We were told that Heybeliada lay twelve miles off the coast of Istanbul, the second largest in a constellation of islands the locals knew as Adalar. It was crowned by two steep forested hills to the north and south, and its middle section bowed into a plain of settlements where the natives lived and plied their trades. Much of the work there was seasonal. In the winter, the squat apartment blocks and rangy wooden houses stood vacant and unlit, but when the bright weather came again they filled up with summering Istanbullus, who sat out on their fretwork balconies, sunbathed on the rocky beaches, flocked upon the shining Marmara like gulls, and drank merrily on their roof-decks until dark. The Turkish meaning of its name—Saddlebag Island—evoked its shape at sea level, but, looking down from a higher vantage as we did, the place bore a closer resemblance to a hipbone. It was far up on the south-eastern peak, amidst the dense umbrella pines on the tubercle of the island, that Portmantle was positioned. The only part of it that could be seen from the ferry as you approached was the upper limit of its gabled rooftop, and even this had been seized by so much moss and grime that it was lightly camouflaged.

Every guest who came to Portmantle took the same route from the dock. It required specific information just to find your way. You could not step off the boat and expect to pick up signs. You could not stop into any of the cafés or lokantas on the waterfront to ask for directions. The horse-drawn faytons would not take you there. It was too removed from the populated strip for any of the locals to be concerned with, and those few natives who knew of the place believed it was a private residence, owned by a reclusive academic who took violently to trespassers. And so the refuge was afforded the same courtesy of disregard as any other private mansion or holiday villa on the island, which made it a perfect spot to disappear.

The only way into the refuge was from the east, via Çam Limani Yolu, a dirt road that led up to a spear-top fence, cordoning off the property. MacKinney always said it might be possible to circumvent the gates by swimming across the bay from the south-western point of the island and climbing up the promontory on the blind side, but we had never seen her theory put to the test. The phoney warning posters stapled to the fence along the slope were a good enough deterrent: DIKKAT KÖPEK VAR/BEWARE OF THE DOG.

It was not known how long Portmantle had existed, but we understood that many others had sought refuge there before we ever claimed it: to rescue the depleted minds of artists like us was the reason it was founded. In the seclusion of the grounds, artists could work outside the straitjacket of the world and its pressures. We could tune out those voices that nagged and pecked, forget the doubts that stifled us, dispense with all the mundane tasks, distractions, and responsibilities, detach from the infernal noises of industry—the endless ringing of the telephone, the urging letters that came in logoed envelopes from galleries, publishers, studios, patrons—and work, finally work, without intrusion or the steering influence of another living soul. ‘Creative freedom’, ‘originality’, ‘true expression’—these terms were spoken like commandments at Portmantle, even if they were scarcely realised, or just phantom ideals to begin with. It was no more than a place for recuperation. A sanatorium of sorts—not for the defeat of any physical affliction, but for the relocation of a lost desire, a mislaid trust in art itself. Clarity, we called it: the one thing we could not live without.

It was a custom at Portmantle to forgo the mention of time except in the barest measurements: the passing of days, the turning of seasons, the position of the sun above the trees. Both Ender and the provost kept pocket watches to ensure the smooth running of things, but there were no clocks in our lodgings, and we were not encouraged to have timepieces or calendars of any kind. It would be wrong to say that we were not allowed them, because we were free to do as we pleased, within certain limits. Any of us could have smuggled in a wristwatch or made a sundial with our bodies and a line of chalk, but the idea was acknowledged by everybody as self-defeating. Why should we let our thoughts run clockwise? Why should we live by the laws of a world we were no longer governed by? Art could not be made to fit a timetable. Instead, we used vague descriptors—‘tomorrow morning’, ‘last Wednesday’, ‘three or four seasons ago’, et cetera—and they served us well enough, liberated us from the notion we had that our pulses were countdowns to zero.

That is why I cannot say with complete accuracy how long I had been at Portmantle by the time of Fullerton’s admission. The year I arrived was 1962, but since then I had watched so many winters frost the surrounding pines that they had begun to blur into one grey season, as vast and misted as the sea. Early on, I ran out of things to write in my journal, so I could not extrapolate a definite figure from the tally of entries. According to my best calculation, though, I had spent at least ten years at Portmantle along with MacKinney, while Quickman and Pettifer were closing in on eight.

