Peter reached into his bag. Next to his camera was his wallet. Inside the wallet was Kristin’s business card with the phone number she had given him. He could call her. Perhaps she could use the weight of her diplomatic position to clear this up. Whatever temptation he felt to hand over his camera was immediately overruled by his desire to avoid the humiliation of a robbery. Whether it was a survival instinct or self-pride, Peter couldn’t say. Perhaps, he thought, there wasn’t much of a difference between the two. The reason didn’t matter. He was not handing over his camera.
Peter pulled Kristin’s business card out of his bag. “I am with the U.S. consulate,” he said. “You can call that number for a reference.” He pointed to Kristin’s handwritten scrawl from many months before, which was smudged, and the edges of the card were worn and dog-eared. As far as credentials went, what Peter had presented was a poor offering and he imagined Kristin sitting at her desk, the ranks of cellphones arrayed in front of her. What were the chances that she’d even answer? And if she didn’t answer? Peter imagined himself disappearing into a holding cell in the bowels of the local precinct until he could contact someone who would vouch for him, which might be never.
Holding out the business card to the two men, Peter wished that he had never volunteered it. But there was nothing he could do about that now. He had placed his fate in their hands, and in Kristin’s. He’d never known that he could feel such precise regret.
The taller man snatched the card. He held it at arm’s length as he read, offering a slight grimace. Whatever I’m selling, they aren’t buying, thought Peter. Next it was time for the man with the gold incisor to examine the card. He took it from his colleague, rotating it between his fingers before he held it steadily in front of him and began to read. Then he glanced up. “Cultural Affairs Section?” he said gravely.
“That’s right,” answered Peter.
“You expect us to believe that you are with the Cultural Affairs Section?”
Peter explained that he was a photographer on an artistic grant from the consulate and that his work dealt with “cross-cultural dialogue.” The two men exchanged blank, confused stares. Peter described in greater detail the nature of his project, his theories about how societies are held in place by invisible yet binding constructs, his method of categorizing photos to reveal this, the manner in which an image conveys one impression when displayed on its own but another impression entirely when it’s paired with a different image. “It’s a matter of context,” Peter said.
They both began to laugh at him.
The taller man then said something to his partner in Turkish. They turned serious, determining what they should do with Peter. They kneaded their stubbled chins. They kicked at the dirt with the toes of their shined boots. Pondering his fate was a form of torture and they chose to torture him. Once or twice each of them glanced directly at Peter. They even offered smiles.
The day was heating up. The sun had burnt off most of the mist, which had stalled so thick along the strait that morning. The wind came steadily now, blowing down the hillside and carrying an increasing measure of tear gas, an indication that it was being administered in more liberal doses further up the path.
Peter began to sneeze.
“God bless you,” said the man with the gold incisor.
Peter couldn’t stop sneezing. He’d broken into a fit, bending over at the waist. The taller man reached into his pocket and handed Peter a somewhat used handkerchief, which Peter took, not wanting to appear impolite. He blew his nose and wiped his eyes and soon recomposed himself. “Give her a call,” he said, pointing toward the business card. “She’ll sort this out for us.” He struggled to speak confidently as he imagined either of the two dialing the number, holding the phone to his ear while they all listened to its empty ringing when no one answered. Peter also imagined the phone on Kristin’s desk and her ignoring it as she spoke to someone of greater importance, or answered emails, or did any number of things except for the one thing that Peter needed her to do, which was to help him.
Peter waited to see what they’d say.
“We don’t want any problems with Cultural Affairs,” concluded the man with the incisor. “You can go. But if you’re determined to spend the day in Gezi Park, you should try to get a gas mask.” He returned Kristin’s tattered business card, holding it with both hands as if it deserved at least this much deference. Peter felt he had managed to capitalize on the reliable strain of paranoia which ran among the Turks. Cultural Affairs, he thought, almost speaking the two words. Then a half dozen menacing three-letter acronyms of U.S. government agencies flashed through his mind. Peter couldn’t help but find it amusing—even empowering—that someone would presume his affiliation with such dark, conspiratorial forces.
He set off toward Gezi Park, climbing a web of alleys that ran in switchbacks up the hillside and toward the city’s heart. Belief in conspiracy theories was a form of paralysis, he thought. To be unable to look at a person, or a series of events, and take them at face value, to see manipulations and lies everywhere, it must cripple a society, make it incapable of progress, vulnerable to an unbearable hysteria.
He glanced over his shoulder, struck by an unsettling premonition that the police officers had chosen to follow him. The path behind was empty, as if proving that they were hidden somewhere on it, for surely they weren’t amateur enough to be discovered with a simple turn of the head. And if they were back there, unseen, what could he do? He could forget them, as if that were possible. Once he had climbed a bit further up the path, Peter surveyed the congested traffic on the seaside road beneath him. The pair of uniformed officers still leaned against the hoods of their cars with their hands resting on their holstered pistols. He then looked beyond the traffic, to Dolmabahçe Palace. From his elevated vantage, he could see behind its walls and into those once forbidden grounds.
