Often, he and Nisan went dancing at Tulip Terrace, a 7^th floor bar in Cihangir. It was almost always crowded, and they would go in groups of four or five, taking a table as far from the band as possible, so they could talk beneath the noise. Nisan was a few years older than him, a freelance journalist from the Balkans whose mother was Turkish.

She had a lot of stories about her childhood. Her mother had left when Nisan was only four or five, eventually turning up after the war in an asylum, where she still was, and Nisan and her sister bounced from city to city with their father, who survived by working as a hustler and part-time arms dealer. As things in Bosnia got worse, her father tried in vain to ship the girls across the border to live with relatives in Istanbul, but they refused to take them.

During the war, he’d nearly sold both of them - Nisan was fifteen and her sister thirteen - to two men who promised to get them jobs as au pairs in Istanbul, though almost certainly they would have locked them in brothels in Aksaray. Nisan pleaded with her father not to go through with it, and had even contemplated killing him to avoid going.

“You’ll be safer in a whore house than a war zone,” he’d said, and in fact, it had been the war that had saved them. One of the men was killed during a bombing, and the other vanished without a trace.

In truth, she told David, the war hadn’t been that awful. The bombings were scary, but they grew accustomed to them. In fact, by the war’s end, her friends organized bombing parties in local shelters. The last months of the war were a blur of ecstasy, pot, and strange men.

“I learned more about sex during the war than at any point in my life. Everyone thought we were going to die, so no one really gave a fuck. I’d blow two guys in one night and fuck a third and think nothing of it. I was sixteen.

“I suppose I forget how scary it was. Because it was terrifying, especially at first. But you can get used to anything, even raves while you’re being bombed. All I really remember are those parties.”

David had been twelve, a sixth grader at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, and remembered watching video of the bombings on a grainy, old television that had been wheeled into his history classroom on a cart. The video was shot in night vision, and tracers darted across the sky like fireflies or firecrackers, the explosions causing the video stream to crackle and break, so that when the feed rejoined the action, all David could see was clouds of white smoke, the tracers slicing through.

Nisan ran away from home the year after the war ended and showed up at a cousins’ flat in Istanbul. They turned her away, but she found a room in Fatih and got a job cleaning hotels at night. By 22, she had saved enough money for university. She took the entrance exams and got accepted into Bogazici, where she studied journalism and public relations. She’d been working in the city, mostly for Zaman, ever since.

Sometimes, though rarely, Amjad joined them on the rooftops. More frequently some of Nisan’s university friends joined, Okan, a filmmaker; Khadife, a waitress; or Gizem, an urban planner with the city government. They were all David’s age, beautiful and waifish, prone to flightiness. Okan, slender with an impressive bouffant and an even more impressive moustache, was always away on commercial shoots, flying to Cyprus on a whim for a TurkCell shoot or traveling to Antalya with Coca-Cola. Gizem, who was stocky with short, dark hair and thick rimmed glasses, would be out of contact for days on end, overseeing some new high rise on the city’s outskirts.

Khadife was tall and thin with glittering onyx eyes, and was semi-famous in the city for having quit her job in exports to work as a waitress at a café in Cihangir. A local radio station had heard about the story, and done a special on her, and now she was a minor celebrity, her café packed at lunchtime with people sharing similar stories, looking to Khadife for advice, or to verify that her story was true.

One night, all of them got caught on a terrace a block off Istiklal. Two dozen young men were antagonizing the hundreds of police in Taksim, who’d chased the protestors down various side streets. They indiscriminately lobbed tear gas down the alleys, which wafted up to the terrace, pushing everyone away from the balcony, moving indoors, where the gas was even worse.

Nisan was wearing a pencil skirt, her hair held up, a thin layer of sweat on her upper lip, her eyes bloodshot from the intermittent rounds of gas. They were stuck there, at least until the small mob dispersed, so they had no choice but to drink, and drink heavily.

When they finally left, around three, they found the street littered with the cinders of garbage fires and discarded tear gas canisters; Nisan picked one up thoughtlessly and would later pot flowers in it. She asked David if he would walk her home. He did, and walking past the tomas and water canons in the square, she took his arm.

When they reached her place in Besiktas, she invited him in, stepping out of her skirt in front of him, walking into the kitchen in high boots, sky blue panties, and a strapless bra. She retrieved a bottle of wine, and they sat in her courtyard until dawn, Nisan in her bra and panties, David without his shirt, and they drank straight from the bottle. She also brought out a jar of salt, which she sprinkled around their shoes and the wine, keeping the giant slugs and snails that oozed across the patio at bay.

At dawn, they went to bed, both of them drunk enough that, in the oppressive heat, their knees kept sliding out from under them, their bodies loudly coming together in the still silence, the suck and pull of moist skin.

In the afternoon, after a few hours of fitful sleep, both of them having tossed and turned in the cauldron of her room, they got breakfast, acting as if the night hadn’t happened, and, in fact, they never discussed it night again. The rooftop summer ambled slowly forward, like a lazy funeral parade through New Orleans.

Every Sunday during July and August, a rotating coterie took one of the state-run ferries out to the islands. They were never more than six but never less than three. They usually went to Burgazada, the second of the four islands. It had been the Greek island during the Ottoman empire, and the architecture reflected that - white washed homes, climbing hibiscus, fragrant courtyards.

They would eat breakfast at one of the cafes fronting the harbor, where fishermen prepared their sun-faded boats for a long day on the sea. The meals were sumptuous and leisurely, sprawling platters of soft cheeses and fresh tomatoes, sliced cucumbers and bubbling bowls of menemen, mud-thick cups of Turkish coffee and tea the color of blood.

They would buy bottles of water, white wine, and a few lemons and walk around the island’s north edge, past private beaches blasting pop music and crowded with deeply tanned, saggy bodies. The further from town they got, the more unkempt and rural the island became. The houses were in sad shape, little hutches cut from the ferns and wild hibiscus, olive and lemon trees growing among dusty lots cluttered with salt-stripped boats and old mattresses.

Eventually, the road darted inland, into forests of scrub pine. Occasionally, a horse drawn carriage or a phalanx of bikers would glide past, the horse’s bells sing-songing along, its nostrils flaring.

Their beach was halfway round the island. They descended a slender trail through a shady cluster of pines, past a few tents, and came out on a long, mostly deserted shale beach littered with the remnants of bonfires and barbecues. At one end of the beach was a concrete hut that sold ice cold beer and shots of tequila; the other disappeared around a cliff side. They would leave the wine and water in shade and lay down on the stones in the baking sun.