Four Lifejackets

The shop opposite Basmane station had lifejackets in the window at half price, and Farhad, who had come to buy four, was told that the family they were for had left in the night without their shoes.

He was told it by the landlord of the Pension Güneş, which meant sun, and which had not seen any since it was built. The landlord was a heavy, unshaven man in a cardigan who had been standing in his own doorway, waiting to tell somebody, since six in the morning. He told it in Turkish, and then, when he saw that the tall foreigner had only half of it, in the Persian he had picked up from ten years of Iranian guests, which was a language made entirely of prices.

‘Four persons. Room six. Paid to Friday.’ He held up four fingers, then six, then rubbed the fingers together. ‘In the night, a car. They go. This morning I go up. Shoes.’

‘Show me,’ said Farhad.

It was raining in Izmir, a fine grey steady rain off the gulf that the guidebooks did not mention, and it had been raining for the three days he had been there. He followed the cardigan up a staircase that smelled of bleach and frying, past a first floor where somebody was coughing behind every door, to a room at the back with two iron beds and a mattress on the floor between them.

The beds were made. That was the first thing, and he stood in the doorway and looked at it for a while. A woman who makes the beds in a rented room before she leaves it at night has not been dragged out of it. She has been told there is time. On the mattress on the floor, somebody small had left a drawing in felt pen of an aeroplane with a face in every window.

And along the wall beside the door, where a family from the south-east of Iran leaves its shoes as naturally as it closes its eyes to sleep, there were four pairs in a row, largest to smallest. A woman’s black slip-ons, worn down at the heel. A pair of trainers with the laces tucked in, neatly, by a girl who had been taught. A second pair of trainers, filthy, one of them split along the toe by somebody who kicked things. And a pair of pink plastic sandals with a strap mended in wire.

Farhad crouched and looked at the split trainer. It had been kicking a football, he supposed, in a courtyard in Saravan, six weeks ago. He did not touch it.

‘They come back?’ said the landlord. ‘Because Friday, I have Afghans.’

‘What kind of car?’

‘Not car. Small lorry. Like this.’ The man made a box with his hands. ‘White. Closed. On the side, writing. Old writing, gold, like on a shop for weddings.’ He was pleased to be asked, and he took his time. ‘And a picture. A fruit.’

‘What fruit?’

The landlord thought about it with his whole face.

‘İncir,’ he said at last, and then, since the foreigner only stared at him, he put his fingers to his mouth and mimed, with considerable delicacy for so large a man, the eating of something soft, and sweet, and full of seeds.

He bought the lifejackets anyway. He could not have said why, except that he had crossed the road in order to buy them, and a man who stands in the rain outside a shop changing his mind is more visible than a man who goes in.

Basmane had been selling them for eleven years. In the summer of 2015, when Syria emptied itself into the streets round the station, the tailors and the shoe shops had cleared their windows of suits and brogues and filled them with orange, and they had never quite gone back. There were fewer now. The Syrians had gone home, some of them, or on. But there were still three shops on this one street with lifejackets hanging in the window among the school uniforms, adult and child, and a handwritten card that said in Arabic and Persian and something that was probably Pashto: original, not copy. Farhad had been told once, by a man who knew, that the copies were stuffed with packing foam and drank water like a sponge. He had been told it in this street. He had been wearing one at the time.

‘Four,’ he said. ‘One adult. Three for children. Fourteen, eleven and eight.’

The boy behind the counter did not ask where the children were. Nobody in Basmane asked that. He brought them out, and Farhad paid in lira, and carried them back across the road in a black bin bag that deceived no one, past the taxi rank and the simit seller and the long yellow front of the station, which a Frenchman had built for an English railway company in the days when the neighbourhood behind it was Armenian and the city was called something else.

The café was on the corner. It had four tables under an awning, a television showing a football match from another year, and a window so steamed with breath and tea that the street outside looked like something remembered. She was at the table at the back, where she had sat for three mornings, with a laptop open and a pile of photocopies and a glass of tea she had allowed to go cold.

He did not join her. He sat down two tables away with his back to the wall and put the bin bag under his chair, and ordered tea, and looked at the football.

