Enlightenment (3 page)

Because the boys were Sinan and his best friend Haluk. The girls were my ex-best friend, Chloe Cabot, and two Turkish classmates of ours from the Girls’ College, also former friends about whom I had very mixed feelings. Their names were Lüset and Suna. Suna was the one who had fallen out of the fourth floor window during interrogation. It was Suna I had heard calling down the stairs.

Perhaps everyone carries around a story like this – an unimaginable horror, visited upon a childhood friend, or the boy next door, or the
girl you haven’t seen since she sat between you and the window in second grade. When you knew them, they were ordinary in every way. As deeply as you bore into your memory, as mercilessly as you dredge it, you can find no sign that marked them for their fate. But you need to find it – it must be there – it must have happened for a reason, because it if didn’t, it could also have happened to you. So if you can’t find the answer in the past, then you must at least try and conjure up the scene of the crime, make some sense of it – understand, at the very least, how A led to B.

For years, I’d tried. Lost years of sleep, struggling to force the facts I had – the facts I thought I had – into a shape that made sense. But I never got very far. I could imagine Sinan with another girl, a girl like me, but more innocent. I could see them arm in arm at the Pasha’s Library, breaking my heart as they watched the moon rise over the Bosphorus, on the marble bench at the edge of the secret garden. I could see Jeannie’s father, standing on the glass porch, affably clocking them. And if I gazed over the ledge into the village of Rumeli Hisar, I could see the garçonniere: the glasses piled up in the sink, and the shoes and socks strewn across the floor, and the never-washed sheets. I could imagine my lost friends at the table, reading coffee grounds, pretending to believe the outrageous fortunes they found in them, but laughing all the while. I could imagine Suna tapping Sinan’s coffee cup and saying, ‘So this spy who’s betrayed us. What are we to do with him?’ But no matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine what Sinan might have said in reply. A curtain descended, and my mind went black.

From time to time, a scene would drift in from the shadows. Always the same cast of characters, and always in the garçonniere – but arranged into a new formation. Sometimes Suna had the gun, sometimes it was Chloe or the cipher who had replaced me. Sometimes Jeannie Wakefield was an innocent bystander, and sometimes she was the accuser. Sometimes she was facing an armchair whose occupant I couldn’t see, and sometimes she was standing over the body lying face down on the floor. Sometimes it was Sinan standing over the mentor who had betrayed him, and sometimes it was Haluk. Sometimes it wasn’t a gun in his hand, but the hatchet I could never bring myself to believe he’d used to chop Dutch Harding’s body into pieces. No
matter how I arranged the scene, it refused to stay in place. There were too many variables, and too few facts. There had been a murder. I seemed to know almost everyone implicated in it. But I did not know which one was the killer. And neither could I understand what might have driven him or her to kill the softspoken, bookish, arrogantly inert Dutch Harding.

I just couldn’t see him as an agent provocateur.

But I could see the girls, abandoned, and left to clear away the evidence, lugging the trunk down the stairwell, across the cobblestones to the waiting taxi. Their hearts stopping when the taxi driver threw it into the trunk and cried, ‘What do you have in there, a body?’ Their hearts stopping again as they paid him off in front of Lüset’s father’s yacht, and as they dragged the trunk up over the curb, and looked behind to see a trail of blood.

Suna, in the interrogation room. On the window ledge, dangling her legs. In the shadows behind her, the shape of a man. In the street below, Sinan, saying nothing, but pleading with his eyes. What did he want her to do? Go back into the room or jump?

Things he’d said during our seven-night tryst came floating back to me. Things that, under other circumstances, would have meant nothing. I’d be sitting in a lecture hall at Wellesley, jotting down notes about Savanarola – or in the dining hall, at the salad bar – and I’d see him on the chaise longue, smiling his sulky smile, stroking my arm, bringing my hand to his lips, to kiss each finger, one by one.

