Last Letter from Istanbul: Escape with this epic holiday read of secrets and forbidden love. Lucy Foley
idea came to him that they had been sent here to die.
It was said their enemy, the Russians, had fur-lined boots, thick greatcoats, astrakhan caps. Some of his fellow men, soldiers of the Mighty Ottoman Army, wore sandals. Some wore nothing at all: exposed flesh was dying, turning black. He was lucky to have kept his, thin-soled city shoes that they were.
To keep his mind off the cold he thought of home. He would summon to himself the memory of spring days beside the Bosphorus, light glancing from the water, the loud celebrations of the birds. The new warmth upon his face, the scent of things growing; the precise scent of the colour green. Then the drone of summer, a lazy spell cast by the heat, the city hazed with gold. He tried to remember the feeling of this. It was impossible to believe that there could have been such a thing as too hot: though he remembered his mother saying it, often, spending her days sheltered in the shaded cool of the sofa, emerging only with the respite of dusk. Colour, too, seemed an outlandish idea. Here was only the white of the snow and the grey of men’s faces and the black of their hair and occasionally the bluish tinge they got around their mouths and fingertips when things were bad with them. He remembered: the purple of a fig, split open. The rust-red sheet of his mother’s hair.
He had to believe he would return home, to that place of colour and warmth. There he had done the thing he had always felt himself born to do: to teach. The small satisfactions of his day: the walk to the school through the cobbled streets, his bag of books heavy on his arm. As he walked he would plan the day, the lessons, anticipate anything that might arrive; the miniature crises that occurred in a classroom populated by the very poor, by children who hardly spoke the language. The pleasure of knowing that something had been learned, despite all the odds.
How naive he had been to assume that his life would always be like this, that he would do the same thing until he grew old. A life in which he had never known fear, the particular taste of it in his throat. The joke of a man like him pretending to be a soldier.
There seemed to have been no consideration of how they might feed themselves properly – it seemed they were expected to live entirely on bazlama bread. Before the war it had been delicious; eaten with honey and butter, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee. He had not known how little taste it had on its own. Baked on sheets of iron in the villages, it was stuffed into sacks, loaded onto donkeys and brought to the front. By the time it reached them it had frozen. To warm it you had to put it beneath your jacket, against the skin, under the arms. You saw men shaking it from their sleeves, scrabbling on the ground for lost morsels. The colder they became, the more difficult it was to unfreeze the stuff.
‘If I could warm it between the thighs of a beautiful woman,’ Babek said. ‘That would be better than the finest honey.’ The other men had jostled him, groaned in mingled disgust and appreciation, and felt warmed by their shared laughter. Babek grinned; he enjoyed a crowd. ‘But a man’s unwashed armpit – even if it is my own unwashed armpit … that has to be the worst seasoning imaginable.’
Babek was his friend. They met in the enlistment centre at the beginning of the war. None there were soldiers by training. Just ordinary men selected by the bad luck of their birth dates, ready to be forged into heroes. Babek had turned to him as they waited in line. As a barber, he said, all his experience had been about how not to injure someone, how not to spill their blood, and here he was about to learn how to kill a man. It wasn’t a very funny joke. But he heard the tremor of fear in the barber’s voice, fear that matched his own, and knew the bravery it took to make it at such a time.
They were opposites – Babek was the clown while he knew he was seen by others as too serious. He was nineteen, Babek was thirty, and seemed older. As though he had seen the world and everything in it and had not been particularly impressed by any of it: though found enough humour in it to get by. But he knew that there was greater depth to Babek. He might seem foolish, happy-go-lucky, but there was that bravery, too.
Once, when they were being taught how to fire the ancient rifles the army had provided, Babek had been caught in the shoulder by a glancing bullet, knocked to the ground with a huff of surprise, nothing more. All of them stood mute, watching as the wound bloomed with red. It was the first sign of blood any of them had seen. Perhaps it was just the shock that had kept him from crying out. But after that day, everyone who had been there had a new veneration for him, the thin, awkward man who managed to escape ridicule simply by being the first to laugh at himself.
Babek had a wife. For all his ribaldry about other women, it was she he talked of constantly – though not to the other men, in case they thought him soft. And children: two little boys and a baby on the way when he left. If it was a girl, they had decided, they would call her Perihan – a name like a flower, or a princess from the old days. His wife had the most beautiful hands, he said, she moved them like white birds when she talked. Even before he lifted the veil to look at her face for the first time he saw those eloquent hands and he knew.
They had come to see him off at the sidings of the railway track – his wife invisible beneath a charshaf and veil, the boys dressed like miniature men in their best clothes and fezzes. They waved handkerchiefs. They had looked particularly small and helpless down there beneath the bank, seen through a cloud of steam from the train, dwarfed by the great machine as it thundered above them on its way to war. Perhaps Babek had felt this too, because he had suddenly looked uncharacteristically sombre and his eyes had gleamed wetly.
‘I wish they had not come,’ Babek said, as though to himself. ‘It would have been better if they had not come.’
Once upon a time, in another world, he himself had been a schoolteacher. He had imagined a small life for himself. Not the one his parents had hoped for him: he was not made for the world of government, or medicine. But perhaps this life could be great in its own way, even heroic. What better gift than that of knowledge? For the rich learning was just an embellishment, another asset among many others. For the poor, it could represent the promise of a different life.
But that was another life, as remote as if it had happened to another man. He had once known the children in his class so well that he understood each of their idiosyncrasies as well as he did his own. How Kemal began to swing one leg before he was tired, how Arianna looked at a stain on the ceiling when asked a question, as though she would read the answer there, how Enver spent most of every class looking out of the window, which was infuriating, but if challenged could recite the whole lesson word-for-word. Now he could hardly remember what any of them looked like. They were slipping from him, he was untethered from that life. His world had shrunk to this white void, driven only by hunger and fear, the animal instinct to survive. And this was what they said it meant to be a hero.
Within this blindness of snow one became very aware of the internal world. Of the rhythm of the heart in the chest. The beat of blood in the ears. But the extremities no longer seemed his own. His numbed feet felt … not like feet, but something else, two thin jeweller’s razors upon which the full weight of his body could not possibly balance. They did not want to obey him. Beneath the snow was compacted into ice, and with every few yards gained he seemed to slip back several more. The fury of the snow. It felt a personal fury, vindictive. It whipped the cheeks like a lash and he began to long for the time when his face, too, would cease to feel.
A few days into the offensive Babek had begun to look unwell. He had always been thin, no matter how much he ate, and there had been so little food at the front. All of them had lost weight, but he had had none to lose in the first place. His lips had begun to turn bluish, the nail-beds of his bare hands. His breath rattled when he talked or even breathed, as though something had come loose inside his chest.
When he made his jokes now they did not always make sense … the words were disordered as though something in his mind was not connecting properly. He would never say this to Babek, though, because he did not want to frighten him, and because he did not want to give a voice to his own fear. So when Babek finished one of his nonsensical jokes, and waited with that expectant look – this at least was familiar – he laughed just as hard as he ever had. Harder, probably. If Babek suspected any fakery in this he did not mention it.
One man in the company – a southerner – had lost his genitalia to frostbite