Land of the Blind Page 11

  When she’d left Kerim Gürsel at the Aya Triada, she’d had no other intention than to go home. But when she’d reached Gezi she just couldn’t. Iris, the girl with the dreadlocks, had taken her to a man who had fallen over and cut his leg. Amazingly there’d been a ready supply of cleaning materials and Steri-Strips.

  ‘Medicine we can get,’ Iris had told her. ‘It’s people who know what to do with it that we lack.’

  Pharmacists had to be helping them, or doctors. Iris kept Peri busy well into the dark hours. More police arrived with yet more TOMA vehicles. People got hurt and yet there was also a carnival atmosphere too. Two headscarfed women smiled and laughed as they handed out simit and drinks, while a man on stilts juggled with flaming batons. What came as a shock to Peri were all the pictures of Ataturk that seemed to suddenly be everywhere. When she’d been a child such pictures had been common, but in recent years their numbers had started to dwindle, and it was only now that she had noticed. Had the present government been trying to cut the founder of the Republic out of everyday life, or was that just her paranoia speaking? The darkened facade of the Ataturk Cultural Centre seemed to point towards the former. Once it had been a hub of artistic life but now the government wanted to replace it with an opera house and a mosque. But then, was that a bad thing? It was, to Peri’s way of thinking, just another ugly 1960s block. It was what it symbolised – cultural exchange – that mattered. So was cultural exchange under attack here?

  A little girl carrying half dead flowers in a basket gave Peri one and said, ‘Wear it for the park, abla.’

  She was ragged and a bit dirty and Peri thought that she was probably a little Roma girl. She expected to be charged for the flower but she took it anyway and stuck it in a buttonhole in her cardigan.

  ‘That’s it,’ the little girl said and then she was gone. Peri chided herself for thinking that the kid was trying to make money but she smiled. If the girl had made a few kuruş out of the situation then who could blame her?

  Peri looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. She should go home. She had to get up for work in the morning, she couldn’t just take another day off. But she wanted to.

  ‘You know what he’s calling us now, that man who runs this country?’

  Iris was at her side eating börek, her face curled into a sneer. ‘Hooligans and looters,’ she said. ‘Have you seen anyone looting? Seen any bad behaviour except by the fucking police? His police?’

  She hadn’t. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re politically engaged is all,’ the girl said. ‘Finally. Just because we’ve had enough of his developers and his cronies ruining our neighbourhoods and our parks. Enough of the rhetoric dividing people. I don’t give a shit if someone’s Christian, atheist, Muslim or queer and I won’t be told I have to give a shit.’

  Peri looked away. Was the girl saying things she knew someone like Peri would want to hear? But how did she know who she was? How could she?

  And then the sound of marching cut across the laughter and the conversation that had sprung up around makeshift homes in tents and under trees.

  ‘Oh, no!’

  Peri stood on tiptoe to see over Iris’s head. A mass of dark figures marching in time signalled what her brother always called ‘boots on the ground’. The police had called up reinforcements. Just outside what had become the Gezi encampment, they stopped. Inside the camp everyone stopped to look at them.

  Under her breath, Iris said, ‘Bastards.’

  But the officers didn’t move. Their faces hidden behind visors, they could have been anyone or anything. Peri’s phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  Her voice sounded loud in the almost silence. She lowered it. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are you?’ her brother said. ‘You should have finished work hours ago.’

  The men behind the visors moved forwards slightly. The crowd in front of her moved, almost, to meet them.

  ‘I’m in Gezi,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here all day.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘People were injured, Ömer,’ she said. ‘What was I supposed to do? Leave them?’

  ‘You didn’t go to work?’

  ‘I called in sick.’

  He didn’t answer.

  She said, ‘This was more important. I know you know that, Ömer.’

  For a moment he was silent, then he said, ‘I know that the situation is very dangerous. They’ve just sent in reinforcements.’

  ‘I know. I can see them.’

  ‘Then you . . .’

  Peri held the phone away from her ear as people around her jostled to see what was happening.

