Anyush (37 page)

The Letters

155 Linden Strasse

Helgenplatz

Berlin

January 22nd, 1921

For a long time Jahan sat in the chair beside the bureau. The clock in the hall struck the quarter hour and then the half. After a while, he folded Armin’s letter and put it back in the envelope. Taking the next letter from the bundle, he began to read:

Jahan picked up the next envelope. It was older, the writing faded and the corners torn.

A board creaked and the light in the room dimmed. Jahan looked up to see his mother standing in the doorway.

‘You knew,’ he whispered.

‘Jahan–’

‘You knew all along. I thought it was only Papa who had betrayed me. I would have staked my life on it.’

He held out the letters clenched in his fist.

‘Some of these were written after he died. The last one only two months ago. You kept them from me.’

His mother sighed and removed her hatpin. Carefully she lifted the hat from her head and placed it on the chest beside the door.

‘Yes, Jahan, I did. I hid them along with all the other letters that woman wrote to you.’

‘That
woman
is Lale’s mother.’

‘She’s an Armenian! What did you expect me to do? Send Lale back to her? A stranger? This is Lale’s home. Here with us. We’re the only family she has ever known. Would you take her away from it?’

‘It wasn’t your decision to make.’

‘Whose was it? Yours? I don’t think so! You came back from the war like some impostor wearing my son’s clothes. Have you any idea what we went through? The worry you caused? You weren’t capable of making decisions. You weren’t even capable of looking after yourself. I spent nights pacing the floors waiting for some gendarme to tell me you had thrown yourself under a train or drowned yourself in the Bosphorus. Did you really think I would let you decide my granddaughter’s future?’

Jahan looked at his mother’s still beautiful face. ‘I thought better of you.’

She smiled sadly. ‘You’re a dreamer, Jahan. Intelligent like your father but a dreamer. Look around you. Everyone has changed. Everybody who survived the war is altered by it. It is the price we pay.’

She went and stood at the window looking down onto the street.

‘You’ll learn, Jahan, that certain things in life are beyond our control. The war … the death of your father … losing the business. Events greater than personal resolve decide our fate. There is a period of adjustment,
and then you carry on as best you can. I was never surprised you fell for an Armenian. It was almost inevitable. No doubt she was young and pretty and you needed a cause to champion, but it’s over now. There are harsh realities facing all of us. Your sisters depend on you, Jahan. They are your responsibility until the day they marry.’

Turning from the window, Jahan’s mother walked back to the room and picked up the deeds from the floor.

‘You have obligations, especially where Lale and Hanife are concerned. What happened with the Armenian is finished. It’s over.’

She held out the documents and when Jahan didn’t take them she placed them in his hand. Slowly, he got to his feet. ‘This is not over. This is only the beginning.’

Anyush

T
he baths looked more like the foundations of a building site than a swimming pool. Two enormous holes had been carved out of the ground, the sides squared by large blocks of stone. A huge water-wheel and sluice in the middle pumped water from a well. Some of the older boys pivoted the sluice first into the bath where the girls were swimming and then over to the boys who they pushed and jostled to stand under the flow. The younger children splashed around naked while all the others bathed in their underclothes. Anyush stood in the girls’ pool, her skirt tucked in at the waist and her hair bound up in a scarf. It was still warm but not so hot that pale skin would redden and burn. In her arms she carried two-year-old Dikkran, left on the hospital steps when his mother died of puerperal fever. Dipping him in the water, she swung him high in the air as he kicked his thin little legs and laughed with delight. Around her the girls shrieked and the boys shouted.

‘Andranik, try not to drown your brother. And leave some water in the well … eh?’

The early autumn wind blew across the pools, cutting through the heat and whipping around gates and walls. Anyush looked over to the group of children sitting on chairs in the shadow thrown by the main
building. These were the TB orphans, the infectious children who were confined to their own wing and couldn’t swim with the others. A lonely group whose number varied from week to week and whose hopes of a cure were slim. When Anyush had first come to work at the orphanage, these were the children she was drawn to, but in recent weeks Matron had forbidden her to have anything to do with them.

‘You won’t get into America if you have TB.’

America. It seemed she was going one way or another.

A sudden quiet had fallen over the baths. The girls were huddled together in a group and the boys stood silently beside the dripping water-pipe. They were staring over towards the main building at the path leading to the front door. Anyush followed their gaze and saw a stranger approaching, a man whose face was shaded by the sun at his back. Cautiously, he stepped into the sunlight. He was not that tall, wore a light grey summer suit and walked with a pronounced limp. A small girl tugged at Anyush’s skirt, but she didn’t notice.

The person who walked towards her looked like an older brother or uncle of the man she remembered. He made slow progress, without the aid of a stick but as if every step took an effort. His thick black hair had thinned at the temples, and his skin was the colour of someone who spent too much time indoors. Jahan had aged, the years of the war written on his face.

‘Take Dikkran, Houry,’ Anyush said, handing the child in her arms to an older girl. ‘Ask the boys to empty the pools.’

Tugging her skirt down, she waded over to the edge of the bath where Jahan extended a hand to help her out.

‘Can we go somewhere?’

They walked around towards the back of the hospital, followed by the children’s curious stares. The formal garden of the original convent had fallen into decay but for the newly-dug vegetable patch which led down
towards a disused side-gate. They kept to the path, stopping at a garden seat half hidden beside a bolted door.

