Authors: Martine Madden
Anyush (4 page)
T
he captain’s second encounter with Anyush happened on the same beach some time later. He saw her in the distance, but this time she was distracted and didn’t notice him. Carrying a boot in each hand, she pitched them into the air, throwing them furiously along the curved line of sand as though aiming at someone’s head. The boots sailed past his ear and landed in the shallows at his feet. He picked them up and brought them to her.
‘You missed,’ he said, ‘but I’ll give you another shot if you allow me the pleasure of walking with you.’
Holding out the wet boots, he smiled apologetically, and she began to laugh. Her eyes were filled with the brightness of the sea, and when he came to think about that day down the years, he remembered it as the day he fell in love with her.
They walked towards the eastern end of the bay along the shore. Her smile quickly disappeared and she became wary of him. The beach was screened by the cliff and the woods, but every so often she glanced over towards the track and the road leading to it. The captain didn’t think she was afraid of him but understood that she was reluctant to be seen in his company. He wanted to find a way to put her at ease. More than once,
he tried to catch her eye, but she stared fixedly ahead. Her cheeks had pinked up prettily, but it was only when he pretended to stumble that he had a full view of her face. It was a perfect oval with a wide brow, a small straight nose and pale complexion that was more cream than milk. Her eyes were widely set and the colour of liquid sugar, but it was her mouth that caught his attention – full, slightly protruding lips, the colour of persimmons, with a downward droop at the corners. He was staring, and she looked away.
‘This is a difficult place to find,’ he said. ‘The track is almost invisible.’
‘
You
found it.’
‘So I did. Well, actually, I followed you.’
A look of alarm crossed her face.
‘I couldn’t find my way down here from the main beach. You were walking on the road ahead of me and turned off in this direction so …’ He shrugged. ‘I apologise if I’ve imposed myself on your hideaway.’
‘It’s not mine,’ she said, walking on again. ‘Anyone can come here.’
‘It’s really lovely. In an odd way it reminds me of home.’
‘Constantinople.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Your accent. And you use French and English words.’
‘Do
you
speak English and French?’
‘Some. Bayan Stewart teaches them at the mission school.’
The captain’s interest was piqued. ‘So you grew up here? You have family here?’
Unexpectedly, she clamped up again.
‘That’s rude of me,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you ask me something in return? A sort of trade.’
There were things she wanted to ask. He could feel her curiosity and also that she wouldn’t give in to it.
‘I’ll tell you about myself, then. I’m the oldest and only son of four
children. My eldest sister, Dilar, is a terrible flirt and will make some poor fellow very unhappy. My middle sister, Melike, is shy and bookish with a talent for painting, and my youngest sister, Tansu, could charm every snake in the Empire. My father is retired from the army, due to ill health, and has ambitions for his son, that is to say myself, to take over in his stead. And my mother? Well, she wants to marry me off as soon as possible. There. Now you know everything. Your turn.’
‘I didn’t make any promises,’ she said. ‘Seems to me you were entertaining yourself.’
He laughed, and her colour deepened.
‘At least tell me what it is you do when you’re not wielding pitchforks.’
He had the satisfaction of extracting a small smile.
‘I help Bayan Stewart at the school. And I’m a nurse’s assistant at Dr Stewart’s hospital.’
‘I’ve met Dr Stewart. He’s a serious man.’
This, he could see, was easier for her, safer than talking about her family, or anything concerning herself. She spoke for a time about the Stewarts, and he learned how they were in the village as long as she could remember. How Dr Stewart was respected and how he had set up a hospital in the village, which people travelled to from as far as Trebizond, and beyond. The American spoke Turkish, Armenian and Kurmanji badly, she said, but people made allowances for him because he worked hard. Mrs Stewart, or Bayan Stewart as she was known, was a doctor for women and had taken over the running of the school after the previous teacher left. She had also set up a sewing and embroidery cooperative for girls and was much loved by the village women.
By this time, they had come to the end of the beach, and the base of the headland loomed before them. They could only go back, but the captain found that he didn’t want the conversation to end.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to the cliff. ‘At the top?’
‘A ruined church. And a graveyard.’
‘Is it possible to get up there?’
Pointing out rough-hewn steps cut into the side of the cliff, she said that it was, but that few people went there because some believed it was haunted by ghosts.
‘Can you show me?’
She hesitated, and he thought she would refuse, but she turned and climbed up the slippery stone, telling him to watch where it was eaten away in places. Picking his footing carefully, he followed her, struck by the ease with which she climbed. It was clear she had done this many times before, and ghosts did not deter her. At the top, the wind blew directly in their faces and whined between the headstones in the tiny graveyard. Some stones had fallen into the sea, and others leaned over like stumps in an old man’s jaw. The church itself was a small beehive-shaped building, with part of the roof missing and the main doorway skewed slightly to the west so that it looked out over the sea but away from the prevailing wind. Inside, the render had long since fallen away, revealing the stonemason’s ingenuity in constructing a circular wall with layers of chiselled granite blocks. The stone floor was speckled with bat and bird droppings, and the place smelled of must and salt. He walked around the walls, grit cracking beneath his boots, while she watched from the entrance. There was nothing else to see, no ornament, no icons, nothing of any religious nature, except a short transept at the apex of the circle opposite the door. A swallow flew over his head and darted out into the sunlight.
‘Only a bird would find this homely,’ he said, his voice competing with the moaning wind. ‘I feel as though I’m standing at the centre of a drum.’
‘Go to the back,’ she said. ‘The very back.’
He moved to the darkest part of the church, to the wall opposite the doorway. In the space of a few paces, the noise of the wind dropped, and the place became eerily quiet. He stepped back towards the door, and
there it was again, the wind whistling and sighing.
