PART IV
2013
Three o’clock on that afternoon
Peter sits on his sofa and through the silence he listens for Murat. The toilet whines as it refills. Water hisses out of the sink. The metal ring with the folded hand towel swivels on its joint, clanging against the rectangular subway tiles. By these sounds Peter tracks Murat as he moves through his apartment. He visualizes Murat’s every step. Straining to keep track of him in this way requires complete focus and for this reason Peter is startled when his phone rings.
He thrusts his hand in his pocket to mute it.
“Get that if you want,” says Murat. He ambles into the living room but doesn’t sit next to Peter. Instead he steps to the rain-streaked window that overlooks the Bosphorus. The apartment is warm, fogging the pane. Murat wipes a circle with his hand and looks outside. Before the storm arrived, most households had taken their laundry down from the wash lines strung between the buildings. Peter imagines the heavy, damp heaps scattered across kitchen counters and over the backs of sofas in the many cramped apartments whose occupants can’t afford a dryer. The wash on a few of the lines hasn’t been taken down. A child’s brightly colored shorts. A patterned housedress. White shirts flapping like so many flags of surrender. Perhaps these households hoped the storm would clean their laundry twice over. These abandoned possessions dance mournfully above the street, like the torn sails of a ghost ship.
Murat turns away from the window. He sits next to Peter on the sofa, crosses one leg over the other and folds his palms across his knee. “Take the call if you need to,” he once again insists. He then leans forward and thumbs through the books scattered across Peter’s coffee table, editions of photos mostly. Murat offers Peter no privacy, for he must know that it is Catherine who’s calling and he must relish forcing Peter to sit with him while her calls go unanswered.
If Peter had anticipated a heated confrontation with Murat, it doesn’t manifest. An hour before, when Peter had exited the taxi and approached Murat’s double-parked Mercedes, he had half-expected their introduction to turn violent. Peter had his fists clutched to his sides in expectation, hoping that if provoked he might be the one to land the first blow, assuming things would come to blows. Instead, Murat had approached him with his hand outstretched. “You must be Peter,” he had said. Peter didn’t answer, but rather unclenched his fists so that the two of them could shake hands. Murat had then parked his car in an empty space on the street and invited himself up to the apartment. As they climbed the stairs Murat had asked about the building—the terms of Peter’s lease, if utilities were included, whether the landlord was responsive to maintenance requests, what Peter thought about the planned renovation to the building’s modest façade and the inevitable disturbance this would create with workmen climbing on scaffolds, obscuring his view, at least for a few months. Murat had inquired about this last subject as Peter was unlocking the front door and Peter had said that he didn’t know of any planned renovation. “Ah, well, perhaps they haven’t told the tenants yet. I came across the approved paperwork a couple of weeks ago.” Then when the door opened, Murat had added, “That’s a shame, too, because you have such a nice view.”
Murat had settled himself in the middle of the sofa so that Peter would have to sit awkwardly close to him, or stand. When Peter had offered Murat a drink—tea, coffee, water—Murat had asked if he had anything stronger. Peter had disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a tumbler of whiskey. The previous tenant had left behind the bottle. Peter had never touched it, but it was all that he had and he thought nothing of serving something of questionable palatability to Murat. For himself, he poured a glass of tap water.
Neither of them had wanted to raise the issue of Catherine and William. That first hour was spent in a collegial standoff. “I understand you take photographs,” Murat had said. Peter had looked up at the walls, at his portraits that he had framed and hung. “I do,” he had replied. Murat had mentioned his involvement with the Istanbul Modern, how he had overseen plans for its renovation and expansion. “You’ve visited, of course?” Murat had asked. “Of course,” Peter had answered. Murat had guided their initial back-and-forth, dictating its pace. Like sportsmen warming up before a match, they had volleyed genial snippets of conversation to one another. Neither of them had said much, asking simple questions, giving simple answers. Murat had then excused himself to the back of the apartment, ostensibly to use the toilet. When Murat returned, he didn’t sit on the sofa, he stood by the window. And Peter now watches him as he looks out across the city, toward the water and in the direction of the park with its shaded elms and empty playgrounds where, unknown to Murat, Catherine waits with their son.
“So where is she?” Murat asks.
Their entire interaction up to this point has been framed around this single question. Peter can feel how Murat has lured him in, establishing a rapport between them, no matter how tenuous, so that he can strike out after this one fact. He hadn’t said Catherine’s name, only she. By acknowledging that he understood Murat’s question, Peter would be affirming what exists between him and Catherine, the depths of their relationship, its illicit nature, that when speaking she, Catherine is the only person to which either of them could be referring. Peter understands the weight of his own response. His answer could free him from Catherine, and from William. A sickening temptation invites Peter to reveal their location, which would return his interrupted life to him. He glances at Murat, who continues to look away from him and out of the window. The rain has been falling steadily for the past hour. He remembers the birds from that morning, how he had taught William to photograph them in the instant when they would land or take flight. He wonders where they have flown off to in the storm. When the weather clears, they will return, fluttering between his window ledge and the others. After he leaves this city, whenever he decides to journey home across the ocean, someone else will watch them from this same window. It is inevitable. And jealously, he recognizes this inevitability, and that he will have to answer Murat’s question.
“She doesn’t want you to know where she is.”
Murat turns away from the window. He steps around the back of the sofa so that he stands menacingly beside Peter. Murat inhales once, heavily, bows his head and then clasps his hands in front of him. “Okay, but now I am asking you to tell me.”
“Have you tried calling her?”
Murat unclasps his hands and crosses his arms over his chest. “Why don’t you call her for me?” He glances down at Peter, toward his pants pocket and the phone that had been ringing earlier.
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to trick her into speaking with you,” says Peter.