Enlightenment (11 page)

Jeannie’s journal entries for the autumn months of 1970 are fragmentary and sporadic, and even now, as I leaf through the pages, I can see her spreading herself too thin. There are no confessional outbursts from here on in, no mad visions, no details about where she and Sinan met or what they did or did not do – no sense of how she felt about him – or herself, or her father. Instead there are sketches – a film crew she saw shooting a lover’s quarrel one afternoon at the foot of the Aşıyan, a woman she noticed at the fruit and vegetable shop, examining zucchini as if they were criminals. An article in the paper about a man who went blind when he was knifed in the head only to regain his sight the moment the doctor pulled the knife out. Her thoughts on the Nâzim Hikmet poem that Sinan read to her in Turkish and then tried to translate for her the day before he left to visit his father in Pakistan. (It was about a journey, about never regretting it, even if it led to death.) Folded between the same pages, two poems Sinan wrote on the plane out (‘The Tragedy of Innocence’ and ‘The Turbulence in My Heart Knows No Master’) along with a postcard of a mosque. On the pages that follow are Jeannie’s impressions of Alexandroupolis, Kavala, Thasos and the roads she and her father travelled during the small trip they took together to Northern Greece at the end of August:

There is a long description of the soldier with the submachine gun who searched their car at the border when they were re-entering Turkey. An even longer description of Nafi Baba’s tomb – its fine curved windows, lined with little burnt out candles and knotted ribbons, its desolate beauty, and Jeannie’s thoughts as she sits on the empty hillside next to it and looks down at the castle and the blue ribbon of the Bosphorus snaking around it. But no mention of Sinan, who must have brought her here the day he got back. And only a passing mention of the ‘talk’ she and her father had that same evening.

He wanted her to ask Sinan to visit one of these days. Perhaps that same weekend? Perhaps for supper? He knew this was not the local custom, but Sinan was not entirely local, ‘so he won’t think this means I expect him to ask for your hand in marriage.’ When Jeannie prevaricated (‘I still think this is weird’) he said, ‘Look, if you’re seeing this much of him, I don’t want him skulking around in the shadows outside like he was tonight. He should come inside, say hello, be civil. Act like a grown-up. It’s not as if he’s a stranger, after all.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re driving at,’ Jeannie insisted.

‘Then let me put it this way. Have you ever asked him what it is, exactly, that stops him coming inside?’

She never did, though. She just didn’t have the confidence. She thought she might lose him if she asked for the truth. I have no written proof for this. But I’m sure of it. This is the one part of the story when she really does step into my shoes.

On the first Monday of September, 1970, Jeannie Wakefield became a special student at my old school. She was a special student for the same reason I had been: though most classes at the American College for Girls were taught in English, regular students were obliged by law to study certain subjects in Turkish. Anyone who didn’t was classified as special. There were only a handful of us. We were all foreign, and we
left without diplomas. In my case, that was not a set-back, as I found a good college willing to accept me on the basis of my transcript. In Jeannie’s case, it didn’t matter either: she had that place waiting for her at Radcliffe.

On my last day in Istanbul – in November 2005, almost a week after Jeannie’s disappearance, and two days after my incriminating article came out in the
Observer
– I went back to see the school again for myself. It was my first visit in thirty-five years. As I walked up the long, steep path to Gould Hall, and gazed up at its great and glaring pillars, I was still late for mathematics class. As I climbed the last steps, my schoolbooks still scraped against my ribs. I pulled open the door, and there was Marble Hall, as cool and white and mausoleum-like as ever. There, in the corner, was a glass door covered in ruffled gauze. There, behind it, was the little room we’d used for the school newspaper, and the Current Affairs Club. From time to time, Miss Broome’s reading group had met here, too. Even when we had no express purpose, Chloe and Suna and Lüset and I would come with our midmorning coffees, and just to stand at the threshold was to feel the sting of our arguments.

I opened the door, and there was Suna, blue eyes blazing. I must have gasped – I wasn’t expecting this – but she was quick to reassure me. With a faintly mocking smile, she told me that she’d ‘come in friendship’, having tracked me down with the help of my parents. She’d been heading in this direction anyway, for lunch, at the alumni club. Had I not seen it, at the far end of the campus? Never mind, she said, as she let her smile soften. This was ‘our hour for memories.’ There, on the table, was a large scrapbook with mementos of our fevered years together.

