“How do you think it’s going to end?” I asked.
She weighed her words. “We will win. Turkey has always been secular. But it will cost.”
“How you getting on with the raki?” Annett asked.
I coughed. “Wonderful. Shall we go?”
She nodded. We stood up, thanked the barman, and said goodbye to the protesters. Annett poked her head out the bar’s door and sniffed at the air.
“Breathable?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I say we risk it,” Annett said. “I’ve lost my appetite anyway. Which is a first. Hopefully a last. Shall we just go back to the apartment and lick our wounds?”
“Fine by me.”
Two turns later, we walked into a barricade that was on fire. A police van rushed towards it. We turned back, planning to loop the long way round. Lost, and entirely by chance, we exited a lane onto İstiklal Street. İstiklal is one of the main shopping thoroughfares of Beyoğlu, an artery feeding directly into Taksim Square. A square that leads to Gezi Park. We found İstiklal awash with protesters assembling in small groups, getting kitted up in their home-made riot gear of hard hats, goggles, hazard masks, and anti-tear-gas milkshakes. From there they’d move towards Taksim, confront the police, get tear-gassed, fall back, rest, and then go again. Shops were frantically pulling down their protective awnings, fearing a full-scale riot. A young man appeared next to us carrying a large cardboard box.
“Gas masks,” he shouted. “Gas Masks!” I laughed at this enterprising display of pop-up capitalism. “It’s always like this in the Middle East,” he said. “Business comes first.”
We bought a mask each. They weren’t really gas masks, more the sort of white hazard masks you might wear while painting, engaged in DIY, or, if you were particularly unlucky, taking a relaxing city break.
We looked on in a mixture of awe, fear, and uncertainty. We weren’t the only ones. Others had been out doing normal everyday human things—shopping, eating, not protesting their democratically elected government—and had also gotten caught up and were equally unsure how to get out again.
I looked at Annett, standing there in her mask, checking her map. “I don’t want to state the obvious, but this is not going very well,” she said, her voice muffled by her mask and the sounds of sirens and chanting. The whites of her eyes no longer were. That smell returned.
People began moving quickly in our direction. I paced back and forth.
“I’ve no idea which way is safe,” she said, “but I checked before we came out and there’s supposed to be a meetup happening on İstiklal, above that restaurant with the blue sign. It’s a Couchsurfing thing. Wanna go there and wait it out?”
I had no better idea. It would get us off the street. And we’d often had good nights at Couchsurfing events, where travellers and locals meet up in bars around the world to swap stories. At the address, we found a dented metal door with the bar’s name on it. The bar was on the third floor. There were about twenty people inside. It was one of those deliberately shabby bars that tries really hard, and absolutely unsuccessfully, to look as if it isn’t trying at all. The furniture didn’t match. Reggae music played. The Couchsurfing group were huddled around three large windows that offered uninterrupted views of the theatre of discontent playing out on İstiklal, directly below us.
A block of protesters was being pushed away from the park by a wall of overlapping riot shields. Over that wall came a jet of water and more tear gas. A protester picked up one of the still steaming cans and lobbed it back over into the throng of police.
“I can’t believe this,” said a girl from India. “It’s like a movie scene out there.”
“What are the protests about? I mean, I know they’re anti-Erdigen,” asked a Canadian in a red baseball cap.
“Erdoğan,” corrected a wiry, bearded local, who introduced himself as Ahmed. He had a small ace tattooed on his right index finger. He was digging his nails into his thigh. “Erdoğan’s a…” He turned to his friend, a Turkish girl in thick red-rimmed glasses. She helped with the translation. “A tyrant,” he said. “In the beginning, he wanted to change Gezi Park into another stupid shopping mall—”
“It started before that though,” the girl interjected. “He is trying to change the parliamentary system to stay in power, and ban abortion. He’s awful.”