‘Extraordinary!’
But she hadn’t heard because she had gone outside. He could see her dark-blue skirt and light-coloured blouse moving among the gravestones, her head bent and the sun shining on the plait hanging below her scarf.
‘I have to go,’ she said when he joined her.
‘Let me walk with you.’
‘No. I can go home this way.’
He tried to insist, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
‘You never told me your name,’ he called after her.
She stopped and turned around. ‘Anyush.’
‘Very nice to meet you Anyush. My name is–’
‘I know your name.’
Quickly, she crossed the headland and disappeared into the hazel wood beyond.
Diary of Dr Charles Stewart
Mushar
Trebizond
June 8th, 1901
We are finally something like a proper medical practice, if ‘proper’ is the right word. The small maid’s room is now furnished with microscope, specimens and slides. I’ve been obliged to use the kitchen as an operating room and our downstairs parlour has become the consulting room. The patients I find waiting for me every morning come in all shapes and sizes: men in salvar trousers, tent-like kaftans and Western suits; women veiled, cloaked and burquaed; children standing at their mothers’ sides and one or two sitting in the branches of the fig tree. In the beginning they liked to stare sullenly at me, as though I do not measure up to their idea of a doctor and they are already regretting abandoning the local chekeji, but I think finally we are reaching an understanding. They have had to adjust to my ways, and I must adjust to theirs. The local ideas of rank and influence, for example, were familiar to me from our time in Constantinople, but, if anything, are more pronounced here. There is a system of caste, a pecking order of those who must be seen first, no matter who is the most ill or infirm. It is related to the country’s long and troubled history and can neatly be summarised as Turk, Kurd and lastly Armenian. The Turks are the ruling class, the oppressors, if you like, even though historically the Armenians were here first. And the Kurds are fierce hill tribes who think nothing of killing a man for his horse or his money. They command respect even from the Turks. That leaves the Armenians, who are viewed by the government as being sympathetic to Russia, the old enemy, and so have little chance to improve their station in life. Paul and I have had many discussions on the subject. He believes the Armenians are unfairly oppressed, but, as I’ve often told him, the Turks are a territorial race and all outside alliances are viewed with mistrust.
Meanwhile, I’ve acquired a guide. A personal bodyguard probably describes him best, and he comes with me whenever I leave the village and sometimes when I’m still here. Hetty says she expects to find him eating breakfast with me any day now or sitting with his rifle in our bed. He’s a Kurd by the name of Mahmoud Agha, who brought his youngest son to see me with one of the worst cases of trachoma I’ve seen. The boy was almost blind, but after I had successfully treated him, Mahmoud assigned himself the job of my guide and protector. Like most of the mountain Kurds, he’s a farmer, and spends his time with his flocks of sheep and horses. He has three older sons, a wife he referred to as ‘kuldeoken’ or ‘ashdumper’, and many ‘children’, as he calls his daughters. Hetty has been allowed treat his girls when they’re ill and many of the local women also, but the men will only see me, Doktor Stippet as I’m known. I was telling Paul about this and about some of the unusual cases I had seen when he came to dinner this evening. In particular, the numerous and distressing incidents of children with burns and branding-iron scars to the neck and belly.
‘Burning is thought to cure trauma,’ Paul explained. ‘Or any kind of fright.’
I told him I thought that kind of ignorance was appalling, but he advised me not to dismiss the traditional cures.
‘You’re not seriously promoting them?’
‘No, but you’ll find the old remedies are as important to them as the new. If you force people to choose, they’ll return to what they’re used to.’
‘Even if it’s misguided and dangerous? Our role is to educate as well as to treat.’
‘Education by example, Charles. Once they see that western medicine is effective, more effective, you’ll win them over. Although never completely.’
We talked on in this vein, and I told him about a six-year-old child I had seen in the surgery this morning called Anyush Charcoudian. She had not been burned or forced to ingest some horrible concoction, but I suspected she had been beaten and probably by her mother. Paul thought this was unusual. He said that Turkish children are generally well behaved and their parents moderate in matters of corporal punishment, but in this instance there can be little doubt. The child was
sitting outside my surgery with her grandmother, bleeding from a cut over her eye when I called her into my room. She glanced apprehensively at the old woman but walked in obediently. The cut was deep, requiring several stitches, and although it was difficult and took a while to suture, not one word escaped her during the whole procedure. Afterwards, she stared at the instruments and charts on the wall and I asked her grandmother what had happened and where was the child’s mother. The old woman’s refusal to meet my eye was not that unusual, but something about her put me on my guard. It is a wariness every doctor feels when he realises he is hearing only a version of the truth. A fall from a tree had caused her granddaughter’s injury and the mother was too busy to come. It was entirely possible of course that when the child hit the ground she made contact with something sharp, but I noticed red linear marks along her cheek and bruising near her ear. Although the story did not convince me, the old woman seemed genuinely concerned, and the child was obviously very attached to her. On the pretext of listening to her lungs and palpating her belly, I looked for other signs of trauma. There was nothing much to see except a fading, yellowish-green bruise above her left elbow. Accident or pulling injury? I could not tell. She was a striking child with huge brown eyes and chestnut-coloured hair. Quite an unforgettable little girl, so that I found myself wondering what kind of person would do her harm. I offered her one of Hetty’s cookies, which I keep in a jar on my desk, but she seemed reluctant to take it. Her eyes flicked to her grandmother for permission before she took one and bit into it. The shock and delight on her small face when she tasted the sugary cookie made me smile. The old woman smiled too, and for no other reason than the obvious pleasure she took in her grandchild, I asked no more questions.