Courgette flowers, evanescently light, with white cheese and honey.
A salad of chopped herbs, lemon, oil, which is the precise taste of the colour green.
Pastry so fine it melts into nothing upon the tongue, leaving a delicate sheen of butter and sugar upon the fingers.
‘Grandmama’s stuffed cabbages’.
Chicken simmered with molten, dissolving figs.
My restaurant is called Stambol. Because that is what we called it, those of us who lived there, those of us to whom it belonged, who belonged to it. Constantinople was for the enemy, who could only understand it by the name that had been given to it by another Western conquerer.
Sometimes I feel a fraud. I am considered, through Stambol, to be a kind of expert on a place: or at least one specific element of its culture. The truth is that the version of the place as I knew it is now long out of date, a version preserved as though within a glass dome – utterly false. I am about to be confronted with the reality of this.
Food, for me, has always been a way of belonging. I know that this was what I was really trying to do when I opened the restaurant. It was more than the indulgence of passion and ambition, it was the creation of a place and time, somewhere in which I had once belonged. A resurrection. One critic wrote that he had travelled via the senses to somewhere he had never visited in life. ‘Each forkful,’ he wrote, ‘transported me, bodily, to a place of warmth and light, history and colour.’ This was a coup, especially from a man who tends to prefer starched tablecloths and French precision. But I was envious of him, too. Because try as I might – the most faithful interpretations, the most authentic, best-quality ingredients – I could never quite seem to make that journey myself.
A very English school. The dismay of greyish meat, boiled to stubborn tastelessness; khaki-coloured vegetables spouting lukewarm water. A lumpish beige-coloured rice pudding with an optimistic exclamation of raspberry jam. What I wouldn’t have done then for a little bag filled with spices and salt; a concoction that made anything palatable. This sorry fare tasted as bad as a clod of earth taken from the rain-sluiced sports field beyond the refectory window. But when you have known hunger – not the schoolboy meaning of ‘starving’ but the real thing – you do not refuse a single bite of anything. And there was also one small, embarrassing hope. Perhaps if I ate this food for long enough I would become like the other boys around me. My difference from them would be less visible.
But I could remember fresh almonds piled atop a cake of ice, the white flesh creamy and sweet. Figs, eaten straight from the trees, the nectar beading through the skin and sticky against the palms.
This book arrived on my eighteenth birthday. I told him I did not want it: that life, the old country, was part of the past now, a past from which I wanted to separate myself.
‘I understand your anger, but it is ill-placed. It was never her fault.’
‘She gave me up.’
‘She believed that she was saving your life. She may well have done so, for all we know.’ He smiled, then. ‘And her loss was my gain.’
‘She did not love me enough.’
‘She loved you too much.’
I must have looked unconvinced by this argument. He went away, and returned with a sheaf of old newspapers. ‘Part of me wishes that you never had to read these,’ he said. ‘But if it helps you to understand, then I think it may be necessary.’
I could not see how some miserable articles could help me do this. But then I began to read. About the Armenians: my people, though I had never thought of them as such. I learned of women and children forced to leave their homes carrying their worldly goods upon their backs to walk across a desert on their bare feet. I learned of villages and neighbourhoods set alight. Of unimaginable sights. A hillside of discarded, broken bodies, denuded and pitiful. Bloated corpses in a stream. Thousands of bones discovered beneath a thin layer of sand. I learned of the attempted annihilation of a people, a way of life: what had once been my people, my way of life. I learned that the little boy found in a burned building, who travelled alone across the entire breadth of Europe in a railway carriage – from one who loved him, to another who would love him – was one of the luckiest ones.
And he showed me a letter. I recognised the hand, because it was like my own. Its sender, after all, was the one who taught me to write in the first place.
I looked at him.
‘I show you all of this,’ he said, ‘not to cause more anger, or upset. It is because I want you to see that there were many sides in that war: not just two. There were elements that cannot be understood or explained even now, even knowing that in war terrible things happen, that people act in ways that cannot be understood.
‘She did it because she loved you. Can you see it now? If she had loved you a little less, and herself a little more, she would not have let you go.’
At the time, I was too caught up in my own distress and confusion – and also far too young – to consider what it must have been like for him. To get that letter, with its entreaty. To have to decide how he would answer it, this plea from the woman who had been so much to him. It must have changed his life. He was still a fairly young man, with a sick wife and now a small, traumatised boy to look after.
The loss was something he wore upon his person. Even if you had not known his story,
