Last Letter from Istanbul: Escape with this epic holiday read of secrets and forbidden love. Lucy Foley
three weeks before her wedding. She is trying to fix the moment in her mind, because she knows it will be one of the last evenings like this. How many suppers have there been like this? Hundreds? Thousands? The ease of not having to make conversation – though soon her grandmother will light a cigarette and perhaps begin the gossip with which she likes to round off an evening. Or her father, flush from the wine that his religion and his mother frown upon, may decide to make a little speech. He has been particularly affectionate this evening: several times the candlelight has caught the gleam of tears in his eyes. He has talked this evening of love and family, of how special she is to him – of his only daughter, his little rose. Nur thinks she understands … he fears the change as much as she does. She does not know the full truth yet. That this morning he evaluated his symptoms, as objectively as he was able, and realised that he would probably not live to see his daughter wed.
She eats a morsel of fig, savours the rich sweet juice. The first fruits of the season are always a revelation of flavour.
Beneath the murmur of voices around the table comes a sound, faint at first, carried across to them from the other side of the water like strange thunder. And then growing, seeming to swell in the silence as a fire feeds upon air. Whatever it is, it is loud. Few sounds reach them from the city here. Here they are protected. Even before they have understood what the sound is there is an ominousness in its insistence. It has silenced all talk. They are hardly breathing, so intently are they listening.
They come for the new recruits with drums too. A marching band, the flag held high. It is – yes – rather exciting. Her grandmother, always an aficionado of pomp and circumstance, is delighted. They watch Kerem leave with this grand train, blushing at all the fuss being made for him. A schoolteacher turned soldier: such a strange idea! The crowd sings the old song. For the first time Nur hears the words properly: ‘Oh wounded ones I am coming to take your place and my heart is crying because I am leaving my beloved ones …’
She goes to see him the next day as the recruits leave the building in Sirkeci for a temporary camp on the Black Sea. He has the eyes of a sleepwalker. He smiles at her, but he hardly seems to see her. She wonders if it all feels as unreal to him as it does to her.
‘You’ll come home soon,’ she tells him. ‘They have said it will be over quickly.’ This is true. But then there had been a time, too, when they thought that he would not be called up at all. They came for the older age groups first – many of them veteran soldiers, battle hardened. The same drums of war. The Bekçi Baba – the warden – calling out his summons in the streets: ‘Men born between 1880 and 1885 must report to the recruitment centre within a day. Who fails to do so will suffer the consequences of the law.’
Now they have come for those of her brother’s age – the youngest group. But it will not be a proper war, everyone says.
‘They say,’ she tells Kerem, ‘that it will be over by Eid al-Adha, in the autumn.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I know. I’ll come home with some stories to tell. I suppose I have always wanted to travel a little.’
There is an unreality to it all, at first, that makes it feel rather exciting, almost romantic. Brave Young Men will go to war and return transformed: Heroes of the Empire.
So when her grandmother asks, later: ‘Did he look handsome in his uniform?’ it seems only right to nod and say that he had looked very smart indeed. ‘And his boots,’ her mother adds, ‘did they look up to much?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Nur says. ‘Excellent quality.’ She has always hated lying – she is bad at it. The truth is that he had been wearing his own clothes, his own insubstantial city shoes. The only thing that was correct in the description she gave them was that he had been carrying his bag, stitched by her mother and filled with food, woollen socks and gloves, clean underthings.
When she imagines him at the very end – which she cannot stop herself doing – she sees him wearing these pitifully inadequate clothes, those thin-soled shoes. The shoes of a schoolteacher. A gentle, genteel man in a world utterly hostile to him.
When they found him he had been cradling Babek as though he were his own dead child. The officer in charge had informed him, graciously, that he would not write this up in his official report: it was not quite seemly. What he would write was that Babek had: ‘died in proud service of his country, a hero of the Empire’. There: that would be something for his wife and children.
On that train south he had caught sight of himself in the glass and seen how the cold had disfigured him into someone he did not recognise. He had grown so thin that his skull seemed to be only loosely covered by a thin layer of skin: his near-death writ large upon his body. But there was more than this: his eyes had changed. Perhaps it was just the reflection, but he thought he saw in them a new absence, something that the place had taken from him and might not give back. It frightened him, the sense of distance he felt looking at this stranger. Where was the man he had been? The cold seemed to have killed some invisible part of him as efficiently as it had destroyed visible flesh: the ends of his toes, the pads of his fingers, the scabrous patches on his face, and even the tip of his nose – black as a mark of punctuation, the cold’s little joke. That young schoolteacher, who seemed now like a person he might once have briefly met.
The Red Crescent medical officer who treated him had seen worse cases, though.
‘Worse how?’
‘Oh. Well – the ones who have lost whole limbs, of course. And then there are the ones who die. You’ll be all right.’
He wondered what this meant, exactly. He got his answer quickly enough: it meant that he was whole enough to join a new regiment in the south, below Lake Van. Here, their principal enemy was no longer the Russians.
It was quite simple, his new commanding officer explained. The Armenians had betrayed them. Now they had to leave Ottoman lands. There were two options. They had to be encouraged to go, leaving their villages after collecting the possessions and food they would need for the journey eastwards, toward Mesopotamia, or they had to be forced.
‘All of the Armenians?’ he asked the officer. ‘Have they all turned against us?’
There had been children in his class who were Armenian – one of his favourite pupils, a small boy – had been Armenian. Then he thought of the man who had betrayed them. He thought of Babek. But these were simple people, weren’t they? Their villages were sleepy, unremarkable places: the bleat of a goat, the wail of an infant, the constant low drone of the heat. Where the most dramatic things that happened was a wild dog running amok in the chicken coop, the occasional modest wedding, the death of an old man. They had lived like this for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of years. These people, surely, knew nothing of grand deceptions. It was unclear whether they even knew much about the war until these men of the Ottoman army had descended into their midst and ordered them to begin packing their bags.
‘To remove the cancer,’ the officer told him. ‘We must remove everything. You think these people wear a uniform, to tell us, helpfully, that they’re the ones to look out for? They’re a little more clever than that. They work in the shadows. That’s what makes them so deadly. But we have the element of surprise now. They have no idea what’s coming for them.’
This was certainly true. The villagers had simply stared at them as they gave them their orders – even after they had been translated into the local dialect. When they had eventually assembled at the muster points – after threats both shouted and administered with the butt of a rifle – many had come empty-handed, without the possessions they had been ordered to collect. It was as though they did not believe any of this could be quite real.
‘But most of these people,’ he said to the commanding officer, ‘the ones we’re actually moving … they seem to be all women, old men, children. Surely we should be looking for young men?’
‘Look – what’s your name? These orders come from the very top. Oh. And you do know the penalty for disobeying