Last Letter from Istanbul: Escape with this epic holiday read of secrets and forbidden love. Lucy Foley
the boys dressed up like little men, waiting for their father to return to them: a hero.
They were to take the Armenians further east, to the very edges of the Ottoman Empire, toward the border with Persia. These were their orders; from the highest echelons of the War Office in Constantinople. A ‘rehoming’: this was the term used, apparently. But the area to which they would be moved was known only for its hostility to life: a desert place, a no-place. No one could be expected to make a life there. Yet he could not summon the indignation that he expected to feel, that he might once have felt. It was as though the cold had got deep inside him and frozen any repository of emotion. There was a barrier beyond which he could not go; a numbness.
Besides, Babek had not been given the chance to live. And his old life had been taken from him. He had witnessed events that had changed him, irrevocably. So perhaps it was no unexpected thing that he could not find the empathy he might once have felt. At least these people would be given an opportunity to make a new life, slim though it was. Wasn’t that more than he and Babek and all those other frozen corpses had been allotted?
So he no longer complained, no longer questioned, when they marched into the desert with the elderly and very young, the sick, the unfit, the pregnant mothers and newborn babies.
‘I have something for you. Follow me.’
He stands, resenting the loss of the sun and his book, but curious.
Nur hanım leads him into the kitchen. There, on the stone counter a plucked chicken sits, nude and stippled. Beside it, a bowl of plump green figs. The figs on the tree here are over; she must have got them elsewhere. There is more. Excitement quickens in him. A jar half-full of honey, another – he reaches for it, waits for her to stop him. When she doesn’t, he sniffs it. Oil. Onions, firm and glossy gold. Several branches of some fragrant herb.
‘Thyme,’ she says, ‘the recipe asks for it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘I think I should be thanking you. I thought you would cook it for us.’ Her eyes go to the stove, where – not being tall enough to reach – he recently upset a pot of coffee. ‘We will cook it together.’
Nur hanım, who does everything so quickly, is the same with cooking. Though he has never done it before he knows it cannot be rushed. Such a thing requires reverence, patience … even a kind of love. He knows the method as well now as he knows his own name, as one might memorise poetry. Here is the onion to cut into delicate slices, the shape and slenderness of the new moon. He passes it to her and watches how she hacks into it with the knife, as though it has done her some personal injury. When she isn’t looking, he salvages the job himself. When it comes to cooking the slices gently just until they have turned clear she seems to stab at them with the spoon, bullying them over the heat in the skillet until they begin to crisp and brown. Next time, he thinks, he will ask her merely to light the oven for him: the one thing that he cannot do so easily. After a while she allows him to take over. He gives her only the simplest instructions: stripping the leaves from the woody stalks of thyme, washing the figs (which the recipe does not even ask for).
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