“So that he never does it again.”
I had been robbed in Philadelphia and, worse, in New York. I would, in the years to come, go through far fewer moments of harassment, ass grabbing, and home following in Istanbul than I ever did in America. The neighborhood was indeed watching. But the particularly Turkish remedy of neighborhood justice unnerved me. “Why didn’t you just call the police?” said one good-liberal, American male friend. “You just let these guys beat this kid up?” Yet when I told my friend who had grown up in India, he said: “Yeah. Sounds like the boy needs a slap.”
The Turkish police, notoriously corrupt and violent themselves, had long ago faded from society as a proper regulating force, but neighborhood justice seemed to be more than mere punishment. This delivery boy had denigrated not only my honor but the whole neighborhood’s—perhaps all of Turkey’s—and so it was up to ordinary Turks to win it back. They would beat him not only because he was dangerous but also because he didn’t know his place.
It was clear to me, as my neighbors listened to my story, that I hadn’t known my place either. “These animals!” said a Turkish friend. “But why did you even open the door all the way? What were you thinking?” Caner shook his head. “I am telling you, you are too friendly, you smile too much. You cannot be this open.” I had confused this young man with my friendliness. My self-conscious American class sensitivity had upset the order of things. But it was this kid who would be set straight, not me. When we told the owner of the deli where the kid worked about what happened, he said, “I am so sorry.” Then he turned to Rana with shining eyes, looking as though he might dissolve from shame. “Sister, she is foreign, but I know her. She is a neighborhood girl.”
Turks couldn’t do anything about foreigners moving to their city, they couldn’t do anything about the mysterious country folks moving there either. Instead, they exerted control over that which remained manageable—the boundaries between classes and sexes. My friends’ point was: While this class snobbery may offend your Western sensibilities, you, foreigner, are perhaps better off playing by the rules of this country, instead of your own. If I was going to live in Turkey, I had to learn to think like a Turk. These were not my rules to break.
*
ONE DAY I WENT to Gebze at the end of Istanbul’s commuter train line that runs along the Sea of Marmara. The thirty-mile trip took eighty minutes and passed through suburbs called Fenerbah?e, Suadiye, Bostanc?, Kartal—the city couldn’t be that big, could it?—but it wasn’t until Gebze, an industrial village of cheap lime-green apartment buildings, metalworking plants, shipyards, and dreary, alien highways, that you felt you had really left Istanbul behind. Ask someone: “Where does Istanbul end?” They will say: “Gebze.” Along the way I listened to a conversation between the man and woman sitting across from me, which was about the Italian peace activist who had been raped and killed in Gebze just two weeks before.
“Prison is not the solution,” the woman said. The man glanced at me. The mere presence of a foreigner might have re-aroused what had become a national, collective shame.
That March of 2008, Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, or Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian artist from Milan, had set out on a journey of performance art and peace activism. Following the lyrics of an Italian singer who prophesied that one day we would all come as brides to a world of peace, she and her friend Silvia Moro wore wedding dresses—frilly ones with cascades of lace—and began hitchhiking through Europe and the Middle East and Turkey, to show that all over the world, or, more specifically, in these maligned countries that border the eastern Mediterranean, human beings could be trusted. If these human beings saw two foreign women in wedding dresses standing on the side of the road, they would pick them up and help them travel to their next destination. The women believed that some sort of innate generosity needed to be proven in places like Bosnia, Turkey, and Israel. Their endeavor was called Brides on Tour. Its website proclaimed: “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.”
For some reason, Pippa and Silvia decided to take two different routes in Istanbul and reunite in Beirut. Two days after Pippa left Istanbul, no one had heard from her, and her friends and family in Italy began to worry.
Over a week later, the police tracked down Pippa’s phone. It led them to Murat Karata?, an unemployed man from Gebze. Karata? himself led the police to the woods where he’d stashed her naked body. He had also stolen Pippa’s cash and camera; newspapers claimed there was a photo of Karata? on it, perhaps hours or minutes before he turned on her. Karata? had then used the camera at a relative’s wedding, taken pictures of people dancing. Karata? told the police that he’d raped Pippa and then panicked, so he strangled her to death.
My previously scheduled trip to Gebze just after the murder of Pippa Bacca was a coincidence; I was going to visit a scholarship boarding school for poor kids. From the get-go, my Turkish friends frowned on the idea that I would go to Gebze, as if one foreigner’s death would create a domino effect of embarrassing hate crimes. Heated conversations followed. Of all the weighty political issues in Turkey, the problems between men and women were the most elemental. They drove the debate about the head scarf, about modernity and secularism, the fears of the Islamic conservative ruling party. The reverse was also true: all those abstract questions dictated what happened in love, in the bedroom, and on the street.
To liberal Turkish women the harassment of women on the street was political. “I think this is what this pious government has done to Turkish society,” said one thirty-year-old activist I spoke to. “By using women as a symbol in their political discourse, they have divided women into the pious and the bad. That’s why the men stare so much, and make comments. Because they see me and they judge that they can treat me that way, as opposed to pious women who they’d never do that to. It used to be that they would see me, and see an educated woman, and so they would never treat me that way. But now it’s different. It’s worse in places like Istanbul or other cities where all these forces are thrown together. At least in the country they still have their strong families to keep the men in line.”