Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  I must have watched him for a whole minute without knowing who he was.

  WHAT I KNOW ABOUT HIM:

  • Early life in seven different embassies, but he says they were all the same.

  • Cared for mostly by servants, a different set in each one.

  • Four different primary schools, three English and one American.

  • When he was five he and his chauffeur were caught in crossfire between demonstrators and the police, and at seven he witnessed a coup d’état.

  • At eleven, he met Nasser and Tito.

  • His mother really was a singer, which really is unusual for a woman of her class and background, and next to impossible for the wife of a diplomat.

  • When he was twelve she ran off with a Brazilian crooner.

  • He then ran off with someone else, so after the divorce Sinan and his mother came back to Istanbul, where, after two unhappy years in a Turkish school where he could not bear the discipline, he moved to Robert Academy, where his father decided he should take the Turkish courses as well as the ones taught in English. This was a terrible mistake, because he still could not bear the discipline. He refused to accept it. And this led to open war.

  • They are making him take this resit to break his will.

  • It won’t break his will, but he’ll have to pretend, just to get them off his case.

  • He’s never been close to his father, but now, after this, he hates him.

  • His mother is away a lot, but she loves him in her way.

  • He’s going to study engineering, to please his mother and keep his father off his back, but has no intention of ever being an engineer.

  • He has other plans. That’s all he’ll say about it: other plans.

  WHAT I DON’T KNOW:

  • What he’s thinking.

  • How he feels about me.

  • How he feel about this girl who took his heart.

  • Who she is.

  • Why not even Chloe seems to know this.

  • Why this girl whoever she is, is so important, when she’s not even here.

  • What’s holding him back.

  • Why he always leaves before he has to.

  • Where I stand with him.

  • What I’ll do if the answer is nowhere.

  • Why he makes me so happy, just by entering the room.

  • Where he goes when he leaves.’

  July 21st 1970

  ‘Still stuck in the same place.’

  July 29th 1970

  ‘I did talk about it with Chloe today, and she was sympathetic, though somewhat blasé (her favourite word). I think it’s easier for her to live with all this because she’s used to it, having grown up here. I mean all this subterfuge, these rumours that you never know are true or not, and the way people will tell you these things about themselves that defy belief but then withhold everything else. When I asked her why they did this, she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “To keep you guessing?” When I asked why they would want to do that, she said, “Well, obviously. So you can’t control them.”

  She’s much better than I am at accepting the world as it is.’

  August 2nd 1970

  ‘I had a dream this morning, when I was floating in and out of sleep and it sums up how I’m feeling. I’m playing cards, and even though I have mysteriously learned how to count them, I’m still losing. Because the deck keeps changing – one time it is all hearts. The next time there are five queens of spades. Sometimes there are fifty-seven cards in all, and sometimes only fifty-one. So I know someone at the table is cheating. I know something is wrong. But I can’t say what until all the cards have been dealt and I’ve lost again.’

  August 3rd 1970

  ‘Today we took Kitten II over to Kanlıca and went to one of those yoghurt cafés, and Sinan and I took the ferry back. I tried to take advantage of our time alone together to say something, but the words just evaporated.’

  August 4th 1970

  ‘Today it was very hot and all I did was go over to Chloe’s house and make peanut butter cookies. The recipe was from a book called An American Cook in Turkey.’

  August 5th 1970

  ‘What would I have said, a few months back, if someone had told me I’d spend my summer making cookies from a book called An American Cook in Turkey?’

  August 6th 1970

  ‘Today I tried to walk into Bebek along the shore. But there were hundreds of boys sunning themselves on the pavement and they kept throwing themselves in my path and trying to look up my skirt. I tried to cross to the other side, a car slowed down and the driver hissed something ugly and guttural I couldn’t understand though of course I didn’t need to. I pretended he didn’t exist and kept walking towards Bebek and eventually he gave up, but I hated having to keep my head down.

  I hate it that I can’t go anywhere in this city without a boy.

  PLACES GIRLS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO GO BY THEMSELVES IN THIS CITY:

  • Beerhalls.

  • Restaurants.

  • Cafés.

  • Any street.

  • Any public place, except perhaps for the breakfast room at the Hilton, but after five in the evening, not even there.

  PLACES GIRLS CAN GO BY THEMSELVES WITHOUT RUNNING THE RISK OF BEING HARASSED:

  • Their room.’

  August 7th 1970

  ‘Well, I’ve seen his room now, and it was not what I expected.

  I don’t know what I was expecting.

  It happened very suddenly. I didn’t plan it. I just blurted it out – “I want to see your room” – and he just looked at me, and said, “Why?”

  I said, “Because it’s there.”

  “Why now?” he asked.

  I said, “Because I want to see what you have in there.”

  Then there was a long silence, punctuated by distraught sighs. After which, he said, “Okay. But I warn you. You’ll regret it.”

