In S.G. Ondercin’s “Never Rome,” the reader inhabits Sergey’s POV and ultimately feels as displaced as he does. He’s fled Russia to land in Turkey, waiting tables while imagining a different reality. What does it mean to belong? What is home when home isn’t the place it used to be?
Picture this:
A man stands beside a white-stalk lighthouse and peers over water to the land across. He’s not too old (barely thirty, say) but looks older for his sunbeaten skin and thick beard. His name is Alexios, he’s got a wife and two kids, and he spends days caulking and repairing boats in the harbor. It’s good work and pretty steady, because there are always boats coming in. Just now a Venetian galley slips west toward the Marmara while a Trebizond outrigger, sails full of wind, makes east for home. Alexios speaks Greek but he calls himself a Roman because why shouldn’t he? The city across the Bosporus had more claim on Rome than anyone; definitely more than whatever shambles the Goths left in Italy, more than the feral Franks in the West. Beyond the gap of gulls and whitecaps rests a city of seven hills, The City. He doesn’t cross to the City often, but he likes to linger on Chalcedon’s opposing shore when he can, ignoring the wave-crash and salt-spray, eyes always on the City.
Can you picture it? I can, no problem. Alexios is a little tricky (his life, his tenth century quotidian) but the rest is effortless: stone, water, gulls, and the City. It looks a little different lately but that’s okay. I’ve lost every other anchor, so it’s not hard to unmoor myself in time.
There’s still a lighthouse tipping the cape at harbor’s edge, and I like to linger there when I can. It’s been rebuilt since Alexios’s day, just like Chalcedon’s become Kadıköy and joined Istanbul’s transcontinental reach. There’s no old Romans now, just Turks, and us, of course. Third Romans, adrift in history.
* * *
A couple nights ago at the Wolf & Bear, Grisha waved me behind the bar and told me, “That’s good hustle. I told you you’d get the hang of it, right? It’s just like back home.”
Gulnaz elbowed him and added, with a tight smile, “I told him your education would pay off, Sergey, but he never believed me.”
They laughed. I laughed, tiredly, then darted to the kitchen and grabbed pirozhki for the Anglos at table 4. I told them to enjoy in my best English, unloaded, immediately got flagged by table 5 asking about their meal (Türkçe this time) then made a sidewinder around the bar, slipped back to the kitchen, asked the new chef (Recep from Rize) where the pilav and qazi was. I must have garbled it—I’m the first to admit my Türkçe’s trash—because Gulaz had to repeat it all, and two minutes later I darted back to table 5, plates in hands and elbow-crooks, elegant and swift.
I learned grace under pressure at the Lomonsov. When I started at the cafe, just downslope of Moscow State, Grisha warned me that I was going to be doing waiter work the rest of my life. I thought he was just giving me shit, as big brothers do, but I was still working at the Lomonsov three years later, when all I had to show for myself was a diploma and a fifty-page thesis on the development of the merchant class during the Macedonian Renaissance of the Eastern Roman Empire. (Not Byzantine history. Byzantine is a postmortem moniker hooked on by condescending Westerners. In their hearts and souls they were Romans, carrying that holy torch.)
All I carry are plates. After removing the emptied pile from table 3 I got a breather and lingered silently beside the bar while Grisha poured clear Russian Standard for some Russian standards, a duo from Krasnodar who show up almost every night. None of them even glanced at me. Gulnaz slid up from behind and punched two fingers in the small of my back, making me jump.
“We’re through the worst of it,” she told me.
I halfway panted. “I hope so.”
She smiled the fond, dismissive smile she probably thinks is big-sisterly. “It’s been a busy night. That’s good.” She crossed arms over blouse and scanned the scene. “We need more like this.”
I almost groaned but held it in. “Working tables fine. It’s just physical. The language still trips me up.”
“Just keep trying. You’ll learn.” Which was easy for Gulnaz to say; it’s not a long leap from her native Volga Tatarça to Turkish Türkçe.
To explain or excuse myself I said, “I can read okay and I know what I’m supposed to say, right until I have to say it. Then it’s like my brain gets blocked up. You know what I mean?”
