Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  What William Wakefield’s job actually entailed I do not know. But he made no effort to hide his interest in Robert College. By the late 60s, my parents and most of their colleagues were preoccupied by the same issues that were tearing up college campuses in the US – civil rights, the assassinations, Vietnam, Cambodia. Many had, like my parents, left the US to escape the McCarthy Era. Because they leaned to the left politically and led vaguely bohemian lives, the people at the US Consulate took a dim view of them. We were a hotbed of Communism, they often said. The Soviets must have overheard. Certainly, I remember a string of very friendly men from the Soviet Consulate coming uninvited to my parents’ parties. The only people they befriended were the drunks who saw them as a source of Russian vodka. But William Wakefield, who was a regular at these parties, too, would never fail to take my friends and me aside and warn us not to speak to these men or accept their gifts.

  My closest friends at that point were mostly American – and mostly children of my father’s colleagues. But by the late 60s, I had left the international community school and was studying at the American College for Girls, where tuition was in English and all but two of my classmates were Turkish. The boys we knew were mostly from Robert Academy, the boys’ lycée that was our brother school. Or they had already graduated and moved on to Robert College, where the students had themselves drifted steadily leftwards during the 60s, in much the same way as students in Europe and the US, aided and abetted by the handful of young Americans who shared their sentiments. My own political education began with one such teacher – a Miss Broome, from Mount Holyoke, who taught us English. Sinan was a protégé of her lover, a Dutch Harding, who taught mathematics at Robert Academy. His degree was from Columbia, and he was, we were told, a veteran of its famous 1968 strike.

  That, in any event, was what Sinan told me during our brief time together.

  When I stepped back into the Pasha’s Library late last summer, all I knew about the Trunk Murder was what I’d read in that lurid newspaper clipping that an anonymous ill-wisher had sent to me all those years ago. Which is not as strange as it might sound. In the early 70s, links between Turkey and the outside world were severely limited. The economy was closed to all but essential imports. Foreign travel was unusual for Turkish citizens and difficult to arrange. The phone lines were unreliable, and there was no direct dialling abroad. Letters from America could take up to a month to arrive or longer. All the television and radio stations were owned by the state and expressed its views.

  By June 1971, when that lurid clipping reached me, newspapers were subject to censorship just as severe. Because by then the military had stepped in, to clamp down on the leftwing students whose ever more violent riots, pitched battles, bombs and kidnappings had, they said, taken the country to the brink of anarchy. A large part of the intelligentsia (including many friends of my parents) and thousands of students (including many of my father’s former students) were behind bars. This had not, however, stopped the bombs and the kidnappings. From ex-students living in the US, my father heard it rumoured that these incidents were provocations orchestrated by MİT, Turkey’s notorious intelligence service – with the CIA offering a helping hand.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, such rumours showed that there was still some public sympathy for the students. This changed abruptly in the first week of June 1971, when a cell led by a student named Mahir Çayan kidnapped the Israeli consul and killed him. It was later rumoured that the cell-member who orchestrated this event was a colonel in the Turkish army – an agent provocateur – though the newspapers of the time made no mention of him. He had, it was alleged, already fled the country when his comrades barricaded themselves into an apartment building on the Asian side of the city, keeping an army officer’s twelve-year-old daughter hostage until the police stormed the apartment, shooting to kill. This was one of two scandals that turned the public against the student left. The other, which came less than a week later, was the so-called Trunk Murder.

  The story as I had it from the lurid newspaper cutting went like this: a Maoist cell consisting of the sons and daughters of some of Turkey’s leading diplomats and industrialists had befriended one Jeannie Wakefield, the daughter of a US consular official, poisoning her mind and drawing her, perhaps unknowingly, into a plot against her father. All members of the cell were taken into custody after a bomb planted in the consular car left only his Turkish chauffeur in critical condition. However, they were later released. (It was implied that this was due to parental pressure.)

