“When a civilization, or indeed life, moves on, much is lost and disappears,
but there are also kingdoms that have dominion over time.”
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
Five Cities
PASSAGEWAY
Impossible to prepare for the eeriness, as pale stone by pale stone, tower by tower, Istanbul’s former Scutari Barrack Hospital, today the First Army Headquarters of Turkey, comes into view. I recognize the gargantuan rectangular architecture, know it from lithographs, engravings, old, grainy photographs, but recognition hardly accounts for the visceral emotion of undertow, the uncanny sense, if put to words, I have been here.
I am lucky to be here at all. Access to this military base demands stamped paperwork. Security is strict. I must surrender my cell phone, my hope of photographs, into one of dozens of small, gray lockers.
I walk behind a young lieutenant, his khaki uniform pressed to a knife’s edge, climb a paved incline towards the building’s massive, arched entrance. Behind me are my husband and our Turkish guide, Yigit Tahtalioglu. The passageway, a shadowy tunnel, leads to an enormous, sunlit parade ground. It exists. This dank place where wounded soldiers were brought, carried off overcrowded transport ships crossing the Black Sea from Crimean battlefields. I remember Jerry Barrett’s Mission of Mercy at Scutari, a famous oil painting set in this same passageway. Florence Nightingale, a celebrity in England, had refused to sit for her portrait, telling Barrett she had no time. Not giving up, he sketched, then later painted her receiving the wounded amid a party of others, his own face peering, impish, from an upper window. A copy of that painting, which has always seemed contrived to me, a tableau lacking Scutari’s true horror, hangs in my study, a gift.
Memory is notoriously unreliable. But this uncanny feeling is less a memory than some stirring or rousing up of long dormant depths. Does the insistent thought, it exists, rise from years of research or from the enigmatic pairing of history with the novelist’s imagination? I have been here.
Keeping up with the dour lieutenant’s brisk pace, I pass through an immense, noon-lit courtyard, enter the former hospital on its northwest side. Two flights of marble stairs lead to a second floor. To my left, a white corridor, gleaming white floors, white walls, a long row of deep-silled,windows. An austere, dream-like corridor that lengthens into an ever-narrowing gray distance. One of the many corridors where soldiers lay on pallets of rotting straw, corridors she famously walked nights, carrying her lamp-turned-symbol, an ordinary Turkish fanoos. I cannot summon the cries of the suffering, the putrid odors of blood and feces, the faint smell of gunpowder. A whitewashed monotony of walls, ceiling and floor has obliterated a generation’s trauma.
Saying little, the four of us enter The First Army Museum. In this large, shadowy room, I regard a panorama of Turkish wars, from the Crimean War to the 1919-1922 War of Independence. Bronze tableaux of life-sized soldiers simulate heroic action with swords, cannon, horses, wagons, artillery. On the sand-colored walls, a frieze of black and white photographs, glassed-in displays of war memorabilia, red and white Turkish flags, an oil portrait of Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic. In the room’s center, a life-sized sculpture of a machine gunner and his assistant, their field artillery horseshoed by bronze sandbags. I am discomfited, aware I am the reason four of us are in a room commemorating Turkish wars and heroes of wars. I feel collective reproach, disapprobation from these soldiers lying prone, hunched motionless behind cannon and sandbag, aiming rifles at the First Army Museum’s neutral, empty air. Then, at the opposite end of the room, I see it – deus ex machina – a spiral staircase leading to the next floor. Without waiting for the others, I cross the room and climb the stairs, in search of the one reason I am here at all.
