Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  They laughed, even, when discussing a tremor that had occurred earlier that same day. They discussed it in some detail. For some, it had been an up-and-down movement, and for others, the buildings they’d been in had seemed to sway. It was in the middle of this exchange that the restaurant itself began to shake.

  It was then that Jeannie saw the fear in people’s eyes. And frankly, it was a relief. This was not a dream after all, she was not locked inside a ghastly fairy tale in which everyone was living happily after, except for her. When the shaking stopped, no one moved. Then everyone began talking at once. ‘You felt that, too, didn’t you?’ ‘Where do you think the epicentre was?’ ‘What did we do to bring this misfortune on our heads?’ Out came the mobiles. Suna was the first to give up. ‘The network has been flooded,’ she told Jeannie. ‘That means it must have been a relatively bad one. The moment there’s a bad one, everyone in the entire city gets straight on their phones. What a shame our old friend İsmet is no longer with us – I could have berated the Pocket King to his face!’

  Jeannie stood up. ‘I need some air.’

  It was colder than before. She buttoned up her coat. She looked inside: they’d all found something new to laugh about. And – she knew this was churlish and ungrateful and hard – she couldn’t bear it. It was as if she was lying in a lonely ditch, watching the glittering windows of a passing train.

  She looked at the way Haluk and Lüset talked to each other. She would lean forward and so would he. She would begin a sentence, he would laugh as he caught the thought and ran with it. He would turn to the woman on his right but at the same time draped his arm around Lüset’s shoulder, and her face would light up, as if he had just given her an unexpected gift.

  And she, their old friend, should have been glad for them. She cursed herself for coming back. She turned down the alleyway. A dark figure was walking towards her, his head bowed, his hands plunged into his coat.

  39

  November 1st 1999

  ‘He was here when it hit. Here in this apartment. He was still based in Denmark at that point but had been back in Istanbul all summer, working on a film about his mother’s family. Sibel had been flattered, flattering, generous with her reminiscences and mostly co-operative, but there had been flare-ups, and then there was the choking, polluting humidity. To escape it she’d gone out to Çınarcık, near Yalova, to stay with a friend for a few days, and at 2.58 am on Tuesday August 17th, that’s where she was.

  Sinan was here, in the House of Shrouds, with Suna, but that’s another story. The clattering was worse than the swaying floor. The electricity cut off almost at once – you could hear the books and plates and glasses falling from their shelves but you could not see them. When he found his mobile, he tried to call his mother. But his network was down. On the radio there was only music.

  Outside in the landing, there were shrieks and wails as his neighbours struggled down the stairs in their night-clothes, their way lit by a few flickering candles. Most camped outside all night.

  The news began to filter in at daybreak, and this was when they had the first aerial views of the affected areas. From the line of flattened buildings, you could see that the fault ran straight through the middle of Çınarcık.

  They were there by ten, but when half a street is rubble, there is no such a thing as an address. Where his mother had been staying, the pile of rubble before them was so small that you could hardly believe it could ever have been six storeys high.

  The sun was high in the sky now. A perfect day for the beach. There was an Israeli rescue team that came to Çınarcık later, but that morning it was just Suna and Sinan and others like them scrambling over the slabs, digging with their hands. Meanwhile, Suna came and went, bringing food, water, blankets, news. “And my cameras. Yes, that’s what sort of man I’ve become.”

  The soldiers did not arrive until the fourth day but before then there were strangers coming from all over to help. Bringing food, water, pick-axes, underwear. On the fifth day they dug out his mother, and it was while his fellow rescue workers were consoling him that he knew he had to “stop this anchorless life I’d been leading, criss-crossing Europe, always at ease but never at home. I knew then that this was my country, these were my brothers, these were my friends and if life could end this quickly, I would want it to end here.”

  The hardest part, he told me, was coming back to this apartment. He no longer trusts walls.’

  November 2nd 1999

  ‘If I stand on the balcony, looking out over the Asian shore, and the Old City with its domes, its palaces, its mosques, and the great and teeming waterways between them, I can still see the city I remember.

  If I’m going somewhere and veer into the back streets, I can smell that damp. The ferries are the same, though they seem less numerous. There are still nut vendors everywhere, and corn vendors, and cheap watch vendors and kiosks selling newspapers, cigarettes, bubblegum and grilled cheese sandwiches. Most shop signs in most back streets are still crooked, most pavements still have potholes, and the vogue for neon has not yet passed.

  There are vast new neighbourhoods stretching endlessly in all directions. In poor neighbourhoods we always find a minimarket, a pharmacy, a kebab restaurant and at least three banks. A sweet shop, a damp arcade where they sell flowers, newspapers, meat, fish, and pink quilts, a generic police station and a generic mosque. Men in skullcaps and men in caps and brown suits and men in Tommy Hilfiger; women in Tommy Hilfiger and women in long Islamic coats and tightly knotted scarves.

