“Palamut” by Mark Jacobs

The palamut at the fish place in Fenerbahçe doesn’t taste like it used to. Dick Vickery is beside himself. His face, already ruddy with sun and strong opinions, flushes. He puts his fork down, about to call the waiter to send his plate back to the kitchen. Louise, his wife, grasps his forearm and tells him no. He relents.

“I don’t get it,” he tells Rachel. There is more perplexity than sulk in his voice. “October is the month for palamut. I can’t tell you how many times we came here in October. When the plane touched down, my mouth started watering.”

Rachel has no idea what to say to him. The Vickerys are—were—her parents’ friends. When the Dillards learned the Vickerys would be in Istanbul at the same time as their daughter, they considered it a lucky coincidence. Over a day and a half, Rachel kept saying no. By phone and by text, she explained that it was a work trip, she would be too busy. Finally, she gave in. To her parents in Falls Church, a week out from her father’s cataract surgery, it seemed strangely important. Rachel, an only child, could not refuse to be their emissary to the past.

Evening in its shawl. Behind them, the Bosporus is a giant dark presence, something out of a folk tale that will devour you if not propitiated. The restaurant is filling up with a roughly equal mix of Turks and foreigners. Turkish pop plays through good speakers. Rachel resists the urge to look at her phone for the time.

This is not the first time she has met the Vickerys. Dick was the Army attaché at the U.S. embassy in Amman when her parents were stationed there. A long time ago. Rachel was in middle school. She remembers Dick more distinctly than Louise. At embassy parties, he had a way of taking over the room. Now, she would have recognized neither of them on the street.

Up or out, her father used to say. There was a time-tempered bitterness in his words. Get promoted or retire, that was the system. Dick Vickery topped out as a colonel. Owen Dillard did the same in the foreign service equivalent as an FS-01 officer. Beginning in the Cold War and continuing into the stiffening antagonisms that came in its wake, both men are considered to have had honorable careers in the service of their country.

At seventy-something, Dick’s sandy hair has a washed-out look as though it, too, has been retired from service. He carries no excess weight on his slight frame and has retained something of a military bearing. Louise has allowed her hair to discover its natural fine silver. She wears it short in a perky cut that belies the age spots on the flesh of her arms, and a pseudo-ascetic gauntness. She loved being the wife of the Army attaché, Rachel’s mother told her. Her husband’s accomplishments meant the world to Louise.

Trying to deflect Dick from the disappointment of his fish, Louise asks Rachel to tell them about her business. Both of them listen attentively.

“I work for the Palmerston Group. We specialize in boutique, one-of-a-kind hotels around the world.”

“In other words, expensive,” says Dick.

“Well, they’re not for the budget-minded. We cater to people looking for a unique travel experience they won’t get at a chain, regardless of how upscale it is.”

She is new in the job. She makes more money than her father ever did with the federal government. She is confident, internalizing the Palmerston way of doing business, which is exacting, not to say unforgiving. Her ambition, she has been told by a mentor, is a muscle that must be exercised.

Louise says, “You have your eye on a place here, is that it?”

“It’s called the Gelincik. Three blocks from the Hippodrome. It’s owned by a well-known old Istanbul family, the Aslans.”

Dick says, “I take it you’re here to negotiate with them.”

“We haven’t reached that stage yet. My job is to confirm agreement in principle with the family. And I’ll make my own assessment of the property. We believe it will be a good fit for us, but I want to have an up-close look at the place and ask some hard questions.”

 They talk with ease, considering they are strangers. The palamut, in Rachel’s opinion, is excellent. The Vickerys ask questions about her parents. She answers as if representing their interests, the way a conscientious lawyer would, offering nothing that is not true, although her editing is judicious. They are drinking white wine. It goes to her head, and she feels a fleeting euphoria. The dense immensity of Istanbul suddenly feels like a gift.

At one point, Dick taps the handle of his knife on the table, Old King Cole calling for his pipe. “Here’s the problem,” he tells Rachel. “Nothing stays put.”

“Rachel doesn’t want to listen to you moan and groan,” Louise tells him.

“Whose fault is it?” Dick insists. “That’s what I want to know.”