  The following day, the cell decamped to the ‘garçonniere’ in the village of Rumeli Hisar that doubled as their secret hideaway. Shaken by the discovery that the authorities were fully acquainted with every aspect of their illegal activities, they became convinced that one of their number must be an informer. Having subjected the accused to a kangaroo trial and found him guilty, they had killed him, chopped him up, and put him into a trunk.

  The victim was their teacher and political mentor, Dutch Harding.

  The boys in the group had vanished after the murder, leaving it to the girls to dispose of the body. But while they were dragging the trunk from a taxi onto a private yacht that belonged to one of their parents, the driver noticed a trail of blood, and duly informed the authorities. The girls were then taken in for questioning. One had fallen out of a fourth floor window and nearly died.

  Running across the top of the lurid newspaper article were the culprits’ lycée graduation photographs. With their black robes and mortarboards, they looked at first to be members of the same studious family. Or perhaps it was shock that had kept me from recognising them right away.

  Because the boys were Sinan and his best friend Haluk. The girls were my ex-best friend, Chloe Cabot, and two Turkish classmates of ours from the Girls’ College, also former friends about whom I had very mixed feelings. Their names were Lüset and Suna. Suna was the one who had fallen out of the fourth floor window during interrogation. It was Suna I had heard calling down the stairs.

  Perhaps everyone carries around a story like this – an unimaginable horror, visited upon a childhood friend, or the boy next door, or the girl you haven’t seen since she sat between you and the window in second grade. When you knew them, they were ordinary in every way. As deeply as you bore into your memory, as mercilessly as you dredge it, you can find no sign that marked them for their fate. But you need to find it – it must be there – it must have happened for a reason, because it if didn’t, it could also have happened to you. So if you can’t find the answer in the past, then you must at least try and conjure up the scene of the crime, make some sense of it – understand, at the very least, how A led to B.

  For years, I’d tried. Lost years of sleep, struggling to force the facts I had – the facts I thought I had – into a shape that made sense. But I never got very far. I could imagine Sinan with another girl, a girl like me, but more innocent. I could see them arm in arm at the Pasha’s Library, breaking my heart as they watched the moon rise over the Bosphorus, on the marble bench at the edge of the secret garden. I could see Jeannie’s father, standing on the glass porch, affably clocking them. And if I gazed over the ledge into the village of Rumeli Hisar, I could see the garçonniere: the glasses piled up in the sink, and the shoes and socks strewn across the floor, and the never-washed sheets. I could imagine my lost friends at the table, reading coffee grounds, pretending to believe the outrageous fortunes they found in them, but laughing all the while. I could imagine Suna tapping Sinan’s coffee cup and saying, ‘So this spy who’s betrayed us. What are we to do with him?’ But no matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine what Sinan might have said in reply. A curtain descended, and my mind went black.

  From time to time, a scene would drift in from the shadows. Always the same cast of characters, and always in the garçonniere – but arranged into a new formation. Sometimes Suna had the gun, sometimes it was Chloe or the cipher who had replaced me. Sometimes Jeannie Wakefield was an innocent byst
ander, and sometimes she was the accuser. Sometimes she was facing an armchair whose occupant I couldn’t see, and sometimes she was standing over the body lying face down on the floor. Sometimes it was Sinan standing over the mentor who had betrayed him, and sometimes it was Haluk. Sometimes it wasn’t a gun in his hand, but the hatchet I could never bring myself to believe he’d used to chop Dutch Harding’s body into pieces. No matter how I arranged the scene, it refused to stay in place. There were too many variables, and too few facts. There had been a murder. I seemed to know almost everyone implicated in it. But I did not know which one was the killer. And neither could I understand what might have driven him or her to kill the softspoken, bookish, arrogantly inert Dutch Harding.

  I just couldn’t see him as an agent provocateur.

