Authors: Maureen Freely
Enlightenment (25 page)
So ends the second section of Jeannie’s confession. There follows a gap of eighteen years, bridged only by a brutal endnote:
‘In the years following the military coup of September 12
th
1980, 650,000 persons – blue and white collar workers, civil servants, teachers, university lecturers, students, technicians, physicians, lawyers, jurists, and civic leaders were detained or arrested for political reasons, according to figures gathered by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey. 210,000 were put on trial and 65,000 convicted. The death penalty was recommended for 6,353 people and 500 sentences passed, of which 50 were executed. Of the thousands who were tortured and crippled, 460 died.
Following the coup, martial law commanders also removed 4,891 civil servants from their posts while 4,509 were sent into exile; another 20,000 were forced into resignation or retirement. All in all, 30,000 people fled the country; 15,000 were deprived of their citizenship. Kurdish was banned, making Turkey the only country in the world to prohibit the speaking of a language.
Newspapers and journals were closed down, sometimes for limited periods and sometimes indefinitely. Journalists and writers were sentenced to lengthy prison terms; sometimes they were tried for up to a hundred offences simultaneously but given consecutive sentences adding up to hundreds of years. Tens of thousands of books were burned, 937 films were banned, as were (for a time) all political parties. A total of 23,667 associations, foundations and trade unions
were forced to close.
Methods of torture applied during this period include: beating, blindfolding, systematic humiliation, electric shocks, mock executions, isolation, suspension on a hanger, restriction of food and water, sexual harassment, rape, exposure to cold floors, subjection to jets of pressurised water, death threats and the
falaka
. Torturers routinely pulled out their victims’ hair, moustaches and nails, inserted needles between their nails, squeezed their testicles, forced them to wait in garbage-strewn cells, and made them watch others being tortured or listen to their screams. Also common were threats to torture victims’ relations. Some victims reported being beaten inside tyres, buried in the snow, immersed in sewer pits, and forced to eat salt or human excrement. According to figures gathered by the HRFT, 78% of the torture took place in security centres, 11.6% at police stations, 9% in
gendarmerie
stations and 1.3% in other locations.
In prisons, various other forms of violence were commonplace. Wards were routinely too hot, too cold or dangerously overcrowded; inmates were denied fresh air and their private belongings were routinely destroyed during raids. There was also a systematic withholding of food, drink, clothing, books, newspapers, writing supplies and essential medication and treatments. Those severely injured or made ill by the cruelty visited upon them were only rarely hospitalised: hence the expression “torture without marks.”’
In November 2005 – two weeks after Jeannie Wakefield’s disappearance, ten days after I turned myself into a
persona non grata
by writing a piece about her, eight days after my return to London, and only hours after receiving the first two emails from the unknown party who continues to bombard me with leading questions and vaguely worded threats – I rang Jordan Frick.
He came right over. He had only just returned from Uzbekistan so had not seen my piece. I printed out a copy and, once he’d read it, I brought him up to date. He listened intently, interrupting me only for the odd clarification. When I got to the end, he remained silent for some time. ‘This letter Jeannie left for you,’ he said finally. ‘Do you mind if I take a look at it?’
I told him to brace himself. He gave me a pained look. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen worse.’ Leaving him sprawled on the sofa that would be his bed for the next three days, I went off to the kitchen to assemble the daube that would last just as long.
When I returned to my study, he was still on the sofa and the room smelled like smoke and socks. He had his feet propped on the armrest, his hands propped behind his head, his eyes on the ceiling, and Jeannie’s fifty-three page letter on his chest.
The first thing he did when he sat up was to open it to the brutal endnote. Tapping it with his pen, he said, ‘That’s the bottom line.’
When I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘It’s the only thing that matters. What’s more, it’s all true.’ He lit up a cigarette. ‘Do you ever wonder why they torture people? Why we stand here and let them?’
He paused to exhale. ‘It isn’t to beat the truth out of people, that’s for sure. It’s to keep them from knowing it. To scare them out of asking.’
Another pause. ‘So someone has to ask
for
them. Don’t you think?’
Nothing he said that afternoon – or that evening, or the next day, or the morning after – followed on from the thing he had said before.
But whatever direction his mind took, it led back to his old haunts.
