by Gina Perry
Chairs scraped. The tourists were leaving.
‘How did they get away with it?’ Dwayne wanted to know.
After I got off the phone, I wandered around the museum, among tributes to rodeo stars and stunt riders, but I wasn’t concentrating. I was thinking about Dwayne with a vague sense of uneasiness, as if I’d done something to be ashamed of. Perhaps in looking for these lost boys I had been just as blind to my own motivations as Sherif appears to have been, and I was blithely stirring up old hurts. It seemed that as far Sherif and OJ were concerned, as long as no boy was physically injured, everything was fine. They ignored the boys’ emotional states almost entirely, except insofar as they had a direct bearing on the success of the experiments.
But, from that early, casual afternoon in the archives, over time I had become just as single-minded in my quest to find the boys and establish some link between their experiences at the camp and their later life. I’d set out to discover how the boys involved were affected then and later, and how the experience had changed them. I had a theory, a hypothesis, that perhaps they carried some hidden legacy from the experiment that shaped who they were today. I’d thought of them as lost boys in the sense that they had a missing part of their childhood that as a researcher I could restore to them. But without realising they didn’t know they’d been experimented on, I had blundered in, not always duly considering that the information I was delivering might be intrusive or unwelcome. Or that the news they were part of an experiment could disrupt their sense of themselves and their life story in ways that took time to unfold. Absorbing this information and making sense of it was a process.
The next morning I prowled my hotel room, checking emails, flitting between internet tabs, waiting for something that I couldn’t name. I went for a walk through Oklahoma City’s old warehouse district, down along the canal, hoping that physical exertion would settle my restlessness. But the further I got — past the ballpark and Mickey Mantle Plaza of Bricktown; along the shaded canal, with its early morning emptiness — the more convinced I became that I’d missed something. I stopped and watched a man step onto a canal boat, holding the hand of a small boy who struggled and tried to pull away, clearly wanting to get on the boat by himself. I thought of the boys, now men, I had interviewed and the painful new knowledge that they had been deceived, and I thought of the man who had deceived them. Muzafer Sherif inspired and attracted a dedicated team of researchers, yet none of his male colleagues I’d spoken to so far remembered his charm or garrulousness as much as his demanding temperament and drive. I realised that despite all my research, Muzafer Sherif remained a troubling and enigmatic figure to me.
Was he just so driven by ambition or idealism that he was blind to anything else? But he undermined his own study on many occasions with his self-destructive behaviour, his inability to manage staff, his drinking. Could there perhaps be a psychological scar in his own past that could explain his apparent lack of compassion for the boys? Who knew? He spent his formative years in Turkey, I knew that, but apart from this rudimentary detail, for all the hours I had spent examining the files and the documents, reading this man’s letters and notes, there was still a mystery at the centre of the story, and that mystery was Sherif. He had heart and soul invested in this group research, but I wasn’t any closer to understanding why. I wouldn’t understand the story of the Robbers Cave until I came closer to understanding the mystery of the man who orchestrated it.
Part Three
10
Empire
In the summer of 1914, a group of village boys kicked a ball along the road, shouting and sending up puffs of dust. They moved in a pack, chasing a donkey and cart along the road, jostling at the village well to take long drinks of water, slowing down only when the sun began to wane.
Muzafer Sherif was one of them. As usual, he’d discarded the leather sandals that marked him out as wealthier than the other boys, the sons of his father’s tenants. When the camel caravans passed through Ödemiş — an Anatolian market town in the Aegean region — on their way from Egypt, the drivers stopped at their favourite tea house. It would have been a typical Turkish establishment, with a large tree outside that kept the interior of the wooden building dim and cool even during the hottest part of the day.
While the men sat inside with glasses of tea, the boys, led by Muzafer, sneaked behind the building where the camels were resting and restrung their ropes. When the drivers returned and the camels stood again, they were not tied in single file but every which way. It was chaos. The men shouted, and a few ran from the square, looking for the culprits. But the boys were gone, racing through the narrow streets, and I pictured them gasping with laughter and exhilaration.
