Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” I said, nodding at the others, who stood watching, motionless, their eyes blank and dark. “You’re worried what they’ll think. I can tell.”

  “They know what to think,” he said. “And they know what to expect from you. You traipse in here, not a bruise on your little American body, and throw us this poison. Which when it comes down to it, is – what? Some cockamamie story about a conversation between two men I sincerely doubt you could even see, on a distant evening that you couldn’t pinpoint if you…”

  “It was the 19th of May,” I said. “It was the night after you planted that bomb under Haluk’s Mustang.”

  “Got that on film, too, did you?” He folded his arms and laughed. “I don’t know how you guys feel,” he said, turning to the others. “But I’ve had about as much of this as I’m willing to take.”

  So now Suna took over. “Get out. Get out before I push you out!” Once again, she was brandishing that gun. This time Dutch made no effort to stop her. I turned to Sinan. First I asked him if he could tell Suna to put the gun down. Then I asked him if he could tell Suna and the others what I’d done. How I’d put myself on the line. How I’d do so again, and forever, if only they’d believe me. But he wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t answer me. Just stood there, staring at the floor. Until I asked him if he could come outside with me. “No!” he shouted. “Never!” When I asked him why he’d let them poison him against me, he fixed his burning eyes on me and told me to leave. “You have no idea what you’ve done to us.” Those were his last words.

  I turned to Dutch. “Don’t think it stops here. Don’t think you can do this and get away with it. When I see my father…”

  “I wouldn’t bother, if I were you.”

  “Why not?” I yelled. “Because he’ll protect you? Because you’ve been working for him all along?”

  On my way back up the hill, I like to think I paused to reflect on what I’d done – what I’d unleashed, simply to assuage my jealousy and my raging heart. But I have no recollection of it. I remember only the rush. And the ache, the ache that is with me to this day.

  It was only when I heard another cool American voice calling to me that my first doubt struck me. It was No Name, waiting in the car, which had its engine running.

  He looked at his watch and smiled. “Said your goodbyes now? Ready to go home?”’

  IV

  How to Bury a Story

  24

  First let me apologise for my long silence, Mary Ann. In answer to your question – I think I just needed a break. A few days in my own shoes. Mary Ann – it took something out of me, writing all that down. I was in danger of forgetting where my life ended and hers began. You might even say I was in danger of becoming her. You can see it even in my words. As anyone who knows me from my journalism can tell you – and a few of your colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change do seem to fall into this category – I don’t usually write like this. (Though I do have a tendency to over identify with my subjects.)

  I discussed all this with Hector Cabot in November 2005. Let me place it for you – it was just after my visit to the garçonniere. I’d rashly asked Chloe what she remembered of the days leading up to the Trunk Murder. She’d answered sharply: ‘You want me to describe the days leading up to a rumour?’ I’d apologised. Relenting, she’d mentioned that her father had visited Jeannie in Northampton in June 1971, ‘id est not long after the murder-that-never-was.’ Perhaps to make up for her burst of irritation, she’d offered to drive me back to her house to see him.

  Chloe lives in a multi-million-dollar villa in Emirgân – the glass palace, she calls it. Needless to say, it overlooks the Bosphorus. She and her stepchildren (‘the ingrates’) live upstairs. Her parents (‘the young ones’) live below, and Chloe thinks it is very silly that they insist on paying rent. Though she feels she has to take it (‘you know what a stickler my mother is’) she secretly pays it into an account in their name. ‘They’ll need it soon enough,’ she told me as we headed down the stairs that connected the two flats, reminding me, not for the first time, that her parents had ‘forgotten’ to take out pensions.

  Forgetting is a fine art for Hector and Amy, and the bright, airy garden flat is their greatest work. To look at the pictures on the walls – children and grandchildren and stepgrandchildren, weddings and christenings and circumcisions, Amy and Hector in front of the Sphinx, the Parthenon, and the windy walls of Troy – you’d never know there’d been a twenty-five year blip in their marriage. They do not deny it – what unites them is their refusal to dwell on it. The past is a vast, disordered attic. They extract only what might look nice on a shelf.

