Peter’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Catherine. That afternoon he hadn’t shown up to their scheduled time at his apartment. He didn’t want to explain where he was, lest she worry. He also had an instinct not to tell her whom he was with. Peter had spent the day with Deniz, staying within an arm’s length of him among the sea of protesters. Taksim Square’s Gezi Park had the energy of a rock festival, one fueled by the danger of impending violence instead of music and drugs. The police lingered among the tributary roads, which fed into the demonstrations. Some of the roads they had closed, others they had left open. When they shut a road, they sealed it with a span of chain-link fence and a sawhorse painted powder blue with POLIZ stenciled across its length in white, or they parked one of their armored buses across the road’s width. Water cannons were fitted on the rooftops of the armored buses. Chicken wire spanned their windshields. Black steel I beams that could be used as battering rams were welded across their fenders. The protesters danced, turning circles in place as they sang with their mouths wide open and their heads tossed back. They took over one of the excavators that would have been used to break ground on the shopping mall, the construction of which they had at this moment successfully brought to a standstill. They had spray-painted the excavator pink. They drove it in figure eights into Gezi Park and out through Taksim Square, waving a Turkish flag from its cab. Peter took photographs. He locked arms with the protesters when they chanted and danced. But always he watched as the police rearranged their barricades and parked and then reparked their armored buses.
The band of men Deniz had arrived with milled about the park and the square. They hung their hard hats, gas masks and goggles from their belts as they joined in with the most enthusiastic of the protesters, who counterintuitively weren’t the young but the old, the septuagenarians with their smokers’ coughs, who hacked and laughed as they danced, giddy with the idea that they had survived long enough to deliver a final word to the State. When the old kissed one another, the young cheered. The hours of the day passed across a wide spectrum of embrace. The music played on.
But the day was over now. Deniz crumpled his empty paper teacup. “Are you curious about why I didn’t choose to show your work?” he asked Peter.
“I assume you didn’t think that it was good enough.”
“Good has nothing to do with it. What’s shown is largely a political decision.”
Had his work in some way been deemed politically subversive? This idea intrigued Peter. Perhaps the grant he had taken from Kristin disqualified him from an exhibit at the Istanbul Modern. Or, better yet, perhaps he had made a bold statement, one that even he didn’t fully comprehend. He suddenly felt himself to be at the center of an intrigue. “I don’t want to cause any problems for you,” he said. “I could always tighten up or reimagine the project—”
“I’m not asking you to tighten up or reimagine anything,” interrupted Deniz. He exhaled a long, impatient breath. “When I say that it’s political, I mean that there is a rift between Catherine and me. I’m not comfortable with her dictating what gets shown in the gallery and, because she and I share a history, she increasingly tries to influence decisions that aren’t hers to make. I don’t mean to offend. I know that the two of you are”—his voice wandered off and then he resumed—“that she is your friend.”
“I understand,” answered Peter, though he didn’t quite.
“I did like what you showed me,” said Deniz. “Have you tried reaching out to the consulate to see if they could help you?”
Peter nodded but said nothing. He had no intention of bringing up the grant he’d already received. Deniz fished a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket. He offered one to Peter and then lit both of their cigarettes.
“So now that I can’t help you, what’s your plan?” asked Deniz.
Peter appreciated the honesty, though he had no answer. Instead he stood, stretched his limbs and faced down İstiklal Caddesi in the direction Deniz had told him the riot police would enter the square. He thumbed at his camera, scrolling through the viewfinder and examining the photos he’d taken throughout the day: the triumphant crowd standing atop the excavator, the old couple kissing one another as they danced, the boy who had climbed onto the Statue of the Republic and shrouded the likeness of Atatürk with the national flag and the portrait of the woman in the red dress. Peter had documented these moments but added nothing to them. What he had produced memorialized the day but went no further. With night setting in, he felt as though an opportunity had escaped him.
Peter allowed his camera to hang heavily around his neck.
The old man with the samovar circled the Statue of the Republic one last time as he tried to corral a final bit of business, his eyes flitting anxiously up toward the few unbarricaded streets, which were the only avenues of escape into the adjacent neighborhoods. “Bir chai,” said a thirsty university student, holding up one finger. His voice was hoarse from chanting in the square. A winsome pane of black hair fell across his forehead.
The old man poured out his cup of tea. “Iki lira,” he said, extending his palm.
The student knifed his hands into the pockets of his slim-fitting designer jeans. He fished out a carelessly folded wad of bills and a couple of coins, which tumbled to the ground. As the student picked up the coins, the old man held the cup of tea in front of him and continued to cast his eyes nervously toward the few open roads exiting the square. To the north, to the south and to the east, in every direction except the west, the police had begun to congregate. They weren’t blocking the way, not yet. Their assembly signaled a grace period to the protesters: Now is your chance to leave.
From their knees to their ankles the police wore greaves, and from their wrists to their elbows they wore gauntlets; they covered their torsos with breastplates, and all of it was made of a black carbon fiber that was tough as steel yet light as plastic. They tilted their weapons on their hips and cradled their white helmets in their overdeveloped biceps while they opened and closed the transparent visors on their face guards. With their chest-high riot shields leaning against them, they appeared like modern-day hoplites, men who were well practiced in old forms of violence. They smoked cigarettes and laughed among themselves. Their superiors handed out fistfuls of tear-gas cartridges and bandoliers of rubber bullets from plywood crates. The sound of their easy conversation rose up, hardly matching the pitch of the demonstrators’ chants, but serving as an ominous undertone for anyone who chose to listen.
The thirsty student didn’t have enough change, just a twenty-lira note. The old man with the samovar nervously asked if he had anything smaller while his gaze hardly moved from the gathering ranks of police. The student apologized. With the cup of tea already poured and the night setting in, he assumed that he would be given it for free. The old man refused and demanded that the student find change among the crowd. Halfheartedly, the student asked a few of the others who were standing nearby, including Peter, who checked his pockets for the meager sum, but he had already handed over his change to the old man for the tea he’d bought earlier for him and Deniz. When the student said that he couldn’t find the two lira, the old man made a libation of the tea by pouring the full cup onto the pavement. It splattered against the student’s shoes and expensive jeans.