Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  Her face lit up when she spotted her old students and once again she resembled her younger self. She and Suna had kept up their correspondence over the years. She had been helpful during both Suna’s stays in prisons. The ugly exchanges that had so marred their friendship in the spring of 1971 had now become yet another thing to joke about. The same went for Jeannie’s last meeting with her in Northampton, when she was researching her ill-fated article for the underground newspaper. They’d met at the prep school where, she now told them, she’d continued to work for another twenty-nine years.

  Now she’d taken early retirement. ‘And unoriginal person that I am, I’ve come straight back to my old haunts.’ A smile flitted across her face. ‘I’m so glad that you two have taken some of the things we used to discuss and run with them. It makes me feel I’ve done something of worth.’ There was still that teacherly note in her voice that made them feel as if they were back in class, discussing Malamud. When she leaned forward, Jeannie was half expecting her to ask her to define his tone and style. Instead she said, ‘I need your help.’

  The apartment was near the Galata Tower, on the fifth floor of the splendid, recently restored building where they’d ushered in the millennium. The view was as marvellous by day as it had been by night. From the front you could see the silhouette of what seemed to be every dome and minaret in the old city, and the Golden Horn, and the hundreds of vessels plying the Bosphorus. The hazy mouth of the Marmara, the Asian shore from Kadıköy as far as Çengelköy, and the first Bosphorus Bridge. But then Billie led them down the dark corridor. She opened a large oak door and they were hit by the stench of smoke and rakı.

  She nodded at the bed, where a half-clad man lay sleeping. He was on his back, with one arm hanging above an overflowing ashtray and two bottles. Perhaps it was shock that made them overlook the yellow tinge to his skin that ought to have alerted them to the hepatitis that would go undiagnosed until he reached his parents’ home in Arizona.

  But his sandy hair had not seen a comb in some time. He had several days’ stubble on his face, and his lips were lined with white. Jeannie could tell from the way Suna grabbed her hand that she recognised him as fast as she had.

  Jordan Frick.

  ‘How long has he been here?’ Suna asked. Her voice was calm.

  ‘Since last Thursday,’ Billie said. ‘When I arrived, that was Wednesday, he was his old happy-go-lucky self. Bursting with plans! The night before last, he took me out to that sleek new place near the Pantocrator.’ She waved in the direction of the Golden Horn. ‘He’d had perhaps one drink too many. The waiter did something to annoy him, and he went into a diatribe about “various ex-students” of mine who were turning the city into a theme park for rich foreigners and in so doing, sweeping away what made the city what it was. Then came other grievances, too personal to relate. I fear he’s drinking himself to death.’

  She wanted to know all there was to know about hospitals in Istanbul. Was there a good one that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg? Jeannie was sick to her stomach, but Suna seemed unfazed. She rattled through the options. There were some excellent hospitals now – this was a bustling, modern country fastforwarding into Europe, after all – but the general understanding of substance abuse problems was still inadequate for the following economic, cultural and political reasons. Here were the names of some excellent doctors, and here was where they’d trained. These were the ideas they were now struggling to bring to Turkey. But here were the reasons why Suna advised getting in touch with the US Consulate to arrange for an immediate repatriation. Here was the number. Here was what Billie Broome was to say to get past the switchboard. Here was a phone.

  They sat with Billie Broome until the helpful man she’d tracked down at the Consulate had found someone who knew Jordan’s byline. Jordan, it emerged, had been back in Turkey since early summer but working out of Ankara. But by the time the man from the consulate bade them farewell, he and Billie had agreed it might be a ‘very good idea’ if Jordan took ‘home leave’.

  Billie was heading out to Cyprus the next morning, so after they’d handed Jordan over, Suna undertook to put her back into the travel mood. She chose a place called Badehane, in Tünel, on an alleyway just behind the Masonic Lodge. Even after she’d knocked back a double-vodka, Billie’s hands were shaking.

