The Renovation

I had been unable to find work in the village. Admittedly, I was holding out hope to remain in my field. I had been a school psychologist back in Turkey, and had occasionally contracted out to hospitals to do specialized testing for kids in the psychiatric ER, but with my limited Italian, the different tests and licenses between the countries, and the dearth of children in the village compared to Istanbul, it soon became clear it was foolish for me to keep trying. My husband had been an accountant in Istanbul, though he grew up in his father’s garage in Ankara. I have a picture of him as a boy on my nightstand, covered in grease with shining engine parts sticking out of his pockets. When we settled in Italy, he immediately took a job with a local mechanic while I stayed home hunting for Turkish-language positions, which is to say I deluded myself. So it didn’t feel wholly uncaring or irresponsible to allow my father to get his own place and practice a little independence. I was always available; I could check on him and bring him food or go and collect him and plop him in front of my television while I mopped the floors and did the laundry and aired out the rooms, much as I might have done with a child for a playdate.

But in the months leading up to the renovation, I had been collecting him with greater frequency, making more of his meals each week, and having him stay the night a few times each month. In reality, this was the first step of his moving in with us. Over the last ten years, my father’s faculties had been ebbing away. It was painstaking, but not gradual, not in the sense of something steadily, as a ramp or graph, easing downward. Some days he was himself or more so, back to that darting intelligence of his youth, walking down the stairs and up the street to the bakery without much of a fuss, though he needed his cane still, but most importantly, on the good days, he could do this without forgetting where he was going or how to return. Other days he was replaced by this husk, a father-shaped mannequin or a crash test dummy, always tipping over and falling on the hard floor of the kitchen, or against the rim of the bathtub, or into tables laid with white lace doilies and brittle vessels balanced atop them, as brittle as the bones of an old man. Other days still there was nothing exceptional about his physical health, but sitting in his chair he would stare for extended periods without moving or blinking, and I could see something begin to churn beneath his face. I could see a man who had lost a word. Then another and another and another. Even before we left Istanbul, my father spoke fewer than half the sentences he used to, couldn’t remember such easy words as onion, house key, bedsheet. He became very quiet, a stark contrast to the expressive and passionate man I had grown up with. He seemed to be retreating into himself, as if his body were a ship taking on water and, in order not to drown, had begun sealing up the flooding compartments and so abandoning them to seawater.

One night last autumn, having canceled plans for lunch with him and then forgotten to stop by before dinner, I realized very late that I had not yet checked on my father. I hurried over to his apartment a few streets away. When I knocked, he didn’t shout from inside or come to the door. I didn’t wait long, but something about the moment felt protracted and distant, as if I were very far away from myself, though I don’t much believe in premonition. Maybe it was the change in our routine that made me suspicious. I fumbled with the keys as I let myself in. All the lights were out. The flat was submerged in a wet darkness. Through the glistening shadows, I could see him lying on his back, one of his arms limply stuck into the air, paddling as if he were trying to swim. He looked metallic almost, dimly shining. He was covered in blood. This sharp regret large as a railroad spike pierced me, releasing all the air from my body. I could feel the suffocation curling my fingers, climbing up the long cords of muscles in my arms, bending my whole body over.

We were fortunate. He’d broken his nose and it bled profusely, but in the darkness everything looked much worse than it was. The ER nurses said, broken nose aside, he looked fine. They said that standing between me and him. The lights of the hospital room were so blinding that everything looked two-dimensional, impossible to pick up and hold. My father’s eyes were bloodshot, his face purple and swollen, fresh stitching creeping over the rim of his lip, and two wads of gauze stuffed into his still-bleeding nose. He looked like a ghoul. They said everything that was already wrong with him was still wrong with him but nothing new was wrong with him and he could go home.

He moved in with us, transforming the dining room into his hospice with his electronic bed and chair. The main bathroom quickly filled up with his pills and slip-prevention devices and other medical clutter, and so we decided to expand our en suite (architecturally little more than a toilet crammed into a broom closet) into a second bathroom just for us. All the while we kept saying to each other that he might get better as a way of convincing ourselves of its truth, but his condition was by now very poor. Eight years of Alzheimer’s didn’t leave much else to be expected. The doctors didn’t say that. It’s not so bad right now—that’s what the doctors said, knowing it would get worse—but they didn’t ask my father or me, and that’s not what either of us would have said: It’s not so bad right now.

Trying to remain calm, I decided that maybe the builders were playing a joke. They had learned about my husband’s research into lock picking, and knew I listened at the jamb while they worked, and they were pulling one of those pranks you see on social media that has everyone in the comments laughing even though it is in fact a complete destruction of the victims’ lives.

“Alright, you can come out now!” I shouted, and threw the bathroom door wide open. No grinning builders emerged from a secret compartment. I shouted again, “Very funny, out you come!” After a minute, I stepped into the room ensconced in all the trappings of a prison cell with even a guard walking by the bars just then. Relief flooded through me.

