He twisted his lips and then murmured, “It was a ship. From Romania…”
“Why did you keep saying, ‘Forgive me, Nadia’? What happened?”
“Did I…say so?”
His face turned from pale to white, he closed his eyes, and spoke with a very low voice.
“No, no, no,” he whispered frantically.
So I didn’t insist. There is no need to force an old and devastated man.
They pulled up in front of my door as if they’d been there many times before. I said goodbye to the professor but his eyes were closed and I don’t think he heard me. The driver got out and opened my door for me. I thanked them both for their trouble, and they very graciously told me it had been their pleasure to be able to help.
I opened the apartment door somewhat apprehensively, not knowing what to expect. Neither my brother nor the security agents were there, but Kerem, sitting on the couch with a huge bag of potato chips on his lap, greeted me cheerfully. He was in such a good mood that he didn’t push me away when I hugged him.
“Where’s your uncle?”
“He left. He said for you to call him tomorrow.”
“And what about the other men?”
“Uncle Necdet spoke to them for a while. I couldn’t hear what they said. Then they left. Uncle Necdet told me that there was nothing to be afraid of and that you’d be home soon and then he left. Mother, what’s going on? Who are these men?”
“Can we talk about it tomorrow, Kerem?” I said. “I’m exhausted. And pass me the potato chips.”
I was famished, I hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours, and I began devouring the potato chips. I was always telling Kerem not to eat these disgusting things, but at that moment they seemed delicious. Kerem laughed and told me to leave some for him, but I just shook my head and kept stuffing my mouth.
Then I took a long hot shower, put lip balm on my lips and night cream on my face, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and went straight to bed. Just before drifting off I thought about the professor and hoped he would be all right. Then I fell into a deep, sound sleep.
CHAPTER 7
I woke at seven from a dreamless sleep, feeling better than I had for some time. Indeed, to my surprise, I realized that I felt quite happy. I was also very, very hungry.
I didn’t get up right away, but lay there for a while thinking, trying to piece things together and wondering why I felt the way I did. I had no reason to be happy. In fact I had quite a few reasons to feel worried. I knew that Süleyman was going to start spreading gossip about me as soon as he got to work. He was going to tell everyone about finding me and Professor Wagner naked in bed together. I knew that he would exaggerate and add invented details, that he would tell the story in a way that would put me in the worst possible light. And I could just imagine how delighted those fat, miserable, sour-faced witches in the administration building would be to cackle to each other over this juicy item. On top of this, Wagner might be seriously ill, and I had those creepy security agents trying to intimidate me. Yet somehow, at that moment, none of it bothered me. I also thought about Kerem, and how cheerful he’d been. I hadn’t seen him smile like that for a long, long time. What was happening to us?
I went to the kitchen, put on water for tea and took the sucuk out of the fridge. Sucuk is the classic spicy sausage that the migrating Turks brought from Central Asia and that was adopted throughout the Middle East and the Balkans. Originally made from horsemeat, it is now usually made from beef, though Christians in the Caucasus and the Balkans also use pork. Every region in Turkey has its own variation on the sucuk, and my favorite is the Kayseri version, which contains much more garlic than others, and allspice instead of the more common cumin. I sliced the sucuk, placing the slices in the frying pan over a low heat. There was no need to add any oil or butter, because the sucuk’s own fat would soon come oozing out.
Then I started making the tea in exactly the way my grandmother had taught me. As soon as the water had come to a boil I turned off the flame and waited. There is a nonsensical nursery rhyme I had to recite to myself; I think the time it takes to recite this is exactly the length of time the water has to cool. Then I would hold the kettle about a foot and a half above the teapot and pour the water into the teapot in a slow trickle. When I asked her why she did this she said it had to do with oxygenating the water, and for a long time I accepted this. I later learned that it had to do with bringing the water to exactly the right temperature to bring out the full aroma and flavor of the tea. Adding the water slowly, in a trickle, also allowed the tea to release its aromas more fully. I did all of this not simply because it made for better tea, but because the ritual made me feel connected to my grandmother, made me feel as if in a way she was still with me, and this always calmed me and gave me strength.
Then I broke the eggs over the sucuk. Not just any eggs, not supermarket eggs, but what they call village eggs. Of course I knew these eggs didn’t come from any village. I knew exactly where they came from. I bought them from an old Bulgarian woman who sold them on the street corner. She raised chickens in the garden of her little house above Bebek, and whatever she fed them, or whatever else she did to make her chickens happy, they were the best eggs I’d ever been able to find in Istanbul. The yolks had such a deep, rich, golden color.
I filled two glasses with tea and put them on the table, and by now the kitchen was filled with the irresistible smell of frying eggs and sucuk. Then I took the frying pan and brought it into Kerem’s bedroom.
