There is a kind of sanctity in the silence in the room that I am fearful to shatter. Then from the water comes the loud, rude sound of a ship’s horn, shattering it. It is like the starting klaxon: the permission that I have unknowingly sought.
I tell her of the boy’s journey. The train, the strangers, the mountains. The terrifying crossing of the grey sea. The arrival in the great old English city. The enemy city: now home. The man waiting to greet him. Smaller, somehow, without his military khaki. I tell her of the school in the English countryside – the teachers who could have learned from her. I tell her of the restaurant. I do not tell her of the woman, the invalid wife, who even a small boy could see had something broken inside her.
I cannot tell whether I cause pleasure, or pain, or indeed whether I am heard at all.
‘I understand,’ I say, ‘what you did.’
I look out again, through the trees toward the water, a silver irradiation.
What can never be known for certain is how much danger I would have been in if I had stayed. By most accounts, the genocide – the name they found for it – ended around the time the new state rose from the ashes of the Empire. I might have been one of the lucky few. But that was not a risk, in her love for me, that she was willing to take.
Nearer at hand a flock of tiny birds moves as one, like blown leaves. I wonder what it is I am trying to gain from this. I feel a movement, faint but unmistakable, beneath my fingers. And one of the small, gnarled hands – lifted slowly, as though it is a very great weight – comes to rest over my own. The warmth is from the skin, after all.
I have come back here for him, at his behest. He left no room for dissent. He knew that if he did not ask me to make this journey, did not make it impossible for me to refuse, I would not have had the courage on my own.
I want to tell her about him. I want to tell her about the relics, the things he kept from that time: our shared inheritance. The hours he would spend in his study in silent contemplation of that photograph, this house, with the attitude of a man at prayer. But I do not want to cause her pain.
‘Nur,’ I say, instead: her name at once foreign and familiar. ‘I have brought him back.’
I leave her, now. I step through the doors that lead outside, I step down onto the stone jetty. I take the painted tin from my pocket.
It had to be love.
A man, and especially a man like him, the man who became my father, does not ask for his final remains to be delivered to a place he knew so long ago upon the basis of a whim, a fond memory.
I raise my hand. The Bosphorus waits beneath me. Patient, eternal, curious. It has come from the Black Sea. It will find its way, now, out to the Sea of Marmara, to those mysterious islands where once he swam in water clear as air.
I let go.
A Note on Names
If you know a little about Istanbul’s history, you might be aware that at the time of this novel’s setting, the city was, in Western European parlance and in some official Ottoman usage, known as Constantinople. You’ll see the British characters in the book refer to it as such. Istanbul was its official designation after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, and other countries were exhorted to refer to it as such. The name, however, was not by any means new. It had been used in common parlance before and during the Ottoman Empire. In fact, etymologically, the name ‘İstanbul’ can be translated to literally mean ‘the city’ or ‘in the city’ from the Greek phrase, στην Πóλη.
This perhaps gives you an idea of its huge importance as a metropolis throughout the ages: it was the city – no need to refer to it as anything else! Nur and her family would almost undoubtedly have referred to it as İstanbul.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to editor extraordinaire Kim Young, Charlotte Brabbin, Ann Bissell, Hannah O’Brien, Isabel Coburn, Emma Pickard, Rebecca McNamara, Rhian McKay, Charlotte Webb, Niccolò de Bianchi and the wider team at HarperCollins for the great passion and skill you have shown in the publication of all my books. An exciting few years await!
To Cath Summerhayes, my fabulous agent (and Cath’s wonderful mum – one of this book’s first readers!), Katie McGowan, Irene Magrelli and all at Curtis Brown.
To my darling mum, for accompanying me on my research trip, clambering through ruined buildings with me in forty-degree heat and drinking cocktails on a rooftop above the city into the small hours!
To my beloved dad, who read this book very early on and proclaimed it his favourite yet!
To my family and friends, for your incredible ongoing support – for buying copies, reading them (!) and sharing the love.
To the Imperial War Museum, for its excellent archives, wherein I discovered diaries and letters from men billeted to the city during the occupation and glimpsed the human stories