“Aha, you got me!” My voice carried far away, faintly echoing in the uncarpeted room.

The guard, who really could have been my contractor in disguise, seemed genuinely shocked to see me. “What, what is this?” he exclaimed in Turkish. He paused with a stupefied look on his face, and I asked him in Italian to explain himself. Confused, he asked me in Turkish what I wanted.

“Where am I?” I responded in Turkish.

“Are you sick? Silivri Prison.”

I was growing impatient. “That’s not right. This is supposed to be a waterfall shower with two heads and massaging jets and a marble bench.”

“Massaging jets, ha ha! No, this is the prison.”

“But what’s it doing in my bathroom?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” he said. I pointed behind me at the doorway I had just walked through and my bedroom beyond it. He looked into the cell and frowned. “Now, how did they mess up like that?”

“The builders just finished today. The plumber turned on the water a moment ago,” I said.

“Well, how do you know your bathroom isn’t in Silivri Prison instead of the other way round?”

It was a natural enough question that nevertheless irritated me. Couldn’t the oaf see that there were far greater consequences on my side of the bars? I mean, I was the one now without a bathroom while his fictitious prison still had plenty of cells. “Put yourself in my place,” I said.

“Oh ho, yes, that’s a good one! As if a guard has never heard a prisoner say that. You’ll have to be cleverer than that to get out of here.”

At that I lost my temper, rushed forward, and threw myself against the cell bars, nearly throttling myself, but they wouldn’t budge. Up close, I could see the guard was standing in a corridor that extended beyond my field of vision on either side. It was hard to understand how they had fit all this into our tiny en suite.

“Keep this to yourself,” he said, as if talking about an elephant behind window curtains. “I don’t need the headache of explaining this to the warden. I have enough problems as it is without you stirring up trouble.”

As soon as he said “trouble,” I ran out of the cell, back into my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and pulled the plastic tarp down. My husband would be home from work in maybe ten minutes. Too long to make a snap decision, and not long enough to rationalize a plan. I went to the main bathroom, where my father stood staring in the mirror. I said Hello, how are you, do you need anything, a blanket, tea, a bit of a sandwich? as I took out the P trap under his sink, then went to the kitchen and grabbed our toolbox, and in a mad dash (really my husband was late at this point and would be home any second) I threw a bunch of ratchets and nuts and bolts and screwdrivers and pliers and the P trap next to the tarp in our bedroom to make it look like the plumbing would need a few more days to finish. Moments later, I heard my husband open the front door, and I flew down the hall to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. He gave my chin a pet, and I took his briefcase from him (he liked having a briefcase though he had absolutely no use for the thing). I told him the plumber had made a mistake and that we would have to keep using my father’s bathroom.

He sighed and asked me about my day and then we settled into our happy, if well-worn habits, but obviously the only thing on my mind was the prison. Each sound in the flat made the surface of my skin fizzle. A real, live prison guard was looming just beyond my door. Did that mean there would be a prisoner moving into our bathroom? The walls of the flat were not soundproof; would we hear them whispering to themselves? What if a guard started hollering in the corridor or, worse, sounded an alarm? What if a fight should break out? There was no way I could convince my husband these were merely the sounds of a defective toilet. Worse, what if someone on the other side heard us in our flat, and sent the guards pouring through into our bedroom like cops in a Buster Keaton movie? Fortunately, however, my prison was a quiet one, or by some other miracle the sound did not carry through the door, and we got through the night without incident.

The next morning was a gruelingly slow pantomime of our routines. I wanted my husband out, out the door and off to work right away, but he always paused between his coffee and his breakfast to read a little bit of a magazine (literary in some way) or a page or two in a very long book with which he seemed never to make any headway. The whole time I pretended to be decluttering my wardrobe, making decisions about which items I might be able to consign to a used-goods shop and which I could repair and which I could dress up with a few new accessories, narrating everything aloud so that my husband might be very bored and would stay out of our bedroom. I was absolutely sure that some loud noise would burst out from the en suite at any moment: a morning alarm or loudspeaker to wake the prisoners or perhaps a call to prayer (I hadn’t thought about that once in my life till now; did they have muezzins in prison?).

My father emerged from his room and trundled toward the kitchen. “Coffee!” he yelled to me, as if I were a lazybones sleeping in. My husband had only made a single cup for himself. He was an enormously self-sufficient man and rarely noticed when he might be useful to others.

“Yes, this blouse would do well with a little vest, I think!” I shouted back, pacing back and forth in our bedroom and slamming the door closed with an “oops!” then stuffing more comments under the gap at the floor: “I must get a new pair of flats, or better an old pair that is new to me!”

“Coffee!” my father shouted again.

