“And if you don’t?” she asks.
Peter straightens himself. He glances up the empty road.
“In an hour.”
Before she can respond, he pounds once on the roof. The taxi eases into gear and quickly makes a turn, descending toward the Bosphorus. Then it disappears. Peter walks to his apartment. He can hear the scrape of his shoes on the wet asphalt. He can feel the wind on the back of his neck. The air is damp and the clouds above him are heavy with rain.
The black Mercedes reappears, making a turn, easing onto the road directly ahead of him. Peter continues in its direction, taking unrushed and measured steps. He places his hands in his pockets. He notices a parking space which hadn’t been there before. The Mercedes drives past it. Murat double-parks instead. He opens his door, one foot in his car and one foot on the street, waiting for Peter.
May 29, 2013
Kristin had spent that entire night at her desk answering questions from her superiors in northern Virginia and their superiors in Washington, D.C. A muted television on a wheeled stand in the corner played the news. She had watched the live footage of the armored buses lurching along İstiklal Caddesi. When their water cannons tossed a person down the street, she wasn’t surprised by the harm water could do. She had seen it before, not here, but in other postings. She had also seen crowds mowed down by rubber bullets, choked by tear gas, blinded by pepper spray. Violent images had little resonance with her. Although they might be shocking, such images did nothing to place that violence in its political context, which was what interested Kristin.
After midnight her husband sent her a series of text messages. He was going to sleep. He had left her dinner warming on the stove. She thanked him, for the dinner. No problem, he replied. She told him that she didn’t know when she’d be home. He didn’t answer. She wrote that she loved him. He still didn’t answer. She figured that he had already gone to bed. At least this is what she hoped. The alternative, that her relentless hours at the office might have disrupted the delicate equilibrium of their marriage unsettled Kristin. Although her work supported their family, his patience was the essential adhesive binding the two of them together, and marooned at her desk on nights like this, she wondered if that patience had turned cold, and into his resignation.
She considered sending him a last text in case he hadn’t seen the other two. But she thought better of it. He was asleep, not ignoring her. She assured herself of this and then set her phone down amid the chimes and flashing lights of the many other phones she kept strewn across her desk with their dozens of unanswered calls and texts. Over the last two days her scattered network of contacts had reached out to her in a singular panic. She couldn’t process all of the calls and messages, so in a nearly subconscious attempt at fairness she responded to no one.
Kristin leaned back in her chair, trying to make sense of the protests and what appeared to be their relative spontaneity. Murat had warned about corruption within the government’s massive urban development initiatives. Although she didn’t doubt the truth of his reports, she hadn’t figured that it would amount to this popular eruption that choked the city. She struggled to understand why repurposing a dilapidated patch of earth like Gezi Park into a shopping mall would result in citywide and what now seemed to be nationwide protests.
A photograph taken earlier that day was circulating on the cable news channels. A woman in a red dress stood on the park’s grass in front of a rank of police shields. An officer in a gas mask had stepped from the pavement onto the grass to confront her. He cradled a metal cylinder and from it he released a gust of pepper spray, which tossed a wave of the woman’s curly black hair skyward. Slung over her shoulder was a white canvas tote bag.
Kristin switched stations.
The photo had begun to run on nearly every news channel. Kristin could see why it resonated. The colors: a red dress, a white tote bag. These were the colors of the national flag. Contrasting with them was the sickly mustard-colored stream of pepper spray directed at the woman’s face. And she was pretty, not beautiful, but familiar. Any person watching the television could see her as whatever they chose, their daughter, sister or wife.
The next morning the photograph ran in the papers on the front page. By midday it was sketchily painted on banners that would be unfurled in the park and in the square and held by dozens of hands while they marched. That night at her desk, Kristin wondered if perhaps Peter had taken the photograph. She doubted it, but imagined that he could have headed down to the square. She wondered if he had gotten caught up in the protests. She had no idea that he had met the woman in the red dress and that he had taken a different picture of her, one that few people would care about, one that revealed far less.
She wondered whether Catherine would convince Deniz to show Peter’s work at the Istanbul Modern. She understood how important this was to Peter and that he might leave if nothing came of his project. She could always circumvent Catherine and take the matter up directly with Deniz, though her instincts told her this wouldn’t go well. Deniz’s rise through the museum’s hierarchy had been improbable, and Kristin’s intervention would only play on his insecurities, reminding Deniz of her familiarity with the poverty and obscurity from which he came. No, thought Kristin, going directly to Deniz is sure to backfire. You know too much about him. A second thought percolated in her mind. Before it could assume a shape, she snuffed it out like a tic she had long ago learned to suppress. That idea, had it formed entirely, was: He knows too much about you.
Early in the morning, in that part of it that was still night and not long after her thoughts had turned to him, the phone she had assigned to Peter began to ring. Of all the calls that had come in, it was the only one she would choose to take. And when she answered, it wasn’t his voice on the other end of the line.
* * *
“How long has it been now?” Peter asked.
Deniz sat next to him on a concrete bench cantilevered to the wall. Pockets of darkness lingered in the corners and beneath the steel bunks strewn haphazardly about their dimly lit cell. He angled his watch toward a single two-inch-thick plexiglass window, which admitted a rectangle of orangish light from the streetlamps outside. “Two hours,” Deniz said.
Peter raised his head from his cradled arms. He blinked tentatively upward, his eyelids breaking apart the tears that had crusted around the lashes. The final thing he had seen was the nozzle thrust in his face before the police doused him with pepper spray. Although he knew that pepper spray didn’t blind, it was a hypothetical knowledge, one that didn’t correspond to the pain he felt, which suggested permanent injury in its intensity, and he was in a near panic to regain his vision, no matter how excruciating it was when he tried to pry apart his tender eyelids. He grimaced in an attempt to open them, drawing his lips together tightly.
“Just leave it,” said Deniz. “You’ll be fine in another hour or two.”