Lot 114, Slightly Foxed

The auction house had chosen to describe Lot 114 as "a Bosphorus view, oil on canvas, signed lower left, slightly foxed", a phrase that Nermin Hanım, seated in the third row with her handbag clamped on her knees, considered a masterpiece of understatement. The painting was not slightly foxed. It had spent four decades in a damp basement in Moda, in the company of a broken sewing machine and several cartons of her husband's magazines, and it looked it. The sky had acquired brown freckles; the water had faded to the colour of weak tea. Nobody in the room, she suspected, would want it. That was the point. Her granddaughter, who had arranged the sale after a ruthless afternoon of clearing out the flat, had assured her that the estimate of three hundred lira was "optimistic, if anything", and had advised her to stay at home. Nermin Hanım had thanked her, nodded and promptly bought a ticket for the viewing. The bidding began at fifty. A young man in a very good coat, who had been consulting his phone with the air of someone attending a meeting for which he had not been properly briefed, raised his paddle. At a hundred, a woman at the back joined in. At two hundred, to the visible astonishment of the auctioneer, a third bidder entered the contest from the telephone bank, and Nermin Hanım felt, for the first time in an hour, a sensation not unlike alarm. She had known precisely what the painting was worth to her: nothing at all, financially, and a considerable amount otherwise. Her father had painted it from the window of a rented room in Kandilli, on a Sunday in a summer so distant that she could no longer recall whether it had been hot. He had been a bank clerk by profession and a painter in every way that mattered to nobody but himself. He had never sold a canvas. He had never, to her knowledge, expected to. The price reached six hundred. Then eight. Then, with a gesture of suspicious lightness, the man in the good coat nodded at a thousand and the telephone fell silent. "Going once," said the auctioneer, in the voice of a man reluctant to interrupt a miracle. "Going twice." She could have raised her paddle. She had, in a purse she rarely opened, just enough to reach a thousand and fifty, and the temptation was considerable. But as the hammer hovered, she found herself looking at the young man, who was staring at the painting with a bewildered, almost reverent frown, as though it had started to speak to him in a language he had forgotten he knew. The hammer fell. Nermin Hanım lowered her handbag from her lap, and for the first time that afternoon smiled. "Slightly foxed," she murmured to nobody in particular, rising with the care of the elderly. "Well, the fox is in good hands."