The Winter City

Posted on by Justin



The blood from the feast of the sacrifice had long been cleaned from the streets. The new Bayram dresses and suits had been put away until the next celebration, or perhaps the next child. All that lay ahead was winter. 

Tear gas had returned, wafting up to David’s balcony in the evening. From his bathroom, he could hear the shots in Tarlabasi, the whir of helicopters idling overhead. During the day, platoons of plain clothes officers also idled, clogging street corners and cafes in the neighborhood, given away by their shabby clothes but impeccable haircuts. Young Kurdish men passed them warily, banners stuffed into their back pockets. Occasionally, an officer would call a man over and they’d barter with one another for cigarettes, achieving an uneasy truce.

News around the city was uneasy. Nathan, who was teaching English at Istanbul University, came over one night for beer and burgers. As the thwomp of tear gas canisters echoed in the distance, 
David closed the windows.

“It’s bad at the university,” Nathan said, standing at the window, looking down on Tarlabasi, the searchlight from a police helicopter flitting like a twitching eye over the rooftops. He and David had become easy friends, both being from Philadelphia. But while David’s social life was more diffuse, Nathan had become something of a staple in the city’s literary scene. He hosted poetry readings once a month, and was known around the city for having written a novel while heart broken in Greece. Along with his cousin, Sean, he was also known for breaking hearts.

“Yeah?” David said, flipping burgers on the stovetop.

“We’ve had fights pretty much every day.”

“They attacked those girls, didn’t they?”

Nathan nodded. “And yesterday, a group of ISIS guys showed up with clubs. Nails sticking out of them. And there were Kurds waiting for them. It was like some kind of old west showdown.”

David couldn’t help smiling.

“Of course, some people say the ISIS guys are really just cops, out to rile up the Kurds.” Nate smirked. “And other people say that the Kurds are cops, too, and it’s just cops fighting cops, all in the hopes of stirring shit up.”

“What do you think?”

Nathan shrugged. “Who the hell knows anymore? Anything’s possible.”

He finished his beer.

“Do you have an escape plan?” Nathan asked.

“An escape plan?”

“Yeah. In case things really get out of control. I mean, that’s worst case scenario. Extreme worst case scenario. But you never know with this government. They excel at causing problems where there are none.”

David hadn’t thought about leaving since April, when things between his company and the government had moderated.

“Seriously?” David asked.

“In a place like this, you’ve always got to have a second option. I keep enough money in the bank for an emergency flight, just in case.”

David sat down at the table, bringing the burgers with him. “Where would you go?” he asked.

Nathan loaded his burger with ketchup and mayonnaise, a tomato and a leaf of lettuce. He bit into it, the blood spilling down his chin.

“I’d probably just go back to Greece,” he said. “It’d be easy. I’ve still got friends there. Especially if it’s winter, I’d be able to find a place to crash.” He smiled. “It’d be strange going back. It’d be like stepping into a past life. The scene of the crime.”

“You’ve done all right for yourself. You and Sean both.”

Nathan laughed. “It’s very strange to me. This attention from women. When I was younger, I was so timid, but I think I was a good guy. Or, I was at least kind. And honest. But women wouldn’t give me the time of day. Now? I’m a dipshit. A total fucking dipshit. And women are the easiest thing in the world.”

“Well, it makes up for what happened.”

Nathan shrugged. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Works like what?”

“That an abundance which comes after a loss can fill the absence. Don’t get me wrong: I love this city. I’m grateful for it – and for the women I’ve met. But it’s not an exact match. It doesn’t make me not miss Sus. It doesn’t ‘justify’ the loss, or somehow atone for it. It just kind of is: loss on one hand, abundance on the other. You know what I’m talking about,” he said offhand, making a gesture with his fork.

“With my brother?”

“Sure. Would you trade this life to have your brother back? Or at least to know where he is?”

David thought about it. He wasn’t sure, which in itself seemed remarkable. He never thought he would’ve gotten to the point where he might look at his brother’s disappearance as anything other than a catastrophe. Maybe that was putting it too harshly: he never thought he’d build a life that could possibly fill his brother’s absence.

But now, he didn’t know. Would he give all this up to have Andrew back?

“It’s an unfair question,” Nathan said. “But I get it all the time. ‘Would you give all this up to have Sus back?’ First off, it’s bullshit, because it’s hypothetical. But more than that, the two things aren’t equitable. They aren’t at all equal. But that fucks with me, too. How can the linear parts of my life not be equal? But they aren’t.” He shrugged, cracking another beer. “I just accept that the two are on parallel tracks, never to intersect.”

