Don’t call the cops – excerpt, part 1

I mentioned earlier that at one point I had an apartment in Moda. Moda is a relatively quiet residential neighborhood on the Asian side of the city. It is a neighborhood of artistic elites, of the well-educated and the theater-going types, of the worldly internationals. I loved that neighborhood, and I loved that apartment. The apartment was three times too big for me, but I had never lived in a place with marble hallways before, and it was just two blocks from the sea so I could walk down to the water in the mornings and listen to the waves lapping at the shoreline while I drank my tea.

Life in Moda wasn’t always idyllic though. In the apartment above me lived a couple that, shall we say, didn’t get along. One day they had a particularly nasty fight that went on for hours. There was more than the usual amount of yelling, and when the verbal argument turned physical, the yelling turned into screams of terror. The walls and ceilings of that building were not particularly thin, but that day they seemed like they were made of paper.

When I hear a woman scream like that, two alarms go off in my head. One alarm tells me there is a damsel in distress and I as a self-respecting man must provide assistance. The other alarm, however, tells me to not be the one who provides that assistance when the dispute is domestic, because an enraged husband will kill anyone intervening in “his” business. There’s a good reason cops around the world say domestic violence calls are the most volatile, and potentially the most dangerous, in the business.

Not sure which alarm to heed, I wandered out into the hallway to see what my other neighbors were doing. They were all standing in their doorways whispering to each other, saying, “What’s going on?” “Should we do something?” and “I wonder if she’s okay?”

In halting Turkish I stammered out a suggestion, something I was almost too embarrassed to say because I assumed that of course they would have done it a long time ago. I said, “Should we call the cops?” Their whispering stopped dead and they looked at me expectantly, as if they thought I was about to deliver a punch line. Then a moment later when they realized I was serious, they burst out laughing.

Confused, frustrated, and angry, I wandered back to my apartment and a few minutes later walked down to the sea to calm myself. I couldn’t bear the crashing sounds of the fight any longer, and I couldn’t understand why my neighbors had laughed at my suggestion to call the police.

A few years later I found out, through first-hand experience, why they had laughed at me…

One day my wife and I drove over to her parents’ place for lunch. We were excited to find a parking space just around the corner from their home. Istanbul is a congested city and it’s rare to find a public parking space anywhere near your final destination. My wife was driving, and as she maneuvered the car into the empty space the owners of the neighborhood market we were parking in front of ran out to shoo us away, telling us no, we couldn’t park there, that that space was reserved for customers of the store.

In Istanbul this practice is quite common. Markets block off spaces at the curb outside their front doors, even if the curb is public domain and anyone is theoretically allowed to park there.

…

[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Don’t call the cops” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]