The Water Diviner Read online

  Omer smiles sympathetically. ‘We are clinging to the edge of a continent that does not want us. Surely the war has taught you that much?’

  Ayshe is in no mood for a lecture and opens the door to the courtyard.

  ‘Orhan, go and find me one egg please, son.’

  Orhan takes flight, pilfering a piece of cheese on the way past. Before Ayshe can follow Omer takes her gently by the arm and turns her to face him.

  ‘Ayshe. You are a Turkish woman. A proud and beautiful Turk. It is time you behaved like one. You know what is expected of you. You must do the right thing now, if only for Orhan.’

  She smiles with lips tightly clenched, knowing in her heart he is right. Before she can reply Orhan returns holding up a single egg in triumph.

  ‘Look! They try, but they cannot hide them from me!’

  Ayshe exchanges the egg for a hug. ‘Thank you, my courageous hunter.’

  She fills a saucepan with water from a terracotta urn partially recessed in the floor in the corner, and places it on the stovetop. She lowers the egg in with her fingers and waits, listening as Orhan repeats the prayer, ‘Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil ’alamin . . .’

  When Ayshe returns to the salon with the boiled egg, wrapped in a cloth to keep in the heat, Ibrahim is still deep in conversation with Connor. The Australian has no idea what he has agreed to and when Ayshe appears his relief is palpable.

  ‘Oh, thank you. I am sorry, I didn’t mean to put you to so much trouble. It’s just that I usually have eggs – at home.’

  She places the egg and a spoon down in front of him without ceremony.

  ‘You are a guest.’

  Ibrahim breaks his chatter momentarily to quiz Ayshe in Turkish.

  ‘Where is his wife?’

  ‘I do not know, father.’

  ‘Ask him,’ he urges, as Connor cracks the top off his egg and smiles, everything opaque to him.

  ‘No. You ask him if you are so interested. But you’ll have to learn English. He speaks nothing else.’

  A look of confusion washes over Ibrahim’s bristly face. ‘English? This is not Professor Doctor Emile?’

  ‘No. It is not him. He is not a doctor,’ she explains gently before turning to Connor.

  ‘Your wife? He is asking where she is.’

  Connor sips the grainy coffee and winces. The cup looks like doll’s house crockery in his blunt fists.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Suddenly this enigmatic man makes sense to Ayshe; his harrowed look, the prickly personality. How could she not have recognised the melancholic ache of loss? Then the revelation comes to her in a gasp.

  ‘And your sons, too?’

  Connor says nothing, but the look on his face speaks for him. His armour is breached and he is run through.

  ‘I see it in his eyes,’ Ibrahim whispers in Turkish, and so now can she.

  Ayshe has seen enough bereft parents in the last four years to know that men and women grieve differently. Men must act, keep moving, stay ahead of the sorrow that will swoop on them like a hawk if they stall. Helplessly they try to restore order to life, realising too late that when a child dies the parents’ world is turned irreversibly on its head. She knows that if she were to lose Orhan she would be adrift, off beam, forever.

  Where she was once Ayshe, daughter of Ibrahim, she is now Ayshe, mother of Orhan. Her son defines her. It is the same for Connor, and now even in death his sons give him purpose, no matter how futile, misguided or irrational it might seem.

  She offers an olive branch.

  ‘Without papers you cannot go to Gallipoli. They won’t let you off the boat. You must take the ferry to the town of Chanak, then find a fisherman – pay him enough and he will sail you across the Straits. He will have no need for British permits.’

  Ayshe sees the black veil of frustration and anger slowly lift from Connor’s face. She has given him a way forward, tenuous as it may be. She has offered him hope as naturally as if she had handed him a lamp in a darkened room.

  Connor nods in gratitude, his face softening. For the first time since he arrived at the Troya, Connor is not looking at Ayshe as if she is an enemy. Pleased for that, Ayshe leads her father by the arm to the courtyard.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The stench hits him like a punch in the face.

  Rainbow is over two hundred miles from the sea, and Connor’s entire life until coming to Constantinople has been earthbound and landlocked. He knows the smell of shit and dirt, stone and fire as well as he knows anything, but despite the long weeks on the boat getting here, the scents of the sea are still utterly alien to him. During the journey over, he came to appreciate the invigorating tang of sea spray and the caustic bite of salt drying on hot canvas. But the wharves in Eminönü are working docks where men of the sea labour ceaselessly, leaving behind malodorous fish guts rotting in the sun and seaweed stagnating in the shallows. He will never become accustomed to these rank and briny smells.