The next time, the drivers left one man behind to hide and keep watch while they had their tea. Muzafer and the other boys were in the middle of retying the camels when the drivers — tough men used to fighting off bandits and thieves — charged towards them, yelling and waving their knives. In the shouting and confusion, the boys scattered — all except for Muzafer, who, caught between two camels grunting and kicking in fear, was knocked to the ground. He lay unconscious in the dust, and when he came to, he was surrounded by the furious camel drivers. I don’t know how he got away; perhaps one of the other boys ran to Muzafer’s home and got his father, who was also the town’s mayor, to hurry to his son’s rescue.
Fifty years later in America, Sherif had a brain scan following a stroke, and his doctors were mystified to see evidence in his X-rays of serious head trauma. It was then that his wife, Carolyn, recalled the story about him being kicked by a camel. Sue Sherif, their daughter, told me this anecdote. Sue wasn’t able to tell me a lot more about her father’s early years in Turkey because he didn’t like to talk about it. But she gave me what she could: snippets of his childhood, the name of the village where he was born. Muzafer was born in the summer of 1905 in a mountain village above Ödemiş called Bozdağ after the mountain range’s highest peak.
The taxi driver dropped me off on the edge of Bozdağ, at the one hotel, which was closed. Brown leaves lay on the bottom of the swimming pool in inches of muddy-looking water. Except for a tractor that chugged down the centre of the street, trailing a cloud of diesel fumes, the place was empty. Under the shade of the awning, a small strip of village shops displayed their wares. Straw brooms poked out of a bucket; earthenware pots were stacked on a table covered with a chequered plastic cloth.
On every side, the mountains rose above the red-tiled roofs. It was September 2015, early autumn, and between tourist seasons. The summer rush was over, although the shop in the main street still had brightly coloured beach balls for sale, hanging in a string bag, for swimming excursions to nearby Lake Gölcük. It was a warm afternoon, and the winter season — when the village turns into a ski resort for locals — seemed a long way off.
I had no more than a few words of Turkish, and I had worried about how I’d get by in the country, especially further away from Istanbul. But I’d negotiated a fair price with Osman, the taxi driver, and he kept up a steady stream of conversation in Turkish as he drove across the valley and up into the mountains. He pointed out the window at the countryside as he drove, the blue eye amulet swinging wildly from the rear-view mirror, and I smiled and nodded from the back seat as if I understood.
Strings of chillis hung in pretty red loops against a stone wall; latticed wooden balconies threw lacy shadows. I felt optimistic, convinced suddenly that I would do more than just get by here. I had done as much reading and preparation as I could before I arrived, and even though I’d found next to nothing in English about Bozdağ, I knew enough to see that this sloping street, lined with ancient stone houses and terracotta roofs, would have looked exactly the same when Sherif was a boy.
Under the blue awning, a small group of men looked up from their game of backgammon as I drew close. One of them stood up and rushed over to talk. ‘Where are you from?’ he cal
led in raspy smoker’s voice as he approached. He had a cloth cap pushed back jauntily on his head, and a thick white moustache.
‘Australia,’ I called back.
He nodded confidently. ‘Sydney? Perth? Darwin? I’ve been to all of them,’ he said proudly. ‘I was a sailor. I went all over the world.’ He dragged on a cigarette. ‘You like Turkey?’
I nodded enthusiastically.
‘What are you doing in Bozdağ?’ he said, tipping his head to one side.
I hesitated. Was he old enough to have known Muzafer Sherif or his family? ‘I heard it was a pretty place,’ I answered eventually.
He shrugged and looked up and down the empty street, then back at me.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, trying to calculate his age. But the sun had turned his skin leathery and brown, and it was hard to guess.
‘No, no,’ he said, flapping the hand with the cigarette in it at me, as if the idea was preposterous. ‘I am visiting my cousin.’ He gestured towards the players at the table. One of the men called something to him and he muttered back. He threw away his cigarette. ‘Have a safe journey!’ he said, and strolled back to the backgammon table and took his seat again.
