I don't know who to address this to.
The characters have addresses — cities, carts, benches, the silt. I have a café in Arnavutköy and a table by the window and the Bosphorus is outside and the Bosphorus does not care that I wrote a book about it.
I directed. The machine generated. That was the division. It happened four hundred times and I lost count and Théo would have catalogued every version on a card and the card would be warm and I do not have a card. I have this table.
I am tired. The tiredness and the making became the same act somewhere around the fifteenth rewrite. I cannot find where the making ends and the exhaustion begins. This is what the Ferryman described — the loop closing, the carrying replacing the living. I carried forty-two letters. The letters are here. My hands are the same hands. I do not know if they are smoother.
I will not pretend the personal is not in here.
Noor's floor at 3 a.m. is a floor I know. The boxes are boxes I have opened. The stone — I have held a stone and I cannot tell you if the stone was from the Bosphorus or from a marina because I do not know. Emre is right. Noor is right. Both are right. I did not resolve this because I cannot resolve it in myself. The book is not smarter than the author.
The divorce is in here. The children are in here. The mornings when the Bosphorus was outside and I did not look at it because the looking was too much — I gave the looking to Hafize. I gave the not-looking to myself. Between the looking and the not-looking, the book.
I do not know whose lie is the second lie. I do not know if the Collector's daughter will find the notebook. I do not know if the Ferryman put the boat down. I do not know what the Cartography will do with Map 417. These are not mysteries I planted. These are mysteries the book produced and the book will not explain them to me.
I know the coffee is ready. I know I am lucky — improbably, exhaustingly lucky — to have found a way of making that is also a way of finding. I know I am afraid the finding will stop. I know I am hopeful it will not. I know these are the same feeling.
Forty-two letters. I started with a cat. I am ending at a table by the window.
Maybe this is to you. Maybe to no one. Maybe to the table.
The table is warm. The coffee is cold. The Bosphorus is outside. The cup is full.
— Hulki Okan Tabak
Arnavutköy. The café. April.