Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Murat could see the roses. They still grew just beyond the gate.

  “How did the gardener die?” William asked.

  “Like his father, Bayezid turned to conquest as he grew older. At the sultan’s request the loyal gardener—now the headmaster—recruited his students to become soldiers. He then led them in a campaign for Bayezid and died in one of the battles.”

  “And Bayezid, did he die in the battle?”

  “No,” answered Murat, “he died some years later.”

  “How?”

  “He had a son, and that son betrayed him.”

  Murat stared out into the garden. His eyes shifted from the broad Corinthian columns flanking the entrance of the lise, to the sturdy masonry of its three wings, to the terra-cotta-shingled roof and, finally, to the cobblestone footpaths lined with benches where students reclined against their backpacks reading books that were flapped open across their chests like flightless birds.

  “This must be the most expensive building on the İstiklal,” announced William, as if solving the riddle that his father had laid before him.

  Murat smiled at his son but absently. When he was with the boy he felt both burdened and unburdened at once. To prepare William for an unkind world, he needed to be firm. But he also needed to equip him with the reservoirs of approval and affection that would sustain him against the same unkind world. His responsibilities as a father conflicted with one another. He could love the boy too much, or he could love the boy not enough. If a tension existed between Murat and his son, it was a reflection of these two conflicting impulses, and Murat believed that this tension, which dogged him, was also the proof that he was a good father. Anything aside from tension was a failure. He took an appraising, final look at the lise.

  “I’m not certain that you’re right,” he told his son. “The lise would never be for sale. I guess you would say that it is priceless.”

  “But that means it is the most expensive,” said William.

  “Perhaps,” Murat answered. “When the value of a thing exceeds an amount that money can capture, that’s when it becomes priceless, but, of course, this can also mean that something is merely worthless.” Then Murat scooped up his son, who looped his arms around his father’s neck. As he carried William the last two blocks to school, Murat noticed the time and nearly broke into a run. Waiting on a leather sofa in his office was a lawyer who had come to see him about the football stadium and who billed one thousand lira per hour. Murat did the math in his head as he hurried down the İstiklal. He would be at least thirty minutes late, so five hundred lira. Try as he might, he could not help but calculate what this morning with his son had cost him.

  * * *

  William rests his head on his mother’s shoulder and watches the city unspool as they return from the party: dark side streets interrupted by channels of bright wet filth, the moon’s white reflection brushed across the ambling current of the Bosphorus, the bridges with their spans studded in lights. Catherine types furiously, grasping her phone with both hands, as if she’s captured a snake by its neck. Her expression is drawn, strained and afraid. William shuts his eyes. He tries to sleep.

  The clanging house gate slowly rolls open. William sits up and Catherine tucks her phone back into her folded black silk blazer. The taxi pulls along the curved driveway. Murat stands waiting under the arch of a white colonnade that leads to the front door. His look is heavy, a mix of worry and anger, as vacant as the bronze sentries William had observed outside the walls of Dolmabahçe Palace. Gravel crunches beneath the taxi’s wheels. Then they stop.

  The driver announces the fare. But before Catherine can pay, Murat has opened the driver’s door, as if he might drag him out from behind the steering wheel. Instead, he drops a hundred-lira note in the man’s lap. Murat then opens the back door. He grabs his wife just above the elbow and pulls her onto the driveway. Catherine reaches after William, but Murat swats her arm away and hoists the boy from his seat.

  William lunges for his mother. Murat lifts William by the waist and then plants him like a stake in the ground. Then he snatches both of their wrists and leads them inside. The last thing William hears before the front door shuts behind them is the taxi’s wheels churning at the gravel as the driver speeds out to the street.

  All of the lights are on in the marble foyer. A porcelain blue-and-white temple jar filled with white orchids rests on a mahogany center table. The table is aligned beneath a crystal chandelier and the house smells heavily of cigarettes and flowers. Murat stands with his wife on one side of him and his son on the other, their wrists each cuffed in his firm grip. He breathes from his chest. He sights down at Catherine and then at William. He struggles to direct his sense of betrayal and anger away from his son.

  He is unable to ease his breathing.

  He drags William upstairs.

  Catherine tries to follow them.

  “Don’t,” snaps Murat.

  She hasn’t succeeded in taking even a full step. Caught in the foyer, she clutches at her silk blazer, pulling its lapels across her body as if warding off a chill. Murat stands in the stairwell and flips the light switch.

  William watches as the chandelier above his mother goes out.

  Half past three that morning

  His apartment has a view. It seems they all do. This is an advantage of living in a terraced city, one that reaches into the hills. The window by Peter’s bed looks out on the First Bosphorus Bridge. Its spans and cables are ornamented with turquoise LED lights that reflect off the water, which glides past like black oil. The strong current swirls in the light and the surface of the deep strait swims with color.