The next day, David slept late. He dreamt of Andrew for the first time in a long time. They were in a car going somewhere – he didn’t know where – and David kept trying to talk, but whenever he opened his mouth, he was unable to speak. It was a common dream, and one he’d had a lot about Andrew.

It stuck with him well into the afternoon. So, too, did Nathan’s question: would he give this up to have Andrew back? What would his life even look like if Andrew hadn’t vanished? Where would he be? Who would he know? Nathan was right: such thinking was a rabbit hole best avoided. But that was the thing with such an absence, David thought: no matter how thoroughly you tried to fill it, you still trip over it in moments.

The city seemed suddenly muted. The lush sun of summer had given way to the pallid, brief days of winter, even though it was only October. On the street, people were already bundled in winter coats and scarves; Turks, he’d learned, were not hardy folk.

Shortly before sunset, after wasting most of the day in bed, David went for a walk. Down his block, a police Toma sat like a sleeping elephant. Old city buses were parked with their doors open, police officers disgorged from inside. They stood in ragged lines, some holding riot shields, others fingering tear gas launchers. Almost all of them smoked. It occurred to David, and not for the first time, how incredibly young all of them were. They were college freshmen, mostly. Fresh faced, given responsibility for the first time in their lives. When he was their age, he and Maj snuck onto the steeple of Christ Church – both of them actually climbing out a window to do so. He certainly shouldn’t have been given a gun. How many of the world’s enduring problems were spent making up for the mistake of throwing foolish kids onto the battlefield? How many men spent their lives trying to atone or justify the mistakes of their youth?

One night last summer, during the heart of the protests, he’d gone for a run, skirting the madness of Taksim. He ended the run atop a steep hill, where a battalion of riot police idled, just like this. One of them came over and put a hand on David’s shoulder; the others broke into cheers.

Kids. They’re just kids.

Curiosity drove him up the central vein of Istiklal, towards Taksim. As usual, it was crowded, and this made navigating difficult. The throb moved slowly, protestors mingling with weekend shoppers. Occasionally, lines of police tried to stop the crowd. They flailed blindly, trying to grab young men before they could slip away. Those they managed to corral were turned around and marched down the street. Some protested, claiming they were shoppers; many surely were. And those that were protestors would surely dart down the many labyrinthine alleyways off the main street, and would soon be making their way to the Square again.

Along the shop windows that lined the street were oddities and sideshows – the chestnut vendors and trinket hawkers, the buskers and mimes, the malformed who displayed their nubs in hopes of inspiring charity. Every so often, there was a Syrian family huddled together beneath a single blanket. It was usually a mother and a few children, all of them waving their tattered, faded passports – proof to the doubters (since the influx of refugees, there’d been a rash of ‘fake Syrians’ begging on the streets).

Sometimes, the families split up. The mother would beg on one corner, a baby in her arms, and the older children would be down the street, grinning up at you, their nascent forms swimming like fish between the hordes of shoppers and protestors, asking for money in Arabic, Turkish, and English.

David was always struck by their eyes, which, unlike Turkish eyes, were often green or even blue (they, perhaps, triggered recollections of his Norwegian grandparents); framed by the dirt and grime on their faces, these eyes shone even more brightly. They shone, he thought, with a kind of irrepressible joy – the oblivious possibility of childhood, which embraced even displaced children like this.

But it’s possible he was just willing this onto them, his own guilt insisting that they were still too young to understand what was happening; that someday, they might look back on this the way he looked back on games of kick-the-can or ghost-in-the-graveyard with Andrew: with peculiar nostalgia and wonder, a kind of groping in the dark for some lost shape.

Of course, the children’s demeanor usually betrayed this fantasy. The girls – those alone – were practiced in their mannerisms, even flirtatious. There was a façade to their smiles, a hand behind the scenes pulling the strings – a mother telling them how they must act. Maybe this performance had even been made into a game.

A mother – he couldn’t discern her age – reached for the leg of his pants. In the crux of her arm was a baby, its mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a dying fish gasping for air. At first, David thought it was a doll: it was simply too young, too small, to be real. But then it uttered a small, muffled cry.

David fumbled around in his pocket as she, with one hand, thrust her tattered passport towards him and, with the other, clung to his pant leg.

There had been a morning, when Maj came to visit the States, when he’d woken early to pick Andrew up from the airport. As he bent to kiss her a temporary good bye, she – bleary with sleep – pawed at his shirt with her hands, pulling at the fabric. A childish gesture, trying to draw him back to bed.

He handed the woman three liras, and she touched her heart with thanks while her baby continued to wordlessly chew the air.

