“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?