He could see the football stadium too, just beneath him. It was an enormous hole in the earth. Before construction stalled, work crews had levered thick wooden stanchions temporarily into place to keep the sides from collapsing in on themselves so that a new foundation could be poured. Peter recalled the placard he had seen outside. The government and Yaşar Enterprises had partnered on the project, yet this partnership made no sense. The government had never worked with a private sports team and Beşiktaş hadn’t won a championship in decades. The two were unlikely collaborators for a new, subsidized stadium. How much would this all cost? he wondered. And who, ultimately, would pay for it?
Peter continued his ascent toward Gezi Park, threading his way through the crooked lanes where the pavement was a bit uncertain. What concern was the stadium to him? He kept his back to it as he climbed. He could have constructed any number of conspiracy theories around this unusual project, but there was little point. So he didn’t waste his time. Such theories could paralyze a mind, he told himself as he traveled steadily upward.
* * *
The street was empty and Peter hiked along its center. The mist had slickened the cobblestones and asphalt. The grade was steep. He lost his footing once or twice. The wind smelled like the sea. The birds that circled the ships in the strait also circled the treetops, some of which were beneath him. The leaves on the trees were full and green and the birds landed inside them. In places the leaves rustled and Peter could not tell if the rustling was from the wind or from the many invisible birds jockeying for space within the crowded branches.
The air became still again. Peter watched the moving trees and thought they must be very full of birds. The higher he climbed, the more the sound of the leaves mixed with the sounds from up the hill, from inside Gezi Park. He could hear the murmur of the chanting crowd, whose voices rose and rose as he approached, until they were dispersed by the pneumatic pops of discharging tear-gas canisters. He had begun to sweat as he climbed, and he could feel the residual tear gas seeding its menthol tinge into his pores and the c
orners of his eyes when he blinked.
He felt very awake.
The alley he had climbed emptied onto Sıraselviler Caddesi, an avenue in the European quarter of the city. The shuttered café façades gave off an early-morning atmosphere, as if at any moment the owners would sweep the sidewalks, set out their tables and scour the streets for customers. Adjacent to one of these cafés was the German Hospital, a relic that had long ago been turned over to local administration. Four men and a doctor stood at the front gate. They had gathered around a green, military-style stretcher. A woman was sitting up on the stretcher. She wore a red dress and carried a white canvas tote bag. Her hair was black and she was bleeding from behind her ear. The blood had traveled down her neck and mixed invisibly into the left strap of her red dress. Her arms were crossed over her knees. She looked confused.
All four of the men argued with the doctor. They had carried the woman down from Gezi Park and the doctor didn’t want her in his hospital, lest there be trouble with the authorities. The men were muscular, athletic types. Their shoulders were rounded, their waists were trim and their arms hung low at their sides, their knuckles practically brushing at their knees as if they were perpetually carrying a stretcher.
Peter thought that the woman had been lucky. Four physically fit men had been nearby in the crowd and ready to help her when she was struck. Peter then realized that this was no accident. Someone had decided that these four men should be stretcher-bearers—the protesters had begun to organize.
While the argument around her continued, the woman stood and began to walk back up Sıraselviler Caddesi, toward Gezi Park. She wore a pair of heels and as she stepped on the cobblestones she wobbled a bit. She had likely been on her way to work and, like Peter, had seen the morning news and been curious about the protest. Unlike Peter, she had gotten caught up in these events and now, seemingly, she wished to rejoin them.
The four stretcher-bearers and doctor came after her. They took her by both arms and began to help her back to the hospital’s front gate and her stretcher.
She swatted them away with her open palms.
Had she known how to make a fist, how to deliver a punch, she likely would have. But she didn’t know how to fight. She’d never had a reason to know. That morning she had been a woman in a red dress on her way to work, nothing more, and now blood spilled from a gash on her head. Life had had an order before that morning, tenuous and strained though it may have been. The woman had known her place within it. And now she didn’t. Whatever dignity had been taken away from her, she didn’t seem to understand how to recover, so she appeared determined to return to the spot where it had been taken, to go back to Gezi Park, as if she might reclaim it there.
Her open-fisted blows landed on the uplifted arms of the men, who blocked their faces as they tried to lead her away. Peter lifted his camera and got off four shots. Then the woman came after him, her arms cartwheeling with suddenly clenched fists. She cursed at Peter in Turkish and he thought to run away but didn’t. He had done nothing wrong. It was his right to take these pictures—for this was how he thought about such matters, in terms of his rights and the sanctity of those rights. He stood in the street with his camera clutched to his chest.
She switched over to English. “Get that thing out of my face.”
Peter affixed his lens cap. This seemed to satisfy the woman. The doctor had slunk up behind and again grabbed her arm above the elbow. “Okay,” he said, relenting. “Let’s do a quick examination. But for the time being I don’t want you going up to the protests.” He faced the stretcher-bearers and explained further. “She needs help. I can examine her, but I can’t do it inside the hospital.”
