Six Litres

The body left the room toward noon, when the lodos had been blowing for three hours and the rain had not yet decided. Thirteen degrees on the digital sign of the eczane at the corner of İstiklal, a digit that on a different sky would mean a clean spring, but in a southerly off the Marmara means a sea that has been pushed against the city all morning and has begun to complain. The wind on these days carries everything the gulf has agreed not to keep: wet quayside rope, fishmonger's tile an hour after the morning rinse, and beneath both, fainter than the body had any right to expect, the smell that for forty years was simply called pis koku, the dirty smell, the smell one walked into and pretended not to. The body noticed the absence the way one notices a tooth that has stopped aching.

I had folded the article into the inside pocket of the coat before leaving. Two stops earlier, in a kıraathane on Cumhuriyet Caddesi where the proprietor will not allow more than three glasses of tea before he begins to discuss politics, I had read on a phone passed across the formica that the Belediye had finished another hectare of the dip çamuru, the bottom mud of the gulf. The figures arrived in the kind of dry numerals that should not be capable of producing vertigo and yet did: one million eight hundred thousand cubic metres lifted from the floor, the equivalent of two hundred and seventy-one football pitches, a hundred and twenty thousand truckloads carted to wherever such mud is carted. And the figure the body kept turning over without quite knowing what to do with: each pinna nobilis, each great fan-shell anchored by whatever byssus it had managed to spin, sieves six litres of water per hour.

Six litres an hour. Multiplied by the colony the divers had located in January between Tuzla and Hereke, the arithmetic becomes a kind of silent labour the body cannot picture. The clams have been doing it without intermission, without strike, without sabbatical, since whatever year a small mollusc decided this rock was its rock. I sat down on a low wall outside an apartment whose ground floor had once been a fabric shop and put my palm against the limestone to feel whether it was wetter than the air. It was.

Ἀρριανὸς ὁ Νικομηδεύς (Arrianòs ho Nikomedéus) was born here, in a quarter now collapsed under a bus terminal, and wrote, among other things, a treatise on dogs, a manual of tactics, and the discourses of the Stoic Epictetus he had heard as a young man and copied down later for fear of losing them. Almost nothing of it on the sea. The sea was, for him, a thing one crossed; he produced for Hadrian a Periplus of the Pontus, a sober list of distances and harbours and the colour of the water near each mouth. Nicomedia faced inward, toward the heat of Bithynia, toward the road to Ancyra, and the gulf was less the city's window than the city's drain. Cities built on the inner edge of a sea learn, over centuries, to turn their backs to it.

I walked down to the Yat Limanı, where the boats sit on lines that have not been changed for the season. The water at the mole was, there is no other word, clear in a way that ought to have been ordinary and was not. A man with a wire frame was lifting kalkan from a friend's net. A woman pointed at something offshore and used the word yunus three times inside one sentence, the way one uses the name of a relative who has come back unexpectedly. The dolphins. The kadim misafirler, the ancient guests, returning to where for thirty years they had unmade their own routes.

There is in Aelian's Περὶ Ζῴων Ἰδιότητος (Perì Zōiōn Idiótētos) a sentence I do not have before me and which the body remembers in fragments: the dolphin does not belong to the sea so much as the sea belongs to the dolphin. Aelian, who by all accounts never sailed, who compiled his marine zoology from the libraries of Praeneste, manages in three or four of his chapters a kind of accuracy the wet hand does not always produce. He observes that the dolphin disappears when grieved. He observes that it returns when, somewhere, a wrong has been undone.

The body's reading falters here. I do not know whether what has been undone is enough, or whether the gulf has merely been given a single breath of oxygen and the creatures, mistaking the breath for restitution, have come to see. The numerals do not say. The pina sieves its six litres regardless. The dolphin breaches the water and the gulf, for a moment, mistakes itself for what it once was; and the body, on the wall, with the palm against the limestone, mistakes itself, too, for something less borrowed than it is.

Lodos. The wind has shifted half a point. Somewhere along the slope toward Yarımca an awning is being undone by it, and a woman is calling out a name I cannot make out, and the rain, finally, has decided.

Claudius, il Bisso