Rachel has no answer. She barely understands the question.

Paying the bill, Dick tells the waiter, “Palamut güzel deḡildi.”

The waiter is a plump bald man of fifty in a white shirt, his black tie slightly askew. He flinches but covers his reaction with a steel smile.

On the way out, Rachel asks him, “What did you say to him?”

“I told him the fish was no good.”

Rachel is glad the meal is over. She has done her filial duty. Saying goodbye in the street, she feels a sense of relief. In the short taxi ride to her hotel, she composes a chirpy text to her parents, hoping that will be the end of it.

She is still slightly jetlagged, and sleep eludes her. In her hotel room—not at the Gelincik, but a comfortable small place in Beşiktaş recommended by the Palmerston CFO—she sits in a wing-backed chair, going over the questions she will ask the Aslans. So she’s awake when Sam calls. He’s working at home in Park Slope. Writing code. Sam is always writing code. Dinner with the Vickerys has unsettled Rachel. It has to do with Dick’s over-the-top reaction to the fish. It would be good to sort through what she’s feeling, but her boyfriend doesn’t do relationships. Find your island, he’s always telling her. Plant your flag. Go live there. It’s not that he lacks empathy, but he experiences it at a distance.

“So did you like them?” he wants to know.

“I didn’t hate them.”

“Cool.”

“One thing was strange.”

“What?”

“I get the idea that Dick Vickery wants everything to be the way he remembers it, and it’s not.”

“That’s the way old people get. They can’t handle change.”

“It’s not that simple,” she tells him.

“Sure it is.”

This is why she restricts her conversation with Sam. He has blind spots. Any other time, she would tally the great things about him that compensate, but exhaustion has finally caught up with her, and five minutes later, she is asleep.

The next morning, she takes a taxi along the Bosporus on the European side of the city. The driver drops her at a high black iron gate shielding a sprawling waterside property, assertively taken up with a stone house of three stories. Rachel follows a flagstone walk down the park-like grounds that slope toward the strait below. Peacocks wander in and out of hedges and along winding paths. They seem to be looking for something they have misplaced. Under a pergola on which the leaves from primordial grape vines have made a dense mat, two tawny cats lying on their sides bat each other with their paws. A gardener sets down his wheelbarrow and stares briefly at Rachel, then goes back to work.

Istanbul is leaving the summer behind. The chilly air is damp. In a place she does not know, Rachel feels the change of season in her body like the sliding of a bolt in its lock.

The house imposes itself on her. The massive wooden door is opened not by a servant, as she expects, but by Davut Aslan. She recognizes him from Zoom meetings. He’s in his forties, the middle child of three, and the one most involved in selling the Gelincik.

“Hoş geldiniz, Rachel. That means welcome. Come in. My parents are expecting you.”

In chinos, a blazer, and exquisite loafers, giving off a faint odor of cloves, Davut strikes her as a domestic creature. His longish dark hair is thinning in strings. A Buddha smile lights his round ivory face. He conducts her through the house to a large, high-ceilinged room with crown molding and an impossibly ornate chandelier. Four tall windows offer glorious views of the Bosporus, on which sheets of thick gray mist lie resisting the encroachment of morning.

Mustafa Aslan, the patriarch, sits straight in a wheelchair, put there a year earlier by a stroke. His thin legs are covered with a plaid blanket. A hawk nose and an expression of hauteur at odds with the words of welcome he offers his American visitor. The red-lipped smile on the face of Bahar, his wife, gives away nothing. She stands stately in a dark dress displaying jewelry that looks as though it belongs in a museum.

In fact, there is something museum-like about the whole house. Every piece of furniture, the paintings on the walls, the décor all express gentility and postured ease, but from a bygone era. Old-fashioned divans in plush fabrics take up much of one wall. A lamp with a Tiffany shade preens between two Art Deco chairs.

They sit in a semi-circle to accommodate the man in a wheelchair. A slender middle-aged woman brings tea. The service is silver, the cups are embossed with pink roses. On a tray, a heap of pastries looks extravagant, what you would serve your elderly aunt, the one who is always critical of your arrangements.