“A little.” Another nudge, this time elbow-to-flank. “Number 7. They’re finishing up.”
I glanced at the Turkish couple at the corner table. “I’ll get the check ready.”
Just then a party of three slipped through the door, Turks by the look of them, but you can’t always tell until they open their mouths. “Take care of table 7,” Gulnaz said, then slipped past me for the newcomers. I heard her hum under-breath: “A good night.”
Good for Gulnaz, Grisha and the Wolf & Bear’s profit margins. When they set this place up, I was still at the Lomonsov, slowly coming to terms with the uselessness of history until history happened to me. September 21st is a date none of us will ever forget, not those of us who scrambled into airplanes or vans or cars and rushed for the nearest border as soon as Putin announced his general mobilization from his Kremlin bunker. When the Motherland called, we ran. Not many of us got into Europe and it’s only through Grisha that I landed a work visa; Turks have gotten stingy about handing those out. Nobody wants Russians around nowadays.
Because this is all I have, I try to do my best. I confronted table 7 I with the same stock phrases, linguistically shifted, that I used in the Lomonsov long ago. “Yemeğini beğendin mi?”
The guy looked from his date to me and nodded. “Evet. Hesap lütfen.”
I proffered the bill. “İşte.”
“Teşekkürler.”
Simple, easy, and hollow. A fast retreat to the bar (Grisha and the Krasnodar pair still at it), a return to table 7, collect the Visa, scan the Visa, return the Visa. I didn’t embarrass myself and they even left a tip. A good night for the Wolf & Bear, maybe even a good night for me. The best kind of night I can have, probably, so long as I’m adrift.
* * *
Being flotsam, I spend a lot of afternoons lingering at Kadıköy’s water-dashed cape, standing by the lighthouse and watching ships move through the Bosporus. Every so often a warship bristles by, too far away for me to tell whose. They’re not letting Russian ones through anymore, but it feels ominous.
When I stand on the rocks and watch the City and the strait, I don’t pretend I’m Alexios. I don’t try to put myself in his shoes. I’ve got no wife, no kids, no tenth century caulking business; just a brother and sister-in-law generous enough to save me from bleeding out in a Donbass ditch. But there’s a guy who sometimes watches the sunset the same time I do. Thick beard, sun-dried face but still-lean body, always topped with a black baseball cap bearing a white Latin N overlaid on Y (I think the C is implied). Just once I saw him with a woman, maybe his wife; I remember how the late light tinted her pale face and cream-colored headscarf. It’s a millennium too late for Alexios, but is Ahmet really that different when he watches sundown on the Bosporus?
I wonder. Now imagine these two: His name is Michael and hers is Zoe. They grew up here in Chalcedon, sixth century glory years, say Justinian before the plague. His father works in the quarries and cuts stone for Hagia Sophia being built across the strait. Her family is more domestic; say, potters. Since childhood they’ve seen each other at Mass and chanced into each other in the street. She’s got a big hook nose and her parents say it might cost her a husband but Michael barely notices: he’s captivated by the black lashes that frame her expressive eyes. As for Zoe, she always liked Michael for his fast loose-limbed stride, the kind some call lanky but she sees confidence. When they were old enough to run errands on their own they started talking in alleyways. One thing led to another. Now they’re making up excuses to slip out of their parents’ homes and rendezvous by the shore. Holy Wisdom rises across the water but all Michael and Zoe care about is each other: fast hands, sloppy kisses, hot breath, hot bodies, years of dreaming fulfilled.
I don’t know what their real names are (Mehmet and Zeynep?) but I see them at the Kadıköy corniche all the time. They’re skinny and young and they can’t keep their hands off each other. She’s always got her hijab on but doesn’t seem to mind him feeling her up in public. A couple times I’ve seen them horizontal and making out park benches. I don’t know how to say get a room in Turkish but probably wouldn’t if I could. Young lust is comfortingly universal. It transcends culture, place, even time, the greatest breach of all.
