Arrested in Istanbul, now what?

The arrest didn’t come as a surprise. As I neared the bridge I’d guessed my odds were 50/50 at best.

Nearing midnight By the time they pick me up I’m almost half way across the bridge and I think I’m heading for a home run. The Bosphorus Bridge, which connects Europe to Central Asia, is the first time in a while that I’ve had to consciously engage with that rule of the walk, my stubborn need to walk every walkable inch. Since reaching France in June last year, that part of things has been easy. I wasn’t expecting to have to re-engage with it until attempting to enter Iran a long way to the east, where refusal would leave no ready path around the Caspian sea. But it’s illegal to walk any of the three bridges that connect these two continents, so that choice is raising its head at the Black Sea, not the Caspian.

My best guess is that a police car that had blown by heading to another call-out just before had seen me and called it in, but the response time felt impossibly quick. Minutes later the flashing lights were headed my way. They were slow-rolling both the west-bound lanes while the 300 cars backed up behind them blared their horns. I considered running for it, but the bridge is long (1.5km), and if my odds of getting this far had been low, the chances of my outrunning them with my pack on were much worse.

That and I’d be giving up the claim of ignorance that I would later rely on back at the station when they made me read out a statement,

I understood that it is illegal to walk on the bridge.

Fearing a trap I made a point of saying,

I now understand that it is illegal to walk on the bridge.

In the back of the police car they were urgent in trying to establish that I am a tourist — the alternative presumably being that word we hear so often, that rhymes with tourist but includes a certain error. After they were satisfied, and this had been relayed over the radio, they became friendly. In the car we retraced my steps before exiting the highway to turn around and cross the bridge in the permitted way.

The two officers seemed to play an unwitting riff on the good cop, bad cop routine. Both seemed to be on my side, but while one had a serene calm about him and kept assuring me that everything was okay, the other was worried that I was in for trouble back at the station, though he seemed much more distressed by this state of affairs than me. In the car and at the station everything was mediated through Google Translate. At one point in the short drive, the drivers chosen words translated to There will be a conviction, which was disheartening. I imagined being expelled from Turkey, what that would mean for the walk, with the only alternative route being through Ukraine and Russia. How daft my stubborn attachment to continuity would seem then.

Reaching the police station, the response time immediately made sense. The station which, apart from a tidy paint job, resembled a military compound transplanted from a war zone, could not have been closer to the eastern end of the bridge except by being on it. Another officer attached himself to me, he seemed serious but said only little to begin with, while the two who’d picked me up talked to three officers who’d emerged to take my passport and process me. Happily, whatever had translated to ‘conviction’ was revealed to mean something more like a booking and a fine, but it took some time before anyone knew what the sum of that fine was supposed to be.

Eventually they settled on 1000 lira, or about 30 euro. I breathed a sigh of relief, having expected at least ten times that. A supervisor came out, seeming as frustrated as I was puzzled that it took so many officers to process one wayward tourist.

While the three from admin did the paperwork, the three standing around me asked me more questions. They seemed to be just passing the time rather than establishing facts. I was tired after big days and nights of walking and initially reluctant to chit-chat, but they’d all been nicer than they had to be, so I uncoiyled a bit. They wanted to know the usual: where I was from, what I was doing, where I was going. Eventually I let on the scope of the walk and the temperature spiked. More questions, lots of enthusiasm, more officers — all of them either smiling, laughing, or looking very puzzled — feeding questions to the two who were translating with their phones. Familiar questions: what?! All the way? No auto-stop? No bus? How far? To India?!

I began asking them if there was any way I might be allowed to walk across the bridge, with a police escort perhaps? No, impossible. Was it possible to walk across either of the two other bridges that cross the Bosphorus further north? No, impossible.
Fair enough.

The supervisor returns, looking doubly agitated about the now larger crowd of idling officers, but the driver starts speaking to him very fast and I hear ‘İngiltere’ and ‘Hindistan!’ and smile when I see him repeat my gesture of walking.

A couple of minutes later the driver returns and pulls out his own phone to translate something. He doesn’t turn the phone to me as the others do, instead he sounds out each English word very slowly,

You
can
go

He looks at me and smiles. I probably look very confused because he starts to say it again, but I interrupt him by saying Teşekkürler about a dozen times and shaking his hand very vigorously. As I’m busy shaking the whole audiences hands too, I consider asking if the supervisor could give permission for a crossing, but it seems doubtful, and I don’t want to be seen to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The driver walks me to the gate and, my usual cheekiness returning, I tap out a last message: any chance of a lift?

Having escaped the fine, I opt for a taxi. The first people I’d messaged when I was detained were Kyle and Avvai. In part because it was them I was walking towards that night, but also because they feel closest to the story of the walk right now. They were coming to the end of a four month cycle from the Baltics to the Bosphorus when we met out on the road a few weeks ago, and something clicked immediately.

To my surprise, when I arrive at the hostel, Kyle has already seeded the story to the other guests, who have many questions. Someone has made lentil soup and I’m very glad to inhale a bowlful, but I stick around only long enough to not be rude before retreating to Kyle and Avvai’s room. They hear the first telling of the story, still ringing fresh in my head, before I crash and sleep like the dead on their floor.

In the days since the arrest, the tone of the walk has changed. Not for the worse, and not yet for the better either. In this new tone there is doubt. Part of that is doubt about this commitment to continuity, which privately I have held as a last indulgence to a particular part of my ego. About 800 metres of the Bosphorus remains uncrossed. There is a voice in me that struggles to bear that, that feels cut off not just from the rest of Turkey, but from a part of myself, by that narrow gulf. Yet, there is a another voice that knows that much of the growth in me over the last seven years has come from one kind of letting go or another. What would it do to the walk, to me, to let go of this attachment?

And there is another doubt too, one that makes that one seem quaint, pointless by comparison. A doubt not just about continuity, but about continuing.

This walk came into being in service of a dream of community, a way of making myself subordinate to an Idea both of, and beyond, my own ego. I was never under any illusion that this mode I have chosen was the only path toward that dream, nor even that it was the best, only that it was a path I felt I could manage, and the one I chose. Primed by another kind of transformation with Jess, and fed by the engine of congruous ideas that Kyle, Avvai, and I seem to be, I begin to find the courage for things previously out of reach, things both harder and more rewarding than walking to India.

Many thanks to the officers of the İstanbul Emniyet Müdürlüğü, for making my stubborn walk very difficult¹ but in everything else for being very pleasant and kind, and above all, for their contribution to a life that I find interesting, which is really all I ask.