My wife ignored the shopkeepers that day. She was fed up with this very common Istanbul practice, and she had decided that she was going to park in that space come hell or high water. It was, after all, a public space, she was a taxpaying citizen, and who were these shopkeepers to claim that space for themselves?
So as the shopkeepers stood at the curb and yelled at us with increasingly-offended self-righteousness, my wife finished pulling into the spot, turned off the engine, got out, slammed the car door shut, and started walking away.
“Uh oh,” I thought, “this is not going to go well.” My wife was hell-bent on seeing through this particular course of action, and I knew from experience that there was no stopping her. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out too, shutting the passenger door behind me and hustling off to catch up with her before she got too far away.
We weren’t half a block from the car when I heard footsteps rushing up behind us. Within seconds a furious, hulking lunatic of a man brushed me aside and went straight for my wife. He was in crazed animal mode, and he grabbed my wife’s hair and started kicking at her.
In my mind at least, the scenes that follow play back in slow motion with a muffled soundtrack, because as soon as I saw that bald-headed thug grab my wife’s hair with his thick stubby hands, I was aware of only one thing in the whole world, and that was a man attacking my wife. I too went into crazed animal mode. I launched myself between them and tried to separate them, furiously prying the thug’s hands from my wife’s hair as he redirected his kicks at me.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small crowd running towards us from the direction of the market, and I was relieved to realize the crowd included this thug’s father, an elderly man with a long beard who I thought would surely put a stop to this insanity. What father, after all, would allow his son to beat up on a woman? If I saw a son of mine beating up on a woman, I would kill him myself right there on the spot.
But this old man didn’t come running towards us to stop his son. He actually began egging his son on, and his other sons, not to be shown up in front of dear old dad, joined the melee.
Within moments my wife and I were surrounded by the brothers and their buddies from the street in a scuffling, confused mass of humanity. At one point someone threw a punch at me, but there were too many bodies knocking each other to and fro, and the fist merely glanced off my cheek.
Thug #1 continued to kick and scratch at my wife while his brothers and their buddies pulled me away from her, threw me into the street, and surrounded me like a pack of wolves. I quickly realized what was about to happen and I thought, “Oh man, this is not going to go well.”
As the wolf pack closed around me, my wife began screaming at the top of her lungs. It was a piercing, desperate, terrified and terrifying scream no human being should ever have to hear. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, not even when that woman upstairs was getting thrown around by her husband, and I hope to god I never hear a scream like that again.
Evidently, everyone in the crowd was as startled by her scream as I was, because for a split second they stopped what they were doing to look over at her and see what could possibly be issuing such a horrifying sound. Recognizing the brief window of opportunity and knowing what would happen if we let it pass, I pushed through the crowd, grabbed my wife by the shoulders, lifted her halfway off the ground, and pushed her backwards towards the corner. “Go, go, go,” I yelled at her, knowing that if we didn’t disappear around the corner in the next couple seconds, the crowd would snap out of their disorientation and come after us again.
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.
This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.