1
“Do what you want,” she said. “Go wherever you like.”
He said nothing.
“İyi yıllar.”
She hung up.
The invitations had arrived in December, and they had arrived for two people. A rooftop in Kadıköy. A thing in Cihangir that was never fully explained. By the thirty-first each had arranged itself without him.
At nine he made tea. At ten he made tea again. The radiator ticked. On the television, a square full of people in silver hats counted down in a language he didn’t know. Their midnight had come six hours early.
He went through the names. A colleague who would ask questions. A cousin who would be glad, and would tell people about it afterwards. Then Burak, who had said on Tuesday that they would be home.
He called at eleven. Burak answered on the second ring. Behind him: glasses, a crowd on a television.
“We’re home,” Burak said. “Come.”
From Fulya it was half an hour on foot. There were taxis on the avenue and a minibus that would have done it in ten minutes. He put on his shoes, one hand on the hallway wall, and walked.
The cold came in under his collar. He did not walk faster.
The flat was on the third floor. The door opened before he knocked.
Inside were ten men, all of them warm from the radiators, all of them glad to see him. Burak took him round: two from the surgery, a cousin, two neighbours from the floor below. He introduced him as his friend. Each man said his name and put out his hand, and the round went on.
Someone put a paper hat on his head. Someone filled his glass.
A man on the arm of the sofa asked him what he did. He had got as far as the roads when the room went up over something at the other end of it, and the man went with it, and the question stayed where it was.
At midnight the room folded in on itself. He was hugged, and he hugged back, and was passed along to the next pair of arms. Each man said something into his shoulder and the music took it. He had never hugged this many men in a single day. At five past they went a second round, because the first had somehow missed the cousin.
He took the paper hat off and set it on the table, square to the edge.
Burak came over with the bottle. He stood in front of him and looked at him for a moment.
“This is good,” he said, holding him by the shoulders. “This is a good year.”
At one he was on the balcony with his phone. İlker had posted a photograph: a living room full of people in high-waisted trousers and dotted dresses, hair set in waves. The caption called it the best night of the year. The location tag was a street in Beşiktaş.
He typed: You all look great. Room for one more?
The answer came in under a minute: Come over.
“Stay,” Burak said at the door. “There’s a bed. Nobody’s leaving.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
Burak put both hands on his shoulders again and opened the door for him.
He walked down. It took twenty-five minutes and he followed the blue dot without looking up.
The party was on the ground floor of an apartment building, light spilling through the curtains onto the pavement. Jazz came from a speaker somewhere. Inside, everyone could dance. It was a class, he gathered, and this was their party.
İlker met him at the door with both arms out. They had been at university together in Ankara. He was an actor. He was warm with everyone in the room, and within five minutes he was somewhere else in it.
The host took his coat, camel and old at the cuffs, and carried it to the back room. He watched it go through the door.
On the sofa a group had shut itself into its own conversation, four or five of them, loud, none of them dancing. A camel coat lay over the arm, and the man it belonged to sat beside it in shirtsleeves, talking. A phone rang in the coat. He reached over without looking, silenced it, and dropped it back in the pocket.
A woman in a red dress took his hand.
“Come,” she said. “You’ll learn.”
He learned. She counted for him, one two three, one two three. He stepped on her twice. The third time she turned it into part of the step, and the two nearest couples applauded. By the fourth song his shirt was damp and the room had stopped watching him. He laughed once, loudly, surprising himself.
At the door, İlker was leaving with three others, coats already on. He raised a hand across the room.
Behind the music, at the door, a woman was leaving. She was leaving now, she said, and no, she was not waiting, and no. She buttoned her thin black coat with the door already open. The host said something about the last boat.
The music covered the rest.
Someone lifted the coat off the arm of the sofa to make room and carried it through to the bed.
At two the dancing thinned. The woman in red was claimed by a man with suspenders. He stood at the edge of the floor for the length of one song. She did not look over. His body was wrung out and humming, and he went to the back room for his coat.
The coats lay on a bed in a pile — dark wool, cheap satin capes, one feather boa. Light from the hall reached the bed in a triangle, and in the triangle a camel sleeve. He pulled the coat free.