First, our newspaper. Or rather Suna’s newspaper, conveying Suna’s views, under a dazzling array of pennames. Salome, Mrs Rosenthal, Emma Goldman, Mata Hari. All shared the same stormy style. Especially when it came to student council meetings. You’d have thought we were in Moscow circa 1917. ‘More Heads Roll in Bloody Coup.’ ‘Yasemin Ağaoğlu Reveals Vanguardist Tendencies.’ ‘Masses Go Hungry as VP Mervey Akyol Fails to Oppose Cafeteria Price Hikes.’

Wedged between these tracts were Lüset’s famously cryptic cartoons. One featured a man in a fez next to a man in a top hat. Both were looking at a cow with a woman’s head. The caption read, ‘Do we really want this?’

Another featured a dead girl with her head in an oven. Next to her was a policeman. Behind him, the distraught parents were wringing their hands. The caption read, ‘But where is the weapon?’

It was surprise, I think, that made me laugh. ‘I’d forgotten these.’ Suna gave me a cryptic smile and turned the page. ‘But this one you cannot have forgotten because it was after your time,’ she informed me. I looked at the date: October 1970. I was at Wellesley by then, and Jeannie had stepped into my shoes.

On the front page were the usual student council exposés. On page two I found, amid more cryptic cartoons, three painfully earnest pieces by my replacement. One was a short biography of the little White Russian who’d made us coffee. Another was an appreciation of
ayran
, the yoghurt drink. The third was an essay entitled ‘What is Education For?’

Looking more closely at the cartoons running alongside these pieces, I saw that they were not by Lüset, and not at all cryptic. They featured grimacing young women with thought balloons. The thoughts were in Turkish, so most of our teachers wouldn’t have understood them. They ranged from ‘What is this drivel?’ to ‘If the dogs of capitalism can really run, let them run home to where they belong.’ None of this really surprised me. The Suna I had known in 1970 had fierce views about who belonged where, and she would not have been happy to share her sacred space with anyone, least of all Jeannie; it would only have happened, I guessed, under duress. ‘So tell me,’ I asked Suna. ‘How exactly did she win you over?’

‘I hated her – that goes without saying,’ Suna explained. ‘Not Jeannie in the flesh, of course, but everything she stood for. And of course Jeannie was going everywhere with Chloe in those days. Bearing in mind that Chloe and I were still competing for that ingrate, Haluk, it was all very painful. And yes, I was terrible. Yes, I lived up to my name. Especially when this Jeannie upstart complained to her father that I was refusing to give her space in my paper. He complained to Chloe’s
mother! Who complained to our advisor! You remember her, don’t you? The saintly Miss Broome. That was why I was forced to make room for Jeannie. But as you can well imagine, I made her pay.’

‘Yes, it was a very terrible price I extracted from her,’ Suna recalled with some pride. ‘When she came to the next meeting, first I dared her to denounce us for expressing ourselves in our native tongue inside the school walls, in direct contravention of school regulations. Of course, she told us very haughtily that she was not a sneak or a spy. She used this very word, spy. She was, she told us, an ordinary student insisting on her “ordinary’ rights”. So of course, when the rest of us went into Turkish, I peppered my sentences with jokes at her expense that soon had everyone except Jeannie herself laughing. However! This did not scare her away. I had no choice but to become less cryptic. I now began to pepper my Turkish with little phrases in English. Phrases like “human microbe” and “foreign sirens who suck on the flower of our youth.” Of course I made long critiques of her own offerings, and as you can see, it would not have cost me much effort.’ Again, Suna smiled.

‘But then Jeannie surprised me. She stood up for me!’ Suna turned the page. It was the last page of the scrapbook. ‘You are looking at the final issue of our brave little school newspaper, and the piece that shut it down.’

The offending article, by ‘L.A. Internationale’, was headlined: ‘Miss Markham Linked with Running Dogs of Capitalism.’ Miss Markham was our old principal. The ‘link’ was her brother, a US pilot serving in Vietnam. She had, said L.A. Internationale, brought fresh colour to this villain’s cheeks by allowing her school to be infiltrated by the daughter of a ‘well-known CIA operative.’