  ‘Ömer, they’re surrounding the park,’ she said. For the first time she felt a twinge of real fear.

  ‘Then I will have to come and get you,’ her brother said. ‘Stay—’

  ‘No!’ The word came out loudly and violently and Peri noticed that people were looking at her. She dropped her gaze.

  ‘No? What?’

  She put her head down and whispered into her phone. ‘Ömer,’ she said, ‘do you remember all those times when we were at school and we couldn’t say what we really believed? Couldn’t be who we really were in spite of everyone knowing exactly what we were because it gave them a licence to bully us? These people here are done with that. They’re done with developers and hate speech and they are standing up for their rights.’

  The visored men put their riot shields up. Peri felt her body shake but she said, ‘So don’t you dare come and get me. I’m here, now, because I want to be. And if you came here and mixed with these people you’d feel like that too.’

  The reinforcements began beating their shields with their batons. Peri ended Ömer’s call.

  He sat in front of the gates he usually hid behind – doing things with his hands. Making things disappear, reappear, manifest out of nothing. He called it magic but it was just a load of tricks.

  As he walked towards the Negroponte house, Ahmet Öden could hear the wall of sound from Taksim. Arseholes! What were they getting themselves so worked up about a park for? It was just a few trees and a bit of grass. It wasn’t as if it was even a nice park. In the winter it was a lake of mud while in the summer it was dry and lifeless.

  Yiannis Negroponte looked up and, for a moment, while he thought he was alone, he smiled. But then he saw Ahmet.

  His face dropped. ‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ he said.

  ‘I come empty-handed and alone,’ Ahmet said. ‘A man out for a walk, that’s all.’

  ‘Men don’t go for walks in cities that are as dangerous as this one is,’ Yiannis said.

  Ahmet looked around. ‘There’s no danger here in Sultanahmet that I can see. And you are out of your house.’

  ‘I’m on my threshold,’ said Yiannis. ‘I live here. You live out on the Bosphorus. What do you want? Or need I ask?’

  ‘Your house?’ Ahmet hunkered down opposite Yiannis, who put a hand on his gate, clearly so he felt he could go inside at any time. ‘No, not this time. I’d just like to talk if that’s OK.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About what you want out of life.’

  ‘Oh, so we’re back to the several million lira you have offered me for this house. I told you, I don’t want to sell. I won’t sell. Bring your bulldozers back and I will die in this house together with my mother. Ahmet Bey, you either leave us alone or you get blood on your hands. There is no middle ground.’

  Ahmet thought. What Negroponte had said was probably true, although, if he did have to kill the old woman and her son to get it, then so be it. Their deaths would complicate what he wanted to achieve, and people would ask questions which could hold up the work, but he wasn’t where he was to even think about that.

  ‘Yiannis—’

  ‘Mr Negroponte.’

  ‘Mr Negroponte. Look, I accept that you don’t want to sell your house now.’

  ‘Or ever.’

  ‘OK, or ever,’ Ahmet said. ‘But I need to acquire property in
this area and so, if you’re staying here, I’d like to be on good terms with you.’

  ‘So I can help you to persuade some other poor bastard to sell to you?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Ahmet remained quiet for a moment and then he said, ‘I don’t want any of your neighbours’ houses.’

  ‘That’s not what you just implied.’

  Did Negroponte know why he wanted his house? He had to. He was no fool. But should Ahmet allude to it? He hadn’t been planning to take that line.

  He leaned in close and felt Yiannis cringe away from him. ‘You know why I have to have your house, Mr Negroponte,’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You know what’s there . . .’

  Yiannis began to stand up but Ahmet dug his fingernails into the flesh on his hand.

  ‘I’ve been into your house,’ Ahmet said. ‘Many years ago. Before you came from Germany. When I was just a builder on a job . . .’

  He looked into Yiannis’ eyes. A steady gaze met his and Ahmet was almost tempted to look away. What held him was the need to try and read what was in Yiannis’ soul. But he came up with nothing. Ahmet dug his fingers still further into Yiannis’ flesh.

