Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  ‘But why am I bothering even to waste one ounce of thought on him? He knows nothing about the human heart, and one day Sinan, his most faithful disciple, will discover that he knows LESS THAN NOTHING about revolution.’

  She hid this journal well. Under the floorboards, where it would, after her departure, remain for more than thirty years. But it was too late for small acts of discretion. They’d been heard. They’d been recorded. They’d said the incriminating words, and now the dominoes were falling. Click, click, click.

  The day after her visit to Dutch Harding’s office, Jeannie arrived home to find her father sitting on the glass porch, waving a rolled up newspaper. ‘The New York Times has come through for us!’ He passed her a long and exceptionally biased piece justifying the military coup, and the declaration of martial law in eleven provinces: there had, it said, been a real and imminent danger of what a government spokesman had called ‘a strong and active uprising against the motherland and the republic.’ Or maybe more than one – there were the Kurds in the Southeast, and the rightwing extremists, and the Syrians with their jealous eyes on Hatay province, and the leftwing student extremists, many of whom were alleged to have been trained in Palestinian camps. There was, as usual, no effort to explain why.

  Jeannie was just remarking on this to her father when they heard footsteps in the library. It was Sinan. A sullen, silent Sinan. Though her father had gone out of his way to insist that Sinan should use their house as his ‘second home’, this was in no way reflected by the tone William took with him now.

  ‘Who let you in?’

  Lowering himself into a chair, Sinan asked if he could speak to Jeannie privately. ‘Be my guest,’ her father said. But he didn’t move. So they went out to the garden, where Sinan told Jeannie the news. That afternoon Dutch had been called to the headmaster’s office and threatened with dismissal for keeping a cobra on school property without permission.

  ‘My first response was elation. Good riddance! I said to myself. But not to Sinan. No, to Sinan I expressed consternation. But not as convincingly as I should have done, because now he said, “There’s more, you know. You won’t think this is so funny when I’ve told you the rest.” For after castigating Dutch over the cobra, the headmaster had produced a list of books. Was it true that Dutch kept these dangerous volumes in his office? Was it also true that he met secretly with a group of handpicked students to incite them to take up arms against the state? And what was this about drugs? What exactly was this “Operation Judas Tree”? Although he wouldn’t say where he’d got his information, the thing in his hands was clearly a transcript of our conversation in Dutch’s office. Almost certainly courtesy of İsmet.

  Now I, too, was outraged. But alas, not thinking clearly. When I think back now on the tumultuous days and weeks that followed, I sometimes wonder if I was able to think at all. Am I wrong to find myself lacking? Is this what it means to be overtaken by events?

  That evening, though, it still looked simple. We had been wronged. We would insist on our rights! My father would fix it for us. My father would get İsmet on the phone and read him the riot act. But when we went inside, Sinan asked me to go upstairs, so he could talk to my father alone.’

  It was not a happy conversation. It began with shouts and ended with slamming doors. ‘I’m sorry,’ her father told her when Jeannie rushed downstairs, ‘but I’m afraid I had to read him the riot act. For his own good, of course.’

  She reached for her coat. Her father stopped her.

  ‘I’d give him time to cool down if I were you.’ When she kept moving towards the door, he pulled her back. ‘You listen to me when I’m talking,’ he said. He had never taken that tone with her before.

  Then came the lecture. A hundred leftists had been arrested in Istanbul during the night. Most were students belonging to associations that had now been outlawed. The most famous was Deniz Gezmiş, the leader of the gang that had kidnapped the four US airmen in early March. Although they had not harmed their hostages, there was a strong chance that he would get the death penalty.

  ‘But he’s just a student!’ Jeannie protested.

  ‘He’ll hang anyway,’ her father replied

  ‘You don’t sound too sorry about it.’

  ‘I am very sorry. Especially for the poor deluded souls who go down with them. Which brings me to my point. I’m not happy with these new playmates of yours.’

  ‘Who exactly?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many names I don’t know.’

