“… a letter from the ambassador carries a great deal of weight, both with the authorities here and with our Immigration Services. As you can imagine, we can’t just hand out these letters to anyone. Such a letter is usually reserved for those who have aided our diplomatic mission in some essential way …”
His father would eventually pull him out of the pool, he would wrap Murat in a towel, and then they would put their shoes on and cross back over the snow, into the warm confines of the hotel, where in the locker room they would change back into their clothes. If Murat hadn’t complained too much, if he had been sufficiently brave with his crawling and kicking and if he’d kept his head up, then his father would take him into the hotel’s restaurant. They would sit in the plush, silk-upholstered chairs among the guests, where his father would order a cup of strong black tea, served in an oblong glass on a porcelain saucer, the steam curling across its surface, while he would order his son a single glass of Coke on ice.
Kristin flagged down the poolside waiter. She had finished her rosé and ordered one more. “Would you like another Coke?” she asked Murat.
“One is enough,” he said, as he emptied the warmish Coke into his glass.
The waiter nodded, cleared Murat’s bottle and Kristin’s glass and then disappeared through a service door that was discreetly built onto the north wing of the hotel. This entrance to the kitchen was used only in the summer. In the winter the kitchen staff kept it shut, as there was no poolside service.
The afternoon he had learned to swim, Murat’s father had left him barefoot in the snow standing beneath that doorway. Murat had defied his father as they changed for the pool, telling him that he didn’t want to swim in the cold. His father had ignored him at first, pulling off the boy’s trousers and prodding his kicking legs into a pair of swim trunks. He had then wrapped Murat in a towel and lifted him up, carrying him outside, while repeating, “Now is the time to learn.”
Murat cried. His body convulsed in his father’s arms. When he tried to speak, his voice stuttered with hyperventilation. Unable to express himself—to speak, to bellow, to wail—in a way that would catch his father’s attention, he instead wound up his arm and smacked him. The blow landed right on his father’s temple. He calmly set down the boy near the locked doorway to the kitchen and out of sight from anyone in the hotel. “Why do I bother with you?” his father said. He tried to lift Murat and carry him inside. But Murat refused. So his father stared at him one last time with the sharp blue eyes that his son had not inherited and abandoned him out in the cold.
Watching the waiter depart with Kristin’s empty glass, Murat estimated that perhaps thirty meters separated the pool and the doorway where his father had once left him. However, in his memory, that distance was a yawning chasm. He had stood in his swim trunks, his bare feet melting prints into the layer of snow beneath them, while his father returned inside, changed back into his business suit and then sat in the restaurant, sipping his black tea, waiting for the sense to return to his obstinate son.
Murat could remember the sensation of the melting snow gathering beneath his toes, his inability to act, the way his body betrayed him and froze as if he were again standing in snow, and the many times he had lain in bed with Catherine, feeling that same paralysis when a demand was placed on him to perform, the germ of which had appeared so long ago, perhaps not on this day he was now remembering, but through the many altercations with his father. He knew, as he remembered, that Kristin would soon make her demands of him. Murat would have to pay for the request he’d made for his son, and even if he wanted to refuse Kristin he felt that same chill of paralysis overtaking him as he sat next to her by the pool. He would do whatever she asked, not because he wanted to, but because he couldn’t refuse.
After his father had left him, Murat decided that he would learn on his own and, not understanding the dangers of teaching yourself to swim, he ran across the snow and leapt into the pool. He could remember that moment in the air, the instant of the leap, how he hung suspended above the water while his father watched him through the restaurant’s window. Then the water encased him. Murat clamped his eyes shut, not wanting to see. His body didn’t float. He settled a few feet down, on the bottom of the shallow end, which, nonetheless, rose well above his head. A burning sensation spread through his lungs. He thought perhaps he would drown, teach his father a lesson, but the burning became too much. He braced his feet on the bottom of the pool and pushed, shuttling himself upward until he breached the surface. His body rose out of the water, past his shoulders. He could see his father rushing toward him, sprinting down the steps and out into the snow. Once again the water enveloped Murat, but now he did as his father had instructed: he crawled and he kicked. His head was thrust back, his rhythmically gasping mouth sucking the air. He inhaled in the same hyperventilating cadence as when he had struck his father a few minutes before. However, this wasn’t a tantrum—this was the struggle for breath, to evolve: to learn without being taught. This was the path Murat had decided to take when he entered the water alone.
His father leapt into the pool fully clothed while Murat flailed his arms, accidentally striking him across the temple, in the same place he had struck him before. His father continued to lunge after him, but he couldn’t get a firm grip on his son, who jumped at him with his fists. Then he observed that Murat was, in fact, swimming. The stroke Murat had chosen didn’t have a name or, perhaps, it could have been called panic. Nevertheless, he remained afloat. His father took a step back, the vent of his suit jacket billowing up in the water. With this little bit of distance, Murat now recognized that he clung to no one and to nothing, and that whatever he was doing it was that alone which kept him from sinking. He made it to the side of the pool. Exhausted, he rested his head by the drain and listened to his breath mix with the lapping sound of the water.
As he sat next to Kristin, Murat could hear the same rhythmic ebb and flow of the water lapping at the drain while she spoke without interruption, “… the good news is that in your case the entire process of naturalization is extremely complicated.” Kristin’s second glass of rosé had arrived and she was well into it.
Murat turned to face her. “I don’t understand. How is that good news?”
“The more complex a bureaucratic matter is,” Kristin said, “the more room exists for finesse.”
“Finesse?”
“Favors that move things along,” said Kristin.
Murat glanced at his Coke. The ice cubes had melted. He stirred them with his straw and took another sip. It had an unpleasant, watered-down taste. “Are you offering to do me a favor?” he asked.
“You’re going to need one to get your son’s naturalization sorted out.”
“I don’t know how I feel about taking a favor,” Murat said.
“That’s understandable.” Kristin stood and took a few steps to the side of the pool, where she crouched, dipping her fingers in the water, making a swirling motion. “Perfect temperature,” she said, while flicking her wet fingers toward the ground. From the small bottle of Purell she kept in her bag, she squirted a drop of hand sanitizer into her palm and then dried her hand on the back of her gray slacks. She returned to her seat next to Murat. “Your family used to own a large share of this property, didn’t they?”