Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Tell me,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘If I’m putting you in danger just by being here, then maybe…’

  ‘Don’t even say it,’ said Sinan. He kissed her forehead, then her lips, then her neck. ‘Don’t even think it. If you let me handle this, I can make it all right. But please, be careful. Please, no more Turkish. You must try and keep your face blank, too. You must never, ever, ever, let them know how much – where are you going, Jeannie? What are you doing?’

  She was drawing the curtains.

  21

  ‘When you hear your name, don’t move. Don’t even move your eyes. Keep looking downwards. Study your hands. Concentrate on your lips, on keeping them still. Even when you want to laugh. Especially when you feel like screaming. Try to let your thoughts wander, because it’s easier to keep this pretence going if you’re really not listening. Whenever possible, pick up a book. But even then, don’t let your guard down. Once you understand a language, it will always find a way through to you. You can’t shut it out.’

  The closest call Jeannie had during her last three weeks in Turkey was on the 17th of May, and there was a reason why she remembered the date. The gang had gone out to Burgaz that day. Sinan’s mother was back from Paris and staying on the island with her two dearest friends. They’d invited out the ‘children’ for a day of ‘sun and sea.’ It was only on the ferry that Jeannie found out one of Sinan’s mother’s ‘dearest friends’ was Suna’s mother, and the other Lüset’s.

  The house to which they had been invited belonged to Lüset’s family. And here was another piece of news: Lüset’s family was Jewish. How could it be that no one had thought to mention that? A pout and the shrug of the shoulders. ‘It is perhaps not significant.’

  The house was a sprawling modern bungalow with verandas on several levels and its own landing. Across the channel were the forested hills of Heybeliada. The season had not yet begun and there were two maids busily shaking out dust covers when they walked into the sitting room. In the kitchen, another team was rolling böreks. On the television set in the corner – a trophy set, one of the first in the country – they were giving the latest about the terrible earthquake in Burdur Province several days before, in which a thousand people were thought to have died. The maids stopped shaking their dust covers for a moment to shake their heads. They were surprised when Jeannie did not do the same. ‘She’s a foreigner,’ said one to the other, ‘She doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t foreigners have hearts?’ the other asked.

  ‘Of course! They must! But when the man spoke, it meant nothing to her.’

  ‘What sort of life is that?’

  Exactly, Jeannie thought. Exactly! She fled the room. She had no idea where to go so decided it must be the bathroom. She opened a door – not the bathroom. Suna was sitting on a bed with her back to her. And what was that on the chest of drawers in front of her – a jewellery case?

  She jumped. Looked around. Such fear in her eyes, but then she saw who it was. ‘Excuse me,’ Jeannie said. Shutting the door, she moved on to the next room. This seemed to be a study. Lüset was sitting at the desk. ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ she said in Turkish without looking up. ‘I just need to make a call.’ But after Jeannie had closed the door, she heard Lüset opening up the filing cabinet.

  ‘Enough long faces!’ said Suna’s mother, bounding down the corridor ‘The sun waits for no man! Into the sea with you, at once!’ So began the slow procession to the sea. When they returned, dripping, an hour or so later, the mothers were waiting gaily with large towels and tall glasses of apricot juice. They were dressed in short, bright shifts and sang along to every song they put on the stereo. Jacques Brel, Adamo, Christophe, Peppino di Capri, Jose Feliciano, Petula Clark, the Monkees. From time to time, one stood up to try out a new dance step. Then she would beckon for the other two to join her. And to the children: ‘What is haunting you? What is youth except a chance for endless fun?’

  Over lunch, Sinan’s mother reached into her handbag and produced a little red book. It was the little red book. ‘Sinan. Darling. Look what I have.’

  He looked but said nothing.

  ‘What’s more, my dear boy. I have read it. I cannot, however, say I understand a single word.’ She opened at random. ‘“The revolution is not a dinner party.” Is this a code, or a metaphor? A deep thought, or a senseless rambling?’

