Enlightenment (13 page)

How clear the air was when Jeannie set off for home that evening. As she made her 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, stopping on the 138th step to catch the first glimpse of the sea, she made her plans. She chose her words, so carefully that she was on and off the bus and halfway up the Aşıyan before she had composed them to her satisfaction. For once it didn’t feel too steep. For once she did not trip on a single cobblestone or cower in the shadow of the castle or turbaned tombs that lined the cemetery wall.

How golden the
meydan
looked in the late afternoon sun. How dusty their green gate. How sharp and damp the evening air as she walked down the path. How dark the churning waters of the Bosphorus. How easy it was to pull up a chair next to her father’s great desk and ask the question. As the words hung in the air, he showed no surprise. She might as well have asked what they were having for supper. Tipping back his chair, he said, ‘So let me guess. Someone’s been giving you a hard time?’ But how easy it was for her to insist on a proper answer.

This was his answer: ‘Basically, I’m a desk guy. Mostly, I just sit at that desk of mine and analyse information.’

Which was just not good enough. So she kept pressing. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘The short answer is that there is no short answer. It varies. Sometimes we pay for our information, or people owe us a favour. Or they want revenge. Mostly they’re lying. And mindbogglingly boring. That’s our greatest secret, the one no thriller can divulge…’

‘What I still don’t understand is what you do all day.’

‘The truth, Jeannie, is that I spend most of my day in meetings.’

What sort of meetings?

‘Meetings with goons.’

‘And then?’

‘I write reports about these meetings for other goons who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, and care even less.’

‘Then what’s the point?’ she asked. ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’

‘Well, look at it like this…’ he began. She cut him off.

‘What’s the point of being here if they don’t like us, Dad?’

‘The army likes us. The army loves us!’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what about the people?’

‘The people might not like us, but they’d like the Soviet alternative a hell of a lot less, believe you me.’ Tipping back his chair, he recited his tired mantra. ‘So that’s why we’re here, Jeannie. To defend freedom, justice and democracy, the principles that made our country great. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – remember? Not that you’ve looked very happy lately.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘There isn’t one!’

‘I’m wondering if it isn’t that Bolshevik classmate of yours who pushed you into this.’ She shook her head, perhaps a little too vigorously. ‘Then is it Sinan?’ She shook her head again. ‘In that case, it must be his parents,’ her father said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Parents are very interfering here. Though not without cause.’

‘So tell me. What’s this cause?’

He waved his hand, as if to swat a fly. ‘Oh who knows? They could be worried we might spirit Sinan off to the US of A. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea! This is just between you and me, by the way. Same goes for the other matter we were discussing. I don’t say this lightly. Do you hear?’

‘What – you want to turn me into a liar, just like you?’

‘I’m telling you to exercise caution. Listen, rumours in and of themselves can’t hurt you. They’re a dime a dozen, and there’s safety in numbers. But if you go around with a sign on your back…’

‘I don’t have to tell anyone. They know already.’

‘What I mean is, don’t let them know
you
know.’ He stood up, and as Jeannie did the same, he turned to beam at her.

She didn’t know this look. What was it – concerned? Abashed? Solicitous? No, condescending. Patting her on the head, he said, ‘Poor old Jeannie. All the woes of the world on her back. Is all this getting too much for you? What I meant was…you were so full of life when you got here. So full of curiosity and joy. You’d look into a horizon and dream of what was beyond it. You’d watch people walking along the waterfront and see their stories trailing after them like comets. But now…’ He fixed her with his beadiest and most regretful gaze.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘You’re sure, now.’ It was a question.

‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping.’

‘Well, maybe this will help.’

Let me pause here, Mary Ann, to answer a question that one of your number raised in a recent email. As the mother of two grown children, I do understand where it comes from. It must be very hard for someone in Washington DC to take on board – especially if that person is sitting in the well-appointed, amply funded and closely guarded offices of the Center for Democratic Change. Here we have a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come close to death or serious injury at the hands of an anti-American rabble in the streets of Istanbul. Why did she not take the first plane home? To quote your colleague – there are two parents involved here. If William Wakefield refused to see the writing on the wall, why did Jeannie’s mother also fail to act, once it became clear that the city was fast becoming a no-go zone for US personnel?

