Twelve-thirty on that afternoon
Murat knows where Peter lives. Kristin has told him that he needs to go and wait for his wife and son there, but he doesn’t want to go. He has their passports, so Murat imagines that Catherine will have to bring William home eventually. If they show up at the consulate requesting new passports, Kristin can have her colleagues turn them away, or so Murat assumes. There is no need for him to wait in front of Peter’s apartment. There is no need for him to endure the humiliation that such a confrontation will surely entail. Kristin insists, though. “You have to head this thing off,” she says. “Otherwise I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to keep her from leaving the country.”
The admission takes Murat by surprise.
Kristin stands in the kitchen, explaining herself. “Your wife has certain rights.”
“And my rights?” he asks.
Kristin removes her bag from the counter. She digs through its contents, checking for her identification badge and cellphone as she prepares to head into work. Murat’s crisis has consumed her entire morning.
“What about my rights?” he repeats.
Kristin holds up her badge by its lanyard. “Do you see Turkish Ministry of Interior on this thing? I can’t help the fact that she and your son are American,” she answers. She shoulders her bag. “I have done and will do everything that I can to stop them from leaving. That’s why I’m telling you to go wait for them at Peter’s apartment. They have to head back there.”
“William wouldn’t be an American if it wasn’t for you,” says Murat.
“Need I remind you that you asked for my help?” answers Kristin.
She exits the kitchen and passes through the foyer, with its grand marble floor and white orchids in the vase by the door. For a moment, Murat thinks that he might try to stop her, just as he had tried to stop Catherine. That had been a spectacular failure. If he hadn’t been able to think of anything to say that would keep his wife from leaving, he knows there is nothing he can say to keep Kristin from doing the same. However, he possesses an instinct that Kristin won’t abandon him, at least not yet, though he can’t say why.
The door shuts behind her.
He sits at the kitchen counter. He is left staring at the photograph of him and William at the Kabataş ferry terminal, with William holding the umbrella over both of their heads when their excursion to the Princes’ Islands had been rained out. They had managed to make the trip a couple of weeks later, just the two of them. It had been an unmitigated disaster. William had gotten seasick on the transit, vomiting over the railing into the water. When they’d arrived, the beach had been closed. Unbeknownst to Murat, who hardly ever vacationed, the season had finished the week before. The father-son excursion fell short of expectations. Perhaps this is why Murat looks at the photo of their aborted trip with such nostalgia, even though he would rather forget the day itself. When it comes to his family, he loves the idea of them while, at times, he isn’t certain if he’s capable of actually loving them.
He recognizes this as the challenge Kristin has put before him. Were he truly a family man, he would already be parked in front of Peter’s apartment willing to say and do anything to get his wife and child back. If the humiliation of waiting at Peter’s apartment is Kristin’s way of testing his fidelity, Murat knows that his fidelity to her has already been proven in other matters. He was the one who had helped Kristin—and by that measure the entire U.S. diplomatic mission—navigate the treacherous days around the Gezi Park protests.
Kristin’s genius wasn’t that she understood the intricate web of regulations and relationships that proved essential to interpreting the uproar around Gezi Park, but rather that she understood months before anyone else that she would need someone who could decipher those intricacies on her behalf. Throughout that entire summer of protests across the city and then across the country, Murat had delivered to her the information she needed so that the U.S. diplomatic mission never compromised its interests by misbalancing its nominal support for both the government and the protesters. Murat had provided the information required for American diplomats to do what they did best in crisis: keep each side in a state of tension—which is to say, equilibrium—with the other.
Kristin had been prepared for that summer. Murat had not been. His collected real estate holdings had since lost more than fifty percent of their value and the government had reneged on supporting the new football stadium in Beşiktaş, leaving him to support a ruinous debt on that property. Murat had inadequately anticipated the change that was coming. And he had paid dearly for it.
This is also the case now. Kristin must have intuited that Catherine would leave him. She might not have known the exact moment, but if Kristin possessed the foresight to predict the Gezi Park protests, she surely possessed the foresight to know that Catherine would inevitably try to escape. Now that Catherine has acted, Murat recognizes that he should begin listening to Kristin. She has already told him what to do and, reluctantly, he will do it.
Murat climbs into the black Mercedes sedan parked in his garage. The cream-colored leather interior creaks pleasantly as he sits down, releasing a luxurious new car scent. He had bought the Mercedes only the year before, after the last of the contracts had been signed on the Yaşar Zeytinburnu 3 development and before his more precarious investment in Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4 had failed to pay out. He searches the glove box for the keys; that is where his driver usually leaves them. He readjusts the motorized seat controls to cater to his slightly longer legs.
He turns over the ignition and sits for a moment in the garage with his hands resting on the steering wheel while the engine idles. He will drive across town, into Cihangir, and he will wait outside Peter’s apartment in the parked car. He will know what to say to Peter and Catherine when he finds them. He will also figure out how to say those things in front of William and in such a way that William might someday forget about the entire episode. His mind churns through the sequence of events, which will likely take all afternoon. He hopes it won’t take into the evening; otherwise he will have to call the office and cancel a business dinner. Murat feels irritated, and in this moment of maximum crisis he is struggling against the idea that his family is, at its core, one massive inconvenience.
