They found the neighborhood easily—a charming, posh borough in the European side of the city. But the house wasn’t there anymore. A modern, five-story apartment building had been erected in its place. The entire first floor was a classy-looking fish restaurant. Before going in, Asya checked her reflection in the glass, adjusting her hair while discontentedly eyeing her breasts. As it was still too early for dinner, there was no one inside except for a handful of waiters sweeping the traces of the previous night off the floor and a rosy-cheeked, stout cook in the kitchen preparing the mezes and the main courses for the evening under a cloud of mouth-watering smells. Asya talked to each of them, asking questions about the building’s past. But the waiters had arrived in the city only recently, migrating from a Kurdish village in the southeast, and the cook, though he had lived longer in Istanbul, did not have any memory of the street’s history. “Of the long-standing Istanbulite families, only a few have remained on their soil of birth,”