Annett and I spent the next few hours at those windows, watching, talking to the Couchsurfers, drinking to calm our nerves, and being deeply impressed by the bravery and conviction of the protesters below—conviction to run deliberately into a battle with armed police, knowing full well they were going to be tear-gassed, sprayed with water, arrested, beaten up, or maybe even shot with a rubber bullet.
We witnessed many small, absurd moments, such as the cloud of smoke being punctured by a child in its pushchair, being frantically steering by its mother. They wore matching hard hats, hazard masks, and safety goggles. The child’s hard hat was an adult size and swallowed almost all of his head. He held it up with one hand, his little eyes peeking out from under it, and seemed totally calm, as if he were heading back from a trip to the zoo.
I guess, in a way, he was—the Human Zoo.
As the day darkened to night, it was harder to see what was happening outside. Someone below the windows set fire to an old armchair, and three or four protesters danced around it in triumph. “That’s not it, man,” said Ahmed. “We have to protest nice. Otherwise we’re no better than them.”
A man clutching shopping bags appeared next to the on-fire sofa, as if he’d been in one of the new shopping malls and had gotten lost on the way to the parking garage. He whipped out his smartphone and took selfies in front of the fire, throwing gangster signs.
“Ouch, the fremdschämen,” said Annett, rubbing at her forehead. Fremdschämen is a German word for the untranslatable but instantly recognisable emotion of feeling shame on someone’s behalf. A kind of embarrassment once removed.
“These people are crazy,” said Andrea, an Argentinian man sharing our window. There was a quiet but commendable intensity to him. He looked long and plunged deep. If he blinked, he did so in secret. Weirdly, he seemed the most affected by what we were seeing. I resolved to buy him another drink after I’d gotten back from the toilet, hoping this might help loosen him up. My adrenaline had dropped, yet I was in a surprisingly good mood up in the safety of the bar. I was impressed by the protesters, and what they were willing to endure to stand up for what they believed in. What they thought would make their country better.
The three narrow, rectangular windows in the toilet were broken and letting in the toxic air from outside. I still had the hazard mask around my neck. I sniffed each of the three cubicles to see which would be the least toxic to my health before snapping my mask back in place. My throat stung as I stood there, relieving myself to the sounds of the protest outside. I felt very present in that moment. The background faded out. I felt… interested, part of something, even. Not at home relaxing, as per usual.
Turkey was a place where you didn’t have to go looking for politics—it found you. To my surprise, having being apolitical most of life, I was suddenly enjoying the sensation of being found. Maybe life was better when we didn’t all just “agree to disagree,” as I’d been raised to do in England.
Back in the bar, I handed out drinks. Andrea nodded a wordless thank you. Opened his mouth. Closed it again. Nodded some more. Took a swig of beer. Scratched his head. Frowned. Looked deep into our souls and found us lacking. “I don’t get it, man,” he said, finally. He gestured towards the window. “I don’t get this. Any of it. This country. Politics. All the fighting. Argentina, even. You’re from Germany, right? Germany has taken part in two world wars and lost them both. Argentina has been in zero. Yet today, Germany is one of the strongest economies in the world… and… we’re nothing. We fight amongst ourselves, we fight with our politicians, just like here. Just like Turkey. You know?�
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I nodded.
“Why aren’t we Germany, while you’re Argentina? Or Turkey? Or Azerbaijan? Or North Korea? Why do some countries work when the rest are just chaos?”
It was a good question. I thought about it at the window over the next hour or two. It wasn’t the sort of question you could actually answer because it was really a thousand questions shoved into a too-small box of intrigue. He was right about one thing though: for every popular exhibit in the Human Zoo—every New York, Rome, Great Pyramid, Great Wall, Great Barrier Reef—that gets 99 percent of the attention, admiration, and tourism, there are dozens of countries, thousands of cities, hundreds of millions of people living way off over there, far away, in places you rarely hear about. Places where the normal equation of People + Resources / Time = Functional Society has gone badly askew, creating results far away from the prosperity, freedom, and (comparative) equality that Annett and I experienced in Germany.
