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

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 after relieving himself against a tree. He had died some short while later. A mercy, some said. But what message to bring back to his mother? The standard, of course: He died with a smile upon his face, in proud service of the Empire.

Some of the men were huge brutes, farmers and fishermen with skin like leather and corded muscles in their arms. They towered over him. And they were already half-broken. When he stood next to them in his mind’s eye he saw not a man, but a small boy, gripping his bayonet with hands too small to reach, emerging from a uniform ten sizes too big to fit.

Suddenly a new sound, a hiss of air. At first he believed it was some new intensification of the snow. Then the man beside him fell, a little yelp of surprise. He looked down. The peculiar beauty of the colour in the white, spreading fast like ink upon tissue. Such a very true red, almost the red of the Ottoman flag itself. He envied the man his expression of absolute peace. By the time he had understood that he should call for help, and could summon the words with which to do it – he had not spoken for hours, days it seemed – it was far too late. The enemy had come for them.

The Traveller (#ulink_2e3be0fe-ee07-5bd3-b3c4-c769f1c4e482)

As we leave the shelter of the station the rain begins, as though it has been waiting for us. Some say rain spoils everything. I say it depends on the position of the beholder. Now, as water spreads itself in filmy sheets against the glass, the austere train carriage is transformed into a hallowed space; sanctuary from the onslaught without. The light seems to change in defiance of the bleakness, to kindle; the winter-pallid faces about me gain new colour. Beyond the glass the drear suburbs and the formidable distant shadows of the banlieues – the backstage of Paris – acquire the romance of a watercolour.

I prop the suitcase on the couchette next to me. From the cushioning of a scarf I unwrap a photograph in a tin frame. I have looked at it so many times through the years, trying to understand the sequence of events that changed everything, that changed my life.

A building, surrounded by dark trees. It is slightly out of focus, lending the house a blurred, provisional appearance so that it does not appear made of wood and stone but something evanescent, a structure of vapour and light. It looks more like the idea of a house, a phantasm that has alighted on the bank and is making up its mind as to whether it should stay. But I recall tangible things. Painted tiles, a stone fountain, fine objects, white linen, voices echoing in high-ceilinged rooms. Hard to believe … that for a short span of time it was something like a home to me.

I bring the photograph so close to my face that my breath steams the shielding pane of glass, hoping to catch some evidence of life within. For the merest fraction of a moment I think I have seen something in the lower row of windows: a small face, looking out at me. But it must have been merely the creation of a hopeful imagination. When I look again the windows are blank-eyed and dark, withholding their secrets.

Nur (#ulink_173f937c-067d-50f4-8969-bfee2980010a)

Morning. She feels renewed, the humiliations of the day before have lost their sting. The streets are still empty enough at this hour that they can stride through them quickly. She enjoys the pull and stretch of her muscles, the sound of her shoes ringing upon the cobblestones. The lesser note of the boy’s feet as he follows behind: two steps to her every one, and even then he struggles to keep up. He is still so small. But he is also, she knows, distracted by the scents that reach them from the bakeries and cafes they pass, his nose aloft in that feline way.

She is aware of the looks. In these narrow streets they pass near enough to see the glimmer of eyes through latticework screens and one woman pulls her shutters closed with an ostentatiously violent clatter. Odd, that it should be the women that seem most outraged by her bared face, by her presence in the street. The older ones are worst of all, understandably. She still feels the sting of their glances. At first they were almost enough to send her running back to the apartment for her veil. Now she steels herself against her own sense of shame. Because for all that the war took from her – and it was more than she ever thought she would have to give – there is this one thing that it gifted her. Her city. And she is not ready to give it up. The liberation of walking these streets that have always been her home and yet for so long have been beyond the limits of her knowledge.

She is not alone; much of a generation has joined her. Barriers shifted, dissolved entirely. Young women who had remained hidden indoors behind filigree screens ventured out into the streets. They appeared bare-faced. They took on the work of men – her grandmother is still outraged by the appearance of trouser-clad female street sweepers.

The boy is dawdling.

‘Come on, hurry up – we’re going to be late.’