If I’d stayed – if he’d kept his promise – if we’d kept to our plan – would he have pulled me into this cell of his, and this murder? Had he tried, would I have the sense to pull away from him, or would I have melted at the sight of him, as I had done a thousand times over, each and every one of the seven secret nights we’d spent together? If there was such a thing as a point of no return, would I have recognised it – or sailed along regardless like the rest of them? I needed to believe that I was made of different stuff than they were. But I knew I wasn’t. It could have been me in that room, if I’d stayed, if he’d kept his promise. I’d been spared only because he’d fallen out of love with me – if he’d ever been in love with me – and chosen someone else. Did that mean I had no part in it? For I had wished them to hell. And my dream had come true.

Six months after the murder, in December 1971 when I was a sophomore at Wellesley, I ran into Chloe Cabot, my ex-best friend, in Harvard Square. (And yes – you may have guessed this already. Our final disagreement had been about Sinan. Though they’d been only friends, they’d been close friends. Though she’d had no real reason to feel jealous, she’d acted as if I’d stolen him away.) This chance meeting in Harvard Square was the first I knew Chloe was not languishing in a jail in Turkey. For someone who’d been involved in a murder, she was disturbingly offhand.

She had just started at Radcliffe, she told me. She hated it, of course. She didn’t think she’d last. Our short and stilted conversation tapered into a silence: this would, I knew, be my only chance to ask her what had really happened. But as I searched for the right words, a wave of terror passed through me. I was afraid, I suppose, that she might tell me the truth.

Later that winter, in a burst of belated courage, I did make an effort to track her down, only to be told that she had taken a leave of absence.

The following summer – this would have been June, 1972 – I was helping a friend paint a room in a house on Cape Cod when my eyes happened to fall on the sheet of newsprint we were using for our brushes. It was a front page from one of Boston’s underground papers, and at the bottom was a little black box in which it was stated that on
June the whatever the paper had run a story about a murder, allegedly involving a CIA operative then stationed in Istanbul, Turkey. Because the author, Jeannie Wakefield, was personally acquainted with all involved, the editors had been less than diligent in checking her facts. As it had since emerged that her story was false in just about every particular, the editors, along with the author, wished to offer their most sincere apologies, and their most sincere thanks to the Turkish Ambassador, who had kindly offered to furnish the full facts of the case in a later issue. I forgot to keep my surprise to myself – of all the places to see this story, and this name! It was my friend who, eager to know more about this murky tale, got straight on the phone to the underground newspaper. But for the obvious legal reasons, and to my huge relief, they refused to send her the issue with Jeannie’s original article. So once again, it was out of my hands. From time to time, late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would regret having made no second effort. But never for long.

I had the sense, at least, to recognise that the real problem was in my mind, that, strictly speaking, the Trunk Murder had nothing to do with me, that any new facts I gleaned were unlikely to explain to me why I felt as if it did. Slowly, I weaned myself off it. If my thoughts returned regardless, I learned not to play along. No more rearrangements of the cast at the scene of the crime, no more long nights lolling on the window ledge, staring into the abyss. Though the scenes still came back to me, they were less and less frequent. Slowly the life drained out of them, until no one spoke, and no one moved, and nothing in the shadows or the street below disturbed or even interested me.

Much later, when my parents were back in Istanbul, I did hear passing references from time to time – enough to know that Sinan (who had spent many years in Denmark) worked in films, that his old friend Haluk (who had spent many years in England and was now back in the bosom of his industrialist family) was rumoured to be Sinan’s chief backer, that Suna (who, like her friend Lüset, had been released from prison in the mid-70s) was now in the sociology department at the university, and that Chloe, (who had returned to Istanbul in the late 80s) had been blissfully married to a plastic surgeon until he died of leukaemia. I felt no urge, and made no effort, to get back into touch.

But now here they were, in the Pasha’s Library, the entire cast minus Sinan. Bustling about the great new loft that they’d turned into some sort of incident room. At first they didn’t see me. And, in a sense, neither could I see them. I am wondering if it’s even possible to explain how I felt at that moment – what thoughts crossed my mind as I stood there, contemplating the path not taken.

I noticed first of all how gracefully they occupied it. Four shapes, huddled around a desk, a screen, a pool of lamplight. Heads and shoulders rising and falling to the rhythm of their whispers. Their every gesture speaking of the years I had not shared with them.

