Audio: Ayşegül Savaş reads.
Some years after we moved to the city, my husband and I started looking for an apartment to buy. We were renting a small place past the southern boulevard that marked the end of the historic neighborhoods. On weekends, we’d usually take walks, always in the direction of the finer quarters that had first lured us to the city with their Old World charm. We lived on an unremarkable street, without cafés or shops. At the corner was a large glass building, on whose steps teen-agers congregated at every hour, smoking, laughing, playing music. Those with skateboards rode up and down the boulevard, dodging out of the way of old women who frowned at them. During our first year, we learned that the building was a youth center, founded by a journalist couple whose own daughter’s suffering had gone unnoticed in the midst of the parents’ careers.
We’d been happy in our flat. At the time we moved in, it presented itself as a perfect space to play out our still elusive adulthoods. We bought paintings, oil ones from flea markets, distinguishing our new home from the studio we’d lived in as graduate students, which we had decorated with framed posters. Now we had our sights set on a real kitchen, made of quality materials, a bathroom without chipped tiles or mold.
Our weekends, once taken up by those long walks, after which we would meet our friend Sami at a wine bar, were spent on the metro, going from one end of the city to the other, and sometimes out to the suburbs, to look at apartments. More than the prospect of a home, we were intrigued by all the different lives, the arrangements of space to work and rest, to store and display, the priorities of strangers that were so different from our own. We still met up with Sami, and reported our finds to him over drinks that extended to dinners of cheeses and cured meats.
During our first weeks of searching, we were struck by an eighteenth-century apartment, even smaller than our current one. It was impeccably restored, with an open kitchen fitted tastefully and resourcefully, and a bathroom that, though tiny, gave the feeling of luxury. The owner was a flamboyant man in his fifties, whose exquisite belongings seemed to have been bought specifically to fit the shelves of his home. After showing us in, he took his place in a leather armchair and let us walk through the apartment by ourselves, aware that it needed no explanation. Afterward, my husband and I sat at a café down the street, with a red lacquered façade and marble tables. If we were to buy the apartment, we said, we’d come here for morning coffee and late-night drinks, would know the waiters by name. The thought was pleasing, though somewhat foreign, as if we’d put on very expensive clothing that didn’t belong to us. Still, I could imagine us in this life tailored to perfection, like strangers I’d wish to befriend. When we showed Sami pictures of the apartment, he said it seemed ideal for a couple who received no guests and had no children. That part, he added, was for us to decide.
Another place that interested us was a loft in an old factory building. It was on the train line east, past the wealthy suburbs. After leaving the station, we had to cross a highway before arriving at an area of industrial lots, some abandoned, some converted into chic homes for young families, others occupied by immigrants. There was a mosque, and next to it a basketball court with a looming mural of Muhammad Ali. On the evening of our visit, lanky boys were throwing a ball with casual focus, calling out from time to time to their friends passing by. At the entrance of the mosque stood a man the size of a small child, with a thickly furrowed forehead, greeting those arriving for evening prayers.
Inside the gates of the converted factory was another world altogether. The walls were overgrown with green, the communal garden dotted with terra-cotta pots and round tables. The owners of the loft had three children, whose toys were made exclusively of wood. There were bicycles stacked against one wall, part of a cheerful clutter that communicated sanity and care. When we arrived, the family was cooking together, the children standing on stools, chopping and peeling with their small hands. I wondered whether the scene had been planned to coincide with our visit, though they were all so merry, and welcomed us so warmly. The place was spacious enough that my husband and I could each have a work area and even host guests without having to change our routine. Our families lived in other countries, which was why this seemed an especially important prospect to consider.
After the visit, we could find no café in the neighborhood at which to sit and talk about our impressions, so we took the train back. On the way, we both said that we’d liked the diversity of the area, and would be excited to live there, though it also seemed that we might not be able to become part of the community, that we’d be living shuttered within the confines of the splendid loft, travelling all the way to the city whenever we went out. Over drinks the following evening, Sami told us he’d take the train to visit us on weekends. He was such a good friend to us, always offering his support of our choices.
