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.