This is what he’s thinking as he pulls out of the garage and this is what he is still thinking as he sits in traffic nearly an hour later, cranking at the gearshift as he ekes his way across the city. When he finally pulls up in front of Peter’s apartment, he is confronted with a contingency he hasn’t planned for, and neither has Kristin: there is no place to park. He can’t wait out front if he doesn’t have a parking spot. So he circles the block. It is all that he can think to do.
May 28, 2013
Deniz suggested that Peter take a photograph of the sunset. After they’d bumped into one another along Sıraselviler Caddesi, Peter had followed him up through Taksim Square and then on into Gezi Park, which brimmed with tens of thousands of chanting, flag-waving protesters. It was late afternoon. The two of them sat among dozens of others at the base of the Statue of the Republic, a boastful bronze replica of Atatürk and his companions advancing against the great imperial powers—the British and French—to found their democratic nation. Peter had brought Deniz a cup of bitter tea from an old man with a steel samovar fastened to his back on a makeshift aluminum frame. The old man brewed and sold his tea in the same manner it had always been done, from the time of Constantine to the present day, a reminder that some things didn’t change, or couldn’t be improved upon.
“The sun will set right there,” said Deniz, pointing down İstiklal Caddesi. The wide boulevard gleamed in the fading light, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Belle epoque façades and kitschy, shuttered tourist shops lined the way. The protesters congregated in Gezi Park and overflowed into the adjacent Taksim Square, readying themselves for the night and the chaos that the da
rkness would inevitably bring when the police advanced on their encampments, attempting again to disband them. “The police will come from that direction, with the sun at their backs so we can’t see them in the glare. Before they do you should get a photo.”
“Sunrises and sunsets never come out right,” said Peter, placing the lens cap on his camera. A soft, orangish end of day touched the rooftops and slowly spread into the streets. He could feel a last, extra bit of warmth on his face. “My apartment has an amazing view at sunrise, one of the best in the city, so I’ve tried.”
“The best view in the city at sunrise is from a suite in the Çırağan.”
“When were you in a suite at the Çırağan?”
“Many times,” Deniz said casually. “The concierge used to be a friend of mine. If one of the suites wasn’t occupied, he’d let me stay for free.”
“That’s some friend.”
“Let’s just say he couldn’t have that job and be open about who he was. I never would’ve outed him, but he was always worried that I might. I had nothing in those days, living in a gecekondu in Esenler after I was kicked out of school. But a few nights a month I’d show up at reception having dressed the part and he would check me in. When I met someone in the lobby, or in the restaurant—man or woman—and told them I was staying in the suite … well, it wasn’t as hard as you’d think to convince them to come up, ‘just to see,’ they’d insist. And once they came up, they always stayed. Watching the sunrise from the suite in the Çırağan after a night like those is the best view in the city.”
“And your friend, the concierge?”
“Eventually, the police found him in a hammam in Çukurcuma,” said Deniz, slowly shaking his head. “They beat him so badly he couldn’t return to work. Do you know what they call us?”
Peter grew silent.
“Do you?”
“I can imagine.”
“Ibne … it means faggot,” said Deniz. “That woman you helped earlier, the one with the red dress, how many times do you think she’s squared off with the police?”
Peter shrugged.
“Never, I would bet.” Deniz then pointed out to the crowd.
Professional women and men milled about in their business suits, clutching their briefcases as if they’d gotten lost on the way to work. Students had brought out guitars and stereos that they danced around as if they’d transplanted their dormitory common areas into the midst of this protest. “The police are going to try to clear out the square. We ibneles have seen how ugly this can get. All of them”—and Deniz once again gestured to the other protesters—“all of them have not.”
Peter’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Catherine. That afternoon he hadn’t shown up to their scheduled time at his apartment. He didn’t want to explain where he was, lest she worry. He also had an instinct not to tell her whom he was with. Peter had spent the day with Deniz, staying within an arm’s length of him among the sea of protesters. Taksim Square’s Gezi Park had the energy of a rock festival, one fueled by the danger of impending violence instead of music and drugs. The police lingered among the tributary roads, which fed into the demonstrations. Some of the roads they had closed, others they had left open. When they shut a road, they sealed it with a span of chain-link fence and a sawhorse painted powder blue with POLIZ stenciled across its length in white, or they parked one of their armored buses across the road’s width. Water cannons were fitted on the rooftops of the armored buses. Chicken wire spanned their windshields. Black steel I beams that could be used as battering rams were welded across their fenders. The protesters danced, turning circles in place as they sang with their mouths wide open and their heads tossed back. They took over one of the excavators that would have been used to break ground on the shopping mall, the construction of which they had at this moment successfully brought to a standstill. They had spray-painted the excavator pink. They drove it in figure eights into Gezi Park and out through Taksim Square, waving a Turkish flag from its cab. Peter took photographs. He locked arms with the protesters when they chanted and danced. But always he watched as the police rearranged their barricades and parked and then reparked their armored buses.