  In the rich neighbourhoods it’s endless rows of skyscrapers, malls, glittering showrooms displaying all the world’s most expensive cars, designer clothes and designer ice cream, bathrooms, furniture, computer software. The dark, damp sinister streets of Tepebaşı are changed beyond recognition, lined with bright and beautiful restaurants, cafés, clubs, and salsa bars; the stretch along the Bosphorus between Ortaköy and Kuruçeşme, where there were once only coal depots, is a glittering strip with vast open air clubs and there are, I’m told, so many bouncers and valets and famous football players with famous model girlfriends that in the early hours of a summer morning it can take up to an hour to creep half a kilometre.

  Those old Ottoman villas that were falling into their foundations – these days, no rich man can be without one. There aren’t many left but those that are left have been restored and are so sumptuous they hurt your eyes. Suna tells me that many were restored by an old classmate of ours. A recurring theme. Our old classmates, even the ones who did time in prison in the 70s or early 80s, seem to have enjoyed colossal success in almost any field you care to mention, especially since the boom began.’

  November 3rd 1999

  ‘The boom began when Turkey opened its markets in the 80s. When the Cold War ended, Istanbul ceased to be an outpost and became once again, the centre of its world. The city is teeming with people from the former Soviet Union. Some are tourists, some are professionals, others are in the “import-export business” and/or vice. Last night, when Chloe and I were riding together in a taxi, we were stopped by the police who’d seen us from the back and taken us for “Natashas” (Russian prostitutes).

  The Soviet Navy no longer parades up and down the Bosphorus, but the traffic is heavier and more treacherous than ever, and the ships from BAPNA are in desperate need of repair.

  No one’s afraid of the Communists now – with sixty percent of the population under thirty, it’s a dwindling minority that can even remember fearing them. Now it’s Islamists they obsess about. And when Islamists speak, they express their anti-western sentiments in much the same language as Sinan and Suna did when I first met them. The tables have turned, and then turned again.’

  November 4th 1999

  ‘The building code, I’m told, is on a par with Japan, the US and Western Europe. But unless there is a foreign insurance company involved, construction firms cut corners. The owners do foolish things like removing essential supports to create more shop space. Which is
why so many apartment buildings in the earthquake area look unscathed – until you notice that they no longer have front doors, or ground floors.

  If I am ever in an earthquake, Sinan tells me, I am to race upstairs, not downstairs. If I can’t do that, I am to crouch against a radiator, a refrigerator, a bathtub.

  Last night, after I’d been awoken by yet another aftershock, I looked over at Sinan, and for a moment he looked like a pile of rubble, too.’

  November 6th 1999

  ‘He’s been showing me his films.

  He is vague about the course of his career – his degree was in political science – but around the time he got married he got a job in television. He started doing his own films in the mid-90s. This strange name of his, Yankı, dates from then. He’s won several prizes, and although he still takes his films to all the festivals and gets plenty of commissions in Europe, Haluk seems to be his main backer.

  His first films were very much in the “vanishing Turkey” mode. One follows the old Bosphorus fishing boats, another a family struggling to keep its old Ottoman yali from falling into the sea. Rakı Sofrası is about three retired generals in pursuit of the perfect summer evening. The 23rd of April records the Children’s Day parades in seven different towns, and although it says something subtle about patriotism, Suna finds it “maddeningly oblique”.

  She takes the same view of Three Merchants, which follows the fortunes of a Circassian jeweller in Adapazarı, a Suryani carpet dealer from Mardin, and an Armenian copper-dealer with a shop in the Bedestan. All have tangled, hidden histories, but never once does Sinan go beneath the surface. In my view, if not in Suna’s, it doesn’t need to.

  The best of the films I’ve seen so far is The Atatürk Factory. It’s about just that – a factory that makes statues of Atatürk. Some scenes, like the one in which the two sculptors argued passionately about Atatürk’s “true” face, have a comic edge, though apparently some critics found them disrespectful. It ends with the minute of silence on the day of his death. There’s a young, square-shouldered man standing on the shore just outside Üsküdar, saluting the old city. In his face is pride and love. Just beyond him is a man washing down a restaurant boat. He is wearing an Islamic skullcap and not observing the silence. As the camera moves to the domes and palaces and minarets of the old city, we hear Atatürk himself, uttering his most famous saying: “How happy I am to be a Turk.”

  The film Sinan was working on at the time of the August earthquake is called Chanteuse and draws upon the interviews he did with his mother in the weeks before her death. It includes the famous footage of the concert at Montreux. His next film, Hidden Family, will begin with his mother’s death and move on to the funeral, which was attended by two Greek aunts he was meeting for the first time. Both live in Thessalonica, and the film will follow them home.’

  November 7th 1999

  ‘From the moment I got here, I’ve been racing, racing, racing, but the world rushing past me is faster and I’m still falling behind. I wake up in the morning and I ask myself – could it be only two weeks ago that I picked up the phone and heard Suna’s voice? Suna says I’m too set in my ways. I need to, as she puts it, “grow with the flow”. This is not the sleepy city I “once knew”. It’s going “fastforward into modernity”. But even in 1970, in its sleepy backwater days, I was, I recall, always struggling to keep up.

