I

It is quiet.

Much quieter than Gül imagined it would be.

They have everything there, they’d said—her mother-in-law, her stepmother, the neighbours—and everything’s much better than here. That was why Gül had only brought the cardboard suitcase.

She had boarded the train in Istanbul, in the noisy city where everyone seemed to have something to do, where the voices of the street hawkers mixed with the screeching brakes of the trains, the braying of a donkey with the rattle of a coach overtaken by a car.

Germany must be something like this, Gül had thought, only not so many animals and even more people.

At the stations where she had to change, she was scared she wouldn’t find the right train and would get lost in a strange place. This last station is so small that Fuat, standing on the platform, looks taller than she remembers him, even though he’s lost weight. There’s nothing left of the belly he grew on his military service; in fact his cheeks look sunken, and even his hair seems to have got sparser still.

Gül falls into his arms, relieved that someone is there to hold her. Someone who knows the way. As she feels his body the image returns to her mind, of Ceren crying when she said goodbye, at the bottom of the stairs in her parents-in-law’s house.

Fuat’s mother Berrin was holding her, a child of almost three screaming and writhing as the tears ran down her cheeks and she scratched her face with her fingers and tugged at her hair, pulling out bushels although Berrin tried to hold her little arms tight.

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Ceyda, nearly six now, stood next to her grandmother and seemed to understand less than her sister what this goodbye meant. Ceyda is a good girl, obedient and hard-working, Gül thought there at the bottom of the stairs, she’s a clever girl, she’ll make the best of the separation. But Ceren is still so little, and even though Gül makes no distinctions in her love for her children, part of her heart stayed behind there, forever caught up with Ceren’s screaming, scratching and writhing that’s not right for her age. This is how she’ll remember Ceren for the next eighteen months.

But at this moment on the platform the image disappears as she frees herself from Fuat’s arms. He takes the suitcase from her and they walk side by side along streets that look abandoned. Gül can’t imagine people live in these houses, even though there are lights behind the curtains.

Outside, there’s a low hum from a flickering streetlamp.

‘How was the journey?’ Fuat asks, but Gül doesn’t want to talk about her fear at the stations, not to a man who could hardly wait to come to Germany, who left his wife and daughters without looking back for longer than the year they’d planned. She doesn’t want to talk about how she couldn’t do her business in the cold, reeking train toilets these past three days, about how glad and relieved she was to see Fuat on the platform.

‘The journey was long,’ says Gül, ‘as long as the journeys in fairytales.’

‘Yes, it’s a long way on the train. We’ll fly on the way back, God willing. That’s quicker than taking the bus from the village to Ankara, you’ll see.’

He was right, thinks Gül when she sees the apartment. In the only room are a bulky bed, a bedside table, a single-door wardrobe and a chest of drawers; there’s no space for anything else. There’s a small kitchen with a table and two chairs and a tiny hallway.

‘The toilet’s in the corridor,’ says Fuat once Gül has put her suitcase on the bed. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

In her parents-in-law’s house the toilet was in the yard and it didn’t have flushing water like this one, but she’s never seen such a tiny apartment. She thought Fuat was exaggerating as he so often did page 220 when he said there was no room here for the children, even if they slept standing up in the wardrobe.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he says, ‘to work. I’ll be back in the morning.’ Once Gül has closed the door behind her husband she sits down on the bed and opens her case. One pair of shoes, a pressure-cooker, two dresses, underwear, two skirts, a cardigan and not much more.

Why bother lugging cheap rubbish from here all that way, they said, when you can buy yourself really good stuff there?

Gül starts putting her clothes in the chest of drawers, but when she sees the mess she simply tips out the drawers on the bed and starts tidying. When she’s finished with the drawers and the wardrobe, she goes into the kitchen and lights a cigarette, a Samsun. She smoked almost two packs on the journey, and she’ll only have one last cigarette left after this one. She pulls her feet up onto the stool, leaning her back against the wall. There’s a little mirror on the wall above the sink. Gül gets up and looks at herself. She still looks exactly the same as she did in Turkey, but she doesn’t feel that way. Her feeling goes beyond the image in the mirror. Perhaps that’s why she feels like a stranger.

When she hears the key in the lock she wakes instantly and knows immediately who it is. She leaps up, welcomes her husband in her nightshirt and puts the kettle on in the kitchen. Fuat’s eyes are small and red. He doesn’t talk much over breakfast, just nodding at the stories Gül tells about back home. Once he’s eaten he takes a bottle of whisky out of the fridge and pours three fingers into a water glass. Gül looks at him, amazed.

‘Yes, that’s the way it is,’ he says. ‘Whisky, real whisky, like in the movies. You don’t just earn money here, you can really buy something with it too.’

‘But so early in the morning . . .’

‘So what? I’ve been up all night, I’m allowed to have a glass or two when I knock off work.’

And as if out of spite, he pours himself another.

He sips at his glass in silence while Gül washes the dishes. She’s still in her nightshirt and hasn’t even been to the toilet.

‘Aah,’ Fuat heaves a sigh of pleasure after his last determined mouthful. ‘Come,’ he says and walks ahead into the bedroom.

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Once he’s fallen asleep Gül rinses his glass, dries the dishes, puts the kettle on again, lights her last cigarette and puts her lessons on the table. She’s cut them out of the newspaper over the past few weeks.

From these snippets of paper, she’s memorised the word for door in German, day, week, time, road, apple, house, key, breakfast, lunch, bed, chair, table, trousers, skirt. Words she found difficult to remember, which were of no use to her at the German customs either.

They’d told her back home she’d have to go through the German customs, but the word had sounded strange to Gül even in Turkish. In her mind it had got entangled with an image of a brightly lit corridor where men stood in uniforms, heavy guns dangling at their hips.

She hadn’t imagined a man with a black moustache, who fetched a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, then laid her suitcase on a table, opened it and searched for something. He seemed to be asking questions as well, but Gül had just looked at him with a shrug. She might have recognised the words Tür, Haus, Tag, Woche, Apfel, but she only guessed at the word Zigarette, which sounded similar to the Turkish word.

None of the words Gül knew helped her to say: I haven’t got any more cigarettes. That’s my last pack, that one in my coat pocket.

Still, she would say later, it would probably have been enough just to say, Nein, Zigarette.

But her eyes and reality helped where language wasn’t enough.

Gül repeats all the lessons from the newspaper, then she writes a letter to her father and one to her mother-in-law, drinks another tea, smokes another cigarette, which she takes out of Fuat’s box and which tastes very different to the ones she’s used to. She looks out of the window, cleans the hob, empties out the cupboards and wipes the insides down before she puts everything back. She smokes another cigarette and looks out of the window for a while. The streets still seem empty, but as clean as if they were swept once an hour.

Fuat wakes up that day at around two and wants breakfast. At about four o’clock, Gül goes outside with him, to Germany.