All of these things, suddenly, seem so much more inappropriate than the simple act of moving in time to music with a person one has come to see – against the odds – almost as a friend. She thinks, too, of all the people so desperate to disapprove of her, simply because she goes out into the city to earn her living, because she does not cover her face. She remembers the shame of passing those French officers, the way they had seemed to view her presence in the street as a mark of promiscuity, of permissiveness.
It is this memory, most of all, that decides her. If there is one place in which she will not allow the concept of propriety – of inappropriateness – to dominate her actions it is here. Her home.
This is why she shakes her head, and says, ‘No. You are mistaken. I would like to dance.’
The doctor is taken aback. It is as though he never thought she would accept his invitation or – more likely – never quite meant to make it in the first place. It was the music, perhaps, the strange magic of an entire invisible orchestra filling the empty space. The still air in the room now seems like a held breath. Does the house disapprove of her? This house is part of the former way of things, and that world, certainly, would disapprove. But the old world is gone. If, when, the occupation ends, there will be no resumption, no wholesale return to the old ways. That world has fractured. They must find a new way. They must re-inhabit it.
The doctor removes the Stravinsky, and chooses a new record.
‘A waltz,’ he says, and then flushes, as though he has said something indecent. He places the new disc upon the spindle. She thinks she sees his hand tremble in the action. The mechanism itself: the elegant curvature, the burnish of the brass, the dark recess of the horn, seems newly to acquire an eroticism that embarrasses her – that seems so emphatic she cannot believe she had not seen it before. He must see it too.
That half-buried night with her dead husband. The fumbling darkness and then the surprise of a new sensation shameful, voluptuous, complex, insisting on itself through the discomfort. Not quite anything in itself but the shadow of something, the promise of it.
He takes her hand in one of his, places the other above her hip. His touch is so light that if she could not see her fingers in his, against her waist, she might think she had imagined it. And yet for a moment she is pinioned by shame. She thinks of her grandmother. She thinks of Kerem. All certainty has deserted her.
Then the music begins and she steps into it.
George
Ah. Now, here is a problem. He has managed to think of her in terms entirely unrelated to the physical. But now there is scent and warmth and breath, and her hand, in his. The soft indentation of a waist beneath the silky stuff of the dress. Now is the unarguable fact of her, human and … yes, beautiful, yes, desired.
Even if it had not been so long – and all of that fraught in memory with difficulty and guilt – even then he would desire her.
He is a coward. He has ignored this aspect of himself, concealed those other motivations even from his own sight. He is a coward because he asked her to dance, when it should never have happened, and because he will not put a stop to it now, though he should do so immediately and perhaps salvage something from this intact.
He is a coward because he has allowed her to think him good, and noble, and not like others. He has hidden the truth of himself from her.
The Boy
They think that he is asleep. But he knows how to be quiet, as quiet as a cat. He has slunk so silently from his own room and into this one that he might be just another one of the evening shadows gathering in the corners. The music is pouring from the wonderful machine. Nur hanım and the doctor stand very close together and her hand is in his. The two of them move together with the same kind of magic that holds a formation of birds in perfect synchronicity. It is pleasing to watch them, as it is pleasing to watch anything graceful, but he senses that there is also something dangerous in it. He is reminded of that day when Nur hanım had suddenly seemed so small to him, surrounded by the other people in the street, and he had been afraid for her. He is afraid for her now – though, again, he would not be able to explain why.
Nur
That night she wakes from strange dreams. The unconscious world of them so lucid that the real one seems thin by comparison. But as with so many dreams they are elusive. She cannot summon them to herself logically, or in any complete form. She is left only with a feeling. She would rather forget this too.
She presses a hand to her face and finds it hot. As she does she feels, more vividly than she does her own, the sensation of another’s fingers. As she rises from beneath the sheet she remembers the weight of a body. Not a suffocation, a longed-for weight. No, she reminds herself: longed-for only within the realm of the dream. And more: the warmth and tenderness of skin. Of breath, of blood beneath the skin, of lips, of hair. There is a rhythm to these images, they seem to chase one another through her memory without end, a serpent
