The night she met Peter, Catherine arrived at the terrace restaurant early, giving the hostess her name so that she might wander among the adjacent galleries. The museum was a cavernous, echoing space. The walls were insubstantial, no more than wood-framed partitions painted white. Above them the ceiling was a crosshatch of pipework, wiring, exposed air ducts, and halogen lights aimed at whatever assemblage of artwork the overworked curator had shotgunned into place. The museum was housed in a converted warehouse in Karaköy, a gentrifying neighborhood which had only a couple of years before been a deteriorating dockyard. Now its streets smelled like paint, wet concrete, sawdust, as construction companies like her husband’s built cafés, artisanal bakeries and luxury apartments along the waterfront. The eastern face of the museum was partially constructed of glass and boasted an unobstructed view of the Bosphorus. It was a clear night, and winter. Outside the air was sharp and the boat and bridge lights reflected strongly off the chinked surface of the water, which glimmered like coins. The hills across the strait, in Asia, were pitch-dark along the folds, like dozing bodies ensconced under thick blankets.
“Catherine Yaşar … ?”
She startled.
Peter apologized and introduced himself. He stood regarding Catherine with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that she felt she had said something quite wonderful. He wore the one sports coat he owned, at least the only one he had brought with him when he moved to the city. It was brown corduroy, so didn’t wrinkle easily. He had worn a tie also, but when he saw how Catherine was dressed—jeans, black silk blazer, white T-shirt—he loosened its knot and then took it off, affecting that he had come from some other, more formal engagement, and would now dress down, relax even.
“Karsh is one of my favorites,” said Peter, as he pushed up his glasses and craned his neck toward the series of photographs hung against the wall. Catherine had been looking out the window, at the water and the city. She had hardly noticed the gallery she had wandered into. A placard also hung on the wall, summarizing the life and the portraiture of Yousuf Karsh: born during Ottoman times in Mardin, an ancient city in the Armenian southeast, Karsh grew up during the genocide; his sister died of starvation as the Turks drove his family from village to village, until, finally, at the age of sixteen he fled to Canada.
“He was an expatriate, like you,” said Catherine.
“And like you,” said Peter.
She laughed. “No, not like me, I think.”
He then pointed to one of the portraits: a man in a three-piece suit who wore a thin set of spectacles, his arms crossed jauntily along the back of a leather-upholstered chair. The subject brimmed with an early-twentieth-century dignity, as if inviting the camera to look as deep as it wanted, confident that its lens could reveal nothing except what he had chosen to lay before it: an unshakable claim to wealth, empire, social standing. Peter read aloud from the placard, “Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld.”
He glanced back at Catherine to gauge her reaction to the portrait, which she studied like a woman who understands all the answers to a work of art, or at least all the questions, first leaning back and then inching ever closer, as if searching for the correct angle from which to examine the photograph. She rested an index finger on her mouth and then smiled beneath it, but her lips were thin as thread.
“Do you see the hands?” said Peter, pointing into the portrait. “Karsh was an innovator. If you look at his photos, he lights the subject’s hands and face separately. It’s his trademark.”
Catherine gazed down the row of frames, searching for what Peter referenced, the special lighting on each subject’s hands. “I’m glad you like our exhibit,” she said, feigning through her tone that she had, in some way, been part of putting the exhibit together.
“Has there been any controversy surrounding it?” asked Peter.
“None,” answered Catherine, yet she felt herself on shaky intellectual ground. Why would an exhibit of twentieth-century portraiture by Karsh be controversial? Before she could answer Peter further, the hostess called their reservation from the entrance of the restaurant.
“I thought there might have been some anti-Armenian backlash around Karsh,” explained Peter as he followed behind Catherine.
“Oh that,” she said. “Usually when the government gets wrapped up around the Armenian issue, it’s just posturing. How long have you been here?”
“About six months.”
“Times are good now, the economy, security, everything is stable. When times get hard, that’s when the Armenian question, or some other question, becomes relevant again.” They had followed the hostess into the restaurant. She had found them a corner table in the back, one near the window. Peter offered Catherine the seat facing outside. She refused, saying, “I’m used to the view, tired of it even. You’ve got a fresh set of eyes.”
* * *
They ordered three courses and the kitchen was slow. Behind Peter, on the wall of the restaurant, there was a clock. Catherine watched the time pass, not because she wanted to leave, but rather because she wanted to stay. She willed its hands to slow down, to allow her this night to sit and talk with him. He had produced a book of his work, setting it on the table. She then took it in her lap. He explained that his current project was a survey—thousands of photos—and that the book represented a sampling of the work he had gathered up to this point. Glancing through its pages she asked, “And what is the concept behind all these portraits?”
“There is an old political theory I’m interested in,” explained Peter, “a holdover from the Cold War. The western powers called it the strategy of tension. They would at times support leftist terrorist attacks, propaganda and even radical politicians in order to keep their right-wing allies under threat. A society in crisis, one that is gripped by tension, can be more easily manipulated and controlled than one that’s stable, or so the theory goes.”
Catherine flipped through the images as Peter explained himself. The entire book was perhaps one hundred unfinished pages of black-and-white portraits, all shot on the street, and all shot from the shoulders up. Catherine found nothing remarkable in the photos themselves; rather, she was interested in their arrangement, the way each was juxtaposed to its pairing across the page—a homemaker in hijab buying groceries at the market set next to an uncovered female executive at a client luncheon, a politician campaigning through Beşiktaş district set next to an army officer waiting at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Terminal for the train which would take him back to his front-line post in the restive southeast, a bar owner smoking a nargile off İstiklal Caddesi set next to a muezzin climbing his minaret in Ortaköy.
Peter leaned over the table to gauge Catherine’s progress through his book. “The point of the survey is to take the portraits, but most importantly to arrange them against one another. It is basically a huge pairing exercise, not only are you seeing each person, but you are also seeing their contradiction.”