Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  The men were swarthy, angry, hungry, bewildered. ‘Let me handle this,’ said Chloe. She addressed the men in Turkish. But no one moved.

  They were so close Jeannie could smell them. One man stepped forward and lifted a lock of Jeannie’s hair. There was a murmuring, the same three-syllable word hissing from lip to lip. But just as the man closest to Jeannie pushed closer a second man stepped aside to let the girls pass. Chloe grabbed Jeannie’s hand and pulled her around the corner into the street. They hurled themselves downhill, down to the next corner, where they made the mistake of looking over their shoulders. There they all were. Swarthy, angry, hungry, bewildered, and waiting to be told what to do. The man with the club let out a cry and they all came hurtling down the street.

  ‘We were saved, in the end, by a man who ran a button shop. He’d gone outside to see what the noise was about. When I tripped on a cobblestone, he picked me up and pulled us inside.

  I remember peeking around his counter, watching our assailants rush past. And the worried crowd of well-wishers that gathered around us afterwards, the tea they brought us, the sting of the iodine our saviour poured over my knee. The murmured question, repeated with every new arrival. “Where are they from?” The answer, rippling through the crowded shop and into the street. “They’re American. American. American.”

  A swarthy man was staring through the window. Insolent, contemptuous, disgusted. What did he see in my face that made him hate me so? How could he hate me so, when he didn’t know a thing about me?

  The buttonseller insisted that his boy escort us to the ferry station. We must have been in shock, because when the ferry pulled away from the shore, we both burst out laughing.

  We did the same when we walked into Chloe’s kitchen. When her mother asked what was so funny, Chloe said, “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Are you sure? You look dishevelled.”

  “No, honestly, I’m feeling fine,” Chloe said. “I would even go so far as to say I feel…American?”

  Chloe’s mother was not amused. She stood in the doorway, her arms akimbo. “Being American is not a joke, you know. You should be proud of who you are.”

  That night I dreamt I was Sisyphus, rolling not one rock up a hill, but two.’

  But not for much longer. Walking into the little dining room off Marble Hall the following afternoon, Jeannie found Suna laying out papers for the Current Affairs Club. Normally this involved much barking of orders, but today she was so fired up she hardly noticed the others. For at last she had found ‘the perfect illustration of our problem.’

  Next to a cursory report on the bombing of the US Officer’s Club in Ankara the previous weekend (clipped from the International Herald Tribune, with the words ‘no casualties’ highlighted in yellow magic marker) she had placed a sheet of paper on which she had listed by nationality the number of dead in the Korean War. At the top of the list was Turkey. Above Exhibits A and B was another sheet of paper on which Suna had written: ‘CONNECT THE DOTS’.

  ‘Just the sight of those three words made my blood boil. So I asked her. What exactly was she trying to say? Her answer: “It’s my thought for the day.” My retort: it made no sense.’

  Oh yes, it did, Suna insisted. But only if her esteemed American friend was brave enough to ‘connect the dots’.

  ‘I could tell from her smug smile that she knew what those three words did to me. So I asked her: What did a war that happened almost twenty years ago have to do with a bombing that happened last week?’

  ‘To an American, perhaps nothing,’ said Suna airily. ‘But to a Turk, everything. You used us as cannon fodder in Korea, you know. But did you ever apologise?’

  To which Jeannie replied: ‘It wasn’t me who used Turks as cannon fodder in Korea.’

  To which Suna said nothing. Instead she began to hum. So Jeannie said it again. This time she shouted:

  ‘IT WASN’T ME!’

  I hate crying (she confessed in her letter). I hate people seeing me cry. I hate it when I have to ask them to pass me a tissue, because I forgot mine at home. I hate blowing my nose in front of them, and running out of tissues again, and seeing the pity in their eyes. I longed to run out of the room, out of the building. I didn’t want anyone to see how red my eyes were, most especially Miss Broome. Who was due any minute now. Who would be so concerned, so attentive, and so keen to discuss my distress. Suna seemed to understand all this. After she had brought me my tissues, and conferred in whispers with Chloe and Lüset, she said, “I think we should go for a walk. But don’t worry. No one will see us. We’ll leave by the back.”

  She didn’t even flinch when the alarm went off. “If you walk normally, no one will notice.” So we walked normally to the far end of the plateau. We sat down on the marble bench and watched the passing ships.

  “I am truly sorry about yesterday,” she said then. “I had no idea. I should have been more sensitive. But I am a very strange person, with very strange moods, and I am always saying things I shouldn’t say. I know.”

  I told her I liked it that she spoke her mind, but then I caved in again.

  “No more tears! It’s an order! The general commands you! Here, I brought more tissues. Please. For I have more to say.”

  She had a confession to make. So terrible she could hardly bring herself to say it. “I love having arguments with you. What sort of monster does that make me?”

  A human being?

