Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Don’t stare. Didn’t I tell you not to stare? Please, Jeannie, listen. You can criticise me later, but for now, can you please obey me? At least pretend to obey me? Look. I mean – don’t look. In a few minutes they will leave. But for now you must sit still, very still, and pretend you still love me.’

  ‘Later, much later, at the House of Shrouds, we came back to this.

  “Okay! I was wrong! I was a terrible, jealous Turk! But Jordan or no Jordan. You still broke your promise.”

  “You’re wrong, you know! So wrong!”

  “You’ve had lovers,” he said.

  I said, “And you haven’t?”

  “I never forgot you.”

  “You never wrote to me, either,” I said. “For ten years, nothing! You might as well have been dead!”

  “I was dead,” he finally admitted.

  And I said, “So was I.”

  From beneath the covers, I stole a look at him. He was still thin, but broader. His smile the same, but so much harder to tease out. His eyes were still too dark to read.

  “You’re still too cold,” he said.

  “Then hold me tighter,” I said.

  “Like this?” He pinched my cheek. It was a joke but not a joke. We were running out of time.

  We were lying under seven quilts and fifteen fur coats in his mother’s bed. It was the only piece of furniture that didn’t have a sheet draped over it. It had been years since any living person had used this place, and we hadn’t managed to turn on the heat. We’d been under the covers long enough to create a pocket of warmth, but it when we stretched out our feet, we touched ice. We could see our breath.

  It was still dark inside the room but a shard of daylight was coming through the drapes. We had, I thought, reached an understanding. Or we would soon.

  I’d pressed him hard, too hard. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You don’t understand me. You don’t listen, you just talk.”

  “You’re even worse. You don’t listen or talk,” I said.

  “I know. You’re right. I’m impossible.”

  There was a lightness to his voice now. It was different from the leaden tones he’d used earlier, and I took this to mean that at last I was getting through. So I asked him outright. Could he look me in the eye and say there was no hope for us?

  He touched my arm. “You’re getting cold again.” As he tried to rub some warmth into it, he said, “You’ve changed, you know. You were never this cold. What are we going to do with you, Jeannie? Who is going to look after you when I’m in prison?”

  He’d said this several times already. When I’d asked why, he’d prevaricated. He’d done nothing. He’d done nothing, but live in Denmark. For nine years, he’d done nothing, but then, on the spur of the moment, he’d come back to help Suna, who was on trial again, even though she’d done nothing either. During his nine years in Denmark, he’d done nothing to help her. Since returning to Istanbul, he’d still done nothing. And now he was more in debt to her than ever. For it was thanks to Suna that we were here in bed together. It was thanks to Suna that he could look me in the eye and say there was no hope for us.

  “Why? Don’t you love me?”

  “Of course I love you. I’ll always love you. But I can’t give you any more than that. I can’t…”

  That was when we heard the voices outside the door.

  I tried to argue with them. Sinan patted my shoulder and told me not to bother. His bag was packed and waiting in the spare bedroom. I tried to pick it up but it was too heavy. “Yes,” he said. “I’m taking lots of books. You can always send me books, by the way. So long as they don’t tempt me to take up arms against the state.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re going in so willingly,” I said when they’d put us into the jeep. He shrugged his shoulders. “As you’ll soon see, I’m not.” The jeep was just swooping down into Dolmabahçe by now. The storm had moved on. The sky was bright and clear and blue. The city looked freshly laundered. Across the Bosphorus, just at the tip of the hill behind Üsküdar, I could see the sun rising. “Look,” he said. “Another false dawn.”’

  Their first stop was a nondescript office building. As they stepped down from the jeep. Sinan took her hand and squeezed it very hard, but he did not look her in the eye. His last words to her were, ‘Don’t let them see how you feel.’

