The Water Under Hocapaşa

About this book

Istanbul, autumn 1894. Three months after the earthquake, the city is opening its old water lines before the winter rains, and Yusuf Kalender — forty-eight, serving master of a guild about to be dissolved — is the only man left who can read what runs under the streets. When the commission clears a choked culvert beneath the Hocapaşa quarter, it finds the bones of a body nobody ever reported missing and a brass badge stamped with a master's seal. They ask Yusuf to name it. He says he cannot. The lie is easy, and it protects a pension, his daughter's appointment, and a quarter that burned in the summer of 1865 without ever learning why its fountains ran dry. Yusuf was nineteen that summer. He was there when the water stopped. The report is signed in forty days.