* * *
It might seem weird to reimagine modern Istanbullular as long-gone Eastern Romans, but why should it be? It’s not like Turkish Turks are real Turks anyway. Turkish Turks are a post-Ottoman melting pot with genes stewed from three continents, pretty much like the Second Rome in its heyday. Even Istanbul is a Greek name tweaked. (A dozen-plus names over two thousand years and none of them are Turkic. What does that tell you?) I had a friend at Moscow State, Chingiz from Kazakhstan, whose ancestors slept in yurts and rode horseback on the steppe ‘til Stalin stamped them down. That’s a real Turk. Even Gulnaz is more authentic than the ones here.
I tried to articulate this to her once. It was a slow weeknight and we’d closed the Wolf & Bear. Grisha went home early so it was just the two of us in the sealed front room, quiet and dark.
I don’t know why I tried to explain post-Ottoman ethnography to her, since her response was what I’d expected. She smirked, shook her head, and slumped on the barstool she’d occupied. Dim lamplight made liquid sheen in her almost-black hair.
“So Turks here aren’t really Turks?” she smiled. “You might want to keep that to yourself. It could get you in trouble.”
“I know. I do. But Turkic peoples originated in inner Asia. They were menacing China back in the Han Dynasty.”
“That was thousands of years ago. We’ve covered ground since then.”
“Linguistically, sure, but culturally? Genetically? They do studies. People in modern Turkey are a mix of Anatolian, Caucasian, and Balkan genes. There’s barely anything from Central Asia. Like, two or three percent.” I added, “Not like you.”
“Or you?”
I shrugged. Grisha and I have roots in Kazan and apparently we’d picked up a Tatar ancestor here, a Bashkir there. Gulnaz’s family is firmly Muslim (in the half-assed post-Communist Tatarstan fashion, secular like Kemalists only envy) but even she’s got a Belorussian great-uncle somewhere. So really, there’s nothing unusual about her and Grisha being married. East and West may never meet, but Turks and Slavs twain easily enough.
“Maybe people here don’t have much in common with Tatars or Kazakhs or Yakuts. But so what?” She gave me that supposedly-sisterly smile. “A thousand years ago they called themselves Romans, but they weren’t really Roman, were they?”
I said immediately: “That’s different.”
“How is that?” Half-interested, she leaned back and rolled her head, flashing neck’s soft white.
“There was a continuity from the original Roman Empire. Not just dynastically, but culturally.”
“They spoke Greek.”
“Greek was the most common language in the Empire, even under Augustus. And the official language in Constantinople—in the courts, in the palace—was still Latin until Heraclius in the seventh century.”
“But after that they used Greek. Officially.”
“They were still Roman. They called themselves Roman, they thought they were Roman. They only started calling themselves Greeks in the nineteenth century. Greeks are a modern invention. Just like Ottoman Muslims calling themselves Turks.”
“And Russians?” She did the sisterly smile again. “They’re supposed to be the Third Rome, right?”
I wanted to say Russia has a legitimate claim to the title: a Palaiologos princess married to Moscow’s king, Orthodox Christendom, a sprawling capital with seven hills. The czars loved to claim it, I loved the thought of it, but I’ll admit the link from Rome Two to Three is more tenuous than One to Two. And nowadays, different geopolitical fancies have taken hold in Moscow (neo-Soviet, pan-Eurasianist, goopy Duginism, whatever justifies a war).
I didn’t try to articulate the complexities. I could tell she was getting tired of the conversation. Gulnaz, like Grisha, keeps her eyes on the material, the practical; the necessary stuff like running a restaurant and greasing hands to get work visas for useless brothers. Theory bores her.
When I didn’t answer she sighed, leaned over the bar, and lowered her head tiredly onto folded arms. Hair spread like an inky wreath around the half-moon of her profile. She closed her almost-black eyes like she was ready to go to sleep, but she said, “Let them be what they want. I’m a Turk, they’re Turks, Grisha’s a Russian. You can be a Roman. Second or Third.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Right.” Gulnaz snickered softly. “You can’t even grow a good beard.”
Early on I’d tried to let mine grow out (more laziness than Philhellenism) but the results weren’t impressive, so I went back to shaving. Too many latent Tatar genes, she’d teased.