  She wanted to talk about the old days, but vaguely. Her sentences kept trailing off. Then her eyes would light up but before she could speak, Suna would pull them back into the present. One edifying lecture followed another: the rise of the new middle class, the rise of the Mafia, the meaning of the word maganda. The unsuccessful efforts to impose basic safety regulations on the foreign (mostly Eastern European) ships that were turning the Bosphorus into such a dangerous waterway. The future of Islamist political parties in Turkey and the root reasons for the grassroots support. Why so many young women now wore headscarves. Why the new university laws discriminated against them, but not their brothers, why this was simultaneously tragic, ironic and sociologically fascinating.

  She offered a rundown of the Susurluk car crash, the great political scandal of the 90s. The victims included a police chief, a beauty queen and an assassin long presumed dead though in possession of a Turkish passport issued by the Embassy in Rome. The lone survivor was a Kurdish tribal chief/MP rumoured to be a drug baron.

  It was a ‘conspiracy theorist’s dream,’ Suna told them. The deep state made visible! Seeing that this term meant nothing to their former teacher, she tried again. The Susurluk car crash was living, ‘or rather dying,’ proof of the links between government officials and organised crime. There had been millions of dollars in the trunk, she added gleefully. When the government refused to investigate, ‘the people responded by turning off their lights at nine each evening and banging on their pots and pans. But only for a minute,’ she said. ‘A minute of darkness for enlightenment!’

  ‘You understand the significance of this gesture. No? Then let me explain. It began with the Young Turks, who equated darkness with the corrupt traditions of the Ottomans, and the light with the West. It became an imagistic shorthand. Perhaps one example will suffice…’

  Jeannie was into her eighth month by then, and the evening had brought no breezes. They were sitting outside on low stools and though she was taking regular sips of water, she was having trouble breathing. When Suna said she’d better get her home, Jeannie thought she heard regret in her voice. But after they’d waved Billie Broome goodbye, Suna said, ‘Ah! That was truly unbearable.’

  At Bebek, she said, ‘Please, don’t leave me yet. I am not yet recovered.’ They decamped to the Hotel Bebek. It had only just turned seven so they had their pick of tables. Over the next half hour, they watched the terrace fill up with its usual unusual mix – university lecturers in crumpled linen, pouting ladies dripping gold, businessmen entertaining foreigners, gangsters with their molls. All chairs were turned out to face the turquoise bay, the bobbing boats, the golden lights playing on the windows of the Asian shore.

  ‘So,’ Suna said. ‘I suppose you’ll be mentioning this to Sinan.’

  ‘Listen,’ Jeannie said. ‘I have nothing to hide. Whatever he might have told you, Jordan and I were never an item.’

  ‘It’s not your item I’m concerned about. It’s mine.’

  42

  Had Jordan never told her about it? The more Jeannie insisted that he hadn’t, the less Suna seemed to believe her.

  ‘But he told you. Most certainly, he told you! Worse still, you believed him! Yes, Jeannie. That’s what hurts the most.’ She was talking about ‘the rumours’ Jordan had spread. They were all false, of course. ‘But attached to them is a shameful secret.’

  For there’d been a night – ‘and it was only a night’ – when she had ‘succumbed’ to his charms. ‘In the spring of ’71. Those last crazy days. If you were not there to witness my downfall, it is probably safe to say that I am speaking of the days following your demotion to pariah.’

  Sighing,
she gestured up at the apartment house where Billie Broome had once lived with Dutch Harding. ‘It was there, on that very balcony, that he approached me. He was very handsome in those days, wasn’t he? It must have been my wish to impress him that prompted me to introduce myself as Turkey’s most dangerous insurgent. Trained by the PLO, no less, in the Bekaa Valley. Jordan understood my joke at once, and it was in this spirit that he was soon confessing to the murders of Jack Ruby and JFK. What’s more, he had brought down de Gaulle. His name was also mud at NATO. Jeannie – he had even conducted a secret mission to the moon.’

  Her voice was so tragically theatrical by now that the languid ladies at the next table were moved to take off their gold-rimmed sunglasses. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘do not let these numbskulls distract you. They cannot understand English.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jeannie asked.

