Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Confused by this, Murat awkwardly inquires whether there is a policemen’s association, or some other benevolent organization where the officer could proffer a contribution on his behalf. For what seems to be his amusement alone, the officer allows Murat to struggle with the appropriate method to offer a bribe. But the officer has no intention of taking a bribe, which only confuses Murat further. “Then give me my ticket for loitering and let me go on my way,” he says.

  “What’s the real reason you’re down here?”

  Had the officer been willing to take a bribe, Murat would have happily explained everything, knowing that the officer would be vulnerable to him for having accepted money just as he would be vulnerable to the officer for having revealed the disarray in his personal life. But to reveal a vulnerability without the other person making themselves equally vulnerable, Murat knows the power he’d be granting this man. He grows very quiet.

  The officer reaches into his pocket and removes his pad of tickets and a pen. He begins to fill out a citation while speaking to Murat. “You will see in the bottom right corner I am putting down a date. That is the deadline for protesting this citation, otherwise …” The officer doesn’t need to go further. Murat knows that an official recording of the ticket would be registered, that he would then have to take up the matter at a court summons and, hopefully, he could get the entire issue dropped before any further inquiry. He hasn’t committed a crime, far from it, but he has foolishly allowed himself to come under suspicion. He knows all too well that, just like guilt, suspicion carries its own sentence.

  “You see that building.” Murat raises his finger.

  The officer stops writing. He squints upward.

  “My wife’s lover lives there.”

  “So that’s your explanation,” says the officer.

  Murat nods.

  The officer flips closed his citation pad. He slides it into his pocket. “Good enough for me” is all he says and walks back to his cruiser.

  Murat’s admission is done. His hands grip the steering wheel. His eyes shift nearly imperceptibly into the rearview mirror. The police cruiser pulls out from behind him. Its lights are off. As the officer drives past Murat’s window, he stops so that their cars are alongside one another. The officer removes his sunglasses. His eyes are gray and dull, like unpolished silver, or a day without sun, or any other neglected and disappointing thing. “Drive safely, Mr. Yaşar,” he says. “Maybe I will see you around.”

  * * *

  Murat still circles the block. The two commentators on the radio continue their debate about who is to blame for the tragedy of Berkin Elvan. “Blame rests with the person who committed the original crime,” says one of the commentators, “and that is the government.”

  “The demonstrators began this chaos, not the government.”

  “The Gezi Park protests were the inevitable reaction to corrupt policies.”

  Murat wonders how much longer they can volley inconclusive arguments at one another. The fuel gauge on his dash nears empty. He hasn’t seen another car on the road for at least a quarter of an hour. Then, up ahead, he glimpses a taxi. He can make out the silhouettes of three people in the backseat. The taxi’s blinker signals its turn in the direction of Peter’s apartment.

  “Ultimately everyone is to blame or no one is to blame,” announces the radio commentator, as if such a sweeping statement might settle the matter.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because this circular argument has no use.”

  “Circular argument? Ridiculous. You’re missing the point.”

  Murat mutes the program. He is hunched forward over his steering wheel, peering up the road at the taxi. Then its blinker switches off. Changing its course, the taxi doesn’t take the turn but continues straight ahead. Murat considers following after, but he isn’t sure. They’ll have to return here eventually, he concludes, so it’s best to keep on looping the block. And this is what he does. But he leaves the radio off. His mood is such that he prefers to drive in silence.

  May 28, 2013

  There was no wind. Clouds of tear gas obscured İstiklal Caddesi. Peter couldn’t breathe. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Deniz, who had removed his gas mask so the two could share it. They hacked and wheezed between inhalations with their heads hung toward their feet. The front rank of protesters pressed their heaving bodies against the riot shields of the police, while the back rank pressed against the front rank. Peter and Deniz stood in the front rank, and when a spiraling canister fell at Peter’s feet and spurted a thick white cloud of tear gas from its end, he wound up huffing a mouthful, which left him choking, his torso bent so far forward that he nearly toppled headfirst onto the pavement.

