Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  “Okay then,” she said. “That’s sort of how I feel, too.” But then she said, “I love this view.” Then she lost herself inside it, as people do. When she came back to herself, she lit up a Marlboro in a stiff, ceremonial way that betrayed her newness to the ritual. Then she laid out the options.

  There was the Covered Bazaar. But it would be a hot and dusty trip and “deadly dull, because my mother wouldn’t give me any money.” There were the Prince’s Islands, “but the trip out there will be long and agonising and even if you wear those jeans you’ll get harassed.” The third option was a beach on the Black Sea, but there was a strong undertow and the lifeguards were hopeless. “Or I could take you to meet some boys I know.” Her pout faltered at that point, so I said, “Tell me more about these boys.”

  “They’re just boys.” Then she added, “They’re fun.”

  “Turkish?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But their English is better than yours. Well sort of, I mean one of them. And even the other one has read Chaucer in the original and you probably haven’t.”

  That, for some reason, had decided it. A quarter of an hour later, they were at Robert College, on the terrace with the postcard view of the Bosphorus. The wall was lined with students sitting with their backs to it, and facing the student dormitory, which was festooned with the same anti-American banners she’d seen in so many other parts of the city, and that her father had been more than happy (too happy?) to translate. But this afternoon, it was too hot to wonder why. The trees gave some shade but the only movement of air came from the tablecloths a group of waiters were shaking as they set up tables for a reception next to the statue of the man she now knew to be Atatürk, the nation’s founding father.

  She turned her attention to the two boys in the tennis court.

  ‘If I’m going to be absolutely honest, the one I noticed the first was the one everyone must notice first, because he looked like he had walked off the cover of Sports Illustrated. Bronze-limbed and golden-curled – an Apollo in his tennis whites! He had an easy smile and no inclination to hurry and if he missed a shot, he just burst out laughing.

  His friend was thinner and darker and more intense. He’d made no concessions to the tennis god. He was wearing a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and paint-splashed cut-off jeans, and he moved like a cat.’

  He had short, black hair that was just beginning to curl its way out of a regulation haircut, and large, dark eyes, and a sunny smile that had a note of defiance in it. When a ball went over the fence, and he came out to hunt in the bushes, Jeannie noticed a bead of water rolling down his face. When he saw Jeannie noticing him, he stopped short and, for a few moments, stared back. Sulkily, expectantly – as if they had history. Was he waiting for her to smile and wave? Before she could decide, he stood up and walked away.

  ‘I’m still not sure what game he was playing at that point. Or Chloe. Or Apollo, whose name turned out to be Haluk. Only that there was a great deal of humming and hawing, with everyone wandering around pretending they didn’t recognise anyone, until suddenly they were throwing their tennis rackets into the back of a not very new Mustang (though apparently it is quite a coup to be the owner of a not very new Mustang in this inscrutable country) and before I knew it, we were in the Mustang, too, myself in the backseat next to the dark boy who introduced himself as “John Reed, the author of The Shot Was Heard Around the World” and had the nerve to expect me to believe him. What does he take me for, an ignoramus?

  His real name is Sinan.’

  10

  This he’d revealed some time later, after several brushes with death, when they were illegally parked in front of the Bebek police station, overlooked by a soldier who was cradling a rusty submachine gun in his arms. (No one else had found this at all alarming, or even strange.) Haluk and Chloe (who seemed to be an item, though their conspiratorial manner suggested this was somehow controversial) had gone off on some undisclosed errand, and Jeannie had taken advantage of the lull to ask this sulky cat-boy a few key questions. To which Sinan’s answers were: no, they hadn’t ever met before, though he’d heard a lot about her from her father. And yes, her father knew his father, who was currently the Ambassador to Pakistan. What’s more, her father knew his mother, who was currently trying to revive her singing career in Paris. ‘And while we’re on the subject, my name isn’t really John Reed.’

  ‘Actually, I sort of worked that out already,’ Jeannie said. ‘So Sinan,’ she added, when he had told her his real name. ‘It sounds like you’re all alone here.’