  ‘Then let’s keep it that way. I’m warning you – this Enlightenment crew in particular – they’re heading for trouble. They’re Maoists, did you know that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. But even if they were, why would it matter? They’re not doing anything illegal.’

  ‘Since when did you have to do something illegal to end up in jail?’

  ‘That’s so cynical,’ I said. ‘No it’s worse. It’s sick.’

  ‘Be that as it may. There is just no way this government is going to let this insurgency go unchecked. They have to shut this thing down.’

  ‘What, by throwing people into jail when they haven’t done a thing?’

  ‘They’ll have no trouble finding a pretext, believe you me.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me they’d stoop so low as to set them up?’

  William Wakefield sat back.

  ‘That’s vile,’ Jeannie said.

  And he said, ‘That’s life.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ she said.

  ‘You wish.’

  The martial law command had instated another curfew: no one was to be out in the streets after 9 pm. At 9.15 the phone rang. ‘Speak of the devil,’ her father said. But it was someone calling from the US. Their only phone was on the desk in the library; Jeannie could see him rolling his eyes as he boomed his most affable ‘hello’. The person on the other end had a lot to say. Her father punctuated his ‘yeses’ and ‘certainlys’ with contorted grins. Once he hit his own head with the palm of his hand. ‘If you spoke the language, Bob, you’d see the problem. The long and the short of it is that the Turkish for Judas tree has nothing to do with…’ There followed a tirade. Her father took the phone receiver off his ear so that his daughter could hear the anger.

  ‘You’re a drooling idiot. Do you hear that?’ This was her father shouting at the phone after he’d hung up. ‘I’m sorry, Jeannie. I hate to leave you here all alone. But someone’s pushed the panic button and I have to step out.’

  ‘What makes you so lucky that you can step out in the middle of a curfew and no one shoots you?’

  ‘For some reason I have a special pass.’

  ‘I was just going to bed anyway,’ she said. But she couldn’t sleep till she’d found Sinan. She tried all the likely numbers, but no one knew where he was. She got her book, made herself a cocoa, and curled up on the sofa next to the phone.

  At around eleven the doorbell rang. She spoke into the intercom. No answer. She went upstairs, to look down onto the meydan and caught just a glimpse of a young man heading down the stone path that led down past the house. She bolted downstairs, reaching the porch just in time to see him stepping out of the last pool of lamplight. It was Sinan. What was he doing outside during the curfew? He could be shot on sight – didn’t he know that?

  She went to the other side of the porch and got up on her tiptoes, craned her neck, willing her eyes around the corner that blocked her view of Haluk’s apartment. All she could see was the roof. But when she stood on a chair, the two top floors came into view. The windows of Haluk’s apartment were dark at first, but by the time she returned with her father’s binoculars, the light had gone on in the front room, and there was Sinan, pulling chairs around the table. Now he was answering the door. Three men came in, and two women. They looked like students. The door opened again, and in came the man she now hated more than any man in the world.

  Dutch. Instead of sitting down, h
e scratched his head and asked a question. Sinan pointed down the hallway. He disappeared and then Jeannie saw the light go on in the bathroom. She could just see Dutch’s silhouette in the frosted glass.

  There was another man in the doorway. He was rubbing the side of his face and smiling, smiling as if it hurt to do so. She knew this man, too, but it took her a few seconds to place him. No sooner had she realised that he was Sergei, the man from the Soviet Consulate, than he vanished into the shadows of the corridor.

  She moved the binoculars across to the third window. The back bedroom. The curtains were drawn. But - had they always been? Had she never checked?

  She felt like she was going to throw up.