But then she mused, “Maybe you can be. A Roman, I mean. You’ve got your head so deep in the past.”
“The rest of me’s stuck here,” I said. On the rocky shore, wondering what the hell I’m doing in the place I wanted to be, a thousand years too late.
Gulnaz sighed sleepily. Since her eyes were closed, since we were alone, I could get away with staring. The lips on her half-moon face barely budged as she said, “Why not, though? They used to pretend they were Romans here, now they think they’re Turks… Everybody needs a lie sometimes, if it’s sweet and feels right.”
* * *
Here’s another one. He’s named Giacomo, he came from Genoa, and let’s say it’s the eleventh century, before East versus West snowballs into the Fourth Crusade. Giacomo’s made a pretty good business importing Italian glasswork and exporting Anatolian textiles from his office in Pera, just across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. After spending a year getting his business on good footing, he brought in his wife Maria and their daughters. Sometimes he likes to climb the tower atop Galata’s hill. He watches the boats drifting through the Bosporus, in and out of the Horn, and on lucky days he can spot ones flying his own company’s colors. Living is good but not perfect. The Venetians are muscling in on Genoese shipping using underhanded Venetian tricks, and while Eastern Romans tolerate Latin heretics for trade there’s still religious tension. Last year there were riots enough to make blood flow down Pera’s cobblestones to the sea. (That hasn’t stopped him from taking a lovely Roman girl as a mistress, though keeping Helena hidden from Maria is another headache.)
Giacomo might still be Giacomo, or maybe he’s Jacques or George. On the rare occasions I make it up to Beyoğlu I see ones like him: guys in slick suits and nice shoes, sometimes double-fisting smartphones and lattes they stroll along İstiklal or the malls up in Şişli, looking for places to exploit the haywire Lira. Often enough they’ll have a golden girl clinging to one arm, origin inscrutable—authentic Westerner or bottle-bleached hanım? It can be hard to tell. How long they’ll stay here is anyone’s guess. Business in Turkey isn’t what it was five or ten years ago, and guys like them only came here because they have places to go back to.
The rest of us make do with what we’ve got, some better than others.
* * *
Grisha was always better at making do than me. He says it’s because he grew up in the Bad Old Days of the ‘90s, when you couldn’t afford to let a ruble slip away. And I, the soft little brother, grew up in New Russia, in the age of Putin/Medvedev before Medvedev went off his nut; the rich, open, hopeful years when you could actually be dumb enough to think studying history was a good idea.
History screws everyone in the end. You’d think they’d have taught us that, at least.
Grisha didn’t need a four-year degree to know that, so he keeps his eye on the prize. Kadıköy is a popular neighborhood for hipsters, tourists, emigres and long-time Istanbullular, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to start a restaurant. He and Gulnaz cook up a Russian/Tatarstan mix that gives them a unique niche, but they still have to deal with supplies, rent, salaries, unreliable employees, nosy customs officials and city ones with surreptitious hands out.
One morning about a month after I came here, Grisha sat me down in our apartment (Gulnaz was running errands, leaving us two in the kitchen, quiet and bright) and he said to me, “Listen, Sergey, I’m going to try and make this work long-term. I can make a nice place for you, if you want to learn and do the work.”
The first thing I asked was: “How long is long?”
“As long as we can make it.”
“What about when the war ends?”
“Even after that.”
I wasn’t surprised by what he said, only the seriousness in his tone; the determination. But even that I should have expected. Grisha was a restaurant’s assistant manager back home. Gulnaz was a hostess. What they’ve got here is more than they ever had before.
And the war ending might be an if, not a when. People have been leaving Russia for all sorts of reasons, some of them a lot more principled than mine or Grisha’s. I’ve never thought of myself as brave and when I snared the flight from Sheremetyevo on September 21st, I was physically trembling with mortal fear. Putin prefers to reap cannon fodder from far-flung Tuva or Chechnya, not the metropoles, but a barely-employable young Moskvich seemed too tempting a harvest.