I’d decided to keep the fact that I was a writer to myself. Otherwise it meant I had to check in at the police station of every village and town I visited. But I could see now the problem with that plan. It was difficult to have genuine conversations with people if I lied about what I was doing here.
I wandered down the street and stopped in the centre of the village, outside the mosque, and squinted up at a statue of what looked like a soldier in baggy shorts and black boots, holding a rifle and gazing off at the mountains. Beside him, there was a large framed black-and-white photo of Mustafa Kemal, bareheaded and in what looked like a tuxedo, who peered seriously out at me from under the splash of red, the Turkish flag. I was trying to figure out the relationship between the two of them when I heard the toot of a horn, and Osman’s taxi rolled to a stop beside me.
Osman was impatient with my desire to walk through the small village. Clearly, for him, the attraction of the place was the mountain itself. He followed the road up a steeply wooded mountainside, where he passed through large iron gates and then parked in a clearing beside some dilapidated picnic tables and a small tea house set up under the trees.
A cool breeze came off the mountain peak above, but it was invisible behind the forest of oak and pine trees. Mount Bozdağ was capped with snow year round, and back when Sherif was a boy, enterprising locals had climbed the peak and brought back pieces of ice wrapped in felt that they sold for refrigeration. Two miles above sea level, the 2,000-metre-tall chain of mountains had been a magnet in summer for wealthy Levantine families wanting to escape the heat of the plains. They arrived with their servants and camels loaded with tents and furniture, food and utensils, for a season of hiking, blackberry picking, picnics in the forest, and boating on Lake Gölcük.
The mountains were also a great hiding place for local brigands or outlaws. The sultan’s authority only extended so far. When Sherif was young, groups of armed bandits, or Zeybeks, lived in these mountains, beyond the reach of law and order. They thundered down the mountains on horseback to rob traders, kidnap for ransom, or demand protection money from those in passing caravans. It was a great place to hide. One local brigand named Charkirge had a price on his head for kidnapping and holding wealthy hostages for ransom. The summer Muzafer was born, the Levantine community holidaying in the mountain resort were panicked by rumours that Charkirge, frustrated by the birth of yet another daughter, was planning with his followers to kidnap and keep a baby boy. The rumours panicked a missionary family who were holidaying nearby, and in particular the new mother, who was recuperating in the mountains after the birth of her son. In her memoirs, she recalls how she appeased Charkirge by taking gifts to his wife and hosting a lavish picnic on the mountain in their honour.
The owner of the tea house insisted I climb up into a kind of treehouse, furnished with cushions and a low table, and brought me tea in a small glass rimmed with gold. He and Osman settled at a table in the shade below, and the smell of their cigarettes drifted on the breeze. It was quiet except for the rustle of the wind and the low gurgle of a nearby spring.
Yet soon the tea house owner was back, gesturing at me to follow him. Past the picnic tables, he pointed at an ancient chestnut tree, which, a sign beside it told me, was 20 metres high and 3 metres in diameter. I ran my hand over the trunk, feeling for carved initials. The tea-house owner showed me a pipe that gushed mountain water, encouraging me to cup my hands and take a drink of water so cold it made my teeth ache. As a boy, Muzafer would have drunk from this same stream, thirsty from games of hide and seek when he was little, after hikes or horserides up the mountain with his brothers as he got older. In spring, the floor of the forest was carpeted with yellow, white, and blue crocuses. The trees threw a welcome shade, where he would have been able to sit on a bed of soft pine needles when he got tired. How long was his childhood peaceful, I wondered; at what age did he become conscious of the violence that was never far away?
The year Sherif was born, there was widespread revolt supported by the Committee of Union and Progress, or the Young Turks, against the sultan’s unjust taxes. Three years later, the Young Turks led a revolution, restored the Ottoman constitution of 1879, introduced a multi-party political system, and ended Sultan Abdülhamid’s thirty-year autocratic rule, replacing him with his younger brother, who was little more than a figurehead. But the euphoria — the Muslims, Christians, and Jews celebrating and dancing in the streets — did not last long.