We were given false names because our real ones were too much baggage; some reputations were greater than others, and Portmantle was intended to be a place of parity. It was also believed that our real names fostered complacency and restricted us to established methods, familiar modes of thought. So the provost chose new surnames for us from telephone directories and old ship’s manifests (he collected these on his travels and archived them in folders in his study). Our given names took no account of race or ethnicity, which is why MacKinney—the daughter of Russian émigrés—bore the handle of a Celt, and why the place had been home to numerous other oddities: a Lebanese painter called Dubois, an Italian novelist called Howells, a Slav illustrator called Singh, a Norwegian architect who answered only to O’Malley. In a funny way, we became more attached to our false names than the true ones. After a while, they began to suit us better.

I was born Elspeth Conroy in Clydebank, Scotland, on 17th March 1937. I had always thought my family name quite unremarkable, and my Christian name so formal and girl-pretty. Elspeth Conroy, I felt, was the name of a debutante or a local politician’s wife, not a serious painter with vital things to say about the world, but it was my fate and I had to accept it. My parents believed a refined Scottish name like Elspeth would enable me to marry a man of higher class (that is to say, a rich man) and, eventually, I managed to prove their theory wrong in every aspect. Still, I always suspected my work was undermined by that label, Elspeth Conroy. Did people exact their judgements upon me in galleries when they noticed my name? Did they see my gender on the wall, my nationality, my class, my type, and fail to connect with the truth of my paintings? It is impossible to know. I made my reputation as an artist with this label attached and it became the thing by which people defined and categorised me. I was a Scottish female painter, and thus I was recorded in the glossary of history. One day, when I felt secure enough to leave Portmantle, I would return to being Elspeth Conroy, take her off the peg like a stiff old coat and see if she still fitted. Until then, I was allowed to be someone different. Knell. Good old Knell. Separate and yet the same. Without her, I was nobody.

Of the four of us, it was surely Quickman who valued his detachment most. In the early days, we could not look at him without thinking of the famous photograph on the back cover of his novels—the sunflower lean of him towards the lens, arms crossed defiantly, the brooding London skyline on his shoulders. We had grown up with him on our shelves, that stylish young face squinting at us over bookends, from underneath coffee mugs on our bedside tables. His real name was known in many households, even if it was not part of daily conversation; in literary circles, it was a synonym for greatness, a word that critics added esque to in reviews of lesser writers. Every resident at Portmantle—even the provost—had owned, or at least seen, a copy of Quickman’s first book, In Advent of Rain, published when he was only twenty-one. It was a required text on school curricula in Britain, considered a classic of its time. But the good-natured soul we knew as Quickman was not quite the same person—he was prickly at times, though self-effacing, and stood opposed to all the fuss and fanfare of the literary scene. Now he hungered only for a quiet room to be alone, a basic legal pad, and enough Staedtler HB pencils to fill an old cigar box. His given name suited him perfectly. His speed of thought was exceptional. And he was so unbothered with grooming that his beard spread all across his cheekbones like gorse; it hid the handsome symmetry of his features and gave him the look of a man long shipwrecked.

Pettifer’s real name also held some weight out in the world. As an architect, he was rarely in the public eye and, in truth, his stubby face did not register with me at all when I first saw it. If he ever spoke of buildings he was responsible for (it happened, on occasion, when he got maudlin), their shapes could be summoned to mind, but only in the nostalgic way you might recall a favourite chair or a special bottle of wine. His real name was the type brought up at dinner parties and society gatherings, after which people nodded and said, ‘Ah yes, I always liked that building. That’s one of his, is it?’ Now he was so used to being called Pettifer, and its various abbreviations, that he had vowed to adopt it when he left the island. He would establish a whole new practice one day, so he claimed, under the banner of Pettifer & Associates. We did not know if this was a serious promise, but it would not have surprised us to find such a plan eventuated.

Of course, we assumed that Fullerton’s real name must have held some equal notoriety on the mainland—everyone at Portmantle had earned a reputation in their field, which is why great measures were taken to safeguard its location. The fact is, we were too removed from the world to understand the scale of the boy’s renown. He was a frequent surprise to us.