Maybe I’m just a coward, maybe I don’t want to leave my brother’s protective shadow, maybe (I can admit it to myself) it’s Gulnaz keeping me. I told him, “I’ll stay. I’ll help. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
Grisha looked at me like he was trying to decide what kept me here. If he figured it out, he didn’t tell me. “That’s good, Sergey. This’ll be good for you. Better than taking your chances in Russia. And better than trying to make a living as some dumb egghead.”
That kind of talk annoyed me growing up, when I valued kindness over honesty. But that was a while ago, so I told him, “Thanks.”
“The restaurant business is tricky, especially here, for us, but we can make it work if we really try. Sokolov’s place, down by the harbor, has been going strong for fifteen years. And we’re making our own place for ourselves.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed thick arms. “I’ll start showing you the books. After that I’ll introduce you to some of our suppliers.”
“Okay.”
“You’d better brush up on your Turkish too. Gulnaz can help you with that.”
“Right.”
“If you’re going to stay here, you’ve really gotta work on the language.” Grisha never draws stuff out. He stood up and made to leave, but stopped just long enough to say, “Not just for the restaurant. People here can be standoffish, but they’re not that different from back home. You can find yourself a nice Turkish girl or something.”
He left me like that, and I still don’t know what he meant, how much he understands. He didn’t sound like he was joking, but he could have been. I’d been dismal in that field in the Third Rome; in the Second I’d never tried, never entertained the thought of trying; not because of Gulnaz or anyone, but because the long-dead made-up Romans in my head feel more real to me than modern Istanbullular.
But that was the suggestion he left me with in the kitchen that day, and I’m pretty sure he meant it, and in meaning and saying it he’d undone the fragile conviction he’d been trying to instill. Sitting in the lonely light of morning, I started to think (seriously, for the first time since my frantic exodus) that I might go back to Russia after all.
* * *
There’s a guy I call Stephan and he’s always camped at the mouth of the Golden Horn. I’m not sure how old he is but he’s got a bald, bronzed head with a white skull-side fringe. He always leans on the railing, holding his fishing rod over water’s edge. Does he catch any fish flitting through the Horn? Does it matter? I’ve never tried fishing but I’ve heard it’s meditative. It probably is for old Stephan, considering how an empire just ended and the City burns. It’s the thirteenth century, the Fourth Crusade, and a bunch of “Holy Romans” and backstabbing Venetians have been pillaging the Second Rome for days. Drunk Latin whores lounge in Holy Wisdom and Papists haul off divine relics by the boatful. But Stephan keeps fishing, because what else can you do when the Second Rome burns?
There’s a lot of twenty-first century Stephans on the Galata Bridge, dangling their long fishing lines past boats that slip under-bridge down the Horn. There’s a guy (Selim, probably) who seems to be there every time, on the south end facing the Bosporus. White mustache, white rim of hair, bald dome, but he only shows the last when he takes off his wide America-style hat to fan himself. I always wonder where he got a cowboy hat. Selim’s modern-day tribulations seem pretty mild; hot sun, cool rain, pollution from the cars and trucks chugging by. He doesn’t have to endure Latin barbarism or Venetian perfidy. (Fucking Venetians. They deserve to sink underwater.) So he’s got it okay, all things considered.
Sometimes I think about talking to him. About the hat, about fishing, about anything, but my Turkish is barely enough for business at the Wolf & Bear. I can’t imagine sparking conversation with a stranger. Stephan, Selim, call him what you will, he’s as constant as the fish and gulls, small but enduring on water’s edge for two thousand years. And what am I, Sergey Sergeyevich? Not even a passing boat, just flotsam caught in the Bosporus pulse. I see him, but how could he ever see me?
* * *
We’re not the only Russian emigres in Kadıköy—far from it—but it sometimes seems like Grisha and Gulnaz are the only real people around me; them and my Roman phantoms. It wasn’t always like that. On the frantic flight from Moscow I got seated beside another Sergey, same age as me, fresh-graduated from Moscow Phystech, and for the next six months we almost never separated. Pretty quickly the other Russians in town saw us, spoke of us, Sergey Sergeyevich and Sergey Ivanovich, as a collective unit: Sergey & Sergey.