Our parents asked if our creative work was secure enough for us to take on a mortgage, and wondered about the schools in the two neighborhoods and the availability of doctors, especially pediatricians, even though my husband and I had never said that we wanted to have children. We’d never denied the possibility, either. It was one of the aspects of our lives that we still needed to bring into focus, so that we could better picture a future home. The process was an act of imaginary acrobatics, trying to launch ourselves forward with only a guess of where we wanted to land.
Around this time, I went to visit my cousin Tara at her university. I took an early-morning flight, then caught the train to her campus, where I arrived in time for Halloween celebrations. My cousin had insisted that I come on this date, though I was a bit daunted by the idea of being at a party with students who were more than a decade younger than me. Tara met me at the station, in a long, checkered wool coat that had once been mine. Her hair was bleached at the tips and she was wearing makeup, which I’d never seen on her before. I noticed her pleasure at being autonomous in her new setting. She showed me the main street with its bookshops and cafés, an Italian restaurant and a bakery, as if the street were playing house.
Tara had made a dinner reservation, which moved me; I’d always been the one to take her out. When she came to visit us in the city—trips for her birthday, to celebrate her good grades in school—she’d felt like, if not exactly our child, then something close to it. After dinner, we headed to her house, where some students were immersed in hysterical preparations, putting on makeup in the corridor, pouring drinks. One guy, trying to pull a tutu up to his waist, turned to give Tara a high five.
“Where’s the gang?” Tara asked. The guy said that everyone was on their way.
We put my bag in Tara’s room, which was lit with fairy lights and smelled sweetly of incense and weed.
“You’ll sleep here,” she said, though I’d offered to book a hotel in town. “And I’ll stay with Mari.”
Mari, beautiful and goofy, was part of the “gang,” which had formed the previous semester, pulling all-nighters together during exams. Another member was an artistic kid named Luis. I guessed that Tara had a crush on him, because she acted exceedingly sisterly with him. The boy in the tutu and his twin brother had happily adopted the role of comic relief. There was Ellie, soft-spoken, and a guy named Simon, who I only later realized was part of the gang, after he’d accompanied us from party to party, finding the girls’ coats for them amid the piles stacked high on beds when it was time to leave. I joined the group for a few hours—Tara and I had dressed up as fortune-tellers—then went back to Tara’s room while the others went to a club downtown.
The following day, I read at a café while Tara was in class. I sent my husband a photograph of the narrow street, the students in sweatshirts, and texted that I’d been to more than one Halloween party the night before.
“Shall we just move into a dorm?” he wrote back.
In the evening, I told Tara that I wanted to take her and her friends out to dinner. Tara objected at first, then conceded to inviting only two friends, because she didn’t want me to pay “an avalanche bill.”
“We should definitely invite Luis,” I told her and winked, at which she smacked my arm. And Mari, I added. Later, as we were waiting to meet up with them in front of Tara’s house, we saw Simon across the street. He walked over, looking for a moment as if he didn’t remember who I was, or, rather, as if I might not remember him—a look of apology.
“What’re you ladies up to this fine evening?” he said, so awkwardly that I quickly asked him to join us. We went to the Italian restaurant on the main street. I ordered a bottle of wine and appetizers for us to share before our main courses of pasta.
“Could we just get the garlic bread?” Tara asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m such an old woman. I don’t know what you youngsters like to eat.”
It was self-deprecation, of course. I knew I was young enough for them to consider me interesting. Tara had told me as much that morning—that her friends thought I was cool. I’d been strangely satisfied by the compliments of twenty-year-olds. But I was old enough to have a direction in life, or so it seemed from the vantage point of Tara and her friends. They asked me about the city, and what it had taken for my husband and me to find our creative footing, to make a living from our passions. In turn, I asked them where they wanted to settle in the future, what they’d want to see from their bedroom windows. Mari and Tara led the conversation, discussing the advantages of living on a southern coast, where they could go swimming every morning, or on a rough western one where they could watch the crashing waves; perhaps they wanted to move to an exotic capital. Luis made fun of these options, which he called unpractical.
“Don’t be so cynical,” Tara said.
Luis brought his hand to his heart. “ ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,’ ” he quoted.
“He’s just showing off to you,” Mari told me. “We’re reading Yeats in lit class.”