  That was how it had all started. Though (as seemed to be the custom in the baiting game) he’d begun with the truth. ‘Alone? You are sadly, very sadly mistaken. There is the maid, always the maid breathing over me. And my father’s sister. And about a million other relatives. Right now, I’m mostly at Haluk’s. I don’t know if Chloe mentioned this, but we’re cousins.’

  ‘It all sounds very cosy,’ Jeannie said.

  Sinan snorted. ‘Cosy. That’s good.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘You want the truth? Okay, then. I’ll tell you. Haluk’s father – my uncle – is a gangster.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. Strictly speaking, he’s an arms dealer, and let me tell you. You don’t want an arms dealer making sure you do your homework.’ Sighing for effect, he’d added, ‘We can’t do anything without his knowing. Not even if he’s out of the country, like he is today. Let me put it this way. In the vast prison that is Turkey, his reach is infinite.’

  ‘That’s quite an indictment,’ Jeannie had said, but in a way that made it clear she was not buying it.

  His eyes darkened. ‘We try to make the best of it, of course. But right now we’re under house arrest, and I mean literally. You see, we failed an exam – the same exam – and so summer was cancelled. We’re supposed to be studying. Haluk’s grandparents are supposed to be our jailers. They let us out because they feel sorry for us, but if Haluk’s father finds out, he’ll kill them. And he will. He has spies everywhere. We can’t even have an ice cream without him hearing about it.’

  Losing her patience now, she’d asked, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Because it’s true,’ he’d insisted. ‘And everyone knows it.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean he’d want you blabbing about it, does it?’

  ‘In a country like this, it makes no difference one way or the other.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s accepted. It’s just how things are.’

  ‘That,’ Jeannie said, ‘is what people say when they bow to defeatism.’

  The faintest glitter in his eyes this time. ‘So you think I am defeatist.’

  ‘Not just a defeatist, but a liar.’

  ‘You want me to prove it? Okay, then. I will.’

  So their next stop had been a swimming club called the Lido, where it was immediately clear that there were indeed a lot of people watching their every move. Mothers, anyway. One by one they ambled past to say hello to the two boys, to ask after their parents, to enquire after ‘these delightful girls’, and from time to time, to ask after another girl called Suna. Though the name meant nothing to Jeannie, it did to Chloe, who flicked her head at the very mention of it. When Jeannie asked who Suna was, Sinan explained that she was someone who thought she was going out with Haluk. ‘Well is she?’ Jeannie had then asked. She wasn’t. ‘Then why does she think so?’ The answer: ‘This is Turkey.’

  Before she could ask for a fuller explanation, they were joined by a dark-haired woman Jeannie guessed to be in her forties. Though she had no sense of her face, just gold and red nail varnish, sunglasses and flashing white teeth, she’d found her gaze unnerving. She could not, of course, understand the tense exchange that ensued – only that she was its object.

  Then without warning this woman threw back her head in raucous laughter. Offering her hand to Jeannie, she said, ‘How rude I’ve been. Allow me to introduce myself.’ She turne
d out to be ‘Suna’s mother.’

  ‘I hear you have only just arrived in this country and have yet to acquaint yourself with our strange ways.’

  So Jeannie had told her, with a sincerity that this woman seemed to find very amusing, that she was doing her best.

  ‘Ah, yes. I’m sure you will continue to do so, too. But I hear from these boys that you refuse to believe a thing they say.’

  To which Jeannie had replied that they’d been telling her some pretty preposterous things.

  ‘Ah – for example – that Haluk’s father is a gangster?’

  Yes, that was one thing. ‘Though I find it hard to believe.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Suna’s mother, leaning forward with a smile.

  ‘Because in America, no one ever admits to that sort of thing. They’d have to lie about it. You know, hide behind a front.’

  ‘Where did you find this girl? What a treasure! So innocent! So sweet!’

