Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  • “This causes me pain, but because I love them I sometimes think it’s for the best.”

  • “Some things must stay buried.”

  November 10th 1999

  ‘Today, when I was sitting with Chloe – we were at the Divan Café in Bebek, and she was just finishing her third éclair – and it’s beyond me, how she manages to eat the way she does and still stay so thin – I remembered those peanut butter cookies we used to make, during what we called the lulls, during that first summer, in 1970. And then I remembered how, during one such lull, I’d complained about never getting a straight story from anyone. All this subterfuge, all these rumours you never know are true or not – the way people would make an offhand remark alluding to events that defied belief but then withhold everything else. When I’d asked Chloe what “the point” was all those years ago, she’d just shrugged her shoulders and said, “To keep you guessing?” When I’d asked why they would want to do that, she said, “Well, obviously. So you can’t control them.”

  Today, when I asked her the same question, she said, “Because they don’t trust you? Because there are things they’ve done they can’t bear to remember? Because it’s just too painful, and too long ago?”’

  November 12th 1999

  ‘I’d thought, after all our visits to Yalova and Izmit and Adapazarı that I’d seen every which way a building could crumble, but today I went to Düzce with Sinan and his crew. Only fifteen hours had passed since this terrible new earthquake, the second killer earthquake in just over three months; the disaster (7.1 on the Richter scale, they now say) was still fresh.

  I saw rows of houses, collapsed onto each other like cards, crushed cars, shrivelled and toppled minarets, apples and oranges and clay pots spilling onto the road, a broken office window, and inside, an ashtray with a cigarette propped on it, a pair of glasses, a phone off the hook.

  I saw minimarkets turned to dust, houses propped up by trucks, houses that had lost their fronts, lamps still plugged into their sockets, dangling over the street, whole families sitting in their ruined gardens on salvaged sofas, staring at their cracked and lurching homes. Next to every pile of rubble, a hopeless and uncertain crowd.

  In the courtyard of what was no longer a hospital, tents and doctors from all over the world, and just beyond them, behind the cameras, an endless string of politicians, speaking respectfully to the cameras and then jumping back in their big black cars to return to Ankara, honking to scatter the bewildered families still struggling to put up tents.

  Sinan pitched in, passed out the bread and big bottles of water we’d brought with us, listened to the stories, collected small requests. Numbers to call, messages to pass on, letters to post. It was sunset by the time we left and there was a nip in the air. In a few hours it would hit freezing.

  Returning to the city, the traffic was slow. We came to a standstill on the second Bosphorus Bridge, and although it was hard to see it over the cars trying to cross in the opposite direction, we could just make out the Pasha’s Library. How strange it was to be suspended over Rumeli Hisar, to see it from the air, to know that the bridge from which we were watching it would probably survive the next earthquake, just as it had survived the others, but that it might also swing and buckle and crack and spill us into the sea.

  “But that is the beauty of it,” Sinan said. “That undercoat of death.”

  Almost but not quite quoting my father.

  So I said, “Sometimes I wonder if that’s all you can see these days.” And, “What exactly is it you’re afraid of?”

  WHAT SINAN SAID NEXT (After a very long silence – it felt like an hour and we were still there, sitting on the bridge):

  “Suna asked me the same question, you know. After she brought you here.”

  “After I’d told her how furious I was.”

  “She asked me what I was afraid of and I said bringing you here, drawing you back into our world, was asking for trouble, and she nodded – between you and me, trouble is exactly what she’s asking for.”

  “So I repeated what I’d told her many times before. It was never meant to be. It was tempting fate.”

  “And you know what she said? She said, ‘What else are we here for? Why bow to the gods? Why not tempt fate?”’

  “I’ve been sitting here all this time trying to think of a reason not to tempt fate and I know in my heart that any reason I came up with would be a lie. You and I should never have met, Jeannie, but we did. You should never have come back here, I should never have come looking for you, we should never have fallen back into each other’s arms, but we did. If this is tempting fate, if, in a moment’s time, this bridge begins to swing and buckle and break us apart, isn’t it right that we plunge into the sea of death together?”