  It was teatime when we arrived, and (as was so often the case with my own parents at this hour) the room was full of visitors. One (a former student) was a physicist, now working in Denmark. Another (also a former student) had just purchased a budget airline in the American Southwest. With him was an English travel writer, in Istanbul to research a book about the travel writers who had come before her. After she’d left, we were joined by a Greek politician and a Turkish playwright. They’d come to discuss a cultural exchange that Hector’s foundation was helping to sponsor. When they discovered my line of work, they of course had things to say about the sins of the media, and most especially, the way their own countries were reported in the US and European press. ‘It is as if they have set out to kill all hope of peace!’

  I tried to explain the problem from the other side: though there were some very good journalists out there, they weren’t always heard. Their readers had only the sketchiest knowledge of the Ottoman Empire and its troubled legacy. As a rule, they disregarded anything that did not confirm their prejudices. Then there were the gatekeepers – the editors, the advertisers and the long line of little people in between them – who decided what was news and what was not, who rarely thought something was important unless someone important had pronounced it to be so, and who between them had a thousand ways of burying a story.

  Hector did more listening than talking, though he interrupted with a jabbing finger from time to time to say, ‘But this must stop! Europe or no Europe, Turkey needs to be back on the world stage!’ Or: ‘You have got to make them come to grips with history. They have got to see that the dividing line isn’t Islam!’ It took me back to my teens, when this man was close to being my second father. There were only about a dozen faculty families on the hill in those days. We’d all been in and out of each other’s houses, and there were no separate tables. Whatever the adults happened to be arguing about – the Balfour Agreement, the road to Damascus, or the music teacher who had rolled under the sofa at a recent party, never to be seen again – they were as interested in our views as they were in their own.

  In those days, Hector was the life of every party. But late one drunken night, he went out into his garden to shoot a rabid dog and shot his own mother by mistake. There were no more parties after that. He gave up drink, found God in some form, and moved back to the US. I’d never quite forgiven him for his defection. But now, as he drew me back into a conversation we’d left off thirty-odd years earlier, I thought how lucky I’d been, to grow up surrounded by adults who’d taken us and our thoughts so seriously.

  As the physicist and the budget airline owner rose to leave, they asked Hector if he’d had any news ‘on the Sinan front’. It emerged they were old classmates. They listened sadly to Hector’s update, and there was news in it for me, too. Hector told us that William Wakefield had been on the point of returning to the US to rescue little Emre. ‘He was so happy the last time I saw him. He’d finally found the right string to pull. He thought the problem was solved!’ Now that he was ‘no longer with us,’ they were ‘Back to Square One’, as no judge was going to release the child to a party, ‘however responsible,’ who did not maintain a residence in the US. But Hector did. So he and Amy would be flying back to the US that weekend to see if the authorities might agree to move Sinan’s young son out of fo
stercare and into their custody. ‘But of Jeannie, poor soul, we’ve heard nothing.’ Then Hector turned to me. ‘Unless you have something new to tell me?’

  I shook my head. ‘Right now, I’m just trying to establish what happened. I’m hoping that might tell us where she went.’ I added that it was not just the recent past that concerned me, as every avenue of enquiry took me back to June 1971.

  Chloe’s mother didn’t seem to like that.

  ‘Please do try and understand,’ Hector said, after she had left, somewhat huffily, to see to supper. ‘She doesn’t like to discuss that summer you mentioned, and with good reason. She was recently divorced, poor woman. She was dating a man who, however inadvertently, pulled her daughter, our daughter, into the middle of a murky political intrigue. Amy herself spent several weeks under house arrest, did you know that? But she’s a woman of courage – don’t you forget that. Police guards notwithstanding, she still found the courage to give shelter to your old flame when he was on the run.’

  ‘She hid Sinan?’ I asked.

