The Other End of the Bench

Chapter 1: I. The Opening Roll

There is a bench on the seafront at Moda, in the old Istanbul neighborhood on the Asian shore, that has been sat on every morning for three years by the same man, who has never once sat in the middle. He sits at the left end, with his back very straight and his hat on his knee, facing the water. The right end he leaves empty. Nobody in the neighborhood has ever asked him why. The tea-garden waiters know it. The fishermen on the pier know it. The retired schoolteachers who walk their little dogs along the promenade at eight each morning know it, and they steer politely around the bench, the way one steers around a grave. His name was Cemal Yıldız. He was seventy-four, a retired radio engineer, a long, slow, stooped man with white eyebrows and a faintly startled expression, as though the world had been rearranged while he was looking at something else. He wore the same gray cardigan every day. He carried a thermos of tea and a folding backgammon board under his arm. And every morning at a quarter past eight, he set the board up on the empty end of the bench, rolled the dice, and played a game against nobody at all. His wife Gülsen had died in the spring of 2023. She had loved this bench. She had loved the view of the Princes' Islands rising out of the haze, and the ferries going by, and the gulls, and the particular color of the Marmara at half past eight on a cold, clear, February morning, which she had described, for forty-four years, as "the color of a good decision." The empty seat was hers. He had not said so to anyone. He did not need to. On the first Monday of February, at twenty past eight, a woman sat down in it. She did it without any ceremony at all. She was small and straight-backed and seventy-one, in a wine-colored coat and a silk scarf, with silver hair cut sharp at the jaw and a bag of simit, the sesame bread rings sold on every Istanbul corner, hanging from one wrist. She lowered herself onto the right end of the bench with the air of a person who had walked a long way. She took out a simit. She began to eat it. Cemal stared at her. His hand, with a pair of dice in it, had frozen in midair above the board. "Excuse me," he said, at last, in a voice that came out much more strangled than he intended. "That seat is..." "It's a public bench," said the woman, without looking round. "I know it's a public bench." "Then I'm sure you won't mind." "It is not that I mind," said Cemal, stiffly. "It is that I am in the middle of a game." She turned, then, and looked at him, and then at the board between them, and the little scatter of ivory and walnut counters, laid out in the midst of a contest against nobody. "Against whom?" said the woman. He did not answer. "Because," said the woman, tilting her head, and peering at the board with an expression of sharp, scholarly interest, "if you're playing the white, you've made a terrible mistake on the third point. You've left a blot. A child of six would have hit it." He looked down. He looked back up. "I beg your pardon?" "A blot. A single checker. Left open to attack." She finished her simit and dusted the sesame seeds delicately off her gloves. "I taught mathematics for forty years. I have been playing tavla since I was five. My father cheated, and I learned to catch him." She turned the full force of her eyes on him. They were very dark, very bright, and, he realized, faintly amused. "Would you like me to show you?" Cemal Yıldız had not been spoken to by a stranger in three years. He opened his mouth. A seagull shrieked overhead. Out on the Marmara, a ferry sounded its long, low, mournful horn. "Nesrin," said the woman. "Nesrin Aksoy." She held out a gloved hand. "I've just moved to the neighborhood. I'm living with my daughter. She thinks I need fresh air." He looked at the hand. He looked at the empty bench, which was no longer empty. And something old and heavy and stiff, a thing that had been locked in his chest for three years, gave, very slightly, with a creak, like a gate in the wind. "Cemal," he said. He shook it. "You're sitting very close to the dice." "Then roll them," said Nesrin, "and let's see how bad you are."