Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  September 5th 2000

  ‘The books say that infants can’t smile, but they’re lying.’

  September 5th 2000

  ‘How strange, to be so happy, when my body feels like a worn out shoe.’

  September 5th 2000

  ‘Sinan brings in the papers every morning. He turns on the radio and we listen to Haluk and his stepson David, arguing about the day’s top stories – just as we do every morning at home. When my father visits, every hour on the hour he turns on the television. Sometimes it’s BBC World, sometimes it’s CNN, whatever it is, there’s some outrage they’re misreporting that he goes on to tell me more about. When Chloe comes in, we watch lighter stuff, and she points out the beauties on the screen who’ve been to her for nosejobs.

  Only Suna understands that I have only one interest right now, and only she knows the depth of my ignorance. Thanks to her I now have enough childcare books to fill two shelves. They all contradict each other – Suna is shocked at what she calls their “low level of professionalism” but for this she is also, I suspect, secretly relieved. At last! A new subject to explore, dissect, critique and discuss to death.

  There’s something between us – there has been ever since that argument we had the morning I went into labour and that she refers to, always with a curl in her lip, as the Dawn of Truth. I am willing to accept that I might have chosen my words carelessly – I was out of my skull, for God’s sake, who knows what was in that injection they gave me.

  At any rate, I can remember what I’d intended to say but not what I actually said. Did I offend her somehow? Last night I asked her, to be met with dismissive waves. “What a question. And such self-doubt! No, Madame. I am bowing, as ever, to your superior wisdom. However, the fact remains that you know nothing about babies. If you will permit an impertinence – less than nothing!”

  I asked why she was as thirsty for this knowledge as I was. Her answer: “Ah! He’s not just your boy, you know! He’s our boy!” My books at bedtime – chosen, read, and analysed by Suna: last night it was Freud on infant sexuality. Tonight, I hear, it’s Piaget.’

  September 6th 2000

  ‘It’s when I see Emre in his arms that I realise how little Sinan has told me about his older children. Or perhaps he did, but I didn’t (or couldn’t) read between the lines. But I can see now – just from the way he picks him up – that he has had years of lifting, loving children. Emre will be clawing at me, balling up his little fists and screaming, and nothing I can do will settle him. Then in he swoops: “Why don’t I try?” Sounding so tentative, but just to protect my feelings: the moment the baby feels Sinan’s chest he goes quiet.

  Dad, on the other hand, doesn’t dare touch him. But he can sit there next to the bassinet for hours, staring. Even when we’re watching a Class A Atrocity on CNN, his eyes still slip back to the baby. Yesterday, when Amy was visiting, and she asked him whom he thought Emre resembled, he smiled shyly and said, “Oh well, especially at this age, who can tell?” Even though there is no resemblance whatsoever.’

  September 7th 2000

  ‘We came home today. And after a month in that small blinkered room I find the space, the loud colours, and sheer number of objects almost dizzying. You get so accustomed to blank white walls when you’re in –’

  September 21st 2000

  ‘I see it’s been a fortnight since I last picked up this journal. If anyone had told me you could do nothing all day but feed, bathe and change a tiny infant, and still have –’

  November 1st 2000

  ‘I’ve been feeding him rice cereal, and perhaps that’s what’s settled him. This afternoon, for the first time ever, he woke up without crying. I went into the room to find him hitting the little clown on the mobile we bought him last weekend. His face tensed, his breathing shallow, his legs churning, his eyes almost crossed and his concentration absolute. He batted the clown, watched it spin. When he caught sight of his own hand in front of him, did he really gasp, or did I imagine it? He examined it at length; it as if it were the most amazing hand ever created. It is.’

  November 16th 2000

  ‘There’s a mirror next to the counter where I’ve put the baby bath. In the beginning he’d just stare at the baby being bathed next to him in the reflection, as if to say, What are you doing here? This is my house. But today, while he was glaring at it, he suddenly broke into a lopsided smile. He still glares at all his other reflections, though. Quite right, too.’

  November 18th 2000

  ‘Today we went to Akmerkez and bought a new stroller. Suna insisted. After researching the matter exhaustively, and I mean exhaustively, she has determined that our existing stroller did not provide adequate support for Emre’s back. So off we went to remedy matters with a thing with wheels big enough for a man’s bicycle. Why we bothered I cannot say. Unless we plan to spend our days strolling up and down this mall. High-rises and glittering waterfronts notwithstanding, there are still as many potholes, ledges and tapering, tilted pavements in this city as there were thirty years ago. I could do a city-wide map. Rate them in order of treachery. One star for a steep staircase, two for a steep staircase with a broken step, three for a shop entrance that can only be negotiated with a stroller if you back into it, but that must never be backed into, because of the steep staircase awaiting you on the other side.

