“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 protester 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.