  20

  The next day began like any other day, with breakfast at seven o’clock sharp on the glass porch. William Wakefield had a boiled egg, two pieces of toast, a stick of goat’s cheese and black coffee; Jeannie had two pieces of toast with jam, a stick of goat’s cheese, three olives and a glass of Turkish tea. When they were through, William took the plates back into the kitchen and came back with a big pile of newspapers. At the top was the most recent International Herald Tribune. He handed this to his daughter and spent the next five minutes going through the five or six Turkish papers underneath. Jeannie could make out the odd word here and there: anarchy, army, constitution, law, determination. Every front page carried the same pictures of the same men. She recognised one of them as the new Prime Minister. She assumed the others were the generals who were now in charge. Pigs, every one of them. Pigs.

  ‘Feeling better now?’ She did not deign to answer.

  He smiled at her as if she’d said something civil. And then, carrying on in spite of her silence, he said, ‘Well, anyway, things should calm down now. At least for a while.’ He put the last paper back onto the pile.

  The phone rang. ‘Maybe I spoke too soon.’ He answered, then cupped his hand over the receiver and beckoned Jeannie inside. ‘This will take some time,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you…’ She walked right past him and headed for the door.

  It was a sunny morning, with the clear air that only the north wind brings, but when she tried to get into the car, Korkmaz stopped her. He hadn’t finished checking the car for devices. She went to sit with Chloe on the marble bench under the plane tree while he prodded the underside of the car and she asked herself what difference five yards could make, or if she even cared.

  ‘So what’s the plan for the day?’ her father asked as they bumped along the steep cobblestone road to the shore. She shrugged her shoulders. When he dropped them off at school, he made his usual joke. ‘So girls, keep your eyes peeled! Don’t talk to any Communist sympathisers!’

  ‘I’ll talk to whoever I want to,’ Chloe said. She headed up the path looking haughty. As Jeannie made to close the door, her father caught it. ‘You okay?’

  She refused to look him in the eye.

  ‘I know – it’s a lot to unload on you. But it’s better that you know.’

  What she knew now was that her father had a file on every friend she’d made in Istanbul. He knew how old they were, what their favourite flavour of ice cream was, he knew their parents’ politics and all the organisations, overt and covert, they’d ever belonged to. He knew how well or badly they’d done in school. Who kept a mistress, who was heading for bankruptcy, involved in a swindle, interested in young boys. He knew everywhere Jeannie had been, too, and everyone she’d met, in greater detail than her own memory could furnish.

  He knew everything Dutch had ever said to anyone.

  He’d amassed these files, he said, to protect her. He asked her, as per usual, to keep it under her hat. As if she could tell this to anyone. Oh – by the way. My father’s been watching you. Just to be on the safe side, just to be in the know. He knows all your family’s secrets, by the way. And now, thanks to him, I know a fair number of them, too.

  How to warn her friends? How to protect them? Why had she been so blind, so wayward, headstrong and stupid? It could not be wrong to assume there were lines no father would cross – even a father like hers – but at what cost blindness? The worst thing was knowing that if she told her friends what she’d discovered, they’d just tell her they’d known all along.

  At Current Affairs Club that afternoon, her mind kept straying. As Suna took her ‘American friends’ through the Turkish papers, telling them what they didn’t say about the new crackdown and the role the US had played in it, the likely outcome for the Deniz Gezmiş gang and what this augured for the student left, Jeannie kept remembering things her father knew about her – and her family, and Lüset’s, and Miss Broome’s.

  She was sitting in the little dining room off Marble Hall afterwards, stirring her coffee, staring at the spoon, thinking of the lists they were on now, not because they were dangerous people, but because they were her friends. Then Suna burst in. ‘So there you are. This is good. We need your help.’

  Miss Broome had offered to ‘liberate’ a mimeograph machine for them, and Suna had decided that Jeannie should be the one to carry it out of the building. ‘You’re a special student. Your father can get you out of anything. So hurry.’