DESK
Ordinary, even ugly, it dominates the right-hand corner of the small room. Behind it, a banker’s slatted wooden chair. As the Turkish lieutenant, stifling a yawn, tells us that the desk, the chair, too, had been hers, I am swept up in a violent wave of remembrance. But instead of flinging myself across the desk, as I suddenly and irrationally, want to do, and because it is crowded in this dollhouse-sized room, I edge away from the others, stare out a window to calm myself. A glittering, squared bit of the Sea of Marmara that had once been her view. Behind me I hear my husband, his voice strained with disbelief. “She’s here,” he says. “She’s right here.” I turn to look at him. This is not a man to be taken in by anything he would call metaphysical “woo-woo.” This is a retired surgeon with a mind of granite, a man of science, staring down at her desk with tears in his eyes. Confirmation of my own feeling – we are on the threshold of some invisible otherworld. Florence Nightingale’s “presence” emanates, a palpable force, from the hard, brown desk where she sat day and night for nearly two years, scratching out hundreds of letters and reports to the Secretary at War, requisitions to the purveyor, personal letters of sympathy to soldiers’ families, hasty letters to her own family. The desk is a porous border, a portal, where the veil between physical and metaphysical, this world and the next, falls away. Standing beside the desk after the others have moved away, I never want to leave it. It is the closest I have ever come to her. Its oak surface supported her powers of eloquence, her frustrations, rages, lacerating wit, held desperately inked pages of numbers, facts, shocking absences of, and demands for, food, supplies, medicines. It was her anchor, sturdy ballast, where she sat with paper, pen and inkwell, wresting administrative order from chaos, persuading, commanding, with tireless lists, letters, statistics, demands. Oh, the loyalty of that desk, companion of sorts, holding steady course in a turbulent sea of blood, death, incompetence, corruption, misogyny. It is reported she rarely slept. Not far from this desk, less than a minute’s walk, are the notorious corridors of wounded and dying, the “kingdom of hell,” as she called it. Today those corridors are purged of ghosts, their collective resonance scrubbed away, much like our hotel in Istanbul. A former prison for political prisoners up until the 1980’s, with words in Ottoman Turkish chiseled in stone above the entrance – A rest house for murderers – words that provoked astonishment but little else, even when Yigit related the amusing story of a former political prisoner, revisiting the site of his incarceration, crossing the upscale hotel lobby with its oppressive scent of roses to inquire of the receptionist whether a former inmate might be given a discount.
OBJECTS
Genius loci: Latin for “the guardian spirit of a place.” Is there an equivalent phrase for the guardian spirit of objects? These objects are on her desk, as if to add authenticity:
- A rectangular wooden box with metal hinges and nine drawers. The drawers, (I check,) are empty.
- An oil lamp.
- An engraved bronze object. The lieutenant picks it up, guesses it was used to administer medicines. Yigit, distracted by a series of framed letters on the wall, doesn’t add his guess. My husband is certain it held quills for a pen, that the tiny pot attached like a growth to its side, was the inkwell. It turns out he, not the lieutenant, is right. It is an antique Qalamdan Divit, an Islamic scribe’s portable pen case with inkwell.
Did she use it? Was it hers? I feel no recognition. Later, touring the Grand Bazaar, I will see dozens just like it in antique shops.
- A nineteenth century leather medical bag.
- A terrifying looking chest drain.
- On a wall near her desk, shelves lined with stoppered medicine bottles of sea green glass, others the purplish brown of root beer.
Here, in the oneiric theater of Nightingale’s Museum, I feel myself looked at by these objects.
SPIRAL
Opposite the desk, the staircase continues, winds up to another floor. Ascending into the third layer of her past, I feel unsafe. The stairs are narrow, the turns too tight. How did thirty-eight women, wearing nineteenth century nuns’ habits and nurses’ uniforms, go up and down these? On the third floor, another room becomes a portal. An oval dining table, overlaid by oyster colored linen, is curiously pierced by dozens of tiny holes, needle-like pricks. Four mahogany chairs surround the table, as if anchoring it. I remember a scene from my novel where some of Nightingale’s nurses, resentful, regretting their decision to leave England, sit together sewing. I fixate on the tiny, mean piercings in the worn cloth, embittered jabs made by the women’s needles.
Grunting from the effort, my companions squeeze up the stairs. While I read the framed letters, admire her sloped, hasty penmanship, I sense, behind me my companions’ strained patience, their waning of interest. Suddenly, I want to tell my husband what I am thinking – that the military is a compelling system, one in which an individual is sacrificed to the whole, where rules are strictly enforced and obedience rewarded by the esoteric language of badges, ribbons, medals, an increasingly hierarchic string of titles. I would suffocate in such a system. As a child, I lived with the guilt of never feeling loyal to any one team or group of friends. Always the outsider, observing, dreaming, until one day, as a young mother, I began writing down all I had observed and dreamed. Here, in Nightingale’s theater, I am a revenant of history.
At Scutari, she was accused of authoritarianism, of strict rules, iron clad codes of conduct – of sending nurses back to England for infractions – alcoholism, flirting, proselytizing, general incompetence or in some cases, illness. A great “experiment” rested squarely on her shoulders – to prove, for the first time in British history, that “mere women” could be nurses in wartime. To succeed, she had to be severe. Had to hold the long view, bear the isolation of the leader, withstand gossip, resentment, petty rebellions. Controversy over her character and effectiveness, the questioning of her legend and myth, continue to this day.
Downstairs, I gaze a last time down the whitewashed corridor, spartan and surreal, still hoping for some memory, occult evidence of her “kingdom of hell.” But I feel nothing, no upswell of emotion, no sense, as with the arched passageway, the desk and sewing table, of overlapping, multiple dimensions of time. This corridor keeps its non-dreaming vigilance, its scrubbed erasure of trauma. Its history, whited out.
