* * *
When Kristin steps from the apartment, the street is empty. She fumbles through her purse searching for her keys. After a couple of seconds, she finds them in the interior pocket of her suit jacket. The day had been a busy one, stressful, leaving her preoccupied. Misplacing keys has become too common a tic, like a geriatric placing dishes in the laundry hamper or books in the dishwasher. To Kristin it’s a sign she’s slipping. It frightens her, this slippage, for Kristin has lived continually not only on her guard against others, but also on guard against herself.
As soon as she resolves the detail of her misplaced keys, she unlocks the white Chevy. When she hears steps approaching, Kristin glances up—it is Deniz, returning from the İstiklal. Kristin now realizes that she has made another and far more severe oversight. With the door to the Chevy open, Deniz can clearly see the woman inside, the petite silhouette which Kristin had used to menace whatever equilibrium still existed in Murat’s and Catherine’s lives.
“You’re leaving?” Deniz calls out.
“Yes, but we’ll be in touch about everything,” says Kristin, sliding into the car. Their voices carry and Kristin thinks that perhaps their conversation won’t travel as far if she sits inside the Chevy.
“And who’s this?” asks Deniz, stepping beside Kristin’s door.
The slight woman in the hijab glances at Kristin like an actress who has forgotten her lines, or worse, like an actress dealing with another actor who has gone off script. Kristin shifts her eyes to Deniz, answering as she turns on the ignition. “She works with me at the consulate.”
Kristin puts the Chevy into gear. Deniz straightens himself and then, as if sensing shifting weather overhead, he glances up, to where he catches a glimpse of Peter, who is standing in the open window of the apartment. Deniz waves at him good-naturedly. Peter has been watching the entire time and he shuts the window behind him.
PART V
An evening in early July 2016
How it glimmers. Encased in glass, the renovated wing of the Istanbul Modern invites the light. During the day it shines and shines along the bank of the Bosphorus, radiating like a second sun. At night the boat lights, the bridge lights, even the passing gridlock along Cevdet Paşa Caddesi reflect kaleidoscopically from its windows, behind which a priceless mélange of contemporary and classic collections hang the interior walls, adding their value to the exterior glass walls, which Murat Yaşar has built to house them. A year before, Peter had his first show in the Istanbul Modern’s old wing, which by all accounts was a wild success. Scheduled to run for two weeks, it was extended to three months. The coverage Deniz arranged in the Turkish press had been both rampant and generous. Venerable European auction houses took notice and began to inquire about Peter’s work, and the museum had gone on to purchase a half dozen of his photographs for its permanent collection while the consulate had purchased a half dozen more, even providing him with another grant, which he no longer needed but happily pocketed and then used to purchase his rented apartment.
On opening night of the Istanbul Modern’s new wing, Peter dresses next to his bed in that apartment. His sheets are predictably mussed, the evidence of another afternoon spent with Catherine, who still insists on their series of knocks and counterknocks, even though on the occasions when she cannot easily find a cab she’s had Murat’s driver deliver her straight to Peter’s front door in the black Mercedes. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, Peter struggles to articulate the series of cinches, twists and pulls that will construct his bow tie, the last detail on the tuxedo he has rented a half dozen times over the past year, a fact which has led Catherine—and the tailor who rents him the tuxedo—to ask why he simply doesn’t purchase one. A question he has yet to find a satisfactory answer to, except his nagging hunch that each celebration of his talents might well be the last in what has become an unsettling string of successes.
In the back of the taxi Peter steals glances at himself in the rearview mirror, specifically at his bow tie, of which he has made a shoddy job. Something is off about the knot, which isn’t quite straight, so the bow tie keeps unscrewing a few degrees to the left. Peter twists it back to center, but it then stubbornly propellers to its natural, off-kilter position. Changing lanes, the taxi driver glances in his rearview mirror. A laugh escapes him as he notices Peter’s determined effort. Peter slinks into his seat. From his interior coat pocket, he removes the engraved invitation which Catherine had hand-delivered to him several weeks before. It is printed on heavy stock, the edges brushed with gold paint and lettering to match. Listed in a curlicuing font on the back of the invitation are the dinner’s cochairs in alphabetical order, aside from Catherine and Murat, who despite the first initial of their last name have been placed on the top, as in Murat and Catherine Yaşar, along with…invite you to…and so forth.
Peter touches his bow tie. It has again unwound into its off-kilter position. He knows that he cannot fix it in the back of the cab and that he will have to remember to tend to its stubborn unwinding until he finds an opportunity to retie it himself. It occurs to him that if Catherine had been in the cab, if the two of them were traveling together to this opening like any normal couple, she would have simply turned to him and fixed his tie in the backseat. But things have never been and will never be this way between them. He returns the engraved invitation to his coat pocket.
In front of Dolmabahçe Palace traffic congeals to a near standstill. A match between Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş has released a roiling mass of drunken fans into the late-afternoon darkness. Their bodies filter between car fenders, which lie against one another like so many bricks in an impenetrable wall of traffic. Clad in black and white, the Beşiktaş fans chant in one singsong cadence, while the navy-and-gold-clad Fenerbahçe fans rise up in another voice entirely. Peter asks the driver if he knows who has won the match. “Nobody win,” says the driver. Around the time of Peter’s first show at the Istanbul Modern, Murat had managed to refinance the construction of the new stadium through “unidentified sources” as the newspapers had reported it. Since its completion the year before, the games—popular as they are—have crippled the city’s transit system. “Nobody win,” repeats the driver, with a hint more vitriol.
They pass directly in front of the stadium and the pulsing artificial lights from its exterior jumbotron cast shadows inside the taxi. Squinting upward, Peter catches dramatic replays from the match and then the final score: nil to nil. All of this commotion over nothing, he thinks. And then he eases back into his seat and shuts his eyes to the relentless light.
A phalanx of security men in dark suits lingers at the entrance of the museum. In the spots where the temporary offices had once been, Mercedes, Bentleys and Audis are parked. Their sleek curving black chassis are menacing, like a pack of predatory cats. All except for one. Parked in a far corner, as if it must have been the first to arrive, is the white Chevy. Atop a marble flight of stairs with a crimson runner, a woman in a ball gown cradles an iPad. She checks Peter’s name against a list and then opens a glass door for him.