He did not show up for dinner on his first evening, and I found myself worrying about him more than I had reason to. What if he had caught the flu, I wondered, or pneumonia? I could not bear the thought of him alone and suffering in his room, having had a bladder infection myself during the summer: there were few things quite as lonely as a summertime fever, with the sunshine spearing in through the shutters as you lay waiting for the provost’s medicine to take hold. I believed a winter illness might be the only thing worse. And so the four of us agreed—not entirely unanimously—that we should pass by his lodging after dinner, just to make sure he was in decent health.

Pettifer was curious to see the boy’s studio and find out what he was working on. ‘He’s surely too young to be a painter,’ he had suggested at dinner. ‘I’ve known a few good illustrators under twenty, but still—seventeen. Awfully young to have any sort of authoritative voice or style. Unless he’s one of those ghastly pop artists. He doesn’t look the type to me. But then, why would they have given him a studio when there are plenty of free rooms upstairs?’

Fullerton had been allocated the remotest lodging on the grounds, set fifty yards back from my own, in a closet of pomegranate trees and dwarf oaks, and so many varieties of oleander in the spring. The refuge comprised ten buildings, spread over what was said to be nine acres but which felt more like fifteen. An imperious fin-de-siècle mansion with spindly wrought-iron cornices loomed at the dead centre; its timber panelling was so weather-struck that its entire bulk had taken on a dreary, elephantine colour. The provost lived on the top floor. He had decided against repainting as the building’s very drabness was its most effective disguise. In certain places, below the guttering and such, we could make out the remnants of the original aquamarine gloss and could imagine the house as it once was, the majestic thing it was made to be.

At full capacity, the other twelve bedrooms in the mansion were occupied by artists whose projects demanded little by way of space or apparatus: the playwrights, the novelists, the poets, the children’s book writers were all sheltered here in humble rooms, along with Ender and his staff of two: a youngish woman, Gülcan, who cooked, cleaned, and laundered, and an ungainly fellow called Ardak who saw to the garden and generally fixed things about the place that did not work (if only he could have fixed us too). The day room was on the ground floor, the kitchen and mess hall on the level above. Orbiting the mansion were eight basic cinderblock huts with flat shingle rooftops that guests would often sit upon when the weather allowed, watching the trawl of the sea, examining the stars. These were the studio lodgings for the painters, the architects, the performance makers: any artist who required a broader plot to work in, or who had materials and equipment to store. (Only one sculptor had been admitted in our time, and she had made such a commotion throughout the workday with her chisels and hammers that there had been great relief when she finally left—no others had been invited since.)

The studio huts had all the grandeur of shoeboxes, but they were spacious enough to feel untrammelled, and had large windows that vented cool air and natural light. Mine served its function as well as any workspace I had ever owned. I had everything I needed: a bed to sleep on, a coke-burning stove to warm my fingers by, regular meals up at the mansion, a place for ablutions and calls of nature, and, above all, a glorious peace I could count on not to be broken.

As we approached Fullerton’s lodging, we found his door hanging open. The lamps were on and a stream of yellow light was angling out onto the trodden snow outside. ‘I’m quite sure he said to leave him alone,’ Quickman warned us. ‘He might actually be getting work done in there.’

‘Shsshh,’ I said. ‘Can you hear that?’

There was an odd din emanating from behind the studio. It was not a musical sound as such, though it had a bouncing sort of cadence. ‘See, I told you—he’s perfectly all right,’ Pettifer said. ‘We’ve done our duty. Let’s go.’

MacKinney pulled on my elbow.

‘I’ll fetch the board then, shall I?’ Quickman said. ‘Pretty sure I had it last.’

‘Knell—are you coming?’

‘You three go. I won’t be long.’ I could not settle until I saw the boy again. Quickman’s backgammon games sometimes ran late, depending on how well Pettifer fared against him, and I planned to stay up afterwards, working until dawn—I would probably miss breakfast. It seemed cruel to leave Fullerton unchecked for all that time. ‘I’m just going to look in the window.’

The others started backpedalling through the snow. Then they paused, waiting in the moon-blue space between the dwarf oaks. They made hurry-up gestures with their hands: ‘Go on then!’ ‘Get on with it!’ ‘Don’t take all night!’

