* * *
Catherine and William fall asleep, his head rests on her shoulder and her cheek rests on his head, they have collapsed one onto the other. Traffic is at a standstill. Had they been awake, Peter would have recommended they all walk. But they need to rest, so he says nothing. “Maybe twenty minutes more,” the taxi driver whispers to Peter, who checks his watch and examines the road ahead of them, which leads toward his apartment.
“How old is your son?” asks the driver.
“He’s not my son,” answers Peter. There is a dip in the conversation. It is unclear who’s supposed to speak next. The driver allows Peter this space, which he soon fills. “His mother is my girlfriend.” Peter has never referred to Catherine in those terms. He feels an impulse to offer more, as if he is confessing himself. The driver continues to drive, saying nothing, which is in effect his invitation for Peter to say more, if he chooses. “His father is a problem,” Peter adds. “So they’re staying with me.”
The driver glances in his rearview mirror, his reflection only a pair of watching eyes. He makes a quick examination of Catherine and William. Perhaps in their sleeping faces, a clue exists as to the problem Peter has referenced, but if a deeper examination might reveal some concealed history, the driver seems to quickly lose interest. Within an instant his stare has returned to the road.
Like a burden being shifted uncomfortably back onto his shoulders, Peter resumes his silence. He is alone next to the driver. Searching for something to do he rolls down his window. The driver shoots over an irritated look.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Peter asks.
* * *
Catherine jolts awake the moment they take the final turn toward Peter’s apartment. While she straightens her clothes and hair, William continues to doze with his head propped against her shoulder. His color hasn’t completely returned. Nevertheless, he appears refreshed, for he is still young enough that his face bears few signs of last night’s and this morning’s ordeals. His mother, however, wears the evidence of that strain in her puffy eyes, and the faint wrinkles etched around both her mouth and forehead like fine handwriting, and in her silence.
Catherine continues to adjust herself—retucking her shirt, straightening her jacket—taking care not to dislodge William’s cheek, which remains on her shoulder as he sleeps. She glances outside. A heavy lid of clouds continues to hover at the tops of the tallest buildings. The sun has yet to burn through the morning overcast and by the early afternoon it seems as if it never will. Rows of apartments crowd the narrow street. They reach skyward, like inadequate columns built to support a vast ceiling. Without color, shading or halftones, a gloom of simple light follows their return.
“Almost home,” says Peter, hooking his arm behind his headrest so that he faces Catherine in the backseat. He offers an easy smile as he turns toward her, but now that smile vanishes and in its wake a blank stare forms—confusion turning to fear—when his eyes focus out of the rear window.
A black Mercedes has taken a right turn, following behind them.
“Keep straight,” Peter snaps at their driver, and then faces forward.
Murat’s silhouette appears in the rearview mirror. Like when a shark appears in a wave with its unmistakable outline shooting darkly through the aquamarine, Murat’s menacing silhouette proves unmistakable. Then, just like the shark in the wave, and just as quickly, Murat disappears. His Mercedes breaks right, looping the block in the opposite direction as Catherine and Peter’s taxi, which continues straight on.
Peter slinks down in his seat. The slackening in his body is equal parts relief and disappointment, for he feels a reluctant draw toward Murat, as if he wants to park the taxi so that he can step onto the curb, flag down his rival and, perhaps, clear the air between them.
Catherine has seen the Mercedes too. “Wake up,” she says, shaking William by the shoulders.
The boy whimpers, pleading for his mother to leave him in peace.
“Where do you want me to drop you?” asks the taxi driver.
Peter glances at Catherine through the rearview mirror. Her uncertain gaze matches his own. He resents her silence, her lack of a plan. She has imposed herself on him, first by bringing William to his exhibit the night before, and now by luring Murat to his apartment. Peter can’t return home. She has placed him in the exact same position she is in, upending his life. She could redeem herself somewhat by offering an idea of what they should do now. But he knows that she has none. The entire contour of their affair—that first night on the bridge, sharing cigarettes on the terrace at dinner, the afternoons at his apartment—none of it has been thought out. It has been a series of ill-considered impulses. None of it deliberate. None of it with meaning.
“Stop the cab,” he says.
The driver presses hastily on the brakes.
“Where are you going?” asks Catherine.
“I’m going to talk with him.”
“You can’t do that.”
“He’s your husband,” says Peter. The door is open and his foot is planted on the pavement, though he has yet to transfer his weight onto it. “Come with me. We’ll do it together.” Her eyes shift toward the street in a flash of consideration, but then her gaze freezes. She stares straight ahead, at the road.
He steps from the taxi.
Catherine reacts to his departure by placing her arm around her son, who glances from the backseat upward at Peter. William has listened to their exchange, but if he feels any concern that he might not see Peter again he doesn’t show it. With both hands William clutches the camera Peter lent him, which he wears around his neck. Peter can’t bring himself to ask for his camera back. He also can’t bring himself to abandon Catherine entirely. Had theirs been a normal, casual romance, he would have left. But it hasn’t been. They have become entangled within one another’s lives. From her son, to his work, to her volatile husband, she has encumbered him. And Peter can feel the weight of those tethers holding him in place as he attempts to leave her.
