18:07.
You are sitting on Yelena's bed while she fastens her earrings.
The earrings are small, silver, older than both of you. She has worn them to three funerals and one wedding. She does not say this. You see it in the way she touches them before she puts them in.
"Ready."
"Yes."
"Your hand."
You give her your hand. She puts into it a small card with a phone number and an address. She closes your fist around the card.
"If anything goes wrong. Anything. You call that number, you give that address. You say benim. You hang up."
"Benim."
"It means it is me. Say nothing else."
"Yelena —"
"You do not argue tonight. We go."
18:32. Tomtom Mahallesi. The address.
The neighborhood has been Italian and Greek and Turkish in turns. The door you are walking to is the same door for each.
The address is the top floor of a three-story building on Kumbaracı Yokuşu. Ground floor shuttered. Second floor a language school closed Thursday evenings. The third floor is Emre's friend's apartment.
Emre is already there. The documents are in a brown envelope on a round wooden table. Emre has also brought a fourth person.
Fifty. Grey-streaked hair in a braid. A black shirt. Glasses.
Yelena stops in the doorway.
"Emre."
"She is safe. Yelena. She is —"
"Who is she."
The woman stands.
"My name is Ayla. I am with the paper. Emre asked me to come because —"
"Emre was told three people."
"Yelena —"
"Three people, Emre."
"Yelena, I am sorry, but if we are doing this we need the paper and I cannot publish alone."
Yelena looks at Ayla. Ayla holds her gaze. Ayla is not afraid of Yelena. Ayla has been in rooms like this before.
Yelena closes the door.
"Sit. Fast. Vera, the door I mentioned — it is the door behind the kitchen. Yellow handle. Goes to the stairwell. Stairwell goes to the courtyard. Courtyard goes to Kallavi Sokak. If I say go, you go. Through the yellow. Not out the front. Are you listening."
"I am listening."
"Sit."
18:47.
The meeting starts.
Emre has the envelope open. Inside are four things: a photocopy of a document in Russian; a photocopy of a document in Ukrainian; a photograph of a page of a third document that has been partially burned; and a handwritten list of six names with dates beside them.
The names are older than you. The dates are more recent — they are the dates each person on the list died.
Five of the six died in ways that were not called what they were at the time.
The sixth is your grandmother. The date beside her name is empty.
"She wrote something," Emre says. "This list is from her. We think. We think she gave it to someone who was to bring it forward when the six had all died. She is the last to die. Two thousand nineteen."
"Why seven years ago."
"The person who was supposed to bring it forward could not. The person was Jana. Jana was not well. Jana was well enough recently to send Nina. Nina did not arrive. Your grandmother wrote more than this, Vera. She wrote a monograph. The monograph names someone. The folder is missing. We think it is in Prague."
19:14.
Ayla has been writing. She writes with a felt-tip pen that has been bitten at the cap. Her son bites the caps. He is fifteen and is asleep at home with the dog.
"When were you planning to publish," Ayla asks.
"When the monograph is in hand," Emre says.
"That is not a date," Yelena says.
"The monograph is not a date."
"Publish what you have. Now. It is enough to force the monograph out of whoever has it. Publish the six names. The world will know what it needs to know."
Ayla says, "We will be killed."
Yelena says, "We are being killed, Ayla. This is not a future tense."
19:38.
The room is hot. The window is open. Outside, three floors down, a tram runs every eight minutes with the sound all old trams make.
You have been quiet. You have been watching them argue about publishing your grandmother.
You say, "Give me one of the copies."
Emre looks at you.
"Why."
"Because I am going to Prague. I am going to find the monograph. I am going to bring it back. For that to be worth doing, one of us who is not in this room has to have what you have right now. In case this room does not leave this building."
Yelena looks at you. Yelena's look is the look of a woman who has been waiting to see if you would say something like this.
Emre slides the envelope across the table.
You take the envelope. You fold it. You put it in the inside pocket of your jacket next to the photograph.
The jacket is heavier now by two pieces of paper.
20:12.
Emre goes to the window. He looks down.
He comes back and sits.
"We should move this."
"Move this where," Ayla says.
"Anywhere. The building. The room. There are three cars I recognize on the street that were not there forty minutes ago."
Yelena stands.
"Vera. Go."
"Yelena —"
"Vera. Through the yellow."
The door to the apartment opens before Emre reaches it.
20:21.
Three men. Dressed like anyone on this street. One of them you know — grey jacket, the man from your head, the man from Gate B37, the man who may or may not be the same man.
He does not look at you.
The other two go for Emre and Ayla.
Yelena pulls you backward through the kitchen. You go. You do not look back.
The yellow handle. The stairwell.
Behind you a sound begins that you will not be able to unhear. It is Ayla's voice. Then it is not Ayla's voice. Then it is Emre's, once, short.
