Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Of course not. You’re never attracted to anyone. But he is pretty cute.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it, Fran!’

  ‘Who am I to begrudge you an adventure? But Mike can’t be too happy about it, can he?’

  Mike had been Jeannie’s boyfriend throughout law school. He still was her boyfriend, though he was working in Washington. ‘It’s none of Mike’s business,’ she told Fran. ‘If he cares about me at all, he’ll know it’s something I have to do.’

  In fact, Mike was not at all happy to hear that Jeannie was going off to Turkey on an ill-defined mission with a journalist so famous even he knew his name. When she wouldn’t back down, he said fine, if that was the way she wanted to play it, then so be it. He slammed down the phone, and they didn’t speak again until the day she was due to leave. This was another short call. ‘I’ve called to say goodbye,’ she said. And Mike said, ‘Well, okay then. Goodbye.’

  The moment she put the phone down, it rang again. She said, ‘Listen, Mike,’ but it wasn’t Mike. It was her father. His first words were, ‘That’s the spirit, Jeannie! Give the bastard hell.’

  Her father was living in Columbia, Missouri now, running what purported to be an air cargo business. Whatever his real work was, it bored him to tears. But there was always the sloppy biography he had just finished, the joke of a course he’d just signed up for at the university, the former colleague who’d just disgraced himself in a way that ‘makes you think there might be a God after all.’

  The big news this time was his Vietnamese housekeeper. She was ‘putting the moves’ on him. ‘And I can’t say I blame her. The husband’s no good. He’s gambled all their savings away. And she has two kids heading for med school.’

  ‘Sounds like a lot to take on, Dad,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘But that’s not what I called you for.’

  He waited for her to say something. She knew enough to stay silent.

  Finally he gave in. ‘I hear you’re about to head off to old pastures.’

  That threw her ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Same way I know everything.’ He said this with pride.

  ‘I bet it was Mike,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. Mike and I speak almost daily.’

  She opted for silence again. If he was so curious, let him make the next move. But how much did he know already? When she could not bear to wait any longer, she said, ‘Listen, it’s my business where I go and who I go with.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, Jeannie. I just hope you know what you’re heading into.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. But listen, that’s not why I called.’

  ‘Then tell me. What can I do for you, Dad?’

  ‘You can do me a favour,’ he said. ‘You can drop by and see Amy.’

  ‘I’m not sure she’d like that. We didn’t part on very good terms.’

  ‘On the contrary. I’m sure she’d be insulted if I told her you’d been there and not paid her a visit’

  ‘Am I to understand that you’re in regular touch?’

  ‘Let’s put it this way. Whenever I pick up a paper and there’s news about Istanbul, I ask myself if she’s okay.’

  ‘So you want me to drop by and check her pulse or something.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. You could also ask her if she still has that box.’

  Her heart skipped a beat when she heard that, and he seemed to read her mind. ‘It’s not what you think. Actually, it’s mostly photographs.’ He paused for effect. ‘You might find them interesting. Nevertheless.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll have time,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know. No rest for the righteous. All I can say is that you might find it worth your while.’

  ‘Any messages, if I make it?’

  ‘Mention my new housekeeper,’ he said. ‘Tell me how she reacts.’

  32

  They flew out on a Friday night, on a plane that was half-empty. Jordan – or No Name, as she still insisted on calling him – had brought her things to read. Most were by or about the various underground groups they would be trying to contact. There was also an unpublished paper on the history of the Turkish left. ‘Try to commit as much as you can to memory,’ he said.

  He was working on an article, something about the Somozas. He phoned it into the copytakers at Charles de Gaulle, finishing only just in time to make their next flight. The aftermath was, he explained, like coming off a drug. ‘You use so much adrenaline to get there. You shut everything else out. When it’s done, there’s this amazing rush. But after that you sort of fall apart. At home, I go for a swim, or a run. But right now, guess what. I’m having a drink.’

