Day 3, 10:47. İstiklal.
You walk down İstiklal with the camera-facing side of your body to the shop windows because a body photographed from behind is a body harder to flag.
Yelena taught you this in an afternoon.
You did not know such things took afternoons.
Sofyalı Sokak.
Not a main street and not a side street either. Three- and four-story buildings, Ottoman façades with the plaster repaired and repaired. A meyhane two doors up with chairs already set out at ten-forty-seven. On the ground floor of a building older than the Republic, Minoa Pera.
The man behind the counter is perhaps forty. Closely shaved. Pale despite the sun. Black shirt.
"You are looking for Emre."
"Yes."
"He is in the back. I will close the front."
He flips a sign in Turkish and Greek. He locks the door.
"Go."
Dark curly hair going grey at one temple, not the other. Jeans. A grey T-shirt with a coffee stain on the hem. His eyes are the eyes of a man who has slept four hours a night for the last year and a half.
"Vera."
"Yes."
"Sit."
You sit. The back room smells of old paper and cigarettes and a faint oud cologne that is his. On the desk: a laptop with its camera covered by a strip of black tape, a notebook, two phones (one off, one face-down), a pistol (small, silver, the safety on).
"It is for the window," he says.
"The window."
"Someone has been standing across the street for six weeks. He is there now. You did not see him. Do not turn."
You do not turn.
"Yelena said you have something."
"Nina had documents. Nina was bringing them by hand. Nina did not arrive. I have part of what Nina had."
He opens a drawer. He takes out a single folded sheet. He does not unfold it. He puts it on the desk between you.
"The part I do not have is what your grandmother wrote in Moscow in nineteen seventy-one. I need your help recovering it."
"How."
"I will tell you on Thursday. Six p.m. An address in Tomtom. Yelena will bring you. Three of us. If there are four, the fourth is a problem and you leave by the door I show you at the start."
"Okay."
"One more thing. Nina is dead, Vera. She died in Vladivostok on the sixteenth of May. She was found by the harbor."
You sit with it.
The back room breathes around you.
You do not cry. You take a breath. The breath goes in and goes out and you are still the person you were before the sentence and also not.
"Does Yelena know."
"Yelena knows. She asked me to tell you first. She said you are practical about grief, even when you are not."
"Practical."
"Her word."
"There is something else," Emre says. "The name Jana."
You look up.
"Your grandmother had a friend in Prague. They met at a conference in sixty-nine. They wrote letters. Your grandmother went to Prague once, autumn of seventy, and stayed in Jana's flat."
"Why are you telling me this now."
"Because she is alive. Jana is sixty years older than you. Jana is in Prague. Jana sent Nina, via your grandmother's instructions in a letter Jana did not open for seven years. Jana is the reason you are in this room."
A pause.
"There is one more thing I should tell you. About Nina. Your grandmother taught Nina to read Pushkin one afternoon at Jana's flat in autumn seventy. Nina was seven. The book was red cloth, faded at the spine. Nina told me last winter."
I am holding my own hand under the desk. I am sitting on a wooden chair in a bookshop in Asmalımescit. There is a coffee stain on the man's shirt. There is a woman named Jana in Prague who is sixty years older than me. There is a word — Jana — that a man said at a knife-point in my TA's hallway in New York, and the word was a name, and I did not know the name until this afternoon.
Nina is dead.
The sentence is said in my head in English. I do not know how the sentence would sound in the language Nina spoke to me in.
You nod.
You say, "Thursday. Six. Tomtom."
"Good. Go out the way you came. Do not walk toward the tower. Walk toward Karaköy and take the funicular up to Tünel. The funicular has cameras we own. Go home."
Karaköy.
You go down the hill. The city falls with you. Karaköy smells of salt and frying fish and diesel. A man is selling simit from a cart. You buy one. You do not eat it. The Golden Horn is older than any of the countries that have fought over it.
You eat half the simit and throw the other half to a gull.
In the funicular at Tünel.
The funicular is 19th-century. The ride is ninety seconds.
The funicular stops. The doors open. You get out. Your legs do not feel like your legs yet. The city is louder up here than it was down below.
You are less alone than you came. The city has added you to itself, which is another way of saying you have lost some of yourself into its weight.
You feel lighter by subtraction.
You do not think this is a good thing.
Day 3, 19:40. The bar on Asmalımescit.
You did not plan the bar. The door was open and a woman was laughing inside and that is what you wanted. To forget for an hour.
You go in.
The bar is small. Six tables. At the bar, a man alone, writing in a notebook.
About thirty. Dark hair. A scar on his right eyebrow the shape of a comma. He writes with his left hand.
You sit two stools down.
"What are you drinking," the bartender asks in English. Your clothes gave you away before your mouth.
"A rakı. Whatever is open."
The man in the notebook looks up.
"You drink rakı."
"I want to drink rakı."
"Those are different things."
"Tonight they are the same."
He closes his notebook. He has the face of someone who can close the book on himself at will. You find this restful.
His name is Cenk. He is an architect. He has been divorced for fourteen months. He is not interested in having you fall in love with him. He says this early, in the third sentence, not to warn you but to set the conditions of the evening so that both of you can relax.
You relax.
You drink one rakı. You drink a second. The ice turns the liquid white.
At ten-forty you leave with him.
His apartment is two streets away. Twelve-foot ceilings and bad wiring and a view of a courtyard with a fig tree.
He does not ask about the bruise on your thigh, which has faded to green-yellow and is healing.
He does not ask about the cut on your palm, which has closed.
He does not ask about anything.
He is a careful man with a careful mouth. You are surprised by your own body when it responds. You have not been in your body this way since before Perry. You thought that door was closed for a season. The door is open. The door is not the same door it was before — the room behind it is a room in a city you are in for six more days — but the door is open.
After, you lie next to him. He is already asleep.
You get up at two. You dress in the dark. You do not leave a note. He did not expect one.
You walk back to Kameriye through streets where nothing is moving except the cats.
Keep your face still.
The survival voice is tired tonight. The survival voice is also pleased with you, in a way you do not examine.
Day 4, 16:18. Kameriye.
Yelena makes tea. Yelena does not ask where you were last night.
You tell her anyway. Not the details. The fact.
She nods.
"Was he good to you."
"Yes."
"Good. Some things heal that way. Some do not. You learn which."
She pours another cup. Half the people I came with are gone, she says to the cup. Not leaving. Gone. You do not ask which half. She does not say the years.
"Yelena."
"Yes."
"Emre told me about Nina."
Yelena puts down her cup.
"I am sorry, Vera. I told him to tell you. I did not know how to say it in a way you would not hate me for."
"I do not hate you."
"You might yet."
"I might."
You drink your tea. The tea is black. The Bosphorus through the window is grey-blue and has two container ships on it, one going up, one going down.
"Tomorrow is Thursday."
"Yes."
"You will come."
"Yes."
"It will be hard."
"I know."
"I do not think anything will happen at the meeting. I am preparing you in case I am wrong."
"In case of what."
Yelena looks at the window.
"In case we are wrong about who is left on our side."
Day 4, 23:58. The small room.
You lie in the dark.
You think of Cenk asleep two streets away. You think of Nina in the water off Vladivostok for twenty hours. You think of your grandmother in Moscow in nineteen seventy-one with three books and a folder and a revolver.
The city breathes around you.
Tomorrow is Thursday.
You sleep an hour at a time until light.
⁂