I’m delighted to hear that you ran into Carol. She’s got a heart of gold and she’s a wonderful nurse to boot. I hope the two of you had a nice time together.
Next Sunday, if the weather has improved, Can, Zemirli’s nephew, and I are going to have a picnic on the Princes’ Islands that I told you about. Mama Can makes me take Sundays off now, so who am I to disobey?
I’m glad to hear that your painting is coming along and that you’ve been enjoying working in my flat. I like imagining you there, paintbrush in hand. I hope that when you head out of the door every night you leave a little of your color and your madness behind to keep the place alive until I return. (Yours is usually a good sort of madness—take it as a compliment between friends.)
I often intend to write but feel too worn out to carry through with it. And here I am at the end of another letter that feels too short. I’d like to tell you a thousand other things, but I’m about to doze off.
Your faithful friend, who sends you affectionate thoughts from her window in üsküdar every night before going to bed,
Alice
P.S. I’ve decided to learn Turkish, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. Can teaches me and I’m coming along quite quickly. He says I speak with almost no accent and is proud of my progress.
My darling Suzie,
Who, pray tell, is the Anton you had on your mind when you wrote your last letter to me? (A letter, I might add, that was no quicker in arriving than the previous ones . . .)
If I weren’t such a stickler for never crossing out, I’d start again. You must think I’m in a dreadful mood. Which I am, to an extent. I’m not at all happy with the way the painting has been progressing (regressing?) over the past few days. I’m having a great deal of trouble painting the houses of üsküdar, particularly the one where you live now. From the Galata Bridge, where we once stood, they seemed so tiny, but now that I know you live there, I want them to seem immense, or at least recognizable enough to see where you are.
You failed to mention your work in your last letter. I don’t mention this as a concerned business partner, but as a curious friend. How are things going? Have you managed to recreate the illusion of dust, or would you like me to send a little sample from home?
In other news, my old Austin finally gave up the ghost. I know it’s not nearly as sad as the loss of Mr. Zemirli, but it wasn’t easy to leave her behind at the mechanic’s. On the other hand, this has given me an excuse to waste a little more of my inheritance, and I intend to buy a new car next week. I hope, if you ever come home, that I’ll have the pleasure of seeing you drive it.
Your stay seems to keep dragging on, so I took the liberty of paying your London rent directly to our landlord. Please don’t make a fuss about it. It’s completely normal for me to pay the rent as long as I’m the one using the place.
I hope that your outing to the Princes’ Islands was as pleasant as you had anticipated. Speaking of Sunday outings, I’ve let Carol convince me to go to the movies this weekend. Very original idea on her part, actually, since I never go to the cinema by myself. I can’t tell you what film we’re going to see because she’s keeping it a secret, but I’ll tell you about it in my next letter.
I send my affectionate thoughts from your flat, which I’m about to leave for the evening to return to my place.
Until next time, Alice. I miss our dinners together in Istanbul, and your stories about Mama Can and her talented husband make me miss them all the more.
Daldry
P.S. I’m delighted to hear about your talent for Turkish. Nevertheless, if Can is your only source of information, I’d advise you to invest in a decent dictionary to double-check his lessons . . .
Dear Daldry,
I’ve just come home from the restaurant and am writing to you in the middle of the night. I doubt whether I’ll get any sleep because I’ve had some rather disturbing news today.
Like every morning, Can came to walk me down the hill to the Bosporus. One of the konaks in the neighborhood caught on fire in the middle of the night, and the collapsed remains of the house had blocked off the street we usually take. The nearby streets were jammed with traffic, so we ended up making a broad detour.
I know I’ve already told you about how smells immediately call up old memories for me. As we were walking past a gate covered with climbing roses, I stopped in my tracks. The smell was oddly familiar, a mix of linden and wild roses. We went through the gate, and at the end of a passage we saw an old house. There was an elderly man pottering around in the garden. I recognized the smell of the roses, the gravel, the chalky old walls, and the old stone bench under the branches of a spreading linden tree. Suddenly, it all came back to me: I had known this courtyard when it was full of children, and I recognized the blue door at the top of a little flight of steps. A series of images came flooding back as though out of a dream.
The old man came over to us and asked what we were looking for. I asked him if the building had once been a school, and he confirmed that indeed it had been a small school a long time ago, but now he lived there alone. At the beginning of the century, his father was the schoolmaster and he was one of the teachers. The school closed after the revolution in 1923 and never reopened. He put on his glasses and gave me a closer look, one so intense that it made me uncomfortable at first. Then he said, “I recognize you. You’re little Anouche!” At first I thought he wasn’t right in the head, but I remembered we initially felt the same way when we met Mr. Zemirli, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him that my name was Alice.
He claimed to remember me well and said he’d never forget the “lost look” that I’d always had. He invited us to have some tea. We had barely settled into our seats when he took my hand in his and told me how sorry he was about my parents.
I immediately wondered how he could possibly know about my parents dying during the war, and when I asked him to explain, I could see something was amiss. He said that my parents couldn’t have escaped to England. He continued, saying that his father had known my father and that the violence of the young generation at the time had been a great tragedy. He said that they never knew what had happened to my mother, that I wasn’t the only one who had been in danger, that the authorities would later close the school so that people would forget.
None of it made any sense, but he seemed so sincere and convinced of what he was saying that I didn’t argue.
He said that I had been a studious, intelligent child, but that I refused to talk and that it worried my mother to no end. He talked about how much I looked like my mother, and how when he first saw me just now, he thought he was seeing her, before he realized it had been too long, that it was impossible. He remembered her bringing me to my first day of school, so happy that I was able to study at last. He said his father was the only schoolmaster who would accept me into his class. The other schools didn’t want a child who wouldn’t talk.
I started asking more questions. I asked how he could possibly think that my mother and my father had not died together, explaining that I myself had seen the house we all lived in destroyed by a bomb.
He looked very sorry for me, and then he started talking about my nanny, who, until recently, he used to run into when he did his shopping in üsküdar. He said that he hadn’t seen her in a while and thought perhaps she had died.
When I told him that I’d never had a nanny of any sort, he asked if I didn’t remember Mrs. Yilmaz.
He told me how much Mrs. Yilmaz had loved me, how much I owed to Mrs. Yilmaz.