His appearance, circa June 1970: ‘Did I really look like a shorn sheep?’
The 1971 coup: ‘In the beginning, life went on as normal.’
The bombs that same year: ‘In a strange way, they came as a relief.’
Dutch Harding: ‘That’s stranger still. All he did that year – all I saw him do that year – was drink beer, smoke hash and read.’
Jeannie as a teenager: ‘Very apple pie. And very young.’
Jeannie as a young woman: ‘Walking wounded. But now I see why.’
Jeannie on the page: ‘Stern. Much too stern. Self-flagellating. Why?’
Jeannie on their visit to Istanbul in January 1981: ‘Everything she
says is true. Everything and nothing.’
It was only on the third night that he gave me his version of the story. He began with an apology. ‘I’ve been having a hard time remembering how I remember this. This brute Jeannie describes – is it really me? I’ve given this some thought now. As much as I hate to say it, I think it probably is me. Or was. I think – I hope – I’m better now at controlling my temper.
‘I guess you want to know about the box now. That’s easy. I walked right into it. The night before we left New York – in January 1981 - I got a call from William Wakefield. He told me he’d asked Jeannie to pick up this box Amy Cabot had been keeping for him. He asked me to remind her. That was all it was. My mistake was not to mention it at the outset. And then to blurt it out like that. That looked bad. Very bad. But once I’d done that, anything I said was only going to make it worse.
‘One of the things Jeannie’s right about – what the city was like that winter. Everyone was in hiding, or lying low. Everyone was terrified. And paranoid. You couldn’t be there without getting sucked in. They were all desperate to get word out but at the same time they were terrified that someone might report them. Their worst fear was that they would confide in someone like me, only to have me turn them in. Actually, this is not as paranoid as it sounds. There were armies of informers back then. As there are now.
‘There was something else, too. I’ve seen this in other places, at other times, so don’t think I’m talking just about Turkey circa 1981. People who need outside help, and clamour for outside help, actually find the whole thing extremely humiliating. This feeds into their doubts. There is some dignity in betrayal, but none at all in charity, which comes with strings attached. The first thing you have to do is make your benefactor look good. And righteous. That’s wrong. In my book, there are no innocents.
‘I don’t bear any grudges. At the time, yes, I was angry. It’s no fun getting kidnapped. Especially when you’ve been kidnapped by the people you’re there to help. But even then, I could see that – in their own minds – they were doing something noble. Though what that was…well, your guess is as good as mine.’
Was it, though?
I couldn’t say. Or rather, I wasn’t quite ready. I needed more proof. And so, it seems, did he.
That night – on
Newsnight
– we watched in silence as an august transatlantic panel discussed the latest wrinkles in the war on terror. The peg was an article – first published in the US, reprinted in London – decrying the overdependence on technology and dearth of qualified operatives ‘in the field.’ The author’s name was Manfred Berger, and the first time they mentioned it, Jordan sat up straight.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Nothing?’
Silencing me with a wave, he leaned forward to follow the discussion. When it was over, he went onto my computer.
‘Find something?’ I asked, when I’d finished the washing up.
‘Too early too tell,’ he said.
‘I take it you know this man.’
‘Manfred Berger? No, not really.’
‘So what’s the connection?’
‘I know someone who used to use that name as a pseudonym.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, way back.’
‘Way back as far as Turkey?’
‘Even further.’
‘Which reminds me,’ I said. ‘In all these years, I’ve never asked you where you’re from.’
‘I’m not from anywhere,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
‘By which you mean?’
‘I grew up all over.’
‘What – was your father in the military?’
‘No, you dork! The foreign service.’
‘So where did that take you?’
‘Kampala, Manila, Sasparilla. Anywhere that ends with an “a”.’
‘So what did your father do in all these places?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Let’s see. Was he some sort of expert?’
‘That’s one way of looking at it.’
‘And – I’m guessing – he was away a lot.’
‘Yes. In the field.’
‘Was he…an agricultural expert?’
‘Gotcha,’ he said.
We both fell silent.
It was only later, much later, as we were making up his bed, that he said, ‘So you understand now, do you?’
I nodded.
‘I do what I have to do.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I have no choice,’ he said.
And I said. ‘I know all this! You forget sometimes.’
‘Forget what?’
‘We belong to the same tribe.’
