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then could your sponsor offer you precise instructions, and you would
be required to commit these details to memory fast, because they could not be spoken again or written down. Only when you had made it to the Gare de Lyon in Paris were you allowed to open your
sponsor’s envelope with the provost’s passphrase. Only then could you take the night train to Lausanne, following the Simplon Orient Express line with a second-class ticket your sponsor
had paid for under his own name, his real name, through Milan and Belgrade, to the Turkish-Bulgarian border, showing your passport when you arrived at the terminus in Istanbul. Only then could you
pay your fee for the entry visa and find the cheap hotel room your sponsor had booked, and burn that passport in the bathtub, dousing it with the shower-hose before it set off the sprinklers (you
had to set fire to it early, to stop yourself from turning back later). Only then could you go out into the bright spring sun of the wide-open city and walk along the main road, past the swell of
traffic, the taxis with their rolled-down windows and their music blaring, the clattering trams, the towering mosques, until you reached the ferry port at Kabata ş .
    Only then could you put one dull
jeton
in the turnstile slot, like your sponsor had advised, keeping another to remind you of your homeward trip every time your fingers met it in the
folds of your pocket. Only then could you walk through the barrier and wait in the muggy departures terminal with your hat on, your eyes concealed by wayfarers, fanning yourself with the newspaper
until the doors were opened to let you step onto the hulking white ship. Only then could you find a seat on the upper deck amongst the gathering hordes, right up close to the railing, to watch the
ferry push away and feel the sudden breeze upon your cheek, taste the brackish cool upon your lips, the thrill of it. Only then could you know the full splendour of the Marmara as it ebbed around
you, fathomless, agleam.
    And this would be your final chance to lean back and exhale, to listen to the outcry of the seagulls following the stern, the dizzy flocks that clamoured near the deck as though escorting you.
Soon, the Turkish men would lean over the railing with
simits
held aloft; the birds would swoop to steal the bread right from their fingers, screeching; and you would come to realise the
gulls were not escorts at all, but hustlers and hangers-on, like everyone else you were sailing away from.
    Only as you arrived at the first stop in Kadiköy could you undo your watchstrap and remove it, let it slide between the slats of the bench, as though you had forgotten it. Only as you
sailed by the first strange island with all its tombstone houses could you glean how far you were from the world you knew, the people you loved, the people you did not. Only when you passed the
next of them—one broad and inhabited, another just a sliver of green where nothing seemed to live but herons—could you understand how close you were to what you needed. Only then could
you see the khaki hump of Heybeliada rising in the sun-stirred haze and know that you had made it.
    Only then could you stand with the giddy tourists on the lower decks as the ferryman threw a withered rope onto the dock, waiting to step off onto a foreign land but somehow feeling you were
almost home. Only then could you skirt by the Naval Academy where the uniformed cadets did their parade drills, and head south-east on Çam Limani Yolu, as you had been instructed, until the
streets became narrower, emptier, and the space between houses grew so wide that you could see the spreading forest up ahead. Only then could you lose yourself in those dry, slanting pines and
sense that you were now released from everything that had weighed on you before. Only then could you see the shoulders of a tarnished mansion surface above the treetops. Only at its gate could you
throw down your backpack, push the buzzer,