The priest came in and took a drag on the cigarette smoking in the desk ashtray.
“Father,” said Kosmas, “isn’t coffee-reading forbidden by the Church?”
The priest blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Pardon?”
Kosmas pointed to the overturned cup and raised his voice as much as he could without sounding disrespectful: “Is coffee-reading allowed? I mean, can clerics do that?”
The father righted the cup, covered it with a napkin, and winked. “You’re still a bachelor, aren’t you, Kosmaki?” he said. “Are you aware that no one in Pera gets married without my authorization?”
“Of course, Father,” said Kosmas. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Kosmas returned to the tea room hoping that Rita Tereza might have forgotten his faux pas. But she frowned when he delivered her tea, turned her back when he sat down, and resumed a heated debate with the lily-adorned old lady about the nutritional value of white flour. Another bride lost.
Kosmas was the first to depart. Halfway down the hill, at the point where Yeni Çarşı becomes Boğazkesen Street, he stopped and looked up at the birds sweeping through the stratified glow around the dome of Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. Now that was architecture: a mosque built on the model of Hagia Sophia for Ali Paşa, a sixteenth-century Italian corsair who had converted to Islam and later become an Ottoman admiral. The complex was designed by Mimar Sinan, a converted Rum and the chief architect to three Ottoman sultans, including Suleiman the Magnificent. For a second, Kosmas thought that maybe he, too, should stop wasting his energy and convert, like Ali Paşa and Mimar Sinan. Then he lowered his head beneath his umbrella and walked on.
He didn’t want to return home to his mother, yet on a rainy Sunday morning there were few places to go. Without any particular destination in mind, he trudged down to the Bosporus, wandered through the muddy seaside park where working-class families picnicked on sunny days, and took a seat at one of the tea gardens. What he really wanted was to see Gavriela’s niece, but she was probably still in bed.
He ordered a toasted cheese sandwich and settled down to watch the boats gliding between the Asian and European shores within the strait and across the mouth of the Sea of Marmara. Waves crashed against the quay and sprang up like fountains, leaving pools of saltwater on the rough cement. On the other side of the inland sea, the mountains of Anatolia rose into low gray clouds. Kosmas wondered, as he always did while watching Istanbul’s waters and the smooth movement of the ferries, why he still lived in the City of his isolation, where he didn’t seem to have the slightest chance of ever finding a Rum wife. Perhaps he should have left long ago for America, Canada, Australia, or Greece, like everybody else. But now he had his pâtisserie and an aging mother on his head. It was too late.
A waiter with a full tray of tea glasses made his way through the tables. Kosmas raised a finger. The man set a glass before him. The seagulls, which seemed to have more of a right to the City than anyone, uttered murderous cries when a hobby fisherman emptied a plastic bucket of fish heads onto the quay. Within minutes, nothing but a water-blood trail remained. As Kosmas watched the poor Sunday fishermen casting their lines into the gray Bosporus, he wished to God that he could be like Fanis, who knew the names of all the female cashiers at the local supermarket, never exited without saying hello to each, and sat in the tea garden like a pasha while women of all ages came to kiss his cheeks and forehead. Kosmas, on the other hand, had never even worked up the courage to ask for Emine’s phone number.
Κosmas was sick of the moldy angels of love who worked in Tarlabaşı’s derelict Rum houses: the last prostitute he had visited had filed her nails while he toiled away and then charged him extra to touch her breasts. Kosmas had vowed to change on numerous occasions, yet he couldn’t manage to assume the confident, carefree air that enabled Fanis to acquire the numbers of half the women of Pera. He had tried impressing the American with his new business card—complete with the gold-embossed Pfeifenberger symbol—but she hadn’t even deemed it worthy of a glance. He realized that part of the problem was that he had a penchant for cultivated “salon girls,” but look what had happened when he gave homely Rita Tereza a chance. If she had no interest in him, how could he possibly aspire to please Gavriela’s niece?
“My God,” he said out loud, “if only you had made me like Fanis.”
And then he had it. He would go straight to the source, to Fanis, and ask the old rascal to become his mentor. He took his phone from his pocket, called Monsieur Julien, and scribbled Fanis Paleologos’s phone number on a napkin.
3
The Lady of the Western Approaches
The night before daphne left for Istanbul, Sultana Badem warned her daughter that she must not under any circumstances fall in love with a man still living in the Poli, which is the only word Istanbul Rums use for their homeland: the City.
“Why?” Daphne asked in Greek, her mother tongue.
Sultana pulled taut the floral-print sofa cover, sat down beside her, and lit a cigarette. “Because he’ll only be using you as a ticket out. And his mother! There’s nobody nastier than an Istanbul mother-in-law.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. Sultana was sometimes strangely critical of other immigrants and overly admiring of natural-born citizens. This explained her particular affection for Daphne’s boyfriend Paul, a white-toast American mutt with only a vague notion of his English, Polish, and Lithuanian heritage. Even Paul’s surname—Winters—was a rootless, immigration-office switch for a long and difficult Polish name.
“And don’t go about alone,” Sultana continued. “At least until you’ve learned your way around. All you have to