‘Our worthy principal hauled us in, of course,’ Suna told me. ‘Of course Miss Markham instructed me to apologise to Jeannie. But then, to my surprise, Jeannie stepped forward to insist that she was not offended: it was a practical joke! And what was a joke between friends? Miss Markham was not convinced. “It’s a strange friend who slanders your father in the school newspaper.” These were her words. Still Jeannie insisted. She told Miss Markham that I, Suna the Terrible, could never hurt her. She had no fear of me, because we
were in all ways equals.

And the moment she said that, I thought,
“Yes, that’s the truth”.
So we became friends. Though I am sure I do not need to remind you that this word means something different to me than it does to most people.’

An understatement if ever there was one. But it made me think. As I made my way down the steep and winding path to the Bosphorus, pausing from time to time to look up at the gnarled and curving branches of the Judas trees, and (in deference to a long lost habit) stopping on the 138
^th
step to catch the first glimpse of the sea, I asked myself: had Suna and I ever been friends? Had I risen to her challenge as Jeannie had – refusing Suna’s ill will, appealing to her better nature – might we have resolved our differences, too? On balance, I thought not. Suna had good reasons to mistrust me. But on the most important point she was wrong.

As she well knows. As she would be forced to admit if I had the time, courage and stamina to press the point. My family did not move to Turkey to colonise it. My father came here to teach. He was not an employee of the US government, nor was he here to further its ambitions. He did not report to a desk in Washington. He was not a spy.

So when Suna sat me down next to me all those years ago in the ACG cafeteria, and insisted that my father
was
a spy, or
in all but name
a spy, or
in some sense, even worse than a spy,
I could indulge in the burning anger that is the preserve of the unjustly accused. I could stamp my feet. Point my finger. Scream!

Jeannie could do none of these things. For her there were only two options. Either she made excuses – for Suna, for Sinan, for herself, her father, everyone – and ‘ventured on.’ Or she faced the truth, the whole truth, and let her life unravel, until there was nothing but truth left.

But not yet. Please God, not yet. Does anyone face a choice like that unless it’s forced on them? I can read her journal and see her unvoiced anxieties seeping into every sentence. No description is neutral. Even the city is doomed.

By October 1970, cholera had come to Istanbul. Although all reported cases were in the shanty towns on its western edge, there were draconian measures to keep it from spreading. Every restaurant and cafeteria in the city shut down.

The date for that entry is October 23
^rd
1970. The next entry is dated January 7
^th
1971, and it offers only the most cursory references to the months in between. But in the letter she left me on her computer, just before she disappeared, Jeannie described them to me in bitter, jagged detail.

Each detail serves the moral of her self-lacerating story: people who can’t face up to the truth need scapegoats. The best scapegoats were the ones you never got to know as people. ‘So inevitably (she wrote) Dutch Harding was doomed to become mine.’

It happened slowly, and in stages. It would be many months before their orbits intersected. Was this deliberate on Sinan’s part? If so, why? In her letter, she still wasn’t sure.

Certainly he made no effort to
hide
him from her, or her from him. As she wandered about the campus on Sinan’s arm that autumn, he would occasionally point out a long-haired man in a sheepskin coat dashing into the Robert College library or snaking his way though a crowd at the opposite end of the playing field and say, ‘That’s Dutch over there. Can you see him?’ Although he was always too far away for Jeannie to see him properly, she felt she knew him, for she and Sinan could not have a serious conversation without Dutch coming into it. ‘Well, you know what Dutch says about this, don’t you?’ Sinan would say. Or ‘Dutch has an interesting take on this.’ Or ‘I used to think that, too, until Dutch reminded me that…’ But never once did he say: ‘It’s about time that you met.’

At first, this really bothered her:

The showdown took place at Süreyya’s – then the most expensive restaurant in the city, although it was situated over a BP station. It was the only time Jeannie ever met Sinan’s father: she remembered him as a ‘grey, grim eminence, with grave, appraising eyes.’ She remembered, too, that Sinan was wearing a navy blue sports jacket she’d never seen and never saw again. He sat as if he had a board up his shirt and peeled an orange with his knife and fork.

Whatever Jeannie said, the father’s reply was, ‘Aha! How fascinating!’ He was all smiles, even when the conversation turned to Sinan’s studies. Sinan was all deference. ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘Of course, Father.’ ‘Certainly, Father.’ His answers were truthful, if strained and rehearsed. He was attending his classes, keeping up with his work, not enjoying it, but keeping an open mind.

