur.
She is afraid of him now anyway, he can see it. And she is changed from who she was. She seems to have become hard, angry, fearless. His guilt is tied to the old version of her, the familiar version. She is gone.
But the past.
But what help has the past been to him? In fact, it must be annihilated. It can have no part in the man he is to become, or the country that is to rise out of these ruins.
The English occupiers. The boy, the Armenian boy. Everything that he has lost is the fault of these enemies. His house: colonised. His humanity: the things that were asked of him because of the Armenians’ betrayal, those things that have made it impossible to return to the person he was in his old life. His sister: who now appears to be loyal to these enemies rather than to her own flesh and blood.
Here is the thing he has been searching for: the thing that will go some way to filling the void within. A purpose.
Nur
When Nur visits the hospital the next evening the boy asks the doctor. ‘Have you shown Nur hanım the gramophone yet?’
In spite of herself she is intrigued. She has never seen one before, though her father had, and had described it to her.
And yet the object the doctor shows her is more strange than could ever have been conveyed in words. It has an almost submarine beauty, she thinks: the brass trumpet shaped like a shell. She walks around it, studying it from every angle. The doctor enumerates the parts for her with the precision of a medical man.
‘It’s yours?’
‘I found it in a small village on the Caspian Sea, when we were passing through.’
‘You took it?’ She does not try to keep the censure from her tone.
‘I bought it. Contrary to what you may have heard, the British army are not plunderers. Not as a rule.’
‘How does it work?’
‘I will show you.’
They gather nearer, the three of them. He winds the handle, gives a huff of exertion. Then, with great delicacy, he lifts the small brass arm that extends upwards out of the base.
‘Look below,’ he says.
She obeys.
‘See it? The needle? That’s what tracks the tune.’
‘How?’
‘It is all written, upon this disc.’
She looks hard, but cannot see anything other than concentric circles.
‘I don’t quite understand it either.’
She glances up, and sees his smile. She finds herself returning it.
Now, with infinite care, he moves the arm into place. She sees how elegant his hands are – like a musician or an artist’s – the dextrous curve of the thumb, the tapered pale ovals of his nails; the hands of a doctor.
And then she steps back in shock. Sound is pouring from the thing. She had known that it would, and yet she had not expected it, at least not that it would be like this. The clarity of it – but not merely of one single tune, rather a whole orchestra. She can discern the separate parts, the strings, the wind. Can it be called music? It has all the discordancy of the jazz she has heard flooding out of Pera streets, but it is different again: violins, flutes, the high shrill voice of the piccolo. There is a violence to it. It speaks of things broken apart and reforming, forcing their way up through the old. It speaks of things growing, and things being pulled apart. The old torn asunder. The wonder and terror of the new. It does not try to be liked … it does not want to. It simply is: brave and vulnerable and fierce and strangely beautiful and hideous and, above all, new.
It is some time before she realises that she is weeping. The boy is looking between her and the needle, as though fascinated by both. Nur does not think the doctor has seen; his head is bowed, his eyes almost closed. A great relief. She turns away from him, and puts a hand to her face. Her glove comes away half-sodden; she is amazed.
After they have returned the boy to his room, and she has bid him good night, the doctor turns to her and says in a strange rush of words, ‘I wondered if you would dance with me.’
There is a crackling silence, in which his words seem to echo. She is so surprised by his question that she has forgotten to immediately decline. She is reminded of that first day, when he asked her if she would join him for coffee. The shock at the transgression: as though no one had taught him the rules of how it should be, between Occupier and Occupied. But this time, of course, it is something different, so much more.
To his credit he seems almost as shocked by the question as her. He is first to recover his voice. ‘I apologise,’ he says, ‘that was absolutely …’ he is searching for a word, ‘absolutely inappropriate.’
That gives her pause. Inappropriate. It is an interesting choice.
Because, really, what is appropriate about the situation? And by this she is thinking of the wider situation, not their own. This occupation is inappropriate. Unsanctioned. The requisition of homes across the city – some, unlike this one, in which families still live alongside the occupiers. Or the fact that there are some twenty half-clothed men lying in a room that used to be reserved
