Weather Permitting

The Datça Autumn Regatta had been held, with a regularity that bordered on stubbornness, every October for forty-three years, and in all that time its organiser, Commodore Rıza Bey, had never once been satisfied with the wind. He considered it a personal failing of the Aegean that it should be either too strong, which was dangerous, or too weak, which was embarrassing, and he spoke of it in tones normally reserved for a disappointing relative. This year, the problem was the latter. By eleven o'clock the sea in the bay had acquired the texture of poured glass, and the thirty-odd dinghies assembled at the start line hung motionless, like insects trapped in amber. On the committee boat, Commodore Rıza Bey consulted his barometer, tapped it with the air of a man who no longer trusts his friends, and announced that the race would begin "as soon as circumstances permitted". Circumstances declined to cooperate. Parents on the quay began to unwrap sandwiches. Somebody's grandmother produced a flask of tea and, in the spirit of the occasion, offered it to the Commodore, who accepted it without a word of thanks. Among the competitors was a twelve-year-old named Ece, sailing a battered, faded-blue dinghy that her uncle had bought for the price of a good second-hand bicycle. She had never won anything, and nobody expected her to; the more experienced sailors, with their sleek boats and their serious expressions, were already positioning themselves for the first puff of wind, jostling with a politeness that did not entirely conceal their intentions. Ece did the opposite. She sat still, her hand loose on the tiller, and watched the water. After a long while she noticed what the others had missed: a dark line far on the left of the bay, crossing the surface so lightly that it looked like a pencil mark. She let the dinghy drift, an inch at a time, towards it, resisting the temptation to hurry. When the breeze finally came, shortly after half past one, it arrived on the left of the course, exactly where she was waiting. By the time the other boats had worked out what was happening, her little blue sail was already filling, and she was a hundred metres ahead. She won by an easy margin, a fact that Commodore Rıza Bey recorded in the logbook with the expression of a man signing a document under protest. At the prize-giving, he handed her the small silver cup and, after some visible internal struggle, said, "Patience is a form of skill." "So is knowing where to look," said Ece, and he pretended not to have heard. The wind, as if embarrassed by its earlier behaviour, stayed until dusk.