  ‘Take your hands off me.’

  ‘Yiannis, Mr Negroponte—’

  ‘That policeman, İkmen, he may be a Turk but he has a fair mind and this is assault.’

  They looked down at their unnaturally conjoined hands at the same time. Blood had seeped on to Ahmet’s fingers and behind his nails.

  ‘If I show İkmen this—’

  ‘Then you’ll have to prove that I did it,’ Ahmet said. ‘You’ll also have to prove I didn’t do it while defending myself.’

  The end of a scream funnelled up from Taksim and then what sounded like drumming began. Ahmet looked at Yiannis’ blood on his fingers and felt excited.

  ‘Take your hand off mine,’ Yiannis said. ‘I tell you this one more time or—’

  ‘Or what?’

  But Ahmet let him go.

  Yiannis jumped to his feet. ‘Get off my property, Mr Öden,’ he said. ‘Get off it and don’t come back. I don’t know why you want my house and I can’t imagine why you would think that I would know. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been inside the Negroponte House or not but I can assure you it is an ordinary, if shabby, house.’

  ‘Then let me see it.’

  ‘Had you not bullied me and my family, I gladly would,’ Yiannis said. ‘I don’t know what fantasies you have about this place, but they have no foundation in reality. You may have seen my house many years ago, I don’t know. But what you remember now is flawed. Go home, Mr Öden, and wash my dirty Greek blood from your hands before it taints your soul.’

  When he got back to his car, Ahmet very carefully scraped the fragments of Yiannis Negroponte’s flesh and blood into the sterile container he had acquired from the Internet. There was more than one way to get that ‘Greek’ out of his house. Ahmet knew what he’d seen all those years ago and, as soon as he got into that house, he’d see it again, whatever Yiannis Negroponte said.

  İkmen got as far as his car before his phone rang.

  ‘Sir, it’s Ömer Mungun.’

  ‘Ömer?’

  He got behind the steering wheel and put the key in the ignition without turning it.

  ‘Çetin Bey, I have a delicate situation,’ he said.

  ‘You also have a superior who is not me.’

  There was a pause. Then Ömer said, ‘Sir, my sister Peri is in Gezi Park. Reinforcements have recently gone out there.’

  İkmen leaned back on his car’s tattered headrest. He really wanted to go home and sleep.

  ‘Where are you, Ömer?’

  ‘I’m looking at you,’ he said. ‘Out of my office window.’

  İkmen looked up and saw that the light was on in Süleyman’s office. No Süleyman, of course, but then he was with Gonca if he wasn’t being unfaithful to her somewhere. İkmen chided himself for being so fucking judgemental while at the same time feeling entirely justified in his opinions.

  ‘Çetin Bey, if I try to get through our lines on my own, I doubt I’ll make it. But if you come . . . I’d heard of you when I was back in Mardin,’ he said. ‘Everyone has heard of you. I must make sure that Peri doesn’t get hurt.’

  İkmen took a breath. He’d met Peri Mungun once. A tall, spare young woman, handsome rather than beautiful, who had that eastern Turkish dreaminess in her eyes. He suspected her religious beliefs were as obscure and unknowable as her brother’s. To İkmen’s consternation, most cops in recent years talked about faith. Ömer Mungun never did. İkmen let his breath out.

  ‘Come and get in the car and we’ll go there,’ he said.

  ‘To Taksim?’

  ‘That’s where Peri is, isn’t it?’

  In less than five minutes they were on their way.

  Chapter 10

  The two women behind her had turned out to be transsexuals. They’d also had their small tent burnt down by the police.

  ‘They only let you join if you’re a thug,’ Peri heard one of them say to the other.

  ‘And stupid,’ the other replied.

  ‘Oh, stupid’s essential! If you’re not stupid they don’t give you a gun. Why would they?’

