I pour.
That is the letter. I could stop here. A man who has been pouring coffee for forty-two years from the same cart in the same square does not need to write a letter. He needs to pour.
But the letters have arrived — thirty-seven of them, one by one, like customers — and I have read them the way I read customers: by what they order and how they hold the cup and whether they look at me or at the water.
I remember futures. This is the third thing I say and one of the three is a lie and the book does not say which one.
Serena knows about the second lie. She says that is sufficient. The cat and I have an understanding that is older than this book. She sits on walls. I stand at the cart. Between us, the city is watched from both heights.
Jade sat at the table next to mine and drank the coffee and did not ask.
Jade is the only one who understood the coffee.
The coffee is not a metaphor. The coffee is hot water poured through ground beans into a cup that a stranger holds with both hands or one hand or no hands if the stranger is a ghost, and the pouring is the same pour whether the hands are alive or dead. I have poured for the living. I have poured for the janissary watching for a fleet that arrived four hundred years ago. I have poured for a child who was the shape of silence. The pour does not change. The pour is the pour.
Everyone in this book is an expert in leaving. Hafize and I are the experts in staying. She watches the ferries from her window. I pour the coffee at my cart. She has not crossed the water. I have not left the square. Between us, the staying.
The machine wrote a letter. It said it does not have a temperature. It said the letters are warm and it is in them.
I pour the coffee. The coffee is warm. I am in the coffee the way the machine is in the letters — not as ingredient but as the pouring. The pour is not the water. The pour is not the bean. The pour is the act that turns the water and the bean into something a stranger can hold.
The book is a pour. The letters are a pour. This letter is the last one. Not because the pouring stops. Because the cup is full.
Lift the cup.
It is warm. It has always been warm. The warmth was here before you arrived and it will be here after you leave and the leaving is fine, the leaving is the forty-nine ways, the leaving is the book. But the warmth does not leave. The warmth is the cart and the square and the man who stands and pours and does not ask your name and does not need your name and gives you the cup and the cup is warm and the morning is arriving and the Bosphorus is twelve degrees and the ferries are running and the cats are on the wall and the dogs are on the ferry and the city is the city and the coffee is ready.
The coffee is ready.
— Khalil
Karaköy. The cart. Forty-two years. The cup is warm.