But as I watched him tussle with the covers, hurl his head onto the pillow, and stretch his legs far, far beyond the end of the sofa, only to bend them double, in search of warmth, I couldn’t help thinking how strange that tribe was, and how little either of us understood it.
Please do not read too much into that word. We’re too odd an assortment to count as a real tribe. Whatever ties we have are tenuous. If we have anything in common, it is shifting sands. It is rootlessness.
Wherever we lived as children, we were guests. Wherever we went, we were ambassadors for a country we knew only by hearsay. We grew up knowing no one whose parents were not teachers, missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, agricultural experts, oil company executives, drug enforcement agents or spies. Then, at eighteen, we flew ‘home’, to colleges that left the same imprint on us as they did on you. But what they taught us about the world was at odds with what we’d seen with our own eyes.
What do you think, Mary Ann? Is that why we keep coming back?
Jeannie did make a life for herself after losing Sinan. Or rather, it slowly and painfully made itself. These were the Reagan years. She was not the only one sifting the recent past for the seeds of her undoing. The stores were full of books for the disillusioned children of Cold Warriors. So she came to know a great deal about the OSS and the early years of the CIA. She read everything of note on the Soviet Union, the McCarthy era, the arms race, the Cuban missile crisis, the endless string of foreign misadventures that her father may or may not have played a part in:
‘I may have done so partly to put my own small tragedy into context but mostly to feed my huge grief. There was no moment when I saw
the light and buried my sorrows to move on. I don’t think things happen like that. I was in my thirties by now and could no longer think of happiness as a divine right. Or I knew I couldn’t count on finding it. Even if I did, it was unlikely, at this point, to be in the shape of a man.’
So in 1985 she left the big firm and went to work in the legal department of a newish and still struggling human rights organisation. Because she was the only woman in her office without a young family, she did more than her share of travelling. Most of her journeys took her to what polite people call trouble spots. Over and over, she saw what trouble did to people – how it sucked them under like a wave, turned them upside down and magnified them, propelling some to unimaginable heroism and others to cruelty; how it receded, often as abruptly as it had come, leaving the heroes stranded with the villains; how the past lurked under every stone and no one with a future dared to look. Watching the troubled surfaces of survivors’ lives, she came to see that peace could never be taken for granted and was as thin, as permeable, as breakable as skin.
‘My own grief had not dissipated, but I had, at least, come to see the lie in my own great expectations. Once I stopped asking why the world wasn’t as I wished it to be, once I knew that anyone who tried to change it was doomed, I saw my work in a more modest light. The honour, I thought, was in attempting anything at all.’
In the early 90s, after the Berlin Wall came down and before the wars in Yugoslavia, Jeannie helped organise a group of American lawyers going into Eastern Europe to advise on the new constitutions and penal codes. After a year in Skopje, she went on to Bucharest. By now her pessimism about the world and her place in it was so ingrained that it came as a surprise to her that some things, small things, could change for the better.
‘This revelation stayed with me, even after the wars began. What mattered, if you were to survive, were your principles. If trouble was
inevitable, then trouble was an education. It was thanks to the trouble I’d seen at too young an age that I was sometimes able to bridge the gap between my harried, underfunded Rumanian hosts and my startled, coddled American colleagues.’
It was while Jeannie was in Rumania that she became involved in another exchange programme funded by the EU. It was this work that took her to England, to a temporary position at University College London that became permanent in 1995. She was part of a new study centre looking at European integration and although she was drained by the strains of fund-raising and the endless round of committees, she enjoyed the common sense of purpose.
‘There were times when I saw a grand design in their work, even in their composition. No two were the same nationality. Each had roots in at least two countries, and for many it was three or four. Convinced that this congregation of displaced souls must be my new home, I began to look at houses.
The day I made an offer on a garden flat in Stoke Newington, I walked over to Dalston and found myself, without warning, back in Istanbul.
It was not just the kebab restaurants and the Turkish signs. It was the beautiful bounty of the produce spilling out onto the pavements, the smell of soap inside the shops, the gentle, sombre faces behind the counters, the soft ribbons of music, the whispered commands and the cries of conventional anguish: “
She wants two kilos of tomatoes. May Allah release me from my sorrows. What’s the time, big sister? I’m bored, my soul is being squeezed. Give her the pistachios that came in yesterday. Allah save me from my son. He should have been back an hour ago. What did we do to bring this trouble on our heads?