  He turned off the engine and pulled me into the back seat, where he whispered a poem into my ear, so rapidly that I first mistook the thoughts for his own:

  “We open doors, we close doors, we pass through doors, and at the end of the one and only journey there’s no city no harbour; the train comes off the rails, the boat sinks, the plane crashes. The map is drawn on ice. But if I could choose to set out or not on this journey I’d do it again.”’

  40

  On November 7th 2005 – a week after Jeannie’s disappearance, and two days before I was due to return to London – I went to visit Haluk and Lüset in their villa on the Bosphorus, just outside Bebek. It was the same villa where Haluk had once lived with his grandparents, but it was no longer furnished in naugahyde and plastic. Instead there were comfortable sofas in muted colours, and built-in bookshelves, and kilims of arresting and unusual designs, and ancient urns. The parquet floors glinted in the autumn sunlight as anxious servants rushed back and forth on slippered feet with trays of tea and cakes.

  They took me out to their terrace, from which I could see the bridge where Jeannie and Sinan had sat in traffic, hand in hand.

  Haluk and Lüset wanted me to know that – until they had been pulled into this ‘senseless tragedy’ – these two dear friends of theirs had enjoyed a happiness that was all the deeper for having come to them so late.

  They had the photographs to prove it, and as we went through the albums, they reminisced. There they all were at that lovely restaurant outside Assos. What a happy day that had been. Here they all were in Göreme, Çıralı, Sile, Bodrum, Knidos. Did I remember Uludağ? Had I been back to Turkey for a blue journey? No? Then it was decided. The following September, I would be their treasured guest. They no longer owned their own yacht – as I must have heard, Haluk and his family had been locked up in a series of senseless lawsuits. The family business had yet to recover from the Turkish stock market crash four years earlier. But what did it matter, Lüset asked, if you had the sea and the sky? ‘This view is all I need to feed my soul,’ she said. ‘And what is the point of a summer house when all is said and done? Is it not better to bring together a group of friends and rent a gulet? It is simple, but so beautiful, as you shall see for yourself.’

  ‘A good gulet can sleep between twelve and sixteen people. If all are friends, there is laughter from dawn till midnight! Look. You can see for yourself!’ One laughing group after another. Always the same cast. With Sinan and Jeannie smiling at the centre. The pictures could all have been from the same blue journey, but for the bump that turned into a baby and then a tousle-haired boy. ‘You can see from Jeannie’s face what this boy meant for her. How it brought her back to life. Though the pregnancy – well, yes, this was another question,’ Lüset conceded.

  ‘Could it have been another way?’ said Haluk. A woman coming so late to motherhood was bound to travel through “a few storms”.’

  ‘You are right, my darling, but some storms could have been avoided.’

  ‘Perhaps, my dear. Perhaps. But have you ever known a time when gossip could be avoided?’

  For there had been rumours. Senseless rumours. Rumours that did not bear repeating. Suffice it to say that they had all served the same pur
pose – to destroy the peaceful happiness that Jeannie and Sinan had brought each other. ‘But storms are never made to last. This is one thing life has taught me.’

  ‘Difficulties born of arid soil can flower into blessings.’

  ‘The arrival of Jeannie’s father, to give just one example. Of course we were concerned! Of course we wondered about his true motives! But time had moved on. He was happy to see his daughter happy, and look, look at him in this picture with his grandchild. Have you ever seen a happier man?’

  ‘With time, even Jeannie understood this,’ Lüset said. ‘This is the nature of family bonds.’

  ‘Then I take it,’ I said, ‘that, at least for a while, she resented her father’s presence.’

  ‘Of course, but only for a time.’

  ‘Why did he come back? Do you know?’

  ‘Why is this even a question? It is obvious! His family was here!’

  There was something about their communal smile that made me want to press for facts. Closing the album, I asked why, in their view, was Sinan wasting away in prison, and Jeannie missing, and her father presumed dead?

