Anyush (36 page)

Five years later

Beyrouth, nestled in Saint George Bay, was clapsed like a lover in the arms of the Chouf Mountains. Beyond the boats and tin shacks of Batroun Harbour, tall buildings of pale stone and yellow brick lined the wide paved streets. The town was once grand, but when Anyush stepped off the boat and saw it for the first time, it was not as she had imagined it. Because of the blockade set up along the Lebanese and Syrian coasts, Beyrouth was in the grip of a famine. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese had died of hunger before the end of the war, and a cholera epidemic had overrun the city so that bodies lay rotting in the streets as fodder for the rats. That first day it seemed to Anyush that she had returned to the scene of her worst nightmares.

For six weeks she slept under a bridge with three other Armenian families who offered her the protection of numbers. She was hungry and cold and never less than afraid, but a chance meeting with a woman from Trebizond resulted in her moving to the Armenian Refugee Camp. It was located on a patch of waste ground in the Beyrouthi suburb of Karantina, where jumbled-together shacks and lean-to cabins were fashioned from iron sheeting, old doors and loosely stacked concrete blocks as well as the remnants of Red Cross tents. A few chickens pecked at the dirt, and clotheslines stretched from dwelling to dwelling, crossing the spaces like
a badly drawn spider web. At first, Anyush shared a hut with five children and three adults, but the removal of a bone from a child’s throat brought her to the attention of Dr Altounyan, the Armenian doctor who ran the orphanage and held clinics at the camp. He offered her the job of nurse’s assistant at the orphanage hospital, but by then word had got around that she had worked for Dr Stewart, and she found herself in the role of camp nurse and first-aid doctor. Dividing her time between the hospital and the camp, she was given the privilege of a shack to herself – one room, just wide enough that when she lay down her head and feet touched the opposing walls. She had a bed-roll to sleep on, an upturned crate for a table and a box to hold her tin cup, her plate and her old abaya and burqa. Food was cooked outdoors over fires or stoves, and a trench dug at one end of the site served as a latrine.

Anyush was happy in Karantina. Nobody in the camp spoke about what had happened but they were drawn to each other, to memories played out alone and in silence. On quiet nights when Anyush could hear the distant sound of waves breaking on the shore, she thought of the village. Of her family and the faces of her friends. Of her old school classroom and the first time she had ever seen Dr Stewart. She remembered the feel of wet sand beneath her feet and the taste of Gohar’s lavash and the early morning smell of sap oozing from the pines. She thought of her old life like a story in one of Bayan Stewart’s picture books, and, though she mightn’t have wished to, she thought of Jahan.

The orphanage where Anyush worked took up one side of a sunny square in Bourj Hammoud. Known locally as the children’s hospital, it had been housed in an abandoned convent of Catholic nuns. The building was three storeys high, made of cut stone and with arched and barred windows that faced onto a central courtyard. Surrounded on all sides by the city, a newly chiselled block of granite over the door informed the visitor that this was the Armenian Orphanage Hospital of
Beyrouth, funded by Near East Relief. Two security men sat in a small hut at the gate.

‘
Günaydın
, Anyush,’ Arshak, the younger man, greeted her.

Ohannes also lifted his hand and smiled.

Arshak had come from Adana on the Mediterranean coast and was almost completely blind. Matron Norton had nicknamed him Caesar because she said he reminded her of a bust of the Roman emperor she had once seen in a museum. He had a noble head, the shape visible beneath his close-cropped hair, but it was the white discs of his almost blind eyes that most resembled an ancient statue. Arshak didn’t live in Karantina with the other Armenians but slept in the security hut on the hospital grounds and still managed to work as a messenger boy and handyman. He was devoted to Matron Norton who had taken him in even though he was over sixteen and should have been sent to the Home for the Blind. British soldiers had found him wandering alone in the Syrian desert where he had survived for two years on grass, roots and herbs. He had some sight in his left eye and none at all in his right but had the ability to hear what no one else could through walls and ceilings and doors. Arshak never spoke of how he had come to be in the desert, but it was said that he had lost his entire family in the concentration camp at Deir al-Zor. The older man, Ohannes, was Lebanese by birth, Armenian by birthright and a relative of Dr Altounyan.

‘Matron wants you,’ Arshak said. ‘She has a letter for you.’