The woman in the red dress paused. Her mouth was slightly agape. This was the first time Peter had had a chance to look at her eyes. They were brown and of the normal sort, but the whites had reddened at the corners and it was difficult to say whether or not this effect was solely the result of the unavoidable tear gas or was perhaps a by-product of other, hidden emotions, or hidden injuries of the sort the doctor now searched for.
The doctor helped her walk back down Sıraselviler Caddesi, to the stretcher laid adjacent to the wrought-iron gate at the German Hospital’s entrance. She perched on the stretcher’s edge. The doctor reached into the pocket of his clean white jacket, which seemed out of place in the street. He tugged on a pair of turquoise rubber gloves, the latex snapping at his wrists, and then he began his examination, standing over the woman, glancing down at the back of her head while he combed apart her hair with his fingers like one primate grooming another.
Peter sat next to the woman on the curb.
She gave him a sidelong glance, and then winced as the doctor pressed the gash on the back of her head. A fresh trickle of blood crept down her shoulder and was absorbed into her dress’s left strap. The doctor made a quick call on his cellphone, asking an orderly inside the hospital to bring a few supplies to the front gate.
The four stretcher-bearers excused themselves. They had other work to do. The morning was pressing on and they returned up the road, toward the police barricades and the chanting protesters, toward the sailing canisters of tear gas and the sound of batons smacking against riot shields. Taking a bend in the road, they disappeared.
Watching them go, Peter couldn’t help but ask the woman why she hadn’t gone into her office that morning, why she’d come to the protests instead. When she glanced up at him, her eyes twitched a bit, as if they couldn’t hold focus.
“I was curious,” she said.
An orderly rushed up to the front gate in a pair of scrubs. She carried the doctor’s medical bag, an old leather satchel with a brass clasp and hinged opening. The doctor removed a hooked needle and thread, a bottle of rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs from the bag’s ample interior. He doused one of the swabs in the alcohol and then picked apart the woman’s hair as he’d done before, looking for the gash.
“Is this going to hurt?” she asked.
The doctor applied a liberal dose of the alcohol to the exposed wound. The woman in the red dress gasped and then her voice choked off. She reached up, as if she was going to punch the doctor, but instead she clenched her fist and placed it firmly in her mouth, where she bit down on her knuckles, releasing a breathy whimper. Her eyes were already red and weepy from the morning’s events, so her expression changed little while all the pain mixed together. Except she was crying.
Soon the doctor had threaded her wound and bound the stitches tightly, leaving them to heal. After making a last cut with his scissors he placed a compress at the base of her skull. The woman stood and rolled her head on her shoulders, stretching out her neck.
The doctor bent over his bag and put away his instruments.
The woman looked at Peter and her eyes seemed clear for the first time. The noise of the protests up the road was still very loud and the sun had burnt off all the mist which had lingered so stubbornly through the morning so that the air was again easy to breathe.
“Would you like to take my photo now?” she asked.
Peter removed the lens cap. He helped the woman in the red dress to her feet and guided her by both shoulders to stand in front of the German Hospital’s half-open gate with its intricate geodesic pattern. When Peter brought her image into focus, the garden courtyard beyond the gate was also visible. He could make out the bright flower beds and a birdbath with sunlight-varnished waters. But this background was blurred in the frame. He glanced up from his viewfinder. He stepped forward and adjusted the woman’s chin, lifting it slightly, which gave her a defiant air, but also turned it just a bit more in profile so that the compress on the base of her skull showed clearly.
Peter stepped back, reexamined his viewfinder and snapped the portrait.
The doctor presented a handful of hospital forms to the woman and gave her a pen. She leafed through them, and after examining a half doze
n she began to rub the aching wound on the back of her head. The doctor offered to help her with the forms and the two of them sat on the curb. When it came time to enter her personal information, the woman handed the doctor her identity card, which contained her full name and address.
The woman in the red dress returned her identity card to her purse. The doctor finished the last of the forms and placed them in a paper folder he’d brought along. “You should go home,” he said, glancing up the road. “That goes for you, too,” he added, looking at Peter. The woman and Peter stared down Sıraselviler Caddesi, away from Gezi Park and in the direction that the doctor suggested they depart.
Turning a bend in the road, a column of protesters advanced toward them, headed in the opposite direction. They walked three across and maybe ten deep, with military precision. They had the confidence of veterans. Each of them wore a white hard hat while a housepainter’s gas mask and a chemist’s set of protective goggles hung from elastic straps around each of their necks. The noise of their jangling equipment and footfalls echoed down the cobblestones, as if carried by its own momentum.
The woman in the red dress had seen enough. She began to walk in the opposite direction, away from Gezi Park. Peter wasn’t ready to join her, but he wasn’t certain if he should venture any further. Then he heard his name called out.
Near the front of the column, a man took off his hard hat. It was Deniz.
“It is Peter, right?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Peter held up his camera and wagged it in the air.
“You should come with us,” said Deniz.
And Peter did.
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