The Staircase That Wasn't There — Orada Olmayan Merdiven

Halil Bey had always maintained that a city is not a place but a habit, and that one can be out of practice with it in the same way one can be out of practice with a language. He had studied architecture in Lyon between 1979 and 1984, had left with a diploma, a weakness for butter and a permanently damaged sense of what bread ought to be, and had not been back since. Forty years is a long time to neglect a habit. When his daughter gave him the trip for his seventy-fifth birthday, he accepted with the gratitude of a man who has been handed a beautifully wrapped exam paper.

He brought with him a map he had drawn by hand in his first winter, when he had been too poor to buy a proper one and too proud to admit it. It covered only a few streets on the slope of the Croix-Rousse, the old silk-weavers' hill, and it was annotated in the ambitious, slightly pompous handwriting of a twenty-year-old who believed that every building had been put there for him personally to criticise. Most of the notes were about rooflines. One, however, written beside a narrow gap between two buildings on the Rue des Tapis, said only: "The steps. Madame Roux. Always at night."

The tourist office had arranged a guide, a young urban historian named Camille Arnaud who was writing her doctorate on what she called "the memory of thresholds" and who seemed, from her first email, alarmingly interested in him. She met him at his hotel with two coffees and a tablet full of historical maps, and listened to his account of the steps with the attentive stillness of someone recording an endangered dialect. As he remembered it, there had been a flight of stone steps, perhaps sixty of them, climbing steeply between the back walls of two houses from the Rue des Tapis to the street above. His landlady, Madame Roux, a widow with formidable eyebrows and a cat named Moustache, had kept the key to the gate at the bottom. She let only her student lodgers use it, and only after dark, so that they could reach the university without walking the long way round. "It saved us twenty minutes," Halil said, "and cost us, I think, a small fortune in gratitude."

Camille nodded, made a note, and then said, very gently, that there was no such staircase. She had checked the land registry, the municipal plans, the inventory of traboules, the covered passages that thread through the old buildings of Lyon and that the city has catalogued with an almost devotional thoroughness. Between the two houses he had marked, there was, according to every document in existence, a solid wall. "Memory is a very good architect," she said, "but a poor surveyor." Halil, who had spent half a century correcting the arithmetic of younger colleagues, did not care to be told that his own memory could not add up, and said so.

They spent the next three days walking. The city had been both faithful and treacherous: the café where he had failed to learn chess was now a shop selling eight-euro candles, but the fountain on the square still dribbled with the same air of chronic exhaustion. Halil found that his feet remembered things his mind had mislaid: which pavement to take in the afternoon to stay in the shade, where a step was uneven, where the smell of a bakery would begin. Several times he stopped in the middle of a street, overcome by a feeling he could only describe as being recognised by a building. Camille recorded it all, asking questions that seemed casual and were not. She wanted to know what Madame Roux had cooked, what the gate had sounded like, whether the steps had been worn smooth in the middle. "Smooth as soap," Halil said. "Like the steps of a mosque, or a very old school."

Each evening, they returned to the Rue des Tapis, and each evening the wall was still a wall. It was a dull, rendered surface, the colour of weak tea, with a drainpipe running down it and a faded notice forbidding the posting of bills. On the third evening Halil laid his palm against it, as one might lay a hand on the flank of an old horse, and admitted, for the first time aloud, that he might be wrong. "Perhaps I have stitched it together from somewhere else," he said. "There are steps like this in Izmir, behind the house where I grew up. Perhaps I brought them with me and forgot to take them home." Camille said nothing, which he took for kindness.

On his last morning she rang him at seven and told him, in a voice that was not quite steady, to come to the Rue des Tapis at once. When he arrived, out of breath and without his scarf, there was scaffolding against the house on the left and a small crowd of builders drinking coffee from paper cups. The house was being renovated; the builders had removed a section of rotten plaster from the ground floor the previous afternoon. Behind it, where every map in Lyon insisted on solid stone, was an iron gate, rusted almost to lace, and beyond the gate, climbing steeply into the dark between two back walls, a flight of stone steps worn smooth in the middle. Halil did not count them. He did not need to.

It was the foreman who told him the rest, and only because Camille had disappeared, rather abruptly, to make a phone call. The passage had been private property, never registered as a traboule, belonging to the house on the left; the owner had bricked up the gate and plastered over it in the late eighties, after a student had nearly broken his neck there on a winter night. "The owner was an old lady," the foreman said. "Roux, I think. Her granddaughter inherited the house last year. She's the one who hired us." He nodded across the street, to where Camille stood with her phone pressed to her ear, not speaking to anyone at all.

She came back eventually, looking very much like a child who has been caught with her hand in a biscuit tin. Her grandmother, she explained, had kept a register of every student who had ever lodged with her, forty-three of them over thirty years, with a note beside each name in a sharp, slanting hand. Beside his own, she had written: "Turkish. Polite. Draws everything. Will come back one day to criticise my roof." When Camille found the steps marked on the old plans of the house, she had wanted, more than anything, to find one of the forty-three before the builders opened the wall. "Then why on earth did you tell me it didn't exist?" Halil asked, torn between indignation and an absurd desire to laugh. Camille had the grace to blush. "Because my thesis is about memory," she said, "and I needed to hear how you remembered it before you saw it. Once you see a place again, you never remember it the same way." "Also," she added, "my grandmother would have done exactly the same thing to you."

That evening, after dark, because some rules deserve to be kept even after the people who made them are gone, they climbed the steps together. Halil went slowly, with one hand on the cold wall, and at the top he stopped to catch his breath and to look back down at the dark slot of the passage and the yellow light of the street below. It was shorter than he remembered, and steeper, and in every way more real, which he supposed was the price of seeing a thing twice. "Fifty-eight," said Camille, who had counted. "Sixty," said Halil firmly, and neither of them was willing to go down again to settle the matter, so the city, as cities generally do, kept both numbers.