Liberation Movements

Katja

At five in the morning, Istvan’s snores wake me. I remain in bed, though, remembering what he said about the idle simplicity of pessimists. He’s right. For the past seven years I’ve let one incident paralyze me. That moment in Victory Park, the sharp cramp of that blade sinking into organs that were made to produce babies, waking up screaming in the Unity Medical emergency ward. Just one night. Years later, I married, but only because Aron Drdova did all the work. I’ve never really been involved in the marriage, instead standing off to the side with my arms crossed, waiting for its inevitable end. But this is not news-it’s something I’ve known but chosen to ignore as I’ve watched my husband, with his seemingly endless naive enthusiasm, labor for three years to keep us afloat, to make us into a family. Now he wants what I can’t give him-a child-and that makes it all that much worse, because I’ve never told him why a child is out of the question. He’s touched the scar and asked, but I’ve only given him angry silence.

As I quietly dress in the bathroom, I begin to wonder if this will change anything. After I’ve done what I’ve come here to do, will it make any difference to my marriage?

Probably not-but there, again, I’m doing what Istvan accused me of: I’m denying responsibility.

He’s still snoring when I get my handbag from the bedside table. It’s heavy. I don’t look back when I leave; I just go.

The gun in my bag makes me self-conscious in the early-morning crowd as I take the Tunel south to the Galata Bridge. Dark men catch my eye, a few even speak, and after a while they begin to look the same, as if any of them could be the man I slept with last night-the man whose name escapes me for a moment. He’s not the first one-night stand I’ve had since taking my vows to Aron, and probably won’t be the last.

No.

On the Galata I smile, because that, again, is the pessimist trap. As things have been, so they will remain. What bullshit.

I’m at the Hotel Erboy by seven, where there’s one other person in the lobby. A teenage boy reading a newspaper. The Cyrillic letters on the front confuse me a moment, then I realize it’s Pravda, PAB A.

For a while-I’m not sure how long, because time has again become strange-I sit in the high-ceilinged lobby, hands on the bag in my lap, looking past him to the elevator in the corner that sometimes spills guests who turn left and descend stairs to the restaurant.

The teenager smiles at me as he turns the page.

I go to the front desk, take a complimentary Herald Tribune from a pile, and return to my seat. My English is terrible, and I mostly look at pictures as the sound of morning prayers bleed through the windows.

A wall clock tells me it’s a little before eight when I come across the story beneath the face of a fat Turkish man. The story itself, which I translate with great effort, interests me now less than it should. Investigators admit to still being unsure about the cause of the explosion that downed Turkish Airlines Flight 54 just over a week ago, in the early hours of Wednesday, April 23, killing all 68 passengers and crew. “That it was a bomb placed by the Army of the Liberation of Armenia, we know, but whether its explosion was on purpose or the result of bad wiring is still being investigated,” said Istanbul police captain Talip Evren at a press conference Thursday morning.

At that point I stop reading, because the man known as Ludvik Mas is exiting the elevator and descending to the restaurant. It’s time for his complimentary breakfast.