Ödemiş felt like a metropolis after Bozdağ. Due to the upcoming election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s face, ubiquitous as it had been in Istanbul, loomed from the side of buildings or from billboards by the highway. The wide tree-lined main street, with its imposing stone buildings built in the early years of the Republic, was lined with restaurants and grocery stores. Cars roared, motorcycles buzzed. Osman dropped me a block from my hotel, and I paused at a café with a large shaded terrace and thought about having a cold beer. It looked like the sort of place that would serve alcohol, but perhaps secularism was losing its grip here in this Kemalist stronghold too. No one else seemed to be drinking alcohol, so I returned to my hotel.
One of Muzafer’s brothers, a lawyer and prison reformer and, later, chief magistrate and mayor of the town, had established a museum of his own on the edge of Ödemiş, housing a collection of more than 16,000 artefacts from the area that he acquired through his lifetime. But the museum looked like a building site; a security guard shook his head at me through the locked iron gates. A harassed-looking woman came out to tell me the place was undergoing renovation and was closed.
The clerk at my hotel, a modern high-rise that seemed set up for Turkish businessmen, handed over my key with a curt nod. I had the feeling he was wondering what I was doing in Ödemiş. It had been a frequent question from shopkeepers since I arrived three days ago. The man behind the counter at the local grocery store had said bluntly, ‘There’s nothing for tourists here. You should be at Ephesus.’ It came across as unfriendly, unwelcoming. It was not a comfortable feeling, and I was beginning — irrationally, I knew — to dislike the place.
Muzafer Sherif’s father, a member of an emerging Muslim bourgeoisie, moved his family from Bozdağ down to the plain to Ödemiş when Muzafer was small. Here he acted as a broker between local farmers and British traders (the British had brought the railway line in 1884) and organised the sale and transport of tobacco and cotton to nearby Smyrna for export abroad. Muzafer’s grandparents lived in the medieval village of Birgi, famous for its silk production and its Islamic scholars, where his grandfather was a teacher. In the town of Ödemiş, Muzafer’s family was relatively affluent, with servants to do the housework and tenants to work the land. Later, Muzafer’s oldest brother would serve as town mayor.
It was the Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Ödemiş, with his passion for the town’s history, who was one of the main organisers of a symposium in honour of Muzafer Sherif in 2013. But by then no one in Turkey remembered what Sherif looked like, and the organisers mistakenly chose a photograph of social psychologist Solomon Asch for the printed program and projected Asch’s image onto the wall during the ceremonies. In the audience, few other than Sherif’s daughters, visiting from America, noticed the error. ‘That’s not Daddy!’ they whispered to each other, debating whether to say something. In the end, they decided it didn’t matter and stayed quiet. Sherif would have been enraged, especially given that he credited himself with inspiring Asch’s interest in social psychology and later came to regard him as a rival. After the symposium, the mayor of Ödemiş snipped a ribbon at the entrance of a small street in the old part of town and announced that it was now named Muzafer Sherif Street.
But the clerk at the front desk of my hotel couldn’t help me find Muzafer Sherif Street. Like me, he checked Google Maps, so I knew he wasn’t going to have any better luck. He tried a few spelling variations, then looked up and shook his head. He typed something into his laptop and swivelled the screen around for me to see. Ödemiş had a city museum that he was urging me to visit.
The local cultural museum was a two-storey eighteenth-century wooden inn with the rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The fourteen rooms on the upper and lower floors had room after room dedicated to local culture, leading citizens, and their business ventures. In the women’s quarters, in the dowry room, a Singer sewing machine stood ready, and mannequins modelled ornately embroidered wedding gowns. In the male rooms, life-size dioramas showed local businessmen going about their daily life in rooms decorated as their shops — the local clockmaker squinted down through his eyeglass into the innards of a watch, the barber sharpened a razor, the shoemaker fashioned leather.