I could at least see that he was a different man to the one I had known in the old place. There he had been more vivid: ruddied by the sun, full of humour. The man who met me on the platform seemed diminished. I assumed this was England at first. I felt myself shrinking as I got off that train and stepped into the yawning greyness of that vast old English station, the grey English day beyond, the cold tight about me as though it were trying to press me into the shape of its choosing. But I don’t think it was that, looking back. It wasn’t because of what he had returned to. It was because of all that he had left behind.
Later, something else would occur to me. If it were not for me, the promise he made to keep me safe, he might yet have gone back to her.
I have wandered the streets of this city so many times in my mind that it is hard to believe they are quite real, that this is not all merely the work of my imagination. But there are changes: cars, more people … more speed. In the distance a bristle of skyscrapers that dwarf the minarets of the Blue Mosque, and yet are somehow held in thrall by it. The future still has a long way to go here to match up with the past.
Halfway across the wide and tranquil channel of water, on the juddering passenger ferry, I realise that my hand has found the tobacco tin within my bag and is holding it tight. It provides a strange comfort.
I see, with a shock, a dark-haired woman on the terrace: a young woman, reading. I feel a powerful sense of trespass. As I approach, picking my way along the path that leads to the front of the house, I see her look up, put away her book, stand up.
I tell her who I am looking for. The old language is sticky and unwieldy in my mouth. My adopted tongue has almost suffocated it. But she seems to understand.
‘She’s inside.’
‘Oh.’ I feel a thrill of something almost like fear. ‘You are her daughter?’
She laughs. ‘Hopefully I do not seem quite that old.’
I realise my mistake. She can only be thirty years old. But for the first time I realise, really understand, what this means. The person I have really been expecting to see is the woman I remember, exactly as I last saw her, who would have been a similar age, I suppose, to this stranger.
‘I was a pupil of hers,’ she says. ‘A long time ago. Now I work as a translator, for a publisher here. But when I heard that she was ill I came to look after her. I owe her a great deal.’
‘So was I: a pupil. Even longer ago. I think I may owe her even more.’
She gives me a long, appraising look. ‘I think I know who you are.’
We step inside. My first thought is that it is smaller than I remembered. Not a palace, after all. It seems very empty, too: the long room that had once been filled with beds, prone forms, the bustle of nurses. But this is a house in which memory is. In which they – all of them, all who have been here – seem only to be in the next room. Not ghosts so much as echoes, ancient reverberations of the stone.
‘I should warn you. She is no longer quite herself.’
The room is the one in which he lay for all those months: that boy who both is and isn’t myself. One of the smallest in this large house, perhaps, but with the best view of the Bosphorus.
The figure upon the divan is unrecognisable to me. I do not know what I had expected: the same eyes, perhaps, or the same quick, clever hands – even if the rest had changed. But the eyes are closed, and the hands folded upon the bedspread are unfathomably aged, clawed and spotted. I could far more easily believe that this is the old woman I knew all those years ago. So grand and proud, who terrified me into ruining a dish of stuffed cabbages; such a memory haunts a chef forever. But logic tells me that of course she is long departed. These, then, are the changes that time has wrought. I should not be surprised. For what resemblance do I bear, plump and grey, slightly balding, to the small quick boy who lay here not so long ago?
I know that it is her; that must be enough. But she looks so still: a saint upon a bier. I have to watch, carefully, for the gentle rise and fall of the sheet.
If I had only come a little earlier …
But it would never have happened. I would never have done so of my own accord. It had to be him; with his undeniable request. His command. And there is no purpose in dwelling upon such things. Life is not symmetry, or pattern, however much we try to see these within it, in the stories we tell of it. It is ragged, misshapen, endlessly frustrating. But perhaps there is beauty in that too.
They loved me. This I know.
I reach for her hand, then pause. I feel an imposter, an uninvited guest. But then these are the hands that I reached for stumbling along cobbled streets, that felt for the fever upon my brow, that smoothed a sheet, that rumpled hair. That carried me from a burned house, into a new life.
I take her hand.
It is surprisingly warm, though I cannot tell if this is the blood beneath the skin, or simply borrowed from the diamond of winter sunlight that has fallen