  It was eleven in the morning, Paris time. As they drank their way over Germany and Austria, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, he talked about his work. What he liked, what wore him down, what the press was there for, what it really did, how he was tired of firefighting, why he thought he might be burning out, what he thought he might do next. What he didn’t know, he said, was how he was going to live without ‘the fix’. ‘When you see a story, how do you stop yourself?’

  She told him she had always imagined that the hard part would be giving up the chance to make a difference. His answer was, ‘Speak for yourself.’ She turned to the window, to hide her face.

  They were now in Turkish airspace, crossing over the arid plains of Thrace. Soon they were making their final descent into Istanbul and low enough for Jeannie to make out the villas lining the shore and the tankers bobbing between the whitecaps, like boats in a bath. They dipped lower still, as if to dive into the sea. But then, at the last moment, the runway reached out to save them.

  Inside the new terminal, the strip lights were harsh and the police at passport control as surly as ever. The soldiers guarding every corner still wielded submachine guns. The luggage hall was swarming with workers just back from Dusseldorf, each struggling to pack the world onto a teetering trolley. The air was stale with smoke, sweat and shoe leather. Crowds of relatives pressed in on them from either side as they struggled through the exit, and the crowds of taxi drivers and scouts. But within minutes they were driving past the old city walls on the Marmara shore. As they approached Sarayburnu, he asked her, ‘How long is it exactly since you last were here?’

  ‘Ten years next June.’

  ‘Ten years? Then you’re in for a shock.’

  They swung around the bend, and there it was, the famous view. To the left, the Galata Bridge with its swarming crowds. To the front, the swarm of ferries and fishing boats coming in and out of the Golden Horn. The hills of the European City, the Galata Tower and the church spires mingling with the domes and the minarets and the tenements spilling down the hill to the Bosphorus. On the other side of the Bosphorus, the hills of Asia. The Bosphorus was grey and choppy, dissolving into a mist. But then the sky broke through the clouds, and there it was, the great arcs of the new bridge joining Europe to Asia.

  ‘Remember all those posters?’ Jordan said. “No to the bridge”?’

  They were booked into the Sheraton, which was like every other Sheraton you’ve ever seen, except for the view. From her room Jeannie could see from Üsküdar to the Old City, from the Bosphorus Bridge to the tankers hovering at the edge of the Marmara, waiting to come in from the mist. She was so tired by now that it gave her vertigo just to look at them, so she stretched out on the bed and went straight to sleep. When she awoke, the room was dark. Someone was knocking. She stumbled to the door. Light flooded in. And there, inside his halo of light, Jordan. ‘Are you hungry? It’s almost nine o’clock.’

  Off they went into the dark Babel that was Cumhuriyet Caddesi.

  At Taksim, they made their way down the same muddy İstiklal, past streams of shivering men in brown suits and dimly lit shoe stores, and the cinemas with their garish posters of women in g-strings and pasties, at last turning right into the flower market, and right again into an arcade of beer halls. The Pasaj:
she remembered coming here with her father. They chose a table near the window, where Jordan knew the bartender, a man with eagle eyes and the hands of a giant. The only other female in the place was the big breasted blonde woman who wandered in and out of the arcade with an accordion.

  While they sat there with their Arjantins of beer, Jordan told her how this place had knocked him sideways the first time he had seen it. ‘It all started here,’ he said. ‘Suddenly I knew who I was, what I wanted to do with my life, and why.’ He told her about the people he had met that year while wandering these streets. He recited their names. How many were still alive? On their way back to the hotel, they stopped to see if the landmarks were as they remembered them: the Italian church, the Russian consulate, the Greek church, the French lycée, the Opera House that took ten years to build only to burn down weeks after opening.

  On their way through Taksim, a car jumped the kerb. Jordan pulled Jeannie out of the way just in time. Afterwards he tried to keep his arm around her, but she extricated herself. Later, when they were crossing Cumhuriyet Caddesi, he took her hand, to steer her away from a car that had veered out of its lane. But when they got to the other side, she took it back.