I was as shocked as anyone when Sergey Ivanovich said he was going back to Russia. When he sat me down to talk about it (privately, Sergey & Sergey and a split bottle of imported Georgian wine) he said he couldn’t get past the memory of all the things he’d left behind: his parents, his sister, the girl a year behind him at Phystech he’d been talking with on Telegram all through exile. He missed the way Moscow memorializes Soviet ambition and Space Age yearning, the rise and falls of its seven hills, how parks between socialist-slab apartments get lush and green in summertime like accidental Edens. Russia, in short. Our entire world, until it wasn’t.
“I don’t feel like I’m living here,” Sergey Ivanovich told me. “I’m just in this place. But I’m not really here.”
And I asked him: “What if you get conscripted? You won’t even be alive then.”
“They’re barely taking people from Moscow anymore. Not people like us.”
“But what if?” I never thought I was brave, but I really felt like a coward.
“I think I can risk it,” he said.
And he did. After that, Sergey & Sergey became Sergey alone. We keep in touch via Telegram but a smartphone screen is no substitute for a real face. He feels more distant now than my fabricated Eastern Romans.
But he calls to me. His messages appear habitually on my phone, which automatically archives them for review in darkest hours of the morning, lying in bed a wall away from Grisha and Gulnaz, pretending I don’t hear them.
He’s said to me:
I’ve gotten settled in an apartment off Vernadsky Prospekt. It’s old but not in bad shape. The landlady’s pretty obliging. I’m sharing it with two guys about our age. One works at a trading company at MIBC and the other one graduated from Moscow State three years ago. (He’s into physics so I doubt you know him.) He jumped to Georgia in September and came back the same time I did. He said he just couldn’t stand being away anymore and decided to take his chances. There’s a lot of us like that.
And he told me:
Yuri (the physics grad I mentioned) got work at Lavochkin this week. He was down on his chances of finding a job when he came back but it didn’t take him too long and salary’s good. We took him to the Arbat last night to celebrate (and made him pay for it). So things are moving along here. How is the Wolf & Bear?
Later he asked:
Have you thought about coming back? I don’t think you have to worry about conscription anymore. I haven’t heard of anyone getting called up in months. It’s quiet here. Things feel mostly like they used to. If you decide to come back to Moscow I can probably hook you up with a place to stay.
One day (after I crossed the strait, saw Stephan/Selim catch a fish, and took the ferry back home) Sergey Ivanovich wrote this to me:
I was talking to Victor Pavlovich (the other roommate, the one at MIBC) and he says a position’s opened up at his company for a junior-level archivist. Pay’s cheap but they want someone to manage the company records after the last one dropped dead (heart attack!). I told him about you. Said you’re used to going through library/archives. I also said you’re desperate for money (sorry). He knows you’re an emigre, says it shouldn’t be a problem.
I can’t promise anything, but if you come back to Russia, there’s a decent chance I can get you a job. And with a job you’ll be safe, right? Think about it.
* * *
Here’s one more. I call her Eudokia. Every afternoon she comes to the shore with a loaf of bread and, tear by tear, tosses pieces to the gulls. She’s dressed from crown to soles in black, the color of mourning, and has been for fifteen years. Her husband died fighting the Turks and smallpox took all four children in a month. Everybody in Chalcedon knows this so they let her be. They curse her for her storm of gulls she summons and privately talk of shooing her away, but nobody does. It’s not just respect for her grief; though unspoken, they feel like Eudokia’s in touch with something deep, that she mourns not just personal loss but something more. It’s the fourteenth, even fifteenth century and they all know they’re in the twilight years.
The real Eudokia’s in a black burqa, not a mourning dress, but she looks grave as she sits on the bench, tossing crumbs to clamoring gulls. She’s always alone, and I always see her at the same bench. Nobody chases her off. Why I can’t say. Probably she has grief of her own; maybe a kid lost in Syria. Maybe they don’t want to fight through her white-wing storm. Watching her I feel intangible grief, and it makes me think of the Second Rome nearing its second end.