I stood for a moment watching him sleep. He looked so innocent, so vulnerable, and I felt a wave of tenderness wash through me. Then he sniffed the air, opened his eyes, and sat up.
“What’s going on?”
“I cooked breakfast. Go wash your face and hands and come to the table before it gets cold.”
He smiled and jumped right out of bed, and right then I realized why I felt happy. Kerem and I had become close again. His moodiness, his depression, his distance and unavailability had all been a tremendous weight on me, perhaps even more than I’d realized. It had darkened every aspect of my life. I supposed that Professor Wagner had unwittingly brought us back together, and I was grateful to him for this and hoped that he was recovering.
At the table, Kerem cheerfully told me about his adventure the previous evening as he dug into his breakfast.
“They were completely thrown off because I wasn’t scared of them at all. I just said, ‘Oh, you must be the men my mother told me about, come on in.’ They just looked at each other and then came in. The guy with the mustache asked if they could take a look around, and I asked if he had a search warrant. He asked how I knew about search warrants, and I just said what, you think I’m the only kid in the world who doesn’t watch television? That got a laugh out of them. Then I said they could look around as much as they wanted, we didn’t have anything to hide.”
He paused to finish his sausage and eggs.
“Later they asked if the computer was yours or mine. I said it was mine and that at the moment I was using it to do some important research on the internet. He thought that was funny and was all, like, research, huh? What are you researching, kid? I said I was looking into the German professors who came here during World War II, and particularly into Maximilian Wagner. This surprised him and he asked me how I knew about this stuff, and I just said you’d asked me to look into it. That was when your call came, and Uncle Necdet got here within a few minutes. They knew who he was right away and they were very intimidated by him. I really had a lot of fun with the whole thing.”
As I looked at him, at his face and his eyes, it struck me how very much he looked like my grandmother.
“So, what did you find on the internet?”
“I don’t know that much about the period so a lot of it doesn’t make sense to me, but I printed a bunch of stuff and put it in a folder. You can look it over when you have time.�
��
“Thanks. Meanwhile there’s something else I’d like you to look up. A ship called Sutuuma or something like.”
“I’ll need more to go on than that.”
“That’s all I have. Except that the ship came from Romania.”
“A ship from Romania. Sumuta?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was Sutuuma.”
He repeated the word to himself several times.
After I’d sent him off to school and cleaned the kitchen, I called Filiz to ask how Wagner was doing. The news wasn’t good. She said he was in pretty bad shape, but they’d have to do some more tests before they could say anything definite.
I opened the window to air out the house a bit. It was still cold, but not nearly as cold as it had been the day before, and I wished the professor had picked today to go to Şile.
Then I put on my dark blue suit and a white silk blouse, put on my makeup, and got ready to face the world.
My first stop was the military base in Maslak. I told the guards at the gate that I was there to see Colonel Necdet Duran.
“Is he expecting you?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m his sister.” They were respectful but still called to confirm, and then told me that someone would come to escort me to my brother’s office. While I waited, I looked around at the carefully manicured lawns, spotless paths, and freshly painted buildings. A squad of soldiers marched past in step, and here and there officers walked briskly, their shoulders squared, their backs perfectly straight, their uniforms flawlessly starched and ironed, and their shoes highly polished. Everyone saluted everyone else they passed, but I didn’t see one person smile.
The military in any country is a world of its own, but here it was particularly so. The officers lived a privileged life in their own gated compounds. They had their own supermarkets, where everything was much cheaper because it was subsidized and tax free; their own restaurants, nightclubs, and even hairdressers and barbers, all staffed by conscripts who were subject to the strictest discipline, and again, of course, all offered at very low prices. They also had their own summer resorts in the best locations all along the coast. These establishments were open only to officers and their families, and they tended to socialize only among themselves. Even the socializing was done according to military rules. There was a rotation of who was to entertain whom, officers wives were expected to take turns at inviting other wives to tea, and the order of service was determined by the husband’s rank. A colonel’s wife was always served her tea before a lieutenant’s wife.
The officers were able to continue their education while they served, then retire in their early forties and start a new career in a firm that was run or owned by former officers. They were able to continue to use all the military facilities, and because all their friends and colleagues were former officers, they never really moved into the real world, but continued to live in an isolated world of privilege where they could continue to feel superior to everyone else.
In the early years of the Republic, one of the most important functions of the military was to indoctrinate conscripts with the ideology of the new regime. They could bring in young men from every corner of the country and teach them what it meant to be a modern, Republican Turk. They were taught how to behave and what to think and believe. For some young men, this even involved learning Turkish for the first time. Over time this led senior officers to come to think of themselves as the ultimate fount of Republican idealism. They felt they knew better than everyone else, and therefore they felt superior to everyone else. They also came to see themselves as the ultimate guardians of the Republic, with a duty to eliminate any threats to the regime. They regularly purged the officer corps of anyone whose political or religious leanings were suspect. And they also regularly staged coups whenever they felt the nation’s politics was heading in the wrong direction.