  Peri knew that Ömer wasn’t like that and felt that she should say something to them. But she’d also seen the police do some cruel, unnecessary and ridiculous things since she’d come to the park. And the more they tried to impose their will, the more the park people just dug their heels in. Slogans had begun to appear on the sides of the tents that remained. They said ‘At least three beers’ in reference to the Prime Minister’s statement about good citizens having at ‘at least’ three children. There were some good cartoons of him too.

  The expected push from the police hadn’t come. No one knew why. Some people feared they were awaiting yet more reinforcements while others, of a more optimistic type, reckoned the protesters had them scared. Peri didn’t know.

  Iris and her dreadlocks walked over and said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘You staying with us, Peri?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been great, we really appreciate it.’

  She wanted her to commit and Peri didn’t know that she could. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but she had responsibilities – and her brother – to consider. His phone call had made her think. ‘I’ve got my job,’ she said.

  Iris shrugged. ‘Nursing rich people.’

  Peri had been able to tell immediately that Iris was from a wealthy family. Even without the dreadlocks and the tattoos, she reeked of the kind of privilege that had clung to the secular elites for generations. Now, pushed on to the back foot by the conservative majority from the countryside, they nevertheless still possessed a huge sense of entitlement. This protest came as much from them as it did from the transsexuals, the Roma and the Muslims who didn’t approve of the current status quo.

  ‘Blow it out,’ Iris said. ‘Some fat businessman who prays five times a day and has mistresses all over the city can afford to get himself another nurse.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t afford to lose my job!’

  They looked at each other and Peri felt Iris’s disapproval.

  ‘God, you want to be here when we change EVERYTHING, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘You’ll get another job, you’re a nurse!’

  Some women started dancing accompanied by other women on bongo drums. Small fires had been lit and she could smell the delicious aroma of cooking meat. It made her empty stomach growl. She ignored it. A gulf had opened up between Peri and Iris and it was one that she resented.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m just an ordinary—’

  ‘No, you’re not, you’re amazing!’ Iris said. She put her hands on Peri’s shoulders. ‘You’ve done amazing things here today!’

  Peri looked into her eyes and, although she could still see the gulf between them, sh
e could also see Iris’s sincerity. And everything around her underlined what she’d said about this being the point at which things changed. Peri knew she wanted them to, probably even more than Iris did. ‘I—’

  ‘Peri!’

  One of Ömer’s bony hands gripped her arm.

  A baby had been found in a dustbin in Tarlabaşı but it wasn’t Ariadne Savva’s. The child, who had been taken to the Taksim Hospital, had been black. Somalis and some Ethiopians lived in the bedsits and damp flats of Tarlabaşı, refugees from the never-ending problems of Africa.

  Kerim had considered the possibility that Ariadne Savva had maybe had an affair with a black man and had been to see the child. But the doctor who showed him the girl had said she would be surprised if the baby had any non-African blood. Kerim could only concur. He lifted the child’s dead face up to his own and he could see no sign of Ariadne’s features on it.

  ‘I don’t think that Pembe will be back tonight,’ Sinem said.

  He had thought that she was asleep, resting in his arms.

  ‘Pembe does as Pembe wants,’ he said.

  The sound from the television, a nature programme about elephant seals, failed to drown out the music and the voices from Gezi. Earlier, some local residents had come out in support of the protesters, banging pots and pans together in the street.

  ‘Do you think that all this will change anything, Kerim?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. It had taken him over an hour to push his way through the crowds on İstiklal and get to the hospital. That was crazy for such a short journey. There were a lot of people on the streets. If they all wanted the government to go then maybe change would come.

  ‘I’d like to see that happen in my lifetime,’ she said.

  Kerim didn’t say anything. When she was in this sort of mood there was no point in trying to cheer her. All he could do was change the subject.

  ‘Have you got enough to read?’ he asked. ‘The crowds on İstiklal move so slowly at the moment I can easily go into Simurg or Pandora and pick up something for you.’

  She didn’t answer at first, apparently fixated on elephant seal mating rituals. Then she said, ‘If you can find anything by Josephine Tey that would be nice.’