The mention of a letter set Anyush’s heart racing. She never lost hope of hearing from Jahan, even though he had answered none of her letters. All she wanted was news of her daughter, or so she convinced herself. Despite everything, she was still curious about him. How did he look? How had he managed his injury? Was he happy? Was he married? She imagined him with a wife, certainly a woman of means, someone who would make him laugh the way she had done, a woman
who would bear him children.

Anyush thought then of Lale, precious Lale who would now be five years old. The loss of her daughter was more deeply felt and harder to bear with every passing year. Anyush ached for news of her, any news. The Stewarts were good people, but she wanted her daughter to know that her mother pined for her, that every child in the orphanage was a reminder of her and that she was tormented by her absence.

‘Matron’s in her office,’ Arshak said.

Up a flight of stairs and along a corridor in a small room, Matron Norton was standing on a chair and talking to someone through the bars of the window. Matron was a small, well-built woman; she was wearing a white dress to just below mid-calf, a long white apron over it and a stiff headscarf that moved not an inch, even though her head nodded constantly as she spoke. On her left sleeve she wore an armband with a red cross, and she spoke with a pronounced American accent. Someone on the far side of the window was getting severely reprimanded.

‘Anyush, I didn’t hear you come in. That scamp has blown out my eardrums!’

‘One of the children?’

‘Spot!’

Matron’s dog Spot was barking loudly in the courtyard below, the sound coming in through the open window. ‘He followed me from home and I had to tie him to the railing in the yard. He’s not happy I can tell you. What would you do with a dog like that?’

Spot was a small, wiry, mongrel stray with a liver-coloured patch over his left eye and ear and another on his rump. He was a clever little dog who liked nothing more than to perform tricks, and Matron adored him. She told him to be quiet, pushed the window closed and stepped down from the chair. Seating herself behind the desk, she dabbed a handkerchief to her upturned nose and invited Anyush to sit. On the desk was a
letter with a local postmark, which she handed to her.

‘It’s your American visa. I knew it was coming because I met Mrs Jordan who told me that the Ambassador had got the list and you were on it. Well, don’t look so downcast! I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am pleased. It’s just … very sudden.’

‘Six months is hardly sudden!’

Matron leaned across and patted her hand. ‘Going by yourself is never easy but you’ve been through worse. You’ll get to know people really quickly. Mrs Jordan tells me there are a number of people from the camp on the list so you won’t be alone. I’ve heard that Vassak is already there and I’m sure he’ll be in touch. Anyway, it will be easier to trace your daughter from there.’

They discussed the matter for a few minutes more before Anyush left to join Dr Altounyan’s rounds. She was thinking of Vassak who had once been as essential to the running of the orphanage hospital as Dr Altounyan or Matron Norton, but in a different way. A second generation Lebanese-Armenian, his family had come to Beyrouth, from Diyarbakır and set up as ironmongers and blacksmiths. Vassak’s older brother looked after the business, while Vassak ran various rackets in the city. The embargo and the famine had wiped out the business but opened the way for a growing trade in black-market goods. When food supplies at the orphanage ran low, Arshak suggested to Matron that Vassak could solve their problems. Sacks of flour, oils, bulgar wheat, lemons, in fact almost anything you wanted could be had through Vassak’s network of smugglers. The only obstacle to filling the orphans’ bellies, he explained to Matron, was the price.

Matron didn’t trust Vassak but the Near East Relief food lorries had been grounded on the wrong side of the Mediterranean and she had no choice but to deal with him. Using her own money and donations she begged from foreigners in the city, she paid Vassak large sums to keep the
orphans fed. Food stocks and medical supplies began to arrive at odd hours of the day and night, including medicines with the Red Cross stamped on them.

Vassak had noticed Anyush working with Dr Altounyan and plagued Arshak until he gave him her name. He began to appear at the Karantina clinics with bandages, liniments and medicines. He brought gifts of dates, figs and flasks of foreign perfume. There was nothing Vassak couldn’t find and he laid them at her feet. Anyush accepted the gifts reluctantly. She had no interest in Vassak but needed the supplies for the refugees. She was polite and cautiously grateful but ignored his more obvious advances. Never a man to give up, Vassak tried a different approach. He was a gifted mimic, and his rendition of Matron in full flight made Anyush smile. Despite herself, she fell into the habit of him. She came to depend on him the way she depended on there being seven days in a week. She never asked about his life outside the hospital but knew more about him than he realised.

Arshak had told her that Vassak was a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a secret organisation whose aim was to assassinate all members of the Turkish Government and those involved in the Armenian Genocide. A Turkish general had been gunned down outside his apartment in Berlin and Arshak claimed that Vassak’s cell had been responsible. In Arshak’s eyes these men were heroes.