My husband, having at last finished reading one page (today it was the long book), packed his toast and jam into his mouth, grabbed his briefcase, in which he kept his book and a magazine and a crossword he never finished, and left for work, shouting at me: “Your dad wants coffee!”

Pacing outside my renovated bathroom, I gave it a couple of minutes to be sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I called my contractor, then tried every member of the crew whose numbers I could track down, before resorting to calling my contractor over and over until at last he answered with a casual hello as if he had no knowledge of what he’d done to my home.

“You’ve bungled my renovation!” I started.

“I don’t think so,” he said. Fair enough; he didn’t know who I was. I told him my name and address and repeated that he had ruined my bathroom.

He said he recognized my voice.

A brittle crash came from the kitchen. My father was undoubtedly trying to make himself coffee. Ignoring the sound, I demanded my contractor justify this egregious mistake. Another, smaller crunch like a wristwatch being crushed in the kitchen, and I could hear my father mumbling between sharp gasps. I asked the contractor to repeat himself as I went to check on my father. He was standing under the kitchen window, taking great care to bend as he reached into the little dishwasher, emptying it though it had not run, and putting soiled plates and pans into our neat little cabinets. He doubled over to grab a large bowl but struggled and couldn’t straighten back up. His cane, the sort that has a few wide feet so that it can stand on its own, was abandoned yet again at the other end of the kitchen—blocking the path between the cabinets and the wall. I brought it back to him and took the bowl out of his hands and put it in the sink. Unoffended, he carefully lifted the bowl back out of the sink and put it in the high cupboard where it did not belong.

“They’re not clean,” I whispered in the threatening hushed voice that respectable adults use on not-so-respectable children in public. I apologized to the contractor and said my service was cutting out, but as he started re-explaining himself, my father fired up the coffee grinder. I could hardly hear the other end of the line, and now my father returned to clattering the porcelain and silverware in the dishwasher. Speeding back to my room, I ducked beneath the tarp and into the prison cell, where all was finally quiet. As mystifying as it was to find a prison now installed in my bathroom, I was more surprised that they had managed to sneak it out of Turkey in the first place. My contractor was telling me that he always verified everything with the customer, that he required receipts with signatures to that effect, and that he had just emailed me scans of my signature, indicating I had approved the installed materials and fixtures.

“Yes, materials and fixtures perhaps, but they put them to use all wrong! They’ve made some horrible parody of my design. I wanted a bidet, not a prison washbasin. It is a jail cell!”

“That is a rude exaggeration, though I can barely understand it with your accent.”

“No,” I insisted. “There is an actual prison where there should be a bathroom. It even has a guard!”

“That seems highly unlikely to have happened in any case,” said the contractor, and he rang off.

Then, as if the notion of coffee (spurred by the grinder) had popped out of my head and begun wandering the house on its own, a small cup of Turkish coffee appeared in the corner of the cell. It was a beautiful cup with blue arabesques on a neat little saucer with a matching pattern. Where had it come from? The guard must have brought it for me, but I hadn’t seen him come by, nor had I heard the soft scrape of porcelain being set down on concrete, nor, as I thought about it, did it make sense that coffee service was a staple of Turkish prisons. The coffee was simply there and the guard was not. I took a sip and felt awash in giddiness. It was the precise duplicate of the coffee served at Mandabatmaz, in Beyoğlu, with its thick foam the consistency of a luxurious dream. It was a favorite café in my family, though it had only four chairs and served nothing but coffee. For a moment it really was like being back there, and all at once I felt the enormous distances of time and space between myself and Istanbul, and felt these distances collapsed if only briefly. I took the coffee inside to my father. I made him hold it, and I mimed drinking.

“Isn’t it just like at Mandabatmaz?” I asked.

He took a sip and made a face. “It isn’t correct,” he said. This was a phrase he had come to rely on as much as he did his cane. His thoughts had become slippery as eels in silvery rivers and the words to wrangle them had wriggled out of his head, leaving precious few phrases that now had to stand in for so much more, for all the sputtering thoughts that he could no longer articulate.

“Isn’t it just how they used to make it?” I asked again, trying to coax something out of him, hoping to jolt his memory. Mandabatmaz had been one of my father’s regular haunts, the first café I remember him taking me to, the only café, really, that made its coffee any differently than all the others. Gently I asked, did he remember our favorite café in Beyoğlu, the taste of their coffee?

He looked at me, knowingly at first. He lifted the cup to his lips again and his face changed. His disappointment was obvious. He raised his eyebrows and pouted his lips and said nothing. He kept repeating these small gestures of the face, pulling his wits about him into a tidy little pile, trying to make something of them, but he only managed to raise his eyebrows and pout his lips and say nothing.

I took the cup from him, ready to finish it myself, but inexplicably it was empty: not just the coffee but the grounds too.

