The bedroom, of course, is empty. And yet at the same time it is strange to find herself alone.
She knows that these are not real memories. They are not of the husband she hardly knew, and lost.
Nur sits, and waits for the shame. It is something of a surprise when it does not come.
Now, in this unguarded hour, her mind feints toward the impossible: plays with it, turns it over, teases it out. And in doing so there are brief inversions by which it ceases to appear impossible. It is madness to think like this. There has been no spoken understanding between them. Yet at times it feels as though there has been something both less and more than that.
In the early morning she takes a ferry to her secret place. Amidst the cemetery at Eyüp, among the figs and cypresses – life and death – time seems to stand still. The city is very far away here. There is a melancholy, as there must be in such a place. But also peace. In the avenues among the tombs the light is green and ancient. The old white marble is tinged by it.
Some of the graves are hundreds of years old, the stones seem to sag with the effort of such a long stretch standing upright. Names now are obscured by time; all those who once remembered them are long gone, too. This is the real death, perhaps, when one is gone entirely from living memory.
But here one is close to the past. Sometimes, here, she feels if she reached out her hand she might brush away the thin veil that separates the now from the then.
The fig leaves, as she moves past them, release their scent. It is her favourite smell. She takes a folded leaf and crushes it to her wrist to release the meagre sap, just to keep the fragrance with her a little longer.
A grey cat follows her out from behind a tombstone, mewling. He has a white smear across one eye, comic, as though he has rubbed his face in paint. She bends down to him. His coat is surprisingly silken for a stray: there is a pride, she thinks, in the way he cleans himself, meticulous, with that rough pink tongue. Only his once-white paws, now permanently grey, are a testament to a life spent trotting about the refuse and dust of the city’s streets.
Now he stops, delicate nose aloft, and goes absolutely still. She wonders what has spooked him. Another cat, probably.
They have terrible fights at night, the city’s cats. Fights that sound as though they go almost to the death, so loud and anguished are the cries. But she has never seen any of them with anything much worse than a scratch. They are wise animals, they know how to keep themselves alive. A bad wound would fester, could prove fatal. The important thing is not to invite the danger in the first place. Everyone could learn from them. She could learn from them.
She bends and he allows her to caress his ears, the delicate bones in the side of his face. His eyes close in brief bliss, he presses his skull with surprising force into her hand. Then he pulls away, stretches first front-then hindquarters, watches a leaf skitter across the ground, momentarily alert, settles himself on the patch of dirt immediately before him, closes his eyes. To be an animal, she thinks: to go about one’s business as always and eat and sleep and be content. Nur takes another step. It must be just the wrong movement, she yelps with pain. The cat opens one quick amber eye, searching the ground for the small prey that might have made the sound. Disappointed, he shuts it again.
She bends and massages the ankle bone. The pain reminds her of another stumble. A dropped book, an English soldier. Scottish, she reminds herself. A Scottish doctor. That was what started it all, of course. Most unhelpful of him to make himself agreeable – firstly by his act of gallantry in picking up her book, and second by not embarrassing her on the jetty. It was so much simpler when she could hate them all universally, absolutely.
She pulls a fig from the branch above her, and knows because of the force with which she has to tug that it is not ready. It is far too early. A sticky sap spills itself onto her forearm. She bites into it, and the taste is as bland as she deserves, the unripe sourness puckering her lips. But the promise of what could be is there, in the fragrance of it. She casts it away.
She takes the long ferry home to Tophane. Rounding the nub of the headland she can just make out the white shape of Maiden’s Tower. Kız Kulesi, a small, lonely edifice rising from the sea two hundred yards or so from the Asian shore. The story is one of those fables so well known to Nur that it might almost be part of her own family history. And yet she still remembers the first time she heard it. They had been passing by in the kayık, on their way home, and her grandmother had pointed it out to her.
‘Can you see it?’
‘Yes,’ Nur had replied. ‘But it isn’t a very big tower.’ Not like the one in Galata, built by the Italians who had once been here. From which you could see the whole city laid out before you, right to the ancient walls. And beyond: the distant dark humps of the Princes’ Islands, the vertebrae of a sea-serpent’s spine, slumbering in their blanket of mist. She doubted that one could see much at all from this small, squat edifice, and surely that was the very purpose of the tower?
‘Ah,’ her grandmother said. ‘But that is because it was only made to fit one person, you see. And it wasn’t so much about looking out as keeping in. I think you