At the end of one very wet autumn, Vassak disappeared. People believed he was dead, a martyr to the great Armenian cause. Arshak claimed he was holed up in the mountains until the next assault, but Anyush knew better.

One night, as the rain fell in torrents and turned the lanes of Karantina into rivers of mud, Vassak came to her door. Water cascaded from him, and she brought him inside. He stood without speaking, dripping and shivering in the small space. Anyush helped him out of his wet shoes and
clothes. His hands felt like the hands of a corpse and she placed them between her own, rubbing vigorously to make them warm. Suddenly he lunged at her, pushing her up against the wall and tugging at her night-clothes. His mouth was on hers, crushing her lips as he tore the cloth covering her breasts.

‘No, Vassak …’

Pulling the sleeves down over her shoulders, he pinned her arms to her sides.

‘Not like this …’

His knee was in her groin, pushing her legs apart and his cold hand between them. He rammed himself into her and groaned. The rain hammered on the tin roof as he pounded her hips against the wall, and then it was over. He slumped against her, water dripping onto his bare back.

‘I have to go,’ he said, pulling away.

Anyush never saw him again, but some months later a letter was pushed under her door. He had to flee, he said, to America. There wasn’t much work but he was getting by, doing a bit here and there. He wanted Anyush to join him in Philadelphia as soon as she could. She went outside to the stove and threw his letter on the flames.

Jahan

‘A
nother one, Papa. Tell me the story about Maman.’

‘I’ll be late,
ma petite.
’

‘One more.
Je t’en prie
.’

‘I’ll ask Melike to read to you.’

‘I don’t want Melike. Please, Papa. A story about Maman.’

‘The others are waiting,
chérie
. Tomorrow night.’

‘Was she a real princess, Papa? Did she live in Topkapi Palace?’

‘Of course she did. Haven’t I told you she was the sultan’s favourite? And all the beautiful gifts he bought her? The rarest, the most beautiful white tiger …’

‘Called Griffe.’

‘And a talking cockatoo …’

‘Called Plume.’

‘And enough jewels and gold to fill a thousand caves. And because she was the most beautiful, most clever princess in the whole world, she always went to sleep when the sultan told her to. So now …’ Jahan bent to kiss his daughter, ‘you must do the same.’

‘Why can’t we go to the palace, Papa?’

‘Because Maman’s not there any more. Remember I told you? That
she became ill?’

His little girl nodded.

‘And that she’s with Grand-père? And she’s very happy there.’

‘How do you know? Have you been?’

‘No darling,’ he smiled. ‘Maybe when I’m old.’

‘Can I go?’

He reached out and stroked Lale’s dark hair. ‘Your
maman
wants you to stay here with me. She would like you to be a princess just as she was.’

‘But I’m not a princess. Tansu said I’m not.’

‘You are to me,’ he said, bending to kiss her forehead. ‘Now sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Jahan tucked her in and leaned over to extinguish the lamp. In the doorway Madame Orfalea stood watching. She was dressed for the opera, tucking a pair of opera glasses into her
réticule
.

‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ she asked as Jahan closed the door. ‘Talking about her mother like that?’

‘How would you have me talk about her?’

‘It might be kinder to describe her in more realistic terms.’

‘You want me to tell Lale that her mother was murdered by men like my father?’

Madame Orfalea flinched as though he had hit her.

It had been almost three years since his father’s death, but his mother still mourned for him. She had changed physically in that time, becoming more lined about the face, but she had also lost something fundamental to herself. Gone was the sparkle and the flirtatious girlish humour. She shrouded herself in black floor-length gowns while the nation’s hemlines moved upwards and the passions of a demoralised post-war Turkey rallied around the young Kemal Atat
Ü
rk. Madame Orfalea mourned not only her dead husband but a vanishing way of life. Because of the war the Empire had lost its territories in the Balkans and the Middle East,
and those sources of income which had been poured into cosmopolitan Constantinople were also lost. Istanbul, as it was now called, had seen hundreds of thousands of its young men die in the war, and, with this sudden loss of population and wealth, its importance on the world stage vanished. Jahan had taken over the tannery after his father’s death, but the demand for leather products had fallen dramatically and he struggled to keep the business afloat. Unemployment was rife and progress in what had once been a great world capital ground to a halt.

‘We’d better go,’ he said. ‘I told Hanife I’d collect her and Madame Bey before seven.’