The first time we took my father to the hospital was almost a decade ago. In 2013 we were still in our flat in Istanbul, on a curved street over a tree-choked cemetery. It had originally been his flat, and his father’s before that, as was almost everything in his life (his neckties were all as old as him or even older). My mother died in 2003, and about six months later he’d mentioned selling the flat and moving the two of us into a house up the coast toward the Black Sea. I’d begged him to wait, wait until I was done with high school and off to university. Every few years after that, he’d say again he was thinking of selling the flat, and I’d eventually convince him to wait, but after I finished my graduate psychology program, married my husband, and moved in with him, my father said he really couldn’t stand it anymore. His parents had died in the flat, his wife after them. “I am outnumbered by the dead and this is bad for my liver. Too many memories in this home—even at the corners and all up the baseboards they are piling.” With a bit of the savings he’d squirreled away, he bought himself a small place in a retirement community in Üsküdar across the Bosporus from us: “It is a necessary change of scenery,” he said.

My father moved out, and my husband and I left our tiny closet near Dolmabahçe and took over the flat I had grown up in (no rent and thrice the space). When my father called, we would ask how Asia was treating him, and he would ask us if Europe was still the Europe it ever was. We visited him for dinner now and again, bringing things that would reheat well, trying to supplement our separation from him and make the time between our visits feel shorter. Eventually geography dictated our relationship. My father and I talked less frequently, went on fewer outings together. “I’m a ferry ride away,” he said as some effort at consolation or accusation—it was difficult to tell which.

“As am I,” I replied, upset at his suggestion. In fact, he took the ferry over every morning on his way to work at the university. He had the time and ability to commute for classes, but not to see his daughter. He didn’t even stop by on his way home, though the university was a quick cab ride from our flat. I had been suggesting he do just that for weeks, but of course it was not an option for him. He moved out to get away from ghosts, and it was insensitive of me to forget that. Yet when he learned that I had turned the second bedroom into a workout studio he was outraged.

“And where am I supposed to sleep when I visit?”

“You don’t visit.”

But I didn’t visit him either. I was too busy at work, rushing between schools and hospitals, and I knew my aunts and uncle never went out to Üsküdar for tea or dinner. He had become a bit of a grouch—a fate I think he was prevented from realizing earlier in life by marrying my mother. As he was a political academic, it was easy to find his company stifling. The man always wanted serious and meaningful conversations, wanted to incite you to serious and meaningful change. If you didn’t take a stake in your country, you didn’t deserve much respect from it, a motto he invoked in response to everything from the price of gas to the new children’s TV programs.

Distracted and negligent, I failed to call him for over three months, until eventually he called me and told me I was being rude. I remembered the comment about the ferry ride. Insensitive or obstinate as children can be toward their injured parents, I reminded him that phones worked in both directions, and he could’ve called me sooner than this.

“It is difficult,” he said apologetically. “Something about dialing the house number … I worry your mother might pick up. Time … I mean … I am lost in time. I worry—if I dial—your mother might answer.”

I made a concentrated effort to reach out to him after this, a drive to maintain our relationship, but my renewed and largely one-sided efforts finally dissipated and we did not speak to each other for a whole year, did not see each other for even longer, though we were distanced only by a cab over the bridge, or an undulating ferry across the wide and resplendent strait.

This changed when the protests started. It was a feral summer (as if the season itself is not always prone to bouts of wildness and ecstasy), and the city was inundated with people objecting to the way things were. My father, no doubt feeling lonely, no doubt feeling restless in sympathy with the restless city, had begun calling me and telling me to turn on the news. We would watch for an hour or so together. I didn’t say much as the throng of people filled the square and pulsed like a giant ventricle, but my father talked the whole time, seemingly unbothered by my unenthusiastic huhs and whoas, asking if I knew what was going on in my own neighborhood, if I knew what was changing in my city, if I knew how much the country had been eroded in these years under Erdoğan. I shrugged my shoulders even though he couldn’t see it. I didn’t really know what all this was about. I wanted to tell him it was easy for an old man to be politically aware; he didn’t have anything better to do all day, he didn’t have errands to run, dinner to cook, or a spouse who wanted to watch sitcoms instead of the news, but I couldn’t say this. I knew he had only called in the first place because he missed my mother, the sole person in the family who would indulge him in his tirades, the sole person who kept up on every bit of news alongside him. I started inviting him over then. His loneliness was unhealthy, I thought. Plus, this way I could make sure he was eating well, not those frozen dinners he’d given himself over to in recent months. Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted these invitations. Side by side on the sofa, we watched the protests develop. While we could, we watched the mass of people grow and grow around Gezi Park. What had started as a few dozen environmentalists protecting a bit of grass and a few trees had, in less than a week, become over a hundred thousand people organizing in Istanbul each day with almost a million others joining them in cities like Izmir, Hatay, Bursa, Adana, and Antalya.