Rachel feels no particular anxiety. As their guest, the Aslans invite her to open the conversation, and she rehearses the Palmerston Group’s expectations for the purchase, should it go forward. Davut, at a nod from his father, does the same for the Aslans. All of this has been said before, on both sides, but it’s important to be specific face-to-face. When she stops and sips her tea, the old man blindsides her.

“We assume you will keep the staff. Some of them have been with us their entire working life.”

Wrong. Palmerston will replace everyone. It’s policy, to be followed except in cases of exceptional need. She has been up front about that since the beginning.

She explains, clearly and slowly, although they speak English well, the Palmerston way of taking over a new establishment. She realizes, as she describes the process, that it’s something like occupation by a victorious army. Bahar gets it. She clasps and unclasps her hands, coughing nervously and glancing at her husband as if expecting an explosion. Davut will not cross his father. It’s up to Mustafa to say yes, we understand, or no, we do not wish to go forward.

The patriarch excuses himself. He rolls his chair to one of the big windows and stares out at the Bosporus. The mist is dissipating now. A sizeable ship is coming into view, moving with ponderous grace on the sun-dazzled water. It’s a bulk carrier, black and gunmetal gray, and Rachel imagines it full of grain from Ukraine. In the interval they wait, she feels herself hardening against compromise. When he is ready, Mustafa Aslan signals with an imperious hand that he accepts the deal. Further negotiation on the subject of personnel is not necessary. Why does she feel a twinge of disappointment?

They discuss a few more items on Rachel’s mental list. None is controversial. They shake hands. Smiles predominate. Davut walks her to the door.

“My father,” he says.

“Yes?”

But he cannot bring himself to say whatever it is that’s on his mind. A Mercedes sedan with a pedigree is waiting to take them downtown to the Gelincik. The driver jumps out and opens her door. Davut goes with her. They spend the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon at the hotel, where they are treated with separate deference. To him, it’s the respect owed a member of the family. To her, it’s the courtesy one accords a stranger. Some of the staff, at least, must know the Aslans are on the verge of selling. It’s a terrific hotel, a better-than-terrific location, and Rachel envisions Palmerston’s logo on the door, understated and elegant.

When she has seen enough, asked all the questions she wanted to ask, the driver drops her at her hotel.

“My father,” says Davut again as she says goodbye, but again he is unable to say what he would like to say. He shakes his head, bites his lips. “Iyi yolculuklar,” he tells her. “It means have a good trip.”

In her room, she begins a written summary of the visit, with her recommendation to buy, when she gets a call from Louise Vickery.

“Can you come over? Something’s going on with Dick.”

“Is he sick? Have you called a doctor?”

“He’s not sick, he’s… agitated. He says he has to talk to you.”

There is apology in her voice. There is also frustration, and possibly some anger.

“I’m working,” Rachel tells her.

“Don’t make me beg.”

Rachel reluctantly takes a cab to the Otel Dedeler, a funky old place in Karaköy near the famous Galata Tower, built by Genoese traders in the fourteenth century. She guesses this is where the Vickerys used to stay when Dick was on active duty. Istanbul was a welcome getaway for people serving in Middle Eastern countries with repressive social systems. In Dick’s day, the conservatives had not taken over Turkey. Cosmopolitan Istanbul was a haven of secular pleasures.

Louise is waiting for her on the sidewalk in front of the Dedeler. Dick’s agitation has agitated her, but when she thanks Rachel for coming, her manner is calm.

“He’s in the room. Four twenty one.”

“What’s going on, Louise?”

“We have a condo on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Cape Coral? Dick can’t stand it. We roam around the world like refugees.”

“What about you?”

The question surprises Louise. Possibly no one ever asks it. She runs a tanned hand through her silver hair. Her face wrinkles, unwrinkles. She sizes Rachel up.

“You’re probably too young.”

“Too young for what?”

“To understand what it’s like, outliving everything. But Jane Marie and Owen, you must see it in them.”

Rachel has a sense, in that moment, of staring down an endless tunnel. At the far end, she can just make out her parents. They seem to be shouting with some urgency, but she can’t quite make out the words.

