“What good did that do!” said the student, squaring off with the old man. The crowd constricted as they sensed the conflict stirring.
“Why not give him the tea?” came a voice.
“We’re all in this together,” came another.
In the name of unity, and for a cause no greater than a cup of tea, they seemed ready to tear the old man apart. As they shoved him, the old man explained himself. “He’s a rich university boy. Why should I give him something for free simply because he doesn’t have a coin small enough to pay me?”
A pair of students reached behind the old man and opened the spigot on his samovar. The hot tea poured onto the backs of his legs. At first he ran in a circle to the sound of their jeers. Surrounded by these youths, he didn’t dare come out of his shoulder straps and stop the flow. He soon changed course and fled toward the police. The taunting students followed after him for a few steps, laughing as he trailed a long brackish thread of tea across the pavement stones of Taksim Square. Then they stopped, recognizing that they had come within striking distance of the police, who, upon seeing the old man sprinting toward them, took the opportunity to don their helmets and form into ranks.
The sun was setting.
The police had blocked all of the roads in and out of the square, except for İstiklal Caddesi to the west. The dancing and singing stopped. A low hum of conversation reverberated among the police and among the protesters. But it wasn’t a sound. It was like the absence of sound after a period of unsustainable noise. It was like a ringing in the ears. Peter could hear it everywhere. His eyes shifted to the barricades and the immovable police. The fading light fell upon them very clearly. Their helmets were on. Their face masks were down.
The first tear-gas canister sailed upward, its tail whinnying across the sky.
Peter followed its arc and then he lost it in the low sun.
He stared down İstiklal Caddesi, blinded by the end of day. His phone began to vibrate again in his pocket—Cat. He could hear rhythmic footsteps marching in time, but he could see nothing. He silenced his phone and then lifted his camera in the direction of the noise and allowed his shutter to release. Later, after the events of that night and the next morning, he would look at these photos. The exposure would develop as a brilliant ring, like a shot of an eclipse, but on the circumference’s periphery he would be able to make out the dark, ominous figures of the police—nearly one thousand of them—advancing through the glare.
Deniz and his companions began to assemble around the Statue of the Republic. They donned their gas masks, their protective glasses and their hard hats. These were the ibneles, as Deniz referred to them. The disorganized masses filed in behind them. Clouds of tear gas wafted up from the sputtering canisters that now littered the ground. The front rank of protesters punted them like sport. Above the crowd a haze gathered with silent fatalism. Someone blew a metal whistle. Everyone advanced, shoulders forward, heads down, as if into a diagonal rain. Peter followed. He didn’t know what else to do. Holding his hand like a visor along his forehead, he squinted upward. He stayed shoulder to shoulder with Deniz. Catching Peter’s eyes, Deniz began to laugh. From his pocket he removed a pair of dark glasses, and with Peter close behind, the two of them headed off in the direction of the sun.
One-thirty on that afternoon
He drives in circles. It takes Murat less than a minute to lap Peter’s block. There is little traffic. Most people have left for work or already dropped their children at school. Older, heavy-chested women emerge from the windows. They cradle their heaps of bed linens and laundry in plastic mesh baskets beneath their arms. Their waists press to the windowsills as they lean outside, clothespins clamped between fleshy lips, while they hang the wash from lines suspended apartment to apartment.
From behind the steering wheel Murat wonders which window is Peter’s and about the extent of the plan that Catherine has set in motion. And he tries to imagine Catherine living with Peter and being reduced to one of these neighborhood women, yet he cannot see it. Murat knows she would never be satisfied with such a quotidian life, hanging out her husband’s clothes to dry and locking up her days with domestic chores, and he wonders how Catherine could have deluded herself into thinking otherwise and if Peter knew her so little as to believe that he could ever make her happy with such a life.
When Murat had asked Catherine to marry him, she had added one distinct caveat to their engagement. “Family,” Catherine had said, “should be the center of who you are, not the circumference.” This had made good sense to Murat. He hadn’t wanted to be limited in his ambitions, which Catherine had always supported. When they’d been younger, she used to steal her favorites of his architectural drawings, only to return them a day or two later in frames. “That’s where they belong,” she had insisted. “Never forget, they aren’t your work. They’re your art.” As for Catherine’s dreams, Murat felt no desire to curtail them by becoming her circumference. Though, in truth, he no longer knew what his wife’s dreams might be. Whether Catherine had an obligation to articulate these dreams to Murat—so he might understand and support them—who could say? Murat had understood them when they first met, at least partially. Aside from her onstage ambitions, she had wanted to leave home, in effect to run from that center of who she had been. Murat had once enabled that. Now Peter did.
Murat tries to imagine his confrontation with his wife and Peter. He will double-park the car, which will ensure that the altercation can’t last for too long. With the engine idling, he will tell Catherine to load William into the backseat. He plans to be quiet yet firm, and he will focus his demands on his son as opposed to on her. His rights as a husband could be questioned. She could lay claim to her emotions and insist that she doesn’t love him. She could also point out his many failings. His rights as a father, however, don’t require her approval. William is as much his son as hers.