  Forty years before, the bridge’s construction had been touted as a great triumph, even though an unspoken shame surrounded its completion. Why had it taken more than a millennia to connect the two sides of this city? Looking at the bridge, he thinks of his exhibit from earlier in the evening, of Deniz and the others—including Catherine—staring at two disconnected versions of themselves. These many years later the bridge has not had the desired effect. After Gezi Park, the country is riven with divisions and in this way Peter can understand the shame associated with a bridge built too late.

  His head is on the pillow as he watches the current, hoping it might hypnotize him to sleep. The sunrise is still a few hours off, yet his mind roams, keeping him awake. Catherine knows he plans to leave. He feels certain of it. He feels equally certain that she can’t come with him, even if he wanted her to, which he doubts. She is bound up in Murat and their son. Perhaps this is why he had succumbed to their affair in the first place, because he knew that it could go nowhere, that it had to finish in this way, and since he already understood the nature of its ending he could be absolved of responsibility, for they both knew this was the inevitable destination.

  As Peter looks at the bridge, his thoughts stray to what he considers their first night. Although they had met for dinner once before, at the Istanbul Modern, this meeting occurred a few days later, when they had bumped into one another at a gallery opening for the controversial artist Taner Ceylan, whose violent, sexually charged and hyperrealist paintings resembled photographs. After the event they had searched the crowded streets for a taxi and had then wandered onto the bridge, which was more like a highway, and usually closed for people to walk across, but it was open that day, so they had chosen to cross it together and, perhaps with a bit of luck, to find a ride home on its far side. In the center of the bridge, she had approached the railing, staring two hundred feet below at the dark, churning current. She waved Peter toward her so that he might look as well.

  “Come here, Peter!”

  He remained a few steps from the railing and didn’t move.

  “Don’t you want to look? We’re right between Europe and Asia, we’re not on any continent.” She leaned deeply over the railing. “This bridge is my favorite place in
the city.”

  “This whole city is a bridge,” said Peter.

  “Maybe so,” said Catherine. The Bosphorus ran dense as mercury beneath them. Peter glanced to its banks, to the two continents, to Istanbul, a city so illuminated that it vanished the power of the moon. “But you can’t live on a bridge.”

  “Why don’t you come back from the railing?” Peter suggested.

  “Are you afraid of heights?” she asked. The wind was quick to carry away her voice and he could barely understand her. “Everyone has one existential fear,” she continued, but now she wasn’t looking down, instead she stared at him and he could see the light from the water reflected from below, its projection playing off her eyes. “For instance, my husband, his fear is that he won’t be a success, or at least that he won’t measure up to his father.” Peter offered a confused look, revealing the absurdity of this fear for a man whose business conquests riddled the skyline. “It’s not as ridiculous as you may think. None of us see ourselves as others see us. If only we could. Our vision of ourselves is like our voice. The world hears us one way, but inside our head our voice sounds entirely different. There’s no possibility of recording that voice, of sharing it with anyone. We go our whole lives without another person ever hearing us the way we hear ourselves. How people see themselves is the same, and there is no clearer way to understand that differing vision than to understand those insecurities, to understand that one fear.” It had rained the hour before and the bridge lights shone on the wet pathway.

  He asked what her fear was.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  He took one cautious step and then another, shuffling his feet as he transferred his weight, as though at any moment while he was drawing closer to her the ground beneath him might fall away. Then he lunged forward and gripped the railing as desperately as if it were flotsam on the open ocean. He glanced up at her, smiling the heedless smile of an idiot, his eyes searching for some reaction, as if she might reward what he perceived to be his conquest of fear or, put another way, his courage when grasping the railing even though he was paralyzed by heights. That night as they stood on the bridge, the wind kept snatching away their voices. Peter had needed to lean in close to Catherine so that he could be heard. “The idea of falling terrifies me,” he confessed. “I can feel the vertigo in my stomach.”

  “The vertigo isn’t from your fear of falling,” she said. “It’s from your hidden desire to jump. That’s why we feel vertigo.”

  Peter pressed his body against the railing and took another deep look at the water below. “So are you going to tell me your fear?” he asked.

  “You weren’t paying attention,” she said. “I just did.” She told him to feel how her heart was beating. He reached for her wrist, to take her pulse, but she said, “We aren’t children, are we?” and placed his hand elsewhere.

  They had continued their crossing and on the far side they finally found a cab. He held open the door for her and they climbed inside. Peter gave the driver his address. When he glanced back at Catherine, so that she might give her address as well, she said nothing. Their taxi climbed the steep, wending roads and through her omission they both made their way back to his apartment. Neither of them spoke. Their eyes avoided one another’s in the backseat. Past the door a rocky bluff plunged hundreds of feet below. Peter was turned toward his window, away from her. He couldn’t help but look at the drop.

  * * *

  Is it two short knocks and then one long one? Or is it one long knock and then two short ones? Peter always forgets, and in the weeks after Catherine first spent the night, he often stood in front of his own door trying to remember before he knocked. When he’d come home, he could always hear her slight, hurried movements inside his apartment—the clinking of dishes, footfalls against creaking floorboards—the quiet patter of someone trying to remain silent. She would visit on evenings when Murat was out of town for business, or in the afternoon between the errands she invented to consume her days.