  ‘You’re not sleepy yet, are you?’ he asked in the lift. She wasn’t. But she said she was. She spent half the night awake, wondering what it was that made her push people away like that, even after all these years.

  ‘But as my mind went round in ever tighter circles, I somehow managed to block out the other, more urgent question. What had I let myself in for?

  When I went to the window the next morning to gaze down at the city as it now was, I could still feel the pull of the city that was no longer, and the life that never was.

  Jordan, by contrast, was all business.’

  But he was not getting very far. As he explained to Jeannie over breakfast. The old Enlightenment team might need help, and Jordan might be in a position to furnish it, but they were not taking his calls. ‘This is part of the game, of course,’ he told her edgily. ‘If you get a summons, the first thing you do is change your address. So we can’t expect anyone to be where they say they are. Meanwhile, let’s keep hunting.’

  There was something he wanted to check out on Büyükada. By midmorning, they were on the ferry. The sea was rough, and the town, when they got there, was deserted. The grey waves washing up against the old Ottoman ferry terminal seemed less real to Jeannie than the smooth blue sea in her mind’s eye. As they walked through the windswept town, past shuttered shops and houses, she thought back to the lost summer crowds, and the flurries of waiters, and the children on bicycles, the maids beating carpets, the creaking and clopping of horses and carriages, the warm stench of manure rising from the tree-lined streets.

  They climbed the hill, passing houses so wet and so grey that she could no longer imagine them any other way. They walked down into a mist and when they came up the other side, they had arrived at the Greek monastery. The church was locked, but from the courtyard they could see the Marmara nestled in a bed of clouds. The rain was not quite with them yet, so they carried on. The first drops hit them as they were passing the sodden, shuttered shack that became a teahouse during the summer. It was while they were taking shelter here that Jordan pointed out the scrub-covered hill where he and Dutch Harding had once met a real life hermit.

  He was German, Jordan told her. He was one of the original Wanderflugeln. He’d come up to Jordan and Dutch while they were trying to light a campfire. Once they’d found they had a language in common, Dutch had befriended him, ‘and that’s how we found out his story. It was only later that it occurred to me Dutch had been my friend for two years by then, and never once had he mentioned he knew German. Strange, isn’t it?’

  He kept looking over his shoulder, as if he expected one of his contacts to be ambling down the road. But there was no one. When the rain had abated, he went out into the bushes, to take a leak, he said. Ten minutes later, Jeannie took the same crooked path over the crest of the hill to find him crouching in a clearing. His rucksack was sitting on the ground next to him, and in his hand was a trowel.

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ she asked

  Staring disconsolately at the tiny mound of loose earth at his feet, ‘I was just asking myself the same question.’

  He remained silent on the long walk into town. But on the ferry back to the city, he apologised for his ‘strange behaviour.’

  ‘Though I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I was up to.’

  No, she hadn’t, Jeannie confessed. ‘Though the presence of a trowel in your rucksack suggests you had a plan.’

  ‘Not a very good plan.’

  ‘Apparently not!’

  ‘Will you stop giving me such a hard time?’

  ‘Tell me what you’re after, then.’

  ‘The same as you,’ he said. ‘The truth about Dutch Harding.’

  ‘Actually, Jordan, I gave up that one years ago.’

  He gave her a dark look. ‘You know they never found his body.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think they ever looked very hard.’

  ‘They didn’t have to. They were the ones who buried him, after all.’

  ‘They.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t give you names. All I’ll say is what a little bird told me. Someone’s thinking of digging the body up again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. To pin the crime on someone? To send the murderer a message? To keep him – or her – from talking at that trial on Tuesday? We should find out more tonight.’

  ‘We’re meeting your little bird, are we?’

  ‘Hush. Enough said.’