I walked up to the bare front window of Fullerton’s lodging. The shutters were folded back and the inner blind was not yet closed. Nobody was inside. His canvas bag lay open on the floor with most of his clothes spilling out. There was a classical guitar leaned against the bedframe. He did not quite have the look of a composer to me, or the swagger of a rock’n’roll singer, but I thought perhaps he could have written music for the theatre or the folk scene.

It was then that he emerged from around the side of the hut, dragging an oil drum behind him. I had no time to move away. When he saw me, he stood still, but he did not flinch or seem surprised. He carried on hauling the empty drum through the snow, towards a patch of level ground, where he shoved down hard on its edges to stabilise it. ‘Knell with a K,’ he said, sounding less angry than I expected. ‘Are you lost?’

‘I just wanted to see how you were feeling.’ This came out rather meekly. ‘You missed dinner.’

‘Wasn’t hungry,’ he said. ‘Mystery solved.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

He gazed at the ground. A fat bird cawed and streaked the dark above us. Fullerton jerked his head up. ‘The crows are all grey here. I can’t get used to it.’

‘You should see the herons when they come in the spring. They make nests all round the island. It’s wonderful.’

The boy gave an uninterested murmur. Then he turned for his lodging and walked straight inside, leaving the door wide open. I was not sure if he was coming back. I waited, hearing the scuff of his footsteps on the floorboards. After a moment, he came out with a stack of what seemed to be pamphlets or magazines, bearing them in his arms like offerings. He did not look at me, just tipped the entire set into the rusty drum, rumbling it. The glossy covers glinted as they dropped into the can. He dusted off his fingers and headed for the door again, stopping only to squint into the trees. ‘Your friends are waiting,’ he said.

‘Will we see you at breakfast?’

‘I doubt it.’

I could not understand his hostility, so I did what felt most natural to me: I turned the problem inward, assumed that I had spoken out of turn. ‘I’m not usually one for small talk,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘That makes two of us.’

‘Well, I’m trying to make a special effort.’

‘That’s nice of you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t need it. The whole point of coming here was to be alone. I really don’t get on with people much.’ And he threw up his hands and carried on into his studio.

‘You’re much too young to talk that way,’ I said, when he came back. Now he was holding a set of ratty papers, banded with a thick elastic. A burgundy passport was on top of the pile, under his thumb.

‘I’m old enough to know my limitations.’ He dumped everything into the drum. ‘Why did you come here? For company?’

There was a lot I could have told him then, but I sensed he would not be glad to hear it. ‘There’s a difference between privacy and solitude, you know.’

‘Uh-huh. I’ll take your word for it.’ He padded the pockets of his cagoule. Underneath, he had on a coarse wool sweater that could not have been his own, as the round-neck collar was so loose it revealed his bare clavicle. It must have been one of Ender’s, or taken from lost property. He was wearing sturdy boots now, too, which gave him extra height. ‘Shit,’ he said, frisking his torso. ‘D’you have any matches?’

‘There should be some by your stove.’

He cleared his nose and spat. ‘There aren’t.’

‘Well, I’ve a full box in my studio. I can fetch it if you like.’

‘Nah, don’t bother. I’ll have to do it the hard way.’ With this, the boy dropped to his haunches and began to burrow into the snow and mulch and pine cones. Soon enough, he was bringing up clods of rust-red soil. He tossed an armload into the drum and it rained fatly on the metal.

‘What are you doing?’

He did not answer, just kept on digging with his hands and plunking the loose earth inside the can.

‘What are you burying?’

It did not seem to bother him that I was watching—there was something tunnel-eyed and frantic about him as he quarried the ground, like a fox hunting rabbits. After a while, the drum was about a quarter full, and he stopped, sitting on the snow with his back against the metal. Strands of his fringe were stuck upon his forehead. He looked so young and afraid.

‘Fullerton,’ I said—it was a difficult name to speak tenderly. ‘Is everything all right?’

He sat there, panting, gazing at nothing.

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘I couldn’t care less what you do,’ he said.

The others were still waiting. I saw their huddled shadows and felt glad of them. But Fullerton called after me as I walked away: ‘Wait a sec. Hold on.’ There was a note of contrition in his voice.