  She had once asked Peter for a key, but he had demurred. Affairs by definition had an element of adverse selection when it came to trust. Could you trust someone who was untrustworthy enough to be making such liaisons with you? So Catherine didn’t get the key. On days when she planned to visit, he would leave it under the mat for her and they would implement their system of secret knocks. Catherine had insisted on the knocks in case someone else came to the door while she was there alone. Peter had thought it a bit overcautious. He had told her that no one ever stopped by his apartment. But he realized her insistence wasn’t really about the knocks, but rather about having a code between them—something only they shared. She then came up with one short, two long.

  Or, he wonders as he lies with his head on the pillow, looking out at the First Bosphorus Bridge, trying to sleep, was it two short, one long? He could never remember the combination.

  It all began with Kristin, and that was more than two years before. He had come to the city to live cheaply and to assemble a body of work that would signal his transition from photojournalist to artist. Peter’s photo credit had, for some time, been a regular microprint feature in the Sunday supplements of several major newspapers. That work had felt like a continuous vibration between gravity and air. Gravity: journalistic assignments covering elections in Venezuela, earthquakes in Haiti and Tibet, the occasional war zone embed, et cetera. Air: commercial assignments shooting starlets at media junkets, insets for glossy music magazines, home décor arrangements for various catalogs, et cetera. The et cetera in his portfolio was the problem. If a photographer transforms the fleeting into the permanent, he wanted to create a lasting body of work, not just magazine snaps. “If you don’t make a vessel for your life to pass into,” a mentor of his once said, “it will simply pass into an urn.”

  When Kristin first returned his call, following up on the grant application he had submitted to the consulate’s Cultural Affairs Section, he had run through most of his savings and was about to return home and to journalism. He had never wanted money from the government, as he thought it would taint the objectivity of his work, or at least how that objectivity was perceived. But he felt that he had no choice. To return to journalism meant to return to the ceaseless stream of body-bagged GI’s, a fondue of suicide bombers, natural disasters, man-made disasters, all of it: senseless. Like Warhol—whom Peter despised—just the same images repeated over and over until they lost all meaning.

  When he arrived at Kristin’s office on the top floor of the consulate, a seven-story fortress in İstinye buttressed by concentric circles of security, he felt the same reservations as he had when he’d submitted his grant application on a lark. He still wasn’t certain that he wanted to exchange his independence for a partnership with the cultural attaché’s office. Then Kristin slid the terms of the grant across her desk and allowed Peter to look them over.

  “The terms are generous,” she said, loading her emphasis onto the verb so that the weight of that emphasis would cut off debate.

  While Peter read, she mixed a chocolate-powder nutrition shake in a large plastic cup with a special twist-off lid. She sneezed as some of the powder got up her nose, and it was a squeaking sneeze, a noise like a sneaker stopping suddenly on a lacquered basketball court. A pair of running shoes sat at the foot of her desk with sweat socks balled inside their heels.

  Peter’s chin sunk toward his chest as he read. The terms were generous, uncomfortably so. It was enough to support his work for at least the next year, likely a bit more if he minimized his expenses. Kristin sipped her breakfast shake and checked a half dozen cellphones laid out in a single rank across her desk. She typed a text message on one and then set the phone down. It vibrated again, but she ignored it, and instead reclined in her office chair and finished off her shake, digging a straw from her cluttered desk drawer to suck up the dregs. Her landline rang. Chatter came from the other end. Kristin replied, “And yo
u got that reading from her mouth or armpit?” She then listened intently with the receiver cuddled between her shoulder and ear. “If her temperature is that high, you need to take her in.” She shifted in her seat. “I don’t care what the doctor thinks.” Peter had finished reviewing the contract and his eyes met Kristin’s. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something,” she said, her voice descending into the phone. “Promise me that you’ll take her in.” Kristin looked down at her desk, away from Peter. “Yes, I love you too.” She set the receiver back in its cradle.

  “If you’re busy, I could come back,” Peter offered.

  “It’s nothing, just family stuff,” she said. “So what do you think of the terms?”

  “You’re offering quite a bit.” Peter’s eyes canted upward, as if he was looking at a bank of clouds hovering just above their heads.

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing.” She rested her clasped hands on the desk between them. “We could always offer you less … if that’d make you more comfortable.” A table fan in the corner circulated the air, which carried the delicate scent of Kristin’s sweat. “You’re an excellent candidate, Peter.” She swiveled in her chair toward a computer on the corner of her desk. Her fingers danced across the keyboard as she opened his application. “Exeter and then Yale”—she turned the screen toward him, revealing a Google search of his photo credits—“plus your portfolio to date, which is quite impressive. You’re here, you want to do good work, and your government wants to help you. Also …” She paused and motioned for Peter to hand her back the terms of the grant. He slid the contract across the desk. She took her pen and indexed it on the payment, “… I think that you need this. I don’t think anyone else is supporting you here and I don’t think you want to go back home. This buys you time. You need time.”