Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  She would then outline her plans for the year. No romance. No attachment. Just serious scholarship. Learning about a new world would be joy enough. There was no need to muddy the water with love, or longing, or the cold comforts of friendship.

  Until the next morning, when, halfway through breakfast, the phone rang.

  12

  June 22nd 1970

  ‘I wonder what it will be like when I leave this place and no longer wake up to ships. There’s an endless procession passing beneath us, in darkness and in light. They’re all shapes and sizes – from tankers, oceanliners and warships glistening with radar, to rowboats and ferries and wooden fishing boats that bounce along the water’s surface like crescent moons. The little ones are as brightly painted as children’s paintings, the ferries were built in Glasgow eighty years ago and look like artworks from a more innocent age. The Turkish Maritime Liners are white with orange anchors on their funnels, the cargo ships tend to be grey or black or rusting red, but there are no rules here and that’s what’s so exhilarating. You never know what’s coming at you around the corner.

  The ships look so stately from up here but Sinan says that the Russian pilots are often drunk and sometimes run aground. He’s pointed out a few places – gruesome empty lots where once stood beautiful Ottoman waterside villas. No one can do anything about it, apparently. This is an international waterway and ships come and go as they please.

  Some are high in the sea and others so low you can imagine them sinking under a single wave. They all have flags and I’ve taken to using Dad’s binoculars to find out where they’re registered. Most are Turkish, but it’s the ominous Soviet vessels that linger in the mind. I have yet to master the Cyrillic alphabet so I can’t decipher all their names, though obviously I have no trouble figuring out which are from the Bulgarian port of BAPNA.

  Yesterday, when Chloe and I were walking into Bebek, we saw nine people jumping off a ship from BAPNA. Defectors, we assume. Chloe says I should think of the Bosphorus as Berlin-on-the-Sea. She also claims that she saw the missiles on their way to Cuba in 1962, and then on their way back again after the crisis was over. Dad says the Bosphorus is a lot more important than Berlin. It’s our outermost outpost – not just where the free world ends, but where the free world has the best view of the other side. Where else can you watch the Soviet might pass before your eyes as you eat your breakfast?’

  June 25th 1970

  ‘The hardest part of living in a foreign country must be getting used to what they eat for breakfast.

  What they eat here is toast (not so strange in itself, I know, but the bread is a different consistency, springy with hard, thick crusts, and never comes sliced). They eat the toast with butter, jam, cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, a thick slice of white cheese, and milkless sugary tea they serve in tiny curved glasses rimmed with gold.

  They drink tea in these glasses all day long. If you go to the Covered Bazaar to buy a carpet, a boy rushes out and brings the teas back on a swinging copper tray, and no one can take a car ferry across the Bosphorus without their glass of tea, although there is often more sugar in it than water. I never put in more than one or two cubes, but Sinan likes six. Six!

  Dad says most of his colleagues eat the same breakfast (“the same crap”) as they did when they were in the States. He says it took him a while to “go native” but now he can’t imagine life without his Turkish breakfast. The maid comes in at seven most days so she’s the one who usually makes it, and I’m sure that’s part of the charm.’

  June 29th 1970

  ‘That’s something else that’s taking some getting used to – every house seems to have a maid. Some are Armenian and Chloe’s is Greek but most are recent arrivals from Anatolia. Ours is called Meliha, or Meliha Hanım to be polite. Her hometown (which she calls her “memleket”, which means “country”) is near Riza on the Black Sea, but actually she lives in the shantytown just above Robert College. (Her house is a gecekondu, which means “built overnight”. Her husband is a janitor at the college.)

  Meliha’s food is excellent – soups, lamb stews, pilaf, stuffed tomatoes, peppers and zucchini, salads in which everything is chopped up very fine, with mountains of mint – and I think it’s a shame when we eat out instead and it goes to waste. She doesn’t drink alcohol, and sometimes I worry about what she makes of all those bourbon bottles. She washes our clothes by hand. She polishes the floor every day, on her hands and knees, and the copperware once a week. She’s highly tolerant of my pathetic attempts to fashion my twenty-three words of Turkish into a conversation.

  I asked Dad what we paid her and was not impressed.

  We also have a driver. A driver! His name is Korkmaz, which means fearless. He has worked for the Consulate for twenty years, and every time he takes me anywhere, he tells me how much he loves Americans. (He may well be the only one.)’

  June 29th 1970

  ‘That’s something else I’ve been trying to get to grips with – how much they hate us here. It used to be the other extreme. Apparently it changed overnight in 1964 when Greece and Turkey nearly went to war over Cyprus. But President Johnson pulled the plug. He said neither side could use NATO weapons. Both countries were left feeling humiliated – that’s Dad’s word for it. The word I hear from Sinan and Haluk is “occupied.”’

