With a sharp tear the elder removed the last of my severed trouser leg, ripping it up the seam. The flesh beneath seemed remarkably unburned, save for a patch around the back of my left calf, though I couldn’t remember how that part had been injured.
The junior listened to my heart, my lungs, took blood pressure, put a mask over my face. I understood very little of the conversation that ensued, the junior uncertain, the elder uninterested, until at last the latter looked up and barked in strict, unyielding English, “Nausea? Blurred vision? Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Hospitaclass="underline" we go to hospital now. You family, friends?”
“No.”
“Embassy?”
“Is that necessary?”
She stared at me like I was a fish too stupid to swim, then turned away. “We go hospital,” she barked, and as a final thought, “You okay. Very okay.”
In the hospital they put me in a booth cordoned off by sky-blue curtains. A nurse plugged me into a heart monitor, took my blood pressure again, an EEG, put an O2 monitor on my finger. As she worked, a doctor appeared, and listened to my lungs, listened to the paramedics, shone a torch into my eyes, examined numbers on a screen, looked at the burn on the back of my leg, another on my left shoulder blade, another down the side of my left arm, tutted, then smiled at me and repeated the motto of the moment, “You okay! You very okay.”
Then he turned to a junior doctor, a girl in a grey headscarf, a doll with a painted face, gave her orders and marched away. She turned to me and said in flawless English, “Ma’am, you have suffered some mild burns and smoke inhalation. We are going to put you on a nebuliser and keep you in overnight for monitoring. Do you have health insurance?”
“Yes,” I wheezed.
“That is good; I will fill out a report for you, you will need it to make a claim.”
So saying, she marched away.
I stayed in the hospital until the first dose of nebuliser ran out. No one came to check on me, except the evening porter to see if anyone needed a cup of tea. He was used to meeting strangers; my presence was no surprise.
After five hours in the hospital bed, a nurse pulled back the curtains and found me, and was surprised. She looked at my chart, looked at my face, smiled uneasily, and strode away. A few minutes later the matron appeared, and went through the same procedure, smiled as uncertainly as her colleague, turned her back on me and exclaimed, “Who signed in this patient, please?!” in a voice that rang across the floor.
I considered trying for another dose of heparin on the nebuliser, making a bigger meal of my burns, but the hospital had already forgotten me. Sometimes it’s only paperwork that keeps you alive — without it, even the memorable can die of forgetting.
Clothes in tatters, stuck in a tea-stained gown, I hobbled through the slumbering corridors of the hospital until I found an in-patient ward where the night nurse was sleeping and the lights were dim. From a woman lying on one side, a bandage around her head and hands beneath her cheek like a child, I stole a pair of trousers and some slightly too large shoes. From an ancient lady with pipes taped to the end of her nose and corner of her mouth, I stole seven hundred lira in mixed notes. I changed in a toilet, and sat on the cold floor and shook for a while as waves of nausea rocked the world beneath my feet. I drank a sip of water, and it was good. I drank another sip and almost choked on it, head down in the toilet, heaving, gasping for air.
When I could stand, I washed my hair in cold water from the tap, slicked it back over my face, scrubbed with tissue paper until my eyes were red and my skin was raw, water running away grey from my cleaning. I shuffled my feet around the palaces of my shoes, pushed the door open, stepped out into the hall.
No one shouted; no one called my name.
The morning prayers sounded from the minarets.
I let the sound fill me, and carry me away.
Chapter 30
No credit card, no passport.
No reputable hotel would have me, but a cab driver had a friend in Zetinburnu who knew a place run by his mother-in-law. The house was four storeys tall, and had been in the family for seventy-two years. Now it was a refuge for the dispossessed: migrant workers who’d entered the country illegally; newly released prisoners thrown onto the street with not a hundred lira to their name, nowhere to go. Wives fleeing husbands; husbands thrown out by their screaming wives. Twenty lira bought a mattress on the floor; forty got the bottom of a three-storey bunk bed.
The matron’s voice whined high as a mosquito. She clung onto my arm as she showed me my room, buzzing, buzzing all the time in heavily inflected English, “Little thing, dear thing, lost your passport, lost your friends, dear thing, I’ll be nice, you’ll see, very nice.”
She gave me a cup of tea in a cracked tulip glass, a slice of thick brown bread with a dollop of jam on the side.
“Dear thing,” she tutted, as I tried a few cautious nibbles. “So hard to be alone.”
As the sun rose, I slept, and when three in the afternoon came she marched into the room and exclaimed, “Who are you? Who are you? What are you doing here?” and threw her shoe at me as I fled.
I sat on the pavement round the corner from her apartment for half an hour, then went back. She’d found her shoe and was studiously sweeping the concrete path to her door.
“Dear thing!” she exclaimed, as I enquired about a room. “Little thing, dear thing, I’ll be nice, you see…”
She gave me back my old bed, still disturbed from the shape of my sleeping body.
In the night I woke wheezing, burning, fire in my legs, fire in my chest.
From the phone by the door, I called a taxi, and went straight to the nearest hospital.
Four hours in this hospital.
Then four hours in that.
I moved from emergency room to emergency room, and waited patiently while they diagnosed me every time — burns, smoke inhalation — and tutted and gave me more cream and another round on the nebuliser. After twenty-eight hours I could recite every procedure, list every medication by rote, and my medical Turkish had taken a leap for the better, to the point that I could stagger through a door and whisper duman inhalayson to every curious nurse who came my way. After thirty-two hours, the problem was beginning to become one of over-medication, and I carefully revised my reporting of what had happened to reflect the dosages I’d been receiving. In every hospital someone approached me with forms forms forms, are you ready to claim for your insurance? and I filled in a few vapid lies and waited for them to forget before folding the documents into paper aeroplanes and gliding them into the bin.
After thirty-six hours and seven different hospitals around Istanbul, I released myself into unexpected, blinding sun, and realised I didn’t know where I was. I had seventy lira left, no phone, no clothes that weren’t stolen, and shoes that didn’t fit. I had somehow worked my way near to Zincirlikuyu Mezarligi, though I didn’t remember crossing the bridge at Galata or how I’d come to be here.
So I stood, and had no sense of place or time, of memory or distance travelled.
Here.
I stood.
And that was all that there was.
I closed my eyes, counted my breaths.
Lost count at four, started again.
Five, six, seven.
The pop of a motorcycle engine jerked me from my reverie.
I found that I was shaking, and thought perhaps I should go back to the hospital, get that looked at.