Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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From the moment he said ‘war in Europe’ – everyone there had enough Turkish to understand the phrase – Gretel and Viv had taken each other’s hands, and now Wilhelm took the letter from the Turkish man and gave it to Viv, his fingers touching hers lightly.

The message, from the Embassy in Constantinople, was brief. Her father was worried about her. She must contact the Embassy immediately and arrangements would be made to get her home safely.

After that everything moved too quickly. A telephone was found, the Ambassador himself spoke to her and said it was a stroke of luck, a ferry was on its way to where she was with an English couple on board who were returning home via the sea route. They knew about her – every English person in Constantinople had been worrying about her – and would be only too happy to accompany her home, so she must wait at the terminus and make herself known to them.

– But surely there isn’t such a great hurry?

– Miss Spencer, you should have left a long time ago. I’ll telegram your father immediately – he has been more worried than I think you can understand.

There was no time for proper goodbyes, no time to accept what was happening. The Germans said they shouldn’t be with her when the English couple arrived, it would only create discomfort. Gretel embraced her, Wilhelm shook her hand vigorously, and then they were gone, and she was standing on a dock with Tahsin Bey, watching a ferry approach. When she stepped close to him, he moved away, holding up his hand in a rejection of whatever it was she intended.

– They may already be able to see us, he said, gesturing to the ferry which was moving too quickly towards the dock.

– You’ll still come for Christmas, won’t you?

– Of course. This will all be over by then.

– But if Turkey does join the war, which side will she join?

– That crazy Enver will want to side with the Germans, but I’m not sure about the others.

– It won’t matter. I mean, to me. It won’t change anything.

– Perhaps nothing will change, perhaps everything will. This sick man of Europe – a war may be the thing that kills him finally.

– I don’t understand.

– All empires end. The Ottomans have been on their deathbed long enough.

– Oh! How terrible.

– Terrible? Why?

– For you, I mean. To contemplate that.

He raised himself up on his toes as he did when turning an important thought in his head, hands clasped behind his back. She wondered if he were trying to keep himself from touching her; she wanted to place her hand on his arm, grip the muscled forearm beneath the sleeve, and feel herself anchored.

– Did you know Nergiz and I are related?

– Nergiz the cook?

– Yes. Distantly. From my mother’s side. Do you understand what that means?

He was trying to explain something to her about class, or social status. A scandal, a taint on the family name which he thought she might care about. She didn’t know whether she was touched or offended.

– It doesn’t matter, she said.

– It matters very deeply. My grandmother’s people are Armenian. To my brothers, this is an irrelevance. But from the time I was a child, I’ve loved that part of my family most. The Bodrum relatives, the family home in Caria. And when I was a young man at university in France the Ottoman Empire’s first socialist party was founded – an Armenian party, with independence from the Ottomans as its goal. For the first time I could stop feeling ashamed around the French students who compared their tradition of revolution to my despotic empire. Though even then I understood the world well enough to hold these loyalties in my heart, not on my tongue.

– That’s why Mehmet made me stop you talking about Scylax.

– Yes. I knew that was what had happened. Scylax the seafarer who was sent on the greatest of adventures by the Persians, just as I was given permission to excavate the most astonishing site by the Ottoman authorities. We take from the Empire what it has to give – but in the end, our loyalties are with the people we loved first, love most deeply. As Scylax ended his days writing a heroic account of the Carian rebel prince Heraclides, so one day I’ll write of my Armenian cousins, the ones braver than me who lived their life in rebellion regardless of the cost.

– You mustn’t speak like this.

– I’ve never said any of it before. Only to you.

He unclasped his hands, touched her for the second time at the jut of her wrist bone, and her pulse leapt as though the touch had travelled all the way through bone and into her blood. Then he clasped his hands again, stepped even further away, and said nothing else.

The ferry docked; an elderly English couple was among the first to disembark; they greeted Viv as though she were their long-lost daughter.

Thank you, we’ll take care of her from here, the Englishman said to Tahsin Bey when Viv introduced them. The suspicion in his voice was unmistakable, and it was for this reason that Viv went up on her toes to kiss Tahsin Bey’s cheek. He didn’t embrace her in return, but instead whispered in her ear – a promise, a proposition, a caution:

– When the war ends, Vivian Rose.

