‘I do not believe that.’
It is true that he has thought of this place as an escape. His time here has existed in provisional, fantastic space – cloaked in a semblance of duty but free from real responsibility. It has been circumscribed by the knowledge of the inevitable return. But what he feels for her might be the only real thing he has felt in his life.
‘We could not live here: I could not live with the shame. You would never be accepted. We could not live in your country, because I cannot leave.’
‘We would find some way.’
‘Your guilt would be with you, always. And my shame. I do not know much of your country, but I know enough to be certain that people would not forgive you for what you had done. I do not think you could forgive yourself. It is important for you to know that you are a good man.’
‘Not as important as other things.’
‘You would become a monster. To others, but more importantly to yourself.’ The force of her logic is suffocating, devastating. She is not finished. ‘We would come to hate each other.’
His vision is blurred. ‘I will come back.’
‘Do not say that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Do not say it, unless you can mean it. I do not think you can. There has been nothing between us of which we should be ashamed. You can go freely, without guilt. You have made no promise to me. So do not do so now.’
‘I mean it. I say it, because I mean it.’
He takes her hand; she does not resist. With one finger he traces a semi-circle in the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.
‘I will come back.’
The Prisoner
Mustafa Kemal and his army are coming for the city, a nation’s pride will be restored, a new state born from the ashes of the old. The Eyüp coffeehouse plotters will have their triumph over the occupiers. The occupation – a broken promise, a humiliation – will come to an end.
Despite everything, he has his freedom. But he is still a prisoner. He is not really here, in this city, nor in the prison camp in Egypt. He is back in the desert, seeing the faces that haunt his sleep every night. He has returned to hell. In truth, he has never really left.
He finishes his letter. It is short, but it has taken him most of the night. The apartment is quiet, sleeping.
He leaves it tucked beneath her latest work of embroidery. She will find it: but not too soon. He has not attempted to acquit himself. He has merely tried to get it all down, everything, even those things that should be too horrible to put into words. She has to know the extent of it; the danger. The things that he has done with his own hand – worse even than the fire. He wrote of the things that have happened to innocent, simple, country-living people. To children. In the name of a state growing strong.
This will not end because the war has ended. This is something older and deeper than that. There are those – I have spoken with them, called them my friends – who believe that if we are to move forward, to discover a new identity for ourselves, we must get rid of the elements that make us weak. Sameness is seen as strength: a unity of culture, belief, ethnicity. Anything that goes against sameness, therefore, is a threat.
He briefly considered telling her all of it, in person. He imagined asking for her forgiveness. Then he realised that whether she could give it or not was immaterial because he cannot forgive himself.
But perhaps there will be some venture toward understanding. Some comprehension of what a young man – not really a soldier at all … a schoolteacher – might, in the name of his state, in the name of honour and glory and victory and strength, be asked to do. How much he might be asked to give: an ever-increasing tally that ended with his humanity. Perhaps she will see that everything that has happened since has in some sense been an inevitable consequence of that.
It is also – thinking of the boy now – a warning.
You must find some way to make him safe – from people like me.
A quiet crossing, very early morning. There are no passengers upon the ferry to witness the strange sight of a young man clambering from the deck and lowering himself into the Sea of Marmara – entering the water with hardly a splash. To watch him striking out purposefully toward the island where the dogs had been banished, long ago, because the city no longer had any place for them.
The çay seller wonders, briefly, what has happened to the fare he was sure had embarked for Tophane and for whom he has now come looking, optimistically bearing his samovar, his tea glasses. The ticket collector wonders it too, but later, only when they have made a full circuit of the various stops and no one has disembarked. But by then there are new passengers climbing aboard, noise and chaos, change to be found and small children to be avoided on the perilous gangplank. And besides, it was very early – he rubs the sleep from his eyes – so he might have imagined it after all. He also considers the rather unsettling possibility that it could have been the brief corporeal appearance of a djinn, a bad spirit. He isn’t a superstitious man, but stranger things have been known to occur in a city as old as this.
So there is no one to witness the final voyage of the young man, striking out manfully at first toward the distant islands (an impossible distance, even for a good swimmer). And then the pace beginning to slacken as his limbs grow tired, his head held a
