Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone

Viv pulled another mug out of the brown soapy water in an excessive gesture which flicked soap-suds onto Mary’s uniform. At least the gruelling twelve-hour days meant there was little time to think of Tahsin Bey, or the refusal of the war to end, or the slow trickle of post between London and Turkey. She hadn’t yet received any correspondence from him, though she continued to write weekly letters which she slipped into the postbox near her house when no one was watching. Her parents couldn’t know about the nature of her feelings for Tahsin Bey, of course, not yet — and the one person who she might have talked to about it was Mary who was now entirely unreasonable on the subject of Germans and Turks. Viv had tried at first to make her see sense: What did the world of Agamemnon and Priam have to do with the commoners of Greece and Troy? Despise a sultan or a kaiser, but why hate those who were born in his realm? Pity them, yes; pity all those who didn’t have the good fortune of Englishness as their birthright — though some could approach Englishness via their education, yes, they certainly could — but why hate them? But she soon gave up.

Anyway, soon there would be even less time in the day to think of Tahsin Bey — her father, acting briskly on Mary’s suggestion, had pulled strings to arrange for transfers for them both at the end of their probationer’s period from this convalescent hospital to a Class A auxiliary hospital where the mugs and mops and dusters would be supplemented by septic wounds and death-rattles and gangrenous limbs. Mary said it would all soon become as unexceptional as the black beetles which had Viv shrieking just a few weeks earlier, which might be true, but who would want such a thing to become unexceptional? And yet every time there had been an opportunity to say she was content to stay right here with the mops and black beetles she remembered her father’s response when Mary first asked him if there was anything at all he could do to place them where they were most needed. A daughter nursing in a Class A hospital was almost as fine as a son going into battle, Dr Spencer had declared. That ‘almost’ had struck at Viv’s heart and prompted her to say if only she were twenty-three already she would volunteer straight away to join the nurses at the Front. Her father’s proud smile a reward that would carry her through the worst of the Class A hospital’s horrors.

The car pulled up to Cambridge Terrace and Viv stepped out into a world of wind and rain. Mary’s chauffeur walked her partway to the front door with a large umbrella held above her head, and the one-armed ex-soldier who Dr Spencer had brought into the house as a footman to replace George — now Private Roberts — rushed out with an even larger umbrella to accompany her the remainder of the way. A month of living-in at the hospital, emptying bedpans, scrubbing bandages, washing cutlery and then, at the end of it, this return to a world where a drop of rain mustn’t be allowed to touch your skin — just before you were sent out again into the world of a Class A hospital.

— Miss Spencer. There’s a gentleman to see you from the War Office.

— To see me? That can’t be right.

— Your father said you must go in immediately on arrival.

Without changing out of her nurse’s uniform? The one-armed footman said yes, Dr Spencer had been clear in his instructions. Viv took off her cap, smoothed down her hair, pinched colour into her cheeks and walked into the parlour where an unknown man was filling an armchair though his frame was slight. Her father stood up to greet her with the broadest of smiles, while her mother covered her mouth with her hand in horror, managing to make Viv feel it was her fault that she’d had to come in without brushing her hair or changing into more presentable clothing.

— There you are! We were just talking about your summer in Turkey, her father said. Those wonderful maps you’ve made of your walk up the coast.

Her sketchbooks from Turkey were piled onto a table next to the unknown man — whip-thin with a pince-nez balanced on the end of his nose — and one of them was in his hands.

— These are remarkable, the man said, standing up and directing a slightly awkward smile at her, as though his mouth wasn’t accustomed to forming that shape. Such detail! When the Ambassador suggested you might have something interesting to impart about your time in Turkey none of us could have imagined this.

— I’m sorry — imagined what?

— The gentleman from the War Office believes your drawings could be useful to the Maps Division, her father answered. He intends to send them to Cairo.

— No, she said, her voice almost a shriek. You can’t have them.

The man was still holding on to one of the sketchbooks, splayed open. She could see her drawing of the cove where Tahsin Bey had found a length of emerald seaweed and draped it over her wrist.

— Vivian.

Her father kept his voice low, the slight edge to it all that was necessary to silence her, and the whip-thin man gestured to her to take a seat, as if this were his house.

— Miss Spencer, I assure you, they’ll be returned to you very soon, in perfection condition. I just need to make copies and send them to Lawrence and Woolley.

— T. E. Lawrence? Leonard Woolley?

— Our men in Cairo.

— But they’re archaeologists.

— They are the great travellers and explorers and linguists of the age. In times of war, such men are indispensable.

— What about such women?

Both men laughed at this, and her father said, I told you she wasn’t like other men’s daughters.

Viv lowered her head and looked away from the laughing men. For just a moment she had imagined herself in Cairo, standing in the shadow of the Pyramids with Lawrence and Woolley, drawing a map of the Turkish coastline in the sand to their cries of admiration. Her mother caught her eye, pursed her lips together and shook her head with that sharply honed ability to know when Viv was thinking a thought that might harm her marital prospects.

— You’re already halfway to indispensable with these drawings, the whip-thin man said. And as to the other half — Dr Spencer, would you mind if I spoke alone to your daughter?

The speed with which Dr Spencer left the room, ushering the resistant form of his wife ahead of him, was remarkable.

For a few minutes thereafter, Viv understood how it felt to be of singular value to Empire. There was no one — no one! — in her position. No one else had spent an entire summer in the company of Germans and Turks and then walked along one of the most militarily significant stretches of land in the world, and observed it so closely. She tucked her hair nervously behind her ear — a habit of childhood she thought she’d long since left behind — and said she wanted nothing more than to be of use, but she didn’t see how. The man — she still hadn’t been told his name — rested a pad of paper on his knee and said to start with she could tell him everything she knew about the Germans who were in Laboonda.

— Labraunda, she corrected him and his smile told her the name was irrelevant.

It soon became clear that everything she knew was irrelevant. He wanted to know about Wilhelm’s political opinions, whether Gretel’s last name meaned she was related to a particular general, where Anna had learned her Arabic. She knew none of these things, though she could have told him of Gretel’s theories about the religious practices of the Carian Satraps, or Anna’s almost uncanny ability to match up the jigsawed edges of shards of pottery, or the gracefulness which entered Wilhelm’s frame when he danced. Soon, the whip-thin man stopped writing down her answers, and a dullness entered his voice as though he were asking questions because it was his nature to be thorough but not because he expected anything useful to come of it. She was acutely conscious that she had proven to be a waste of time, and her father would soon come to know of it.