I turned.

‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said. ‘It’s just—look, I haven’t sussed this place out yet. There are loads more rules than I thought there’d be.’

It bothered me that he had been admitted without understanding everything. My own sponsor had spent two full days readying me for the prospect of Portmantle, explaining everything that lay ahead. So I went back to the boy and said, ‘If you have any questions, just ask.’

He spat again. ‘I was told no drinking, no drugs, no phone calls and whatever. But your mate Quickson said there was other stuff, too. I don’t know if he meant the ferry tokens, but I bought two of them like they told me—there’s one in my bag somewhere. You think that’s what he was talking about?’

‘It’s Quickman.’ I smiled. ‘And, yes, that’s part of it.’

‘Do you still have yours?’

‘I do, but not on me. Somewhere safe. That’s more a superstition than a rule.’

‘Oh.’ He gave another sigh. ‘Well, that old bloke went through my bag before. I thought that’s what he was after.’

‘Ender, you mean?’

‘Yeah, he patted me down. It was weird.’

‘Ender’s OK—just doing his job. If there weren’t any rules, this place would fall apart.’

‘So everyone gets frisked?’

‘Only once. You’re no different from the rest of us.’

‘It just took me by surprise, that’s all.’

‘Your sponsor should’ve warned you.’

Fullerton got up from the snow. He studied my face, as though gauging every pore of it for weaknesses. ‘Well, I don’t plan on staying here that long anyway. I just need to clear my head and then I’m going back to finish what I started.’

‘If I were you, I wouldn’t set myself too many restrictions. It’ll take as long as it takes.’ I wanted to tell him that I had believed the same thing when I came to Portmantle. That I would find my clarity in a matter of days. That I would not need the provost’s intervention: the visa documents specially acquired and signed on my behalf. But there was no point in daunting the boy any further. ‘You know,’ I said instead, ‘when I came here, I was lucky. I had someone to help me through the early part, the hard part. You remember MacKinney?’

He nodded.

‘She and I were admitted on the same afternoon. We took the same ferry from Kabataş and didn’t even know it. If it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have made it this far.’

‘Look, I’m glad it all worked out for you,’ said Fullerton. ‘But that doesn’t mean we’re the same. I’m not like that. I can’t count on anyone but myself.’

‘Well, maybe you should try.’ I held my smile this time, until I was sure he had received it. ‘We’re all loners here. With the right people, you can be alone and together—that’s something you learn how to do when you get older.’

‘I don’t see it happening. No offence.’

‘It’ll happen all on its own.’ It was easy to feel sympathy for the boy. Not just because he was sweat-shined and muddied, but because I could remember what it was like to be his age, so wearied by my own guardedness, letting nobody in, too frightened of getting hurt. ‘And, in the meantime, Tif and Q can probably help you with—whatever it is you’re trying to dispose of there.’

The boy eyed the can and kicked it. ‘I can sort it. And besides—’ He nodded to the space behind me. ‘They’ve already gone.’

But they were not quite beyond sight. I could still make out their shapes between the trees, heading for my lodging. ‘Can you whistle?’ I asked. The boy thought about it, then put his grubby fingers behind his teeth and made the cleanest steam-kettle sound. It took a moment for the others to realise we were calling them.

Pettifer was the first to arrive, covering his ears. ‘I think they heard you in the Serengeti. What’s the big emergency?’ He leaned an arm on my shoulder.

‘Fullerton needs your advice.’

‘Does he now. You hear that, Q?—I’m being asked for advice.’

‘Goodness,’ said Quickman, appearing behind him. ‘Whatever next?’

The two of them laughed.

MacKinney noticed the boy’s condition. His cheeks were striped with the dull red soil. ‘Everything OK here?’ she asked.

‘Trying to get rid of a few things, that’s all.’

He went about explaining his intentions for the oil drum, which caused Pettifer to push out his bottom lip and shake his head. ‘No, no, I wouldn’t recommend a drumfire unless you have kerosene. You need to build up a little pyre of timber in the centre to direct the flames. Otherwise, things don’t burn right, and it can all get out of hand rather quickly.’

The boy stood back. ‘Just as well I don’t have any matches then.’

