No one to witness that involuntary struggle for air, the brief violence of it. Before the struggle subsides and the lungs are flooded and the eyes close and peace comes, perhaps, at long last.
The Traveller
After days of travelling – after interminable hours of unvarying countryside, of tedium and pains and longings for the journey to end, and fearing the end – the city itself comes as a surprise. I am not ready for it. I do not think I would have come back, of my own choosing. But I made a promise. We come first to the Sea of Marmara. Great rusty-hulled freighters in primary colours, either stilled at anchor or too huge and lumbering for one to see their movement. Shoals of smaller craft, sails scimitar-sharp. The light reflecting off the water is too bright – I have to turn away from it every few seconds. But then back to looking, waiting for the first glimpse, blind spots dancing in my vision.
In this sea are the islands. There, somewhere, is the beach from which the sand came. And which I will not visit, I think, for fear of it having been discovered, peopled, littered, transfigured.
Perhaps he would have gone back.
But I am not him. The Scottish doctor who was so unlike me, who no one would ever have mistaken for my father, yet who I learned to love like one.
Nur
In the weeks following the departure of the enemy, the liberation of the city, she has a great deal of time for thought.
There are celebrations. The city is liberated. A new, modern state will be born from the ruins of the old.
But she is not thinking of this.
She is not thinking of the other thing, either. She has known loss before. She understands the way in which it will work. It will be absorbed into the self, it will become a part of the self. A change will occur; mysterious, intangible, but definite. The person will be altered forever by it. But she will not think of that yet.
She is thinking of her brother’s letter. The evil of the deeds described there. Perhaps she would not have believed in it, not really, until then.
She would have ignored them, those other clues: Hüseyin’s warning, the sight George described in the desert, the children who disappeared from her classroom. Two fires. What was it that Hüseyin had said? That one could be too close to the thing to see it clearly. The idea – that she might have simply continued to overlook these signs, these portents – frightens her.
But reading Kerem’s confession, written by a man who had no reason to lie, destroyed by what he had done, she finally understands. She sees the full horror of it; she sees the danger. She sees that she does not have a choice.
Her skills as a correspondent do not match her abilities as a conversationalist. This is not the chief issue. There is also the fact that there is a great deal that cannot be said. They must be consigned to the realm of the impossible.
There is also the fact that her hand is shaking so violently that she cannot seem to make her fingers grip the pen properly. At times she has to press so hard, to control the shaking, that the pen makes small rips in the paper.
A first attempt has to be sacrificed, because the ink has run so badly it can no longer be read. The second time, she remembers to press her veil to her face so that she can protect the paper from her grief.
She finishes thus: I understand that this is a very great and difficult thing I ask of you. I would not ask it unless I believed it to be absolutely necessary. I would not want to ask it. I do so in the knowledge of my own very great personal loss.
She looks at this last sentence. Thankfully, it begins a new page. She discards it, and begins afresh. I understand that it is undoubtedly impossible. Nevertheless, I await your reply.
She signs her name.
This is how one story ends. But where another, possibly, begins.
The Traveller
We are nearing Sirkeci station.
I remember a small boy. The snow falling, transforming the city into the most beautiful, least real, version of itself. The echoing space of the terminus, others milling about, buying tickets. They walk to a small kiosk with a couple of tables, the two of them. A small, domestic scene.
They might have been mistaken for mother and son.
Beyond the station entrance the snow continues to fall. Blanketing the city, perfecting it. This is how it appears to a small boy who presses his hot face against the glass as the train departs the station. Already like somewhere not quite real. A place from a dream.
I open the old suitcase. It was old, this case, back then – when a small boy carried it beneath his arm, its weight unbalancing his stride.
I find the book, draw it out. It is so fragile that I have had to encase it between two wooden boards. The spine is broken so that some of the pages, of their own accord, would otherwise attempt to come loose.
It is of vital importance to my understanding of myself, and of my past. The contents have been my holy book, my way of belonging. And yet, though I have looked at it often, I have no real need to read the words upon the page. Since I was a very tiny boy I have had all of them committed to memory.
Every single dish at my restaurant has its origins in these pages. It felt absolutely necessary that this was the case.
Aubergine,