  But it was two against one.

  I persevered, sailing against the winds of platitude until they had conceded that this ‘unfortunate state of affairs’ might perhaps have been avoided if Sinan had avoided roads leading back to the past.

  ‘Then I take it you regret his decision to make that film about his childhood. My Cold War, I mean.’

  ‘How could we criticise such a beautiful and important film?’ Haluk said.

  ‘Sinan is an artist!’ Lüset said.

  ‘Artists must take risks!’

  ‘Yes, and Jeannie understood this! Whatever else, she understood this! But at the same time, she was a mother.’

  ‘As Sinan was a father. So naturally…’

  Haluk’s voice trailed off. As if to suggest I was pushing my luck.

  ‘As I recall it,’ I said, ‘Sinan ends the film with a string of questions. Though he does not allude directly to the Trunk Murder, the questions very clearly point in that direction.’

  ‘Yes, this was his most artistic touch,’ said Haluk.

  ‘If we went through the questions again now, how many could you answer?’

  ‘By which you mean…?’

  Refusing to answer the plea in his eyes, I recited them from memory: What happened next? Who was the true mastermind? Where is he now? What does he have to say about himself? Who are his new paymasters? Cui bono?

  Instead of answering, Haluk sat forward, his eyes bulging just slightly, his lips pressed into a disbelieving smile.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ I said. ‘What really happened in that garçonniere of yours in June 1971? If none of you were guilty of that murder, why did you pretend that you were? Whose dirty work were you doing? Who were you protecting? Who are you still protecting? Why did you and your friend Sinan skip town and leave two young girls to take the rap? Haluk, what was it like, to open the paper and find that Suna had jumped from a fourth floor window? What does it feel like now, knowing that – had you acted differently – you might have saved your wife from torture?’

  Haluk opened his mouth, and then he closed it. Lüset took his hand, and then she dropped it.

  When I spoke, neither would look me in the eye. But I still tried to speak honestly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That was harsh. And unnecessary. I apologise. And now I’ll leave. I’ll just say one last thing. I’m not asking these questions lightly. I want to help you. I can’t help you unless I know what happened.’

  ‘This is nonsense. What happened is over.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ I said. And that is when I blurted out what I had only just come to see. ‘What happened is not over. This person you took the rap for…’

  As Haluk raised his head to meet my gaze, his eyes bulged again, just slightly.

  ‘You’re still protecting him, aren’t you?’

  No answer. Just the faintest of smiles.

  41

  In answer to your question – yes, Mary Ann, I am only too aware of the rancour in my tone. Think of it as the ghost of the girl I once was. There is something in me that does not want to grant happiness to the girl who replaced me. That delights in the knowledge that the boy who threw me over has had his comeuppance. But you ought to know by now that revenge is not what’s driving me.

  I am almost ready. In just a few pages, I shall drag it out into the light for all to see. But first, I would like you and your colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change to understand just how happy Sinan was with Jeannie, and Jeannie with Sinan, until parties unknown blew their lives apart. I want you to understand that it was not a simple catalogue of easy photographs. Not a given, but something they created together, against the odds.

  From a distance it might be possible to see them as taking up where they’d left off, albeit thirty years later. But that would be to discount the ghosts they’d brought with them. There were the lives they might have led together. The lives they’d made with others only to pull away. The failures, the disappointments, the making do with the cards they’d been dealt. The little habits, his and hers, all jostling for space.

  There was the horror of seeing a locked and bolted door fly open. Where in this haunted house was there room for a child? Even as they went through the motions, reviewing options, comparing opinions, deciding together, there were times when one would look at the other and see a stranger. How had it come to this? Who would have thought? The physical shocks of pregnancy were lessened somewhat by Sinan’s familiarity with them, but this ushered in more ghosts. He already had two children. Or (as he put it once, if only once) he already had enough children. But he spoke of them so little.