It was past midnight now, there were fewer protesters out, and so, proportionally, it felt as though the police had grown more successful at rounding up and arresting those too slow to get away. An extensive amount of tear gas was being used. I’d seen many of the protesters scooping up the empty canisters and taking them, presumably as souvenirs. Below the window a skirmish took place. A police officer in a gas mask threw a canister at a small group of retreating protesters. It bounced off a wall and nestled behind an overflowing bin, on the opposite side of İstiklal. No one seemed to notice it.
The next time we checked our watches, it was 1:30am. Wired from all the adrenaline, we’d long forgotten about the dinner we’d never got around to having. Annett and I stood side by side at the window. There was a lull in the pandemonium. “Should we make a run for it?” Annett asked. I chewed at my lip. “The problem,” I said, authoritatively, “is that by now the police just assume anyone that’s out there is involved, and crossing İstiklal is the way home, and İstiklal is, well, lively. I don’t think we can cross it.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to find another way around.”
I nodded. “I’m willing if you are. We can do a big loop around and try and get there another way.”
Apprehensively we stood and said goodbye to the rest of the group. They made disapproving faces and waved arms in gestures of no-ness.
“Sit down,” Ahmed said. “Wait it out.”
We thanked them for their concern, told them we’d be safe, said another round of goodbyes, and then headed for the exit. We found the door locked. The barman came out from behind the bar and made exactly the same “stop right there” gestures.
“Not safe,” he said.
“We know.”
He pointed back inside. “Stay here.”
I pointed away from İstiklal. “It’s okay, we’ll go away from the trouble.”
He seemed genuinely concerned in a manner that was touching. Since we’d arrived in Istanbul everyone had been extremely kind and accommodating—well, apart from the people who tear-gassed us or set things near us on fire, but we were sure this was nothing personal.
“Thanks, but we know the risks,” Annett said. “We’ll be safe.”
The man’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Okay,” he said, “but, go that way.”
“Yes, that way,” I confirmed, mirroring the direction of his outstretched finger, away from İstiklal.
The stairwell wore the day’s spicy perfume—eau de rébellion. Back on the street, I felt my adrenaline surge. We turned left, away from İstiklal.
“Hang on,” I shouted at Annett, through the smoke of a nearby wheelie-bin fire.
She lifted her mask. “What?”
I twisted to look the other way. “Wait here. I’ll be one minute.”
Before she had the chance to object I began running back towards İstiklal. At the street corner I took a quick glance left and right. To my left there was a police van, about one hundred metres away. The air was thick with smoke and my eyes watered, blurring my vision. I knew what I was doing was stupid, but for some reason I kept doing it anyway; I wanted that tear-gas canister. The one behind the bin on the far side of the street. Deciding it was safe enough I darted out towards it, coughing, the air a toxic soup. I saw the bin just a few metres away.
Next to it a metal object gleamed. I wheezed. My lungs screamed in anger. I reached out to steady myself on the bin. Bending behind it, I felt the cool of metal against my grip. It was still there. I had it. I wasn’t exactly sure why I wanted it so badly, but there would be time for that later, in regret’s post-mortem. I lifted the canister. I blinked. Nothing happened. I blinked some more. My lungs were filling with liquid. I coughed violently, spitting onto the street. The can had a familiar blue-and-silver design.
No. It couldn’t be, could it?
I’d just risked potential arrest and my health and for…
Nobody could be that stupid, could they?
I lifted it closer to my face.
It was… wrong.
It was… too narrow.
It was… not a tear-gas canister.
It was… a can of Red Bull.
I threw it to the ground in disgust. This was a new low. I began moving back the way I’d come. I saw Annett standing there, hands on her hips, head cocked. We were most of the way across İstiklal now; we could take the next left and be pretty much home, five or six minutes at the most. I pointed that way. She turned and began to run. With squinted, streaming eyes and wet cheeks we ran. A few steps later two policemen appeared from that side street, chasing a protester.