Louse goes for a walk. She remembers a bookstore and wonders if it might still be there. Rachel takes an old-fashioned lift with velvet walls of pale violet and bright varnished wood to the fourth floor. As she lifts her hand to knock on room 421, the door opens.

“You’re here. Good.”

Dick invites her in. He seems less military today. He has missed a spot on his chin, shaving. She tries not to look. His lips work with exertion, but nothing comes out. She follows him out to a small balcony with an iron railing where he lights a cigarette. Below them is a high-walled courtyard of ancient bricks. A palm tree with limp fronds sits in a big clay pot. Two boys are kicking a soccer ball in the match of their lives. Their cries rise like bird calls. A minuscule breeze takes away the smoke of Dick’s cigarette.

No chairs. They stand, Dick, leaning his forearms on the railing, watching the boys play soccer. Standing feels good.

“What did Louise tell you?”

“That you’re agitated.”

“That’s one word for it.”

He takes another long pleasurable drag. Probably he rations his smokes, so many a day.

She wants to be straightforward. “I don’t understand.”

A quizzical look. Something like a smile.

“In Amman, I got myself in a jam.”

“What kind of a jam?”

“Let myself get crosswise with the DCM.”

Deputy chief of mission, she remembers. After the ambassador, the power in the embassy, charged with making it run right.

Dick wants to tell her the story, and Rachel relents. Suddenly, she does not mind hearing it. Maybe this is what her parents are trying to tell her, shouting down that lengthening tunnel. The DCM, Dick tells her, was an asshole, a kick-down, kiss-up kind of guy whose every decision hinged on what he thought would make him look good. Dick went to him with some intelligence that contradicted what the DCM was preaching to the ambassador. It had to do with back-channel talks the army commander was opening with a breakaway faction of the PLO. The king had not been informed.

“The son of a bitch reamed me out. In front of people. More than once. Anyway, your father made it his business to work his own contacts and confirm my intel. Gave it to the DCM on a platter at the pol-mil meeting. Owen’s work stood up. The frigging DCM had to back down. It made the rest of my tour a whole lot more comfortable than it looked like it was going to be, for a while there.”

Rachel feels jets of warmth circulating in her body, hearing the story about her father. She asks Dick, “And now?”

“Now? What’s the point, Rachel? What’s the goddamn point of anything?”

She’s not sure that telling her the story does him any good, but she understands why he wanted to talk to her. In the lobby of the hotel, as she leaves, she meets Louise. The bookstore she had remembered is gone.

Rachel’s ticket home has an open return date. She wasn’t sure how much time she was going to need. Back at her hotel, she decides to take tomorrow to see something of the city. Her memories of the place – dim but evocative – go back to childhood, when her parents came through on a vacation. Nobody at Palmerston will begrudge her the day. She reads online for a while, making a list of sites and neighborhoods. The last thing she expects is a phone call from Mustafa Aslan.

“Miss Dillard?”

“Rachel, please. How can I help you, Mr. Aslan?”

“Are you free tomorrow morning? If you are, I would like to show you something.”

He is doing his best to dial back the habit of command in his voice. Rachel is curious. She agrees to meet him at nine the next morning. He will pick her up in the Mercedes. She texts Sam, but he does not respond. When he codes, he disappears. Code is music, he believes, and he writes symphonies. She considers calling her parents, but is not yet sure what she wants to say about the Vickerys. She walks around Karaköy, has dinner in a hole-in-the-wall fish place Dick would approve of, and goes to sleep early.

Next morning, the air is cool, but the sunlight spills in cascades across the city. Traffic is terrible, but Egemen, the driver, is patient and skillful. Rachel sits in the back seat next to Aslan, who is dressed casually, meaning without a tie. He has the poise of a man whose elevated position in society has never been challenged.

“We are going to cross a bridge over the Bosporus,” he explains, “and go to a neighborhood on the Asian side of the city called Körler. It’s a bit of a drive, for which I apologize.”

They ride in silence for a couple of minutes, but it’s obvious that the old man does not want to show but to tell Rachel something.

“When you went to the hotel with Davut yesterday, did you meet the bookkeeper?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Her name is Arsema.”

“No, I’m sure I didn’t.”