Then a thought comes to him very clearly: Perhaps she has been deliberate. Perhaps she had known all along what she was doing with me, how she has held me in place.
Before he shuts the door behind him, Peter dips his head into the taxi’s open front window. “Drop her at Bebek Park,” he tells the driver, pressing a few bills into his hand. He turns to Catherine. “I’ll meet you there within the hour.”
“And if you don’t?” she asks.
Peter straightens himself. He glances up the empty road.
“In an hour.”
Before she can respond, he pounds once on the roof. The taxi eases into gear and quickly makes a turn, descending toward the Bosphorus. Then it disappears. Peter walks to his apartment. He can hear the scrape of his shoes on the wet asphalt. He can feel the wind on the back of his neck. The air is damp and the clouds above him are heavy with rain.
The black Mercedes reappears, making a turn, easing onto the road directly ahead of him. Peter continues in its direction, taking unrushed and measured steps. He places his hands in his pockets. He notices a parking space which hadn’t been there before. The Mercedes drives past it. Murat double-parks instead. He opens his door, one foot in his car and one foot on the street, waiting for Peter.
May 29, 2013
Kristin had spent that entire night at her desk answering questions from her superiors in northern Virginia and their superiors in Washington, D.C. A muted television on a wheeled stand in the corner played the news. She had watched the live footage of the armored buses lurching along İstiklal Caddesi. When their water cannons tossed a person down the street, she wasn’t surprised by the harm water could do. She had seen it before, not here, but in other postings. She had also seen crowds mowed down by rubber bullets, choked by tear gas, blinded by pepper spray. Violent images had little resonance with her. Although they might be shocking, such images did nothing
to place that violence in its political context, which was what interested Kristin.
After midnight her husband sent her a series of text messages. He was going to sleep. He had left her dinner warming on the stove. She thanked him, for the dinner. No problem, he replied. She told him that she didn’t know when she’d be home. He didn’t answer. She wrote that she loved him. He still didn’t answer. She figured that he had already gone to bed. At least this is what she hoped. The alternative, that her relentless hours at the office might have disrupted the delicate equilibrium of their marriage unsettled Kristin. Although her work supported their family, his patience was the essential adhesive binding the two of them together, and marooned at her desk on nights like this, she wondered if that patience had turned cold, and into his resignation.
She considered sending him a last text in case he hadn’t seen the other two. But she thought better of it. He was asleep, not ignoring her. She assured herself of this and then set her phone down amid the chimes and flashing lights of the many other phones she kept strewn across her desk with their dozens of unanswered calls and texts. Over the last two days her scattered network of contacts had reached out to her in a singular panic. She couldn’t process all of the calls and messages, so in a nearly subconscious attempt at fairness she responded to no one.
Kristin leaned back in her chair, trying to make sense of the protests and what appeared to be their relative spontaneity. Murat had warned about corruption within the government’s massive urban development initiatives. Although she didn’t doubt the truth of his reports, she hadn’t figured that it would amount to this popular eruption that choked the city. She struggled to understand why repurposing a dilapidated patch of earth like Gezi Park into a shopping mall would result in citywide and what now seemed to be nationwide protests.
A photograph taken earlier that day was circulating on the cable news channels. A woman in a red dress stood on the park’s grass in front of a rank of police shields. An officer in a gas mask had stepped from the pavement onto the grass to confront her. He cradled a metal cylinder and from it he released a gust of pepper spray, which tossed a wave of the woman’s curly black hair skyward. Slung over her shoulder was a white canvas tote bag.
Kristin switched stations.
The photo had begun to run on nearly every news channel. Kristin could see why it resonated. The colors: a red dress, a white tote bag. These were the colors of the national flag. Contrasting with them was the sickly mustard-colored stream of pepper spray directed at the woman’s face. And she was pretty, not beautiful, but familiar. Any person watching the television could see her as whatever they chose, their daughter, sister or wife.
The next morning the photograph ran in the papers on the front page. By midday it was sketchily painted on banners that would be unfurled in the park and in the square and held by dozens of hands while they marched. That night at her desk, Kristin wondered if perhaps Peter had taken the photograph. She doubted it, but imagined that he could have headed down to the square. She wondered if he had gotten caught up in the protests. She had no idea that he had met the woman in the red dress and that he had taken a different picture of her, one that few people would care about, one that revealed far less.
She wondered whether Catherine would convince Deniz to show Peter’s work at the Istanbul Modern. She understood how important this was to Peter and that he might leave if nothing came of his project. She could always circumvent Catherine and take the matter up directly with Deniz, though her instincts told her this wouldn’t go well. Deniz’s rise through the museum’s hierarchy had been improbable, and Kristin’s intervention would only play on his insecurities, reminding Deniz of her familiarity with the poverty and obscurity from which he came. No, thought Kristin, going directly to Deniz is sure to backfire. You know too much about him. A second thought percolated in her mind. Before it could assume a shape, she snuffed it out like a tic she had long ago learned to suppress. That idea, had it formed entirely, was: He knows too much about you.