January – June 1915

– And then Tahsin Bey said, in this place every gift horse is a Trojan horse.

The young soldier threw his head back and laughed, slapping his hand down on the blanket in the place where his right thigh should have been. Viv’s old schoolfriend and fellow VAD nurse, Mary, caught Viv by the elbow and said, Nurse! There’s work to be done.

The soldier, six months earlier a student of Classics at Oxford, touched Viv’s hand.

– That was the first laugh since they took my leg. Come back and tell me more about Troy if you have a minute?

Viv smiled back – kind but distant, in the manner she’d rehearsed until it had met with Mary’s approval – and followed her friend to the door leading out of the ward, where she turned and gave the soldier another smile, a promise in it that she would return, before continuing on to the kitchen.

– You’re worse than Matron, Mary. Narse! There’s work to be done. Narse!

Mary, as sleek and imperious as ever, even ten hours into a twelve-hour shift, didn’t say a word until the kitchen door was closed behind them. You wash, I’ll dry, she said, with a gesture towards the piles of dirty mugs in the sink. Viv took off one shoe, raised it above her head and turned the tap as far as it would go with a quick twist of her wrist. The gush of water threw the beetles in the sink into panic. Darting here and there, they upturned mugs and milk jugs, fleeing the deluge. Viv and Mary, practised now, smashed the shining dark bodies while balancing on one foot.

– Prison life probably seems a luxury after this, Viv said, bending to put her shoe back on when the scurrying had ceased.

– Well, the headwear here is nicer, Mary replied, indicating the white hat on her own head. In prison, they make you wear bonnets. Actual bonnets. With a bow tied beneath your chin.

Viv tried to picture it, laughed disbelievingly, and scooped a floating, upturned beetle out of the rapidly filling sink before rolling up her sleeves and turning her attention to the mugs. It still didn’t entirely make sense to her that Mary had transformed so rapidly and completely from the suffragette who smashed windows, to this zealous supporter of the war who had taken Viv off to the Red Cross to start her VAD training the day she returned from Turkey, but it was a relief to find that they were no longer staring at each other in bafflement from either side of the Votes for Women question.

She looked out of the window over the sink; the lowered skies, the greyness of London. Not yet 5 p.m. and already the sun had given up any pretence that it would play a part in the day. She sighed, thinking of the Labraunda evenings, and the sound was met with clicking-tongued disapproval from Mary.

Viv pulled another mug out of the brown soapy water in an excessive gesture which flicked soap-suds onto Mary’s uniform. At least the gruelling twelve-hour days meant there was little time to think of Tahsin Bey, or the refusal of the war to end, or the slow trickle of post between London and Turkey. She hadn’t yet received any correspondence from him, though she continued to write weekly letters which she slipped into the postbox near her house when no one was watching. Her parents couldn’t know about the nature of her feelings for Tahsin Bey, of course, not yet – and the one person who she might have talked to about it was Mary who was now entirely unreasonable on the subject of Germans and Turks. Viv had tried at first to make her see sense: What did the world of Agamemnon and Priam have to do with the commoners of Greece and Troy? Despise a sultan or a kaiser, but why hate those who were born in his realm? Pity them, yes; pity all those who didn’t have the good fortune of Englishness as their birthright – though some could approach Englishness via their education, yes, they certainly could – but why hate them? But she soon gave up.

Anyway, soon there would be even less time in the day to think of Tahsin Bey – her father, acting briskly on Mary’s suggestion, had pulled strings to arrange for transfers for them both at the end of their probationer’s period from this convalescent hospital to a Class A auxiliary hospital where the mugs and mops and dusters would be supplemented by septic wounds and death-rattles and gangrenous limbs. Mary said it would all soon become as unexceptional as the black beetles which had Viv shrieking just a few weeks earlier, which might be true, but who would want such a thing to become unexceptional? And yet every time there had been an opportunity to say she was content to stay right here with the mops and black beetles she remembered her father’s response when Mary first asked him if there was anything at all he could do to place them where they were most needed. A daughter nursing in a Class A hospital was almost as fine as a son going into battle, Dr Spencer had declared. That ‘almost’ had struck at Viv’s heart and prompted her to say if only she were twenty-three already she would volunteer straight away to join the nurses at the Front. Her father’s proud smile a reward that would carry her through the worst of the Class A hospital’s horrors.