* * *
And I wonder if I want it to end. It won’t be so calamitous as an Ottoman Conquest; no siege, no cracking cannons or crashing walls. Just get on a plane to Moscow. Endure the glares and harassment at customs. See Sergey Ivanovich. Meet Victor Pavlovich. Woo my new bosses, take my slim but extant paycheck, keep my head down, hope Putin’s reaper doesn’t come for me, endure in the Third Rome. Leave the Second behind, leave Grisha and Gulnaz too.
I sat on Sergey Ivanovich’s offer for a day before I took it to them. (I surprised myself by waiting that long; I depend on them for everything else and I think I wanted them to choose for me too.) I told them everything the other Sergey told me, which I admitted wasn’t much.
Grisha met it with crossed arms and hard eyes. “What have you decided?” he asked.
I said, “I haven’t.”
“If you want to go, that’s fine. It’s your choice, but think about it hard,” he said, and nothing more. He went back into the kitchen to help clean up. Like I said, he never draws stuff out.
But Gulnaz lingered. She said, “If you go back to Moscow, I don’t think you’ll get conscripted. The worst of that’s probably passed.”
I said, “It’ll help if I get the job.”
“There’s no guarantee you will, though. It might even be filled by the time you fly there.”
I said, “I know.”
She added, “Your parents will be glad to have you back in Russia. Even if there is a risk.”
“I haven’t decided if I’m going yet. I really haven’t.”
“The longer you wait, the less likely that job’ll be there for you.”
I said, “I know.”
She kept frowning thoughtfully, and I hung on her lips waiting for her next hard-chosen words to decide me. But all she said was, “You’re smart, Sergey. You’ll decide whatever’s best for you. Just don’t wait too long.” Then she joined Grisha in the kitchen.
In the following instant I felt insulted, even angry. It felt like a blow-off, but looking back I’m pretty sure she meant exactly what she said.
The next morning I went down to Kadıköy’s corniche. If I was going to decide my fate I had to do it away from the restaurant, my brother, and Gulnaz. I usually come here in the afternoon before work and the harbor seemed desolate. Only a few ferries were in the dock; most of the benches facing the water were empty. No Eudokia with her white-wing griefs, no Michael and Zoe stealing snogs in the bushes. The sky was gray, the wind hard and water-flecked; Bosporus spray or dismal rain, I couldn’t tell. Even the gulls were sparse. Holy Wisdom and the Second Rome rested beyond violent water, enduring and unmoved.
I walked down the cape, toward the lighthouse. A stupid thing to do when the wind’s harsh and the rocks are wet, but I did it anyway. I thought I was alone but when I almost reached the end a man stepped out from behind the white pillar. Young body, weathered face, good beard, New York baseball cap on his head. Alexios on the rocks, just like me.
We were the only two on the cape. I’d been walking steadily for the lighthouse but when our eyes met I froze like an idiot. I wavered, going neither forward nor back. He stayed where he was, looking at me, just too far away for me to read expression, but I had the feeling he’d recognized me as I’d recognized him.
Then a gust came, stronger than the others. Waves crashed higher and I flinched to cover my face against the water-spray. When I straightened and looked I caught a black fleck sailing through the air, then falling into the water. Alexios/Ahmet scowled at the rocky shore, head and hairline fully exposed for the first time that I’d ever seen. I understood why he wore the hat.
Then I followed his eyes to the water and saw his black speck in the churning white foam.
\Another wash of tide stranded it on the rough rocks, not far from me. Another big wave might wash it away again. I didn’t have time to hesitate or even think about the risk I took on slippery and treacherous stones. I just went in and did it, stretching out both feet and then both hands, clambering like a four-legged spider to grab the guy’s baseball cap by the brim. I got away just before the next wave crashed, and when I stood straight on drier stone Alexios/Ahmet was there, waiting for me.
He took the soggy salty hat, squeezed it with a fist, took an extra glance at my face and said, “Thank you,” in toneless English.
I tried to do better: “Birşey değil.”
He blinked. “Evet. Teşekkür ederim.”
I think I smiled then, the goofy grin of someone who’d realized he’s done something perilously stupid and gotten away with it. Turks, like Russians, are wary of prolific smilers but he (Alexios/Ahmet/something else) seemed to forgive me; he smiled back.
