One day of the week was a half-day, though it was considered bad form to take it when there was any shortage of hands — which was almost always. So it was a rare Friday on which Viv finished at 1 p.m. and had a beautiful April afternoon all to herself. From Camberwell she rode the buses home, her heart expanding as she saw the tops of the trees in Regent’s Park — in the three months since she’d started at 1st London General Hospital she hadn’t set foot in Cambridge Terrace, though she was entitled to seven days’ leave during the period of her six-month term. (Even the men in the trenches don’t work as hard, one of the VAD nurses had said, and Viv suspected that Mary was the reason the poor woman was placed on a double shift the next day.)
— Good God, Vivian, her mother said when she walked through the door. You look terrible.
But her father swung her up in his arms and said, My returning soldier! He had thought of shutting down his own practice and offering his services to the military hospitals but a delegation of expectant mothers had arrived at his door to say wasn’t it enough that their husbands in the trenches would miss the births of their children — did the best gynaecologist in London have to miss them too?
— This soldier refuses to speak of the war today. Except for this.
From her pocket she pulled out a column of newsprint, carefully folded, and watched as he read the account of Armenian intellectuals in Turkey rounded up and deported. The article had no information about what happened to them but said the worst was feared.
— I read it this morning. Dreadful business.
— Papa! she said, laughing to be the one to explain the world to him. It’s propaganda. I think I may have played a role in placing it there.
She’d never seen him so amazed, so delighted.
It was near the end of the evening, and she could no longer delay returning to the hostel, back into her life of drudgery broken up by horror. She stood up to leave and it was only then that her father said oh yes, there’d been a Christmas card from Tahsin Bey addressed to all of them — it had been posted months earlier, but perhaps it was a wonder it had arrived at all. There was a message in it particularly for Viv so they’d kept it — where was it? Long awful minutes passed before the one-armed footman remembered it had been placed in Miss Spencer’s room. Should he bring it down?
— No need, said Viv, surprised by the calmness of her voice. I need something from up there — if you’ll excuse me, Papa, Mama.
My dear family Spencer
I have no way of knowing if this will reach you — I’ve had no post from London since the war began, and I like to hope this is a failure of the postal service. Regardless, in times such as these the rituals of friendship seem more important than ever so please accept my Christmas Greetings! I hope another Christmas doesn’t pass before we’re able to meet again.
I am well. I spend my days cataloguing the Labraunda finds at a long table under the cypress tree in my garden, Alice asleep on my feet. And although there is a great deal of unhappiness in the world I am daily reminded of life’s capacity to find new ways to delight and enrapture — most recently while reading D. B. Spooner’s account of the excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri, on the outskirts of Peshawar. Vivian Rose, you’ll find it in the ‘Archaeological Survey of India, Frontier Circle 1908-9’. I’m sure you’ll be as taken by it as I am. Since reading it I’ve had a great longing to go to Peshawar (which was once the city of Caspatyrus from where Scylax set off on his great voyage down the Indus. Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end). I would rush to Peshawar tomorrow to see the Sacred Casket of Kanishka discovered there by Spooner if I could. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to do so before I’m able?
With warmth and best wishes
Tahsin
The card was written in a miniature version of his usual script; he hadn’t wanted to waste the opportunity for a single added word. Viv leaned her back against the wall, the legs which endured twelve-hour shifts in a hospital suddenly too weak to support her.
The librarian at UCL remembered Miss Spencer and, seeing her VAD uniform, was happy to let her search through the shelves for a particular reference. When she left a few minutes later he waved goodbye, not thinking to check if her handbag might have the ripped-out pages of a journal folded up inside.
What had he been trying to tell her? Viv, sitting on the windowsill of the hostel’s top floor as dawn light squeezed through the tall elm trees, unfolded the pages of D. B. Spooner’s report to try and make more sense of them than she had when she’d read them the previous night — first, standing on the paving stones of UCL; then in the taxicab on the way back to the hostel; and again by candlelight in bed. So, a casket containing the relics of the Buddha had been found in Shahji-ki-Dheri, near Peshawar in the ruins of the Great Stupa of Kanishka. What of it? Why, of all the discoveries of the world, should this one ‘delight and enrapture’ Tahsin Bey?
It is with special pleasure that I turn now to the subject of the excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri.
This time, the first sentence of D. B. Spooner’s report sent a tremor of discovery along her spine, so overwhelming she had to grip the windowsill to steady herself. She rubbed her thumb along the fingertips of her right hand — with these she had brushed away the clinging mud of the inscription stone and watched Greek letters emerge. Now the fingers were chilblained, the tiny cut on her thumb plastered to guard against a soldier’s septic wound discharging into her bloodstream. She rubbed her hands together, palm sliding against palm — she was in a different skin now.
She leaned back against the grey stone which together with the tall encircling trees kept the hostel in a state of perpetual gloom. Perhaps Tahsin Bey just wished to remind her of this — she was an archaeologist, as was he. In the shiver of their spines they were of the same tribe, regardless of wars and kings and sultans. Could that be all there was to it? Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end. Another puzzle. Scylax began his famed journey down the Indus from Caspatyrus — the ancient name for Peshawar — but he didn’t end it there. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to do so before I’m able?
— Oh, she said.
Somewhere across the oceans a Turkish man sat at a table of discovery under a cypress tree, and understood what no one else seemed to: that she, also, needed a place in the world where she could sit in sunshine, examining ancient coins, fragments of gods, while the war she didn’t understand washed over her and disappeared into the horizon.
— Nurse Spencer! You’ve missed your breakfast and it’s time to leave for the hospital.
City of Men,
City of Flowers,
Land Beyond the Mountains:
Caspatyrus, Paruparaesanna, Paropamisadae, Gandhara,
Parasapur, Purashapura, Poshapura, Po-lu-sha-pu-lo, Fo-lu-sha, Farshabur, Peshawar.
They all had a name for it, century after century — the Persians, the Greeks, the Mauryans, the Indo-Greeks, the Sassanids, the Kushans; kings and generals and Buddhist monks and travellers, everyone felt the tug of Peshawar. Everyone, including an Englishwoman in a Class A hospital who wanted nothing more than a refuge amidst antiquity.