The following day, Jahan left the tannery and the old city, coming to walk along the Bosphorus. The sun was setting and mosques and minarets, tankers and hawsers all gleamed with gold. Only the water in the boatyards lay dark and still, and he found himself thinking of Anyush. She occupied his thoughts less than in those first months, but at moments like this, usually at dusk, she came to him. He walked on, crossing into Galata and making his way to the house on Grande Rue. Madame Orfalea had called him to her suite that morning, insisting he formalise the engagement with Hanife. There was no logical reason not to marry his sister’s tutor. She would make an excellent wife and a wonderful mother to Lale, but there never seemed to be a good time to put matters on a formal footing. Hanife’s father had fled to Germany after the war and her only brother was killed in an explosion at sea. Jahan’s own father had died shortly afterwards, resulting in an uncertain future for the family and the tannery. But these had nothing to do with his indecision. It was no more than dishonest evasion. He wasn’t sure what he wanted. He knew he didn’t love Hanife, but he also knew he liked her. She was a favourite
with his mother and sisters and Lale adored her. Reaching the house, he broke the hinge on his prosthetic leg and began to climb the steps. Madeline opened the door and admitted him to the hallway, taking his hat and coat. Lale came running towards him and he lifted her into his arms.

‘What have you got in your hair?’

‘Paint.’

‘You were painting your hair?’

She nodded.

‘I’m surprised Azize hasn’t scrubbed you in the bath.’

‘Mademoiselle Bey said I could show you first. It’s a
papillon
,’ she said, bending her head towards him.

He laughed. ‘Well it’s very beautiful. The most wonderful butterfly I’ve seen.’

She wriggled out of his arms and ran upstairs to find her grandmother. Standing in the hallway watching her climb, Jahan came to a decision. There would be no more prevarication. He would ask Hanife to marry him at the first opportunity.

Before he could think of the engagement, there was some business which needed attention as a matter of urgency. That evening, Jahan sat down with his mother and told her the true state of affairs concerning the tannery. She was calm and showed a quick understanding of their predicament, and together they agreed to keep the shoemaking plant and to sell the larger of the two businesses, the tannery. The family lawyer was to draw up the terms of sale.

The next day, the lawyer asked Jahan to find the title deeds but there was no sign of them at his father’s office. Jahan guessed they would be with his father’s papers in the bureau in his parents’ suite, but his mother had the only key.

‘Madeline,’ he asked, ‘is my mother anywhere about?’

‘She is out, Monsieur. With Madame Bey.’

‘Have you any idea when she’ll be back?’

‘Non, Monsieur, but she said she would not take
déjeuner
.’

‘Thank you, Madeline.’

It would have been easier to wait for his mother’s return, but he believed that if the process were set in motion then a change of heart was beyond reach.

The house seemed peculiarly silent. Tansu and Melike were at their lessons, and Azize had taken Lale for a stroll in the park. He stood in the doorway of his parents’ suite, looking around him. Their two beds were just inside the door of the first room, and the sitting area was located in the far room with a bay window and balcony overlooking the Grande Rue. As a boy he had played in these rooms while his mother dressed for dinner. Jahan stepped inside, surprised it was still so redolent of his father and his illness. His father’s dressing gown was draped over the armchair, and his silver shaving kit was laid out beside the ewer and basin. Old periodicals were neatly stacked on the marble-topped commode and a book lay open on his bedside cabinet. Jahan walked to the far room facing onto the street and went to the bureau-bookcase against the wall. Through the glazed doors he could see his father’s collection of books and magazines, but it was the slope-front bureau beneath that drew his attention. He tried to open it but it was locked. A key and tassel hung from the doors above it but did not open the bureau. Jahan looked around. The key was probably in the room somewhere, but he was reluctant to rummage through his parents’ things. He had decided to ask his mother when he saw something glinting on the architrave over the door. Reaching up, he felt for it and took down a small silver key that fitted the lock perfectly.

He found the deeds almost immediately. They were rolled into a scroll and pushed into one of the pigeon holes at the back of the bureau.
Taking off the ribbon that bound them, he glanced cursorily through the pages and satisfied himself that all was in order. It was only as he went to close the bureau that he saw the bundle of letters tied up with string. Olcay Orfalea had never struck him as the love-letter sort, and Jahan looked again. The addressee on the top letter caught his eye. Written in large cursive script was a name he recognised. His own.

The deeds fell from his hands as he began to look through the letters. The same name was written on all of them, Jahan Orfalea