  June 30th 1970

  ‘I’ve been trying to define the way they talk. Not Sinan – he went to too many American schools during his travels. But the others have this singsong tone and they never use the word you’d expect. It’s not that they make mistakes – they have huge and terrifying vocabularies – it’s just that they never use a simple word where a weightier one will do – they really have read Chaucer in the original, too. And the complete works of Strindberg. They did calculus in their cradles, where they also picked up several other European languages. It’s nothing to be bilingual here. You can’t show your face unless you can boast four or five. They don’t just quote philosophers I’ve barely heard of – they quote them ironically.

  But they discuss their minds and hearts as if they were perfume sets. As in, “In one corner of my mind I sense a lingering anguish. But linked with this corner is another in which there remains a nuance of joy.” And in spite of all the other nuances I fail to catch – the insinuations, the playful airs that should have told me that A’s and B’s kind words were insincere and the true meanings lurking behind their facades of friendship – they are perfectly happy to admit to strong emotions at the drop of a hat. Sinan included. If he’s in a mood.

  As in, “How are you today, Sinan?”

  “I am in despair at the falseness of the world. My future looms before me like a guillotine. I am suffocating. Here…” and now he’ll take my hand and press it against his chest, “Even my heart longs to escape.”

  All this in his easy American accent, which makes it all sound even stranger.’

  July 2nd 1970

  ‘Another adjustment: the sidewalks. I have yet to find a single stretch that goes for more than eight yards without some gaping hole or an iron prong rising out of the concrete like some sort of demented tree. No one except me is ever phased by this. I’ve never seen anyone but me trip or fall. The same goes for the traffic. There is, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, only one set of traffic lights in the city and when Sinan and I passed them the other day, there was a policeman standing next to it, begging us to stop.

  Elsewhere it’s what Chloe calls the “foot first, nose first rule”. Cars will stop for you if your foot reaches a piece of the road before the nose of their car does. How pedestrians negotiate this rule is never quite clear. No one except for me ever bothers to look before they step into the road. Dad says they must be praying. It seems to work.

  The best way to travel around the city is in the shared taxis. (The Turkish word for these is “dolmuş”). These tend to be two-tone 58 Chevrolets. (The same goes for almost all the other cars you see – they must have shipped them in en masse and then stop
ped abruptly, because now it’s almost impossible to import a car, and even if you’re a foreigner they stamp it on your passport and you can’t leave the country without spending four days in offices drinking tea to get permission to put it in a pound). The shared taxis use the bus stops but you can flag them down anywhere along the route and get off anywhere, too. They’re cheap, and so infinitely preferable to the buses which are gruesome, packed like sardines.

  Sadly, many of the sardines are perverts. Chloe and I took a bus the other day and the man next to us put his hand in my crotch. I was very upset about it, and the thing that stays with me is his face; so detached and faraway, as if he didn’t know what his slimy hand was up to.’

  July 6th 1970

  ‘Unless you count the PX, there are no supermarkets in this city– not what I would call a supermarket, anyway – and no real department stores and nothing even remotely resembling a mall. You buy stockings and shoelaces at the stationery store. The butter comes from one little village near Istanbul that was colonised by Poles in the 19th century. You have to go to the Greek delicatessen near the British Consulate downtown to buy pork. Most people seem to buy their flowers from gypsies and get their milk from a man who comes around with a donkey three times a week. (Then you have to pasteurise it.) There’s an ECZANE (pharmacy) and a KUAFÖR (pharmacy) every ten feet or so and just about as many banks. But lots of products you just never see. There’s no pet food, for example. Chloe’s cat lives on the lungs their maid cooks up for her. They sell lungs whole at the butchers in Bebek.

  To buy a meal in Bebek you have to go from shop to shop but it’s a poetic experience if you don’t mind seeing food in its natural form, id est lamb carcasses dangling from hooks and fish displayed in pleasing patterns on marbles slabs with their gills pulled out so that you can see how fresh they are and their mouths gaping. My favourite shops are the fruit and vegetable sellers – in the place of an outside wall, there is a cascade of the brightest peaches, melons, lettuces, tomatoes and cucumbers I have ever seen.

  Everything you buy goes into a string bag, but according to Haluk its days are numbered. Already you are seeing a proliferation of plastic bags and there is a disturbing degree of littering. If they give up the string bag, things will go from bad to worse. But when I said as much to Haluk at the beach yesterday, he said, “If the Americans can have plastic, why can’t we?” He can’t appreciate anything unless it’s new.’