  ‘I can’t say I warmed to the Lido, though I should perhaps describe it. Strictly speaking, it is swimming club about halfway into the city proper. It has a large saltwater pool that gives the impression of spilling over into the Bosphorus, and its clientele, I’m told, is very select. However, the ivy-covered hotel overlooking the pool is, I’m told, an infamous rendezvous hotel where businessmen entertain their floozies. (Though not, I hope, the ones whose wives belong to the pool.) To add to the bizarre mix, Simon and Garfunkel were on the intercom, extolling “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”. I can’t say I was impressed by the Lido’s fixtures. The tables and deckchairs were clunky and would not have looked out of place in a bus terminal. But the waiters sparkled white, and the women sparkled gold, and though I couldn’t see the eyes behind the dark glasses, I still felt a growing chill.

  So I was not at all sorry when we suddenly had to return at breakneck speed to Haluk’s house, which is one of those big modern villas on the water, just outside Bebek. It has wall-to-wall picture windows on the side facing the water, and highly polished parquet floors dotted here and there with glass-topped tables and black naugahyde sofas. We went straight out to the seaside terrace; an expanse of white marble ending in a pier where a speedboat named Kitten II bobbed in the waves.

  We had only just settled into our deckchairs when the phone rang and Haluk dashed back inside. Sinan explained it was Haluk’s father, calling to make sure he was at home studying.

  They were still conversing when an owlish couple shuffled into the room. Haluk’s grandparents. They were wearing matching grey slippers, and there was fear in their eyes until Haluk told them who I was. It turns out they know my father. Is there anyone here who doesn’t?

  At this point a maid appeared with a dish of baklava. Although she offered it to everyone, I was the only one to accept. Haluk’s grandmother lavished me with praise as I ate her first serving, speaking also of the despair she felt about the others. The problem with the young, she said, was that they were all too thin. It made them ill, and it was illness, she thought, that propelled them into tomfoolery. ‘But you, you are different. I can tell from your appetite and the purity of your face.’

  She kept pressing more baklava on me, and I ended up eating four portions. No one else ate a thing. I was also the only one who made any effort to keep the conversation going.’

  In the fifty-three page letter she left for me on her computer at the Pasha’s Library, Jeannie describes how she stopped at this point, ‘to steel myself, to prepare to stab myself with the truth. But somehow, when my pen returned to paper it refused to bend to my will, skipping instead to the next section,’ she said. This, then, is what she’d skipped over: after she had described her plans for the year, and her great and growing interest in Near East Culture, and run out of anything interesting to say, Jeannie had remarked on what a beautiful house this was. To which the grandmother replied, ‘You are very kind. Yes, we are fortunate. The Bosphorus breathes life into our souls.’ She’d then asked if she and her husband lived there alone. ‘Or does your son – Haluk’s father, I mean – live here, too?’

  ‘It depends on his travels and responsibilities,’ the grandmother had replied.

  To which Jeannie had said, ‘I hear he’s a gangster.’ At which the grandfather stopped chewing. The grandmother let out a tiny cry. Chloe let out the faintest of guffaws and the boys stayed hunched over their plates. ‘Sinan!’ the grandfather cried in a great rumbling voice. There followed a furious interrogation. By the end of it, Sinan’s tan had turned deep red. And then it was Haluk’s turn. Then the grandmother turned back to Jeannie and said, ‘Oh, what is to become of us? Oh, this dreadful malnutrition!’

  ‘The hunger has gone to their heads!’ she cried. This is why they have fed you such lies about Haluk’s father!’ And that was not all. For according to Haluk’s grandmother, it was hunger that had made ‘our boys’ fail their Turkish history exam. It was hunger that had made Haluk answer a question about the founding of the Republic in ‘nonsensical verse’. Sinan had been even hungrier, she said: he had answered in Chinese ideograms, copied, as Sinan himself later confessed, from a book ‘penned by none other than that nonsensical ingrate, Chairman Mao. This is clearly a case of sugar deficiency,’ she told Jeannie. It also explained why, when his Turkish History teacher had called on him to recite the passage they’d been instructed to learn by heart, Sinan had ‘made a mockery of the motherland’ by choosing instead to recite a passage from the Koran.

  To which Sinan said, ‘Actually, I was making a mockery of rote learning.’