In fact, she did, though she was hampered at first by poor information. To illustrate my point, let me backtrack to the first incident your colleague mentions: the bombing of the NCO Club by leftwing students in Ankara in late November 1970. Sadly, it did not make the
New York Times,
so Jeannie’s mother never heard of it.

As for the incident in late December – when another group of leftwing students threw firebombs at the Prime Minister’s car in downtown Istanbul – the
New York Times
did run a short item on his narrow escape. Solicitous mother that she was, Nancy Wakefield called Istanbul at once to register her concern. But her ex-husband insisted there was nothing to worry about. The bomb, he said, was ‘a flash in a pan.’

In January, there was a lull – though the
New York Times
ran a long piece in the middle of the month that alluded to dangerous student extremists pushing the country towards civil war. However, the author was confident that the Prime Minister would keep the ship of state on course, and when William Wakefield spoke to his exwife, he quoted from this article.

A week later, students barricaded themselves into the faculty buildings of a university in Ankara and fought back the police with gunfire, firebombs, dynamite and stones. Eight people were injured, and forty-five were arrested. There was no report in the
New York Times
, and therefore no phone call from Northampton.

In February 1971 Turkey became ‘a story’. When Demirel, the Prime Minister, introduced legislation that would make it a prisonable offence to ‘interfere with commercial activity, occupy factories, make bombs, insult or resist officers of the law, interfere with public services or road transport and deface official posters’, the
New York Times
devoted the better part of a page to putting his move into context. Again, they described the threat as seen from the Prime Minister’s office: the universities were full of dangerous anarchists, subversives and extremists. The most dangerous were their leaders, who were not really students, he said, but ‘agents provocateurs’. Their demands, he said, had nothing to do with university reform but with ‘extreme Marxism and Maoism.’ And yes, this did give Jeannie’s mother pause.

So imagine her horror when, four days later, she opened her morning paper to read that a band of extreme leftwing students connected to Revolutionary Youth, Turkey’s largest leftwing student association, had kidnapped a US sergeant in Ankara. Though they released him seventeen hours later, the Turkish authorities were now under pressure to take visible and decisive action to end the wave of terrorist attacks on US personnel, so they instigated a series of arms searches in the country’s largest universities. They met with heavy resistance. In one raid at Hacıttepe Medical University in Ankara, there were twenty people injured and two hundred arrests.

Reporting on the wave of bomb blasts in other parts of the country, the
New York Times
spoke of an ‘expanded urban guerrilla movement’, increasing hatred of ‘US imperialism’, and the growing
danger to which US citizens living in Turkey were now exposed. Reading this, Nancy Wakefield began her campaign in earnest, but she had made little headway when, in early March, a group calling itself the Turkish People’s Liberation Army, kidnapped four US airmen as they were driving out of an airbase near the capital. The kidnappers sent a letter to a newspaper to announce that they were ‘purging the country of all American and foreign enemies’ and to promise that the hostages would be killed unless they received $400,000 dollars by the following night.

The government responded by sending two thousand policemen and militiamen out to search the universities, where they reported finding a ‘huge amount’ of explosives, guns and ammunition. Students occupying one dormitory in Ankara tried to fend them off with gunfire and dynamite. Two died on the scene and twelve were injured. The next day, reconnaissance planes and jeeps provided by the US for opium control joined the search for the kidnapped airmen. A day later, the hostages returned to base unharmed: their kidnappers had panicked and fled. The search for the kidnappers continued unabated, but a government spokesman said that the job was made more difficult by the fact that the perpetrators of the crime were almost certainly ‘university or graduate students of middle-class background.’ They were probably, he said, hiding out ‘in some plush home.’

The story was front-page news for the better part of a week, so there were daily calls from Northampton. Over and over, William Wakefield stalled her, and if you are wondering why he felt justified to do so, it was because only a handful of the 16,000 US personnel in Turkey had been touched by the violence, and no action whatsoever had been directed against their thousands of dependent children.

He assured his ex-wife that ‘things’ were happening behind the scenes: the military was losing its patience and preparing to step in. The clincher would be the CENTO summit, scheduled to take place in Ankara at the end of March. There was, he said, no way the authorities were going to expose the US Secretary of State and twenty-odd other leading Western statesmen to any risks. He was right: two weeks before the summit, on March 12
^th
1971, the commanders of the Turkish army issued an ultimatum and Demirel stepped down.