The car pulled up to Cambridge Terrace and Viv stepped out into a world of wind and rain. Mary’s chauffeur walked her partway to the front door with a large umbrella held above her head, and the one-armed ex-soldier who Dr Spencer had brought into the house as a footman to replace George – now Private Roberts – rushed out with an even larger umbrella to accompany her the remainder of the way. A month of living-in at the hospital, emptying bedpans, scrubbing bandages, washing cutlery and then, at the end of it, this return to a world where a drop of rain mustn’t be allowed to touch your skin – just before you were sent out again into the world of a Class A hospital.

– Miss Spencer. There’s a gentleman to see you from the War Office.

– To see me? That can’t be right.

– Your father said you must go in immediately on arrival.

Without changing out of her nurse’s uniform? The one-armed footman said yes, Dr Spencer had been clear in his instructions. Viv took off her cap, smoothed down her hair, pinched colour into her cheeks and walked into the parlour where an unknown man was filling an armchair though his frame was slight. Her father stood up to greet her with the broadest of smiles, while her mother covered her mouth with her hand in horror, managing to make Viv feel it was her fault that she’d had to come in without brushing her hair or changing into more presentable clothing.

– There you are! We were just talking about your summer in Turkey, her father said. Those wonderful maps you’ve made of your walk up the coast.

Her sketchbooks from Turkey were piled onto a table next to the unknown man – whip-thin with a pince-nez balanced on the end of his nose – and one of them was in his hands.

– These are remarkable, the man said, standing up and directing a slightly awkward smile at her, as though his mouth wasn’t accustomed to forming that shape. Such detail! When the Ambassador suggested you might have something interesting to impart about your time in Turkey none of us could have imagined this.

– I’m sorry – imagined what?

– The gentleman from the War Office believes your drawings could be useful to the Maps Division, her father answered. He intends to send them to Cairo.

– No, she said, her voice almost a shriek. You can’t have them.

The man was still holding on to one of the sketchbooks, splayed open. She could see her drawing of the cove where Tahsin Bey had found a length of emerald seaweed and draped it over her wrist.

– Vivian.

Her father kept his voice low, the slight edge to it all that was necessary to silence her, and the whip-thin man gestured to her to take a seat, as if this were his house.

– Miss Spencer, I assure you, they’ll be returned to you very soon, in perfection condition. I just need to make copies and send them to Lawrence and Woolley.

– T. E. Lawrence? Leonard Woolley?

– Our men in Cairo.

– But they’re archaeologists.

– They are the great travellers and explorers and linguists of the age. In times of war, such men are indispensable.

– What about such women?

Both men laughed at this, and her father said, I told you she wasn’t like other men’s daughters.

Viv lowered her head and looked away from the laughing men. For just a moment she had imagined herself in Cairo, standing in the shadow of the Pyramids with Lawrence and Woolley, drawing a map of the Turkish coastline in the sand to their cries of admiration. Her mother caught her eye, pursed her lips together and shook her head with that sharply honed ability to know when Viv was thinking a thought that might harm her marital prospects.

– You’re already halfway to indispensable with these drawings, the whip-thin man said. And as to the other half – Dr Spencer, would you mind if I spoke alone to your daughter?

The speed with which Dr Spencer left the room, ushering the resistant form of his wife ahead of him, was remarkable.

For a few minutes thereafter, Viv understood how it felt to be of singular value to Empire. There was no one – no one! – in her position. No one else had spent an entire summer in the company of Germans and Turks and then walked along one of the most militarily significant stretches of land in the world, and observed it so closely. She tucked her hair nervously behind her ear – a habit of childhood she thought she’d long since left behind – and said she wanted nothing more than to be of use, but she didn’t see how. The man – she still hadn’t been told his name – rested a pad of paper on his knee and said to start with she could tell him everything she knew about the Germans who were in Laboonda.

– Labraunda, she corrected him and his smile told her the name was irrelevant.

