You wake in someone else's clothes in a country you have been in for sixteen hours.
Yelena is in the kitchen. The kitchen smells of tea. The tea is black and strong and comes in a glass. The door-frame has a small mark above the knob that was not put there by anyone still living in the apartment.
"You slept eleven hours."
"I did not mean to."
"That is what meaning does. It stops meaning when you are this tired."
You sit. Yelena has cut fruit. The fruit is melon and white cheese and bread. She has put it on a plate for you. She has not eaten. She slices the melon toward her palm, not away — the way her mother did, a motion you will not understand until years later you try it and your hand remembers. Hayırlısı, she says, to the melon or to the knife. You do not know the word.
"You do not eat breakfast."
"I drink tea until noon. Then I eat."
"Why."
"A habit from a year I do not talk about."
After breakfast she tells you about your grandmother.
She tells you in the kitchen with her cigarette unlit. She tells you slowly because she does not guess and will not invent. She was seven in Moscow the winter your grandmother was in Moscow. Your grandmother came to the apartment of a man who was Yelena's mother's friend. Your grandmother stayed four days. Your grandmother had a small leather bag and in the bag were three books and a folder and a revolver. Yelena did not know the revolver was there until she grew up, and her mother said, one afternoon, offhand, your auntie came that winter with a gun. Your grandmother was not her auntie. Her mother called her auntie because the seven-year-old was in the room.
"What did she do in Moscow."
"She wrote something. In four days. She did not sleep. On the fifth day she left."
"What did she write."
"I don't know. My mother never read it. My mother was not a reader of things like that."
"Things like what."
Yelena looks at you.
"The kind of writing that gets you killed."
You do not move. You are in two cities now, both of them Istanbul, one of them the city where your grandmother was a woman you did not know.
"She was kind."
"Your grandmother."
"To me. The grandmother I knew."
"Yes," Yelena says. "Kind women write things that get them killed, sometimes. Kind is not the opposite."
At eleven you walk out with her. Kameriye tilts down to the tram line. İstiklal is louder. İstiklal has been Pera, and Cadde-i Kebir, and İstiklal. The shoppers now are not the shoppers then. The back streets are quieter because they are older. You turn onto Sahne Sokak and stop at a café with a green-painted door and four tables.
"This is where we drink coffee when we can."
The coffee is Turkish. The woman who brings it is called Esra. Esra has a daughter in Bursa. Esra knows Yelena because Yelena has been drinking coffee at this green door for eleven years.
Esra sets down the cups. Every week it is more, she says, not to Yelena, not to you — to the cups. Every week. She says it the way someone says a thing that was once an exaggeration and has become the thing.
From the next table a phone plays low — piano, a voice you know from Carmen's bar. Your shoulders come up one degree. The track switches before you place why.
You sit outside. A delivery man on a bicycle. A cat. A boy with a violin case too big for him. From a second-floor window across Sahne Sokak a kanun and violin drift down — fasıl music, slow, a hand-drum keeping the time. Yelena listens for one bar. Yine bir Gülnihal, she says. Old one. Dede Efendi. She does not say more.
At the table behind you, a man is reading a book.
Forties. Grey at the temples. A linen shirt the wrong color for the weather. The book is English, old edition. You cannot see the title but you can see the spine-creases of something read many times.
He is not looking at you.
He is muttering.
What he is muttering is not Turkish, not English either — it is the English inside the English, a phrase cadenced the way verse is. You catch the undiscover'd country and then nothing and then from whose bourn.
He feels you listening. He stops.
He looks at you — not at you, past you — and says, in accented English, "Forgive me. An old habit."
"It is fine."
"I talk to the text. The text does not answer. It is the only relationship I have been faithful in."
Yelena smiles at the man. The smile is a smile from a long acquaintance.
The man finishes his coffee and tucks the book under his arm and is gone.
"Who is he."
"I don't know. He has come here for years. He orders the same thing. He does not tell anyone his name."
That afternoon Yelena shows you the list.
The list is written in pencil on the back of a utility bill. The list has four names.
"These are people who will know what we know and will not say. You may need them. Memorize. Then I will burn it."
You memorize. Four names. Two women, two men. A street, a neighborhood, a profession for each. A detail — a mark, a phrase — for verifying identity.
"The phone was expensive," Yelena says. She does not say what it cost. She does not say who paid. You understand from the way she does not say that somebody spent money on you before you arrived, and the money is a thing you now carry without having touched it.
"The fourth is my exception."
"Who is the fourth."
"A journalist. He is the one we will meet on Thursday. He has something Nina should have given you. He has it instead."
"Where is Nina."
Yelena looks at the window. The silver of the morning is gone. The window is grey now.
"I do not know where Nina is."
"When did you last —"
"Three weeks. A voicemail. You heard it."
"She told me to come."
"She told you there was time."
"Is there."
"I do not know."
Day 2.
You help Yelena with things she cannot quite manage anymore — a jar lid too stiff for her wrist, a suitcase on top of the armoire, a light bulb in a high fixture. She is sixty-one. She tells you her birthday as a fact someone might need later. You register the fact. You also register how she holds her left hand when she is tired, the tremor that is the beginning of something her doctor is not calling by its name yet.
In the afternoon a phone you do not know rings in the kitchen.
Yelena answers. Yelena listens. Yelena says, "Thank you," and hangs up.
"What."
"Your jacket was found. At the apartment in New York. Your friend Alina went to Joe at the bar. Joe had a number to call. They left the coat at the bar. Joe is keeping it for you."
You sit down on the kitchen stool.
The coat was at Perry. The coat had a name stitched inside the collar by your mother the year you turned seventeen.
Someone brought the coat to Joe.
Someone who knew Joe knew you.
You think of Marcus once, quickly, and the thought flattens.
"Vera."
"I am okay enough to keep moving."
That night you cannot sleep.
You lie in the small room with your hand on the envelope — grandmother's, Joe's pencil note, one photograph — and the ceiling has a crack that runs from the lampshade to the corner and does not finish. Yelena's building is a hundred years old. Everything cracks. Everything continues.
You think about the coat. You think about the name stitched inside. You think about your mother at the kitchen table in the summer you turned seventeen, bent over the collar with her reading glasses, stitching the name because you were leaving for school and she was afraid of losing you in some way she could not say.
You think about Charlotte. She is eight.
You think of the man in the café with the Hamlet.
You think of the woman on the stairs at Perry and the way you decided, by the second floor down, that she was not real.
You fall asleep at dawn.
You wake at ten with Yelena in the doorway of the small room.
"Get dressed. There is a man you should meet today."
"Today."
"Today. He is in Asmalımescit. Bookshop called Minoa Pera. Ask for Emre. He will know your face. Go alone. Come back by six. Do not take taxis. The trams are better. The trams have cameras you want on you."
"You want cameras on me."
"I want the right cameras on you. The wrong cameras are the ones you do not see. The visible ones are the ones you use. Learn this, Vera. There are two kinds of watching. One is enemy. One is witness. Witness is on your side until it is not."
You dress. You put the photograph in the inside pocket of the jacket you arrived in — not the grey coat, the other jacket, the one Joe did not see.
Yelena stands at the door and watches you leave.
"Vera."
"Yes."
"Stay off Galip Dede. Take İstiklal down to Tünel. Sofyalı Sokak is off Asmalımescit. If you see a man in a grey jacket, you do not see him. You keep going."
"Grey jacket."
"Any of them."
She closes the door.
You go down the marble stairs.
You go east, toward the tower.
⁂