They were reading some sort of massive document. From the limpness of the paper, I guessed it was a fax. It was Chloe I could see most clearly, though at first I knew her only from the way she licked her finger as she leafed through the papers on her lap. And her feet – even after all these years, she still turned them in. But there was no other sign of the awkward teenager I had once known. The bulges and blemishes had been airbrushed away. Now she was all angles and gold bracelets and linen cut on the bias. No sign of a curl, even, in her sleek and backcombed copper hair. She had the ‘careless poise’ I remembered our discussing in the abstract with some passion at restaurant tables all over the Mediterranean, as our parents drank and we designed outfits and ‘
accoutrements
’ for the ideal woman.

I remembered in particular an argument we’d had about engagement rings when I was twelve and she was eleven. Chloe’s was to be the ‘second largest emerald in the world.’ When I asked what
she’d do if the love of her life turned up with a diamond, she’d said, ‘Well, obviously. I’d have to say no.’ As her hand flitted to her lips, a flash of green told me she had not been disappointed.

The gentle, bearlike creature sitting next to her – could it really be Haluk, the Playboy of the Eastern World? This man seemed too comfortable inside his skin to have been the restive boy I could still see smiling so blandly as his foot tapped the accelerator. Only when he turned to comfort the woman sitting next to him did I catch a glimpse of…

Lüset! She had not changed at all. She was the same porcelain doll. She was kissing Haluk on the cheek – how strange! But there was no time to consider why. For now here was Suna. The same. Only more so. As her blazing blue eyes cut through me, I could hear her last words to me: ‘
I repudiate you. I repudiate you. And once more. I repudiate you. I have said it three times now. And still you stand before me?
’

What had I said in reply? I remembered only her retort.
‘So stay there! Stand there like a candle for all eternity. It changes nothing! For me – for all true patriots of Turkey – you have ceased to exist.’
Was she still holding to her promise, or had she failed to recognise me? I did not have time to ask, because now Jeannie had run to Suna’s side. ‘Is this it, finally?’ she asked.

Suna nodded gravely. ‘But it’s not good news.’

‘Is this the top page?’ Jeannie asked. She plopped down on a stool and began to read. Her fists were clenched and soon she began to sob. Chloe gestured at Lüset, who answered with a silent nod.

After she had spirited Jeannie away, the others exchanged dark looks and darker murmurs. It was bad, very bad. There was something Suna had found on the Internet that she wanted the others to see. As they huddled around her laptop, I found myself a chair in the corner, where, to keep myself occupied, I surveyed the room. In the centre were two small sofas – one red, one blue – sitting on a carpet of the same colour scheme. Between them was a glass coffee table piled high with glossy magazines and newspapers, a slender brass floor lamp, and a yellow box of Duplo, tipped on its side. As I looked across the vast parquet floor, I could see assorted
Star Wars
action figures, a large Transformer, and an overturned train.

Next to the stairs was a large glass tank. Inside it was a large snake coiled around a tree branch. In spite of myself, I smiled. Another cobra! After all these years! Windows ran along all four walls – from where I sat I could see the full span of the new suspension bridge, and below its glittering arcs, the slow parade of night buses rolling into Anatolia. Running below the windows along three walls was a custom-made desk, long enough to accommodate five workstations. On the wall behind me was a collection of framed posters – most from Sinan’s films, and one from his beautiful mother’s brief singing career. Running above the windows were the framed photographs that told the story I could have done without: Sinan arm-in-arm with Jeannie. Sinan cradling his infant son. Emre learning to crawl, Emre taking his first step, Emre staring at the three candles on his birthday cake. Sinan holding up a silver cup, and, over the bookshelf on which someone – his adoring wife? – had arranged his trophies, a photograph of Sinan standing on a windswept hilltop, looking into the distance, smiling like a man. His frame was wider than I remembered. As was his face. But his eyes were the same – dark, sulky, and idly seeking trouble. For a moment I remembered how it had felt, to sit with him on that chaise longue, to see him lie back on the headrest, hands behind his head, smiling and archly patient, never doubting that if he looked into my eyes long enough, my resistance would crumble.