She was a Frenchwoman this month. Dr Laure Bonnard, of a university in Lyon, an historian of the silk trade, in Izmir for three weeks to read Armenian merchants’ letters in an archive that had been very surprised to hear from her. It was a good cover. It had amused Ezra a great deal. Six years you were an Armenian from the silk quarter of Isfahan, he had said, on the telephone from Jaffa. Now you can go and find out where they sent the silk. She wore spectacles she did not need and a raincoat the colour of weak coffee, and she had cut her hair to the jaw in a bathroom in Bayswater with the kitchen scissors, without asking anybody, and Farhad had thought about it more than he had any right to.

She turned a page. She did not look up.

He took a paper napkin from the dispenser and folded it once and stood it on its edge beside his glass, which meant not here. After a minute she yawned, and took off the spectacles, and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, which meant that she had understood, and was frightened, and would not show it to a café.

There had been four of them, and now there were four pairs of shoes. He did not have a signal for that.

They had come on Monday, as arranged.

It was a careful arrangement, and it had taken five weeks and most of an Englishman’s patience to make. Yusuf’s brother had got them out of Saravan in the back of a cousin’s pick-up, under sacks, the night after the Guards came to the house for the third time. Baluch on both sides of a border do not much notice it. From the Pakistani side they had gone north, by roads Farhad did not ask about, and come back into Iran a thousand kilometres from anyone who knew their faces, and then west by bus, four days, as what they were, a mother and three daughters going to a wedding. At Van they had crossed into Turkey on passports that were perfectly real and that Jonah had paid a clerk in Zahedan to issue without telephoning anybody first. Jonah had done all of it from the back room of a bookshop, by telephone, with a pot of tea and the money from a Victorian atlas he had been fond of.

From Van to Izmir was another bus. Then a room, paid to Friday. Then a boat, on a night with no moon, from a beach near Çeşme, eight miles across the water to a Greek island where a sea captain called Lekkas, who owed Jonah a great many drinks, would be waiting with a van and a cousin in the port police.

It was not a good plan. It was the plan of three people with no country behind them and no money. But it had one advantage, which was that every step of it had already been walked. Farhad had walked it himself. Four years ago, almost to the week, he had come down from Van on that bus with a dead man’s name and a photograph in a pair of rolled socks, and slept in a room on this street, and been put in the back of a lorry by a man who sold lifejackets.

He paid for his tea and went to find him.

Cemal’s shop was in an arcade behind the station, between a money changer and a man who repaired telephones, and it sold, officially, luggage. There were suitcases stacked to the ceiling. There was a rack of the tartan zip bags that every refugee in the world carries, as though they were issued at birth. At the back, behind a curtain, there were the other things: the jackets, the inner tubes, the waterproof pouches for a telephone that hang round the neck.

He was older. That was all. A small quick man with dyed black hair and a grey moustache he had not got round to dyeing, sitting on a stool with a glass of tea on his knee, watching the arcade the way a fisherman watches a float.

He looked at Farhad for perhaps two seconds. Then he looked at the bin bag.

‘You bought from the boy on the corner,’ he said, in his bazaar Persian. ‘After everything I did for you. He’s a thief. Those are copies.’

‘They said original.’

‘They all say original. My mother said I was original.’ Cemal got up and kissed him on both cheeks, hard, and held him by the arms to look at him, and saw the scar above the left ear, where the hair had not yet grown back to cover it, and looked for a moment longer than was polite. ‘You got old, brother. And somebody tried to open your head.’

‘A conscript. He was aiming at somebody else.’

‘They always are.’ He let go. ‘Four years. I thought you were dead, or in America. It’s the same thing. Sit. You’re still not drinking?’

‘I’m still not drinking.’

‘Then you’re still the only one of my customers God will recognise.’ He poured tea from a thermos. ‘So. You came out by my door, and now you come back in by it. Nobody does that. Not for themselves.’

‘A woman and three girls. Baluch, from Saravan. They were at the Güneş, room six. I sent you word they were coming.’

‘You sent me word. Friday night, the dark of the moon, four places, paid in London.’ Cemal turned his glass on his knee. ‘I kept four places.’

‘They were taken last night. A white van, closed, with gold lettering on the side and a picture of a fig.’