  Switching into Turkish, he told her that if she kept it up, he was going to walk out that door and she’d never see him again. Turning to Jeannie, Sibel said, ‘What am I to do with this boy, if he says such things to his own mother? Tell me, Jeannie darling, what propels the youth of today to such drivel?’

  ‘It isn’t drivel,’ Suna informed them.

  ‘It’s worse than drivel – it’s nonsense!’ her mother cried.

  ‘Is it nonsense to wish for a better world?’

  ‘What world could be better than this?’ she said, gesturing at the sea, the forested hills of Heybeliada, the cloudless sky. ‘What more could you want?’

  ‘I could want freedom,’ Suna said. ‘I could want to choose my own life.’

  ‘Ah. How American this school of yours has made you!’ Suna’s mother turned to her friends. ‘Who would have thought it? My daughter! An American!’

  ‘Is it American to wish for human dignity?’ Suna cried. ‘Is it American to wish for simple freedom of expression – or ask why our beloved country is the slave of the West?’

  ‘Terbiyesiz,’ hissed her mother. ‘Watch your manners.’

  ‘Bırak, canım,’ said Lüset’s mother. ‘Let it go. We are here to have fun.’

  So suddenly it was time to swim again. This time the mothers came down, too. ‘Let’s have a race,’ Suna’s mother said. ‘How far shall we go?’

  Suna said, ‘China.’ She jumped into the sea first. The three mothers followed her. Jeannie headed off in the opposite direction, stopping to rest on a float. When Sinan joined her, they sat in silence, watching a ferry crossing over from Heybeliada. He reached for her hand. ‘Do you remember, last summer, when the ferry stopped in Burgaz?’ he asked in a soft voice she’d not heard for some time. ‘And you saw people’s stories trailing after them like comets?’

  ‘Well, I don’t any more,’ she said.

  ‘How could you? You’re stuck inside one.’

  She had not been planning to say this. But the words rushed out.

  ‘I saw Suna going through some jewellery.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And Lüset going through a filing cabinet.’

  ‘How strange,’ Sinan said.

  ‘Tell me what they’re up to.’

  Silence.

  ‘For God’s sake, tell me what is going on!’

  A sigh. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I promised not to.’

  ‘Look. You’ve got to decide. If you can’t trust me…’

  ‘It’s not you. I think you know that.’

  ‘Then prove it to me.’

  ‘Let me think.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ he said finally. She was right, he went on to explain. Something was up. Something important. So they had to be ready. Ready for anything. To this end, they were ‘gathering’ money for an escape fund. When he swam back to shore, Sinan was hoping to get into his mother’s handbag and avail himself of the key to the safe she kept in her bedroom.

  Could Jeannie create a distraction for him? Did she love him that much? But by the time they reached house, the commotion had already been created.

  The entire household was gathered around the television. When the man on the screen repeated the news – that the Israeli consul in Istanbul had just been kidnapped – Lüset’s mother let out a shriek.

  On the screen now were several harried looking men and women who’d also been taken hostage but had managed to escape. They were describing their captors. Students, they said. Students! Jeannie thought. Why did they blam
e everything on students? Turning to Haluk, she said, ‘How can they be so sure?’

  Haluk turned to look at her. ‘So sure of what?’ he asked.

  ‘That they’re students. How did they find out the names so fast?’ Haluk paused before replying. ‘You understood all this?’ He scratched his head. ‘And Sinan knows?’

  22

  Two days later, at four o’clock on the afternoon of the May 19th, Jeannie was sitting on the college terrace with Sinan and Suna on the little patch of lawn next to Atatürk’s statue when a bomb went off. It had hurled her to the ground before she heard the crunch. When she sat up, the air was thick with soot. The terrace was strewn with books and shoes and bags and blackened logs that she then realised must be people. For a few moments, no one moved, no one spoke.

