“If this project fails, maybe I lose the football stadium?” said Murat. “People are saying the government is overreaching with so much new construction. They are building in Eminönü, İstinye, Levent. I’ve even heard they’re going to dig up Gezi Park for a shopping mall. When this whole system collapses, when the construction boom is over, I’m going to be very helpful as you try to decipher what remains.”
“What makes you so certain that it’s all going to collapse?”
“Too many people in this country have gotten rich,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Kristin.
“Ministers, deputy ministers, party officials, their sons, their nephews, too many of the wrong people have gotten rich. Everyone is taking a cut. Those cuts have already sliced off the head of this whole economy. It has been a gradual decapitation, so gradual that no one has noticed. And they won’t notice until we walk into a wall.”
“How much do you need?” asked Kristin.
He told her.
She ran her finger over the joist where he’d pounded in the nail. “That’s a lot of money,” she said. “How did you get that deep into debt?”
Murat didn’t answer her. The wind had died down. The thirteenth floor was very quiet now. He didn’t want to explain himself further. His pride wouldn’t allow it. He looked past Kristin, out to the jagged skyline and its many incomplete and hollow buildings. The flags affixed to the crane arms hung limp. The air no longer moved them. The collapse was coming, Murat thought. She could believe him or not.
He picked up another nail and placed it against the joist.
“What are you doing?” asked Kristin.
He gripped the hammer and again began with his long, overarticulated practice swings. He sighted down the wooden handle, taking aim, breathing slowly. “This time I’m going to do it without my own hand getting in the way.”
Kristin turned in the other direction. She couldn’t watch.
One o’clock on that afternoon
The three of them wander out of the restaurant and into the gleaming corridors of Akmerkez. Having slept no more than a few hours the night before, they stumble dazedly among the other shoppers. Catherine loops her arm through Peter’s. William walks on his own. To pass the time they stop and browse the occasional storefront. William asks for nothing, except to be left alone to look at whatever he pleases and to fiddle with Peter’s camera, which hangs heavily from his neck. Catherine and Peter linger behind him, speaking in hushed tones.
“You can stay at my apartment as long as you need,” says Peter, choosing to focus on a problem he can solve as opposed to the crucial problem of the passports.
Catherine nods.
“Could someone from your family wire you a bit of money?” he asks. But Peter knows little about Catherine’s family, just what he’s learned from the occasional offhand remark, that she’s an only child and had gone to five different schools growing up, that her father had made and lost his fortune about the same number of times, and that her mother, a socialite and homemaker, had managed to weather these upheavals while running their household, raising Catherine and even remaining beautiful well into her later years, always suspecting that when her husband finally lost everything she’d be forced to fend for herself and that her looks alone would have to sustain her. The secret of those youthful looks, Catherine had once explained, was a daily ice bath, a practice she planned to take up herself. Where her parents are now, whether they are still in good health, she has never volunteered. The parts of Catherine’s life and of Peter’s which fell outside the scope of their affair had mostly gone unmentioned. Certain boundaries existed.
In the confines of his apartment on those many afternoons in his bed, they had hardly spoken of such things. What had he learned of her? That as a girl she had once successfully auditioned for a summer program at the School of American Ballet, that as a young woman she had left home with Murat to escape her family, who were critical of her unfulfilled ambitions, even though leaving with Murat meant she turned her back on those very same ambitions. When she left, she hadn’t cut ties with her family, or at least she hadn’t wanted to. Her mother and father had visited only once, though it hadn’t really been a visit, rather an intervention, just before she married Murat. And after they married, her parents never returned. They had wanted to support her, money was no issue, but they would do so only on their terms, if she crafted a life acceptable to them. When she refused their support, she refused their vision of her life. Peter learned that she had continued to write them and that they had never responded, and that when she had written with news of William and they still didn’t respond, she wrote a final letter, and then stopped writing altogether.
When Peter had asked what that letter said, she had waved her hand dismissively and mentioned something about Cortés burning his ships while she smiled, and when he looked into her eyes, they were wide as empty plates and endlessly sad so he couldn’t smile back. She had then kissed him, relieving him of the pressure to say something reassuring. Often they said very little, cocooning themselves in silence. During their lovemaking she fitted herself to him and afterward they would lie in his bed, reposed in whatever raw sunlight came through the windows, or they would end up in the living room, watching television, reruns mostly. Lately, they had developed an affinity for the reality show Survivor.
When Catherine doesn’t respond, Peter again asks if someone in her family might wire her a bit of money. She tells him that she wants nothing from them, that she will take nothing from them and that if she returns home she will refuse to see them, just as they have refused to see her since she’s left.
“What about calling Kristin at the consulate?” Peter asks.
“It takes two weeks to issue a new passport,” Catherine replies.
William scrambles over to them from the pet store. He grasps Catherine by the wrist, leading her to a partition of stalls at the window, each filled with a litter of two or three puppies. Nestled in a bed of shredded newspapers and spilled food pellets is a terrier. The dog’s white coat is feathered with grime. Filth cakes around his black nose. His rheumy gray eyes focus on nothing in particular, not even William, who now shows Peter a couple of photographs that he has taken of the dog.
The shop owner steps out from the store. He crouches to eye level with William and beckons him inside with a wave. William looks to his mother, who in turn looks to Peter. There is something very dangerous about allowing a boy to play with a dog that he can never have, thinks Peter.
The insistent shop owner waves to them again.
“Why not,” says Catherine, unable to say otherwise to her son.