The little man did not move. But something went out of his face, as the light goes out of a room when a cloud passes, and for the first time since Farhad had known him, he looked along the arcade before he spoke, both ways.

‘You don’t remember the van,’ he said quietly.

‘I never saw a van.’

‘No. You were inside it.’ He leaned forward. ‘Four years ago I walked you to the end of this arcade at two in the morning and put you in the back, among the boxes, and shut the door. You never saw the outside. Nobody does. That’s the point of it. Gold letters. A fig.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Brother, that isn’t a van that takes people. I’ve put people in that van since I was nineteen. My father put people in it. That is the van that gets people out.’

‘Whose is it?’

‘You don’t ask whose. You look at the hill.’ Cemal jerked his chin towards the north-east, at a wall of the arcade, and whatever lay behind it. ‘In Bornova there is a house, an old Frankish house, with a little glass room on the roof. Some nights there’s a lamp in it. If the lamp is lit, the van comes. If it isn’t lit, you tell your customer to sleep. That’s all I know, and all my father knew, and I’ve never once wanted to know more.’ He drank his tea off in one swallow. ‘It was lit last night. I thought it was for yours. I thought, the Englishman who pays has got tired of waiting for the moon.’

‘It wasn’t for mine.’

‘Then whose lamp is it now?’ said Cemal.

Farhad had no answer. He took out his telephone, the cheap one, and typed with one thumb what the landlord had told him, the gold letters and the fruit, and sent it to a number in London where it was half past seven in the morning and an elderly man would be standing at a window with a cup of tea, deciding which of his books the damp had spared.

The reply did not come for eleven minutes, which for Jonah Ashdown, who answered everything at once and at length, was a very long time.

It was two words.

Which fig?

The Lord Is Not a Bank

Jonah Ashdown had asked a great many frightened people a great many questions in his life, and he could not remember ever being so afraid of an answer as he was of the answer to which fig.

He stood at the shop window with his telephone in one hand and his tea in the other and watched the rain come down on Bayswater. It was December now, so the rain had a certain seasonal authority. Across the road somebody had hung coloured lights in the window of the launderette, and they blinked on and off, red and green, in the wet glass, with the dogged cheerfulness of a man telling a joke at a funeral.

There was more than one fig in Smyrna. He told himself so. It was a city that had sold figs to the world for three hundred years; there must be forty firms with a fig on the letterhead, and vans, and gold paint. A fig was nothing. A fig was a coincidence.

The telephone buzzed.

Cut in half. You see the seeds. Under it two names and a year, 17 something. The landlord cannot read Latin letters. The smuggler says: the house in Bornova with the lamp.

Jonah read it once. Then he put the telephone in his cardigan pocket and drank his tea, all of it, standing quite still, the way one finishes a drink before going in to see the doctor.

‘Mr Ashdown.’

He had not heard the bell. Mrs Okonkwo was in the doorway in a coat of a deep and festive red, with a hat to match, shaking an umbrella with a pattern of holly.

‘Mrs Okonkwo. Good morning. You look like Christmas.’

‘I look like a woman who has been to the bank,’ said Mrs Okonkwo. ‘They were not pleased to see me either.’ She came in. She looked at the shop, as she did on the first of every month and on such other days as the spirit moved her: the shelves, the green lamp, the armchair, and now, through the open door of the back room, a second armchair and a third, one of them propped on a book. ‘You have lodgers.’

‘I have friends staying.’

‘Two friends. A man and a woman. For four weeks. The man prays in my yard at five in the morning, facing my bins.’ She held up a gloved hand. ‘I do not object. I have told my congregation. I said, there is a Muslim in Bayswater who is on his knees before any of you have found your slippers. They did not like it. It has done wonders for attendance.’ The hand came down. ‘But a lodger is a lodger, Mr Ashdown, whether he prays or not, and a lodger pays, and then you pay, and then I pay the bank. That is how God arranged it.’

‘They’re away at the moment.’

‘Then they are not using the hot water. I will take that into account.’ She put a folded paper on the counter. He knew what it was without looking: two months, and now a third, in her firm round hand, with the total underlined twice. ‘In October I told you that the Lord is patient and I am not the Lord. In November you paid me half, from somewhere, and I thanked Him. It is December. I have prayed about you again.’