  At which the grandmother turned to Jeannie and said, ‘Have you learned what is the Turkish word is for youth? It is “delikanlı”, and the true translation is “crazy blood”. I fear that the blood of these two boys is very crazy.’

  With that, she and her husband shuffled off to take a nap. After a few moments of silence, Sinan put his hands on his head and let out such a wail you’d think someone had died. But no, he was laughing. Both he and Haluk were laughing so hard they were in pain. They got up and threw their arms around each other. They staggered apart and held their stomachs and doubled over and embraced each other again, and then, with tears in his eyes, Sinan came over, took Jeannie’s head in his hands and kissed her forehead. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  ‘Thank you for what?’ she said. This sent them back into hysterics. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Everyone knows he’s a gangster except for his own parents?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Chloe. ‘Don’t you get it? They set you up.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ said Sinan.

  ‘So am I!’ Jeannie said, fighting tears. ‘You shouldn’t do that, you know!’

  At which Chloe told the boys they’d ‘both been asinine.’

  ‘Asinine?’ said Haluk. ‘Please, madame, can you define your fine words?’

  ‘I’d rather eat my hat,’ Chloe said. Turning to Jeannie, she added, ‘Listen, if you’ve had enough of this, we can go home.’

  But the boys fell to their knees and apologised, promised to stop playing stupid games, promised the girls that if they stayed, they’d take them out for the evening on Kitten II. ‘I thought you were under house arrest,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘Yes, but if we work hard…’

  ‘You’re not working hard, though. You’re goofing off.’

  They liked this expression and repeated it and laughed.

  ‘Why’s it called Kitten II, anyway?’

  ‘If I told you,’ said Sinan, ‘you wouldn’t believe me.’

  They told her anyway, and she did.

  But how could she have done otherwise? Everything here seemed equally strange, so equally plausible. Was it not plausible that a speedboat named Kitten II might be a descendant of another speedboat named Kitten I? You couldn’t just disbelieve every word someone uttered. Why would anyone who didn’t have an older brother want to pretend, just for the sake of it, that he had?

  What they’d told her (taking care to do so out of Chloe’s hearing) was tha
t Haluk’s older brother had been out gallivanting in Bebek Bay one afternoon when he’d seen a group of men in dark glasses board the powerboat that the CIA kept in Bebek Bay to follow and photograph any interesting Soviet ship that happened to pass by. Upon seeing him, the boys had claimed (their eyes narrowing as they spoke), the spy boat had given chase, and in his panic Haluk’s brother had steered into the path of the Soviet vessel, and ‘crashed to his death’. Chloe had seen it happen, Sinan and Haluk told Jeannie in whispers. She still had nightmares about it, which is why they never mentioned it in her presence. Haluk, meanwhile, was being groomed to take his lost brother’s place and join the gangsterhood. In Jeannie’s fifty-three-page letter to me, she recalled feeling ‘obliged’ to believe them ‘though of course Sinan did have to take me down to the jetty by the mosque to prove to me that there was indeed a powerboat moored there that met with his description. Once I’d seen it, it seemed very important to share his sorrow. Once I’d done that, I was halfway to what I would now call falling in love.’

  By six that afternoon, the boys had abandoned their books for a game of ping-pong. It could hardly be called a game, as their balls landed in the sea more often than on the table. Every time one of them lost a ball, the other would turn to him and say, ‘You shouldn’t do that, you know!’ – imitating Jeannie’s voice. But she could only admire them for laughing at all, for they’d stared death in the face. The only time Jeannie had ever stared death in the face was when she had buried her pet goldfish. She watched Haluk daydreaming at the water’s edge and all she could think was, no; he really doesn’t have the makings of a gangster, does he? She watched Sinan laugh as he dispatched his last ping-pong ball to the sea, and how she marvelled at his spirit. To stand and laugh, in the very place where he had seen his doomed cousin speed off to his death…she’d never have that strength, and now, as she watched Sinan put his fingers through the damp curls clinging to the base of his neck, she again shared his sorrow. The tragedy had left no mark. But she could see it now, lurking under every surface.