Hafize had lived in the same apartment in Karaköy for forty years. The apartment had two windows: one faced the street, one faced the Bosphorus.
From the water window she could see Üsküdar. The buildings on the Asian shore were close enough to count — she had counted them, many times, the way other people count sheep, except that counting buildings on the far shore did not make her sleep. It made her calculate. The ferry had been four lira when she first did the arithmetic. That was — when? Ten years ago. Twelve, maybe. The number had changed since then, many times, through devaluations that turned her savings into smaller versions of themselves the way photocopies turn documents into ghosts of documents. The ferry was no longer four lira. The bread was no longer what bread had been. But the equation — ferry equals bread equals impossible — had survived every devaluation intact — the only thing in Turkey that had. She still thought in fours. The way her mother had still thought in old lira years after the redenomination, carrying the phantom zeroes like phantom limbs. Four lira. The founding arithmetic. The number had changed. The answer had not.
She worked at a laundry on Kemeraltı Caddesi — forty years of detergent had mapped her hands the way the water had mapped the strait. Forty years. Sixty-two years old. No passport. No savings that survived the devaluations. A daughter in Ankara who called on Sundays and asked "how are you" in a voice that meant "please don't tell me."
She knew the ferry schedule by heart. The 07:10 to Üsküdar carried commuters who read newspapers they would not remember. The 08:30 carried students who slept against each other's shoulders. The 12:15 was tourists. The 17:45 was everyone coming home. The 23:30 — the last ferry, the one she watched from her window in winter when the apartment was cold because heating was another equation she solved every month — carried people she would never know, going to a shore she had never touched, across water she had watched for forty years and that had never, in all that time, asked her to cross it.
Her daughter once offered to buy her a ferry ticket. "Just the crossing, Anne. Twenty minutes. You can come right back."
Hafize said no. She said it quickly — a no that was geography, not refusal. She lived on this shore. The other shore was for people whose lives had margins, and margins were white space, and white space was expensive, and Hafize had filled every margin of her life with work and economy and the tape on the bathroom pipe and the bread that cost what bread costs now and the window that showed her, every morning, a city she knew better than the people who lived in it and would never enter.
She had grown inside the constraint the way a tree grows inside a wall — growing around it, through it, shaping herself to the space available and filling that space so completely that removing the wall would not free her. It would collapse her. The wall was structural now. The water was the wall. And the wall was the view. And the view was beautiful.
Forty years of attention to a body of water that did not know her name, that carried other people to other lives, that held swimmers and ferries and the dead and did not hold her, had never held her, because holding requires crossing and she had never crossed and the water, which does not love, which cannot love, which is water, held everyone but Hafize, who stood at her window and watched it hold them and did not ask to be held because asking costs what the ferry costs and the ferry costs what bread costs and bread is more immediate than being held and she had chosen, every day for forty years, the immediate, and the beautiful had stayed on the other side of the water and waited, the way the city on the far shore waited, patient, lit, unreachable, and — not as different from this shore as it looked from here.
She closed the window. She went to bed. The ferries continued without her. They always had. They always would. That was not the tragedy. The tragedy was that she could describe the exact color the Bosphorus turns at 4 a.m. in November — a blue so dark it is almost not a color but a temperature — and she had no one to describe it to, and the description, which was beautiful, which was hers — the only thing forty years of watching had produced that was worth anything — sat inside her like a stone shaped by water that would never finish, because the shaping requires an audience, and an audience requires someone on the other side, and the other side was a fare away, and a fare was bread, and bread was life, and life was the window, and the window was the view, and the view was the Bosphorus, and the Bosphorus, below her, carried everyone home.
Except Hafize. Who was already home. Who had always been home. Who had never left.