  ‘Look at their puffy lips. Can these be natural? No, they are cows. If they can speak English, let them know what I understand of them.’ She took a long swig of her drink. ‘But to return to my confession. It would be impossible for me to remember all the fantastic fictions I fashioned for my flirt on that fateful evening. But it is only my finale that matters: I told Jordan there was soon to be a coup. I claimed certain elements in the military would join forces with the student left. Can you imagine such idiocy? I claimed, too, that I was none other than the kingpin. Can you believe such brazen nerve?’

  Twirling her glass in her hands, she said, ‘Yes, this was surely my pièce de resistance. But even as I spoke, Jeannie, I was myself falling into Jordan’s bed. I was drunk! I passed out! When I awoke the next morning, there he was, smiling so triumphantly. Yes, it was Jordan Frick, zipping up a freshly ironed pair of trousers. His mission having been accomplished. For as you may have guessed by now, my dear Jeannie, I had given him my virginity.’

  She uttered these words with a finality Jeannie could not quite read. ‘When did you next see him?’ she asked carefully. Suna’s eyes brimmed with tears as she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘You know, you were there,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Eleven years later, in 1981. In Kulis!’

  Another tragic look. Jeannie struggled to fathom it. She asked if she had missed something – had Suna fallen in love with Jordan, had he broken her heart, had she fallen pregnant? ‘Hah!’ Suna said scornfully. ‘As if I would have allowed such mundane matters to cloud my vision! No, my dear Jeannie, you have, as usual, missed the point.’

  Beckoning for the waiter, she added, ‘For thirty years now – you have wished to know what part you may have played in the so-called Trunk Murder. If you were the unwitting instigator. In fact, it was I!’

  She took a last suck on her cigarette and attempted a haughty stare. ‘Yes,’ she said with trembling lips. ‘I was the informer. Or whatever you wish to call me. I betrayed everyone. Even you.’

  Her voice had become harsh and thin. It no longer sounded like Suna’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jeannie said. ‘I’m still not connecting the dots.’

  ‘But you must.’

  ‘Then tell me the whole story, not just half of it. You say you never saw Jordan again. So who were you informing?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Listen, Suna. If my father was somehow involved in this…’

  And now Suna laughed. Or rather, snorted. ‘You Americans! How arrogant you are! You always think you’re the bad guys, don’t you? Well, let me tell you. If you ever need an evil puppetmaster, someone who can take an innocent fabrication and turn it inside out and set your mind on fire with unfounded suppositions and deranged paranoias – I’d advise you to go for a Turk.’

  ‘So was it İsmet?’ Jeannie asked.

  But Suna had said her piece. She rummaged through her handbag, fished out two twenty million lira notes, threw them on the table, and rising to her unsteady but determined feet, she left.

  Returning home, Jeannie found Sinan in the kitchen, grilling aubergines. ‘Nice day?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ she said.

  ‘Hmmm. Stormy weather?’

  ‘Well, you know Suna,’ she said. ‘When’s the last time you saw her calm?’

  He smiled, glanced over at the aubergines, picked up his knife to dice a large tomato. He took his time; he still moved like a cat. ‘I’m making a lot of this, by the way, so that you can eat it while I’m away.’ He put down his knife. Here,’ he said, pulling out a chair. ‘Sit down. You’re out of breath.’

  ‘How many days are you away this time?’

  ‘Three,’ he said. ‘First Copenhagen. Then Munich. There’s that commissioning round – we can’t afford to miss it. But listen, if…’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

  He gave her a sharp look.

  ‘But you’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m not fine now.’

  He went back to dicing. ‘So tell me. What did our sacred monster do today?’

  ‘She took me along with her to meet Billie Broome.’

  It took him a moment or two. ‘Oh, I know who you mean now. It’s just that I still think of her as Miss Broome. So tell me,’ he said as he went back to his dicing. ‘Is she the same as you remember, or has she changed?’