‘And what did He say?’

‘He said,’ said Mrs Okonkwo, ‘that He is a shepherd, a rock, a fortress and a very present help in trouble. He said He is not a bank.’ She looked at him properly then, for the first time, and her face changed. ‘You have had bad news.’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘It is on you like flour.’ She considered him. ‘Is it the children? The African gentleman’s children, that you sold the big map book for?’

He had not told her that. He had not told her anything. He supposed the walls of the building were thinner than he had thought, or that she was a better pastor than he had given her credit for.

‘He’s not African, Mrs Okonkwo. He’s Baluch.’

‘He has three daughters and a wife in the hands of wicked men. That is African enough for me.’ She picked up her umbrella. ‘The end of the month. Not because I am soft. Because I will not have it said in Peckham that I put a man out at Christmas while he was about the Lord’s business.’ At the door she turned. ‘And Mr Ashdown. When they come home, your lodgers. The lady is too thin. I will send something.’

The bell rang behind her. On the counter, beside the account, she had left a tract. It was about the widow’s mite.

Yusuf rang at nine, as he had rung every morning for five weeks, from a borrowed telephone in a fishermen’s coffee house in Khasab, where it was already noon and already hot.

Jonah had been dreading it since half past seven. In thirty-four years he had made this call perhaps sixty times, to wives and mothers and the chairmen of shipping companies. He had made it from hotel rooms and airport lounges and once from a public box in Mogadishu with a boy holding a rifle on him for the coins. He had a way of doing it. You said the fact first, in one sentence, before the person had finished saying hello. You did not say I’m afraid. You did not say there has been a development. And then you stopped talking, and let them have the silence, for as long as they needed it.

‘Yusuf. They reached Izmir on Monday, all four, safe and well. Last night somebody took them from the room. We don’t yet know who.’

The line hissed. Behind it he could hear dominoes going down on a table, and a kettle, and the sea.

‘Took,’ said Yusuf, at last.

‘In a van, in the night. Without violence, as far as we can tell. The beds were made.’

‘The beds were made.’ A long breath. ‘That’s her. That’s Maryam. If the angel of death came for her she would ask him to wait while she folded the blanket.’ He laughed, and the laugh went wrong in the middle. ‘Mr Jonah. You told me five weeks ago, in this telephone, that nobody stays behind. You said it is what you are for.’

‘I did.’

‘I am asking you now if it is still true. I am not asking the Israeli lady, who would say yes because she is brave. I am not asking Farhad, who would say God willing. I am asking you, because you are the one who knows what things cost.’

Jonah looked at the three armchairs, and the cold gas fire, and the record player with its lid down.

‘It’s still true,’ he said. ‘I don’t yet know what it costs. I think it may cost me something I’d rather have kept.’

‘Then it is a real price,’ said Yusuf. ‘Good. I only trust those.’ The dominoes went down. ‘Bring me the little one’s voice on a telephone. The pilot. After that you can bring me the rest.’

The ledgers were in the back room, on the bottom shelf, under the Kinks.

There were forty-one of them, foolscap, bound in black cloth with red corners, one for every year from 1952 to the year his father died. Jonah had not opened them since. He had moved them twice, to paint, and dusted them, and once dried them out after a pipe burst. He knew which was the first. It had 1952 on the spine in white ink and, underneath, in his father’s small furious capitals, PURCHASES — LEVANT.

He put on a record first.

He did not have to think which. His hand went to it. The crackle, and then the strings, very low, beginning to climb, and he sat down in his own armchair with the ledger on his knees while Elgar told an empty room in Bayswater, as he had told it so often, that a friend had once walked with him in the country and persuaded him not to give up.

Edward Ashdown had been twenty-six in 1952, a year out of the army, with a gratuity, a degree in Oriental languages and a conviction that there was money in Persian books. There was, as it happened, though not for long and not for him. The early pages were all travel. Constantinople. Aleppo. Tabriz — nothing, robbers. Tehran — a Shahnameh, incomplete, £12. And then, in March, a whole page to itself:

SMYRNA. Corvesi, Bournabat. The library, ENTIRE. 1,140 vols, of which Persian MSS 212. Also the cases. The old man will not haggle & will not say why he sells. £400. Shipped per Corvesi & Lane, the vendor’s own firm (!). Insured Lloyd’s.