PARADE GROUND
Everyone is relieved to be outside, in sunlight. The lieutenant, remarking he has only eight months of military service left, points to a shaded area where a lustrous black crow struts across a square of mown grass. We eat our lunch here, he tells us, but the crows steal our food. I pick a black feather off the hot pavement. Further on, a white gull’s feather. Slip both in my purse.
On our way to the nearby British cemetery, in the back seat of the car, I struggle with my disappointment. I would have liked to have been left alone in those spaces, to have felt my way into the genius loci, to go on being looked at by objects. I would have liked to glimpse fleeting figures, float through liminal spaces. I would have liked photographs. Left with fragmented, dissolving images, I cling to what I felt on first seeing the barracks, passing through the dim archway, looking down the white corridor, ascending the spiral staircase, touching the solidity of her desk, running my fingers over needle pricks in old cloth, supernatural traces of women’s hands. How easily I could have conjured her fingers, nails grimed, writing by lamplight.
HAIDAR PASHA
Stretched along a high promontory above the Sea of Marmara, once belonging to Suleiman the Magnificent (1495-1566,) this narrow sleeve of land was donated to the British by the Ottoman government in 1855. Near the gated entrance is a custodian’s cottage; further on, the Crimean War Memorial, a granite obelisk erected in 1857. A bronze plaque honoring Florence Nightingale was added in 1954.
A straight row of Mediterranean cypress trees borders the gray gravel road the three of us walk along. Leaving the unshaded road to wander broad expanses of parched, yellowing grass, we stop to admire a nineteenth century British ambassador’s memorial chapel, read headstones from various wars. The midday September sun bears down as a large yellow dog, one of Istanbul’s “city dogs,” joins us before loping off, chasing scents undetectable to us.
I lean down to read a row of worn gravestones, set flush against the drought-bleached grass. The inscriptions are scarcely legible, each life reduced to three or four wavering, indecipherable lines. A red motor cart with a bed of rattling garden tools approaches, the dog loping beside it. We meet Haidar Pasha’s custodian, an older man in khaki pants and a dark green polo shirt marked with CWCG, insignia for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He and Yigit converse in Turkish. Yigit translates. The custodian would be honored to take me to the Crimean War’s mass gravesite.
I press ahead of the others. The custodian pulls up beside me, points ahead to an almost circular, treeless, parklike area. Six thousand young soldiers from Scutari Barrack Hospital, victims of cholera, buried here, in a mass, unmarked grave. My husband and Yigit stand back, talking quietly. The dog returns, runs off again.
Silence and heat. I look up at blue sky, the long, black frame of cypress on either side of the cemetery. Walk towards a small, stocky palm tree, solitary at the center of the gravesite. Beneath each of my halting footsteps, the bodies of young men. Reaching the palm, I turn, see my companions walking back towards the car. I kneel and set two feathers at the base of the little fan palm, strangely awkward in its singularity. Crow and gull, in a cross.
When they were alive, she might have sat with these soldiers, “her boys.” Would have written letters home for them, taken down final words, prayed with them, if prayers were asked. Now they share a kingdom of earth, grief eyeing itself, no tomb, no language to gloss the banality, the pointless winnowing, of war. I am being watched by eyes turned inward; faces gone to dust.
Near the car, my companions wait, each in his solitude, having his own thoughts of time, war, the melancholy of cypress, the lunch awaiting us in a local restaurant.
I swear I hear them, a murmuration of souls, like the low hum from a conch shell, six thousand lives spiraling in forever, pressed to my ear. Nameless. Here.
*
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES HENRY BECK LIEUTENANT 23 ROYAL WELSH FUSILEERS WHO DIED 29 SEPT 1855 OF WOUNDS RECEIVED 8 SEPT 1855 AT THE ASSAULT ON THE REDAN, SEBASTAPOL AGED 19 YEARS. THIS STONE IS PLACED BY HIS BROTHER OFFICERS.
Sacred To The MEMORY Of THOMAS KYD MORGAN Lieutenant H.M. 63rd Reg. Second Son Of James Morgan Of The City Of Edinburgh IN SCOTLAND Who DIED At Scutari 11th December 1854 of Wounds Received in The Battle Of INKERMANN AGED 19. Erected by an affectionate mother in commemoration of a most dearly loved son
IN MEMORY OF ROBERT MALCOLM DEWAR, YOUNGEST SON OF JAMES DEWAR, ESQ of N.6 Charles Street, Lowndes Square, LONDON, NAVAL CADET OF HMS VULTURE WHO Departed This LIFE off BALACLAVA on the 24th Day of November 1856, AGED 13 YEARS.
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord