The Weight of Water

I had rehearsed the funeral in my head for six weeks, since the call came from New York in a voice I no longer recognized — his sister, Lena, speaking over a static that made her words arrive like something half-drowned. I had practiced standing in a line with the other mourners, nodding at the right moments, not speaking unless spoken to. I had practiced the part where I would not cry, because there was a whole room of people and a whole city watching, and I had not practiced the part about him. The part where he would appear, thinner than I remembered, wearing his mother's death like a coat that didn't fit, and I would have to look at him for the first time in seven years without flinching.

I had worn the dress she would have approved of, the dark one with the long sleeves, the one that made me look like I had come from somewhere else, from a version of myself that had not spent seven years learning to make things with her hands. I had worn it to the studio that morning and stood in front of the window with the Bosphorus behind me, the water moving back and forth, the ferries crossing, and I had looked at myself in the glass and tried to decide which of us was the stranger. The dress had not answered.

The mosque on the hill above the Golden Horn was older than the road that led to it, and the road was older than the buildings that leaned into the road, and I stood in that long line of black and dark blue while the imam spoke in a voice that moved across the water like a hand laid gently over something trying to surface. The call to prayer had come an hour before, drifting over the rooftops at dusk, and the city had paused for it the way it always did — the ferries slowing, the seagulls going quiet for a moment, even the traffic on the bridge below holding its breath. There is something about that pause in Istanbul that makes you feel, for one second, that you are part of a conversation much older than the one you are having right now.

The coffin was plain walnut, and there was a single sprig of dried rose on it that his mother must have asked for, because she had always been particular about the small things. I remembered her kitchen in Cihangir, the way the light came through the window in the afternoon and caught the steam rising from the çay, the way she would set a tulip glass in front of you before you sat down, as if the glass itself were a welcome. She had never once asked me to leave. That was the first kindness of the seven years, and I would think about it for the rest of the day.

The service ended with the kind of quiet that only a city can hold — not silence, exactly, but the city taking the sound in and keeping it. We file out of the mosque in a line that moves slowly, like water finding its level, and I am somewhere in the middle of it when I see him.

He is standing at the far end of the line, not moving, looking at the water the way you look at something you have been told about for years but have never actually seen up close. His shoulder blades are visible through the grey of his jacket, and there is a bruise-colored shadow under his left eye that might be exhaustion, might be something else. Seven years. He had left in the spring, on a ferry to the other side of the world, and I had watched him from the deck of the ship that carried me home to my side of the Bosphorus, the way you watch something leave that you had been promised you would never have to watch leave.

The line moves. I am beside him before I have decided to move, and when I look down, his hand is in my pocket.

I have not touched him in seven years. I had forgotten what his hand felt like, which is a strange thing to forget — you would think you would keep it, the way you keep a piece of a letter you are not allowed to have. His fingers are thinner now, the knuckles a little more pronounced, and the skin over the back of his hand is paler than I remember, as if the light in New York had not been enough to reach him. He does not look at me. He does not take his hand away.

"She was tired," he says, and the words come out flat, as if he has said them a hundred times already and is only now letting me hear one of them.

"I know," I say.

"Everyone kept saying she was tired." He pauses. "No one said what she was actually tired of."

We stand there in the line, and the line does not move, and the water of the Golden Horn moves below us, grey-green and patient, and I think about how he has never once in seven years sent me a message, not on my birthday, not at Christmas, not when he got the promotion, not when his marriage ended three years after we left — I learned about that from Lena's voice on the phone, the way she said it, like she was setting down a glass she had been carrying too long. He had carried all of it the way she had carried the tea, steadily, without ever turning around to see if anyone was following.

"She would have wanted you both there," I say, and I do not know why I say it, because I am not sure she did, and I am not sure I am qualified to speak for her either way.

He looks at me then, and the look is not the look I had been bracing for. There is no relief in it, no relief on either of our faces. There is only the look of a person who has just been handed back something they thought they had lost, and who is not sure what to do with it yet.

"Walk with me," he says. Not a question. "Just walk."

The street that led down from the mosque was narrow and steep, the kind of street that exists in old Istanbul like a vein under the skin of the city, and we walked down it in a silence that was not the silence of strangers. The houses leaned toward each other overhead, and between them there was a strip of sky so thin it looked like a seam, and I remembered the first time we had walked this street together, three years before he left, when I had just moved into the apartment in Cihangir and the studio in Karaköy was still empty, all white walls and the smell of fresh plaster. He had carried the boxes up the stairs, all of them, and he had not complained once, and when he had finally set the last one down, he had looked at me with that look — the one that said he was trying to figure out how to say a thing without saying it — and I had put my hand on his face, and he had let me, and that was the last time I had touched him without counting.

"You look the same," I said, and I was surprised by how small the words came out.

"You look different," he said. "Better."

"I don't know if I am better," I said. "I am just here. I never stopped being here. That's different."

He was quiet for a long time, and we were walking, and the street curved, and the smell of the water came up to meet us, salt and something older than salt, and a seagull called overhead, loud and sharp, and the sound of it cut through whatever it was that we had been trying not to say, and I thought, not for the first time, that this city does not let you keep things from itself. Everything you try to hold inside, the water finds a way to carry it somewhere else, or to bring it back.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Everywhere," he said. "And nowhere. I don't know. I have been here two days and I can't find any of it. The street where we used to go for çay on the weekends. The bridge where she taught me to fish, even though I could never catch anything. I can't find any of it."

"The street is the same," I said. "The bridge is the same. The city doesn't move, Emre. You moved."

He stopped walking, and I stopped walking, and we stood on the narrow street with the seam of sky above us, and the call to prayer began again, an hour later than I had expected, and the sound of it came down from every direction at once, rolling over the rooftops, and for a moment the street was full of nothing but the sound and the two of us, and I felt the sound go through me the way the water goes through the city, carrying something, leaving something, and I thought about how much of me had been carried away by the last seven years without my asking it to.

"I am sorry," he said, and the words were small and tired, and I could see that he had been holding them in his mouth for a long time.

"For leaving?" I asked.

"For all of it." He looked down at his hand, which was still in my pocket, and he did not take it away. "For not calling. For not writing. For thinking that if I didn't talk about it, it would get smaller. It didn't get smaller. It just got quieter, which was worse."

I wanted to say something that would make it even, something that would put the seven years back on the scale and make it balance, but I couldn't find the words, and the prayer went on, and the street was very quiet, and I let the silence be what it was, which was not forgiveness, not yet, but the beginning of the thing that might become it.

We walked on. The street opened out onto the bigger road, and the road ran along the water, and the ferries were running their last crossings of the day, and I watched them go, the way you watch something you can't touch, and I thought about how easy it is to cross to the other side of the Bosphorus and how hard it is to cross to the other side of a person.

The Spice Bazaar was open, and we went in, and the smell of it hit us both at the same time, the saffron and the sumac and the dried rose petals, and I saw his face change, just slightly, the way a face changes when it remembers something it had been trying not to remember. He stood in the aisle between the stalls, with the tea stacked in pyramids around us, that particular gold of it catching the light from the high windows, and he said, "She used to buy too many spices."

"Too many for one person," I said.

"Too many for a kitchen that size." He smiled, and it was the smallest smile I had ever seen on him, and it broke something open in my chest that I had not known was still closed. "I would come over on Thursdays, and she would make me sit at the table while she told me about every single spice she had bought that week, and I would pretend to be interested, and I was never interested, and I never told her I was never interested."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because she was happy when she talked about them." He picked up a small glass of tea, turned it in his fingers, and set it back down. "And I didn't want to be the reason she wasn't happy about something, even if it was only tea."

I stood very still, and the bazaar moved around us, the sellers calling their prices in the low, friendly voices that the bazaar has, the sound of the glass clinking, the smell of the sumac sharp and bright on the back of my throat, and I thought about how much of a life is made of the small things you don't say, the things you let pass, the things you are too tired or too afraid to name, and I thought about how he had carried all of those unsaid things to New York and left all of the said things behind with her, and how that was its own kind of crossing, and how the Bosphorus had nothing on it.

We left the bazaar and walked down to the Galata Bridge, and it was raining, a fine rain that came in from the water and sat on everything, and the fishermen were on the bridge, the way they always are, casting their lines out over the edge into the grey-green water, and the rain was on their faces, and they did not seem to notice. We stood under the bridge's awning, in the part where the rain couldn't quite reach, and the water moved below us, and the ferries crossed, and the seagulls followed them, their cries cutting through the sound of the rain, and above us, through the gaps in the awning, I could see the Galata Tower standing on its hill, the stone witness, the one that had watched over this city for centuries of comings and goings and was still watching, still there, and he said, "I kept a piece of the bridge."

"A piece?"

"The one spot where we used to stand. The one with the crack in the stone. I used to look for it when I was walking past, before I left. I looked for it every time." He was quiet. "I didn't look for it after."

"Why not?"

"Because if I kept looking for it, it would keep meaning something, and I needed it to stop meaning something." He turned the glass of tea he had picked up in the bazaar, though I am not sure how he had it with him now, and the rain was very quiet, and the city was very quiet, and I understood, in that moment, that he had been carrying the bridge the way she had carried the tea, steadily, without ever turning around to see if anyone was following.

The rain stopped, and the sun came out, and the light that came out of it was the particular light of Istanbul, golden and hazy, the kind of light that makes the whole city look like a memory, like something you are trying to remember but can't quite hold onto, and we walked through it, and the light was on his face, and I looked at it, and I did not look away, and I did not pretend that I was not looking, and he did not look away either, and we walked, and the city moved around us, and the seven years were in the light, and the seven years were in the water, and the seven years were in the space between us, which was not empty, which had never been empty, which was full of all the things we had not said and all the things we had said and all the things the water had carried away and all the things the water had brought back.

The light was getting lower, and the city was getting quieter, and the ferries were running their last crossings of the day, and we walked up the hill to Cihangir, and we walked past the studio in Karaköy, and I saw the clay on the windowsill, the clay that I had been working with all day, the clay that had been under my fingers since before he had come, and I saw his face change again, that small change, the one that meant he was remembering, and I said, "The studio is mine now. It has always been mine. I just didn't know what to do with it until I started making things."

"Making what?"

"Things that are here." I turned the glass of tea in my hand, and the light was on it, that particular gold, the color of the water at dusk, the color of the light that comes through the window in the afternoon and catches the steam, the color of the welcome. "Things that don't need to cross anything. Things that can just stay."

He was quiet, and the street was quiet, and the call to prayer was coming, the last one of the day, the one that marks the end, the one that says it is time to go home, and we stood there, and the sound came over the water, and the city paused, and for one second, just one second, we were not the two people who had stood in a funeral line six hours ago, we were the two people who had stood on a bridge seven years ago, and the seven years were not between us, the seven years were under us, and we were walking on them, and the light was golden, and the water was moving, and the city was holding its breath, and I put my hand on his face, and he let me, and that was the first time in seven years that I had touched him without counting.

We did not go up to the apartment. We stood on the street, under the window of the place where I lived, and the light was on the water, and the water was on the light, and the city was moving, and I said, "Come up."

"I should go," he said.

"You should." I said it, and I meant it, and I meant it in the way that meant I was not going to let him go. "But you don't have to yet."

He was quiet, and the call to prayer was going on, and the water was moving, and I said, "I made something for you. In the studio. I didn't know I was making it until I was already making it. I made it the day I heard about her."

I did not say what I had made. I did not need to. He knew what I had made, the way he knew the street and the bridge and the bazaar, the way he knew the things that had been said and the things that had not been said. He said, "I want to see it," and his voice was very small, and I led him up the stairs. They were narrow and steep, the kind of stairs that exist in old Istanbul like a vein under the skin of the city, and we climbed them slowly, and the light fell on the walls in long amber strips, and on his face, and on mine, and the city was below us, and the city was between us, and we climbed.

The apartment was small, and the windows were open, and the Bosphorus was behind me, the water moving back and forth, the ferries crossing. I went to the shelf by the window, where the things I made were — the things that are here, the things that don't need to cross anything — and I took one down. It was small, and it was white, and it was shaped like the glass of tea that she used to set in front of you before you sat down. I held it out to him, and he took it, and his fingers closed around it the way her hands used to, gently, as if the glass itself were a welcome.

"I made this for you," I said. "So you can drink the tea here, the way she made you drink it. Without having to cross anything. Without having to leave anything behind. Without having to carry anything that doesn't fit."

He was quiet, and the glass was in his hand, and the glass was in mine, and the light was on it, that particular gold. He said, "I don't know how to do this."

"No one knows how to do this," I said.

I put my hand on his face, and he let me, and I did not let go. He did not let go of the glass. We stood there, and the water moved behind us, and the light was golden, and the city was holding its breath, and for the first time in seven years I did not count the touch, and he did not count it either, and the glass was between us, and we were both holding it, and that was enough. That was the crossing. That was the whole crossing, and the water was moving, and the city was holding its breath, and I did not let go.