  Nearby, Orhan stands with a group of sailors, gesticulating wildly. Connor knows better than to attempt to follow what’s being said as he finds the language completely obscure, and is unable to identify any familiar sounds, far less break down individual words. To his ear it is a meaningless, guttural babble. Even the emotional timbre is utterly ambiguous to him. A conversation that sounds like it’s about to end up in fisticuffs is just as likely to culminate in raucous laughter and cheek kissing as it is bloodshed.

  ‘These men have ferry going to Chanak. From Constantinople to Chanak is not far – eight, nine hours.’

  ‘What about Gallipoli? Can they take me to Anzac Cove?’

  ‘This man here,’ Orhan indicates a pimply, friendly looking youth, ‘he is Metin Abi. He has brother in Chanak who is fisherman and he has boat. You give him ten shillings and he take you to Sedd-ul-Bahr and then to Ari Burnu, your Anzac.’

  Connor shakes the young sailor’s hand, and the lad smiles and doffs his hat before turning to join his shipmates.

  ‘He find you when boat arrives in Chanak, and take you to his brother. Now, we get ticket.’

  All around them, porters and passengers push past hollering touts and street vendors plying their trade. Although Connor is not overwhelmed by the same sense of claustrophobia and agitation he experienced upon his arrival in Constantinople, he is still disconcerted by the crush of people and the frenetic pace and activity that surround him.

  Darting into the crowd, Orhan heads for a small booth where he negotiates the purchase of a ticket for the Chanak ferry.

  ‘Connor Bey! Connor Bey! Here! Your boat is here!’

  Orhan raises his hand and gestures towards a passenger ferry swaying in the ebb and flow of the Golden Horn’s fickle currents, its smoke stack billowing white clouds of steam into the morning air. Sailors in crisp white uniforms, caps set jauntily atop their heads, scurry around the floating leviathan, tying and untying ropes, loading and unloading supplies and baggage from a teetering stack sitting on the dock, and securing the gangplanks to allow the growing queue of passengers to board.

  ‘Here, Connor Bey. Your ticket.’ Orhan passes Connor the hand-written bill of passage with a wide smile.

  Without Orhan’s assistance, Connor knows he would have found it impossible to negotiate his way to Gallipoli, let alone work out how to get to Anzac Cove. He turns to the boy, reaching into his pocket for some change.

  ‘Thank you, Orhan.’ He extends his hand, coins jingling in his palm.

  Orhan refuses Connor’s offer. ‘No. No money. I help you, you help me.’

  ‘How can I help you, Orhan?’

  ‘It is good fortune you come to my hotel and you are going to Çanakkale.’

  Orhan takes something from his pocket and hands it to Connor, pressing it into his palm. It’s a photo of a fine-looking Turkish man in military uniform sitting pensively in a chair. Standing by his side is a beautiful woman with a swan-like neck and sparkling eyes, her hand resting on his shoulder. Connor feels a jolt of surprise when
he recognises the woman as Ayshe. On the man’s knee sits a young boy. Orhan.

  ‘Connor Bey. Please. You find my baba in Çanakkale. The war is finished but he did not come home. You tell him he must come home now. Annem – my mother – needs him.’

  As the penny drops Connor’s heart sinks for Orhan. He fights the urge to wrap the boy up in his arms. He knows better than anyone that after four years, Orhan’s father is not coming home, but he cannot let his face reveal it.

  ‘This is your father? Who is the man at the hotel?’

  Hawking a gob of phlegm from the back of his throat, Orhan spits it to the ground in an expression of disgust.

  ‘Omer Bey is my uncle. Baba’s brother.’

  The last of the passengers are filing onto the ferry as the horn sounds, booming and echoing from the ancient walls of the city. Connor is flustered, taking the photo and hurrying aboard, then glancing back at the boy and raising an awkward hand in farewell. Orhan waves enthusiastically, his hand like a pennant flapping in the wind.

  ‘You find him. Ask him when he come home?’ he calls out.

