Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Catherine shook her head no. But she wasn’t certain he believed her.

  “And you? You want this child because … ?”

  “We can’t have children,” answered Catherine, recognizing that her misfortune had promised to rescue Deniz from his, and when she caught him glancing at her stomach, Catherine felt an impulse to immediately correct his assumption that she was the barren one, but loyalty to her husband prevented this and left her with a spike of resentment that she would once again have to assume Murat’s frailties as her own. “I think that we can help one another,” she added, and then reached across the table, pulling Deniz’s arm toward her. She removed the wet dish towel and examined his burn. It would heal in a few days. Perhaps it would leave a scar but nothing more.

  They spoke late into the night. Catherine missed the last bus. The first bus would run out of Esenler at just after three o’clock in the morning, taking the janitors, laundresses, busboys and day laborers to their stations in the eastern, affluent reaches of the city. Deniz thought that Catherine should be on the first bus with the child. “Do you have a name picked out for him?” Deniz had asked.

  Catherine said that she didn’t, that she would talk it over with her husband.

  “Do you think it will be an American or a Turkish name?”

  Catherine said that she wasn’t sure.

  “You’ll have to pick before we go to the Central Authority,” said Deniz.

  Catherine nodded.

  “So you’ll have to pick by tomorrow,” he added.

  “Yes, by tomorrow,” answered Catherine.

  “And will I meet your husband then?”

  “I don’t think he’ll be coming.”

  Deniz’s gaze shifted around the room, to the kettle on the now cold burner and to the washbasin and to the carpet, which didn’t quite cover the dirt floor, and, last, to the infant, who still slept in the corner. “It is better if your husband doesn’t know much about where his son came from … or maybe nothing.”

  Catherine crossed the room and swaddled the sleeping infant in an extra blanket before taking him outside. She and Deniz arranged a time to meet in front of the Central Authority the following morning and then Catherine stepped into the street. The half-moon was up and it was reflected in the puddles of filth that pooled in the clogged gutters. The road was slick and Catherine walked unsteadily, getting turned around almost as soon as she left. The alleyways all looked the same, an endless congestion of ramshackle gecekondus. She was eager to get to the seat on the bus that would take her home.

  But she was lost. She remembered that she had passed an empty lot with a pile of building materials staged nearby, but she couldn’t find it as a reference point—those materials had disappeared. After doubling back several times, she had even become confused about where Deniz’s home had been. She retraced her steps, but only became more disoriented. It was then—not the next day when they signed the papers but then, when she was lost and alone—that she realized the irreversibility of her choice. The child was hers.

  In the clutch of this fear, she heard a noise from behind the shut door of one of the gecekondus: it was a hammering. Then the door swung open; its backside was red and beyond it a man was jointing together the crossbeams of a wooden frame while another stepped outside for a cigarette. In the corner of the nearly completed gecekondu, a woman and her two sons slept on a rug laid across a dirt floor. From the empty lot earlier that day, she remembered the red door—red for luck.

  She now knew where she was going. As she walked toward the bus stop, she thought how remarkable it was that a home could be built in a single night.

  * * *

  That morning in his office Deniz had refused her. No matter her approach—whether it was pointing out the merits in Peter’s work or asking for a personal favor on his behalf—Catherine had made no headway. “What is the debt you believe I’m obliged to repay you?” Deniz had said. Without Catherine, Deniz would still be living in the gecekondu. Without Deniz, Catherine would be childless. There was no debt between them, quite the opposite: they were even.

  Catherine understood this. But she also understood that they weren’t free from one another. Her mind turned to the book Peter had given to her at their first meeting, the paired photographs and their premise. She wondered if Deniz’s ambivalence toward Peter’s work was, perhaps, not indicative of something Peter’s photographs failed to reveal, but indicative of something that they did reveal: an uncomfortable truth that Deniz would rather ignore.

  Catherine had plans to meet Peter at his apartment at the usual time that afternoon. She had hoped to arrive with the good news. She had wanted to triumphantly announce that the Istanbul Modern had, with some persuading by her, decided to exhibit his work. She had, of course, not told Peter ahead of time that she would be meeting with Deniz. This was to guard Peter against disappointment in the event that Deniz said no. And now that Deniz had said no, the disappointment was hers alone.

  Peter had left the key beneath the mat and she had let herself in. When he knocked on the door—one short, two long—she immediately offered herself up to him, without speaking, without asking him about where he had been that morning, so that, she hoped, he would not ask her the same. She reached into her pocket and removed the cigarette case he had given her, pointing to the four dashes on its back, showing him a wry, seductive smile.

  “Fuck,” he whispered back.

  She wished that she had chosen a different word.

  But with her silent, consenting nod they moved quickly into the living room, their steps tangling one on top of another. They undressed awkwardly. She had yet to master how the buckle came off his belt. He could not find the tiny zipper on the side of her trousers. She helped him and he helped her, but such help wasn’t an affirmation of increasing intimacy, instead it was a negative affirmation of the unfamiliarity that still existed between them. They exchanged whispered instructions as they undressed. Once naked, they proceeded in silence.