Murat continues to drive. With his shoulders hunched over the steering wheel, he scans the sidewalks around Peter’s apartment building. Hunting for his son, he notices how his vision has become clearer. At a hundred meters he can catch the details of someone’s face as surely as if they had sat next to him at a dinner party. While Murat doubts any physical harm has come to William, he knows that he is no longer in control of his son’s fate. That uncertainty sends a jolt of fear through him. He can feel it in his fingertips as he grips the steering wheel, maneuvering the car through the narrow streets. He can see it in the way his vision has momentarily sharpened. He loves the boy.
Murat’s urge to recover his son is a primal one, like that of a parent discovering the strength to lift a car when their child is pinned beneath it. How lucky Murat would have been to find himself in those circumstances. But he has no car to lift. His child has been taken from him. Did Catherine understand the cruelty of this?
Of course she did.
He had taken something from her, after all. Had he forgotten what he never gave her, what he couldn’t give her? And now, she had taken away his son. Because of his inadequacies, he had always made allowances for Catherine, even turning the other way when she took the occasional lover, men she seemed to select by a criterion of vapidity, in deference to her husband, so that they would never threaten him. But those allowances had come with the promise that she wouldn’t leave. Or worse, that she wouldn’t separate him from William. Each loop Murat makes around the block is like a spring winding itself tighter and tighter inside of him.
What she has done—in its way—is obvious.
She has the power when it comes to their son. Custody always goes to the mother. This isn’t America or Western Europe. He is now at her mercy. She is exploiting his vulnerability, a reprisal of sorts for what he could never give her. It makes perfect sense to Murat. If a man’s wife denies him physical affection, the husband might choose to take that affection by force. But for a woman? A woman cannot take in the same way. As Murat
realizes Catherine’s method, he almost admires her subtle genius. It might not have been one for one, but what Catherine has done is a near-equivalent revenge.
His inability, and the freedom it afforded her, had worked in their marriage for many years. She had understood his limitation from the outset and although he had managed better when he was a student, it had always been there and only grew debilitatingly worse once they left her country and returned to his home, which was the center of his angst. Then there was no course to run except to make allowances for one another: her occasional infidelities, an adopted child, but not much else. If she wanted to take William, to make him and him alone the center of who she was, could he justify denying her when he’d already denied her so much?
Murat continues to drive, retracing his path, but also searching for the answer to how it had all gone wrong. How he had done this to his wife. And how his wife had done this to him. He keeps returning to what she had told him those many years ago: Family should be the center of who you are, not the circumference. Thinking of that circumference, he scans up and down the sidewalks, looking for his son, as he circles and then re-circles the block.
* * *
The digital clock on the dash reads 13:47. He has been in the car for nearing an hour. The fuel gauge hovers around a quarter of a tank. This gives him an hour more until he will need to find a gas station, which he is loath to do. Having settled into his vigil, he doesn’t want to break it and miss Peter, Catherine and William when they enter or exit the apartment. He has switched the radio on, tuning in to a political talk show. The subject is the faltering economy. Since Gezi Park, the lira has lost a third of its value. It threatens to depreciate further. Foreign investment has dried up. Internal threats (discontent at home, Kurdish separatists) and external threats (Syrian radicals) have destabilized the nation. The radio host and his guests argue about who is to blame.
As Murat listens, he catches himself nodding in support of certain points and shaking his head to refute others. He continues around the block, leaning slightly to the right, over the gearshift, in the direction of his turns.
A police cruiser pulls up behind him.
Murat at first doesn’t notice the wheeling rack of lights in his rearview mirror, immersed as he is in the radio program and his driving. The cruiser lets out a single blare from its siren. Murat doesn’t pull over right away. He needs to take one last turn so that he can still see the front door of Peter’s apartment when he stops. The road is narrow so Murat pulls two of his wheels up along the curb, allowing traffic to pass. The police cruiser behind him does the same. Glancing into his rear and side mirrors, Murat can see the officer checking and rechecking a computer screen bolted to a console on the dashboard. The door to the police cruiser swings open.
The officer steps into the street in no great hurry, stretching some stiffness from his lower back as he bends his torso frontward, rearward and side to side, as if in salutation to the four cardinal directions. He is a man with a curious figure, which tapers upward and gives him the look of a bowling pin. The paunch around his middle appears to be the product of decades of daylong shifts in his patrol car and, as such, this rim of fat doesn’t bespeak laziness or neglect, but rather years of fidelity to his job.
The officer walks from his door to Murat’s in a near waddle. His proud white hair is combed back from his forehead, while a healthy amount of black remains in his thick eyebrows and ample scrolled mustache. He knocks on Murat’s window, and Murat, glancing into the officer’s mirrored sunglasses, notices both his reflection and the thin line which segments the lenses into bifocals.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for some friends,” answers Murat.
“How long have you been waiting?” the officer asks.
