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

Before, she never considered this area, Tophane, as somewhere one might live. It was a nowhere – an afterthought, clinging to the coattails of the great city, a place where the different neighbourhoods inevitably met up with one another, their great streets coming together like so many loose ends of string.

She looks beyond the quays, to the great sweep of the Bosphorus, spotted with warships. From up here they seem miniature, as though she might sweep them back out to sea with the flat of her hand. Below are represented three of the four languages she has in her possession. A dimly imagined peacetime future of tranquil pursuits – of Paris, London, Rome; the reading of European Literature.

The beginning of the occupation. The storm of their boots against the cobblestones. A hundred eyes observing from behind shutters in what might seem to the uninitiated like an empty street: old women, young women, hating them, fearing them. The gun turrets of the huge ugly ships in the Golden Horn swivelling toward the city’s ancient glories – the Aya Sofia, Süleymaniye, Sultanahmet. A threat unspoken, yet deafening.

Those first nights like a held breath.

And they said there would not be an occupation. They had promised it. The British, the French, the Italians – at the Armistice that ended the Great War. Even those who have never read a newspaper, even those who cannot read at all, know this. Know, now, not to trust them in anything.

The new indignities, stinging like a slap: men ordered to remove the red fezzes they had worn for as long as they could remember. Women leered at, somehow all the more so if they were wearing the veil.

Up here, on the roof, this was where she had sat, hidden from view, as soldiers of the British army marched through the streets below. Snatches of speech floated up:

‘Living like animals …’

and

‘Their women little better than whores, really …’

and

‘A man here can take as many wives as he likes …’

and

‘You might be in luck, Clarkson, if the ladies don’t have a say in it …’

and

‘Just look at the state of this place. No wonder they lost.’

Would they have been so loud, if they had known that they were being listened to and understood? She suspected – and this was the most insulting probability – that they would not have cared. The city was theirs for the taking. They even have their own name for it: Constantinople. This other name is from the realm of officialdom, of mapmakers. İstanbul: that is what people call it. That is how she has always known it, that is the place in which she grew up, familiar, beloved. But the rules are made by others now.

As those men had continued with their insults she had crawled to the edge of the rooftop, making sure to stay hidden from view. She had tilted the cup of coffee she held in her hand, and allowed a few hot drops to fall. The whim of a moment; but they fell as though she had planned her target perfectly. A fat lieutenant, removing his cap for a few seconds to scratch his bald pate. The almost perceptible sizzle as the scalding liquid made contact with the sensitive skin. His howl shrill as one of the street cats.

But those were more courageous days. Murmurings of resistance. Brave words, rebel words: they would undermine them at every turn; they would set fire to their storehouses, they would defy the curfew, they would spit in their faces. But then the indignity became commonplace. A numbness, setting in. The business of living got in the way, that was it. By silent agreement, all seemed to decide that the best form of resistance was not with outward mutiny but to continue as though absolutely nothing had happened. They would defy their enemy by ignoring the presence of khaki in the streets, the armada in the Golden Horn. With the exception of a few, that is, who work in the shadows plotting real destruction and death for the invaders.

Now she looks beyond the Bosphorus, to the opposite shore, to the dark green hillside of another continent. Asia. The few dwellings visible amidst the trees are as intricate and delicate as paper cut-outs. Among them is a white house, more beautiful than all the rest.

She is filled with longing. Familiar, but condensed this morning, as strong as she has ever felt it. Something occurs to her. Why not, she thinks? What possible harm can come of it?

She calls down to the boy, ‘I have to drop some embroideries off with Kemal Bey.’

‘I could come with you?’

‘No.’ She has a second destination in mind for the morning, now, and she must go there alone.

‘But I love it at the bazaar.’

‘Yes, I know you do. But you’re like a cat following a scent there. Last time you wandered as far as the Spice Market before I realised you had disappeared.’ The memory of that moment brings with it a reverberation of the panic she had felt. She shrugs it away. He is here, he is safe, she will not let it happen again. ‘Besides,’ she says, ‘you have some reading to do, I think?’

