Badly shaken but safely around the corner, we rushed the remaining half block to her parents’ vestibule, pushed our way through the door, and ran upstairs to be greeted by a pair of confused parents bewildered to see their daughter and son-in-law appear out of nowhere pumped with adrenaline, crying hysterically, and stammering out a bizarre story of parking and assault.
As we told our story to my wife’s parents her father grabbed the phone and called the police, who told us they’d be right over and we should go downstairs to wait for them. While we waited on the street below, I began to calm down, confident right would soon be restored.
A few minutes later I was happy to see a cop car turn the corner, but my heart sank quickly when I saw the two cops inside lazily smoking cigarettes and looking at us with expressions that said our petty call for help had annoyed them. I was about to find out why my neighbors back at that apartment building in Moda had laughed at me when I suggested we call the police.
The police sauntered over to the market and began asking the shopkeepers what had happened. Then the police, instead of asking the shopkeepers why they saw fit to beat up on a woman, turned to my wife and asked her why she had tried to park there when the shopkeepers so clearly hadn’t wanted her to.
My wife and I, and now her father, who had lived in that neighborhood for over 40 years, reminded the police that this was a public curbside and anyone could park there.
When my father-in-law told the sergeant to do his job and defend the public spaces, the sergeant grew silent, looked down at the ground, dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his toe, and looked back up at my wife and repeated, “Why did you try to park here?”
Eventually, seeing that we weren’t going to give up easily, the cops sighed and told us that if we wanted to press charges we could, but we would all have to go down to the precinct station.
So to the precinct station we went, my wife and I to the offices inside to press charges while the Thug Brothers hung around outside the station smoking cigarettes and joking with the cops.
Inside, the desk sergeant took down our report, but then he set down his paperwork, looked at us, and sighed and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? You know how this will play out, don’t you?”
We had been in Istanbul long enough to know exactly how it would play out. My father-in-law, supportive as he was, knew exactly how it would play out, too.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Don’t call the cops” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]