But still the violence continued, and on the night of the 14
^th
of March, there were four bomb attacks against US interests in Istanbul – a Turkish-American trade bank, two newspapers, and the US Consulate. The following morning, two students shot and wounded the American manager of an English language bookshop. Later that same day, Northampton called, in tears this time, demanding Jeannie’s immediate return.

Knowing that his ex-wife was genuinely distraught, but determined not to let her have her way, William Wakefield went on the offensive. He told her she was to stop drawing wild conclusions from what she read in a ‘paper that doesn’t even bother to have a bureau here.’ Yes, the universities in downtown Istanbul were war zones, ‘and no one can claim I’ve tried to hide this from you. But Jeannie never goes near those places, nor would she want to. And there are, I assure you, no gunbattles at Robert College.’ Technically this was true, but there had been several small bombs, a long string of noisy boycotts, and a fierce campaign to nationalise the university. At least half of the student body belonged to Revolutionary Youth. There was no need to go into this: it had not been mentioned in the
New York Times
.

So once again, Jeannie was off the hook. But freedom came at a price – as her father, still nursing a grievance, was only too happy to remind her. She would only be able to stay in Turkey for as long as she let him lie for her.

How to describe the light pouring over them? How to capture the truth in words before it changed? The frost glowing in each little pane of glass, the flashes of gold at the edges, the fierce patches of blue beyond, the heat pumping out of the stove behind her, the scraping chairs and happy murmurs, the aroma of
böreks
…

She looked down the table. Occupying the middle section was a group of students she had only just met. At the far end were Haluk and Chloe, holding hands across the table. Between them, at the head of the table, sat Suna, peering peevishly into an open textbook. Suna was helping Haluk with his homework; he was having a hard time understanding, and an even harder time being seen to struggle. Chloe, meanwhile, was struggling but not quite managing to look
as if she was above all this. Lüset had captured the trio perfectly in a surreptitious sketch on a napkin: Haluk’s hunched shoulders, Chloe’s pout, and the fire in Suna’s eyes as she tapped the textbook with her pencil for didactic effect.

News flash! Chloe had turned to the boy to her right. The boy with the large green eyes and the indolent laugh. Haluk was not happy about it. Slamming his book shut, he glared at his rival. This prompted a lecture on jealousy.

‘But it’s human,’ Haluk said in English.

‘Your job is not to be human, but to be enlightened,’ Suna replied.

He put his hands over his eyes. This provoked a second tirade, but it soon fizzled out, because now the green-eyed boy was telling a long, involved joke.

The windowpanes had steamed up so much by now that they were losing their golden edges. The waiters had just brought them a new platter of
böreks
but hers were still too hot to eat. ‘Did you burn your mouth?’ asked Sinan. Not too badly, she replied. He brushed a strand of hair from her face and, draping his arm around her, turned back to hear the green-eyed boy. Though Jeannie could pick out a fair number of words, the sentences were long, and the suffixes confusing, and they all spoke so fast. Did the girl next to Haluk have a secret crush on him? When she caught Jeannie watching, she fixed her with a glare.

She interrupted the conversation to ask who Jeannie was. Sinan answered sharply – his girlfriend. After a tense silence, the conversation resumed. When Jeannie lost the thread, she turned her attention to the other customers.

At the next table there was a couple that had not spoken for going on an hour. The man looked to be in his forties; the woman half that.

To her right was the man from the Soviet Consulate who often dropped by Nazmi’s on an afternoon, and who, according to Chloe, was given to turning up uninvited at her parents’ parties, bringing with him Russian vodka and copies of
And Quietly Flows the Don
. Sinan seemed to know him, too, though he wouldn’t explain how – only that this man was not to be trusted or acknowledged. Seeing her eyes travel towards this man’s table, Sinan pressed down on her foot.

This same man was standing at the door, adjusting his Astrakhan hat, when Jeannie’s father walked in. ‘Sergei! Just the man I was looking for!’

For a few moments, they conversed. And Jeannie prayed. Please Dad, don’t come in here. Please Dad, walk right out with your friend.

When William Wakefield looked over his shoulder and saw his daughter, he feigned surprise.