Simon was sitting at the far end of the table and didn’t speak very much, but he laughed at whatever the others said. From time to time, I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to order, though we’d got more or less everything on the menu.
On our way back, we were caught in a sudden downpour and took shelter in a doorway, water crashing down in front of us. We stood huddled, watching the street of identical three-story houses, smeared orange by the street lights. After a while, Luis and Mari said they would brave the rain, because they had to help their housemates set up for another party. They dashed off, holding their coats above their heads. When the rain finally slowed down, Simon walked home with us then went to join the others. I hadn’t realized that he’d stayed behind only to accompany us.
On my last morning, Tara and I had breakfast at the station café. I said that her friends were all wonderful. “I’m so happy you think so,” Tara said beaming. She admitted that she did like Luis, as I’d guessed, but felt that Mari did as well. She and Mari were already so competitive, and she didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship. I hadn’t picked up on the competition; perhaps I still perceived Tara in her childish innocence. Her eyes clouded for a moment, the way they used to in her childhood, when she heard the slightest note of tension at a family gathering. Then she smiled. “Oh, never mind, it’s so silly.” She went on to tell me about the twin brothers, who, she said, were actually really smart.
“What’s the story with Simon?” I asked. Tara said he was a really nice guy, perhaps the only balanced one in their group of weirdos. He always listened to their dramas without judgment, never took sides in arguments. I could tell that it pleased her to consider herself weird, the way it had pleased me at her age, providing an identity that cloaked the shakier aspects of myself that I didn’t want to confront.
When my plane landed that evening, I saw that Tara had posted photos of the two of us from Halloween, and from the Italian restaurant, as well as a final selfie we’d taken before I boarded the train. Our faces looked so similar that they might have been a time roll of a single life.
It wasn’t until the following year that my husband and I finally made an offer on an apartment. We’d broadened our search all around the city and suburbs, then narrowed it again. We came to realize that we wouldn’t feel at home living in a faraway neighborhood. Nor did it seem right to move into a small and beautiful apartment where we would live as if embalmed, receiving no visitors, and have no room for a child, if that was what we wanted. I’d found out, after an ultrasound to investigate some abdominal pains, that my chances of conceiving were somewhat low. It was nothing serious, the doctor assured me, though it might be important for us to start trying, if we wished to have a family. I’d always considered the phrase puzzling—having a family—since we already had a family, indeed several. I didn’t understand why our lives should be deemed lacking.
Tara and her gang had moved into a shared house. On a video call, Tara showed me the gray carpeted floors, the utilitarian kitchen and bathroom. Over text messages that semester, she told me that she and Luis had had a brief thing. I didn’t ask what this meant, feeling that I should respect her privacy, though I would certainly have asked a friend about the physical and emotional aspects of the affair. It had petered out, Tara wrote, sort of, and now it looked as if Luis and Mari were going to get together. I assumed that these texts were distilled from what must have been a constant turmoil in their lives, of heartbreaks and misunderstandings, swapped loyalties, conversations analyzed to shreds with new friends, turning strangers into family within a matter of days. Still, I was happy to follow the developments in Tara’s life, albeit from a distance.
I sent her pictures of different apartments, including some we’d decided against but which were more interesting than the practical ones we were seriously considering. Tara wrote back to tell me which window nook or bedroom she would claim and asked whether she could live with us for a year after graduation to write her novel. This was something she used to predict for her future—that she would live in a romantic city working on a book. At one time, I, too, had talked with certainty about all the things I’d do in the future—wildly different projects that would somehow all materialize—as if I had already attained them without even trying.
The apartment we finally chose was in the opposite direction of our city walks, though not so far that we lived out of reach of the beautiful neighborhoods. It was on an unremarkable street, in a modern building without any flourishes. Inside were straight corners and clean countertops, closets that were nothing beyond their mere function. But there was a spare bedroom, which we could use as an office, and, later, perhaps for a crib. Sami told us that we’d made a great decision; the apartment really suited us. He was being encouraging, though I found it insulting that he thought the bland place matched our tastes. Still, once we hung up our paintings and softened corners with plants, the apartment would come alive, would indeed begin to look more like the image of ourselves that we envisioned.