Under it, in a different ink, added later:

This is the shop.

Jonah read the entry three times, while the strings went up.

He had known the name all his life, as one knows the name of the street one was born in. Four hundred pounds, in 1952, to a man who would not say why he was selling. He had known that too, in a general way, and had taken care for fifty years never to know it in any particular one. A colonel of the Revolutionary Guard had said to him a month ago, over tea, about his father and the families of Tehran: it must have been a very good time to buy. He had thought at the time that it was the cruellest thing anybody had said to him since Clare died. He saw now that the colonel had not known the half of it.

The record ended. He let the needle ride in the groove.

He had been to that house. That was the part he had not put in any message to Farhad, and did not intend to. He had been twenty-four, in the summer of 1987, sent out by his father to learn the Smyrna end of a business he had not understood was a business. There had been a garden with a pomegranate tree, and a verandah, and a gramophone, and a glass lantern on the roof like the top of a lighthouse. There had been a girl of twenty-one who swore in Greek and counted in French, and who had told him on the first evening that the English were the only people on earth who apologised before they robbed you.

At the end of that summer she had shut a door in his face without a word of explanation, and he had gone home. Four years later he had married Clare, who explained everything, at length, with footnotes, and he had been happier than he deserved for twenty-six years.

He had never been back. He had never written. For thirty-nine years he had revised his eight records for a desert island, on Sunday mornings and in other men’s prisons, and there was one song that had never once been on the list, in any version, in any mood. He had told himself it was because he did not care for it. He looked at the blue shelves now, at the place just along from number three, and did not get up.

‘You want to go yourself,’ said Ezra.

He was at his café. Jonah could hear the gulls, and a spoon, and the cracked plastic chair complaining.

‘I think I must.’

‘You were on Tehran television four weeks ago as a British spy. The Turks watch Tehran television. They watch it more carefully than the Iranians do. And you want to walk into Izmir on your own passport and knock on a door.’

‘It’s the only door in that city that will open to my name. It won’t open to anything else. Not to Farhad, not to Leïla, and certainly not to you.’

‘Why to yours?’

‘Because my father cheated her grandfather,’ said Jonah. ‘In 1952. I’ve just read it. She’ll have wanted to say so to an Ashdown for a long time.’

There was a silence on the line. He could picture the eyebrows.

‘That is a terrible reason to be let into a house.’

‘It’s an excellent one. People will open a door to be rude to you when they wouldn’t open it to be helped.’ He closed the ledger. ‘There is a difficulty. I haven’t the fare.’

‘I know you haven’t the fare. Graham Pryce has seen to that.’ The spoon went round. ‘It’s bought. Tomorrow, from Stansted, God help you, at an hour when decent people are asleep. I’m sending it to your telephone now.’

‘Ezra.’

‘Don’t.’

‘I want to say it once, so that we both heard it. In thirty-four years I never took a penny from a government. Not yours, not mine. I was paid by people who insure ships, and everybody at every table knew it, and that was the whole of what I was worth.’ He put the ledger back on the bottom shelf, under the Kinks, where it had been for forty years. ‘As of this morning I’m on your payroll.’

‘It’s a ticket on a cheap airline. It isn’t a payroll.’

‘It’s how they begin.’

Ezra sighed down two thousand miles of line. ‘You know what your trouble is? You think your hands were clean. Nobody’s hands were clean. You were just very careful where you washed them.’ The chair creaked. ‘Go to Izmir. Take a raincoat; she tells me it’s as bad as England. And Jonah. Whatever is behind that door, you’ll tell the other two. All of it. They’ve had enough of people deciding what’s good for them to know.’

‘Of course,’ said Jonah.

He meant it when he said it. He was almost sure of that, afterwards.

Freshwater Franks

Bornova had been a village once, eight kilometres from the sea, where the Frankish merchants of Smyrna went in summer to escape the plague, and it was now the end of a metro line.

Jonah came up out of the station into the rain and did not recognise a single thing. There was a dual carriageway. There was a shopping centre, and a hospital the size of a small airport, and ten thousand students in anoraks streaming between the two with their hoods up, and a man selling roast chestnuts from a barrow, whose smoke was the only thing in the street older than Jonah.