Quickly, I looked away. Chloe was sitting on the chair in front of a laptop; Suna and Haluk were reading over her shoulders. From time to time, one of them would cry out in disbelief. And Chloe would look up gravely and say, ‘Should we even be reading this garbage?’ Or: ‘Are you ready for me to scroll down?’ When they reached the end, Haluk straightened himself out, put his fingers through his thinning hair, and gazed out the window. ‘Where did you find this, Suna?’ He was speaking in English, but when Suna replied, and Chloe interrupted, they had slipped into Turkish. I only caught a phrase here and there, but this in itself was familiar, and oddly reassuring. What Turkish I’d learned, all those years ago, I’d learned from boyfriends and classmates: I’d sat there for hours, days, and months on end, struggling to fit together the words that made sense. But I could always read their emotions. Even if I did not know what they said, I knew how they
felt. As I watched my three former friends whispering in their huddle, throwing their heads back from time to time to revert to English – ‘Why would the State Department release such a thing?’ ‘How can we be sure this is a genuine article?’ ‘There is, of course, only one question we must ask, and that is,
Cui bono
?’ – I remembered, for the first time in thirty-five years, why I’d once liked them.

Cui bono.
In the old days, Suna could not go five minutes without asking ‘
Cui bono?
’ I must have shifted in my chair because now Chloe looked up. When she saw me, her eyes widened into a very familiar stare. ‘Crumbs!’

Suna subjected me to another of her fierce blue glares. Then she broke into the warm smile I’d arranged to forget. ‘It’s you!’ she cried. ‘It really is you!’ She ran across the room to embrace me. ‘How long have you been here, cowering like a mouse! Why so quiet? You should have said something! No, it is our fault. We should not have been so rude. Sit, sit down, tell me your news. Tell me what I can offer you. Some tea? Something to eat?’ She sat me down on the red sofa and sat herself down on the blue one, clearing the glass table between us for the tea that soon arrived. Pausing from time to time to urge me to eat more of the sweet and salty biscuits that had arrived on the same tray, she asked me about my life and work, and I asked her about hers. But whenever the conversation lagged, and she reached across the table to give my arm an affectionate squeeze, the new Suna faded to make way for the old one, calling to me across the cafeteria. ‘
Sit down. Have some of my cake. Do you like it? How wonderful. How very glad I am. But now, my darling, I have a question. I was wondering if you could explain to me why the running dogs of capitalism are continuing their illegal invasion of North Vietnam…’

‘
Elma yanak,
’ Suna said suddenly. ‘Apple cheeks. That’s what we called you, wasn’t it?’

‘You know what
we
called
you
, don’t you?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Suna the Terrible.’

Suna laughed, as if reminded of happier days. ‘And I
was
terrible. Wasn’t I? But now you’ve forgiven me. That’s good. So I forgive you, too. No matter what your crime.’ Lighting a cigarette, her lips still
curved, she turned to me and asked, ‘Do you happen to remember what your crime
was
, by the way?’

‘Cultural imperialism,’ I said.

‘Such a broad term. Can’t you be more specific?’

‘If I’m not mistaken, I was polluting the country by my very presence.’

‘Hah!’ she said, throwing back her head in laughter. ‘And
my
crime?’

‘I never really worked that out,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you could tell me.’

I was surprised by my own words, but more surprised to see how little they affected her. Still smiling, she rattled off something in Turkish that made Chloe roll her eyes and Haluk laugh heartily. But when Suna turned back to me, her face was serious again. ‘You’re going to help us. Am I right?’

‘I can’t make any promises,’ I said. ‘But of course I’ll try.’

‘We’re very worried.’ She looked up anxiously at the others and they confirmed her words with dark nods. ‘It’s far worse than Jeannie knows.’

‘There are some new and virulent rumours circulating,’ Chloe explained. ‘We think we know where they’re coming from, but we can’t be sure.’