  After the guards had taken Sinan inside, Jeannie was transferred to a white Anadol. When it became clear that they were heading for the airport, she tried to tell the driver that she didn’t have her luggage with her, or, more importantly, her passport. He just shrugged his shoulders. Outside the departure terminal, he went round to the luggage compartment and produced her suitcase. Reaching into his inside pocket, he brought out the wallet that contained her ticket and her passport. He walked her over to the Lufthansa desk, where a flight attendant had already changed her ticket.

  She was then taken upstairs and left to wait in an office. Her escort stood guard outside the door. Ten minutes later, a slim, agile, clean-faced, middle-aged man came in. He was carrying a thick file. He put this down on the table in the middle of the room. Turning to face her, he held out his hand. ‘Long time no see,’ he said.

  ‘İsmet.’ She kept her voice neutral.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked breezily. ‘They didn’t manhandle you, did they?’

  ‘There wasn’t a “they”,’ she said. ‘I was just with Sinan.’

  ‘But you saw the others in that discotheque, didn’t you?’

  ‘Evidently, you did, too.’

  ‘Well, what can I say, Jeannie? With friends like that and so on. Don’t worry though. We’re talking to Sinan now, as you know, and once we’re through, I’m sure he’ll take us to them.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not following you.’

  ‘So he didn’t tell you. How interesting. Well, what can I say except I’m not surprised. Anyway, for your information, it’s not just you they kidnapped.’

  ‘Who said anything about kidnap?’

  ‘Well I hate to be the one to give you the news, but that friend of yours, Sinan, was in on the deal.’

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘Suna and Lüset,’ he said. ‘They kidnapped your boyfriend. In case you’re getting mixed up – seeing as you have more than your fair share of boyfriends – I mean Jordan Frick.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend. And he wasn’t kidnapped. He went with them willingly. I saw it with my own eyes. And anyway, he was the one who was pursuing them, not the other way round.’

  İsmet lifted his hands, as if to Allah. ‘What can I say, except that fact is stranger than fiction? The fact of the matter is that Jordan Frick is as we speak in the hands of kidnappers. They’ve already phoned in to the press but between you and me it all looks pretty amateurish. An opportunistic act, what actors might call an improvisation. Now we have Sinan helping us, I am sure we will find him. So I’m not concerned. My question to you is, do you want to hang on in there, or should we just keep things simple and off the record and get you out on the first plane? It’s waiting on the tarmac. If you want to take it we can get you out there in minutes flat. But I thought, seeing as you and Jordan are an item…’

  ‘We are not an item,’ Jeannie hissed. ‘And he’s a piece of shit.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get cracking.’ He picked up the phone and gave a command in Turkish. He put down the receiver. ‘It’s been good to talk.’

  ‘If I find out you’ve framed Sinan, there will be hell to pay.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget to pass on my regards to your father.’ There was a knock on the door. İsmet stood up now. ‘These are the guys who’ll take you out to the plane.’

  ‘But before you go,’ he said as she rose to her feet ‘I have one more question for you. Did Sinan happen to mention where he buried his friend?’

  ‘What friend are you talking about now?’

  ‘Dutch Harding, of course. Oh, I’m sorry. Is this news? When
Sinan and I had our chat on the phone just now, it was the first thing he confessed to. That’s why he stayed away so long, you see. He was the ringleader. He was the one who cut his teacher into seven pieces and stuffed them into the trunk.’

  ‘I think you’re making that up,’ Jeannie said.

  İsmet shrugged his shoulders. ‘What you think is of no concern to anyone.’

  Her guards were armed. They escorted her all the way to the first class seat to which she had been mysteriously reassigned. A tactful flight attendant had drawn the curtains to keep the economy class passengers from gaping. As soon as they were in the air, she was back to offer her champagne and smoked salmon. And she lifted her glass just as Sinan had made her promise she would. She was to pretend he was there with her, she was to know he was there with her in his thoughts. ‘It will cheer me up,’ he’d said. But that was then. Now she was high up in the sky, flying to freedom, flying first class, not because she had earned it but because she was her father’s daughter. And Sinan was in a cell somewhere, tied to a chair, having the truth burned out of him with an electric truncheon.