But as soon as the smile went away, we remembered what we were. We were both locked in the middle of the narrow cape, uncertain what to do. His baseball cap was soaked in seawater but he tugged it on anyway, eager to hide his hairline.
Still stupid, I decided to talk. I told him, “Şapkayı beğendim. New York’lu musunuz?”
Idiot question. Of course he’s not from New York. He said, “Hayır,” and then he asked, “Amerikan mısın?”
“Hayır, ben Russian.”
He nodded, like he’d expected that. “Moskova’dan mısınız?”
“Moskova,” I said, and decided to take it a little further. “Istanbullu musun?”
“Hayır, ben Antakyaluyum. Antakya’u biliyor musun?”
He was from Antakya, Antioch of old, pretty much the opposite end of the country from Istanbul. “Evet,” I said, then tried: “Ne kadar zamandır İstanbul’dasınız?”
“Üç yıl,” Three years he’s been here, maybe watching the Bosporus all that time.
“Burası hoşunuza gidiyor mu?” I asked if he liked it here.
Small talk, easy talk even I could manage, but his face screwed up. “Burada dayanamıyorum. Çok fazla insan var. Ama burada iyi para kazanabiliyorum.”
I was pretty sure I got that. Short answer: no, but at least he could make a living. “Bu iyi.” I nodded and thought back to the woman I’d seen him with once. “Karın var mı? Ailen?”
“Evli değilim.” No wife for him.
But I mentioned the woman I’d seen him with before. “Seni bir keresinde bir kadınla gördüm.”
“Belki Fatıma’yı gördün… Belki Halide’yi.” Frown turned to grin. “Kız arkadaşlarım var.”
So he had options. I smiled. He smiled, then he looked over my shoulder, signaling he was ready to go. I sidestepped onto rougher rock to allow him passage. As he brushed by me and I said, “Ben Sergey’im. Adınız ne?”
“Ben Mustafa’yım,” he said.
Mustafa. Not Alexios, not Ahmet, not even the right letter.
“Haberleşelim,” I said. Maybe later.
He stopped, seemed to think a moment. Then he nodded, turned, and was gone. I watched him dwindle toward the promenade and disappear, leaving me with water and stone and wind. I sighed, looked to the lonely lighthouse, the churning Bosporus and the low gray surge of the City. Then, with slow and careful steps, I went down the cape, all the way to the end.
* * *
One more time, picture this:
He’s come to the City from far away, beyond the Black Sea, past the tortured Pontic Steppe. He’s too young to have traveled so far; he can’t even grow a good beard like the locals. But he’s yearned to be here all the same, and when the day ends (say it’s the seventh or the eleventh century, it doesn’t matter) he stands on Chalcedon’s rocky cape and watches sundown dance on the Bosporus, watches Hagia Sophia’s domes turn black, watches twilight crown the Second Rome with dying gold. (Does he have to have a name? Fine. Call him Sergius.)
He dreamed of being here long before he got here. He wanted to see and know the Second Rome’s inherited glory, but now he doesn’t know what to do. He could go back whence he’s come, but it’s a dangerous journey and Sergius doesn’t know if he can make it through unscathed. He could stay here, always the stranger and almost alone, but not entirely. There’s a place he can go to and a few people who welcome him. Their presence is comfort and subtler torture, and sometimes he doesn’t think he can stand it, but in a perilous world you can’t afford to close an open door.
So maybe Sergius can stay here, like this, for a while. Maybe in time limbo will stop feeling like limbo and start feeling like life. He’s sure it’s happened before, to other people in other centuries, so why shouldn’t it happen to him? Millennia of detritus has washed upon Bosporus shores and he’s just one of many, scouring continents for purchase, finding none, not in the City’s crowd-crushed streets, the navy churn of its straits or the gull-flecked marble of its skies, its strata of fickle history and relentless time, its seven hills and Holy Wisdom, but Sergius scours anyway for something sweet and right enough to live up to the lie.
Because after all, it was never really Rome.
S.G. Ondercin lives in twenty-first century Chicago, mostly.