  ‘I was probably never going to be one of those women who bask in pregnancy (she told me in her letter). But it wasn’t just my body I didn’t trust. That giddiness I’d felt from the day of my return, that lack of confidence in the ground beneath my feet, the intimation of an unseen storm gathering and the unnerving certainty that whatever story I was hearing, it lacked the piece I most needed – these anxieties were ever present. They did not define my life so much as flit over it like a family of bats.

  And there was the thing I could not put into words: what I’d seen in Sinan’s eyes when I’d first told him of the baby, as we stood on the terrace of that magnificent building in Galata, ushering in the millennium. The glint of terror, the sad reproach, the silent resignation, the circle squared, the relentless kindness, the secret he wouldn’t tell me…

  Little fragments of the past kept hurtling down at me. We’d walk into Yakup II and a portly man would jump to his feet; I’d recognise the odd glint in his eyes but nothing else. We’d walk past Kalavi and there, next to the gypsy musicians, was a party of women singing “Samanyolu”, the song I remembered Suna humming under her breath as we walked down the hill, that day we’d gone to the Covered Bazaar to help Lüset buy a leather coat.

  I’d be walking up from Eminönü with Chloe, and we’d pass the button store where we’d taken refuge that same day from the angry men. But now it was a bead store. I’d be sitting at home, on our porch, and without willing it, glance over at the garçonniere; seeing a figure in a window, I’d be sure, for one terrifying moment, that it was Sinan, beckoning me back. When I walked outside into the meydan and looked over at the plane tree, I saw the ghost of the marble bench that had once sat at its base.

  Chloe would roll her eyes. Suna would glare at me, Lüset would sigh, Sinan would cluck his tongue and Haluk would raise his arms with helpless innocence, and I was back in Nazmi’s, doodling on the napkins, gazing idly at the frosted glass.

  All winter long, right through spring and into summer, there was İsmet on billboards, urging me to pick up my phone.

  Sometimes I wondered why no one else felt the pull as strongly as I did. If I wondered out loud, Suna was quick to mock me. When I return to my memories of that spring – of our picnics and boat trips, our happy journeys
to the Black Sea and the Lycian Hills – I can see her point. I was obsessed with the past, she said, because I dared not relax in the present. For “some demented and most probably puritan reason” I was convinced that I did not deserve my good fortune. That I was here only to perform a lofty mission – to revisit the past, to come to terms with it. “Though to revisit what you term the past can never be more than a séance.” What was there to gain from such an exercise? she asked. We were soon to find out.’

  Emre was born at the tail end of a sweltering summer. Never had the city been so humid. Though the Pasha’s Library was perfectly placed to catch the wind, Jeannie woke up most mornings to clouds of yellow dust. She woke up alone most mornings. Never had Sinan been so busy with films that took him elsewhere. Never had Jeannie had so much time to think.

  Of all her worries, what plagued her the most was the threatened visit from her father. Although she did not want to deprive him of his only grandchild, she was worried that the others might not wish him to be here. But whenever she put it to them, they seemed almost offended. ‘Why would I mind?’ Sinan said. ‘It’s natural for him to want to visit. He’s welcome, of course.’ But there was still an edge to his voice, just as there was an edge to Chloe’s (‘Well, well, well, who would have thought?’) and Suna’s: ‘Are you expecting me to breathe fire? Let him come! Why should he alone be kept away? One thing you do not appreciate, dear friend: sooner or later, everyone comes back. If you live in Istanbul, you never have to hunt your ghosts – they come to you!’

  The first ghost to revisit Istanbul that summer was Billie Broome. She’d tracked Suna down after the earthquake, and that, she claimed, was what had put it into her head to revisit the city she remembered ‘with such fondness’. They had arranged to meet at that café in the gardens of Dolmabahçe Palace. Suna and Jeannie were late and further delayed by the long line outside the metal detector. It was an oppressively humid day, even by prevailing standards. Every table was full and at first they couldn’t find her. And then they saw this neat, wistful woman gazing out at the Bosphorus, as if the love of her life were submerged in it.