  35

  January 28th 1981

  ‘I am alive again. After nine years, seven months and twenty-four days. Dead hopes swirling back to life, whirling around my head like bats.

  Where is he? What are they doing to him?

  I can still feel his hands on my skin.’

  When she got back to New York, late Monday night, there was a message from her father on the machine. She didn’t call him back.

  On Tuesday she got up early, went out for a run, and instead of going to work, she spent the day calling contacts, scanning the papers, concocting and discarding plans.

  She’d be doing fine and then the shard of a memory would come flying from nowhere. The white fur coats on the bed, and their frozen breath. The brown fur coat he’d worn into the kitchen. The tea he’d brought back. The steam rising from the little, gold-rimmed glasses. The first slivers of light between the curtains. The white fur coats on the bed. His hand.

  It must have been about six in the evening when she went out to pick up some groceries. She stopped in at the West End Café, to see if any of her friends were there. There, propped against the bar, was Jordan Frick.

  ‘You’re a piece of work, did you know that?’

  He was wearing Raybans. His mouth looked ugly. ‘I hope you’re happy.’

  ‘What the hell do I have to be happy about?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be disingenuous,’ said Jordan. ‘You almost got me killed.’

  ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘You sound just like my father.’

  ‘Don’t you be flippant with me. Don’t you dare. I could have helped a couple of hundred people, including your friends, but now my plans are down the tubes.’

  ‘You know?’ Jeannie said. ‘This time last week, I might have fallen for that. But not now, Jordan. I know who you are, and who you work for.’

  ‘As any fool could tell you, I work for no one but myself.’

  ‘If you had spelled it out to me, I might not have minded. But you went behind my back, prepared your ground…’

  ‘What makes you so special that I have to spell out every goddamn detail?’

  He had begun to shout. The bartender took note. He came down to their end of the bar. ‘I’m sorry, Jordan, but you know the score.’

  ‘Kit, this is serious. She had me fucking kidnapped.’ Jordan took off his glasses. He had two black eyes. ‘See what those precious friends of hers did to me?’ he screamed. ‘See?’

  ‘I don’t care what she did,’ the bartender said. ‘I don’t care if she locked you up in a trunk. Raise your voice one more time and you’re eighty-sixed.’

  ‘I’ll raise my voice when I want to, fuckhead!’

  ‘We’ll see about that, my friend.’ After calling over an off-duty police officer, the bartender turned to Jeannie. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes to get home.’

  The first thing she did when she got home was to phone her father. ‘Call off your dogs,’ she said. He did not ask for names.

  ‘I suppose I don’t have to tell you what happened,’ she told her father the next time he called. ‘I’m assuming you’ve already been briefed.’

  ‘Yes, well, in a matter of speaking, I guess I have.’ He sounded unusually sheepish. ‘Not that he was particularly coherent during our, what did you call it? Oh yes. Briefing.’ His voice grew lighter. ‘Yes, as briefings go, it was a lot of fun. I hear our friend Jordan “No Name” Frick fell for the old box trick.’

  ‘What old box trick?’

  ‘God, you’re slow, aren’t you? There was no box.’

  ‘You could have told me,’ she said.

  ‘He actually went in to see the Harkers, did he? That’s just terrific. That’s the icing on the cake.’

  ‘So what was the cake?’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

  ‘What exactly did you send me there to do?’

  There was a long pause. ‘How’s Sinan?’

  ‘In jail,’ I said.

  ‘Did you get a chance to speak at least?’

  She wanted to tell her father how it made her feel to hear that note of light concern in his voice. As if he didn’t know the answer to his question, down to the last graphic detail. Although she got off the phone right away, it was not soon enough to save her from his pity.

  ‘I had no idea he still meant so much to you,’ he said the next time they spoke. ‘I thought you’d moved on.’ He went on to insist – how dare he? – that he’d had no idea, no idea whatsoever, that Sinan would be back in Turkey. ‘Or why, for that matter.’ But now he’d made up for lost time. ‘And it’s pretty ugly, I’m warning you. I hope you’re sitting down.’

