From her wedding ring, Murat knows that Kristin has a husband, and from a photo saved to her phone’s background screen, he knows that she has a daughter. He has met neither of them and he long ago realized that he never would. He has, on occasion, imagined their lives in one of the walled housing compounds leased by the consulate in nearby İstinye, a development no doubt chosen for its resemblance to America’s pastures of prefab shopping malls and rambling bungalows. Based on the hours Kristin keeps, Murat has inferred that her husband doesn’t work, for who else would be at home with their daughter, and Kristin, with her overbearing, controlling personality, doesn’t seem like the sort who would entrust her child’s care to a nanny. Kristin once let slip that she and her husband had endured a brief separation; perhaps this was the point when balancing two careers became too much. Murat doesn’t know, he can only surmise. What he does know is that she has left her family this morning to be with him, and that she is now caring for him as though he were one of them.
Murat sits at the island in his kitchen while Kristin rummages through the cupboards with a frown etched to her face. She pulls down cereals high in sugar. She removes canned soups of questionable nutrition. Packets of cookies, bags of chips, she arrays the goods in complicit rows. “I work more than full-time,” says Kristin, “and you won’t find this junk in my house. How’s William supposed to grow up strong eating this garbage?” She again opens the trash.
She then finds a cupboard stocked with expensive, imported health foods—kale chips, chia seeds, agave syrup—items that can’t be bought at the local Migros supermarket. Each packet has Catherine’s name written beneath the label with a black marker. Kristin reaches deep into a back shelf and removes a tin of raw oats. She fills a pot with milk and places it on the stove. She then measures out the oats. Murat and Kristin watch the burner’s blue flame instead of looking at one another.
“I’m not surprised,” she says.
Murat nods, unable to meet her gaze.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Kristin asks.
The milk comes to a boil. She flings the oats into the pot.
“How was I supposed to stop them?”
“She’s your wife. He’s your son. You could have figured something out.”
Murat crosses the kitchen toward the trash. He opens the lid and quickly examines all that Kristin has discarded. What did she mean that she’s not surprised? he wonders. She isn’t surprised that Catherine has left with William? Or that he was unable to stop them? “I did try,” Murat says, while a hard stone of regret sets in his stomach. He had built all of this for his wife and their son. Or so he had thought. Only when she threatened to leave him did he realize that he would never allow her to and that everything he had built he had built for himself alone.
“How is William’s swimming coming along?”
“You know how it’s coming along,” says Murat.
* * *
“I’m not trying to pry,” she’d said when they first met, “but my colleague thought it was a little unusual that you and not your wife had come on your son’s behalf.”
Kristin had known that she was pushing him with this comment, but she thought that it was fair game. Murat had brought up these issues when he arrived at the consulate ten days before, seeking help. For purposes of discretion Kristin had a nominal assignment within the Cultural Affairs Section, the same as her subordinate, the blond-haired, well-attired gentleman whom Murat would never see again. However, an essential component of her true work, which was within the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a group that took on similar, albeit more anodyne assignments than their colleagues in central intelligence, was understanding what, or who, was fair game. In graduate school, she had taken a class on international negotiation and elicitation techniques, and her professor—the one who later garnered her this “special government job,” as he’d put it—had spoken quite a bit about how once an interlocutor brought up a topic it was fair game, or on the table in any negotiation, though she wondered whether Murat knew that he had entered into a negotiation with her.
They were sitting poolside at the Çırağan Palace Hotel, which fronted the Bosphorus. Many of the hotels in the city had the word palace in their names—the famous Pera Palace Hotel, the kitschy Sultan Palace Hotel—but the Çırağan, unlike the others, happened to have been a palace. Murat had ordered a Coke. Kristin had ordered a glass of rosé. A cascade of cool, pleasant wind came off the water, so they faced toward it and not toward each other.
Murat’s mind resided elsewhere, not concentrating on Kristin’s comments about his wife, his adopted son and the chain of events that had brought him to the consulate. He was, in fact, daydreaming about the rooms in the Çırağan Palace Hotel. The canopy beds built so tall that you had to climb a footstool to get beneath the covers. The heated marble floors in every bathroom. The east-facing terraces that looked out on the strait and welcomed the sun. Terry-cloth bathrobes. A complimentary box of chocolates left on the bed each night. Fruit left on silver trays each morning. Folded laundry placed in a box. The cheapest room was 1,076 Turkish lira per night. Dark-suited security men with chest-holstered pistols lingered by reception. Membership to the hotel club required three letters of reference. Even the most affluent families booked weddings on the grounds two years in advance. Murat’s father had taught him to swim in the hotel’s pool.
This is what he was thinking while Kristin continued to speak, her face turned away from his, her every fourth or fifth word lost to the wind. “The fact that your son was adopted in Turkey and registered with the Central Authority does pose certain impediments. However, I could facilitate a reprocessing of his N-400 naturalization form, but this would require a special letter of dispensation from the ambassador in Ankara. With that letter in hand I could …”
Murat wondered if they still kept the pool open in the winter, as they had done when he was a boy. He recalled his footprints in the snow, and his father’s alongside his as they approached the steaming water. The pool was almost a hundred meters long. To seal it with a cover in the winter would have created a tremendous eyesore, so they left it open and partially heated to keep it from freezing. His father had owned a majority share of the hotel in those days, so he could order the groundskeeper to turn the heat up on the pool. Shoddy management had plagued the Çırağan Palace under his father’s tenure. The heating bill, the water bill, the salaries of the employees, all of it ran over budget. His father used to joke that no other guest in the hotel paid as high a room rate as he did.
The pool along the Bosphorus in the winter under a shroud of steam—Murat could remember it, he could almost see it, and he could feel the anxiety, the pressure on his chest, the cottony dryness in his mouth, his father’s grip on his waist pulling him across the surface of the water trying to teach him to swim. “Kick your legs. Crawl with your arms. Keep your head up, boy.” Murat would flail and when let go of he would sink. His father would heave him up. Murat would gasp the cold air. His father would repeat the commands. “Kick your legs. Crawl with your arms. Keep your head up, boy.” Then his father would let go. Again Murat would sink, and on and on they went. This was how he had been taught to swim, by nearly drowning, over and over.