  July 6th 1970

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place where people spend so much time outside. You drive along and it’s an endless string of shops and coffeehouses and restaurants spilling out onto the sidewalk, and next to the door is a chair where a man is sitting fumbling with his worry beads. The store signs are askew and the neon lighting harsh and so many of the shops sell things you can’t imagine anyone wanting – grim brown suits and grimmer housecoats, plastic shoes and basins and aluminium spoons so thin you could bend them with your eyes, bright pink satin quilts and bolts of glittering fabric even a belly dancer couldn’t wear. There are stray cats everywhere, most of them mangy, and dogs that trot around in packs, and packs of boys with crewcuts kicking balls between the cars. The smell of roasting meat blends in with the exhaust fumes. The idling engines and car horns merge with the click-click of the backgammon pieces coming through the windows of the coffeehouse. The cries of the simit vendors blend in with the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer and the cheers from the empty lot where a boy has just scored a goal, while beyond the silhouettes of men fishing at its edge is a ferry whispering its way across the sea.

  I look at this scene and I think of Northampton with its serene and empty lawns.’

  July 7th 1970

  ‘No one ever wears shoes inside, by the way. Except for us barbarians. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve gone to visit one of Sinan’s bodyguards (and that is one thing he wasn’t exaggerating, he really does have a whole army of relatives and “friends of the family” watching his every move) and I’ve looked down at my feet to find they still have shoes on them. I don’t know why I keep forgetting. The first thing you see when you get inside any of these houses is a double or even triple row shoe park. And then great expanses of glistening marble and parquet floor. The vogue here is for chandeliers so there’s no hiding any lapse from the public glare.

  You have never seen such beady eyes as I’ve seen on these aunts of his – I feel as if they can see through to my underwear and have found it lacking.

  Sinan tells terrible stories about them. If they’re rich, it’s because they’ve swindled someone or entered into some ungodly pact with some crooked politician. If they’re not arms dealers themselves, then their brothers are. If they’re married, they’re having an affair with someone whose spouse conveniently fell off a balcony and died last Tuesday. If they’re bankers or developers or something in Ankara, they’ve just been implicated in a fraud. And yet they can spend entire afternoons sitting on terraces with their deceived and deceiving relatives, smiling fakely, drinking glass after glass of tea. It’s not enough to dismiss them – as Sinan does – as hypocrites.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where they do so much sitting.’

  July 8th 1970

  ‘I know I’ve never been anywhere where they play cards this much. It’s terrifying! I made the mistake of playing the other day with Sinan and some of his cousins. After I’d lost badly three times in a row, I found that I was the only one who’d not been keeping track of every card. Apparently everyone counts cards here. They start on their mother’s knees.

  I decided to sit it out after that. But I still couldn’t follow Sinan’s game. He tried to explain later, but I don’t think it could ever be reassuring to have a tortuous Byzantine subterfuge mapped out for you after it’s just passed you by completely.

  I can only wonder, not for the first time, what else I’ve been missing.’

  July 10th 1970

  ‘Summer really was cancelled yesterday, for reasons that are still unclear. Officially, i.e. according to God, i.e. Haluk’s father, they’re not allowed out at all until they’ve done this stupid resit. Of course that’s not stopping them. But there will be hell to pay if they get caught, so that means snatching an hour here and an hour there, and never going out at night, and that’s very sad, when you think the curfew’s only just been lifted. I’m not sure what caused the crackdown. It has to do with Haluk and Sinan sneaking out one morning when they were supposed to be studying, but they won’t say where or why. Just: “There was something we had to do.”

  Whatever that was, it seems to have something to do with Sinan’s mother’s apartment, which is where Sinan lives, apparently, when she’s not in Paris. To judge from the shrouds covering every piece of furniture, she’s been in Paris for some time.

  The four of us went there this afternoon, but only for about half an hour, most of which, I regret to report, Haluk and Chloe spent in the master bedroom. I sat on the balcony, while Sinan darted back and forth furtively. There’s something on his mind, but he won’t tell me. And when it comes down to it, all things considered – what right do I have to ask?’

  July 12th 1970

  ‘Another visit to the House of Shrouds. I’m beginning to feel like Chloe’s chaperone. If I am, I’m not a very good one! I really do wonder sometimes if she knows what she’s doing. But I also wonder why I end up on the balcony and why Sinan won’t let me see his room.’

  July 13th 1970

  ‘Today, after he’d left me alone on the balcony for some time, I tried to make a joke of it. What had he been doing in his bedroom, stashing guns? He didn’t laugh.’

  July 15th 1970

  ‘I woke up this morning feeling extraordinarily happy, as if someone had given me some enormous present I’d always longed for, but of course no one had. I thought then I must have dreamt it, but when I was sitting on the porch with my tea watching the ships pass, I looked at the date on the paper Dad was reading and then my mood dropped
like a stone. It’s a month to the day since I met my friend Sinan.

  My friend Sinan.

  I told myself not to be stupid. That it was better this way, because friends could trust each other, and know each other, in ways that were never possible in affairs of the heart. But later, when I was sitting on that balcony again in the House of Shrouds, I looked down at the street and saw this man pulling a basket out of a parked car, and it was only when he walked into the apartment with the same basket a few minutes later that I realised that man must have been Sinan.