About fifty meters down the street, he stopped and sat down on the steps in front of the French consulate. Across the way, their sound carried away by the crowd, a brass quarter of older Kurdish men played, a dance circle formed around them. A half dozen children buzzed around the crowd’s knees.

There were times when he thought everyone in the city was harboring some great absence at their core. Whether they were refugees from war or politics, whether they were trying to fill the void left by a sibling or lover, Istanbul seemed, despite its immense size, to be little more than a way station – a gathering point for those who’d been gutted. Its chaos and closeness was the result of so many desperate people trying to fill their wounds.

Nathan’s other question came back to him: did he have an exit strategy? The prospect of leaving consumed him once more. He’d never imagined staying this long. He planned to arrive, search for Andrew, and then leave once he got his answers. Now, it appeared the answers would never come – and, in truth, he’d mostly given up on the questions.

Instead, something else had slowly built itself in Andrew’s void – or perhaps not inside of it, but at least beside it: a life of his own. Not equitable or comparable, but tangible. He was not ready to abandon that life.

It occurred to him that he’d been in the city longer than Andrew had. This, he supposed, made Istanbul as much his as Andrew’s; but then, there were twenty million Istanbuls, each one an impossible language.

Still, this felt important. Whatever shadow Andrew cast, David was now outside of it – at least in terms of his life here. He was now standing upon his own roots, not Andrew’s. Everything from here forward – whether in Istanbul or places unknown – would be his.

One of the last times David had spoken with Andrew in person had been their final Christmas together. As always, Andrew had shown up unexpectedly, without advance warning, and just when their parents were starting to worry. They’d spent a week calling and writing, without response; and then, two nights before Christmas, there he was, marching through the sleet, walking from the train station with only a backpack for luggage (and this was mostly full of gifts).

The four of them stayed up until well after midnight, drinking raki (one of Andrew’s many gifts) and mostly just listening to Andrew’s tales: hitchhiking through the southeast, sleeping on the floor of gas stations, sneaking into Iran and spending a week working at a vineyard (“a vineyard in Iran!” their mother had squealed).

In some ways, their brotherhood had been the classic dynamic: Andrew the wanderer who could do no wrong, and David, who knew that he couldn’t beat Andrew at his own game; instead, he’d thrown himself into school. Of course, their parents were too smart – and too loving – to play true favorites. Though they could never stay angry at Andrew, and though they never grew tired of his stories, they were fiercely, almost preternaturally, proud of David.

But the truth remained: Andrew was the sun around which their family revolved. They were all in awe of him. He was the one out in the world, blazing unexpected paths. David’s trajectory was far more predictable.

He loved those late nights as much as his parents, when Andrew bent the whole energy of the room around himself. David never thought that he envied such charisma – he was content to be quiet, to listen – but it was certainly a mystery to him, how his brother could so thoroughly command a room. It still was.

Looking back, it occurs to David now how hollow many of the stories often were. Hollow is perhaps the wrong word. They were rich stories, full of Andrew’s flourishes and exaggerations. But in the telling of these stories, very little of Andrew ever emerged. One never got a sense of how he was doing, what he was thinking, what part of his essential self had been altered by the things he had seen – above all, one never knew why, exactly, he was going so far from home to collect these exotic stories. And everyone was so awed that no one took the time to ask: why, Andrew; why? It had never even occurred to David to ask until Andrew was gone and he no longer could.

Shortly before Andrew flew back to Istanbul, he came into David’s room late one night. It was bitterly cold, and the wind rattled against the old window panes. Their parent’s house was drafty, and David sat beside a space heater, studying for the GRE’s.

“Hey,” Andrew said, poking his head in. “You’re not looking at porn or anything, are you?”

David smiled. “Not yet.”

“Good. Let’s get some food.”

They bundled up and then climbed into David’s frigid car. The windshield was latticed with ice.

“The heat takes a while to kick in,” he said.

“I always forget that,” Andrew said, smiling, his breath visible.

They turned the radio to WMGK and drove through the empty streets of Chestnut Hill. A few people huddled outside McGlintock’s, smoking cigarettes. Otherwise, the town was vacant, Christmas lights strung around the light posts, casting a ghastly impression on the week old snow.

“So you’re going to go back to Istanbul?” David asked.

His older brother simply nodded, blowing into his hands.

“You like it there?”

Andrew laughed. “Yeah, of course. I’m living there.”

“Well you’ve lived a lot of places. And I guess you’ve just been traveling around so much, I couldn’t tell if this was a long term thing or not.”