Before long, a young officer appeared and very politely asked me to come with him. He led me to a building not far away, up to the second floor, and knocked twice on an office door. I heard my brother call “Come in,” and the officer showed me in and closed the door behind me. My brother got up from behind his large mahogany desk and came over to me. He kissed me on the cheek and sat me down in one of the two chairs facing each other in front of his desk. He sat down opposite me. There were some fresh flowers in a small blue vase on the coffee table between us. I noticed that he had a silver-framed picture on his desk of himself with his wife and children. The office was unnaturally clean and well-ordered, as if here even inanimate objects were afraid to break military discipline.
My brother looked very dapper in his uniform.
As soon as I was seated a private entered and stood at attention.
“Bring the lady sweetened Turkish coffee. I won’t have anything.”
I was touched that after all these years he remembered how I drank my coffee.
“Thank you so much for helping me out yesterday, Necdet.”
“How Kerem has grown,” he said smiling faintly. “He’s really filling out. He behaved with a lot of poise yesterday too.”
“Who are those men, Necdet?”
“As you said, they’re security agents.”
“You mean from the National Intelligence Agency?”
“No!”
“Military intelligence?”
“No!”
“Well, where are they from then?”
“They’re part of some kind of special unit.”
“Well, what do they want from us?”
“They’re interested in that German professor, not you.”
“What do they want from him?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“He was in Istanbul fifty-nine years ago. Is it anything to do with that?”
“In a sense.”
“Is it about some kind of crime?”
“You could say that.”
“What kind of crime?”
“I can’t say.”
At that moment the private knocked on the door and brought in a tray with my coffee and a glass of water. The coffee, in an elegant white porcelain cup, had exactly the right amount of foam on top, and smelled delicious. There must, I thought, be a very strict military method of making coffee. Exactly so much coffee, exactly so much water heated to a specific temperature. No one was ever allowed to vary the method even in the slightest degree, but I had to admit that the coffee was perfect.
“Come on, Necdet, I have a right to know about something that’s causing me so much trouble.”
“It would be better if you forgot all about it and didn’t see Professor Wagner again.”
“All right, I promise I won’t see him again if you just tell me what it’s all about. Or is he a spy?”
“No!”
“Did he steal something?”
“No.”
“Murder?”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “I suppose you could call it that.”
“Necdet, is the professor a murderer?”
“No!”
“Well, what’s the problem then?”
“Maya!”
He stood up, exasperated, paced around a bit, then went and stood behind his desk and put his hands on it.
“Maya, stop pressuring me! I can’t tell you anything. I can only say that it’s better for you and your son if you just walk away from this right now.”
“OK, but one last question. Don’t raise your eyebrows like that. If the professor isn’t a murderer, then why are they interested in him?”
My brother thought for a while. He seemed to be considering how best to put what he was going to say. Finally he spoke in a hushed voice: “The worry is that the professor might stir up the past and bring a crime to light.”
This confused me even more. If the professor was not guilty and, quite to the
contrary, he was trying to bring an unsolved murder to light, then what could be wrong with that?
My brother came over to see me out. He held me by the shoulders—he was a head taller than I—and looked me in the eye.
“Now look Maya,” he said. “There’s one thing I want to make clear. I rushed to your help when you phoned in desperation yesterday evening. But please don’t do it again. The boy has a father, talk to him. You’re a grown woman, take care of your own son. We live in different worlds. Don’t get me involved in this business.”
“Aren’t you my brother?”
“Yes, I’m your brother, but we live very different lives and have very different views of the world. Please, let’s just stay away from each other.”
The way he said this, almost hissing through his tight lips, and the cold look in his eyes hurt me even more than his words. This was not the Necdet I’d grown up with. It was as if his body had been taken over by some alien being.
It was clear that he was scared. I could feel the fear behind his anger and the way he looked at me. But this didn’t give him the right to hurt me, and I gave in to the urge to hurt him back.
“Necdet,” I said. “I have to tell you something. Those men know about our grandmother.”
His jaw dropped.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. They threatened me with it.”
He swore under his breath and looked away for a moment, then turned back to me.
“OK then, goodbye Maya.”
“Necdet, don’t worry. They’ve probably known about it for years but it hasn’t kept you from being promoted. That means no one has any doubt about your patriotism.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure of it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in now. They must know you’re enough of a nationalist to say that your own grandmother has tainted blood.”
“You still haven’t forgotten that?”
“I haven’t forgotten at all, Necdet,” I said. “And I’m curious. Do you still think that way?”
Serenade for Nadia Page 8