We sent our parents photos on the day of our move, boxes piled all around the living room. I wrote to Tara that she should come after her midterm exams for the housewarming party. She didn’t respond, which wasn’t unusual; she was often busy with school and overwhelmed by the threads of conversation on her phone, with friends in her immediate life and those far away. A few days later, I sent her a photo of the desk we’d set up in the spare room.
“So lovely,” Tara wrote back.
“Waiting for someone to write a novel,” I responded, and asked how things were going.
“All right,” Tara said, adding that she and her housemates were worried about a friend of theirs who hadn’t come home since the weekend. His family hadn’t heard from him, nor had his classmates. Tara and her housemates were probably his closest friends, and they had no idea, either.
“Which friend is this?” I asked.
“Simon.”
It took me a moment to remember who he was; his name hadn’t appeared in Tara’s updates in the past months.
I told her I was sorry. I hoped Simon would get in touch soon. I remembered something that had happened at my university, which I hadn’t thought about in years. I didn’t know the boy very well, but I used to exchange daily greetings with him at the library where he and I had adjacent research stalls. He’d left a party one snowy night and was found more than a week later, too late. No one knew what had happened—whether he was drunk, or troubled, or something else.
Within weeks, we were settled. We hired an electrician to install wiring in the ceiling so we could hang a green lamp, Sami’s housewarming present, above the dining table. We went on walks in our neighborhood, always picking a different direction, to identify the places we would frequent, impatient for the time when we would blend in with our surroundings and could claim a history in our new home.
It wasn’t from Tara but from her mother that I heard the rest of the story. Tara had come home following Simon’s disappearance, taking time off from school because she wanted to be with her parents. On the phone, my aunt told me that the housemates had found a note in the kitchen several days after he went missing; it had somehow ended up in the recycling box, though it must initially have been left in a conspicuous spot. By then, the police had already searched the local area and weren’t hopeful. In his note, Simon said that he couldn’t see a place for himself in the world. Not the way that others did. All around him, he wrote, were people who knew what they wanted, and where they belonged.
One of the terrible shocks, my aunt told me, was that no one had even caught a hint of what was happening, at least not until the aftermath. “God help that family,” my aunt said. “God give them patience.” I’d never heard her speak like this, and her words chilled me.
After we hung up, I thought of the dinner at the Italian restaurant, going over the questions I’d asked everyone about how they wanted their lives to turn out. Of course, it was unreasonable for me to feel guilty about the situation, as if I’d been responsible for forcing Simon to confront the impossibility of imagining a future that would accommodate him. I wondered whether Tara had also gone over that conversation in her mind, though she must have had many more memories of Simon than the single one from which I tried to glean meaning.
But it wasn’t so much this I thought about for the rest of the afternoon as it was the fact that Tara hadn’t called to tell me what had happened. I wished she’d asked to come and stay with us for a while, or at least turned to me for consolation. At the same time, I chided myself for longing for Tara’s attention at such a moment. As I went about my day, I thought uneasily that the event would eventually make us distant; that our intimacy had now come to an end, as had Tara’s carefree youth. Perhaps Tara would grow to despise that youth, would perceive in it her own obliviousness.
I’d always been proud that Tara looked up to me, wanted to live as I did, in a beautiful city, with a partner whose tastes and interests mirrored her own, even though I knew that such admiration would inevitably expire. Still, I’d delighted in my cousin’s childish esteem. Ridiculous as it may be, I found in it a validation of my own life.
When my husband came home that evening, I didn’t share any of this with him; there was nothing tangible in my worries. I’d let my mind hurtle ahead to scenarios in which Tara became a stranger to me. I told my husband only what had happened to Simon.
We were sitting at the dining table, our hands almost touching beneath the warm pool of the light, waiting for the water on the stove to boil. I said that the trajectory of events—from Simon’s even keel when we first met, all the way up to the note—felt like something out of a film. Perhaps, though, I had exaggerated Simon’s calm demeanor in my retelling, having no other details to offer from my brief visit. In any case, I was aware that the lives of strangers appeared improbable only because they were seen from a distance.
The living-room windows had fogged up with steam and my husband rose to turn off the stove. There were sounds coming from the upstairs flat; our neighbors must have been throwing a party. It was a constant, lively hum, pierced now and then by a higher pitch. ♦
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