‘You haven’t changed,’ he said, as they sat on either end of it.

‘I have. As have you.’

‘Not for the better,’ he smiled. ‘I’m going to be bald like my father. Oh and of course there’s this.’ He pulled up his trousers to reveal a prosthetic leg. The metal was the colour of old soap and gleamed dully in the sunlight.

‘From your fall?’

‘With a little help from Murzabey.’

The name hung in the air between them.

‘I never knew you were here,’ he said. ‘One of the men from my regiment told me no one survived.’

‘Your friend knew. The lieutenant.’

‘Ahmet was killed at Gallipoli.’

The sun slipped behind the buildings and they were thrown into deep shade. The children’s laughter carried to them from the pools and the sound of water splashing from the pipe.

‘I suppose I should say I’m sorry,’ Anyush said quietly.

Jahan looked at her.

‘His uncle took me in. I wouldn’t be here without him,’ she added.

Jahan nodded, leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the ground between his feet.

‘You forgot your shoes,’ he said.

Anyush glanced at her feet, dirt and leaves clinging to her wet soles. She drew them under the bench as the wind picked up again, whistling through the gate and rattling the rusty iron on its hinges. Anyush shivered.

‘Here,’ Jahan said. He took off his jacket and put it around her. For a moment, his hands lingered on her shoulders and her face came very close to his. He began to say something, and then changed his mind.

‘You’re out of uniform.’

‘Yes. I’ve left the army.’

‘What have you been doing?’

He sat back against the seat, mossy verdigris staining his white shirt green. ‘I’m running my father’s tannery. Badly, but there’s no one else to do it.’

‘You’re a businessman, then?’

‘Not much of one. Not like my father was.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? They told me at the camp you work as a nurse.’

‘I help with the refugees. And the children here.’

He looked over at the hospital buildings and the lines of clothes flapping between. The paint had peeled from some of the walls and two of the top-storey windows were broken. Anyush watched him, his profile just as she remembered.

‘Why didn’t you answer my letters?’ she asked.

‘Believe me, Anyush … I never got them.’

‘Then how did you find me?’

‘Armin. I wrote to him and he told me you were still in Beyrouth. When I got off the boat I went to the refugee camp and they directed me to the orphanage.’ He smiled at her. ‘It didn’t surprise me to find you by the sea.’

She thought of Trebizond then, and the blue-green waters of the Black Sea. She thought of the cove, and the two people it had once belonged to.

‘Anyush,’ Jahan was saying, ‘I met Matron Norton and I’ve made certain arrangements–’

‘I don’t want your money.’

‘That’s not what–’

‘If you had read my letters you would know that I don’t want anything from you. I’ve got my papers for America and I’m leaving as soon as I get my ticket.’

‘If you would just–’

‘The only thing I want is to find my daughter, so if you could tell me where the Stewart’s are living–’

‘I haven’t heard from the Stewarts, but Anyush please, listen–’

A shrill cry came from the direction of the pools, followed by hysterical high-pitched screaming.

‘Dikkran!’

Running along the path, Anyush rounded the corner where the children were huddled around the injured child. Behind her, Jahan called her name.

Dikkran was concussed and bled copiously from the cut on his forehead. Houry tearfully explained that he had wriggled out of her arms and hit his head against the iron sluice. Anyush cradled him on her lap while Dr Altounyan stitched the wound. There would be a small scar, he said, but the boy would heal.

Some time later, she sat by the child’s bed, waiting for him to fall asleep. She wasn’t thinking of the little boy any more, but of the conversation with Jahan. Dikkran’s eyes closed, and she crept from the room, making her way along the corridor to the main door and the yard outside. The pools were empty when she passed them, and she took the path around the corner to the garden. The seat by the gate was scattered with fallen leaves, and the wind whined through the bars of the gate. Of course Jahan was gone.

Arshak was waiting for her on the hospital steps. She was to go to the matron’s office, he said. At once. Climbing the stairs, she prepared to face Mrs Norton’s wrath. A child in her care had been injured, and she should have been apprehensive, but as she approached the matron’s office,
Anyush realised she felt nothing at all.

She had imagined this day for so long. Everything she would say. Everything she would hear. All those feelings of hurt and loss she would give voice to, and all the feelings of joy and happiness she would share with him. And how it would be to touch him again. To smell his hair, his skin, his clothes. To feel his hands on her. To remember what it was like to make love. But the man she knew had died in the war and a Turkish businessman had come to take his place. A man who would ease his conscience with money.

A dog’s loud barking distracted her. The sound was not coming from the yard outside but from somewhere within the hospital itself. She realised that Spot must have managed to get into Matron’s office and was making a lot of noise. Fearful of what she might find, Anyush stopped outside the door. Pushing it slightly open, she saw Matron Norton standing in front of her desk smiling and clapping her hands. Opening it wider, there was Spot performing his trick of standing on his hind legs and begging for food. But he was turned away from Matron, his attention on someone else, someone with a small hand holding out a piece of bread for the delighted dog. Anyush pushed the door open wide as Spot snatched the bread and dropped on all fours to eat it. A small, smiling face turned towards her. A little girl of about five years of age with silky black hair tied up in a bow, skin so pale it was almost white, and laughing brown eyes like her father’s.