He walked. He had learned long ago that a place you have not seen for forty years must be come at slowly, on foot, like a horse that has forgotten you. Behind the main road the streets narrowed. There were plane trees, and high walls streaked black with wet, and now and then, over the top of a wall, a slate roof with a wrought-iron crest and a monkey-puzzle tree, as though a street of Tunbridge Wells had been set down in Anatolia and left there to see what would happen.

What had happened was the university. The great house at the end of the road, where an English family had once sat down forty to dinner, was the rector’s office. The one beside it was a library. A third had a brass plate that said Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Soil. He passed an English church the size of a parish hall behind a locked gate, with a notice of services on the second Sunday of the month, and a graveyard where every stone he could read from the pavement said the same six surnames.

The wall he wanted was the last in the lane. The gate was iron, and had been green. Set into the gatepost was a marble tablet so worn that he had to trace it with his finger: a fig, cut in half; two names; and the date, 1794.

There was no bell. There had not been one in 1987 either. You pushed.

The garden had gone back to whatever it had been before the Corvesi came. The pomegranate was still there, bare and black, with three split fruits hanging on it like something forgotten after a party. The gravel had grass in it. And the house stood at the end of it in the rain, tall and narrow and the colour of old piano keys, with its green shutters and its iron verandah and, on top, absurd and perfectly intact, an octagon of glass with a little lead roof, where somebody’s great-grandfather had sat with a telescope to watch for his ships.

A woman was on the verandah in a man’s tweed overcoat, cutting the dead heads off a geranium with a pair of kitchen scissors. She did not stop when the gate clanged. She cut two more and dropped them in a bucket.

‘The university sends a man every month,’ she said, in English, without turning round. ‘He measures things. If you are he, the drawing room is still eleven metres and I am still not dead.’

‘I’m not from the university.’

The scissors stopped.

She turned then, and looked at him down the length of the wet garden, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all. She had been a thin dark girl with a great deal of hair. She was a thin grey woman with it cut short, and the same straight back, and the same way of holding her chin as though the world were a tradesman who had come to the wrong door.

‘Panagia mou,’ said the Contessa Ottavia Corvesi, softly, which was Greek, and meant roughly Mother of God. And then, in the governess’s English that her family had been buying from Cheltenham for four generations: ‘You’ve lost your hair.’

‘Most of it.’

‘And you still stand in the rain like a man waiting to be asked.’ She put the scissors in the pocket of the overcoat. ‘You had better come up. Mind the third step. It’s rotten. Everything on the left-hand side of this house is rotten; we get the weather from the sea.’

They sat in the kitchen, because it was the only room with a stove. It was a vast cold kitchen with a range from Marseilles and a table that would have seated a ship’s company, and she made the tea herself, without ceremony and too strong. There had been four servants in 1987. He did not ask.

She had put something on the table before she put the kettle on. It was a sheet of blue paper, folded in three, gone soft along the folds. He did not need to open it. He could see the printed heading through the back: E. Ashdown, Oriental Books, London W.2.

‘Seventy-four years it’s been in the bureau,’ said Ottavia. ‘My grandfather kept it. Then my father kept it. I keep it. Four hundred pounds, received with thanks, for one thousand one hundred and forty volumes and the cases they stood in.’ She set the pot down. ‘Do you know why he sold?’

‘I know he wouldn’t say.’

‘Then I shall. In 1942 the Turkish Republic invented a tax on wealth. It was meant for the Jews and the Greeks and the Armenians, and it was assessed by a committee who looked at your name before they looked at your books. We had been Italian subjects for seventy years and consuls for a hundred, and it did not help us in the least; my grandfather’s partner was a Greek, the warehouse was in the partner’s name, and that was enough. They took the warehouse. They took the lorries. The partner they sent to break stones in the east.’ She poured. ‘It took my grandfather ten years to sell everything else that could be sold. The library was the last. He loved it more than he loved my grandmother, and he said so, at dinner. Then one spring an Englishman arrived with a letter of introduction, very polite, very young, and looked at the shelves for an afternoon, and offered four hundred pounds.’