Early in the morning, in that part of it that was still night and not long after her thoughts had turned to him, the phone she had assigned to Peter began to ring. Of all the calls that had come in, it was the only one she would choose to take. And when she answered, it wasn’t his voice on the other end of the line.
* * *
“How long has it been now?” Peter asked.
Deniz sat next to him on a concrete bench cantilevered to the wall. Pockets of darkness lingered in the corners and beneath the steel bunks strewn haphazardly about their dimly lit cell. He angled his watch toward a single two-inch-thick plexiglass window, which admitted a rectangle of orangish light from the streetlamps outside. “Two hours,” Deniz said.
Peter raised his head from his cradled arms. He blinked tentatively upward, his eyelids breaking apart the tears that had crusted around the lashes. The final thing he had seen was the nozzle thrust in his face before the police doused him with pepper spray. Although he knew that pepper spray didn’t blind, it was a hypothetical knowledge, one that didn’t correspond to the pain he felt, which suggested permanent injury in its intensity, and he was in a near panic to regain his vision, no matter how excruciating it was when he tried to pry apart his tender eyelids. He grimaced in an attempt to open them, drawing his lips together tightly.
“Just leave it,” said Deniz. “You’ll be fine in another hour or two.”
Peter again lowered his head into his arms. The small of his back pressed against the cold concrete wall. He was listening carefully. All around him he could hear the heavy breathing of those who slept and the murmured conversations of those who didn’t. These sounds were punctuated by disagreements, the predictable bickering between those who wanted to rest and those who wished to talk. They had arrived soaked from the water cannons, and to keep them from freezing in the night the police had handed them each a wool blanket, which trapped the residual scent of tear gas from their clothes as effectively as it trapped a damp second-rate warmth.
“I need to make a call,” Peter muttered.
“With this on my record, I’ll lose my position at the museum,” said Deniz.
“Will you flag down an officer and ask about the phone for me?” said Peter.
“Without work, I’ll have to return to Esenler.” Deniz collapsed his head into his arms. “I can’t return to Esenler.” He spoke to himself alone, his imagination casting a spell of paralyzing outcomes. Peter could hear the desperation in Deniz’s voice, but he needed his help, even if Deniz believed himself to be beyond help. Peter raised his head and with scissored fingers made another attempt to peel apart his eyelids. The world blurred as if submerged underwater.
“I need to make a call,” Peter repeated.
Deniz lifted his head. His bottom lip had been split open and bled badly from where his braces had cut into it. The blood that pooled in the ridges of his gums outlined his teeth in red. The white of one of his eyes had also been stained red from a blow to the temple. His hair was mussed in such a way that it revealed a slight bald spot, which with his hampered vision Peter managed to notice even though he had never noticed it before.
“Who are you going to call?” Deniz asked. “The consulate? Are you going to call Kristin?” A look of surprise registered across Peter’s face. Deniz continued, “You thought I didn’t know her? I was one of the first people she met in this city when she was newly assigned to the consulate, newly married … she was newly everything back then. She was newly posted to Cultural Affairs, too. They sponsored a reception at the Çırağan, that’s where we met.” Deniz smiled serenely as he thought of Kristin. “Cultural affairs,” he said, rolling the word around his mouth like a peppermint. “That’s one way to put it. Yes, I’m all too familiar with her.”
Deniz gathered himself. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, swallowed and then smoothed down his hair. Straightening, he approached the cell bars and hook
ed his arms through them, stuffing his index and ring fingers into his mouth, releasing a piercing whistle as though he were hailing a cab, or catcalling a woman. A commotion began among those who were trying to sleep in the steel bunks, a chorus of voices pleading for him to shut up, and then they began to offer threats of their own, pledging an assortment of ways in which they would soon silence him. Rising above the growing commotion, someone called him an ibne.
Nearly half those in the cell sat up. “What’d you say?” came a voice.
“Ibne.”
Peter couldn’t see who had said the word, but beneath the rectangular window one of the bunks came crashing down. Whoever had offered the insult had been swiftly pulled to the ground. Sides quickly formed. Among stomps and cocked fists, those who wished to offer this homophobe a beating paired off against those who wished to defend him. And like that, their ranks once again devolved into a mob.
The mêlée instigated by Deniz’s whistling didn’t last long. Tucked in a corner of the cell was a camera, a menacing black orb that held a view of everything. Half a dozen officers materialized down a long corridor as if from nowhere. They didn’t enter the cell, not at first. Instead they rattled their unsheathed batons across the bars. This did nothing to silence the prisoners, who exhibited little concern at the prospect of receiving a further beating by the police.
Peter and Deniz didn’t participate in the brawl. With his severely hampered vision, Peter could hardly protect himself, so he and Deniz hunkered alongside one another near the cell door. One of the officers had begun to blow a steel whistle, which some of the prisoners confused with Deniz’s whistle from moments before. “Shut up with that!” a few shouted, interpreting the noise as a further provocation.
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