  But I could see the girls, abandoned, and left to clear away the evidence, lugging the trunk down the stairwell, across the cobblestones to the waiting taxi. Their hearts stopping when the taxi driver threw it into the trunk and cried, ‘What do you have in there, a body?’ Their hearts stopping again as they paid him off in front of Lüset’s father’s yacht, and as they dragged the trunk up over the curb, and looked behind to see a trail of blood.

  Suna, in the interrogation room. On the window ledge, dangling her legs. In the shadows behind her, the shape of a man. In the street below, Sinan, saying nothing, but pleading with his eyes. What did he want her to do? Go back into the room or jump?

  Things he’d said during our seven-night tryst came floating back to me. Things that, under other circumstances, would have meant nothing. I’d be sitting in a lecture hall at Wellesley, jotting down notes about Savanarola – or in the dining hall, at the salad bar – and I’d see him on the chaise longue, smiling his sulky smile, stroking my arm, bringing my hand to his lips, to kiss each finger, one by one.

  ‘You’re bad. As bad as I am, aren’t you?’

  ‘You’re like me, you don’t know when to stop.’

  ‘How far are you willing to go with me? No – how far will you follow?’

  ‘You want to know what I did last night? I learned how to make a Molotov Cocktail… You don’t believe me? Fine, it’s settled. Next time you’re coming too…’

  ‘What? I don’t think so. You are coming because I say you’re coming!’

  ‘I’m a bloodthirsty Turk, after all. Can’t you see the knife between my lips?’

  If I’d stayed – if he’d kept his promise – if we’d kept to our plan – would he have pulled me into this cell of his, and this murder? Had he tried, would I have the sense to pull away from him, or would I have melted at the sight of him, as I had done a thousand times over, each and every one of the seven secret nights we’d spent together? If there was such a thing as a point of no return, would I have recognised it – or sailed along regardless like the rest of them? I needed to believe that I was made of different stuff than they were. But I knew I wasn’t. It could have been me in that room, if I’d stayed, if he’d kept his promise. I’d been spared only because he’d fallen out of love with me – if he’d ever been in love with me – and chosen someone else. Did that mean I had no part in it? For I had wished them to hell. And my dream had come true.

  Six months after the murder, in December 1971 when I was a sophomore at Wellesley, I ran into Chloe Cabot, my ex-best friend, in Harvard Square. (And yes – you may have guessed this already. Our final disagreement had been about Sinan. Though they’d been only friends, they’d been close friends. Though she’d had no real reason to feel jealous, she’d acted as if I’d stolen him away.) This chance meeting in Harvard Square was the first I knew Chloe was not languishing in a jail in Turkey. For someone who’d been involved in a murder, she was disturbingly offhand.

  She had just started at Radcliffe, she told me. She hated it, of course. She didn’t think she’d last. Our short and stilted conversation tapered into a silence: this would, I knew, be my only chance to ask her what had really happened. But as I searched for the right words, a wave of terror passed through me. I was afraid, I suppose, that she might tell me the truth.

  Later that winter, in a burst of belated courage, I did make an effort to track her down, only to be told that she had taken a leave of absence.

  The following summer – this would have been June, 1972 – I was helping a friend paint a room in a house on Cape Cod when my eyes happened to fall on the sheet of newsprint we were using for our brushes. It was a front page from one of Boston’s underground papers, and at the bottom was a little black box in which it was stated that on June the whatever the paper had run a story about a murder, allegedly involving a CIA operative then stationed in Istanbul, Turkey. Because the author, Jeannie Wakefield, was personally acquainted with all involved, the editors had been less than diligent in checking her facts. As it had since emerged that her story was false in just about every particular, the editors, along with the author, wished to offer their most sincere apologies, and their most sincere thanks to the Turkish Ambassador, who had kindly offered to furnish the full facts of the case in a later issue. I forgot to keep my surprise to myself – of all the places to see this story, and this name! It was my friend who, eager to know more about this murky tale, got straight on the phone to the underground newspaper. But for the obvious legal reasons, and to my huge relief, they refused to send her the issue with Jeannie’s original article. So once again, it was out of my hands. From time to time, late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would regret having made no second effort. But never for long.