‘But if you ask the most obvious question,’ said Suna, ‘in other words, “
Cui bono?
”, it is clear that the rumourmongers’ aim is to discredit Sinan, do whatever necessary to make him look like the terrorist they so fear. But now there’s a new twist. Our enemies are seeking to weaken Sinan’s links with those who love him – make his own wife doubt him! Let me show you.’ Walking over to the newspapers and picking up the one on the top, she pointed to the loud red advertisement running along the left hand side of the page – a sleek and smiling middle aged man, speaking on a cell phone, smiling in profile at a young girl on another mobile phone who was gazing up at him in abject admiration, and beneath this tableau, a single word: ‘ŞENLİK.’ ‘Does this man’s face ring any bells?’

Here Haluk put a hand on Suna’s shoulder. He said something in Turkish that sounded like a warning. ‘You’re right,’ Suna said. Turning back to me, she said, ‘We’ll speak about this later. Tomorrow, perhaps?
In the meantime, tell me. You need to begin your research, and we need to help you.’

‘Jeannie had some papers she thought I should see.’

‘Did she mention anything in particular?’

‘It was something of an open invitation,’ I said. ‘I think she wants to make it clear that she has nothing to hide.’

‘Ah! Yes! We forget at our peril that we ourselves are under suspicion.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said.

‘Oh really? Then what did you mean? Let me think. Ah. Now I see it. To prove to the world that we’re not terrorists, you must first pretend you wish to prove it to yourself…’

‘Crudely speaking, yes.’

‘And to prove it to yourself, you must go way, way, back – if not to our prehistory, like this rumourmonger who has come back to re-infest our lives, then to those other rumours. I take it you know which ones.’

She turned to the window, puffing ominously on her cigarette, and as I watched her, I felt the sour pit of fear in my stomach. I had forgotten what it was like with her – how a friendly exchange could slide into a war of words from which there was no escape.

‘I’m not sure I know what rumours you’re talking about,’ I said carefully.

‘You don’t? Oh, please. My friend! Are you as wide-eyed as all that? But never mind. I have lived with this for a long time. And am used to seeing it in people’s eyes, as I can see it in yours… So please. Dear friend. Come with me. As it happens, we do not have to go too far.’ Taking my hand, she led me to the window and pointed down at the glittering houses and apartments spilling down the hill beneath us. ‘Do you see that window, the third floor up, in the building just down there? It has red curtains, and behind them a chandelier is burning. Do you know what happened in that very room – how long has it been – thirty-three years ago last June? No, of course you don’t. But of course – you’ve heard so many things. Such horrors! Guns and kidnappings and kangaroo trials and informers and cold-blooded murders and bleeding trunks – but tell me, did anyone ever…’

‘Suna!
Allah aşkına.
’

This was Lüset, who had come upstairs to join us at the window. Had she done nothing in her life, other than rush into rooms to plead with her reckless friend? She took my hand. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. After a pause, she said, ‘It is a very difficult time, so I hope you can be patient with us.’

‘I never…’

She raised a hand to silence me. ‘The past is the past. But that’s why we need you. We need someone who understands our situation, but who also has a voice abroad. I’m afraid that our own journalists, who do not have the high standards of other countries, have only made matters worse. They do nothing but circulate old and discredited rumours. They still can’t mention us without also mentioning this murder that never happened.’

I turned around, and looked at each of them in turn.

I must have gasped. ‘The Trunk Murder never happened?’

‘You didn’t know?’ Chloe said.

‘Do you mean to say that…’

‘No – wait a minute,’ said Chloe. ‘I need to get this straight. Are you saying no one ever told you? That all this time, you’ve thought…?’

I turned to Suna. ‘So what actually happened?’

‘Nothing happened.’ This was William Wakefield, who was standing at the top of the stairs. ‘Nothing at all!’ But there was something about the way he stood there, grinning at me with his arms akimbo, that told me he was lying.

I did keep my promise and dropped by Suna’s office at the university the next day. But she was on the phone and late for a faculty meeting so I found myself sitting there across the desk, trying to compose myself, and the questions swirling about my mind. Of all the things I needed her to explain to me, the first was this: even assuming that this murder had never happened, how could it be that a person of her political complexion could be on such friendly, such intimate, terms with a man she knew to have been a spy? As I watched her bent over her phone, her arms going back and forth – was she doodling? Underlining? Taking notes? – it suddenly hit me. She was erasing the past.