“That’s the job, Dave. I have to find things that people want to read about. Always chasing that next story.”

“Sure, of course.” He tried to wipe away some of the ice on the windshield, leaning forward to check a stoplight. “But you’ll stay in Istanbul for a while?”

Andrew shrugged. He ran a hand through his hair, which had grown long. “I don’t know. I’m starting to get a bit antsy.” He laughed self consciously; when was he not antsy? “That seems to happen to me if I stay anywhere too long, though. One of these days I’ll just have to bite the bullet and stay somewhere.”

“Why is that so bad?” David asked. “I guess I just don’t get why you think that’s the worst thing you could do.”

Andrew smiled. It was rare his younger brother challenged him. Their relationship, over the years, had mostly been one of affirmation.

“Do you remember the move?”

“From Chicago?”

Andrew nodded.

“A little. I was pretty young.” Nine, to be exact.

“Well do you remember how I handled it?”

David shook his head.

Again, Andrew smiled. “Not well, little brother. I cried and threw a fit. For months and months. I just dragged it on and fucking on.”

“I barely remember that. But so what? We were kids. The move sucked.”

“Well do you remember my breakup with Carla? My break up with Ally?”

David did have a vague memory of finding Andrew in the basement, curled in a ball and sobbing. And of police showing up at their door, threatening a restraining order if Andrew didn’t stop calling Ally. It was a strange lacunae in his image of Andrew: that kind of emotion was completely opposite of how David had come to view his brother – so cool and detached.

“Sure, a little bit. You were pretty sad.”

Andrew laughed curtly. “I was wrecked, man.”

“I still don’t get what this has to do with Istanbul.”

“It’s about loss. About handling loss.”

“Okay?”

“You haven’t thought about this?” Andrew asked, smiling with a bit of disbelief and a bit of older-brother-pride; he was in his element, imparting lessons.

“Not really. I mean, I’ve thought about loss, sure. I think about losing things. I think about losing you, since you’re always gone.”

Andrew let that sink in for a moment, than cleared his throat.

“At some point, my feeling became, you know, everything is lost. All of life is loss.”

“That’s a pretty nihilistic view, isn’t it?”

“No. Absolutely not. Come on, Dave. Don’t be like that. What isn’t lost?”

David tried to come up with something, but Andrew had him stumped. With more time, surely he could think of something.

“I mean, are we talking human-time or cosmic-time?” David asked.

Andrew laughed. “What the hell does cosmic time matter to us? All that matters is human time. And if we’re talking human time, everything is eventually lost. We accumulate and accumulate, and then someday we start to lose it all. And I was pretty terrible at losing things, little brother. And the more I thought about it, the more this really bugged me. If life is ultimately loss, then isn’t our worth as a person defined by how well we lose things? Isn’t our real test the ability to lose things with a measure of dignity?”

David shrugged; it sounded convincing, but most of his brother’s monologues sounded convincing at first blush.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this one, Dave. About how my inability to lose things was really hurting me. Not only was I resisting the natural order of life, which is impermanence, but I was missing out on life within the moment because I was so focused on the past, and the absences of the past.”

“So what … you just let go of things without missing them? You don’t miss us while you’re gone? You just plow on ahead as if we don’t exist?”

Andrew laughed in a way that struck David as condescending. “No, Dave. That’s not what I’m saying. The key, as far as I see it, is to exist within time.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Another vaguely condescending laugh.

“It means you feel what’s in front of you. You stop rushing through things to get to the future, or you stop lamenting what could’ve been. It doesn’t mean you ignore those things. You just deal with them on their proper scale.

“It’s about balance, I think. It’s about being able to feel the absence without letting it overwhelm you, right? To take stock of what’s been lost without falling into the void it’s left. And that’s a really tough trick, to get that balance right.”

“I guess so.”

“Come on, Dave. Sure it is. Think about when you and Maj broke up. You were a wreck! It runs in the family, man.”

David smiled, remembering his misery, which was very foreign. It felt like something a friend had told him about instead of something he’d lived. Or it was like that Monet painting of the sunrise through the fog of London: so shrouded as to be little more than a refraction. But he supposed he had been a wreck. He’d certainly made a fool of himself.

“I guess I was.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“I was hurt, Andy. What was I supposed to do?”

Andrew thrust his finger at the air. “That’s the point. Our natural response is to hold on violently. And it makes us do stupid, embarrassing things. And if we lose girlfriends or houses like idiots, then how will we eventually handle our own deaths?”

David shrugged. “Not well, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

“So what? It’s dying. It sucks.”