  ‘She took us to see someone.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Jordan Frick.’

  Although Sinan had his back to Jeannie, she thought she caught a momentary pause.

  ‘He’s been back in Turkey for some time now,’ Jeannie offered. ‘But working out of Ankara.’

  Sinan nodded.

  ‘You know about this?’

  ‘Only the bare bones,’ said Sinan. ‘The names, the silent partners…’

  ‘Who are they?’

  Sinan put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Whoever they are,’ Jeannie said, ‘They’ve backed the wrong horse.’

  ‘He’s not in very good shape right now, is he?’

  ‘You’ve heard that part too then?’ she asked. As he poured the diced tomatoes into the pan with the sautéed onions, Sinan nodded, somewhat absently.

  ‘If you knew all this,’ Jeannie asked, ‘why didn’t you tell me?’ Though she knew what the answer was – she was pregnant, she needed to conserve her strength. And he knew how much she hated to hear it. So instead he said, ‘Why upset you for no reason?’

  ‘That’s what Suna said, when she asked me not to tell you.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ he said. ‘She knows I know. She told me!’

  How tempted Jeannie was to ask the question that was burning inside her.

  Could Sinan read her mind just the same? He left the pan hissing on the stove and pulled up the chair next to her. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What’s done is done. Whatever she said to upset you, I am upset because she upset you. But the rest I forgive her. Forgave her. Long ago. Can we leave it there? Come.’ Taking her hand, he led her out to the porch. ‘I command you to put your feet up.’

  ‘You’re treating me like an invalid.’

  ‘I’m treating you like a woman who’s about to bear a child.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean…’

  ‘Listen, I know more about this than you do, remember?’

  ‘Don’t pull rank,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t if you put your feet up.’

  So she put her feet up, and he went back to the kitchen to finish their supper, leaving her to watch the traffic humming below the great glittering arcs of the bridge. Between its snaking shores, the Bosphorus was black – only a light here and there from a passing tanker. Set against the night, the windows of Rumeli Hisar looked like pictures suspended in space. She watched the little figures move about inside them, restless, caged, but still afraid to speak.

  The next morning Suna called her, and in another new voice – thin, edgy, and oozing false calm – she apologised for her ‘drunkenness.’

  ‘And for my garrulous exaggerations,’ she added. ‘I was, as you may have guessed, only speaking metaphorically. But you understood this already. Yes?’

&n
bsp; ‘No,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘I understand, however, that you spoke to Sinan, who assured you…’

  ‘That’s not true. I told him who we saw yesterday, but nothing else.’

  ‘Ah! What a good friend you are.’

  ‘You’ve got to level with me, Suna. I need to know what happened.’

  ‘Nothing happened. I assure you!’

  The stalemate persisted. Jeannie tried to find other ways in – tried to coax her conversations with Chloe and Lüset back to their first year together – dared, from time to time, to ask Sinan a direct question (What was eating away at Suna? If this was old history, wouldn’t it be better if she got it off her chest?). But she couldn’t bring herself to betray Suna’s confidence, couldn’t say the word ‘informer’, couldn’t, for that matter, ask Sinan why, when they got along so beautifully, when she couldn’t fault a single thing he did, when they hadn’t had a single argument (in, what was it now, eight months?) he was still holding himself back.

  She’d be on the verge of putting it into the best words she could muster when it would occur to her that he was no more able to betray Suna’s confidence than she was. If they both had had the same motive, how could she fault him?

  In the absence of facts, she began to spin theories. Had Jordan tricked Suna, walked her into a trap? Or was it someone else who’d blackmailed her, and was that person İsmet? If so, her father would have been involved as well. What sort of information did she pass him, if indeed she passed him anything? Even if Suna had betrayed them all, how could her crime be as serious as she seemed to believe? Around and around the questions flew, in ever-wilder circles. She had to air them; to breathe she had to speak. The more Sinan deflected her, the more desperate she became. But somewhere in Suna’s eyes, she could see the hint of a plea to rescue her, to force the issue.