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pond behind our house. The pond, fed by an invisible spring, is shallow at one end and unfathomably deep at the other. It is so wide that a stone hurled by a young girl will not reach the other side. It is hidden behind a ruined stone wall in the forest. The woman Hannah was floating in knee-deep water, face down, her arms outstretched in an embrace. I did not realize she was dead, having no experience in such things. I stroked her hair. She looked peaceful, like a water princess, and I tried not to disturb her too much as I took her hand and turned her face to the sky. Her blue eyes were open. I told her that I lived here with my mother and my dayi. She looked surprised. I combed her hair with my fingers, arranged her dress, and placed a wildflower against her throat before going back to the house. When I told Madam Élise that a woman was asleep in the water and I could not wake her, I did not yet know the water there was deep enough to drown in.
    The Bosphorus is a powerful sinew of water that flexes and pushes and roils down its long, wide chute to the Sea of Marmara, impatient to find the warm Mediterranean and dissolve into the salty womb of the ocean. Young boys from the village jump in and disappear, moments later emerging hundreds of yards downstream, where they must use all the force of their thin brown arms to reach shore again. Despite vigorous rowing, a boat headed upstream seems held in place by an unseen hand. When one next looks out, magically the boat has progressed.
    Boats headed south, toward Istanbul, shoot along, passengers holding firmly to the creaking shell as the boatmen battle with their rudders. Halil, who had been a fisherman before he lost two fingers to a runaway net and became our gardener, told me that the Bosphorus has two currents. One runs north to south along the surface, carrying cold fresh water from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean; the other, a slippery rope of warm saline liquid, slithers south to north forty meters beneath the hard-muscled surface. The fishermen know that if you drop a line a certain length, you will catch palamut, lufer, and is tavrit that in spring dangle like silver coins from the fishermen’s lines. If you lower your hook farther, there abide mezgit and kalkan. A net caught up by the lower current will pull a boat inescapably northward. When the lodos blows from the southwest, the currents tangle and shift. The wrong fish are caught. Village boys do not reemerge. Young women drown in knee-deep water.
    When Madam Élise saw the dead girl in the pond, she left us that same afternoon, crying and flailing her arms if anyone came near her.
    After Madam Élise’s abrupt departure, I was happy. With no lessons, I spent hours perched on the stone wall dangling my legs toward the water below, watching large pleasure kayaks go by like creatures with many legs moving up and down in unison. I could make out the conical red felt hats of the teams of rowers. Veiled ladies sat on cushions and carpets on the foredeck, their heads nodding to one another in conversation like doves. Maidservants shaded them with fringed parasols. If they were women of high officials or the royal family, between the women and the rowers, under a particularly large parasol, would sit a fat eunuch, his dark skin melting into the shade. Sometimes I lay on my back on the warm stones, watching the sky careen about me. The scent of jasmine trailed across me like a cloak worn by the breeze.
    When I went to the long, gold-framed mirror in the receiving room, the only mirror Mama allowed in the house, I saw a girl-child with black curls that hung to her waist, eyes a pure azure blue, as if they had absorbed the summer sky. My eyes, mother told me, were inherited from a Circassian ancestor, a slave who had become the wife of a high official.
     
     
    I LEARNED TO swim. I owe that skill to Violet. Violet is the daughter of Mama’s distant relation, a fisherman in Cheshme on the Aegean coast. As a child, I