  ‘You didn’t know that? Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Could you possibly pretend I didn’t? Listen. I’m going to be frank with you. I have some serious qualms about this digging you’re doing. I know your intentions are excellent – you want to find Jeannie. You want to help us get little Emre back and secure his father’s release. But I’m afraid that the very things that qualify you for this task – your intimate knowledge of the history, the place and the people involved – are what will rob you of the very thing without which you cannot succeed. Namely detachment. My dear, you just don’t have it.’

  ‘I think I do,’ I said.

  ‘You might think so, but for God’s sake, M, this woman nabbed your boyfriend!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. I damned her to hell. Sinan too. But then they actually went there… Don’t you see? No one wants to have that much power.’

  ‘But my dear girl, you never had that much power.’ He reminded me that the Trunk Murder (‘the so-called Trunk Murder’) had nothing to do with me. Nodding in agreement, I explained that – nevertheless – Jeannie Wakefield and I shared a history. The fact that it was an invisible and unacknowledged history didn’t make it any less important. Because it wasn’t a one-off, I said. Just as she had stepped into my shoes in 1970, so too had I stepped into someone else’s shoes ten years earlier, ‘and to this day I have never known, never even asked, whose shoes they might have been.’ You could, I said, take this story back and back – back to the middle of the 19th century, if you were so minded. ‘Only when you line up all these shoes in a row do you begin to get a sense of who we are, and what we signify.’

  ‘By which you mean to say what exactly?’

  ‘By which I mean to say that Jeannie’s story is my story. Or mine to tell.’

  He gave this proposition intensive thought.

  ‘Or think of it this way,’ I said. ‘Unless I come to some understanding of Jeannie – what she did with the life I left, and what it did to her – I cannot begin to understand the life I chose.’

  Grimacing, his hands cupped around his chin and his eyes still closed, he asked ‘What do you think she would say, if she heard you say that?’

  ‘We’d disagree on certain points,’ I conceded. ‘But listen, Hector. I’m doing this because she asked me. She wrote me a fifty-three page letter, for God’s sake…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But why?’ He paused again to think. ‘After steeping yourself in Jeannie’s words, what puzzles you the most?’

  There were three things in particular. I began with the easiest: William Wakefield. What sort of man would treat his daughter the way he did that year? ‘He let her run wild and then he spied on her.’

  ‘I don’t find that puzzling at all,’ Hector said. ‘It was professional arrogance.’

  ‘You’d think he was God,’ I said.

  And Hector said, ‘A little God. Drink had a lot to do with it, you know.’

  I did. So I moved on to my second question. Sinan. ‘I hope you won’t discount this as sour grapes, but there’s so much he doesn’t tell Jeannie. And – barring the odd crisis – she seems to accept that. Crave it, even. Why?’

  ‘Marriage is a strange thing,’ Hector said. ‘Especially when it’s viewed from the outside.’

  ‘Especially,’ I added, ‘when your father is a spy.’

  ‘So they were both spies, were they?’ Seeing my confusion, he added, ‘I mean Sinan’s father, too.’ In fact, I hadn’t meant that at all. Though (as I now heard) there had always been rumours. ‘I suppose you know that Sinan’s father was an old army buddy of the formidable İsmet?’

  I told him I did. Hector shook his head again.

  ‘İsmet. Now there’s a tough customer. Did I ever tell you about the time he dropped by at the office and told me chapter and verse about every party I’d wrecked and then forgotten between 1955 and 1969?’

  Though it was a meandering tale with a several subplots, each featuring its own little god, he got to the end without forgetting that I had promised three questions and delivered only two. ‘So what is it?’ When I hesitated, he clenched his fists and said, ‘You’ve got to understand that I am asking you for your own good. If you don’t put your doubts into words, they eat you up, you know!’

  So I phrased it as tactfully as I could. As much as I trusted her sincerity, as certain as I was that Jeannie knew no more about the so-called Trunk Murder than she had recorded in her journals and letters, I was still left feeling that there was something very odd about her story.