  There’s so much going on, stories tailing off into stories, so many things for which I have next to no context – I’m left grasping at the details, desperately struggling to read through the lines, and never have I felt a more tenuous grasp of the present. Here I am, in his arms, his bed, his life. After all these years, we’ve found each other, but we don’t trust the walls, don’t trust the ground beneath our feet, don’t trust any moment beyond this one. I am insanely happy, and I am racing towards a cliff.

  Every gesture he makes is familiar to me. Every inch of his body, too. But he’s still a stranger to me. I have no idea what’s going on his head.

  WHAT I ADMIRE ABOUT HIM:

  • How much he loves his work.

  • How relentlessly and courageously he pursues it.

  • How little he complains.

  • Even refuses to complain.

  • How gracefully he has pulled me into the stream of his life.

  • How he talks to me as if we’ve been together all along.

  • How, when he asks for my opinion, he actually listens.

  • How, no matter where we are, no matter how disturbing the thing we have just seen or heard or filmed, he never forgets the little joys of life – what he calls the little dignities.

  There is always a beautiful coffee house around the corner, and the waiter always has a story to tell, and as he tells it, he has a lovely smile, and as I watch him smile, I remember the day of the cobra, when we carried those baskets from one end of the city to the other, meeting people who trailed their stories behind them like comets.

  WHAT I MISS ABOUT THE BOY I ONCE KNEW:

  • The lilt he used to have in his walk.

  • The clarity of his contempt.

  • The thunder of his poetry.

  • The hope.

  • The fire.

  WHAT I FEAR:

  Even when we are in a café bright with lights, and artists, and journalists, and poets, and photographers, and film stars, and television moguls, and singers, and glittering tragediennes…even when Haluk or Lüset or Suna have made the most frivolous joke – when the laughter fades, when I look into his eyes again, I see shadows, deaths, secrets.

  THINGS WE HAVE YET TO DISCUSS, EXCEPT IN TANTALISING AND OFTEN VERY DISTURBING ASIDES:

  • The “events” of June 1971.

  • Who killed Dutch Harding.

  • Who buried him, and where.

  • What happened to Sinan that morning in January 1980, after his arrest.

  • What they did to him in prison.

  • Why he wouldn’t let me help.

  • If he knows about the letter his wife sent me.

  • Why he never wrote, not even after his divorce.

  • Why he’s still so annoyed at Suna for “tricking us back together”.

  • When a day doesn’t pass without his saying that he never forgot me and never managed to “banish” me from his heart.

  • Why was he trying in the first place?

  ALL HE’S SAID (but not in this order):

  (I am putting these sentences into order in a doomed attempt to get some sort of handle on them.)

  • The less he said about 1971, the better. “All there is left is a quagmire of lies.”

  • Our sin – one we all shared, in his view – was immaturity. “I had big ideas, but they were too big, and it was the ideas themselves that were empty. This was because we had no freedom.”

  • We were hemmed in by what he now calls The Fathers. “Mine. Yours. Haluk’s. Our teachers. The Devil İsmet. They were all standing over us, watching us all the time, suspecting us of the crime that we hadn’t yet committed. The crime we didn’t even know about. Not what we’d done, but what we might do when we usurped their power.”

  • “And naturally, we were outraged. To be condemned on the basis of unfounded suspicions! To be labelled dangerous for our thoughts! What we did not know – what we learned that terrible day – is that there are no innocents.”

  • In the aftermath, Suna suffered most, though “there are many forms of torture.”

  • For him, torture meant knowing that two friends – two girls – were serving the sentence that should have been his.

  • This guilt ate into his marriage. Guilt was the very basis of his marriage. “Anna fell in love with me to save me. To save myself, I had to leave.”

  • “You got it all wrong, you know. I mean in those interviews you gave after our night together, after I was arrested, in 1981. You were not the one who drew me into danger. It was as I told you. I had come back to accept my fate. If you choose to give up your
freedom, then you have the inner freedom that can only come from dignity.”

  • But he had fallen short of his ambitions. “What you sensed that night – the night we spent here, the night before my arrest – was the fear I felt. It was only when we were lying here together in this room, that fear overtook me. And it’s true. Listening to your voice, feeling your head against my chest, I questioned myself. I almost wavered. And I was right to be afraid.”

  • But the less said about his years inside the better.

  • The worst part was getting out, heading home. “A street I recognised was worse than a street I’d never seen. Every change leapt out at me. My memories made the present look like lies. I knew then that everything I had wanted from life until that moment was false. My ideas were empty. God had given us eyes so that we could see.”

  • “So I said to myself. No more politics. No more crazy, impulsive gestures. No dreams of revenge. I could no longer base my happiness on İsmet’s downfall. I was a man now, I was a father. I wanted my children to know who I was.”

  • “Of course, they don’t know me. They don’t know me at all.”