  I had the sense, at least, to recognise that the real problem was in my mind, that, strictly speaking, the Trunk Murder had nothing to do with me, that any new facts I gleaned were unlikely to explain to me why I felt as if it did. Slowly, I weaned myself off it. If my thoughts returned regardless, I learned not to play along. No more rearrangements of the cast at the scene of the crime, no more long nights lolling on the window ledge, staring into the abyss. Though the scenes still came back to me, they were less and less frequent. Slowly the life drained out of them, until no one spoke, and no one moved, and nothing in the shadows or the street below disturbed or even interested me.

  Much later, when my parents were back in Istanbul, I did hear passing references from time to time – enough to know that Sinan (who had spent many years in Denmark) worked in films, that his old friend Haluk (who had spent many years in England and was now back in the bosom of his industrialist family) was rumoured to be Sinan’s chief backer, that Suna (who, like her friend Lüset, had been released from prison in the mid-70s) was now in the sociology department at the university, and that Chloe, (who had returned to Istanbul in the late 80s) had been blissfully married to a plastic surgeon until he died of leukaemia. I felt no urge, and made no effort, to get back into touch.

  4

  But now here they were, in the Pasha’s Library, the entire cast minus Sinan. Bustling about the great new loft that they’d turned into some sort of incident room. At first they didn’t see me. And, in a sense, neither could I see them. I am wondering if it’s even possible to explain how I felt at that moment – what thoughts crossed my mind as I stood there, contemplating the path not taken.

  I noticed first of all how gracefully they occupied it. Four shapes, huddled around a desk, a screen, a pool of lamplight. Heads and shoulders rising and falling to the rhythm of their whispers. Their every gesture speaking of the years I had not shared with them.

  They were reading some sort of massive document. From the limpness of the paper, I guessed it was a fax. It was Chloe I could see most clearly, though at first I knew her only from the way she licked her finger as she leafed through the papers on her lap. And her feet – even after all these years, she still turned them in. But there was no other sign of the awkward teenager I had once known. The bulges and blemishes had been airbrushed away. Now she was all angles and gold bracelets and linen cut on the bias. No sign of a curl, even, in her sleek and backcombed copper hair. She had the ‘careless poise’ I remembered our di
scussing in the abstract with some passion at restaurant tables all over the Mediterranean, as our parents drank and we designed outfits and ‘accoutrements’ for the ideal woman.

  I remembered in particular an argument we’d had about engagement rings when I was twelve and she was eleven. Chloe’s was to be the ‘second largest emerald in the world.’ When I asked what she’d do if the love of her life turned up with a diamond, she’d said, ‘Well, obviously. I’d have to say no.’ As her hand flitted to her lips, a flash of green told me she had not been disappointed.

  The gentle, bearlike creature sitting next to her – could it really be Haluk, the Playboy of the Eastern World? This man seemed too comfortable inside his skin to have been the restive boy I could still see smiling so blandly as his foot tapped the accelerator. Only when he turned to comfort the woman sitting next to him did I catch a glimpse of…

  Lüset! She had not changed at all. She was the same porcelain doll. She was kissing Haluk on the cheek – how strange! But there was no time to consider why. For now here was Suna. The same. Only more so. As her blazing blue eyes cut through me, I could hear her last words to me: ‘I repudiate you. I repudiate you. And once more. I repudiate you. I have said it three times now. And still you stand before me?’

  What had I said in reply? I remembered only her retort. ‘So stay there! Stand there like a candle for all eternity. It changes nothing! For me – for all true patriots of Turkey – you have ceased to exist.’ Was she still holding to her promise, or had she failed to recognise me? I did not have time to ask, because now Jeannie had run to Suna’s side. ‘Is this it, finally?’ she asked.