Annett swerved off to the right, back towards the bar, as I followed. Knowing the door was locked we ran on past it. Incredibly, just seven or eight doors down from it, a fruit and veg shop seemed to be open. Four or five people were inside. We tried to open the door but found it locked. I bent over, coughing violently. A man in his sixties with a trim grey beard unlocked it. He found two small blue plastic stools for us to sit on. The protesters inside offered us some more protester milkshake. The man quickly arrived with tea. You had to do very little to be given tea here. They dispensed it without provocation.
It was 1:45am.
Annett’s face was red, her nostrils flaring as she sat opposite me, her hands balled into fists. “I can’t believe you left me!”
I wiped at my leaking eyes. It didn’t help. “I’m sorry. From the bar I saw a tear-gas canister behind that bin. I know it’s stupid but I wanted it as a souvenir.”
She let this sink in for a few seconds. It didn’t seem to sit well. “Why? What? Why!” She shook her head furiously. “How could you be so stupid? That’s just… incredibly dumb.” She took her face in her hands. “Oh, the stupidity, it burns.”
“I know,” I said, avoiding her gaze with the help of the floor. She looked around me. “So where is the stupid bloody can then?”
“It was a…” I paused. “A…” I laughed. “Oh, God.” I laughed some more. Wiped my eyes. “A…” Chuckled. She watched on from her stool, her teeth gritted as my laughing fit spiralled out of control. She tried to remain mad but as I lost control, she did too. Before long her whole tetchy facade collapsed and we were both wiping away tears, and milk and tea from the holes in our faces, even though only one of us knew why.
“It was a… Red Bull can,” I stammered.
She balled a fist, put it to her mouth, took it away, turned her head, tried to speak, stopped, turned back, and punched me in the arm. “Idiot.”
The black comedy continued as the owner of the shop appeared behind us, holding a cucumber aloft. “Now would be a really fine time to pick up some cucumbers and tomatoes for tomorrow’s salad, wouldn’t it?” He said.
Business in the Middle East, it never stops.
We thanked him for the tea and headed back out into the throng, tomato- and cucumber-less. It really wasn’t the right time to think about tomorrow’s salad. Plus, it was already tomorrow. With the help of our map, we took a big detour home. It was 3am before we got there, still too wired to sleep.
We watched the twenty-four-hour-news channels. It felt strange to be the news for a change.
2
An interlude: The night before Istanbul
People always say comfort zone like it’s a bad thing, a thing from which one should endeavour to escape. I’ve never understood this. Sure, zone is ambiguous: time zone, war zone, primary erogenous zone. Zone can go both ways. But comfort? Just try and make that negative. Not possible. Even “comfort tyranny” just sounds like a promising new folk band.
I was thinking about this while lying in the very comfortable zone offered by my living room’s couch in Berlin. I heard the front door open. A loud “Hey!” emanated from within the dark hallway—dark because the light bulb had blown and I’d fully intended to exchange it that very day but had been soundly defeated by said couch’s said comfort. Annett barged into the room sending the door knocking against the wall, which was pockmarked as a result of all the previous times she’d done exactly this. Annett is to subtlety and restraint what badgers are to calligraphy. She was dressed in a variety of high-visibility clothing and looked as if she’d just finished guiding small children across a busy junction while holding a lollipop.
She began her trademark high-speed talking. “Jesus what a day non-bloody stop out there it was if it’s not one thing it’s something else idiots most of them I told that to my work wife and then Judith called me and you wouldn’t believe what’s going on with Simon and tomorrow the whole meetings and staff problems and tra la la circus starts again—”
She paused, noticing my heightened state of relaxation. “Another tough day, I see?”
I nodded. “Hectic.”
She removed the last of her luminous cycle-safety clothing and climbed aboard the couch. We’d purposely purchased the largest in the shop. “Evening plans?”
I gestured at my laptop. “You’re looking at them.”
Her face scrunched like faces shouldn’t. “Let’s do something! I was thinking of maybe meeting Rob and Sarah for a drink later. Wanna join?”
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 2
