“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 dozen 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.
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.