I asked Mrs. Yilmaz what had happened to my mother.
“We never heard anything more from her. In Izmit alone, four thousand Armenians were deported, and across the Empire, during that horrible summer, they assassinated hundreds of thousands of people. Today, nobody mentions it; everybody keeps silent. Only a very few survived, and even fewer find the strength to talk about it. Nobody wants to listen—it takes too much courage and humility to ask for forgiveness. Some people talk about the ‘displaced populations,’ but it was much worse than that, believe me. I have heard from some people that they formed lines of men, women, and children many miles long, that they were forced to walk across the country to the south. Those who were not put in trains had to walk along the tracks without food or water, only to be shot and thrown in a hole when they couldn’t walk anymore. The survivors were taken into the middle of the desert, where they were left to die of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. “When I looked after you at my sister’s house that summer, I wasn’t aware of any of that, though I suspected the worst. When I saw your mother walk toward those men, I knew we would probably never see her again. I was very afraid for you. The next morning, you stopped talking again. A month later, when my sister and her husband had made sure that things were less violent in Istanbul, I took you to the pharmacist in Istiklal. When you saw his wife, you smiled again and ran to give her a hug. I told them about what had happened to your family.
“You have to understand, Anouche. It was such a difficult decision to make, but I did it to protect you . . .
“The pharmacist’s wife had always had a soft spot for you, and you liked her very much too. You always spoke around her, even when you wouldn’t speak anywhere else. Sometimes she would come and see me in the Taksim gardens, where I would take you to play. She had you smell the leaves, the plants, and the flowers, and she taught you their names. You came back to life around her. One evening, when I had gone to get the herbal remedies for your sleep, the pharmacist told me that they would soon be returning to their home country. He offered to take you with them. He promised that in England you would be safe and out of harm’s way. He and his wife would give you the life they had always dreamed of giving a child, the child they were never able to have. They promised that with them you would no longer be an orphan, that you would want for nothing, that you would have a home filled with love and kindness.
“Letting you go broke my heart, but I was just your nanny. My sister couldn’t keep you, and I didn’t have the means to raise both of you. You were the fragile one. It was you, my darling, that I saved by sending you away.”
When she reached the end of her story, I thought I had cried all the tears I had left to cry. But there were more. I asked her what she meant when she said I was ‘the fragile one.’
She took my face between her hands and asked me to forgive her for having separated me from my brother.
Five years after I arrived in London with my new parents, the British Army occupied Izmit, as a part of the defeated Ottoman Empire. During the Turkish Revolution in 1923, Mrs. Yilmaz’s brother-in-law lost his privileges, his wealth, and his life. Her sister, like many others, fled the Ottoman Empire when it was reborn in the form of the Republic of Turkey. She immigrated to England and sold off her few remaining jewels to settle down in the Brighton area.
The fortune-teller was right about everything. I was born in Istanbul, not Holborn. One by one I met the people who led me to the man who would count the most in my life. Now I can find him, because I know for certain he exists. Somewhere I have a brother, and his name is Rafael.
Yours truly,
Alice
Alice spent the rest of the day with Mrs. Yilmaz.
She helped her come downstairs, and after eating lunch under the pergola with Can and Mrs. Yilmaz’s nephew, the two women went and sat beneath the linden tree.
Over the course of the afternoon, Alice’s former nanny told her stories about the past, when Anouche’s father was a cobbler in Istanbul and her mother was a happy woman with two beautiful children.
When they parted at the end of the day, Alice promised to come back and see her often.
She asked Can if they could go back to Istanbul by boat. When they arrived, she watched the luxurious houses that lined the waterfront slip past and felt overcome with emotion.
She went down the hill in the middle of the night to post her letter to Daldry. He received it a week later. Even years later, he would never tell Alice that he had cried when he read it.
14
Alice could think only about trying to find her brother. Mrs. Yilmaz said that Rafael had left on the day of his seventeenth birthday to try to make it on his own in Istanbul. He came to see her once a year and wrote her a postcard from time to time. He was a fisherman and spent most of his life at sea working on large tuna boats.
Alice spent every Sunday that summer walking up and down the port on the Bosporus.
Whenever a fishing boat docked, she would run over and ask the crew if any of them knew Rafael Kachadorian. The months of July, August, and September went by without her meeting anyone who had heard of him.
One Sunday, taking advantage of a particularly warm autumn evening, Can invited Alice to have dinner with him in the little restaurant that Daldry had so enjoyed. Tables had been set up along the wharf so that the customers could eat outside.
In the middle of their conversation, Can suddenly paused and took Alice’s hand with great tenderness.
“There was something I was wrong about, and something I’ve always been right about,” he said.
“Go on,” said Alice, amused.
“I was wrong. Friendship between a man and a woman really can exist. And I consider you my friend, Alice Anouche Pendelbury.”
“And what were you right about?”
“I really am the best guide in Istanbul.” He chuckled.
“But I never doubted it,” she said, laughing in turn. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because the man two tables away from us has to be your brother.”
Alice stopped laughing and turned, holding her breath. Just behind them, a man a bit younger than her was having dinner with a woman. She pushed back her chair and got up. The few steps she took seemed like they would never end, and when she came to his table, she excused herself for interrupting their conversation and asked if he was named Rafael.
The man froze when he saw the face of the woman with the foreign accent, lit by the pale light of the lanterns that swung in the evening breeze.
“I think I’m your sister,” she said, her voice fragile. “I’m Anouche. I’ve been looking for you.”
15
“I like your house,” said Alice as she walked over to the window.
“It’s small, but I can see the water from my bed. Besides, I’m not often here.”
“I never believed that I had a particular destiny, or that little signs in my life were guiding me towards a path I ought to take. I didn’t believe in fortune-tellers or in good luck . . . Even less that I might have a long-lost brother.”
Rafael came to Alice’s side. A cargo ship was slowly gliding through the strait.
“Do you think that the fortune-teller in Brighton might have been Yaya’s sister?”
“Yaya?”
“That’s what you called Mrs. Yilmaz when you were little and couldn’t say her name. It stuck, and she has always been Yaya to me. She said that her sister never wrote or gave any sign that she was still alive after she went to England. She had run away, and I suppose Yaya was always a bit ashamed of that. It would be incredible if it really was her.”
“It must have been her. How else could she have . . . ? And I did finally find you.”
Alice gazed in wonder at her brother. She was still getting used to the idea that he actually existed.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”