  Deniz scooped Peter up beneath the arms. He cupped his gas mask to Peter’s mouth and nose. “Stay on your feet,” he yelled at Peter, but shouts from the crowd carried off the sound of his voice so it registered as barely a whisper. Peter gasped into the mask, catching his breath from what felt like the brink of suffocation. Then Deniz yanked the mask away, taking a breath for himself. One of the protesters held a bullhorn over his head. Its siren blared and blared. The man holding the bullhorn shouted, but his voice was also lost in the crowd and his open mouth became nothing but a silent hole in his face.

  Soon it was night.

  When one of the many protesters was struck in the head by a police baton, or asphyxiated by tear gas, or simply collapsed from fatigue, the crowd would lift them up and without instruction pass them from the front rank to the rear. Bottles of water were shuttled forward. Protesters doused their heads, cleansing their burning skin and eyes, or they drank in unrestrained mouthfuls, exhausted as they were by their efforts.

  And on it went, until, inexplicably, the police stepped away, opening a seam in the center of their tightly formed ranks. The throng of protesters in the back now pushed the front rank forward. Peter watched as all around him people lost their footing. A woman fell facedown on the ground. Her long black hair tumbled against the sidewalk. Unable to lift her head, she struggled to stand as the advancing crowd trampled over her hair, pinning her to the cobblestones.

  The police lined the İstiklal in two parallel ranks. With rubber bullets, they took potshots at the protesters who advanced past them into the open boulevard. Each bullet left its muzzle with a hollow exhalation, an apathetic hiss that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. At such close range the potshots easily found their marks and escalated into a steady fusillade. More protesters fell to the ground, clutching at invisible wounds. Their ranks thinned, and having successfully broken through the police lines, they lost all form. Flags appeared among them, waving in cautious triumph. Peter and Deniz milled about in the confusion beneath the flags. A halfhearted cheer rose up from a few perplexed voices. It soon cut off.

  Turning a bend on İstiklal Caddesi, three armored buses lumbered forward. Like the fingers of a reaching hand, their headlights cast eerie shadows in the darkness. The water cannons on their rooftops sprayed out in lazy, rhythmic arcs. The bone-crushing pressure couldn’t be seen, only heard. The sound of shattered glass as the water struck a shop window. The crush of metal as the water hit a shuttered kiosk. And the tide of that water, which descended the slight downhill grade and pooled at Peter’s and Deniz’s feet as they both realized the trap into which they had fallen.

  “Get on your stomach,” shouted Deniz. He pancaked onto the sidewalk and reached after Peter, jerking him down by the front of his shirt and pulling him to the ground, where they both lay in a prone position. “Cover your head.”

  Peter could already feel the mist from the water cannons against the back of his neck. A dull pain stabbed at his chin. He wiped his face and raised his hand in front of him. A trickle of blood smeared across his fingertips. He had cut himself on the jagged cobblestones. His eyes then focused past his hand and up ahead, to where a lone protest
er stood in the center of the İstiklal, stubbornly waving the national flag in front of the advancing armored buses. Even the police were hunkered down behind their riot shields as a precaution against an errant blast from the water cannons. But this lone protester refused.

  Peter fumbled for his camera, which was pinned beneath his stomach in its case. The flag-waving protester leaned forward, bracing herself. The indifferent cannon continued to sweep the crowd, not even bothering to aim at this one specific target. It traversed and caught the tip of the protester’s flag, snatching it and then cartwheeling it down the İstiklal. The protester’s entire body jolted as if a single electric shock had struck her. This reaction wasn’t because of the impact, but rather in anticipation. When the flag was torn from her hand, she must have felt the power of the blast that was about to strike her. Like many others who had allowed the police to lure them deeper into the confined İstiklal, she had underestimated the force of water. Peter watched her. He imagined that the protester would have turned and run away if given the chance to reconsider the stand she had chosen to make. It was now too late. It would take a fraction of a second for the cannon to find the flagless protester again.

