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best possible way to meet death at the moment of disaster, I will call out in pain to an absent lover: My soul, my beauty, my dolorous one, the day of disaster is at hand, come to me no matter where you are, mayhap in an office thick with cigarette smoke, or in the onion-scented kitchen of a house redolent with the smell of laundry, or in a messy blue bedroom, no matter where you are, it’s time, come to me; now is the time for us to wait for death, embracing each other with all our might in the stillness of a dark room where the curtains are closed, hoping to lose sight of the awesome catastrophe that is fast approaching.

Chapter Three
    GIVE MY REGARDS TO RÜYA
    My grandfather had named them “the family.”
    — RAINER MARIA RILKE
    On the morning of the day his wife was to leave him, Galip climbed the steps that went up to the building where his office was located on Babıali in the old city, the paper he’d been reading tucked under his arm, thinking of the green ballpoint pen that he dropped into the depths of the Bosphorus years ago during one of those boating excursions their mothers took them on when he and Rüya had the mumps. That night he realized, as he examined the farewell letter Rüya left for him, that the green ballpoint on the table with which the letter had been written was identical to the one that fell in the water. Twenty-six years ago Jelal had loaned him the pen that slipped away, noticing how Galip hankered after it. On learning of the pen’s loss, and after asking and hearing where it fell out of the boat into the sea, Jelal had said, “It can’t really be considered lost because we know what part of the Bosphorus it fell into.” Galip was astonished that Jelal hadn’t brought up this lost pen when he wrote of taking a ballpoint pen out of his pocket to scrape away the pistachio-colored moss off the windows of the Black Cadillac, in his column about the Day of Disaster, the details of which Galip had been reading just before he entered his office. After all, the coincidence of details dating back years ago, centuries ago—like his imagining the Byzantine coins stamped with Olympus and the caps of Olympus soda-pop bottles in the mire of the Valley of Bosphorus—was the sort of observation which delighted Jelal and which he worked into his column every chance he got. Of course, that is, if his memory hadn’t deteriorated as he claimed during one of their last interviews. “As the garden of memory grows arid,” Jelal had said on one of the last evenings they were together, “a man dotes on the last trees and roses that remain. Just so they won’t wither away, I water and take care of them all day long. I remember, I remember so that I won’t forget.”
    Galip had heard from Jelal how, the year after Uncle Melih went to Paris, when Vasıf turned up with an aquarium in his arms, Father and Grandfather had gone to Uncle Melih’s law offices on Babıali and trudged up to Nişantaşı all his files and furniture on a horse cart and stored everything in the attic. Years later, after Uncle Melih and his beautiful new wife and Rüya had returned from Morocco, after bankrupting the dried fig venture he went into with his father-in-law in Izmir, after getting barred from the drug and the confectionery stores so that he wouldn’t ruin family businesses as well, and after he decided to get back into law, he had the same furniture moved to his new offices, hoping to impress his clientele. Later still, one night when Jelal was remembering things past, alternating between anger and laughter, he told Galip and Rüya that one of the porters who’d carried the furniture up to the attic twenty-two years ago had been the same one who had later moved the refrigerator and the piano, having developed expertise in moving tricky articles in the intervening years, which had only managed to turn him bald.
    Twenty-one years after Vasıf had carefully studied the same porter to whom he’d given a glass of water,