  The blinds were drawn. All you could see was this large and glowing emerald of terrarium, lots of ferns around a log. I went over to stare at it, I think because I couldn’t think what else to do. He came over next to me and we sat there staring at the ferns together. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. I agreed. “I was so sure you’d be scared,” he said, and I said, “Why would I be scared?” He said, “Because most people are.” I must have given him a look, because he added, “In Turkey, anyway.”

  “This really is a very strange country,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “You’re the one who’s strange.”

  Then he said, “But I’m glad you’re strange.” And kissed me.

  It was only later, much later, that I looked at the terrarium again and saw the cobra.

  I think, under normal circumstances, I would have been terrified.

  It’s not his. He’s looking after it for a teacher. It’s been very difficult, though. Especially getting the mice.

  But apparently he’s very indebted to this teacher, who taught him “how to see the world.” I don’t feel very warm towards this man at the moment, because apparently he’s warned Sinan off me.

  When I asked Sinan why, he said, “Because of who you are.”

  This teacher’s American, too, though. His name is Dutch.’

  August 15th 1970

  ‘Today we took the cobra out to Büyükada, where a woman named Zehra is going to look after it while Sinan is away. (He takes the resit on Tuesday morning and flies out to his father in Pakistan that afternoon.)

  On the way to the ferry, we bought the mice, from a man called Rauf. Rauf’s shop (he’s a tailor, of all things, specialising in men’s shirts) is between Tünel and Tepebaşı. On the ground floor is a louche bar where we went to drink tea afterwards. The woman in charge was about sixty, big and blonde and apparently quite something on the accordion – and falling over with warmth and kindness. She knew French, so that is how we conversed. Apparently she is Russian and came here in 1917 in “a Cossack’s pocket.” W
hen I asked what that meant, she said it was a very long story, but that she would be happy to tell me if I had the patience. Then a customer walked in and Sinan came down the stairs with Rauf so I had to leave without it.

  We walked down to the bridge because now we had two baskets, and although the lids were both firmly fastened; the mice were making too much noise to take into a taxi. We still caused quite a commotion. We had ten dogs and twenty urchins following us by the time we got to the quay.

  The ferry was packed, it being Saturday, but we had a whole bench to ourselves.

  Zehra (the snake-sitter) was another strange one – dark and thin and tragic. No smiles for us, but three for the cobra. She had seven dogs in her garden and twice that many cats and after midnight she goes all over the island putting out food for strays. Although she’s very poor, she lives in a beautiful if rundown old house that an old man bequeathed to her after an angel came to him in a dream. When Zehra took out one of the mice to stroke it, a tear rolled down her face.

  She had an aquarium but it wasn’t big enough, so we had to go to the other end of town to borrow one from a man with the most furrowed brow I have ever seen in my life. Apparently, he’s a former prison guard who took up painting while he was doing a term himself for killing an inmate who insulted his mother. His paintings are of children playing in gardens and are what you call primitive but Sinan bought one, which struck me as kind.

  The ferry back to the city stopped at Heybeli, Burgaz, and Kinalı, and as I watched all those people strolling back and forth along those small and glittering waterfronts, I could almost see their secret stories trailing like comets behind them.

  We didn’t go straight home because Zehra had given Sinan some medicine to give to her sister in Kumkapı. We had a hard time finding her apartment, even with eleven portly moustachioed men in undershirts helping us. She was too ill to come downstairs, so she lowered a basket from the window. It was after midnight by the time I got home. Dad was waiting up for me. (A little the worse for wear, I’m afraid.) He told me Mom had called. Apparently there was a piece in the New York Times about the cholera in Asia, and she was worried I might become Turkey’s first reported victim.

  “She’s jumping the gun,” he said. “But I hope you didn’t have any mussels today.” I did, though. Lots.

  Mom says she wants me to come home if it turns into a full-blown epidemic. She can say what she likes.

  Tonight, before I wrote this, I tried to write to her, to explain why I have to stay here. But I couldn’t find the words.

  I am not the same person who waved her goodbye nine weeks ago.

  I have walked with Sinan beyond the boundaries of my old life and what I’ve seen has changed me, inexorably and forever.

  I am sitting on the edge of the world, gazing into the unknown, and every light shimmering in the distance, every shadow behind it, hints at something greater, truer, deeper.

  I must venture on.’

  13

  Jeannie’s journal entries for the autumn months of 1970 are fragmentary and sporadic, and even now, as I leaf through the pages, I can see her spreading herself too thin. There are no confessional outbursts from here on in, no mad visions, no details about where she and Sinan met or what they did or did not do – no sense of how she felt about him – or herself, or her father. Instead there are sketches – a film crew she saw shooting a lover’s quarrel one afternoon at the foot of the Aşıyan, a woman she noticed at the fruit and vegetable shop, examining zucchini as if they were criminals. An article in the paper about a man who went blind when he was knifed in the head only to regain his sight the moment the doctor pulled the knife out. Her thoughts on the Nâzim Hikmet poem that Sinan read to her in Turkish and then tried to translate for her the day before he left to visit his father in Pakistan. (It was about a journey, about never regretting it, even if it led to death.) Folded between the same pages, two poems Sinan wrote on the plane out (‘The Tragedy of Innocence’ and ‘The Turbulence in My Heart Knows No Master’) along with a postcard of a mosque. On the pages that follow are Jeannie’s impressions of Alexandroupolis, Kavala, Thasos and the roads she and her father travelled during the small trip they took together to Northern Greece at the end of August:

  ‘Six months ago – had I been able to peer into the future and see us – Father and me – sitting in the front of that car, rounding a hairpin bend, gazing out at a lonely goat under the only tree on the browned and terraced hillside, I would have wondered only how it would feel to have a dream come true with such precision. I would never, I think, have identified with the goat.’

