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whispering, again loud enough to hear. When Ali came back from looking for the
simit
seller, he found them on their feet. Biting into their warm
simits
as they stepped into the street, they vanished into the night.

Who Cares?

    Seen from below, the house up on the hill seemed perfect. It was the sort of house that a grocer or a businessman or a rake might dream about during his youth, or a retired teacher or a novelist, churning out great works – the sort of house where an exiled politician might wish, in vain, to end his days.
    It opened onto a road that almost looked as if it had been created by the fallen rocks themselves. On a Sunday you might see a courting couple or two, but on other days, it seemed to recede into itself, affecting that odd anonymity that is not unique to roads. There are a few islanders who like to come this way, but even they prefer to walk the road after dark, to watch the stars – or so it seems to me.
    On one side of the road is the least visited part of the island: a place where the pine trees grow into each other. There’s no room even for a path. That’s why you find no naughty lipstick-soiled handkerchiefs under the pine trees, or newsprint, or sardine cans. On the other side of the road is what seems from a distance to be a beautiful house: on closer inspection it turns out to be two ugly houses. Both sit on the side of the road, hemmed in on all other sides by the forest.
    From a distance you might think that those dwelling inside these houses had come to fulfill dreams of living happily ever after, smelling the pines and the north wind, or that they had come to sell chickpeas or lull themselves to sleep under a pine tree, dreaming of a nation free of pines and all else, but no one beyond chickpea sellers seemed to know. That’s how quietly they lived in these houses. In winter, when the village barber saw a sallow-faced man in his middle years running toward the ferry just as it arrived, he would turn to his customer and say, “That’s the old man who lives in the house on the hill.” What gossip they had all came from this. The old man would return with his arms full of small parcels and then he wouldn’t come down for weeks. And the island’s year-round inhabitants below would engage in their usual gossip and backbiting, until the fishermen came from the Black Sea and they stopped; instead they would try to rent out their rooms to them, on the sly. Unless it was rented on the sly, it could not be rented in the summer to visitors coming to the island to relax and swim in the sea. Because fishermen are bachelors. Bachelors, and also fishermen … True or not, fishermen’s shirts were said to be infested with lice.
    It was on one of those days when the island’s year-round inhabitants were struggling not to disclose to each other the secrets on the tips of all their tongues – who had rented houses to the fishermen, and who was to say nothing on this subject before the summer visitors arrived – when they realized that no one had seen the sallow-faced old man in town for weeks and weeks.
    It was one of those beautiful clear winter days. The fishermen had gone off to the city. The streets were empty, except for a woman whose face seemed quite young, though her blond hair was tinged with white. The coffeehouse owner was having a shave, between customers, and when he saw her he said:
    “So who’s this woman?”
    The barber examined her closely, his narrow eyes flashing like lightning.
    As if to say, good God, who is she? As if to say, don’t I know her?
    “I can’t place her,” he said instead.
    The woman looked first toward the coffeehouse. Two local fishermen, both Greeks, were playing backgammon in the corner. The coffeehouse owner inside was getting a shave. After glancing through the window, the woman raced for the pier. One of the fishermen noticed her.
    “That’s the wife of the man who lives on the hill.”
    And the others said, “You don’t say!”
    The woman