  They spoke again only when they had finished.

  Peter lay on the sofa with the elbow of one arm thrown back and his hand wedged behind his head. His other arm draped heavily over Catherine’s shoulder. “How long can you stay for?” he asked. Catherine was nestled against the side of his warm body, her head tucked just beneath his chin and her leg draped over his thigh. Her instep had a lovely fleshy curve, which cradled his calf. He could feel the length of her against his arm. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Peter lifted her watch off the floor, where it had rested among the folds of their mussed clothing. She knew that she needed to get home and didn’t have to know the time to understand how it had passed, but she wanted Peter to believe there was a possibility that she might linger. It was a little before six. William would be returning from school and Murat from work. The light that crossed the rooftops came into the living room and cast long shadows, and the view from the window out to the city looked directly into the sun, which heated their pale skin.

  “I’m exhausted,” Peter said. “I was out all morning.”

  She tugged up the small zipper on the side of her pants with pinched fingers.

  “I walked from Sultanahmet up to Ortaköy,” he added.

  She reached her arms behind her, her elbows bent awkwardly as she fastened her bra clasp.

  “I got some good new stuff. I’m making progress every day.” He had opened his eyes and was glancing at her from their corners. “What’s going on with your friend Deniz?”

  Catherine had finished dressing. She perched on the edge of the sofa and combed her fingers through Peter’s hair. She hoped that he would close his eyes again. She hoped that he would allow her to leave. His gaze remained fixed on hers. “Nothing much, he enjoyed meeting you,” she said.

  “He didn’t seem particularly interested in my work.”

  “Why do you care what he thi
nks?” she asked.

  He leaned his head back, raised his eyes to the ceiling and then closed them.

  “I shouldn’t care,” he said.

  She stood to leave.

  “… But I do, Catherine. I’m trying to make my life here work.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Maybe he’d do you a favor?” His eyes were still shut.

  She noticed that he wouldn’t look at her while he asked. She would have said yes, or tried again with Deniz, had Peter simply looked at her. Whatever Peter hid beneath his lidded eyes was enough for Catherine to hold back that last measure of herself.

  “I already tried,” she answered.

  “What did he say?” Peter was looking at her now, his eyes fastened to hers. She felt close to him, but not because she loved or admired him, rather because she recognized in him the same desperation she had so often felt. Her closeness with Peter, she realized, was more akin to self-pity.

  “He says no,” she answered.

  When she left, Peter sat up from the sofa. She had taken her watch with her. He looked out his window. From the sun’s orientation against the rooftops, he could tell that it was exactly six o’clock.

  January 27, 2012

  The foundations of the five buildings had been set along a diagonal so that each would have a view. The hillside was terraced with large man-made plateaus cut and then leveled out of its side. Half a dozen excavators sat in the darkness with cakes of wet earth clutching the teeth of their blades. Three months before, the hillside had been crowded with several dozen gecekondus. Anytime he displaced someone from their home—even if those homes were gecekondus—Murat risked arousing undue attention, perhaps a story in a newspaper or an inquiry by a local magistrate, even though he always offered generous buyouts to the families he removed, enough to pay rent for at least a year in one of his soon-to-be-completed glass residences. But if that wasn’t enough to silence their complaints, hush money could always be paid to an overzealous official or journalist. He resorted to those methods with reluctance, however, and only on occasion.

  He harbored few misgivings when forcing people out of their old, rickety homes. In fact, he had thought that it was progress: you start out in a gecekondu and you end up in a glass residence. How come a newspaper never took an interest in that story? How come the magistrates never took note of the service he provided to the city? But no positive stories made it to print and no official ever recognized his contributions. This bothered him, but also only on occasion.

  The five diagonal buildings were in the development Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4. Since Kristin and her colleagues—for this was how she referred to that invisible cohort toiling at the consulate—had helped Murat acquire a majority share of the Çırağan Palace Hotel six years before, they had gone on to help him finance an elaborate constellation of other projects in the same way—by allowing him to post their network of accounts as collateral so that he could secure loans worth tens of millions of lira from the banks. This included the first three developments in Zeytinburnu, a burgeoning outgrowth of the city by the airport. But this, the fourth development, he had financed himself, guaranteeing his loans against his already purchased properties.

  When they had texted to arrange this meeting, Kristin had at first been confused. She sat at her desk, staring at the coded message Murat had sent: YZ4-3-13 0200. YZ, she knew that: Yaşar Zeytinburnu. They had met at this series of developments before, although not for several months. The digit 4, this was what didn’t make sense to her. Usually this was the development number. Kristin wasn’t aware of the fourth Yaşar Zeytinburnu project. To her recollection only three had been built. The next three digits she did recognize: third building in the development, thirteenth floor of that building.