  That evening, they took their hunt to Beyoğlu. After a drink at a bar run by a black Turk named Avni, they went to an old Russian restaurant called Rejans. On their way out, one of Jeannie’s heels got caught between two cobblestones and came off. Jordan said not to worry. Putting his arm around her, they hobbled into a journalist’s haunt called Kulis. It was packed solid, but they found small space near the bar. Billows of smoke furled around the lights. Voices rose and fell. Now it was a woman’s laugh and now it was a man telling a long, serious story. Now there was a chorus of high-pitched protest. They had only just been served their drinks when Jordan leaned forward. ‘Don’t look now, but…’ She made to turn her head. He stopped her. ‘I said don’t! We’re being watched.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘Then, in a minute or so, head for the Ladies. Or whatever we’re supposed to call it now.’

  The door marked ‘BAYAN’ led to a small bright room with a table on which sat a three-foot doll dressed like a Spanish dancer. Spread around her skirts was a generous display of make-up, an ashtray shaped like a porpoise, two glasses, a water bottle and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. Two women were hunched over the table, sharing a cigarette. One was petite and fair, the other dark and dishevelled. They did not look up when she walked in. They were silent when she was in the stall, but when she was washing her hands; one drew the other’s attention to Jeannie’s broken heel. ‘And to think I was feeling sorry for her,’ she said in Turkish. ‘To think I thought she had a limp.’

  It was Suna.

  Her heart pounding, Jeannie turned off the water. She bowed her head. Was this shame? Or nerves?

  ‘So Lüset, my dear. Shall we?’ It was Suna, speaking in Turkish.

  ‘No, darling.’ It was Lüset now. ‘Let’s not.’

  ‘But I’m so bored,’ said Suna.

  ‘Try German, then. Her legs look German.’

  Jeannie was drying her hands now. When Suna asked, in German, if she’d like some cologne, Jeannie thanked her, in Turkish, and Suna let out a faint cry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jeannie said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Please!’ Suna cried Raising her finger to her lips, she indicated with her eyes that the walls might have ears. ‘Understood?’ she asked more softly. Jeannie nodded. Pointing
at the shoe that lacked a heel, Suna said, ‘You are suffering.’

  ‘Not really. I’m…’

  ‘Shhht,’ said Suna. ‘We wish to help.’

  They went back out to the bar, where Suna handed Jeannie’s shoe to a busboy who ran off to have it repaired. ‘Abracadabra,’ said Suna. ‘Could you imagine it could be so easy? Now tell me why you are here.’

  ‘To help you.’

  ‘Why help someone you’ve never met?’

  ‘But Suna…’

  ‘We have never met, this must be clear, we are being watched. Do you understand? We have taken pity on you following the tragedy of your broken heel. So tell me, dear Jeannie, what is your name? What has brought you here on this fine and muddy evening? Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Business,’ she said. Then she added, ‘I’m a lawyer now.’

  ‘Ah. This is very interesting. But perhaps not as interesting in the United States as it is here.’

  ‘My main interest is in international law,’ she said. ‘Humanitarian law.’

  ‘Goodness gracious,’ said Suna. ‘What a radical concept!’

  ‘And what are you up to these days?’

  ‘Ah,’ Suna said. ‘This is a never-ending story. So many things I have wished to be, but still I am lagging behind! Let us just say that I am a struggling sociologist-to-be. As for my dear friend, allow me to introduce her. Jeannie, please meet the delectable Lüset Danon, proud owner of a degree in architecture. Though, alas, she remains locked inside the family business of advertising. Yes, it has been a struggle to be true to our gifts. This week, however, it is all we can do to struggle with the mud. I feel I must offer some apology for the weather.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Jeannie said. ‘It’s you I came to see. I hope you know that.’

  ‘Ah!’ Suna tapped her fingers on the bar. ‘Ah!’

  ‘Suna, for the love of God,’ Lüset whispered in Turkish. ‘Not here!’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Suna, switching back to English. ‘It must be said. She turned to Jeannie. ‘My darling woman. My dear, dear friend. Don’t you think you have already helped us enough? Such a bountiful lady have you been to us! All those books and lecture notes! Such sacrifices you must have had to make to pay the postage! It was, I think, essential to air all this dirty linen in public.’