  Four stars for my father’s new apartment in Bebek, because getting there involves all of the above. Not to mention two of those strange metal protrusions you still see coming through the concrete when you least expect them. Six stars, then? Maybe seven, if you consider who used to live there.

  Plenty of excuses, then.

  I’d feel better about it, I’m sure, if he’d asked me first.’

  December 2nd 2000

  ‘It’s hard to know what he wants out of life. He spends most of his day reading. In the evening he takes a walk along the Bosphorus, and if there’s a lecture on at ARIT, he’ll go to it, usually with his greatest fans, Hector and Amy. Afterwards they’ll go out to supper. On Sundays, unless he’s off on some ARIT tour, he comes to us. While Sinan cooks and I play with Emre, Dad sits and pretends to read the paper, but whenever I glance over at him, he’s watching us. I could almost say – watching over us. It’s unnerving.

  When he’s at home, he watches the Bosphorus. He’s high enough on the hill to see from point to point. Whenever I drop in on him, it isn’t long before he says, “It’s an amazing colour today, isn’t it? There’s no word for it, is there? I could spend the rest of my life trying and I’d never come close.’”

  January 1st 2001

  ‘He was, as Sinan had warned, the only baby at the party last night. But no one minded. In fact, they all wanted to hold their darling Emre. Or “caress” him – the preferred word. Though Suna kept a sharp watch on any honorary auntie she did not trust. And woe to anyone who tried to take him out to the balcony. She was, I’m afraid, particularly critical of Chloe. “There is something unnaturally awkward about her posture,” Suna noted. “If I wished to disprove the notion of a nurturing instinct, it would be this image I’d choose.” As usual, she forgot to keep her voice down, so Chloe heard. “Here, take him back then,” she said, handing Emre over. “Thank you,” said Suna. And Chloe said, “My pleasure.” At which Suna said, “I meant no offence. It’s just that you make it clear with your body language that your breasts have never offered themselves to an infant.”

  “Whereas yours are on permanent loan, I take it.” It has been a long time since I heard Chloe so annoyed. She lit up, presumably to calm herself. But now Suna felt compelled to share the latest findings on the possible link between parental smoking and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

  “I’m not his mother, for God’s sake! And you should get your facts straight, or at least put them in proportion.” At which she rattled off the findings of another less conclusive study, and for a moment I thought we were back in Marble Hall arguing about cultural imperialism.’

  May 15th 2001r />
  ‘This afternoon, when we were at the US Embassy, registering Emre’s birth, he somehow managed to crawl behind the counter and hide under a desk. He couldn’t have been missing five minutes, but by the time we found him, we were seconds away from a full-fledged security alert. After that I tried to hold him in my arms. Impossible: now he was trying to climb to the ceiling, via my head. So I left him to run around the waiting room, always keeping my eyes on him while the very nice woman who was helping us as best she could explained why we, even with both parents in possession of US passports, ought to have come in much sooner.

  Dad says she wouldn’t have dared such condescension if he’d gone in with me. “Retired I may be. But I still count for something. I didn’t put in a lifetime of service to have some dippy woman give you a hard time.”

  Though she couldn’t have been more polite.

  At one point, she asked me what sort of work I did, and when I explained, her response was the usual one. “How interesting.” When she asked me if I planned to work in Turkey, I told her about the bid Suna and I would be making to the EU. For this, I got, “Wow. How fascinating.” Then she nodded in Emre’s direction – he had just pulled a pile of brochures down to the floor and now had several in his mouth. “So what are you doing for childcare?” she asked. And I realised – it hadn’t even crossed my mind.’

  May 20th 2001

  ‘Sinan is in Antalya, doing a film, so this weekend we flew down to see him. I had Emre on my lap – in a window seat, because I thought he’d want to watch take-off. And didn’t he stare intently. I was most impressed. It was only later that I realised he was looking at the window, not through it.

  Tonight, in the restaurant, he spent seventeen minutes examining a strange piece of bread.’

  June 3rd 2001

  ‘Last Friday I was supposed to meet with Suna to discuss this EU bid but the weather was just too beautiful to spend indoors. So I talked her into going out to Haluk’s new place on Sedef instead. We were only going to stay the afternoon, but before we knew it the last ferry had left, and Haluk (who had been planning this, I think) talked us into staying over. Sinan came out the next day, intending to stay only for the afternoon, but Haluk talked him into going out for mussels and somehow they didn’t manage to get back in time for the last ferry, so we stayed over again. By now Lüset had also joined us, and Suna and I had handed our clothes over to the maid and were walking around in broad daylight in Lüset’s night-gowns.

  Emre didn’t go for the mussels, but he liked the pebbles on the beach and tried to put almost all of them in his mouth. What he liked most were the speedboats – he got so excited when one came close enough to the shore to kill us that he fell out of his inflatable tugboat.