‘Well, hi there. Busy studying, as usual?’ He smiled as he eyed each of them in turn. No one smiled back. Feigning equanimity, he turned to Jeannie.

‘Listen. When can I expect you home?’

‘About eight?’ she said in the thinnest voice.

‘Eight at the latest.’ Spoken like a general. As he headed for the door, the girl with the secret crush on Haluk asked Sinan another question. The boy with the green eyes answered for him. ‘
Casus
,’ he said.
Casus
meant spy. The green-eyed boy looked straight at Jeannie as he said it. But she was used to this game now. How to make your face go blank. How to read your enemy’s intentions even when his face was blank, too. How to
imply
contempt while committing yourself to nothing. How to make an insinuation – an
elegant
insinuation – while smiling
sweetly. How to sit on your feelings, press them so thin you could put your finger through them… But that’s so wrong, Jeannie! No good can come of it! Whatever happened to the First Amendment? Did Tom Paine speak in vain? Where are you when I need you, John Henry? Give me liberty or give me death! Give me back my mind!

What on earth could they be talking about? First their voices rose and then they fell. Every so often the girl with the secret crush on Haluk sat back to say, ‘Ah!’ as if it really meant something. At long last Suna turned to Jeannie and said, ‘Do not worry, my little innocent. We have defended you. We have also explained that you are in the process of being educated.’

‘Educated for what?’ Jeannie asked.

‘Ah…’ said Suna. ‘Now it is my turn to say “Ah!”’ Everyone at the table laughed – with her? At her? The conversation drifted away. Jeannie returned to her letter. But it was lies, all lies. A fresh page then. Take in a deep breath.

But she had no idea how to begin any more. She had no idea what she thought. No, that wasn’t quite right. She had forgotten how to think aloud. She knew now how dangerous it could be, how a word uttered was a word lost. But not to panic. They’d be leaving any minute now. All she had to do was stay patient.
Look
patient. Stay blank. Leave it all to Sinan. Wasn’t that how he’d put it?

Gazing out through the frosted window, she watched the sun leave the garden for the Bosphorus. An elegant figure sailed down the dark path. The door swang open and in came their Modern Novel teacher, the saintly Miss Broome.

The room fell silent. The waiters, unaccustomed to seeing a beautiful young woman alone in public, were too stunned to move. It was as if a great light was shining down on them. They feasted gratefully at her large, soft, painfully earnest brown eyes and the long brown tresses that she’d draped over her left shoulder. She was wearing
a long purple velvet coat and a velvet skullcap ringed with silver coins. She removed them prettily to reveal a long black dress. What was it made of? Was it felt? No, it was too soft. It must be cashmere. Could there be anything softer than a long black cashmere dress?

Catching sight of her favourite students, Miss Broome gave them a breezy wave. After the breathless waiters had settled her at a table, she reached into her black velvet handbag and brought out a fountain pen and a marbled notebook. After gazing at length through the frosted windows, as if in search of inspiration, she leaned forward to rub one of the windowpanes clean.

Now why hadn’t
she
thought of that? Jeannie leaned forward, to see what Miss Broome saw. But now the door had opened again. This time it was two young men wearing embroidered sheepskin coats and jeans. One had shaggy brown hair and granny glasses and the sort of gaunt cheekbones that spoke of long years in the serious section of the library. The second had short but ruffled blond hair and it wasn’t until his eyebrows shot up, seemingly of their own accord, that Jeannie placed him. No Name, the shorn sheep, the young American at her father’s desk that morning last June.

They headed straight to Miss Broome’s table. The aesthete with the granny glasses leaned over to whisper in her ear. Without lifting her eyes from her marbled notebook, she smiled. What must it be like, to be free like Miss Broome? To be yourself no matter where you were? No matter how people were treating you, or what they said?

A pat on the shoulder. This was the signal: Haluk had passed Sinan the key. The key was to Haluk’s new apartment in Rumeli Hisar. His ‘garçonniere’. Suna didn’t know about it yet; hence the subterfuge. Except…

It was six o’clock already. Jeannie had to be home by eight. But when he rose from the table, Sinan acted as if he had all the time in the world. When they passed Miss Broome’s table, he stopped, somewhat stiffly to greet the man in the granny glasses. ‘Dutch, meet Jeannie Wakefield. Jeannie, meet Dutch Harding.’