  She heard a cat cry. The cat turned out to be a girl. A log rolled over and moaned; another stood up and limped towards us, crying, ‘Ayla, where are you?’ A third blackened figure stood up and rushed at her. ‘He was here, right next to me! You saw him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Look!’ Suna cried. She pointed at the Mustang. It was on fire. ‘Haluk!’ she cried. She took Jeannie’s hand and they raced down the terrace, weaving their way past blackened logs. When they saw Haluk and Chloe – unharmed, and holding hands – Suna ran over and embraced them both. For once she did not care what they were up to. ‘Only that you’re alive!’ Then she ran off again, crying, ‘Ice! We must find some ice!’

  By now anyone who could walk was carrying anyone who couldn’t to safety. One boy had a gash in his leg, and Jeannie helped Sinan take him down to the infirmary. The air was still black with soot when they came outside again, the grass still grey. Here and there were little groups of friends, sometimes weeping, mostly just staring at the little licks of flame still flickering in the grey, mangled shell of the Mustang. As they left the campus through the Hisar Gate, they heard something clanging in the distance. An ancient fire truck rounded the corner. The firemen leaning off the sides were wearing plumed hats.

  They found Haluk, alone now, back at the garçonniere. When Jeannie asked him how he was, his eyes flashed. ‘I’m fine. Of course!’ But your car, Jeannie insisted. ‘A car is a car. Why should this upset me?’ He said this over and over as more friends filed into the apartment. How surprised they all looked! Yes, of course they were! It wasn’t just words, this time. It was the real thing! They couldn’t quite believe it. Couldn’t quite understand how it had come to this, even after all these months of pontificating ‘the inevitable.’ As Jeannie examined her nails, they struggled to put together the pieces – what had actually happened, who had been injured and who had come ‘this close,’ who might have wanted to hurt them and why. There were a thousand theories but they all agreed that someone, somewhere, was trying to provoke them into doing something stupid, something they would later regret. But they were determined not to do that stupid thing. They had to stay strong. And resolute. Resolute to the end.

  There were ten people injured in the blast – one janitor and nine students. Most suffered minor injuries but one girl lost a leg. Jeannie got these details later that same day from her father. He had not given up talking to her. Even when she refused to be drawn out, he kept talking.

  She had never seen him quite so angry.

  That night, after she went to bed, he talked to a lot of other people, too. Mostly on the phone, with the clink of the bourbon glass in the background. Jeannie did her best to shut it out. She drifted off to sleep, only to wake up (an hour later?) to the hum of a conversation outside her window. Looking down into the meydan, she saw two men on the marble bench underneath the plane tree. Or rather, she saw the embers of their cigarettes.

  At first she couldn’t make out what they were saying. All she knew was that one of them was her father. The second voice was American, too. But younger. Cooler, too. Every once in a while he’d say ‘What? Are you for real?’ And laugh, as if her father were some sort of dinosaur. Every time her father spoke, his voice got louder.

  Until he said, ‘I’ll say it one more time, boy! You have taken this too far. You stop this now or I pull the plug on the whole thing. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Oh, I hear you all right,’ said the American. He let out a reckless laugh.

  ‘Let’s go, then.’ A clinking of keys, a turning of an engine. The shadow of a car, slipping across the meydan. Then silence, pressing the air from her lungs.

  ‘I want to be clear on this (she wrote in her fifty-three page letter). At no point did I see the young American’s face. But everything I registered – the lanky build, the reckless laugh, the easy insolence with which he smoked his midnight cigarette – told me it was my old friend No Name. And while I could not say for sure what he’d done to anger my father so – in my bones, I knew. No Name was my father’s gopher. No Name did my father’s dirty tricks. No Name had been sent out, on my father’s express orders, to befriend Dutch Harding. All year long, and under the guise of friendship, No Name had been spying on him, and reporting back to my father. No it was worse. No Name had been goading Dutch Harding on. Pushing him to violence. And giving him the wherewithal to make bombs?

  And now, according to my father, No Name had gone too far. For a man like my father, what was too far? What was he threatening to pull the plug on? I have never felt such fear. Such confusion. A single thought survived it: I had to find my compass point. I had to find Sinan.

