Last Letter from Istanbul: Escape with this epic holiday read of secrets and forbidden love

George

The Prisoner

George

The Prisoner

George

Nur

George

Nur

Nur

Together

George

Then

Nur

George

The Prisoner

The Traveller

Nur

The Traveller

A Note on Names

Acknowledgements

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VICTORIOUS ALLIES IN CONSTANTINOPLE! (#ueb7ed347-404c-51d1-84c3-1c4f8f42a939)

Today, November 13, 1918, the Occupation of Constantinople began. The vanquished Ottoman Empire, which ill-advisedly threw its lot in with the German campaign, must now yield to a victorious Allied force.

British ships entered the famed Golden Horn, having travelled through the Dardanelles on Tuesday – passing right by the fateful beaches of the infamous battle of Gallipoli three years ago. A disaster for Allied forces, perhaps, but also for the then victorious Ottoman army. It was upon these same beaches that it spent the flower of its youth, a loss from which it would never recover.

Reaching the famous Golden Horn, forces numbering nearly 3,000 British, some 500 French, and 500 Italian soldiers landed immediately and occupied military barracks, hotels, houses, Italian and French schools, and hospitals. There these men will remain until the Allied administrative machine can be set up and the requisitioning of private homes begins, and order can be restored to this war-beleaguered city. These men will not return to their families like the vast majority of their soldierly compatriots. Instead they will remain thousands of miles from home in execution of this noble endeavour.

THE ENEMY ENTERS STAMBOUL

Today, November 13, 1918, enemy ships arrived in our great city, flower of our Empire. This move by the so-called Allies is in express contradiction to promises that they would not seek an occupation of Ottoman lands. Fortunately the Ottoman people have long ago learned to doubt the word of our Western European counterparts.

Men, women and children observed the advancing ships from the banks of our beloved Golden Horn, sorrow in their hearts. Some of those men had fought a valiant battle in 1915 against the ‘Allies’ on the shores of Gallipoli, losing many comrades in the process but emerging from the conflagration with victory and great honour. To see their vanquished enemy follow them here, ready to lay claim to their city and requisition their homes if the fancy should take them, is the greatest imaginable indignity.

PART ONE (#ueb7ed347-404c-51d1-84c3-1c4f8f42a939)

CONSTANTINOPLE

1921

THREE YEARS OF ALLIED OCCUPATION

Nur (#ueb7ed347-404c-51d1-84c3-1c4f8f42a939)

Early morning. In a room above the dockyards of the Bosphorus, a woman sleeps. Her hair, a long black skein of it, has tangled itself about her in the rough seas of the night. She forgot to tie it back as she usually does. Too tired. Above her head an arm is flung in a bodily abandon never shown by day. Her fingers splay, her palm open as though in supplication.

Quiet, save for the self-important ticking of a clock: a dark wood, rather brutish affair. MADE IN ENGLAND. It is conspicuous, perhaps, because there is so little furniture in the room beside it and the low divan with its sleeping human cargo. There was furniture: one can still see the darker impressions upon the floor which the sunlight has not yet been able to fade. Of rugs, too, far finer than the rather workaday affair that remains. Kilim from Anatolia, soumak from Persia.

The sun is coming. It crests over the sward of green on the opposite bank of the Bosphorus, and smooths itself across the water like so much spread butter. Now it touches Europe. In the space of a few minutes it has spanned two continents; a daily miracle. It gilds the ugly mechanical detritus of the docks. It reaches the room with its sleeper. In the fetid air another small miracle occurs: the suspended layer of dust becomes a dancing mass of fine gold particles.

No matter how frequently this apartment is cleaned, the dust remains. It may be to do with the age of the building, or the fact that it is entirely made from wood that over the years has weathered days of rain, broiling heat, frost and snow. Has shrunk and grown and warped and breathed, active as the living thing it once was.

Now the light has slunk up onto the bedclothes, finds sleeping toes beneath a funnel of material. A pattern of embroidered pomegranate, inexpertly but vividly done. The colours are almost a match for the real fruits that will ripen on the trees in a garden across the water. The red seeds of the split fruits become a pattern, marching along the border of the quilt; gold thread forms the fibrous strands between them.

Now the light reaches the tangled strands of hair. In the shade they appeared black – now they reveal themselves as various shades of brown, caught in places as bright as that gold thread. The light gathers itself for the final occupation: advancing up the neck, the fine bones of the jaw, the slightly open mouth, the prow of the nose, the eyelids …

Nur wakes. Pink light. She opens her eyes. White. She sits up, groggy, wipes her mouth. A restless night’s sleep. What woke her, in the small hours? A bad dream. She cannot recall the details now. The more she grasps at them the faster they sink, like creatures burrowing into sand. She is left only with the feeling of it, a lingering unease. More unsettling, this not-knowing. She rises, looks at the day. Across the flat rooftops she can just make out the water, a coruscation of light. She will shake this feeling from her by breakfast, she is certain. For what can there be to upset one on a morning like this?

Oh. A pause. Something is missing. Now it happens to her, as it does every morning. The remembering of all that has changed. She feels the knowledge resettle itself upon her shoulders – familiar, almost reassuringly so. For at least now she has found it again, knows the weight of it. It is far worse than the invention of any mere bad dream.

In the next room, someone is making coffee. The scent of it is like the day itself; intimations of warmth and comfort. She can hear the particular musical note of the copper pot as it strikes the stove. She thrusts her feet into her worn babouches, shuffles out into the corridor. Leaning up, chin just clearing the top of the stove where the pot exhales a dangerous plume of steam, is a small figure. The boy. He looks up at her, caught between pride and guilt. Then he smiles.

She cannot quite bring herself to be angry with him. The boy is like a different child from that of two years ago. Often, in that time, she would find him in the mornings lying upon his back with his eyes open, and wonder if they had ever closed, or if he had merely spent the night watching a projection of horrors upon the ceiling. He began to eat, at least. But there was something mechanical in it, the way he took the food and chewed, and swallowed, and opened his mouth for the next bite. It was a keeping alive, the pure instinct of an organism.

For a long while there had been no glimmer of the boy he had been. She wondered if that child had sunk completely from view – never to return. There were things that could change a person absolutely. And in childhood one was more malleable, more impressionable; the change might be all the more devastating.

She takes her cup up onto the flat roof of the building. This is her secret place; she does not think any of the other inhabitants of the apartment block know of it. Here the day cannot touch her yet. She is mistress of it. The morning is clear, still cool. But there is the promise of heat. The water is eloquent. There is a shimmer of warmth on the horizon, too, the clouds massing above are saffron-coloured.

She takes a sip of coffee. He has made it well, far better than her grandmother, who thinks herself above the making of coffee and always burns it.

The day is still as a painting. It is hard to imagine that down there is movement, chaos. But she can hear it: the waking sounds of the streets, the call of the milk seller, the faraway shouts of stevedores on the quay, the fishermen beginning to hawk the catch of the day. From a short distance away the rattle and whine of a tram. From the nearby district of Pera, some two hundred yards to the west, there comes the thin wail of a violin – relic of a night’s revelries.