  Connor is lost for words.

  For some time after the ferry pulls away from the Golden Horn and begins its journey through the Sea of Marmara towards the Dardanelles, Connor is deep in thought. Orhan’s revelation casts his time at the Troya in a whole new light. Suddenly Ayshe’s latent hostility towards him, right from the time he tried to check in, makes sense. If her husband died fighting Australians at Gallipoli, then every time she looked at Connor, she would have seen the face of her husband’s killers. How it must have galled this proud Turkish woman to have to feed him, have him sleep under her roof, and worse, watch him with her son.

  He can only wonder at why she has not told Orhan the truth. Perhaps she still harbours some forlorn hope that Orhan’s father might one day return. Her anger tells Connor she is not in denial; not really. It is possible she wants her husband to fade from their lives rather than be wrenched away from them.

  Blinded by his own grief, Connor failed to recognise that when he looked at Ayshe he was glimpsing into a wellspring of shared sadness. What Connor mistook for enmity towards him was Ayshe’s anger at the indiscriminate brutality of life.

  Ayshe is a widow, the man in the hotel her brother-in-law. Connor is puzzled. It shouldn’t change anything. And yet, inexplicably, it seems to change everything.

  The photo rests in his hand, a glimpse into a distant, and far happier, past. He takes Art’s journal from his case and slips the photo inside.

  Putting his hat and case neatly on the luggage rack above his seat, he carefully lays the journal on the bench beside him. Outside the ferry’s misted-over windows he can see the rolling, forest-clad hills that plunge dramatically into the inky Sea of Marmara. The gentle rise and fall of the ferry passing through the swell is soothing, and lulls him to sleep, his head resting on the wall behind him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It starts as a sensation.

  Hairs prickle at the base of the neck. Nerves tingle, on edge. Something’s wrong.

  It’s the silence that makes them uneasy.

  The Mallee is so quiet it hurts city dwellers’ ears. Its unsettling and heavy quietude is so pervasive it seems to have a voice; buzzing, pressing on eardrums. Those sounds that hum constantly in the city are absent. No buildings, no walls, no lanes for the interminable cacophony of engines and ceaseless chatter to rebound off. Here in the middle of nowhere, endless plains soak up sound.

  But those who live here can hear the desert speaking in tongues. Chirruping insects, cawing birds, reptiles slithering and scuttling through the dry undergrowth and across the red sand.

  Now, though, even they hear nothing.

  The world is holding its breath.

  Then they hear it. A searing roar far in the distance.

  Something’s coming. Something bad.

  The boys stand in the middle of the field, unsure where to go, what to do, unsure what’s approaching. Art has a .22 rifle slung over his shoulder, and his brothers carry between them a brace of dead rabbits.

  ‘There!’ Art, his eyes scanning into the distance, has spotted it. He points. It’s as if the horizon is disintegrating. Where just moments before a razor-sharp line separated red earth from blue sky, now the division is unclear. A heavy haze of what looks like smoke from a scrub fire, but red as ox blood, is billowing, roiling, barrelling across the plain. It’s travelling fast. Far too fast.

  In a heartbeat, it swells from a line drawn along the horizon to a wall that obliterates everything in its path.

  Art howls. ‘Run!’

  In the middle distance, a small group of Mallee trees hugs the ground. The boys bolt towards it at breakneck pace. The tangled limbs and sparse foliage won’t offer much protection. But this far from home, it’s the best they can hope for. They’re a way away, but they might just make it.

  Art looks back. The solid wall of dust is nearing at an impossible speed, gaining on the running boys with every stride.

  Might get there. If we’re lucky, he thinks.

  A sudden exclamation and cry from behind. ‘Art!’

  He looks back over his shoulder. Ed has stumbled, lies writhing in the dirt clutching his ankle. Art turns and races back, Henry in his wake. They reach their brother as the storm engulfs them. Art draws his brothers to his chest, trying in vain to shield their faces from the apocalyptic torrent of dust and gravel that rips at them horizontally, driven by a wind fiercer than anything he’s ever experienced.