  Sinan, he went on to tell her, had not been charged with the kidnapping of Jordan Frick. But ‘under interrogation’ he’d admitted to a ‘panoply of other crimes, and believe you me, it’s one hell of a star turn.’ He had, her father claimed, admitted to them ‘willingly’. This, Jeannie presumed, was a way of suggesting that he may not have been tortured. ‘Someone acting on his behalf delivered a ludicrously incriminating statement to the press. If we are to believe it, he was the single mastermind behind every student riot in the past fifteen years, not to mention every kidnapping, including, incredibly, the kidnap and murder of the Israeli consul in 1971. Plus he was writing Marxist-Leninist tracts from the age of fourteen. And praising the achievements of Mao under 109 pseudonyms.’

  ‘It’s a joke,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘Of course it’s a joke,’ said her father. ‘But who has the heart to laugh? I have before me a Turkish newspaper with a very sad picture on the front page. It’s all over the papers. It’s a picture of Sinan, pointing to a patch of the Bosphorus where he last saw that trunk. I don’t know if you realise this, but in Turkey the first thing they make you do in a murder case is put you through a re-enactment. Not that it did them much good, though. A decade later, Dutch Harding’s body for some reason is not where our friend Sinan recalls dumping it.’

  ‘That’s because he never put it there. He’s lying,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘Now why would he want to lie about something like that?’

  The next thing she did was to look for Chloe. She was no longer at the address her mother had for her in Venice, California. She was in El Paso, having just been admitted to Juarez Medical School across the Rio Grande.

  Jeannie flew right out. Chloe was standing with the crowd outside the gate at the airport and although she did not immediately recognise her, she picked her out at once. Her hair was dyed carrot orange and she was wearing a Mao Suit and it was clear that she, too, had been through an experience that had left her haunted.

  She’d not spoken to her mother since Christmas, and it was clear, when Jeannie updated her, that she was hearing this chapter of the story for the first time. She did not ask Chloe how she felt about it all – this, too, would have been an indulgence, a deviation – all she wanted to know w
as if she would help campaign for their release. She said she would, and for the next few months, Jeannie and Chloe were in regular touch – if not to exchange notes about the campaign itself, then to discuss what to put into the packages they were sending to their friends in prison.

  By April, when Sinan went on trial, interest in London was high enough for several newspapers to run short news items. These fed into pieces in the op ed and comments pages that gave damning if also rather sketchy accounts of human rights infractions in Turkey in the wake of the September 1980 military takeover. Jeannie knew better than to write anything herself, but she was quoted in the New York Times and photographed for the Observer.

  Later that month, she received a letter from an Anna Sinanoğlu. She introduced herself as Sinan’s wife. She explained that she and Sinan had met when they were both studying political philosophy in Copenhagen and had been married for six years. They had two children, a son and a daughter. Although it was Anna Sinanoğlu’s plan to continue to reside in Denmark, she and the children were currently in Istanbul ‘to assist with the trial’.

  ‘I understand that you met with my husband,’ she wrote ‘during the recent visit to the city to which you allude in the enclosed article in the Observer. I must confess it was quite a shock to read of this, especially because my husband had never once mentioned your name during our years together. However, he is an honest man at heart and now he has told me everything.

  If you were led to believe that there were problems in our marriage, I must ask you how you would respond, if you were a woman with two young children to feed and nurture, and your husband told you he planned to return to his homeland to throw himself into prison for an obscure matter of principle. I wonder if you, as I, would make every effort to dissuade him.

  I would also ask you to imagine how you would feel if you put down the phone on a Friday night certain that you had reached a rational agreement, only to find on Monday morning that he has turned himself in. Well, if you can imagine all this, you will know how I am feeling right now. I am also somewhat perplexed by your efforts to procure his release, as I understand that you were instrumental in his arrest. You ought to have known you were a danger to him, just by virtue of who you are.