“About an hour.”
“Someone in the neighborhood called about a suspicious vehicle. Do you usually circle the block for an hour waiting for your friends?” The officer glances inside the Mercedes’s cream interior. Black piping lines the leather seats. Mahogany paneling inlays the dashboard. Each morning Murat’s driver lightly perfumes the interior, and that scent, which is unmistakably foreign and expensive, wafts up as if to answer the officer’s inquiry about whether this vehicle is suspicious.
“In this neighborhood,” the officer continues, “they don’t see many cars like this.” His eyes cast along the street and then dart up for a moment, catching the residents at their chores through the open windows. He seems to hold them in contempt, even though with a policeman’s wages and the promise of nothing more than a civil servant’s pension he can never hope to rise any further in stature than the husbands of the working-class women who flog their area rugs with paddles and hang their tangled wash above the street.
The officer leans into Murat’s lowered window, reaches across his body and turns up the radio. “I was listening to the same thing before I pulled you over,” he says. A beat of silence passes between them and the broadcast pours into that vacuum. The commentators discuss Berkin Elvan, a fourteen-year-old boy who hovers near death after a canister of tear gas struck him in the head when his parents sent him to the grocer for a loaf of bread during the demonstrations around Taksim’s Gezi Park. For six months doctors have sustained him in a coma while protesters have demanded justice against the police who shot him. The radio blares on:
“His parents should face charges for the damage from these latest protests,” says one of the commentators. “This tragedy is their fault.”
“But it is the police who shot him,” says the other.
“His parents sent him to buy bread during a riot, but you blame the police?”
Leaning against Murat’s door, the officer glances over his shoulder and down the street behind him, to where two or three cars have now backed up. The drivers idle, not daring to honk at the police. The officer stands straight and waves them past, allowing himself to be drawn out of the radio program and its arguments. The cars timidly accelerate by. The officer gives each of the drivers a long, disdainful gaze, for no particular reason, except, perhaps, that he can.
Observing the manner in which the cars submissively pass, with their drivers riding the brakes, Murat can’t help but think about the changes that have occurred across the country in the months since Gezi Park. Two or three years before, a police officer would have been cursed at for needlessly blocking a road. After the protests of that summer, the government had reasserted itself like a parent who had long been too lenient with a petulant child. The people could bang their drums, chant their chants, they could howl in all the public squares of the world, but unless they could topple the State, and unless they could build a new state in its place, their optimistic visions would remain delusions and these delusional children would be the architects of their own prison. When Murat imagines that prison, he knows it to be a place where an aging traffic cop in an ill-fitting uniform inspires fear.
After the last of the cars eases past them, Murat feels that fear in the next question the officer asks: “You’re Murat Yaşar, aren’t you?” Murat keeps both his hands planted on the steering wheel. He stares straight ahead. The radio program fills the silence. The two commentators continue their debate about Berkin Elvan and who is to blame for this latest spate of violence. “Your license plate number came up immediately,” the officer explains. “I wouldn’t have expected to find you in this part of the city?”
“I’m here on business.”
“Business?”
“Scouting out development opportunities,” Murat answers in a meek voice that escapes his mouth in almost a whisper, as if he needs a drink of water.
The officer smirks.
Murat grips the steering wheel more tightly.
“Why would you build anything in this part of the city?” asks the officer. “Regardless, the charge is loitering. Unless you’d like me to do you a favor?”
&n
bsp; “Loitering?” asks Murat. “Are you threatening me?”
“Why should you feel threatened?” asks the officer. “Listen, I could simply write you the ticket but I’ve offered to do you a favor.” He leans a bit closer to Murat. “You could call the precinct captain, or even the police commissioner and ask for a favor, correct? They would, of course, drop this charge for you. You’re an important man. But asking that favor of them would require a bit of explaining, don’t you think? Whereas I could let you go now. Would you rather owe a favor to powerful men like them, or to an inconsequential one like me?”
Murat recognizes the officer’s logic. He also recognizes that a person is only as powerful as the favors he is owed. He can’t afford to have this episode with his unfaithful wife play out in any public way. The charge, “loitering,” has become a catchall by which an investigation into any number of areas could begin. The officer stands with his bent arm thrown jauntily on top of the car door as he awaits Murat’s answer. Of all the negative feelings Murat harbors in this moment, the most pronounced is envy. Yes, he envies the officer. He reluctantly admits it to himself. For his entire life Murat has invested in a series of assets—his father’s business, his marriage, his adopted son—and he has watched as each transformed into a liability. Murat wants what the officer has: the freedom of possessing nothing. It is that freedom that has always allowed the powerless to challenge the powerful, or, put another way, that freedom has allowed the unencumbered to outmaneuver those weighted down by their own successes.
Murat reaches into the silk lining of his suit jacket. He removes his billfold. “How much do you want?” he asks.
“I don’t think you understand,” says the officer. He holds out his palm toward Murat, refusing him. “I’m not interested in your money.”
Red Dress in Black and White Page 17