  25

  Northampton

  June 10th 1971

  ‘My room. What have they done to it? My ceiling rises and falls. My posters buckle. The stuffed dog on my easy chair sways and sighs and my mother’s voice wafts over me like a wreath of smoke. Sometimes she is in the room, checking my temperature, changing my sheets, feeding me water, penicillin, aspirin. Sometimes she is on the phone in the study next door, and sooner or later, she will come in and tell me what I did wrong.’

  She’d been home for three days when she wrote that. She’d stepped off the plane with a fever of 104. But even as her ceiling rose and her posters buckled, she would have known her mother held nothing against her. It was her incorrigible ex-husband that Nancy Wakefield felt like strangling. How dare he put this girl on a plane in this condition? It was his duty as a father to explain the damage done. It was her duty as a mother to hold him to it.

  Especially during those first few days. She couldn’t help it! Anger was coming out of her head like smoke. But to no avail. The consulate wouldn’t say where he was. The State Department wouldn’t either. ‘I just got through to Amy,’ she told Jeannie one evening. This was when she was well enough to sit up and try some soup. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Amy and I just had a pretty long chat, and I must say I’m a little disappointed. Because you know, we had many pleasant conversations over the past year, and I had come to think of her as a friend. But this time…well, something’s definitely come over her.’

  Nancy Wakefield sat down on the foot of her daughter’s bed. ‘So anyway. It was about 9 pm their time when I finally got through, and a man answered. A man who couldn’t speak English. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?’

  She patted her daughter’s knee. ‘You still there, lambie?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Anyway, when I asked Amy about this man who answered her phone, she said he was her bodyguard. So of course I wanted to ask. Why would you need a bodyguard? But her tone was so sharp I just asked if she knew where we could find your father. She then told me she’d be the last person to know, as she had severed all connections with him. Severed all connections! Can you credit that? When I asked her why, she got pretty huffy! All she’d say was that – to the best of her knowledge – he’s back in the States. But I’m sorry. I’m just not going to accept that. You leave it to me, lambie. I’ll get to the bottom of this.’

  Off she wafted. To make another phone call?
Her voice was softer now. She did more listening than talking.

  ‘I’m finally getting somewhere,’ she said later that night.

  The next morning, when she sat down on the end of Jeannie’s bed, her eyes were red. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘So, so sorry. I should have stood my ground. I should never have let him take you.’ She clenched her little fists. ‘The lies he fed me. The things he didn’t tell me! Well, I sure know now. What a name for a tree. Boy am I going to give that father of yours an earful.’

  When Jeannie asked who she’d talked to, she said, ‘Never you mind.’

  When she asked if she’d talked to someone called Sinan, her mother said, ‘Sinan. That’s his name, is it?’

  ‘You talked to him?’

  ‘I believe that the…’ She folded her arms and swallowed hard. ‘I believe I spoke to the boy’s uncle.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Oh lambie, you don’t expect me to remember that, do you? They all have such strange names.’

  ‘What’s happened? Don’t tell me something bad’s happened!’

  ‘Of course something bad’s happened! Look at you!’

  ‘I didn’t mean me, I meant Sinan.’

  ‘Are you talking about that boyfriend of yours? Well, there’s a change! Jeannie, I can’t tell you how hurtful that was. To find out you had a boyfriend but didn’t trust me enough to tell me. I’ll bet it was that father of yours who talked you into that. I’m right, aren’t I? I can just hear him. Best not to tell you-know-who you have a boyfriend. Well, some boyfriend he turned out to be!’

  ‘He said he was okay, though?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeedy. He’s just fine.’

  ‘But someone else isn’t? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

  ‘How the heck am I supposed to know?’ Seeing the tears streaming down Jeannie’s cheeks, she said, ‘I’m sorry, lambie. I didn’t mean to upset you. But really, you can’t expect me to ask about people I don’t even know. Listen, let’s just take it slow, okay? Whatever happened out there, it’s over. The important thing is that you’re home. Let’s just concentrate on making you better.’