She sees what has caught his attention; the same sight that she has been avoiding looking at. A group of French officers, in their blue uniforms, smoking their cigarettes and lounging against an old tree that has forced its way out of the cobblestones.

Children, she has noticed, are disloyally fascinated by the soldiers. Now, with building horror, she sees one of the men drop his cigarette, stub it out with a smartly polished boot, and come toward them.

‘Hello,’ he says, to the boy, in French. From the crowds passing them Nur feels a low hum of disapproval, levelled as much at her as at the man, as though they assume she must have done something to encourage him. And with it there is a certain sense of shame, as though she really has.

‘I have a little son like you, at home,’ he says now. ‘Do you know what he likes best?’ He does not wait to see if the boy has understood. ‘Caramels! Would you like one?’ He fishes a gold-wrapped sweet from his pocket.

‘No, thank you—’ But Nur is too late, the boy has already taken one.

‘I hope,’ the man’s eyes go to Nur’s uncovered face now, and remain there, ‘that you tell your mother how beautiful she is every day.’

She seizes the boy’s hand, and marches him away from the officers as fast as she can, without a backward glance. Ribald laughter follows them.

When they have put a little distance between themselves and the officers she puts out her hand. ‘Spit it out.’

‘But—’

‘Do it, please.’ She knows what a cruelty it is to take food from a child like him. But the French officers are still watching, and this is a point of principle.

With an expression of profoundest agony, the boy does as she says. She throws it down, and within seconds a street cat has emerged from somewhere to sniff at it.

Now she feels as though a layer of skin has been removed, not merely a thin gauze of material. The city now seems to thwart her at every turn: the cobblestones turn her ankles, the crowds press against her. She has become clumsy and conspicuous.

She understands that she is an object of curiosity for such men, who have come expecting veiled forms. She knows that they see her – her hair covered but her face exposed, wandering about the city as she chooses – and make suppositions. She tries to remind herself that it must not matter. To wait until a day when one might not be reminded with every step of one’s difference might mean waiting for a hundred years. More.

The Boy (#ulink_5844803c-d304-5ad8-bd65-5b48cc3a1ab8)

He can still taste the buttered sugar of the sweet, shards of it hidden in the small crevices between his teeth. Lucky that he managed to swallow half of it before she made him spit out the rest. He still hurts from the loss. He knew that he had no choice, though. There had been a dangerous look in her eye. She had already changed into her schoolteacher self.

Nur hanım is different at school. She seems to grow by about a foot. She transforms into a new, more powerful version of herself, like a very subtle shape-shifting djinn. He can nearly forget the version of her that burns almost every meal she cooks, and sometimes sings out of tune while she cleans the apartment. Who sometimes, rather like Enver, spends a rare free hour staring out of the window toward the Bosphorus, silent, insensible to anything around her. He can almost forget, too, that they live in the same apartment together. That sometimes at home, as though she can’t help herself, she reaches down and strokes a hand through his hair, or bends and enfolds him in a tight embrace. She does not give him preferential treatment in the classroom. Often he thinks that it is the opposite, that she makes a point of telling him off for talking or daydreaming much more than she does the other children. He would never dare say this to her, though.

Sometimes, when the chaos in the classroom reaches its highest pitch, he sees Nur hanım rub her forehead hard with the heel of her hand. Only he knows that this is something she does when she is particularly exasperated. When the old woman, for example, is complaining about how terrible their life is now … how wonderful everything was in the old days. Then she rolls her shoulders back (she does this with the old woman, too), and faces up to the challenge like a street cat readying for a fight. When she next speaks, the children fall silent. Even if she has not raised her voice, which she hardly ever does, and even if they don’t quite understand the words. They know the tone.

Nur (#ulink_2bc98092-e5a2-5427-a3e0-38f58527c5f9)

‘Who can tell me what word this is?’ A pause. ‘Enver, I do not believe you will find the answer out of the window.’ The child in question jumps in his seat as though someone has pinched him.

‘Wossis, hanım?’

This from one of the new girls, who wears the same dirty clothes every day.

‘That, Ayla, is a pen.’

‘Oh. Worrus it do?’