  There is a long description of the soldier with the submachine gun who searched their car at the border when they were re-entering Turkey. An even longer description of Nafi Baba’s tomb – its fine curved windows, lined with little burnt out candles and knotted ribbons, its desolate beauty, and Jeannie’s thoughts as she sits on the empty hillside next to it and looks down at the castle and the blue ribbon of the Bosphorus snaking around it. But no mention of Sinan, who must have brought her here the day he got back. And only a passing mention of the ‘talk’ she and her father had that same evening.

  He wanted her to ask Sinan to visit one of these days. Perhaps that same weekend? Perhaps for supper? He knew this was not the local custom, but Sinan was not entirely local, ‘so he won’t think this means I expect him to ask for your hand in marriage.’ When Jeannie prevaricated (‘I still think this is weird’) he said, ‘Look, if you’re seeing this much of him, I don’t want him skulking around in the shadows outside like he was tonight. He should come inside, say hello, be civil. Act like a grown-up. It’s not as if he’s a stranger, after all.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re driving at,’ Jeannie insisted.

  ‘Then let me put it this way. Have you ever asked him what it is, exactly, that stops him coming inside?’

  She never did, though. She just didn’t have the confidence. She thought she might lose him if she asked for the truth. I have no written proof for this. But I’m sure of it. This is the one part of the story when she really does step into my shoes.

  On the first Monday of September, 1970, Jeannie Wakefield became a special student at my old school. She was a special student for the same reason I had been: though most classes at the American College for Girls were taught in English, regular students were obliged by law to study certain subjects in Turkish. Anyone who didn’t was classified as special. There were only a handful of us. We were all foreign, and we left without diplomas. In my case, that was not a set-back, as I found a good college willing to accept me on the basis of my transcript. In Jeannie’s case, it didn’t matter either: she had that place waiting for her at Radcliffe.

  On my last day in Istanbul – in November 2005, almost a week after Jeannie’s disappearance, and two days after my incriminating article came out in the Observer – I went back to see the school again for myself. It was my first visit in thirty-five years. As I walked up the long, steep path to Gould Hall, and gazed up at its great and glaring pillars, I was still late for mathematics class. As I climbed the last steps, my schoolbooks still scraped against my ribs. I pulled open the door, and there was Marble Hall, as cool and white and mausoleum-like as ever. There, in the corner, was a glass door covered in ruffled gauze. There, behind it, was the little room we’d used for the school newspaper, and the Current Affairs Club. From time to time, Miss Broome’s reading group had met here, too. Even when we had no express purpose, Chloe and Suna and Lüset and I would come with our midmorning coffees, and just to stand at the threshold was to feel the sting of our arguments.

  I opened the door, and there was Suna, blue eyes blazing. I must have gasped – I wasn’t expecting this – but she was quick to reassure me. With a faintly mocking smile, she told me that she’d ‘come in friendship’, having tracked me down with the help of my parents. She’d been heading in this direction anyway, for lunch, at the alumni club. Had I not seen it, at the far end of the campus? Never m
ind, she said, as she let her smile soften. This was ‘our hour for memories.’ There, on the table, was a large scrapbook with mementos of our fevered years together.

  First, our newspaper. Or rather Suna’s newspaper, conveying Suna’s views, under a dazzling array of pennames. Salome, Mrs Rosenthal, Emma Goldman, Mata Hari. All shared the same stormy style. Especially when it came to student council meetings. You’d have thought we were in Moscow circa 1917. ‘More Heads Roll in Bloody Coup.’ ‘Yasemin Ağaoğlu Reveals Vanguardist Tendencies.’ ‘Masses Go Hungry as VP Mervey Akyol Fails to Oppose Cafeteria Price Hikes.’

  Wedged between these tracts were Lüset’s famously cryptic cartoons. One featured a man in a fez next to a man in a top hat. Both were looking at a cow with a woman’s head. The caption read, ‘Do we really want this?’

  Another featured a dead girl with her head in an oven. Next to her was a policeman. Behind him, the distraught parents were wringing their hands. The caption read, ‘But where is the weapon?’

  It was surprise, I think, that made me laugh. ‘I’d forgotten these.’ Suna gave me a cryptic smile and turned the page. ‘But this one you cannot have forgotten because it was after your time,’ she informed me. I looked at the date: October 1970. I was at Wellesley by then, and Jeannie had stepped into my shoes.