In the hallway mirror he looked well. He turned once, and again. The coat sat on him better than it had in ten years.
The host kissed him on both cheeks, though they had met that night, and he walked out into January.
The street was empty. His breath went ahead of him in small white instalments. He did not go up towards Fulya.
He went down to the front, where the wind was. The pier was shut, chains through the gate handles, the steps empty, the water black and moving under the lamps. He turned back into the market streets and walked them.
Twenty minutes later he put his hand in his pocket for his phone.
The screen woke and asked him for a number he did not have. Above it, eleven missed calls. Behind it, a photograph of a balcony in summer.
He looked at the cuffs of the coat. They were not worn.
Something went through him, warm, and was gone.
He had followed a blue dot to that flat. The map was in his own phone, and his own phone was in his own coat, with his keys and his wallet, on a ground floor in one of the streets behind him.
His shoulders came down.
The screen lit again in his hand, without a sound, and the phone had a woman on it.
“Why haven’t you answered?” the woman said. “I’m standing here—” Her voice changed gears. “Damn you. God damn you, Serkan.”
“I’m not Serkan,” he said. “I don’t know who Serkan is.”
The line went quiet. On her end, a car horn, and under it the water.
“Whatever,” she said. “Come and get me. I’ll be at the eagle.”
At the far end of the street, a taxi’s roof light glowed.
“Serkan?”
“I’m coming,” he said.
He walked. He passed the taxi with its light still on, and the driver watched him go by.
The coat smelled of someone else’s cigarettes and of a perfume that had spent all evening in a warm room. In the left pocket: four cigarettes. In the right: a lighter. In the inside pocket, folded once, a receipt for tea from the morning ferry. Serkan had had a day, too.
The eagle stood two streets up, in the middle of the square, with the traffic gone from around it. He got there first. He stopped in front of it with his back to the road and looked at the phone in his hand. Two per cent.
Behind him, heels. They crossed the square and stopped.
“Sen kimsin ya.”
It was not a question.
“Months. I’ve asked you what you do for a living and you laughed. Every single time. You laughed tonight.”
He turned around.
She stood with her arms crossed over a thin black coat. The anger went out of her face. She had come with a word and did not use it.
“Sen kimsin?”
“I was at the party,” he said. “The coat was on the bed. Mine’s camel too. Older.”
She looked at the coat. The corner of her mouth moved.
She put out her hand and did not touch it.
“I’m cold,” she said. “Walk.”
They walked.
2
They walked.
The wind had come up off the water. It moved down the side streets in gusts, and between gusts the city was emptied out. A paper hat lay in a doorway. Somewhere a television counted down for someone else.
Her heels struck the pavement, and the sound went ahead of them and came back off the shutters.
“Do you smoke?” she said.
“No.”
She stopped walking. “I do.”
He remembered the coat. He brought out the four cigarettes and the lighter. She took one, and he held the lighter for her, and the wind put it out twice. The third time she made a cup of her hands and it caught.
“Serkan’s,” she said, looking at the cigarette. She smoked it anyway.
“He was texting someone else. I saw it. That’s why I left.”
He nodded. It cost nothing.
They went on.
“I shut the water off before I came out,” she said. “The kitchen tap’s dripped since October.”
“What did the landlord say?”
“That it was nothing.”
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“I don’t know where the flat is.”
She did not answer for a few steps.
“It’s two streets from my building. Walk me home. I’ll tell you from there.”
They passed a dog asleep in the light of a pharmacy sign, and then a family coming out of a doorway, a man carrying a sleeping child over his shoulder. The child’s paper crown had slipped down over one eye. Nobody in the family fixed it.
“I was going over to Pelin’s,” she said. “I passed my building. I didn’t stop.”
Her building was four floors, with one window lit. On the pavement she turned and pointed uphill.
“Up as far as the bakery, then left. Ground floor, the curtains.”
She climbed the steps and unlocked the street door with a key from her bag, and on the threshold she turned.
“İyi yıllar,” she said.
“İyi yıllar.”
The door closed behind her with a magnetic click.
He went back the way they had come, slowly.
