“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe my aunt is right when she says that it’s better not to go digging in the past. What’s the point if you’re already happy? Maybe it’s better to look ahead and think of the future.”
“I’m not afraid of the past. Besides, we all need to know where we come from, don’t we? I can’t stop wondering why my parents didn’t tell me about the beginning of my life. Wouldn’t you want to know the same things if you were in my place?”
“Maybe they had a good reason to say nothing. Maybe they were trying to protect you.”
“Trying to protect me from what?”
“From painful memories?”
“I was five years old. I don’t have any memories from that time, and I don’t think anything could be worse than the ignorance—the emptiness—I feel now. If I knew the truth, whatever it is, I might at least understand why I remember nothing.”
“I suppose that the trip to Gibraltar in the cargo ship must have been difficult. Your parents were probably just glad you didn’t remember.”
“I suppose so too, but until I have confirmation one way or the other, it’s all speculation. But more than that, I just want to hear somebody talk to me about them. I’d be happy to have any memory, even the dullest, most ordinary things—how my mother dressed, what she said in the morning when I left for school, what our life was like in that apartment, what we did on Sundays. It would be a way to reconnect with them, even if only for the length of a conversation. It’s difficult to mourn somebody’s death when you didn’t have the chance to say goodbye. I miss them as much today as I did during the first days after I lost them.”
“Instead of going to Cihangir tomorrow, I’ll take you to Mrs. Yilmaz, but you can’t speak a word of it to my aunt. Do you promise?” They had arrived at the foot of the steps to Alice’s house.
Alice considered Can’s imploring face for a moment. “Do you have somebody in your life?”
“I have a lot of people in my life, Miss Alice. Friends and a very big family too. Almost too big for my taste.”
“I mean somebody special, somebody that you like.”
“The pretty girls of üsküdar pass through my heart every day. It costs nothing and offends nobody to love in silence. And you, do you love somebody?”
“I’m the one who asked first.”
“What has my aunt been telling you? She would make up anything to stop me working for you and helping you with your search. She is so stubborn when she gets an idea in her head that she would say I was going to ask you to marry me. I reassure you, this is not my intention.”
Alice took Can’s hand in hers.
“I promise you, I didn’t believe her for a second.”
Can pulled his hand from hers. “Don’t do that,” he said in a broken voice.
“It was just a show of friendship.”
“Perhaps, but friendship is never entirely innocent between a man and a woman.”
“I don’t agree. My best and closest friend is a man, and we’ve been friends since we were in our teens.”
“You don’t miss him?”
“Of course I miss him. I write to him every week.”
“Does he write back?”
“No, but he has a good excuse. I don’t actually send my letters.”
Can smiled and left Alice on her doorstep, walking backward to keep looking at her as he went. “And you never asked yourself why you don’t send them?”
Dear Daldry,
I think I’ve come to the end of my journey, and yet, if I’m writing to you this evening, it’s to tell you that I won’t be coming home soon, or at least, not for a very long time. When you read the rest of this letter, you’ll understand why.
Yesterday morning, I was reunited with Mrs. Yilmaz, the nanny who took care of me as a little girl. Can took me to see her. She lives in a house at the top of a little street that was just a dirt path until recently. And at the end of that little street, I found a long flight of steps . . .
As they did every day, Alice and Can left üsküdar early in the morning, but as Can had promised, they went to the Haydarpa?a railway station. Their train left at nine thirty. As she watched the landscape speed past the window, Alice wondered what her nanny looked like and whether the sight of her would stir up old memories. When they arrived in Izmit an hour later, they took a taxi that drove them to the top of a hill in the oldest part of the city.
Mrs. Yilmaz’s dilapidated old house had been around for quite a bit longer than she had. The strange wooden structure leaned precariously to one side and seemed as though it might tip over and collapse at any moment. The wood siding was barely held in place by nails, whose heads had long ago rusted away, and the windows were so eroded by the salt and warped from the freezes and thaws of many winters that they rattled in their frames with even the slightest breeze. Alice and Can knocked on the door. A man whom Alice took for Mrs. Yilmaz’s son answered and had them come into the sitting room, where Alice was struck by the odor of pine resin that came from the wood smoking in the fireplace, the sour-milk smell of musty books, a carpet that had the gentle, dry fragrance of earth, and a pair of old leather boots that still carried a scent of rain.
“She’s up there,” said the man, pointing upstairs. “I didn’t tell her anything, just that somebody would be coming to visit.”
As she climbed the creaky old stairs, Alice noticed the linen-closet perfume of lavender, the tang of the linseed oil that had been used to polish the banister, the starched, floury-smelling sheets, and the lonely smell of mothballs.
Mrs. Yilmaz was reading in bed. She slid her glasses to the tip of her nose to better see the couple that had come to visit.
She stared at Alice as she approached, holding her breath before exhaling a long, heavy sigh of relief. Her eyes filled with tears.
Alice, on the other hand, saw only a stranger, an old woman she had never seen before. Until Mrs. Yilmaz beckoned her over, took her in her arms, and clutched Alice to her breast, weeping . . .
. . . As she hugged me, I smelled the essence of my childhood, the odors of the past, of the kisses I received before going to bed. I heard the sounds of the curtains being opened in my childhood bedroom and my nanny’s voice saying, “Anouche, get up, there’s a beautiful boat in the harbor, come and see.”
I remembered the smell of warm milk in the kitchen. I saw the feet of the cherrywood table that I loved to hide beneath. I heard the stairs creak under my father’s footsteps, and I saw an Indian-ink drawing of two faces I had forgotten.
I have two mothers and two fathers, and now all four of them are gone.
It took Mrs. Yilmaz a while to dry her tears. She kept stroking my cheek and kissing my face, murmuring my name: “Anouche, Anouche, my little Anouche, my sunshine, you came back to see your old nanny.” I started crying too. I couldn’t help myself. I cried for all of my ignorance as I gradually learned the story of the people who brought me into the world and never saw me grow up. I found out that the parents I loved, who had raised me as their own, had adopted me to save my life. My name isn’t Alice, but Anouche, and before becoming English I was Armenian. My real name isn’t Pendelbury.