  “Don’t laugh. I’m serious. I love arguing with you, because you’re my equal. I love arguing with you, because you listen. You never say, ‘Oh Suna,’ or ‘Suna, please!’ like the others. As if I were some sort of Marxist-Leninist circus clown. No, you listen, and then you ask a good question, a question that makes me wish I were an acrobat. Because we’re equals, most of the time we’re equals. Except today. Today you were upset.”

  It wasn’t her fault, I said. That, she said, was neither here nor there. “I should have noticed.” A little detail – a change in the way I waved my hand, a catch in my breath, just one of the ten thousand things Lüset noticed.

  “Instead I rolled on. Like a steamroller, to quote Lüset. What I said was not just stupid, but untrue. You did not send those Turkish soldiers to Korea, and you were not the one who used them as cannon fodder. But do you know what, my friend? Even if you had, I’d defend you to the death.”

  She took my hand. “So can we be friends again? Will you forgive me my huzursuzluklar, and the senseless storms that threaten our future? Oh please say yes, Jeannie. I long to argue with you forever.”’

  How clear the air was when Jeannie set off for home that evening. As she made her way down the steep and winding path to the Bosphorus, pausing from time to time to look up at the gnarled and curving branches of the Judas trees, stopping on the 138th step to catch the first glimpse of the sea, she made her plans. She chose her words, so carefully that she was on and off the bus and halfway up the Aşıyan before she had composed them to her satisfaction. For once it didn’t feel too steep. For once she did not trip on a single cobblestone or cower in the shadow of the castle or turbaned tombs that lined the cemetery wall.

  ‘I knew what I had to do, as surely as I knew the wind on my back.’

  How golden the meydan looked in the late afternoon sun. How dusty their green gate. How sharp and damp the evening air as she walked down the path. How dark the churning waters of the Bosphorus. How easy it was to pull up a chair next to her father’s great desk and ask the question. As the words hung in the air, he showed no surprise. She might as well have asked what they were having for supper. Tipping back his chair, he said, ‘So let me guess. Someone’s been giving you a hard time?’ But how easy it was for her to insist on a proper answer.

  This was his answer: ‘Basically, I’m a desk guy. Mostly, I just sit at that desk of mine and analyse information.’

  Which was just not good enough. So she kept pressing. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘The short answer is that there is no short answer. It varies. Sometimes we
pay for our information, or people owe us a favour. Or they want revenge. Mostly they’re lying. And mindbogglingly boring. That’s our greatest secret, the one no thriller can divulge…’

  ‘What I still don’t understand is what you do all day.’

  ‘The truth, Jeannie, is that I spend most of my day in meetings.’

  What sort of meetings?

  ‘Meetings with goons.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I write reports about these meetings for other goons who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, and care even less.’

  ‘Then what’s the point?’ she asked. ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’

  ‘Well, look at it like this…’ he began. She cut him off.

  ‘What’s the point of being here if they don’t like us, Dad?’

  ‘The army likes us. The army loves us!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what about the people?’

  ‘The people might not like us, but they’d like the Soviet alternative a hell of a lot less, believe you me.’ Tipping back his chair, he recited his tired mantra. ‘So that’s why we’re here, Jeannie. To defend freedom, justice and democracy, the principles that made our country great. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – remember? Not that you’ve looked very happy lately.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  ‘There isn’t one!’

  ‘I’m wondering if it isn’t that Bolshevik classmate of yours who pushed you into this.’ She shook her head, perhaps a little too vigorously. ‘Then is it Sinan?’ She shook her head again. ‘In that case, it must be his parents,’ her father said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Parents are very interfering here. Though not without cause.’

  ‘So tell me. What’s this cause?’

  He waved his hand, as if to swat a fly. ‘Oh who knows? They could be worried we might spirit Sinan off to the US of A. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea! This is just between you and me, by the way. Same goes for the other matter we were discussing. I don’t say this lightly. Do you hear?’

  ‘What – you want to turn me into a liar, just like you?’

  ‘I’m telling you to exercise caution. Listen, rumours in and of themselves can’t hurt you. They’re a dime a dozen, and there’s safety in numbers. But if you go around with a sign on your back…’

  ‘I don’t have to tell anyone. They know already.’

  ‘What I mean is, don’t let them know you know.’ He stood up, and as Jeannie did the same, he turned to beam at her.

  She didn’t know this look. What was it – concerned? Abashed? Solicitous? No, condescending. Patting her on the head, he said, ‘Poor old Jeannie. All the woes of the world on her back. Is all this getting too much for you? What I meant was…you were so full of life when you got here. So full of curiosity and joy. You’d look into a horizon and dream of what was beyond it. You’d watch people walking along the waterfront and see their stories trailing after them like comets. But now…’ He fixed her with his beadiest and most regretful gaze.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘You’re sure, now.’ It was a question.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping.’

  ‘Well, maybe this will help.’