” No matter how sombre the subject, each word was a gift.’
When her father came to visit, she took him to her favourite kebab restaurant. They’d given up on the sparring matches, because what was the point? The Cold War was over. They were back with the older conflicts it had only temporarily suppressed, and because of the work
Jeannie did, she knew more about these than her father. But he was eager to catch up.
Now he was retired, William Wakefield spent his time reading, and his favourite reading was anything that suggested America had, at any point in its history, taken a wrong turning. This made for some overlap of interests, though William seemed happiest if he could find a book Jeannie had not yet heard of.
The night she took him to her favourite kebab restaurant, it was
The Peace to End All Peace
. He was only too pleased to tell his erudite daughter how the Allies had stitched up the Eastern Mediterranean after the First World War. He’d pause from time to time to speak to the waiters in his clipped, affectless Turkish. They obeyed without question.
Suddenly Jeannie asked him, ‘Do you ever regret doing the work you did?’
His answer was immediate. ‘Every living day.’
‘In what way?’ Jeannie asked. She was hoping for a
mea culpa
: the regrets he had about the way ‘our side’ had conducted itself during the Cold War; the arrogant pursuit of American strategic interests everywhere, the fanning of mass paranoia; the propping up of any fat cat or dictator willing to tow the line; the covert subversion of any group that questioned it; the sustained effort to keep the American people from knowing what their government did in their name; the need to find a new way of comporting ourselves now that there was no longer a Soviet ‘threat’; the understanding that, though democracy was something you could foster and encourage, it was not something you could impose from above.
But what her father said was, ‘I regret it because the people I did it for were drooling idiots. Boxes for brains. They couldn’t see further than their own one-horse town. Damn it, we were a resource. We knew the ground. They refused to listen to us. They punished us for speaking. For this they expected us to put our lives on the line? They didn’t let us
have
a life. As you saw for yourself.’
He sat back and eyed his daughter beadily. ‘Not once, not twice, but four times unlucky. First your mother, then your stepmothers. Then Amy. They couldn’t stand for it. Not just the danger, but the
subterfuge. You can’t build a life on that. You can’t even be a father. Though God knows I tried.’
Another beady stare. Jeannie knew what she wanted to say but stopped herself. He was a lonely, broken seventy-three year-old man. Instead she pointed to the
kilim
on the wall and asked him which part of Turkey he thought the family running the restaurant came from. The next time the waiter came to the table, her father addressed him in a language Jeannie couldn’t understand. ‘Mardin,’ he announced, when the smiling waiter had retreated. The language they’d been speaking was Kurdish.
‘And that’s another problem that’s not going away any time soon,’ he said. ‘But you can count on our old friends the Washington
Box-Heads
to pay no attention until it’s too late.’ There followed a lecture. He went to bed with his dignity restored. His daughter went to bed with a headache, and for the first time in many years, had a dream about Sinan.
She’d heard from Chloe – this would have been the last conversation they’d had before one or the other had moved again and forgotten to forward their new address – that Sinan had returned to Denmark following his release from prison.
In Jeannie’s dream he was thinking about having a haircut and wanted her opinion. Before she could tell him, he disappeared.
A week or two later she was having a coffee just off Dalston High Street, in the café of the Arcola Theatre. She looked across the room and thought she saw Lüset. The cold terror she felt at that moment took her by surprise, and by the time her heart had slowed enough for her to dare to look again, she was gone.
A month or so later – in April 1996 – an opportunity arose for Jeannie to spend a year in The Hague working alongside the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. One year turned into two, and then her mother’s health failed. She spent the next year commuting between the Netherlands and Northampton, a decision she would never regret, because she was with her mother when she passed away. Though still she would ask herself. Was her mother at peace when she died? By the end, had Jeannie become a good daughter?
It was while she was packing up her mother’s house that Jeannie found her old postcards, and then her old journals (though the most important one remained under the floorboards at the Pasha’s Library: even as she went through her mother’s papers, Istanbul interrupted her thoughts).
She had only just returned to her flat in Stoke Newington when she turned on the television one evening to see a picture of the Istanbul skyline.
Another date to remember: August 17
th
1999.