Then his father reached into his pocket, took out an envelope, and passed it across the table. Inside was what looked like a typed letter. After Sinan had read it, he threw it down, folded his arms, and glared through the filmy green curtains at the Bosphorus. ‘So,’ said his father. ‘I await your explanation.’

‘There is no explanation,’ said Sinan. ‘I’ll see who I want.’

‘In a free country, this might be possible. In ours, alas…’

‘I have a right to my own life,’ Sinan retorted.

‘You are forgetting who you are,’ his father replied.

‘Who am I then?’

‘A Turk.’

At which Sinan picked up the piece of paper, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it across the table. Startled by his bad manners, Jeannie picked it up and smoothed it out. Though the report was in Turkish, she could see the name Dutch Harding. When she asked Sinan why, he snorted, and said, ‘My father has been spying on me. Or rather, he has hired a scum to do it for him. You see, he doesn’t like the company I keep. He thinks they’re leading me astray.’

At which Sinan’s father put up a protesting hand, and said, ‘Please! Don’t exaggerate! This has nothing to do with you, my dear Miss Wakefield. Nothing at all!’ But he said it in such a way that left her wondering.

What did this man have against her? That evening, after supper, after her father had opened the subject (‘I hear you met my old golfing buddy’), she tried to find the words to ask. But the words rebelled, forming themselves into another question: ‘What does this man have against his son?’

‘Nothing,’ her father answered. ‘As strange as it may seem, he loves his boy to death.’

‘So why the snooping? Why the intimidation?’

‘Ah,’ said her father. ‘To answer that, I need to give you some of the history.’ As he rocked his chair and locked his arms behind his head, he studied her carefully. ‘Sinan’s told you none of this, I take it?’

He went on to explain that there had been a war going on between Sinan’s parents since long before the divorce. ‘You could even say it started before the poor boy was even born.’ Sinan’s father’s uncle was a general who had fought alongside Atatürk (and against the Greeks) in the War of Independence. He had gone on to help found a narrowly nationalist political party that later became overtly fascist. Sinan’s father had never been a member of that party, but he had stern views about national honour and patriotic duty. No son of his was going to fritter his life away in the arts: so Sinan had three options: the army, the foreign service or engineering.

Sinan’s mother, on the other hand, came from a famously bohemian and artistic Ottoman family that had (‘like Atatürk himself’) been based in Salonica until the end of the Ottoman Empire. They had moved to Istanbul in the 1920s, and though they were enthusiastic supporters of Atatürk’s republic, they refused to give up their love of things Greek. They had even sent Sibel and her siblings to one of Istanbul’s Greek schools. There was, my father said, no link between this eccentricity and ‘a later political scandal’ that had resulted in one of Sinan’s maternal aunts defecting with her husband to the Soviet Union, ‘though various scandalmongers seem to think otherwise.’

‘So the two sides of Sinan’s family have always fought over him. As families do. But in this case there’s a twist.’ As much as Sinan’s mother might have wished her son to follow her into the world of art, she was as fearful of Communism as her ex-husband. ‘Hence this brouhaha
over his friendship with Dutch Harding. Hence this report.’

‘So you know about it,’ Jeannie said.

‘Not only do I know about it. I’ve read it,’ he was proud to say.

‘Why?’ Jeannie asked. ‘How?’

Smiling through pursed lips, he said, ‘It just so happens that I know the guy. The author, I mean. We don’t always work in tandem, but it’s always better when we keep each other informed. We’re on the same side, after all. Though in this case I am of the view that my friends on the Turkish side are over-reacting.’

Because (as he now informed his daughter) it was important for youth to make up its mind about things. Treat tomorrow’s leaders with respect, and eventually they come round. Come down hard and heavy on them, and they swing the other way. ‘The more they make a fuss about Dutch Harding, the more they add to his allure. Which is tragic, and laughable, because…’

He left the sentence hanging, and he refused to name the author of the report. But later that week, Jeannie met him. Though it would be more accurate to say they renewed their acquaintance.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, William Wakefield gave a party. It was an annual event, and a sought-after invitation, though possibly this had more to do with the host’s famous view than any great affection for the man himself. It was one of the few occasions when the Robert College set mingled with the consular and business people from downtown. William’s Turkish ‘friends’ were also there in force.

