The taxi driver does not talk.
His hair is combed with water. The car smells of his aftershave and a small plastic pine-shaped thing hanging from the mirror. He plays nothing on the radio. He drives the way men who have been driving forty years drive.
You watch the city go past.
The city at 05:47 is not the city at 05:47 anywhere else. The city is a person who has not yet stood up. The hills are grey. The minarets in silhouette. The water is a grey that is not yet blue.
The road climbs out of Beyoğlu and joins the motorway. The Bosphorus is to your right for a stretch, grey as everything else, and then the road turns and the water is behind you. The highway opens. The city falls away behind you like a shawl sliding off a shoulder.
Thirty-two kilometers.
You sit with the envelope inside your jacket and the brown envelope inside your jacket and the photograph inside your jacket, and the three papers together make a small hard rectangle against your ribs.
The driver drops you at the departures curb at 06:31.
He takes the fare. Lira, from Yelena's envelope. He does not count. He says "İyi yolculuklar." You say "Teşekkür ederim," and you mean it.
He drives away.
You walk into the terminal.
The terminal is the largest room you have ever walked into. The floor is the color of wet sand. The signs are in Turkish, English, Arabic, Russian. The announcements are in Turkish and English only. This terminal is seven years old. The terminal the grandmothers flew from for fifty years is closed to the east.
You find the Aeroflot counter.
The line is short at this hour. A family of four ahead of you. A businessman ahead of them.
The businessman is checked in quickly.
The family takes longer. The parents are tired. The mother is holding three passports and three boarding passes. She will let her husband carry one only when they are through security. The daughter is maybe nine. The son is three, sitting on a suitcase half his size, kicking his feet, a person managing his morning.
The daughter turns around.
She looks at you.
She looks at you the way nine-year-olds look — directly, without the social sanding older people apply to their looking. She considers you.
She says, in English that has been in a school for two years, "Are you going home?"
You open your mouth.
You are going to say yes.
You are going to say no.
You do not say either.
You say, "I am going to see someone."
"Who."
Her mother says something to her in Russian that is a mild reprimand about not speaking to strangers. The daughter waves her off without looking.
"Who," she asks again.
"A woman my grandmother knew."
"Is she old."
"Yes."
"Are you going to stay with her."
"For a little while."
"Will you come back here?"
You look at the daughter. She is waiting for an answer with the unshakable assumption children have.
You say the sentence that is the whole sentence.
"I do not know. I have been getting ready to not come back anywhere for eleven months, and I think today I am finally doing what that was for."
She nods.
She does not understand.
She says, "Okay. I hope you come back here. It has good cake."
"Thank you."
The mother finishes checking in. The family moves on. The daughter turns at the luggage scale and waves.
You wave back.
You step up to the counter.
The agent is young. Dark lipstick, a red scarf tied in a complicated knot at six thirty-five in the morning. She does her work.
"Passport."
"Yes."
"Bag to check."
"No."
"Seat preference."
"Window."
She types. She prints. She hands you the boarding pass. The boarding pass says Moscow SVO, and a gate, and a seat, and a name that is yours. The direct flight. You chose it knowing it carries more attention.
She looks up at you.
"Have a nice flight."
"Thank you."
You walk to passport control.
You walk knowing you have said it out loud, to a nine-year-old in a line at Istanbul Airport, in a sentence she did not understand and a sentence you understood only as you said it.
Eleven months.
The drawer in East Seventh.
The cash against your spine.
The door you were carrying inside your apartment since Berlin.
You said it.
You said it in English to a child whose Russian mother was not listening and whose Russian brother was kicking his feet. The world did not register the sentence.
But you registered it.
And the sentence is now a sentence you have said.
Keep your face still.
You walk to the gate.
At the gate, 07:52.
Every person you met in Istanbul this week is, at the moment of your takeoff, a person Istanbul has added to you and subtracted from itself. Istanbul keeps you — your voice at the airport counter, your face in the camera above Kumbaracı Yokuşu, the weight of your foot at 21:11 on a particular flagstone — and you keep Istanbul — the smell of the kitchen with the woman who had the knife, the tilt of the street that goes down toward the water, how Yelena closed her eyes when she said your grandmother was kind. Ironic points of light flash out wherever the exchange is made, and the count is always short.
The gate.
You are at Gate B14. B14 is a window gate. The window looks out onto the tarmac. The plane is there, connected to the jetway.
You sit.
You put your canvas bag between your feet.
You watch the plane.
A man is cleaning the floor in front of the gate. His hair is cut short. He is pushing a cart with a polisher on it. The polisher makes a hum that is lower than the terminal's background hum and you can feel the difference in your sternum.
The man passes. The man does not look up at the passengers.
Across the gate a television is on. A man in his sixties is watching it. His thumb is working the base of his knuckle the way a thumb works the base of a knuckle when a person has been watching televisions through a long thing. You do not watch the television. You watch the thumb.
On the seat beside you, a Turkish Airlines magazine someone left behind. You open it. You look at the pictures. A photograph of the Aegean. A photograph of a café in Eskişehir. A photograph of a horse in Cappadocia.
You close the magazine.
You take out the photograph.
You look at her.
The nine-year-old you in the velvet dress on the staircase. You have spent a week in a city that kept some of her for you. You have another city ahead that has been keeping her longer.
You think of Marcus. You think of him as you would think of a note you wrote to yourself and cannot read. He knew the Shevchenko name the morning of the day you left. He has not answered any of the messages Alina tried to reach him through. He may be one kind of thing. He may be another. You will not know before Moscow, and possibly not before Prague, and possibly not at all.
Prague will wait until you come for her.
Moscow first. Moscow is where someone in the network Yelena trusts will meet you and hand you to the train. The train will take you east to the city Nina called from and did not leave. From that city you will begin the journey west — east in order to go west, the direction grandmothers took.
You touch the brown envelope through the jacket. Six names. Five dates. The blank date is your grandmother. You carry the blank.
You put the photograph back in the jacket.
Boarding.
The announcement comes in Russian, then Turkish, then English.
You stand.
You get in line.
The woman ahead of you is the mother from the counter. The daughter is beside her. The daughter sees you. The daughter smiles.
"Hi again."
"Hi."
"We are going to Moscow too."
"I know. I saw."
"Maybe you will sit near us."
"Maybe."
The mother pulls the daughter gently.
You walk down the jetway.
You show your boarding pass.
You find 14A.
You sit.
The plane is filling. The plane smells of recycled air and the faint strain of every Aeroflot flight you will never take but which you now understand the smell of. A child is crying somewhere forward. The child is crying for a reason that is not your reason.
You put your bag under the seat in front of you.
You put your jacket in your lap.
You put your hand on the jacket.
You feel the three papers.
You close your eyes.
The plane pushes back from the gate at 08:41.
The plane taxis.
The plane turns onto the runway.
The plane waits.
You open your eyes.
Outside the window, Istanbul in the morning is a yellow haze with the water shining through.
The engines spool up. The sound gets under your skin. You feel it in the bruise that is almost gone and the cut on your palm that is almost healed and the cut on your cheek that is new, and you feel all three together as a body.
You think of Yelena in a Kadıköy apartment.
You think of Emre whose name you say once in your head.
You think of the mother on the bed in East Seventh.
You think of Jana in Prague.
I am twenty-three.
I am in a seat on a plane to Moscow.
I have been getting ready for this week for eleven months, and today, finally, I said so, out loud, to a child who did not understand.
The plane goes.
The water falls away under the wing.
Istanbul shrinks into the haze.
The bruise and the cut and the envelope move with me.
I close my eyes again.
I do not sleep.
I am not going to sleep until Moscow.