‘I tried to barbecue a manuscript at my editor’s house once,’ Quickman said. ‘Made a glorious mess of his lawn. There was a lot more ash than I expected. Dangerous thing to do, really.’

Pettifer hummed in agreement. ‘Even a small fire can creep up on you if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘How d’you know so much about it?’ Fullerton asked.

‘My father was a scout master.’

‘That’s cool.’

‘He certainly thought so.’

‘Mine wouldn’t even take me camping,’ the boy said. ‘I still went, though.’

‘I don’t blame you.’

‘Did he let you have a jack-knife?’

‘No. But he kept one for himself.’

MacKinney looked back towards the attic lights of the mansion, yawning. The only lines that did not smooth out of her skin were the furrows round her eyes, which seemed to have the deep-set quality of woodgrain. ‘I suppose we should start getting used to all this macho conversation, Knell. They’ll be duelling with pistols before we know it.’

‘That’s an idea,’ Quickman said.

‘Well, I’m turning in before it gets to that.’

‘What about our game?’ Tif said.

‘I’m not really in the mood. But I hope my money’s still good.’ She leaned into my ear and mumbled: ‘A scoop of French roast on Quickman. Double down if it’s two-two.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll hold on to your winnings.’

She kissed my cheek. ‘Night, all.’

‘Night, Mac.’

I watched her traipsing off into the dark. It was not unusual for her to retire to bed this early, citing some excuse about the need to work. But she made no mention of her play at all that night, and I assumed that she was suffering again with her insomnia. (MacKinney often joked that she would overcome these bouts of restlessness by reading back through early drafts: ‘Even in broad daylight, I can bore myself to sleep.’)

‘What were you trying to burn, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Quickman said to the boy. ‘Hope it wasn’t anything I could smoke.’

‘Just a few things I’m not meant to have brought with me. I thought it’d be OK, but the old man said I needed to get rid of them.’

‘Ah. Been there,’ said Quickman.

‘Been there twice now,’ said Pettifer.

Fullerton grinned, and his face seemed unaccustomed to the strain of it. ‘It’s not a competition.’

‘Funny you should mention that,’ Quickman said. ‘We were about to start some backgammon. Ever played?’

The boy looked away. ‘Once, I think. At school. I’m more interested in poker now.’

‘Poker! That’s a bit too Hollywood for us, but Tif and I have a regular dice game every Sunday, best of five, and to be frank—’ Quickman screened his mouth to stage-whisper. ‘He’s hopeless. I wouldn’t mind having someone else to beat.’

‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

Pettifer coughed. ‘A bit high-stakes for beginners, isn’t it?’

‘Hardly,’ I said, cutting in. It was quite irregular for Quickman to extend an invitation and I wanted to give the boy every chance to accept.

Fullerton looked interested. ‘You lot play for money?’

‘No. Just trinkets,’ I said. ‘We don’t have much to gamble with.’

‘I nearly won that pipe of his once,’ said Pettifer. ‘Another six and it would’ve been mine. Imagine the power I could’ve wielded!’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘They’ve played a few epics. No one can beat Q, though.’

‘OK, count me in,’ said the boy. ‘Why not?’

‘Super! We’ll make it a triangular.’ Quickman clasped his palms and rubbed them. ‘Go and fetch the board, Tif. It’s up in my room.’ His voice was sunnier than I had heard it in a while. ‘Knell, can we set up at yours again? We’ll need a bigger table.’

I saw an eagerness about the boy’s eyes then, too, and I realised that it was happening just like I said it would—all on its own.

Even though the world Fullerton had left was different from the one we knew, altered by a history that had taken place without us, his way into Portmantle was the same as ours. The procedure for admission never changed. First, your sponsor had to seek the authorisation of the provost—no specifics could be shared without this prior consent. It was an inherited knowledge, paid forward by residents of the past to the residents of the present, and if your sponsor could not adequately relay directions, you might never reach the place at all.

