She is silent.
‘Please. Tell me that you understand that.’
She nods. For a long time after she has left he sits as though stunned.
That night he lies awake. For perhaps the first time, he loathes the silence of this place. He would like to be back in Pera, with the clamour of the streets after dark, full of Rabelaisian scenes, comic and sordid and anonymous. Men go to forget themselves in those streets, whether from all that they have seen and known in the last few years, or from responsibilities at home. He has been there, and for both reasons. It would not work now, anyhow. Not unless he got extremely drunk. And he can get drunk here just as well as there. He climbs from his bed, and walks to the study. The treasured bottle of whisky is there upon the desk, as though waiting for him. He holds it up to the light. A third remains. Not quite enough to get so drunk as he would like, but it will do. He would like very much to forget the expression on her face when she had offered herself to him. He would also like to forget the thing he did, when he had no right. Her offer had been repugnant to him in the extreme, but she is not the one to blame for it. In making that gesture, in that moment of gratitude, he had forced it from her.
Nur
On the ferry back to the European shore she sat absolutely still, her gaze unmoving. To the casual observer she would have looked like one stunned by a new grief. It is such a common expression, has been for so many years now, that it is not worthy of special notice. Those passengers embarking and disembarking at the stops before her own stepped over and around her.
Something has broken, and it is her fault. The knowledge of it sits inside her. She cannot quite bring herself to recall the details of the exchange in the study – her mind can only feint toward it, then retreat, scorched. And yet she cannot leave it alone.
The expression he had worn when she had made her offer. The thing that shames her most is not the impropriety of it, though that is bad enough. It is the lack of truth in it. She knows that she would have given herself to him willingly.
Nur
‘He has been here every day, Nur canım. Asking to speak with you. I cannot imagine what the rest of the building thinks of us. An English soldier. It is not seemly.’
‘I know, Büyükanne.’
The old woman sits a little straighter in her chair, and fixes Nur with a gimlet eye. ‘I never thought that I would say this to you. I disapprove, heartily. But I think you should see him – if only to prevent him from destroying the door downstairs with his knocking. The humiliation of it!’
‘I cannot see him.’
‘Whatever there has been between you – and I know that it can be nothing, because you are a clever girl, and a widow, and of good family, and my granddaughter, and only imagine the shame of it – I think that you must. You owe it to him. He saved Kerem.’
‘I know, but—’
‘They are leaving, all of them. The British, the French, the Italians. It was announced this morning. I would not say this to you if it were not the case. But if you do not see him now it will remain with you forever, whatever it is. You will never be free of it. Do you understand?’
Together
She has come to see him. He should have known that it would be thus; on her terms.
There is so much to explain, and so little time in which to do so. The Allied scramble to leave now is something hasty, rather indecorous. They came into this city as conquerors, asserting their right to rule, seizing property, instruments of law, determined to remake it in their image. Now they are party guests fearful of overstaying the welcome of the host.
‘When do you leave?’
‘In the next couple of weeks. I have to arrange transport for the patients, first, make sure that they are properly accommodated.’
She tries to imagine the journey for the sick men – by rail, perhaps, or in the listing hold of a ship. But the distances of that journey are unfathomable, in her ignorance they dissolve into abstraction. He knows those distances well. He has conquered them – he has travelled their vastness to be here.
Then she realises that she is wrong: that perhaps she does know them. Not in the way he does, not by the memory-ache of muscles, the blistering of tired feet, the blur of landscapes seen and hazily retained. But she does know. Those distances are between them now, encompassed by only three feet of air. The gap in understanding. The spaces, unnavigable, between culture, history, religion, sex.
This, then, was why they can never fully understand one another – the thing that separates them just as efficiently as any geography. Hoping for anything else must be a kind of pitiful vanity.
He will take mementos with him, perhaps, like all the others. Trinkets bought in the Grand Bazaar. A few grainy memories in which the city may remain unchanged, eternal, stamped with permanence, but in which the faces will become blurred by time as the memory fades. Features will dissolve into confusion, and they will mean nothing to him.
George
He steels himself to begin.
‘That evening, when you came to me—’
‘I do not want to discuss it.’ She will not look at him. He can see her thinking: how can he shame her like this? Can he not understand her humiliation?
He has to explain. ‘I did not refuse you because I did not want to accept what you offered. It is difficult to express how much I wanted to. But I had a reason. Not just because