  The two of them met as infrequently as possible, which over the years had averaged approximately once every three months, or quarterly as Kristin referred to it, keeping their encounters to a schedule that Murat never entirely understood. Early on, they had met in restaurants, cafés or perhaps a museum, including the Istanbul Modern when Murat was considering the size and scope of the donation he would later endow and had wanted Kristin’s opinion. Soon, however, Kristin moved their meetings to more discreet and less scenic locations: an anonymous studio apartment, the back of a car, once in an alley off Taksim Square when Murat had lifted a handwritten ledger of payouts to government officials from a visiting foreign developer’s hotel suite, a document of such sensitivity that he’d had to pay off a maid in order to get it returned unnoticed within an hour. When Kristin realized the risks he’d taken to do this, she’d scolded him, explaining that he was more important than any one bit of information. She often encouraged Murat to bring William to their meetings, the logic being that a child would reduce suspicion. Murat relented and brought the boy, but he noticed they got virtually no work done as Kristin doted endlessly on William. She had later sheepishly explained to Murat that she’d always wanted a son.

  Murat had expressed the occasional frustration to Kristin that no results ever seemed to come from the information he provided. “What results are you looking for?” she would ask. He realized that he didn’t know. “You can quit whenever you want,” she would also say, though he never believed her. Although he had been naïve enough to start working with Kristin, he wasn’t naïve enough to think that he could divest himself of her.

  It was one minute after two a.m. Murat stood on the thirteenth floor of the skeletal Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4 building, his lazy eyes browsing the city, a terrain of lit and darkened diagrams. Kristin had instructed him early on about the four-minute window for their meetings. You could be two minutes early or two minutes late. Never arrive any earlier. Never stay any later waiting. Glancing at the clock on his cellphone, Murat thought that perhaps tonight she would miss her window, an unsettling first for Kristin.

  A chill, steady breeze whistled through the building. The workmen had yet to install the fourteen-foot-high panes of glass that would encase each floor. The night air played through the open, cavernous spaces and it howled like wind blown through an enormous hollow instrument. Murat had always enjoyed touring an unfinished building. It was an exercise in vision. His father had taken him on construction sites as a boy, pointing out various corners of a project: of a concrete shaft he would say, “Twin glass elevators will go here”; of an empty floor he would offer, “Four separate suites.” Murat could still hear his father’s voice in the sound of the wind passing through empty spaces.

  A pair of headlights twisted up the dirt road where the excavators had been parked. Halogen bulbs peppered the job site, though most of them were switched off. The project was currently ahead of schedule and would likely reach completion without relying on night shifts or overtime. The workers would then receive a bonus. Murat came a step closer to the edge of the building, inching his way forward so that he stood between two load-bearing pillars. He recalled the first time he’d brought his wife to one of his construction sites—though she never came anymore—and what she’d said about heights, that vertigo was caused not by one’s fear of falling, but rather by one’s desire to jump.

  He allowed himself to take a step closer, but as he did, the hem of his trousers caught on the teeth of a handsaw, which had been carelessly abandoned on the floor. The work crews knew better than to leave their tools out. Perhaps they were taking shortcuts in order to finish ahead of schedule. “Inspect what you expect on the job site,” his father had taught him. Murat had in recent days caught himself saying the same to his son.

  Murat tidied up the mess left by the workmen as if his father were watching, or as if Kristin might comment on the general disarray. He heard the elevator gate slam shut on the ground floor. He checked the time: 0205. He should have left three minutes before. He stepped even closer to the edge. Glancing down the thirteen stories, he felt his stomach turn and a slight spell of dizziness. Yes, ver
tigo, he thought.

  The elevator door opened behind him. Before he could see Kristin, he heard her hurried steps echo across the open floor plan. “I’m five minutes late,” she announced. Murat stood with his back to the expanse of skyline. His silhouette was all that she could see, but she could have recognized him from behind at a hundred paces in a crowd: the way he slumped forward with his hands in his pockets, the width of his shoulders, the length of his arms. He turned toward her as she glanced down at her triathlete’s watch and pressed the function button on its side. An emerald luminescence confirmed the time. “You waited for me,” she added, “when you should have left.”

  “You shouldn’t have shown up,” he said.

  They had both breached a protocol that each had assured the other they would always keep. When Murat was a boy, his father once pulled him out of school with a fake doctor’s appointment so that he could join him at a groundbreaking ceremony one afternoon. “What if one of my friends sees me?” Murat had asked. “Then you’ll see him,” his father had answered.

  Kristin stepped alongside Murat, who remained perched near the edge of the thirteenth floor of Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4, just where he’d said he would be. She apologized for being late, admitting that she’d misplaced her car keys, which was a first for her. Then she popped up the collar of her rain jacket and tugged it tight around her neck. “It’s freezing up here,” she complained.

  A snatch of wind carried off her voice.

  She spoke louder. “I had a hard time finding this place.”

  Murat pointed out to the city, to the headlights which threaded an east-west-running highway. “Probably fastest to come in on the O-3 and then drive south,” he said. “Did you pass the seaside road on the way here?”