  The jet of water struck her center-chest. Deflected spray toppled onto Peter. The woman was lifted from her feet. Her body bent at the waist into a right angle. She traveled ten yards or so in the air, as if an invisible tether yanked her back in the direction from which she had marched, flinging her cartoonishly toward Taksim Square and the Statue of the Republic, where they had all gathered hours before in the end of the day, dancing, chanting and extolling the merits of their grievances.

  The protester landed on her back. She whiplashed, her head striking the jagged cobblestones which had so easily split Peter’s chin. She wasn’t moving. The armored buses continued their advance. Peter rose into a half push-up like a sprinter’s start. Before he could run off, Deniz grabbed him once again. “Stay down, you idiot.”

  As he was pulled to the ground, Peter glimpsed from his periphery a half dozen other protesters who now stood from the rows where they had lain flat. Panicked, they also had turned to run. The lazy arc from the water cannons caught them from behind, upending their legs and popping them skyward as effortlessly as bottle corks. These dazed few lay writhing on the ground when the police flanking the İstiklal peeked from beneath their riot shields and then lunged after them, falling onto their bodies like carrion birds as they bound their wrists with plastic zip ties and dragged them into their ranks.

  The armored buses parked. They continued to sweep their cannons over the heads of the crowd. The effect was an artificial rainstorm. The powerful headlights refracted through the falling droplets of water. In a few places, Peter caught the forms of little, curious rainbows being cast in a violent night.

  The police broke ranks. They fanned out across the İstiklal, working in pairs, one wielding a baton and the other a canister of pepper spray. To ensure a compliant arrest, the pepper spray was administered liberally. The officer would depress the nozzle in the protester’s face, dispensing a steady stream until the other officer could administer a pair of zip-tie handcuffs, or a few blows from his baton—this last measure depending on how he assessed compliance.

  The roundup had commenced. Peter was soaked. His shirt stuck to his shoulders and his pants clung to the backs of his thighs. He was now shivering. But he didn’t dare move. The pepper spray had begun to mix with the water. The solution pooled among the cobblestones. Diluted, it tasted like bitter medicine, the sort he remembered his mother spooning into his mouth when he was a boy. It also stung his eyes and particularly the cut on his chin. He lay stomach down with his head craned upward.

  He couldn’t see much. The shimmering flash of black leather boots. An occasional frightened glance from a stranger who, like him, was lying flat on their stomach waiting to be cuffed, sprayed and dragged off by the authorities. And Deniz. He could see Deniz, who had turned his head away from Peter. Deniz had crossed his legs at the ankles, a signal that he wouldn’t run off. He had also placed his wrists together behind his back, so that they could be easily cuffed when his turn came. The two gestures conveyed defeat as clearly as any white flag, and, so defeated, Peter recognized that Deniz didn’t want to exchange looks with him.

  A pair of officers stood over Deniz, whose shoulder blades pinched together as he offered up his wrists. The officer with the pepper spray tucked his canister into a holster on his black mesh utility belt. With a gloved hand he raised the visor on his riot helmet. The other officer, the one with the baton, nimbly cinched Deniz’s wrists together. Deniz came to his feet. Scum from the loose grouting in the cobblestones clung to the side of his face which had been pressed to the ground. The two officers stood behind him, leading him away as each clasped one of his elbows, which were bent so his hands pressed into the small of his back. Deniz accepted his defeat with a resignation that bordered on dignity.

  Lying in the street, in that instant before the police would take him away, Peter felt outside of himself, as if he surveyed the protest from a stratospheric vantage, one that could contextualize the day’s events and his role within them. He also felt a comradeship with the police who had just taken Deniz. Although they found themselves on opposite sides of a dispute, it was the dispute of their time and it was time itself which bound them together more surely than any particular political disagreement divided them. Prostrate on the street, Peter was filled with this impulse.