‘Oh!’ Jeannie cried. But Dutch said nothing. His gaze was frank, thoughtful, detached. She could be a display in a natural history museum.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.

‘Because you’re not what I expected,’ Dutch replied. He leaned forward. ‘And that’s good. Because I hate to be bored. Don’t you?’

‘
Honestly
, Dutch. What’s got into you? Can’t you see you’re unnerving her?’ Miss Broome put a proprietary hand on Dutch’s arm. ‘Don’t pay these boys any attention, Jeannie. They’re just nervous because you’re so pretty.’

‘Thanks a lot, Billie!’ said the shorn sheep. Leaning forward, offering Jeannie his hand, he said, ‘You remember
me
, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Jeannie said. Without thinking, she smiled. Sinan’s fingers pressed into her hand. ‘So anyway,’ she said, turning back to Miss Broome.

‘Yes,’ Miss Broome said. ‘You look like you’re in a hurry. Until tomorrow, then? Same time, same place? Oh, and Jeannie,’ she added, ‘I almost forgot.’ She reached into her velvet handbag. ‘I brought you another book.’

Which one was it that day?
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
by William Appleman Williams, or
The Politics of War
by Gabriel Kolko? She was reading as fast as she could by now, but still lagging behind the others – and rudderless, utterly rudderless – though she knew what she was looking for, and searched for it more desperately each day.

Miss Broome tried so hard to be tactful, to remember where Jeannie ‘was coming from.’ But there was a point in every discussion when she’d take in a sharp breath and clasp her hands to stare into the middle distance like a bird in search of a worm. ‘How much do you know about our foreign adventures during the 19
^th
century?’ she’d ask. And Jeannie would say, ‘Not a whole lot.’ To which Miss Broome would reply, ‘Well, to be fair. Not many Americans do. And that’s a shame, because what we’re seeing now comes to them as a direct result, I’d say, of the Open Door Policy.’ ‘The Open Door Policy?’ Jeannie would ask. And Miss Broome would sigh and stand up and go into her study and come back a few minutes later carrying a book. ‘I think you’d better read this.’

She didn’t always accept what she read and to be fair, Miss Broome
didn’t expect her to. But little by little, some of it was seeping in. It wasn’t that she’d lost her illusions, or stopped loving her country. But she had questions. About who had the power, and what these people did in their name. The more she found out, the more she wanted to know. The more she knew, the more she had to ask herself what ‘we the people’ really stood for. And why, if we the people stood for democracy, we knew so little about the people we voted into office. Little by little, her questions became more loaded. Once in a while, she’d say something to her father that would make him say, ‘Christ! Where do you get that from?’

Repressive tolerance. That was one new concept. Comprador bourgeoisie. That was another. Polymorphous perversity. Commodity fetishism. ‘I defy you to define that,’ he’d say. And when she did, he’d ask, ‘Is this the work of Miss Broome again?’

‘Really, it’s a collective thing,’ she’d say.

‘Collective. As in
Animal Farm
?’

‘Not at all,’ she’d say. ‘Miss Broome believes in democratic debate.’

‘You could fool me,’ he’d say.

And she’d say, ‘No honestly. She wants us to think for ourselves. But she also wants us to know when the papers are lying to us, when they leave things out. Or skew the lessons of history.’

‘Now why would any right-thinking person want to do that?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ Jeannie would ask.

‘Pull up a chair. Tell me more about that book in your hand.’

And she would. And more often than not, he’d have read it, too. He’d tell Jeannie what he thought about it, because wasn’t that part of the deal? He had no right to know where she was every minute of the day, but ideas were something else. She wasn’t going to pretend she agreed with him when she didn’t. The only way she was ever going to hold her own with this man was to speak her mind. So she’d tell him what Miss Broome had said about it, and what Suna had taken issue with, and what Sinan had said about it later, and what great new insight Dutch had allegedly uttered in response, and what she had said when Sinan repeated it to her afterwards. And then their free exchange of ideas would get freer still. For he’d turned a new leaf. He talked to her now as an equal. He had to! Gone were the days when
he could peek into her journal. She kept it well hidden now. Her true thoughts likewise. Whatever she committed to the treacherous page, it had nothing to do with what she truly thought. Far better, she thought, to argue about books.