It soon became clear that everything she knew was irrelevant. He wanted to know about Wilhelm’s political opinions, whether Gretel’s last name meaned she was related to a particular general, where Anna had learned her Arabic. She knew none of these things, though she could have told him of Gretel’s theories about the religious practices of the Carian Satraps, or Anna’s almost uncanny ability to match up the jigsawed edges of shards of pottery, or the gracefulness which entered Wilhelm’s frame when he danced. Soon, the whip-thin man stopped writing down her answers, and a dullness entered his voice as though he were asking questions because it was his nature to be thorough but not because he expected anything useful to come of it. She was acutely conscious that she had proven to be a waste of time, and her father would soon come to know of it.

She cut off the man’s question and said, It might be more helpful if I were to tell you what I do know rather than what I don’t.

– Right you are, he said gamely, though with little expectation.

She stood up, walked over to the tea-trolley to pour herself a cup of tea, offered the man a slice of cake, which he accepted, with thanks – for a few moments everything was familiar, and known. This was her house, those were her sketchbooks, she could reveal a certain amount without revealing everything.

– The Ottoman Empire is very different to our own, she said.

– How do you mean?

– Take, for instance, the Indian soldiers at the Western Front. Thousands of miles from home, fighting with exceptional valour.

– They do us proud.

– That’s just it. There was that one, an Indian, who won the Victoria Cross. I read about him, and I thought, there is a. . a compact between us, the Indians and the English. We’ll honour their bravery as we would that of an English soldier and, in turn, they fight our wars with as much fervour as any Englishman would do.

She hadn’t really known she felt this way until she started to speak but now she touched the apron of her nursing uniform, and was momentarily silenced by the strength of her own feelings. The whip-thin man was nodding as he took off his pince-nez and polished it on his handkerchief, his expression that of an Englishman having an emotion he didn’t want to deny but couldn’t fully find a way to express.

– Fairness, morality – these aren’t just lofty abstractions. In times of war they work to everyone’s advantage, binding ruler to ruled, Natives to Englishmen. The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, is crippled by its own savagery.

She almost laughed at the sound of her voice – here she was, with a man from the War Office, explaining to him the contrasts of empires as though she were a university lecturer.

– Crippled, how? he asked.

– There is no love there, no admiration, for the Ottoman Sultan. No loyalty. That’s what I think the War Office should know – they do not have their people’s loyalty. How are they to win a war without that?

– If I understood more specifically what you meant. .?

– Well, just as an example – the Armenians.

– Oh, I see. Of course, no, the Ottomans aren’t relying on the loyalty of Armenians to get them through the war.

He had been leaning forward towards her but now he sat back, that look of slight boredom returning.

– The point is, it isn’t just the Armenians. There are those who the Ottomans would imagine to be loyal Turkish subjects who simply aren’t that. Their sense of justice won’t allow it.

– Such as?

– I’m speaking generally.

– Miss Spencer, I don’t believe you are.

There was a long, stretched-out moment in which she wondered what to answer, and that became confirmation.

– Who? the man said, softly, as if he understood this were a matter that should only be whispered. She shook her head, her mouth very dry, unable to lie to the man from the War Office.

– You’d be breaking a confidence if you told me? Is that it?

– I’m relaying my observations.

– I wish we could leave it at this, I genuinely do. But you see, what you’ve said, it’s of enormous interest.

– It is?

– Without question. It could certainly guide significant decisions in the propaganda department. But I need to know the source to evaluate the statement. It means one kind of thing if it comes from a workman on your dig; another kind of thing if it comes from a general in the Army.

He put aside his notepad, tucked his pen into his breast-pocket, and held his hands wide.

– I won’t write the name down or even whisper it to anyone else. You must know that giving a piece of vital information to His Majesty’s representative in a time of war is a quite different matter to betraying someone to the Ottoman authorities. If you like I could ask your father to come in and explain that distinction to you. I’m sure he’d grasp it right away.

It had been a declaration of love. She couldn’t explain that to this man, and certainly not to her father. I’ve never said any of it before. Only to you, he’d said, and they had both known he wasn’t talking about Armenians or empires, not really. But the world had changed beyond all recognition now – that’s what the whip-thin man was telling her, his voice as understanding as it was insistent. Every day, the numbers killed or maimed – I don’t need to tell you, he said; you’ve nursed those boys, and they’re the lucky ones. Of course, many women are nurses, but you alone, Vivian, may I call you Vivian, you alone can tell me what I need to know.