  He came up to his elbows. He wanted to look around. He didn’t want to forget all that had happened that day and this night. Peter glanced behind him. His gaze caught the limp, inert form of the protester who had been hit squarely in the chest by the water cannon. Having assumed that she would have by now returned to her feet, Peter was surprised to see her in the same place on the ground. But the protester still wasn’t moving. Her lifeless body had come to rest within just an arm’s length of her flag.

  The generous impulse Peter had felt a moment before evaporated, replaced by crystalline fear. Deniz had understood what could happen in these streets. The way he surrendered himself wasn’t due to dignity, but rather to an equally powerful and Darwinian impulse for self-preservation. Before Peter could follow Deniz’s example—cross his wrists behind him and his legs at the ankles—he felt a knee on his back and a man’s entire weight crushing his spine. A helmeted officer, visor down, held a nozzle right at Peter’s face.

  It was the last thing he saw.

  Two o’clock on that afternoon

  They are four now: Peter, Catherine, William and the white terrier. On the way back to his apartment Peter sits in the taxi’s front seat. The window is rolled down a crack. The driver slowly inhales a cigarette while frigid air creeps into the taxi. The smoke is sweet, rotten, rich and forms a stirring foulness. Peter asks the driver to roll up the window and toss his cigarette. The driver ignores the request. His arm hangs lazily outside between drags and the wind traces swirls through the thinning black wisps of hair atop the driver’s head.

  “Onun adı ne?” The driver points at the dog, asking its name.

  Catherine cradles the terrier in her arms. She has taken to stroking its coat and liberally kissing its head so that a tinge of pink lipstick has formed on the white, fleecy puppy fur.

  “He doesn’t have a name,” says Peter. “We’re just taking care of him for a bit.”

  “No name?” says the driver, switching into heavily accented English. He shakes his head disapprovingly and tosses what remains of his cigarette through the window, which he then finally shuts. With his free hand he reaches back and kneads the fur on the dog’s head.

  They inch through traffic. The driver turns on the radio and drums his fingers along the steering wheel, listening to what sounds like Turkish house music. A compact disc on a string dangles from the rearview mirror, revolving like a disco ball as it catches and then throws off shards of light. The music
, the occasional flash from the disc, the acrid smell of cigarettes trapped in the seat cushions, plus the jostling stop-and-start of traffic flushes the color from William’s face. He has turned a greenish, sickly pale.

  Peter catches a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. “Are you all right?”

  The boy looks up, doe-eyed. Cool beads of sweat are collecting on his forehead and in the dimple of his chin.

  “Pull over,” says Peter to their driver, who glances into his rearview mirror and recognizes immediately what Peter has recognized, whereas Catherine is busy with the dog, running her fingers through its coat and soothing herself as much as anything else. She hasn’t noticed that her son is about to vomit.

  Before the taxi has rolled to a stop, Peter bounds out of his seat, nearly tripping over his steps. He flings open William’s door and lifts him beneath the arms, hoisting him into the street. William retches his grilled cheese onto the curb. Peter hooks his arms beneath William’s, holding him up. He can feel the boy’s entire body convulsing. Catherine now rushes around the back of the taxi. She cradles the dog in her arms, but then sets him on the curb so that she too can support her son. Peter steps away as Catherine begins to rub her palm on William’s back in wide clockwise circles.

  William remains bent over at the waist. He continues to heave, shaking all over, only now he isn’t just sick; mixed in with the heaving is the occasional repressed sob. Catherine moves her hand up to his head, where she runs her fingers through William’s black hair. The boy continues to whimper, as if frustrated at his empty stomach, frustrated that there isn’t some other part of himself that he can retch up onto the street.

  The taxi driver offers William a few tissues and a bottle of water to rinse out his mouth, both of which he reluctantly takes. Catherine helps William clean up, wiping his face. “Feeling better?” she asks him. He nods, but the color hasn’t yet returned. Unsteadily, his mother and the driver help him back into the cab. This leaves Peter standing alone in the street, except for the dog, which Catherine has already forgotten, and which, to Peter’s further displeasure, has begun to sniff at all that William emptied up onto the curb.