Sinan came with his mother, who had by now returned from Paris to ‘watch over’ him. She was as glamorous as her pictures – svelte and sculpted, with large, heavily accented almond eyes, thick black hair chopped in the manner of Cleopatra, and a way of holding herself that suggested sorrows borne but never forgotten. Everyone was watching when she strode across the library with open arms to kiss Jeannie’s father’s cheeks.

She didn’t stay long. Sinan escorted her to the outside gate, returning very slowly, circling the trees in the garden as he smoked. On rejoining Jeannie, he nodded in the direction of a sharply dressed middle-aged man on the porch.

İsmet smiled, as if he’d been expecting them. He gave Jeannie a crisp handshake and it was then that she recognised him as the man with the policemen’s eyes, the man who’d been working with her father that morning back in June. When she told him so, he said, ‘Good memory!’

Sinan spat something at him in Turkish.

‘Whoa, boy. Slow down,’ said İsmet. ‘That’s a pretty big mouthful.’

This prompted another torrent.

‘You know?’ İsmet replied. ‘This just isn’t fair to our lovely friend here.’

Speaking in English, Sinan said, ‘Don’t worry. She knows what I think.’

‘Oh to be twenty,’ said İsmet, flashing his teeth. ‘You know, this boyfriend of yours cuts quite a romantic figure. He’s quite a poet, in fact.’

‘You know nothing about me,’ Sinan snarled.

‘Oh, but I do,’ said İsmet sharply. ‘What I choose to disclose – that’s another matter entirely.’ He turned to Jeannie. ‘How long have you been here now? Three, four months? No, it’s almost six, isn’t it? The novelty must be wearing off. You must be wondering what you’ve let yourself in for!’

He paused to light a cigarette. His lighter was large, heavy and gold. ‘For example, yours truly. You meet me through your father.
You hear I am “his other half.” Then later you discover I am linked also with Sinan. You hear that
his
father and I did our military service together. Did he not tell you this? Oh dear. That must mean he also neglected to inform you I was married to his aunt.’

‘Until she died,’ said Sinan. ‘Ask him how she died.’

This time it was İsmet who spoke in Turkish. And when Sinan responded, also in Turkish, his voice was loud enough to attract their host’s notice.

Pressing his hand down on İsmet’s shoulder, William Wakefield told his ‘other half’ to lay off. Turning to Sinan, he added, ‘That means you, too, boy!’ And perhaps he got the tone wrong, perhaps the tone he used was only acceptable if you were speaking to your own son.

‘I just met your daughter’s boyfriend,’ Jeannie heard a nondescript American woman tell her father some time later. ‘He’s a little mercurial, don’t you think?’ When William said no, he was just in a bad mood, she said, ‘Isn’t he a little old for her?’ Again William said no. His daughter was seventeen and Sinan had only just turned twenty. To which the American woman said, ‘Three years is a lot at that age. And then there’s the culture gap.’

William said she shouldn’t worry about that too much. ‘Sinan’s lived all over the world.’ But the woman persisted. ‘I suppose what concerns me most about Jeannie is that she seems to be doing a lot of care-taking.’

‘You think so?’

‘If I were her mother, I’d be telling her to cool off.’

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ William replied. ‘Jeannie has a mind of her own. And she’s crazy about this boy. They’re inseparable.’

‘All the more reason to tread carefully,’ said this woman. ‘When all is said and done…’ But Jeannie was never to know what happened when all was said and done, because now Sinan was leading her to the door.

There were fairy lights on the trees so anyone could have looked out and seen them kissing. When Jeannie pointed this out, he only held her tighter. ‘If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were doing this for show,’ Jeannie said.

And he said, ‘Why shouldn’t I? We’re inseparable. Remember?’

The next day he took her to the House of Shrouds to have lunch with his mother. Sibel was politeness itself when Jeannie first walked in – thanking her for the splendid party, asking after her father, asking Jeannie about her ‘passions and interests,’ plying her with food, and paying no attention to the son smouldering in the corner. Jeannie was never to know what sparked off the argument, because the first sally, like so many that followed, was in a language she didn’t know. She listened in her usual way, fishing for familiar names and words. Though Dutch Harding came up most frequently, Jeannie heard her own name, too. So rashly she interrupted. ‘What exactly do you have against me, by the way?’