How proud Papa would be to know she had said something useful to the man from the War Office. But even at the cost of betraying one of his closest friends. All those who felt about this war as Viv knew she should were putting their personal lives to one side for the greater good. Mary had convinced her own brother to sign up, though it would break her heart if the slightest hurt came to him. Papa would most certainly have sent his own sons to war. Yes, Papa would do what was right for the war; and that was a sign of his strength.

– You can’t betray a man to his friends, only to his enemies, the man from the War Office said. What you say will do no harm, and it may do our boys at the Front a great deal of good. I can’t put it more simply or honestly than that.

For a few moments there was no sound, not even breath. He waited, his expression grave, and, yes, trusting. Was this how it felt, every day, to be a man – relied upon, responsible, in a position to guide decisions about how to conduct a war? The weight of it was terrible and wonderful all at once.

– Tahsin Bey. Part of his family is Armenian.

She had expected her heart to stutter, her breath to snag, but once she’d said it, it felt inevitable.

– I see. Are his sympathies well known?

– No one knows. His nephew, perhaps, to some extent.

– Would you tell me, please, exactly what he said?

– It was the day we parted company. .

She kept her eyes on his hands as she spoke – the certain strokes of his pen, the half-moons in the nails of fingers balancing the notepad on his knee. He didn’t interrupt, and when she was done he thanked her and said no one, not even her parents, would come to know the details of what she’d said. Then it was over; he departed; minutes later her father re-entered the room, and there was no ‘almost’ in his tone or in his words when he said he wouldn’t press her for details but it was clear from what little the man from the War Office had revealed that she had done as much as any man’s son on the battlefield.

– Oh Papa, she said, placing her arms around his neck, certain then that she had made the right decision.

Once, there were calluses from spadework, cypresses against the blue skies, the scent of figs, the fellowship of curiosity, ancient words imprinted on her palm, the slow headlong journey towards love. Now there was metal probing wounds, the stench of rotting flesh, the weeping of men too deep in suffering to remember shame, the leeching of colour from her skin, her eyes, but never her dreams in which men died as she stood helplessly by, again and again and yet again.This was the world of the Class A hospital, and she would never become accustomed to it.

One day of the week was a half-day, though it was considered bad form to take it when there was any shortage of hands – which was almost always. So it was a rare Friday on which Viv finished at 1 p.m. and had a beautiful April afternoon all to herself. From Camberwell she rode the buses home, her heart expanding as she saw the tops of the trees in Regent’s Park – in the three months since she’d started at 1st London General Hospital she hadn’t set foot in Cambridge Terrace, though she was entitled to seven days’ leave during the period of her six-month term. (Even the men in the trenches don’t work as hard, one of the VAD nurses had said, and Viv suspected that Mary was the reason the poor woman was placed on a double shift the next day.)

– Good God, Vivian, her mother said when she walked through the door. You look terrible.

But her father swung her up in his arms and said, My returning soldier! He had thought of shutting down his own practice and offering his services to the military hospitals but a delegation of expectant mothers had arrived at his door to say wasn’t it enough that their husbands in the trenches would miss the births of their children – did the best gynaecologist in London have to miss them too?

– This soldier refuses to speak of the war today. Except for this.

From her pocket she pulled out a column of newsprint, carefully folded, and watched as he read the account of Armenian intellectuals in Turkey rounded up and deported. The article had no information about what happened to them but said the worst was feared.

– I read it this morning. Dreadful business.

– Papa! she said, laughing to be the one to explain the world to him. It’s propaganda. I think I may have played a role in placing it there.

She’d never seen him so amazed, so delighted.

It was near the end of the evening, and she could no longer delay returning to the hostel, back into her life of drudgery broken up by horror. She stood up to leave and it was only then that her father said oh yes, there’d been a Christmas card from Tahsin Bey addressed to all of them – it had been posted months earlier, but perhaps it was a wonder it had arrived at all. There was a message in it particularly for Viv so they’d kept it – where was it? Long awful minutes passed before the one-armed footman remembered it had been placed in Miss Spencer’s room. Should he bring it down?

– No need, said Viv, surprised by the calmness of her voice. I need something from up there – if you’ll excuse me, Papa, Mama.