The band of men Deniz had arrived with milled about the park and the square. They hung their hard hats, gas masks and goggles from their belts as they joined in with the most enthusiastic of the protesters, who counterintuitively weren’t the young but the old, the septuagenarians with their smokers’ coughs, who hacked and laughed as they danced, giddy with the idea that they had survived long enough to deliver a final word to the State. When the old kissed one another, the young cheered. The hours of the day passed across a wide spectrum of embrace. The music played on.
But the day was over now. Deniz crumpled his empty paper teacup. “Are you curious about why I didn’t choose to show your work?” he asked Peter.
“I assume you didn’t think that it was good enough.”
“Good has nothing to do with it. What’s shown is largely a political decision.”
Had his work in some way been deemed politically subversive? This idea intrigued Peter. Perhaps the grant he had taken from Kristin disqualified him from an exhibit at the Istanbul Modern. Or, better yet, perhaps he had made a bold statement, one that even he didn’t fully comprehend. He suddenly felt himself to be at the center of an intrigue. “I don’t want to cause any problems for you,” he said. “I could always tighten up or reimagine the project—”
“I’m not asking you to tighten up or reimagine anything,” interrupted Deniz. He exhaled a long, impatient breath. “When I say that it’s political, I mean that there is a rift between Catherine and me. I’m not comfortable with her dictating what gets shown in the gallery and, because she and I share a history, she increasingly tries to influence decisions that aren’t hers to make. I don’t mean to offend. I know that the two of you are”—his voice wandered off and then he resumed—“that she is your friend.”
“I understand,” answered Peter, though he didn’t quite.
“I did like what you showed me,” said Deniz. “Have you tried reaching out to the consulate to see if they could help you?”
Peter nodded but said nothing. He had no intention of bringing up the grant he’d already received. Deniz fished a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket. He offered one to Peter and then lit both of their cigarettes.
“So now that I can’t help you, what’s your plan?” asked Deniz.
Peter appreciated the honesty, though he had no answer. Instead he stood, stretched his limbs and faced down İstiklal Caddesi in the direction Deniz had told him the riot police would enter the square. He thumbed at his camera, scrolling through the viewfinder and examining the photos he’d taken throughout the day: the triumphant crowd standing atop the excavator, the old couple kissing one another as they danced, the boy who had climbed onto the Statue of the Republic and shrouded the likeness of Atatürk with the national flag and the portrait of the woman in the red dress. Peter had documented these moments but added nothing to them. What he had produced memorialized the day but went no further. With night setting in, he felt as though an opportunity had escaped him.
Peter allowed his camera to hang heavily around his neck.
The old man with the samovar circled the Statue of the Republic one last time as he tried to corral a final bit of business, his eyes flitting anxiously up toward the few unbarricaded streets, which were the only avenues of escape into the adjacent neighborhoods. “Bir chai,” said a thirsty university student, holding up one finger. His voice was hoarse from chanting in the square. A winsome pane of black hair fell across his forehead.
The old man poured out his cup of tea. “Iki lira,” he said, extending his palm.
The student knifed his hands into the pockets of his slim-fitting designer jeans. He fished out a carelessly folded wad of bills and a couple of coins, which tumbled to the gro
und. As the student picked up the coins, the old man held the cup of tea in front of him and continued to cast his eyes nervously toward the few open roads exiting the square. To the north, to the south and to the east, in every direction except the west, the police had begun to congregate. They weren’t blocking the way, not yet. Their assembly signaled a grace period to the protesters: Now is your chance to leave.
From their knees to their ankles the police wore greaves, and from their wrists to their elbows they wore gauntlets; they covered their torsos with breastplates, and all of it was made of a black carbon fiber that was tough as steel yet light as plastic. They tilted their weapons on their hips and cradled their white helmets in their overdeveloped biceps while they opened and closed the transparent visors on their face guards. With their chest-high riot shields leaning against them, they appeared like modern-day hoplites, men who were well practiced in old forms of violence. They smoked cigarettes and laughed among themselves. Their superiors handed out fistfuls of tear-gas cartridges and bandoliers of rubber bullets from plywood crates. The sound of their easy conversation rose up, hardly matching the pitch of the demonstrators’ chants, but serving as an ominous undertone for anyone who chose to listen.
The thirsty student didn’t have enough change, just a twenty-lira note. The old man with the samovar nervously asked if he had anything smaller while his gaze hardly moved from the gathering ranks of police. The student apologized. With the cup of tea already poured and the night setting in, he assumed that he would be given it for free. The old man refused and demanded that the student find change among the crowd. Halfheartedly, the student asked a few of the others who were standing nearby, including Peter, who checked his pockets for the meager sum, but he had already handed over his change to the old man for the tea he’d bought earlier for him and Deniz. When the student said that he couldn’t find the two lira, the old man made a libation of the tea by pouring the full cup onto the pavement. It splattered against the student’s shoes and expensive jeans.
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