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.