Last Letter from Istanbul. Lucy Foley

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

       The Boy

      From the window he watches Nur hanım leave, rounding the end of the alleyway onto the larger thoroughfare with its thronging crowd. Funny, she always seems to him such a powerful person. But now he sees that compared to other adults she is not large at all. In fact she is dwarfed by many of them, and by the great bag of embroideries at her hip that causes her to stagger slightly beneath its weight. In some complicated way this worries him. He watches her now as though his gaze were a cloak that might keep her from harm, until she is lost to sight.

      He knows exactly what he will do now, and it does not involve reading his schoolbooks.

      He is hungry all the time. When the war came the city forgot how to feed the people that lived in it. Once food was everywhere. A different smell around every street corner: the sweet yeast of simits, piled high and studded with seeds, the brine of stuffed mussels cooked on a brazier, of fried mackerel stuffed into rolls of bread, the aroma of burned sugar drifting from the open door of a pastane, even the savoury, insubordinate tang of boiled sheep’s heads.

      Sometimes it was enough to merely breathe in these scents, so powerful that if one came close enough it was almost like tasting them. Sometimes one found it necessary to part with a few emergency piastres – only to be used in the case of direst need – and share a warm simit with one’s friends on the way to school.

      The pride with which the sellers displayed their wares: fresh-shelled almonds arranged by the bademci – the almond seller – upon a shimmering cake of ice; the sour green plums, that one could only eat for twenty days of the year, carefully arranged in small paper bags. A towering pyramid of plump tomatoes, smelling and tasting of the sun itself.

      When the war came, these vanished. Not at once. In the first weeks there was just a little less. The street food went first, fading from the city like the detail from an old painting. Then the bakeries. In the beginning the bread was a day old. Then a week, then two weeks. Then it disappeared altogether.

      In the burned place he did not eat for three days. He stayed in the dark, and waited for it to take him. When she found him he could not have walked out of there on his own – he hadn’t the energy to lift his head from the floor. Now it is like the hunger has found its way deep inside him, has put down roots. Even now, when there is more to eat, even now it remains. Even after he has eaten it is there, gnawing at his insides. He thinks about food constantly; he dreams of it.

      The other women are in the other room: the old one, and the one who never speaks. From beneath the door comes the scent of tobacco. It smells of burned things. It speaks of the time before. He will not think of that. The important thing is that they are busy. This leaves him free to explore the kitchen.

      These searches are never particularly rewarding. An old onion, perhaps, aged to softness. Eaten like an apple. The memory of it in the mouth had the exact odour of a man’s sweat. Or perhaps a heel of bread, with a white-green bloom of mould. Cobwebs, too, if it has fallen into some hard-to-reach place from which only an arm as thin as his can extract it.

      But now, reaching further into the dark recess than ever before, his fingers brush a new object. He draws it out, mildly curious. A book. This is not of any particular interest; it cannot be eaten. Books are school, and difficulty. In its favour, though, is the fact that it had been discovered by him alone.

      ‘Hello,’ he says.

      There is mystery attached to it. He takes it into the patch of light spilling from the street lamp to look at it. It is homemade, not printed, written in a hand somehow familiar to him. No pictures – this is a disappointment. He has little time for words. He knows that he is clever, but words can outwit him, can shift before his very eyes.

      He stares at it for a few minutes, hardly bothering to puzzle it out, ready to give it up as a bad job. Then a word makes itself familiar to him, as though the light itself has drawn its meaning up out of the page. Chicken. His mouth floods with saliva. He goes to the next word. Walnuts. It is already, thanks to these two words, the most interesting book he has ever come across.

      Concentrating intently, frustrated by his own slowness, he puzzles out the rest of it. Paprika – he knows that, the bright powder made from peppers. The words, he begins to realise, describe a larger whole. A dish. Chicken with Walnuts and Paprika. He can imagine it, yes. He closes his eyes and summons the flavours with a great effort of imagination. The tender flesh of the meat, the bitter of the nuts, the sweet smoke of the spice.

      The idea of the dish in his head is a kind of pleasurable agony. It is almost as good as eating it. Of course, one does not have the fullness in the belly afterward. But he hardly ever has that anyway, cannot remember a time when he has felt fully sated by what he has been given to eat.

      Now the magic of this imagined meal is used up.

      He turns the page, to discover the next delight. Chicken – easy, he had the shape of the word in his mind now. Chicken with … he squints at the word. Figs. That is the best time of the year, when the tree in the schoolyard yields its fruit. In the time of worst hunger they had been everything to him. Less filling than bread, but more so than the aubergine skins he had scavenged from the bins. There are two kinds: white and purple. The latter are bigger but the white are finer-flavoured. Tiny, fragrant morsels. They are his favourite. Unfortunately they are the birds’ favourite too. He was almost tearful with frustration, upon leaving lessons, to discover that they had got to so many of them before him. And they were so wasteful. They would eat part of a fruit, and leave the rest hanging upon the branch to dry out or rot. They would scatter half of what they stole upon the ground. He would eat these remains, or collect them in