  It was Tuesday by the time we managed to pull ourselves away. We stopped off in Büyükada, took a walk up to the house where the snake lady had once lived, decided, when we had returned to the waterfront, that it made much more sense to eat there and return on a late ferry. It turned out to be a very late ferry. Emre conked out the moment we sat down. And so we wove our way from waterfront to glittering waterfront. Büyükada, Heybeli, Burgaz, Kınalı. As we sat there, with Emre stretched across our laps, I thought, who could have imagined? But before I could put it into words, Sinan said, “Would you really have wanted to know? Isn’t it better when life hides its shape?’”

  June 12th 2001

  ‘Today, for the first time in almost a year, I did an honest day’s work. Suna was somewhat prickly. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re so close to the deadline for this EU thing, or because it was hard to concentrate, with Emre devoting so much energy to finding a way to fall off Suna’s balcony, or if she’s afraid, despite my assurances, that I’m going to leave her to do the dogwork. When I told her that I had so many of these things under my belt now that I could do them in my sleep – she gazed at me through narrowed eyes and said, “Perhaps this is just as well, now that you seem determined to spend the rest of your life in a coma.”

  I mentioned this in passing to Sinan and he said, “Yes, well, now that you mention it. Have you considered a cold shower?” I did not immediately get the joke. So he said, “Listen. Stop worrying so much about every little thing Suna says. She’s under a lot of pressure right now.” He went on to tell me that she’d done “another of her interviews”. As he said these words, his eyes hooded over too. It was, he said, an exposé of a family with Mafia links. “I think you can guess which family. And which member of this family we know best.” It took me a moment to realise he meant İsmet. This, too, earned me a hooded look. “Yes. İsmet,” said Sinan. “But this time – thanks to that fiery speech you gave us – don’t tell me your sleepy mind cannot recall this either? Not even vaguely? Such a shame. We were talking about it only the other day, Suna and I, and we both agree it was your finest moment. You were right, of course! You changed our lives in fact! Neither of us will ever dare collude with our oppressors ever again!”

  I let it pass for once, asking instead what Suna had said about İsmet. “She mentioned him by name, expressing doubt about his credentials as a politician, and alluding also to his shadier business dealings – but of course, we don’t know for sure that he’s an arms dealer – by presenting rumour as fact, she’s inviting a lawsuit,” said Sinan. “But that is not all. Or rather, it’s more complicated. You see, the family in question – it’s not İsmet’s family per se, but he’s connected to it by marriage – is already in dispute with Haluk’s family. This could exacerbate that dispute,” he said cheerfully. “There’s no knowing where it might end.”

  Then Emre woke up, and by the time I’d got him back to sleep, the phone had rung, and it was my father, telling me about the lecture he’s set to give at ARIT in September, and then, when I carelessly asked what the lecture was about, explaining at some length. It’s about the Cold War, needless to say. (As he put it: “I’ve decided to become my own historian.”) By the time I was off the phone I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten to ask Sinan where he thought the new Suna saga was leading, so I still don’t know.’

  June 12th 2001

  ‘Something else I forgot to mention. I can’t say I’m happy about it: Suna and my father have made friends. I ran into them the other day on the terrace of the Divan Pub. They were having an argument – about the Cold War, what else?

  “It is not that we agree,” Suna told me. “Not even that I hope we ever will. But how often can you find an enemy who will admit openly to his perversity, and who can converse as an equal? How are we ever to understand our collective past unless we hear from all sides?”

  What she fails to ask herself is what my father gets out of the bargain.’

  June 12th 2001

  ‘He makes no effort to hide his past. If anything, he advertises it. “Speaking as a retired spook” is his favourite way of beginning a sentence. And if his aim is to make people stop and listen to what he had to say, it works. For all his showmanship, he is careful what he says. His second favourite way of beginning a sentence is, “Although you must understand why I cannot speak about specific operations or allude to any document that has yet to be declassified…”

  But he’s happy to talk all night about the bigger picture – what he’d been sent here to do in the mid 50s, how that brief had changed by the time he came back in the late 60s, what the relationship between the US and Turkey was supposed to be, and what it really was, why he was not at all sorry to have been part of the fight against Communism, how and why the CIA failed to do its job, how it did and did not work in harmony with local intelligence networks, and most of all, how and why current US policy in our part of the world was ill-conceived, ill-managed, arrogant and doomed.

  And they love it. They just love it. It’s not, Sinan tells me, just the pleasure of discovering that suspicions you had carried through life had some truth in them. It is the freedom, the release that a grain of truth can bring.

  Once he stayed up all night with Dad discussing his father. They
were not in agreement about the man himself – Sinan called him an “unscrupulous collaborator” who had “used his influence with the Americans to line his pockets”, while my father called him a patriot who “believed his country to be well-served by its strong ties with the US.” But they did agree that this man had had a very strange way of being a father.