Any guest who checked out of the refuge with a clean record—that is to say, without having wilfully contravened any of its rules—was afforded one endorsement to pass on. This could be bestowed upon any artist whom it was felt could benefit from the sanctuary of Portmantle. It was stressed by the provost that endorsements should only be offered to artists in the direst need. The cost of a new resident’s tenure had to be covered by their sponsor; a fairly meagre sum, paid seasonally, but it could last for an indefinite period—such was the case for MacKinney, Quickman, Pettifer, and me. Sponsors, therefore, had to be sure that the artists they were recommending were truly worth helping, as they could remain beholden to that financial outlay for a permanent duration. The responsibility could not be relinquished or transferred to someone else. Because of this, we stalwarts of the place were looked upon with respect—it was assumed that our sponsors’ long-term commitment reflected their valuation of our talents. But there were some who viewed us with a dim-eyed pity, as though we were just shadows of ourselves, washed up and doomed to failure.

Only when the provost had accepted your sponsor’s recommendation would you be told where Portmantle was located. Only then could your sponsor offer you precise instructions, and you would be required to commit these details to memory fast, because they could not be spoken again or written down. Only when you had made it to the Gare de Lyon in Paris were you allowed to open your sponsor’s envelope with the provost’s passphrase. Only then could you take the night train to Lausanne, following the Simplon Orient Express line with a second-class ticket your sponsor had paid for under his own name, his real name, through Milan and Belgrade, to the Turkish-Bulgarian border, showing your passport when you arrived at the terminus in Istanbul. Only then could you pay your fee for the entry visa and find the cheap hotel room your sponsor had booked, and burn that passport in the bathtub, dousing it with the shower-hose before it set off the sprinklers (you had to set fire to it early, to stop yourself from turning back later). Only then could you go out into the bright spring sun of the wide-open city and walk along the main road, past the swell of traffic, the taxis with their rolled-down windows and their music blaring, the clattering trams, the towering mosques, until you reached the ferry port at Kabataş.

Only then could you put one dull jeton in the turnstile slot, like your sponsor had advised, keeping another to remind you of your homeward trip every time your fingers met it in the folds of your pocket. Only then could you walk through the barrier and wait in the muggy departures terminal with your hat on, your eyes concealed by wayfarers, fanning yourself with the newspaper until the doors were opened to let you step onto the hulking white ship. Only then could you find a seat on the upper deck amongst the gathering hordes, right up close to the railing, to watch the ferry push away and feel the sudden breeze upon your cheek, taste the brackish cool upon your lips, the thrill of it. Only then could you know the full splendour of the Marmara as it ebbed around you, fathomless, agleam.

And this would be your final chance to lean back and exhale, to listen to the outcry of the seagulls following the stern, the dizzy flocks that clamoured near the deck as though escorting you. Soon, the Turkish men would lean over the railing with simits held aloft; the birds would swoop to steal the bread right from their fingers, screeching; and you would come to realise the gulls were not escorts at all, but hustlers and hangers-on, like everyone else you were sailing away from.

Only as you arrived at the first stop in Kadiköy could you undo your watchstrap and remove it, let it slide between the slats of the bench, as though you had forgotten it. Only as you sailed by the first strange island with all its tombstone houses could you glean how far you were from the world you knew, the people you loved, the people you did not. Only when you passed the next of them—one broad and inhabited, another just a sliver of green where nothing seemed to live but herons—could you understand how close you were to what you needed. Only then could you see the khaki hump of Heybeliada rising in the sun-stirred haze and know that you had made it.

Only then could you stand with the giddy tourists on the lower decks as the ferryman threw a withered rope onto the dock, waiting to step off onto a foreign land but somehow feeling you were almost home. Only then could you skirt by the Naval Academy where the uniformed cadets did their parade drills, and head south-east on Çam Limani Yolu, as you had been instructed, until the streets became narrower, emptier, and the space between houses grew so wide that you could see the spreading forest up ahead. Only then could you lose yourself in those dry, slanting pines and sense that you were now released from everything that had weighed on you before. Only then could you see the shoulders of a tarnished mansion surface above the treetops. Only at its gate could you throw down your backpack, push the buzzer, watch a squinting Turk with a grey moustache and a shotgun come up to the bars, asking your name. Only then could you say you were a different person. Only then would the old man enquire about the passphrase, so you could finally release it to the air, the meaning of the words becoming clearer as you spoke them. Only then would the gate unlock and slide back for you in the old man’s grip. Only then would you hear him say, ‘Portmantle’ye hoşgeldiniz.’