Andrew laughed. “Yes, but don’t you want to be able to face death with dignity, or grace? Don’t you want to be courageous?”

“I’d never really thought about it.”

“Well, you should.” Andrew shrugged peremptorily.

“What does it matter, Andy? We’re dead.”

“Well, how do you want people to remember you?”

“I don’t think anything I do in the last moment will undo the rest of my life,” David said softly, not even sure that he was wrong, but feeling cowed by Andrew’s assertiveness.

Andrew felt himself triumphant. “I’m sorry, little bro. I’m not trying to bully you. I just think you’re too smart not to be thinking about this stuff. It’s why I left. It’s why I keep leaving. Practice.”

“Practice for death?”

“Sure. And self improvement, in the meantime. Training myself to let go, to handle any loss that comes my way.”

“Does it get easier? The leaving?”

Andrew shrugged; they were almost at the diner. David slowed down, wanting to have more time to talk. He knew the atmosphere of the diner would ruin the intimacy of the car, the motion.

“No. Not really.”

David laughed.

“But it gets easier to channel it into something worthwhile instead of something destructive. I’m much better at allowing the pain to exist, and at feeling it to the right degree, and then getting on with things, whereas before I just would’ve wallowed. And I think that acceptance is progress.”

“I guess so. I still think you’d be okay if you settled down,” David said pulling into the parking lot.

Andrew smiled the way he did when closing a conversation – and he was almost always the one to close a conversation. “I don’t want to get rusty, little bro.”

Before David could respond or take the conversation further, Andrew was out of the car and striding across the dark parking lot towards the bright, fluorescent glow of the diner.

Two children, sisters, approached David. The older one played a recorder. There was no parent in sight. The younger sister sang in unsteady Arabic. David had a vague memory of himself and Andrew serving as acolytes at church, holding the body and blood in their unsteady hands.

“Very beautiful,” David said in Turkish, handing them his remaining three liras; he couldn’t help himself, though he knew most of the Turks thought it was just encouraging the habit. What else were they supposed to do?

Out of nowhere, a tourist with a big camera around his neck stooped over and snapped a photo of the two girls before slipping back into the crowd.

On the walk back down Istiklal, David saw another photographer capturing the mother and her baby. It bothered him, for reasons he couldn’t articulate. He imagined the photos on Facebook or Instagram: look at the authentic poverty of Istanbul; Syrian refugees!

He sighed. He was little better. In his own stories of the place, the refugees often served as window dressing, a note of authenticity – the same way the tear gas did. An external part of the mise-en-scene.

He stopped to watch a different group of girls huddled beneath a blanket. Their eyes light and pellucid. There was a group of boys that roamed his neighborhood – Syrians also – aged seven to eleven. They’d run away from the camps, choosing to fend for themselves.

“They beat us,” they once told David, while they bartered for cigarettes he didn’t have. David often chats with them if he runs into them. Sometimes, if they’ve been huffing glue, they throw rocks at David.

“We’re friends,” he always tried to yell. “Remember me?”

Talking to them always made David feel profoundly fucking stupid. They must mock me amongst themselves, the stupid gullible American who lives indoors and always gives us money. Why did it matter? Why did it make him feel like shit that street kids thought he lacked authenticity? David wondered about the boys’ loss, which they’d not imposed on themselves in some grand gesture of self abnegation or denial, some elaborate scheme of self improvement.

This is where Andrew got it wrong, he thought. Real loss, the ones that actually rip a void inside you, can’t be prepared for. They aren’t some equation you can practice. If his brother was right about one thing – the need to exist within that loss, truly and honestly – his methods were flawed, privileged. Like so many decisions in their lives, Andrew – and now David – had exercised their right to choose. To inflict suffering on themselves that their circumstances would otherwise have not allowed. Andrew had gone so far as to inflict that suffering on others, too. And how had David handled it?

Honestly, he thought. By flailing. He wasn’t ashamed of the pain and confusion of the early months; he was ashamed of this new detachment, this distance, this feeling that he would not give up his life to have his brother returned. He’d moved on, and it felt so fucking dishonest. Would he ever feel Andrew’s presence again?

He turned off Istiklal. More protestors were flooding in from the side streets as night fell. In the distance, a helicopter wheezed out of the clouds, headed into the valley towards Tarlabasi, Dolapdere. Atop the promontory overlooking these neighborhoods, there was a used book festival underway. People had gathered there and were drinking tea, watching as police streamed down the hill, into the valley.

David watched for a minute, until the familiar odor of tear gas tickled his nose. He headed home. From his balcony, he spent the night watching the helicopters. At the club across the street, the party went on, unabated.