The body under the clothes

Mustafa's brother Erdem intended to catch his connecting flight in Istanbul and to continue onto London from there. Since his first confrontations with the police eight years earlier, Mustafa had not been able to see any of his family. In the morning he planned to meet Erdem at the airport. I was focused on preparing review sessions for the students' final exams. My friend Bert had had a crisis related to his girlfriend leaving him. My officemate Anna brought her four-year-old daughter to work that day. There were simply too many things going on, and I had not enough time between classes to make a call.

If we ever spent time together, I would talk to him about the meeting with the Dean, about my maternity leave, about the engineering professor who refuses to grade on a curve and so is having trouble adjusting. I might talk to him about my Americanized student Doğukan's conflicts with his Turkish professor, Mehmet, or about the many many absent students who miraculously show up to class for the review session and finally ask pertinent questions which show that they can think, but that they simply don't want to. If they could only act like students on the other days too, if they could only know why they were here, what their purpose was when not facing yet another test.

So I did not call him, but then that night as I was clearing the laundry off the rack, I started looking at his t-shirts and his boxers again, thinking of his body inside the clothes, his body being brutalized, the police perhaps insulting him or verbally abusing him, and him still possessing that same body, having to sleep on a wire cot with nothing but a sheet and a raw wool blanket to cover him, no one to rib him about his teeth grinding, or maybe someone ribbing him about it, but doing it in a way that made him fear taking a shower or paranoid about walking down dark prison halls.

What were Turkish prisons like today? I had asked my colleague at work and not received an answer. Probably she had believed even the question itself was an insult to Turkishness. (What goes through their heads when they won't just talk to us?) Rahime, for example, yesterday during her presentation about the town of Mersin, about the restoration plans to the St. Paul Church and the nearby well.

Me: "Any idea why the municipal government rejected the proposal to restore the well?"
No answer.
Me: "Was that under Erdogan or before?"
She: "No, it was not under Erdogan."
Me: "Was it in bad condition before?"
She: "No."
Me: "Was it in good condition?"
She: "No."
Me: Any idea what they will do to it?"
Long silence.
She: "Just make it nicer."

I could dismiss it as a language problem, except that I experience the same kind of caginess with the Turks in my department. Veering from the party line to truly disclose information, especially when the person asking the question is a foreigner, they view as a kind of betrayal, as if truth is less important than silence.