You do not stop.
Yelena is behind you on the stairs. Yelena is slower than you. Yelena says, "Keep going. Do not turn."
You do not turn.
On the landing something happens that you feel more than hear. Yelena makes a sound. The sound is not a scream. The sound is the sound a person makes when they have been made to stop being upright.
You turn.
Yelena is against the wall with a hand on her side and the hand is wet.
Behind her, on the landing above, a man is bringing his arm down again.
You run back up the three stairs and put your shoulder into his chest with everything your ninety-nine-pound ninety-ninth-percentile-stubborn body has, and he goes over the railing. You do not watch him land. You hear him land.
You put Yelena's arm over your shoulder.
"Vera."
"Quiet."
"Vera, the —"
"Quiet."
You go down. You go into the courtyard. You go through the alley onto Kallavi Sokak.
20:59.
You are walking west on Kumbaracı Yokuşu with Yelena on your shoulder and the blood from her side going through her shirt through your shirt.
You do not know the time.
You do not know that Ayla is dead, and Emre will be before morning, and the man you put over the railing has a broken hip and a broken collarbone and will be taken into custody by men who will not identify themselves. You do not know the grey-jacketed man is in a car two streets away making a phone call in which your name is not used but you are the subject.
You are helping Yelena breathe.
You are going east.
You are looking for a kitchen.
22:38. The kitchen, after.
You came back through the yellow door.
Yelena is on the kitchen cot in the corner. Unconscious. Breathing. The woman has cleaned her side and sewn it. The woman has the steady hands of someone who has done this before in other kitchens.
"She will live."
"Yes."
"Not in this apartment. I will move her in the morning. I have a cousin in Kadıköy. My cousin is a doctor."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me, girl. Leave. Go home. Pack. Go far. She will call you when she can. She will not call you for a month. That month you will live."
"Where am I going."
"Not my question."
You take Yelena's hand. Yelena's hand is warm. Yelena's hand is not moving. Yelena's hand has a new mark on the knuckle you did not notice before — a small white scar shaped like a comma. You will think of Cenk's eyebrow, three streets and five hours away, at four in the morning when you cannot sleep.
You let go of Yelena's hand.
You leave through the yellow door.
23:17. Kumbaracı Yokuşu, going up.
The street is empty. The trams have stopped. The taxis are thin.
A man is standing in a doorway on your side of the street.
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The man is humming. The tune is old. The tune is not Turkish.
As you pass, the man stops humming and says, under his breath, in English, "the undiscovered country."
You do not turn.
You keep going up.
Behind you the man begins humming again.
You do not know if the man is Hamlet, or a reader of Hamlet, or a friend of Yelena's posted as witness, or an enemy testing whether you will turn.
You do not turn.
23:52. Kameriye Sokak 14.
You let yourself in with the key Yelena gave you on Day 1.
You pack.
You pack in six minutes. You have not accumulated much.
You rinse the blood from the jacket's left side in cold water. The blood has not yet set. It goes.
You take the photograph. You take Joe's pencil note. You take grandmother's envelope. You take the brown envelope from Emre. You take the clothes you arrived in. You leave Yelena's clothes folded on the small-room bed.
You sit on the kitchen stool.
You make two calls.
The first is to the number on Yelena's card. You say benim and you give the Kadıköy cousin's address. A voice you do not know says "Yes" and hangs up.
The second is to the airline.
"I need to change my ticket. I am leaving tomorrow morning. Earliest flight to Moscow."
00:48. The small room. Last hour.
You lie on the bed.
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You do not sleep.
You do a thing you have not done since New York.
You get up. You go into the kitchen. You open Yelena's drawer — the one under the stove, where she keeps the bread knife and the scissors and the tape and the things one keeps. You put your hand on the drawer. You do not open it. You leave your hand there.
You stand in Yelena's kitchen at one in the morning with your palm on a drawer that is not yours, in a city that is not yours, and you think of the drawer in East Seventh, and the hand of your mother on your own bed four thousand miles west, and you think —
I am a woman standing in a foreign kitchen with my hand on a drawer I will not open. I have been this woman before, in another kitchen, on another continent, for eleven months. The drawer is different. The woman is the same.
She knew. She knew without knowing.
You take your hand off the drawer.
You go to sleep at two-ten.
You sleep ninety minutes.
At dawn the taxi is at the door and the day is starting that will carry you east, which is the direction the phone told you to go, which is the direction a notification from an app you did not install sent you at 21:18 on a Thursday in Beyoğlu, which is the direction Moscow is from Istanbul, which is the direction you will go first, before the direction you will go next.
You get in the taxi.
You close the door.
You do not look back at Kameriye Sokak.
The taxi goes.