  If I’m caught, they can’t touch me. This was the chant that kept her going, as the wind ripped around Akıntıburnu, as cars slowed down with gaping men whom Suna dispatched with scornful looks, as she tried not to hear what Suna was saying, because it was no longer safe. Sinan was waiting for them on the college terrace. He looked as if he’d been up all night, too. He wouldn’t look Jeannie in the eye. Why? Had he guessed what she now knew? She did not dare ask – he had a crowd of friends with him. They, too, were loaded down with bags. They were joking around in their usual way but they looked scared. Their bags carried books and supplies they had cleared out of the room from which they’d run an ‘association’. They did not say which – only that it had been banned.

  Haluk had offered the use of his apartment. About halfway there, Jeannie realised that the boy walking next to him was the infamous Rıfat, the green-eyed boy who’d spirited Chloe away from him. But there was no sign of any tension between Rıfat and Haluk now. If anything, Haluk seemed flattered to be of use.

  Just before they reached the meydan the plastic bag in which they’d been carrying Miss Broome’s mimeograph machine developed a fatal hole, so Jeannie took the whole group into the garden of the Pasha’s Library and went inside to find something sturdier. And there in the hallway was the trunk her father had brought out the night before – the one with the files. Yes, she thought. Maybe she should let them see these, let them know what he knows. But when she opened the trunk, she found it empty.

  “That’s perfect,” said Suna.

  “But if your father misses it?” asked Rıfat.

  “He won’t,” Jeannie said.

  “Ah, to be a rich American,’ said Rıfat. And Haluk laughed.

  It was the same at the apartment – Haluk could not do enough to make his erstwhile rival comfortable. Rıfat and his friends were to use the dining room as their new headquarters. Jeannie sat down at the table, dragging her spoon through yet another cup of coffee. There before her was the picture window from which, if she craned her neck and looked up, up, up, she could see her father’s glassed in-porch, and the wall on which he hung his binoculars.

  When she got up to draw the curtains, Suna said, ‘Don’t do that. We need the light.’ How to warn them? Would she make it worse if she warned them? What was she doing here at all?

  Then she heard Rıfat asking almost the same question. ‘Why are we entertaining an American? Under the circumstances, isn’t it foolish?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Suna. ‘I would offer two reasons. First, she is our friend – a sweet, innocent, child, and we trust her. Secondly, she can protect us.’

  ‘Ah. Don’t we already have enough Americans protecting us?’

  ‘This is different,’ said Suna. ‘She shares our ideas.’

  ‘But her father’s a spy,’ said Rıfat.

&nbs
p; And Suna said, ‘Yes, her father is a spy. Even worse, he is an enemy of the people. But who amongst us has a father who isn’t?’ They were speaking in Turkish – they thought Jeannie couldn’t understand them. But – was it because they were speaking more slowly than usual? – she’d understood every word.

  ‘You haven’t told her what we’re planning, have you?’ Rıfat now asked.

  ‘Ah!’ said Suna. ‘What sort of imbecile do you take me for? No, to answer your question, she’s best kept in the dark.’

  ‘But in that case…’ It was only after Jeannie had blurted out these words that she realised: she, too, had been speaking in Turkish. Neither Suna nor Rıfat seemed to have noticed. But Sinan had.

  Slowly, very slowly, he lifted his finger to his lips to silence her. Then he stretched his arms and yawned. ‘I’m so bored,’ he said in Turkish. ‘I need a nap.’

  ‘Our world is falling apart at the seams, and you need a nap,’ said Suna.

  Sinan smiled lazily. Then he turned to Jeannie and asked her in English if she was ‘feeling sleepy’.

  ‘I’m beginning to see how helpful it is to have an American in the house,’ said Rıfat, in Turkish.

  ‘Watch your tongue,’ Sinan snapped. ‘You’re speaking about my girlfriend.’

  ‘Is she good?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Better than you’ll ever know,’ said Sinan.

  ‘Then why not share her?’

  This was too much for Jeannie to bear. Speaking in English now, she said, ‘Not for all the money in the world…’ Sinan’s grabbed her arm and marched her into the hallway. Only when he had closed the door of the back bedroom did he let go. Leaning against the wall, he let himself sag. ‘That was close,’ he said. ‘So close. You have no idea.’