  It was a dangerous thing I did that night, bolting out into the curfew with only a sweater over my white pyjamas to race across the cobblestones, past unlit cemeteries and snarling dogs, striding along the shore where any searchlight could have picked me out, where any passing patrol could have shot me. But I had fool’s luck, and the speed that only comes to cowards, and the clarity that can only come to those whose minds have stopped.’

  It must have been close to three in the morning when Jeannie reached the Bebek apartment that Billie Broome shared with Dutch Harding. Sinan had spotted her from the balcony and was waiting for her at the door. Behind him the apartment was bright with light and humming with voices. Grace Slick, crooning. Miss Broome, shouting over her. Could that be Suna shouting back, and Lüset protesting, and Chloe joining in? ‘What is this, a party?’ Jeannie asked. Not a shiver of fear during her long, dark walk, but now, hearing a party to which she had not been invited…

  Sinan stepped into the vestibule, shutting the door behind him. ‘Who brought you here?’ he hissed. She told him the truth, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her.

  ‘You could have been shot. You could have been kidnapped! Raped! You had no business coming here. No business chasing me. Why can’t you trust me? Do you know how it makes me feel, to be at a house, visiting friends, when the phone rings and it’s you? You’re worse than my mother, did you know that?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m beginning to understand how she feels!’

  But when she told him what she’d heard in the meydan, he fell silent.

  ‘When I go back inside,’ he said finally, ‘I want you to follow me. But stay in the front room. Let me speak to Dutch alone. He’s in the back, packing. We’re trying to help. I don’t want him to see you until he understands that you are, too.’

  So she did as she was asked. And there, in the front room, were her friends. ‘What are you doing here?’ Chloe asked her.

  ‘I could ask the same of you,’ Jeannie replied. ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’

  ‘Does yours?’

  ‘Please. Girls.’ This was Miss Broome. ‘I’m sorry, but while I’m still your teacher, I have to ask. You did all speak to your parents? Didn’t you?’

  ‘What do you take us for? Children? Of course we spoke to them,’ said Suna. ‘Officially I am staying with Lüset and she with me. We’re nineteen years old, you know? We know how to lie. Which brings me back to our subject.’ Bizarrely, it was cheating in exams. Suna (who had never in her life cheated) was explaining to Miss Broome why there was no shame attached to it in Tu
rkish culture. ‘It is a question of helping friends,’ she said. And Miss Broome cried, ‘What, at the cost of their own honour?’ Suna then explained that the most dishonourable thing in Turkish culture was to let down a friend in need. ‘But that makes no sense!’ Miss Broome shouted, somewhat drunkenly. ‘It’s so counterproductive! We’re not in the business of shelling out facts, for goodness sake. We’re trying to change how people think!’

  ‘If only,’ said Suna haughtily, ‘it were a two-way street.’

  Miss Broome caught the tone and accepted the reproach. ‘I’m sorry I’m so scatty,’ she said finally. ‘It’s just been one hell of a week. Although I’m sure you’re just as horrified by this Israeli consul thing as I am.’

  ‘Why grieve prematurely?’ Suna said. ‘The story is not over yet. These are good-hearted boys watching over him – we must trust them.’

  ‘Oh, but we mustn’t!’ said Miss Broome. ‘We really mustn’t. They’ve threatened to kill this man.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Suna. ‘But who is more violent, the kidnappers or the army? The Martial Law Command, or their American paymasters?’

  ‘You’re dodging the issue, Suna, and you know it,’ Miss Broome said. ‘You think in black and white because you’re afraid. You’re afraid to look inside. You don’t know who you are, my dear. You only feel good when you have an enemy to hate. You only feel virtuous when…’

  ‘What – are you for real?’ A cool – easy, insolent – American voice floated over them. It was No Name, coming down the hall. In his arms was a box of books.

  How could he be so calm after what he had done? Standing here, shooting the breeze with the very people he almost killed with her father’s bomb…

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me,’ said Miss Broome, wiping her hand over her moist forehead.

  ‘You must be thirsty,’ said No Name. ‘Let me get you a beer.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ said Miss Broome. ‘I think that’s what loosened my tongue to start with.’