Her flat was dark and cold. She put her bag on the table, then emptied her coat pockets beside it: keys, phone. She kicked off her heels and slipped into the slippers by the door.
She was halfway out of her coat when she looked towards the bathroom and remembered the water.
She pulled the coat back over her shoulders and went out.
The valve was in the cupboard beside the meter, on the landing. She pulled the door shut behind her out of habit, opened the cupboard and turned the wheel until it gave.
The water started somewhere under the floor.
She looked at the door. She tried it. Then she tried it again, for no reason.
Her keys were inside. Her phone was inside, on the table, beside her bag.
The drip would be back now too. She turned the wheel the other way until it stopped.
From the stairwell window she could see the street. A camel coat stood down at the corner, under the lamp.
“Hey!” she called. The window was sealed.
She ran.
She caught him at the corner, out of breath, in her slippers, with her hair across her face.
“The door closed,” she said. “The keys are inside. My phone too.” She took a breath. “Everything.”
He looked at her.
“Do you have a phone?” she said.
His phone was in his coat, and his coat was back at the party.
He brought out Serkan’s phone. She took it and pressed the side button. The screen lit, showed one per cent, and died.
She looked at it in her hand.
“He never charges it,” she said. “He never did.”
They stood in the street. The wind rolled a can along the pavement and left it against the kerb.
She had begun to shiver. The thin black coat did little against the wind. He took off the camel coat and put it on her shoulders, and she pulled it closed without a word.
From uphill, thinned by distance, came jazz.
“It’s still going,” she said.
She was already walking.
3
They walked the first street without speaking.
“I survey land,” he said. “Roads, plot boundaries.”
She waited.
“I followed a blue dot here.”
She laughed once. It surprised them both.
The windows of the building were still lit, but the music had slowed. Inside, the party had come down to the host and a handful of dancers who had nowhere better to be. They moved in the middle of the room without counting anything.
The host met them at the door with his glass in his hand and his eyes half shut.
“You’re back!” he said. “You two.”
He looked from one to the other and laughed.
Neither of them corrected him.
The man went to the back room. Most of the coats were gone, and what remained had been slept on.
A man lay on his side across the pile, still dressed, a paper hat crushed under one shoulder. He slept with one hand open on the wool, palm up, like a man waiting for change.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Serkan,” she said.
The radiator ticked.
Serkan did not move.
She did not say it again.
The man knelt and began to free the coats, one at a time, setting each down without a sound. His own was under Serkan’s shoulder. He drew it out in slow stages, an inch at a time, and Serkan settled into the space it left, and slept on.
He checked the pockets by feel. Keys in one. Phone and wallet in the other.
He stood, one hand on the wall, and turned to her. She slipped the camel coat off her shoulders.
He put the dead phone back in the pocket it had come out of. Then he laid the coat over Serkan and drew it straight, covering him to the chin. Serkan stirred, gathered the coat around himself, and was still.
She knelt and fixed the collar where it had folded under his ear. She stayed down.
Then she stood up and went out of the room.
In the living room, the host had fallen asleep in the armchair with his glass upright in his hand. The dancers were gone or going. They let themselves out.
Outside, he put his hand in his pocket. The keys were there, cold, the flat key turned out under his thumb. He held them a moment and let them go.
“Tea?” he said.
They went downhill, toward the water. The shops were shuttered. A baker’s light was on, deep in the back.
The café on the square was open, or had never closed. The tea machine breathed steam by the door. Two taxi drivers sat over their glasses with the patience of men being paid to wait.
They sat by the window. The tea came in tulip glasses, and she held hers with both hands, for the warmth.
She had taken her feet out of the slippers and set them on top of them, one over the other. Underneath, the slippers were black with the street.
“The door,” he said.
“In the morning,” she said.
The taxi drivers went out, and two others came in and took the same table. The gulls started, out over the water, before there was light enough to see them. The black in the window turned grey.
A simit seller passed with a tray balanced on his head. He stopped at the café door; they bought two and ate them without talking.
Out on the water, the first ferry of the year moved across the grey, lit up inside, nearly empty.
She watched it go the length of the window. Then she turned to him.
“What’s your name?”
He told her.