  ‘That night it did. But the following morning, as I was walking up the long steep path to Gould Hall, lost in the disordered euphoria that can only come from having demanded the truth and received it (I was right, it wasn’t just my mind tricking me, I stood up to him! I spoke my mind! But it’s not as bad as I feared, it’s just a job and someone has to do it, if it’s only analysing information, what harm can there be in that?) the odd thing my father had said at the very end of our conversation floated back into my mind. And that was when it hit me. I had never talked to my father about horizons or waterfronts or stories trailing after people like comets. He knew all this because he’d read my journal.’

  III

  The Coup

  16

  Let me pause here, Mary Ann, to answer a question that one of your number raised in a recent email. As the mother of two grown children, I do understand where it comes from. It must be very hard for someone in Washington DC to take on board – especially if that person is sitting in the well-appointed, amply funded and closely guarded offices of the Center for Democratic Change. Here we have a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come close to death or serious injury at the hands of an anti-American rabble in the streets of Istanbul. Why did she not take the first plane home? To quote your colleague – there are two parents involved here. If William Wakefield refused to see the writing on the wall, why did Jeannie’s mother also fail to act, once it became clear that the city was fast becoming a no-go zone for US personnel?

  In fact, she did, though she was hampered at first by poor information. To illustrate my point, let me backtrack to the first incident your colleague mentions: the bombing of the NCO Club by leftwing students in Ankara in late November 1970. Sadly, it did not make the New York Times, so Jeannie’s mother never heard of it.

  As for the incident in late December – when another group of leftwing students threw firebombs at the Prime Minister’s car in downtown Istanbul – the New York Times did run a short item on his narrow escape. Solicitous mother that she was, Nancy Wakefield called Istanbul at once to register her concern. But her ex-husband insisted there was nothing to worry about. The bomb, he said, was ‘a flash in a pan.’

  In January, there was a lull – though the New York Times ran a long piece in the middle of the month that alluded to dangerous student extremists pushing the country towards civil war. However, the author was confident that the Prime Minister would keep the ship of state on course, and when William Wakefield spoke to his exwife, he quoted from this article.

  A week later, students barricaded themselves into the faculty buildings of a university in Ankara and fought back the police with gunfire, firebombs, dynamite and stones. Eight people were injured, and forty-five were arrested. There was no report in the New York Times, and therefore no phone call from Northampton.

  In February 1971 Turkey became ‘a story’. When Demirel, the Prime Minister, introduced legislation that would make it a prisonable offence to ‘interfere with commercial activity, occupy factories, make bombs, insult or resist officers of the law, interfere with public services or road transport and deface official posters’, the New York Times devoted the better part of a page to putting his move into context. Again, they described the threat as seen from the Prime Minister’s office: the universities were full of dangerous anarchists, subversives and extremists. The most dangerous were their leaders, who were not really students, he said, but ‘agents provocateurs’. Their demands, he said, had nothing to do with university reform but with ‘extreme Marxism and Maoism.’ And yes, this did give Jeannie’s mother pause.

  So imagine her horror when, four days later, she opened her morning paper to read that a band of extreme leftwing students connected to Revolutionary Youth, Turkey’s largest leftwing student association, had kidnapped a US sergeant in Ankara. Though they released him seventeen hours later, the Turkish authorities were now under pressure to take visible and decisive action to end the wave of terrorist attacks on US personnel, so they instigated a series of arms searches in the country’s largest universities. They met with heavy resistance. In one raid at Hacıttepe Medical University in Ankara, there were twenty people injured and two hundred arrests.

  Reporting on the wave of bomb blasts in other parts of the country, the New York Times spoke of an ‘expanded urban guerrilla movement’, increasing hatred of ‘US imperialism’, and the growing danger to which US citizens living in Turkey were now exposed. Reading this, Nancy Wakefield began her campaign in earnest, but she had made little headway when, in early March, a group calling itself the Turkish People’s Liberation Army, kidnapped four US airmen as they were driving out of an airbase near the capital. The
kidnappers sent a letter to a newspaper to announce that they were ‘purging the country of all American and foreign enemies’ and to promise that the hostages would be killed unless they received $400,000 dollars by the following night.

  The government responded by sending two thousand policemen and militiamen out to search the universities, where they reported finding a ‘huge amount’ of explosives, guns and ammunition. Students occupying one dormitory in Ankara tried to fend them off with gunfire and dynamite. Two died on the scene and twelve were injured. The next day, reconnaissance planes and jeeps provided by the US for opium control joined the search for the kidnapped airmen. A day later, the hostages returned to base unharmed: their kidnappers had panicked and fled. The search for the kidnappers continued unabated, but a government spokesman said that the job was made more difficult by the fact that the perpetrators of the crime were almost certainly ‘university or graduate students of middle-class background.’ They were probably, he said, hiding out ‘in some plush home.’

  The story was front-page news for the better part of a week, so there were daily calls from Northampton. Over and over, William Wakefield stalled her, and if you are wondering why he felt justified to do so, it was because only a handful of the 16,000 US personnel in Turkey had been touched by the violence, and no action whatsoever had been directed against their thousands of dependent children.