  A looming shape appears through the haze. Through eyes squinted tightly into slits, Art can just recognise the outline of his father atop his mare, wheeling to a stop beside where he and his brothers crouch in the whirling heart of the tempest. Connor vaults to the ground and slaps his horse’s rump. She gallops into the distance. He carries a thick woollen swag beneath his arm. Battling to keep hold of it in the gale, he unfurls it and lowers it over himself and the boys like a tent, using Art’s rifle as a pole. The three boys and their father huddle beneath the blanket as the blood-red dust consumes them.

  The wind screeches and howls. Connor turns to Art. ‘Good on you, son. You didn’t leave your brothers behind.’

  He sees the look of fear in Ed’s eyes. ‘What’s that magic word, Ed? The one that makes the carpet fly?’

  For a moment, Ed forgets where they are; he smiles. ‘Tonga.’

  Art laughs despite himself. ‘Tangu, you wombat.’

  Connor wraps his arms around his boys. ‘That’s it. Tangu. The name of Prince Hussein’s magic carpet.’

  The storm outside screams like a banshee. But Art, Henry and Ed are safe. They can smell their father’s skin, his hair. Nothing can touch them as long as he’s here.

  ‘Close your eyes, lads. Let’s get out of here. Hold tight. Ed – I can see you peeping! Only works if your eyes are closed. You don’t want us falling off, mate, do you? Now, all together . . .’

  As one.

  ‘Tangu!’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘God, you woulda hated to see this with skin on it. Look at the jaw on this geezer – he was half cow!’ Private Dawson is holding a human skull, Yorick-like, inspecting its pendulous mandible.

  Lieutenant Colonel Hilton has been working too long on this peninsula and seen too much carnage to brook any levity when it comes to the dignity of the fallen. He snaps at Dawson, ‘Private! Bit of respect or I will have you on report!’

  Dawson, shamefaced, puts the skull down. ‘Sorry, sir. He was probably a very good-looking man.’

  Hilton turns and walks towards the summit of a low ridge. As he departs, out of the corner of his eye he sees Dawson salute him with a disarticulated arm. He decides to let it slide.

  From the peak, Hilton surveys the soldiers at work below. They fan out across a shallow gully the size of a rugby pitch, moving methodically from one side to the other as they prod the ground with rifle-cleaning rods, looking for the telltale friable soil they find in patches
where bodies decompose beneath the surface. There is no shortage of soft soil.

  Men dig into the side of the hill, exhuming bones stained umber by the minerals in the earth, some still wrapped in decaying khaki uniforms that disintegrate as the soldiers lift them from the ground. Remains that have lain exposed above the surface since the conflict ended have been bleached to a blinding white by the Aegean sun. They lie in tangled clumps surrounded by the rubble and refuse of war: boots, the leather cracked and peeling; canteens, crushed and flaking; ammunition casings and rifle clips, rusting and packed with dirt.

  Further along the ridge, a man sits on a folding canvas stool, hunched over a large sketchpad that rests in his lap. A thin stick of charcoal held delicately between thumb and forefinger, his eyes dart from the tableau unfolding in the gully beneath him to the sketch that is taking shape on his pristine white paper. Hilton walks over, peers down at the artist’s impressionistic and idealised interpretation of the sombre scene before them. The small, crude white crosses dotting the hillside become monuments of consequence; the dusty, weary soldiers working amongst them transformed into Homeric heroes, biceps bulging, noble brows furrowed. Hilton watches, marvelling at the strange alchemy that transforms monstrosity into beauty.

  Hilton turns to see Major Hasan climbing the hill towards him. It’s been a month since the Turk returned unwillingly to Çanakkale, and the two men have reached a peaceful accord based on a growing mutual respect.

  ‘Merhaba, Hilton Bey.’

  ‘Merhaba, Hasan Bey.’

  Down the slope, Sergeant Tucker has been sifting through the soil. He hails Hilton and holds up a red and purple arm patch.

  ‘One of ours! Sixth battalion, sir.’

  ‘A name tag?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Keep looking.’

  Hilton turns to his Turkish companion.

  ‘You never told me what you did before the war.’

  Hasan smiles sadly. ‘This is Turkey – there was no “before the war”.’

  The men stand in silence for a moment, then Hilton hears a call from the gully below. It’s Private Dawson, who is standing looking in the direction of the shore through a pair of binoculars. ‘Ah, sir? We expecting company?’