My dear family Spencer

I have no way of knowing if this will reach you – I’ve had no post from London since the war began, and I like to hope this is a failure of the postal service. Regardless, in times such as these the rituals of friendship seem more important than ever so please accept my Christmas Greetings! I hope another Christmas doesn’t pass before we’re able to meet again.

I am well. I spend my days cataloguing the Labraunda finds at a long table under the cypress tree in my garden, Alice asleep on my feet. And although there is a great deal of unhappiness in the world I am daily reminded of life’s capacity to find new ways to delight and enrapture – most recently while reading D. B. Spooner’s account of the excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri, on the outskirts of Peshawar. Vivian Rose, you’ll find it in the ‘Archaeological Survey of India, Frontier Circle 1908-9’. I’m sure you’ll be as taken by it as I am. Since reading it I’ve had a great longing to go to Peshawar (which was once the city of Caspatyrus from where Scylax set off on his great voyage down the Indus. Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end). I would rush to Peshawar tomorrow to see the Sacred Casket of Kanishka discovered there by Spooner if I could. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to do so before I’m able?

With warmth and best wishes

Tahsin

The card was written in a miniature version of his usual script; he hadn’t wanted to waste the opportunity for a single added word. Viv leaned her back against the wall, the legs which endured twelve-hour shifts in a hospital suddenly too weak to support her.

The librarian at UCL remembered Miss Spencer and, seeing her VAD uniform, was happy to let her search through the shelves for a particular reference. When she left a few minutes later he waved goodbye, not thinking to check if her handbag might have the ripped-out pages of a journal folded up inside.

What had he been trying to tell her? Viv, sitting on the windowsill of the hostel’s top floor as dawn light squeezed through the tall elm trees, unfolded the pages of D. B. Spooner’s report to try and make more sense of them than she had when she’d read them the previous night – first, standing on the paving stones of UCL; then in the taxicab on the way back to the hostel; and again by candlelight in bed. So, a casket containing the relics of the Buddha had been found in Shahji-ki-Dheri, near Peshawar in the ruins of the Great Stupa of Kanishka. What of it? Why, of all the discoveries of the world, should this one ‘delight and enrapture’ Tahsin Bey?

It is with special pleasure that I turn now to the subject of the excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri.

This time, the first sentence of D. B. Spooner’s report sent a tremor of discovery along her spine, so overwhelming she had to grip the windowsill to steady herself. She rubbed her thumb along the fingertips of her right hand – with these she had brushed away the clinging mud of the inscription stone and watched Greek letters emerge. Now the fingers were chilblained, the tiny cut on her thumb plastered to guard against a soldier’s septic wound discharging into her bloodstream. She rubbed her hands together, palm sliding against palm – she was in a different skin now.

She leaned back against the grey stone which together with the tall encircling trees kept the hostel in a state of perpetual gloom. Perhaps Tahsin Bey just wished to remind her of this – she was an archaeologist, as was he. In the shiver of their spines they were of the same tribe, regardless of wars and kings and sultans. Could that be all there was to it? Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end. Another puzzle. Scylax began his famed journey down the Indus from Caspatyrus – the ancient name for Peshawar – but he didn’t end it there. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to do so before I’m able?

– Oh, she said.

Somewhere across the oceans a Turkish man sat at a table of discovery under a cypress tree, and understood what no one else seemed to: that she, also, needed a place in the world where she could sit in sunshine, examining ancient coins, fragments of gods, while the war she didn’t understand washed over her and disappeared into the horizon.

– Nurse Spencer! You’ve missed your breakfast and it’s time to leave for the hospital.

City of Men,

City of Flowers,

Land Beyond the Mountains:

Caspatyrus, Paruparaesanna, Paropamisadae, Gandhara,

Parasapur, Purashapura, Poshapura, Po-lu-sha-pu-lo, Fo-lu-sha, Farshabur, Peshawar.

They all had a name for it, century after century – the Persians, the Greeks, the Mauryans, the Indo-Greeks, the Sassanids, the Kushans; kings and generals and Buddhist monks and travellers, everyone felt the tug of Peshawar. Everyone, including an Englishwoman in a Class A hospital who wanted nothing more than a refuge amidst antiquity.