“A pity. She is among our most talented employees. I call her our bookkeeper, but she runs the computer network as well.”

They are driving alongside the Bosporus. It appears and disappears as Egemen follows the flow of traffic along the congested street. They cross the bridge and move through sluggish traffic, which sometimes stacks up at an intersection or along a narrow street. This part of Istanbul is not picturesque, like the European side of the city. It’s crowded with commercial blocks of stores selling products of every description, including everything you need to build a house. There are no stand-alone houses, though. People live in enormous, hulking apartment buildings that are ugly, like those in pictures Rachel has seen of Eastern European cities under the Soviets.

“I wish you had met Arsema,” Aslan tells Rachel.

Egemen says something in Turkish to his employer then. They have arrived in Körler. The chauffeur pilots the Mercedes to a stop alongside a small, charmless park. A swingset and a merry-go-round, some spindly trees behind a low fence of iron spikes. Advertising slogans splash color across the backs of concrete benches. Egemen comes around the side of the car to open Aslan’s door. He helps him up and out. But not into his wheelchair. Aslan walks, holding the driver’s arm, to a bench where he sits down stiffly. Rachel has followed them and sits next to him.

“Chai, lütfen,” Aslan tells Egemen, who goes in search of tea.

“I can walk a little,” he tells Rachel. “It always feels good when I do, although later I will pay the price in exhaustion.”

Inside five minutes, a boy with big feet in broken shoes is there with an aluminum tray on which sit cups of tea in small glasses. There are lumps of sugar on the saucers. Aslan gestures, and Rachel picks up a glass. She stirs in sugar with a tiny aluminum spoon. The tea, she decides, tastes like Istanbul.

Egemen has gone back to the Mercedes. White-faced and dour, he stands at attention on the curb. Rachel thinks he might be armed. Probably a pistol in his jacket.

She is ready for Mustafa Aslan’s story.

“I want to ask you to consider keeping Arsema on at the Gelincik.”

He expects directness from her. She is, after all, an American representing an American company. They are notorious for their hard-driving ways and for their ruthlessness in the pursuit of profit. Rachel will baffle the expectation.

“Please tell me why.”

“Arsema is Armenian. You must know the bad history of Armenians in this country.”

“The Ottomans committed genocide against them.”

He nods slowly, stirring sugar into his tea. “The government is sensitive about calling it that. They refuse to accept the term. It has dire implications. But a genocide is indeed what happened. Arsema has a very small family. Most of those who survived the… ordeal left the country, as well they might. Few chose to stay. Her people were among them.”

Rachel does her best not to anticipate him.

Aslan looks up with a start, looks around as if surprised to find himself where he is.

“I come here, now and again, to remind myself what Türkiye really is. It’s not the monuments the tourists love to visit, it’s not families like ours. It is places like this, and the people who live in them.”

They are surrounded by people dressed plainly, going to work, coming from work. They carry bundles and packages. They walk with purpose. They have somewhere to go. Many of the men are bearded. Many of the women cover their faces. The gelid sunlight intensifies the look of endurance they project.

“Arsema has a child,” Aslan says suddenly. “A son, a fine boy. He is bright and hard-working, like his mother.”

He looks at Rachel, wanting to know whether she will insist on his saying that the boy is his son, too. She will not.

“Once the hotel is sold, I will do what I can for Arsema and Stepan, that is the boy’s name. But…” He pauses, seeking a balance between precision and decorum. “There are limits to what I can do.”

“I understand,” Rachel tells him.

The eyes that look at her are old eyes, eyes that have seen pain inflicted, pain absorbed. They have seen upheaval and death and the blue brilliance of sexual passion. They have seen calculation and the abandonment of calculation. Cowardice, and the mystery inside a person that resists cowardice. Mustafa Aslan’s eyes are witnesses to a world beyond Rachel’s reach.

“I will make sure that Arsema keeps her job,” she tells him.

As she says the words, she accepts the complications they will create.

“Teşekkür ederim,” he tells her, and she knows it means thank you.

He stands. Egemen, alert, is ready to come help, but Aslan waves him off. Rachel understands what he wants. She is on her feet, too. She holds out her arm for the old man to steady himself, walking back to the car.