He casts a longing look through the window at the sunlit streets. ‘It’s so warm outside.’

‘You can read outside, then, in the sun.’

He opens his mouth, meets her gaze, closes it. She is many different things to him now. But at such times, first and foremost, she is his schoolteacher.

GARE D’AUSTERLITZ, PARIS

Almost a lifetime later

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

Early morning. November. Cold so that the breath steams, blue-cold like a veil drawn over everything. This is one of the first trains out of the station. The place is thronged with people despite the hour. There is already a small queue for newspapers and cigarettes at the tabac kiosk. The platform is already crowded. Good, I like watching people. Above me soar ribs of iron, the vaulted skeleton of some industrial age monster. A lofty, echoing space: temple to speed and efficiency.

There was another station, like this. A long while ago.

There are businessmen in uniform grey, bound for Lausanne, perhaps. At a glance they all appear mould-made, hatted and shod from the same outfitters. Many are reading papers. The latest news: nuclear tests, Russian spy rings, anti-Vietnam demonstrations. All of it the story of the now. I wonder what use they make of me, an oldish man with an even older suitcase. Or what they would make of the pages I hold, so many decades out of date. The two articles, the British and Turkish, are clipped together. I have read them many times; certain phrases are known by rote. Noble endeavour. Greatest imaginable indignity. Somewhere between them, these few terse paragraphs, is the beginning of the story. The key by which a whole life might be understood.

Funny how similar they are, these clippings: though I am sure their writers would have been appalled to know it. Two halves of a whole? The face and its reflection in the mirror – every detail reversed but essentially the same. Or the two poles of a magnet: fated to forever repel.

Us — Them.

East — West.

Somewhere in the middle: me.

Now I watch an elegant couple a few feet away. He is a few years older than she. She wears a powder pink coat, a pale shock against the grey of the businessmen and the day itself. He is in dark blue, as though his outfit is intended to provide a foil to hers, to allow it to take centre stage. They might be newlyweds, I think, off for a honeymoon in the mountains. Or they might be having a liaison; running away. There is something about the way they look at each other that suggests the latter. Snatched and hungry. A memory comes. Not crisp and whole, sharp-focused, to be replayed in the mind like a scene from a film, but consisting mainly of sensation, atmosphere.

I must be staring: the man glances straight at me, and I am caught out. I have seen something that was not meant for me – not meant for anyone other than two co-conspirators.

I prop my suitcase on the bench beside me: the leather worn into paleness at the corners.

I open it, to return the newspaper clippings to their place within. As I do I block the contents from the view of the crowd with my body; a protective instinct. Some of the baggage within, you see, is rather unorthodox. Inside my suitcase alongside my toothbrush, my change of clothes, my shaving accoutrements, I carry fragments of the past. If one of my fellow passengers has caught a glimpse of the contents they might think I am an odd sort of travelling salesman, specialising in antique curios. They might wonder exactly who I would think might have any interest in buying such items. They have no value in and of themselves. Their value as relics, as evidence, however, is infinite. They are clues as to how a brief interlude in the past shaped an entire future. So it seemed only right that I should bring them with me, these talismans, upon this journey.

The train is pulling into the station now. There is the inevitable panicked surge, as if my fellow passengers fear there won’t be space for them, though they hold tickets stamped with seat numbers. I find I am momentarily transfixed. For the first time, I realise what it is that I am doing. I have always been this way, I suppose: acting immediately, considering – regretting – at leisure. But suddenly, now, I am fearful. If I get on that train I sense that my life will change again in a way I cannot anticipate.

A reframing of the story, the same one that was broken off so many years ago, never permitted its proper conclusion. I am suddenly unsure.

The platform around me is emptying. A horn sounds, ominously. I have perhaps thirty seconds.

A hiss of releasing brakes. And then I am hurtling myself toward the train, case rattling behind, before the gaping passengers.

In through the door that the conductor is just pulling closed, into the warm car.

CONSTANTINOPLE

1921