Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Who was that cooing in Turkish in the background when I called you last night?” asked Anna.

  “None of your business.”

  “Touchy, touchy.”

  “Her name is Tina. She’s a blackjack dealer at the Etap Marmara. Actually, her name is Tuna, but she got tired of people making rude jokes, so she changed it.”

  “Is she in the business?”

  “No. I told you, she’s a blackjack dealer.”

  “What’s the attraction?”

  Taylor looked at her and smiled.

  “Raw sex,” he said.

  Anna blinked.

  “She’s very pretty,” he continued, “in a cheap sort of way. And as she tells all the blackjack players, she has the fastest hands in Turkey.”

  “Give me a break,” said Anna. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, isn’t it hard to relax with someone who doesn’t know what you really do?”

  “Nope,” said Taylor. Anna stared out the window at some pigs. “I’ve learned a lot from Tina, actually,” he continued. “About Turkish women.”

  “Such as?”

  “You really want to know? She’s rather graphic.”

  “I think I can take it.”

  “Well, she told me quite a lot about what it’s like to be a single girl in Turkey.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay. For starters, Turkish men are virgin-crazy. They have to marry a virgin or they go nuts. So a woman tries hard to remain a virgin until she’s twenty-five or so. During that time she’ll do almost anything with her boyfriend. Blow jobs, anal sex, whatever. But no penetration of the vagina. Absolutely not. That, she saves for the wedding night. And if she gives it away to a man who doesn’t marry her, she has a major problem.”

  “That’s pathetic, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t have an opinion. In these matters, I am simply an observer.”

  “And when she’s older than twenty-five?”

  “By then, a Turkish woman stops caring, according to Tina. She assumes the worst—that she’s never going to get married—and starts to live for herself. She assumes that anyone who’ll marry an old bag over twenty-five probably won’t even notice whether she’s still a virgin.”

  “How old is Tina?”

  “She’s twenty-three.”

  “So why does she sleep with you? Or are you a pederast?”

  “Of course not!” said Taylor. “Tina has discovered the existence of a revolutionary medical technique that is going to change life in this part of the world.”

  “And what is that?” asked Anna, not sure she really wanted to know.

  “Hymen reconstruction. The fancy gynecologists in Istanbul already have a fee schedule for it. According to Tina, the standard fee is sixty dollars. Two days before the wedding is ninety dollars. If you want it on the wedding day itself, God forbid, it costs a hundred fifty dollars. Of course, it’s more for Saudis and Kuwaitis.”

  “Yuck,” said Anna. There was a long silence as the car bumped and weaved the last few miles toward Polish-land. Eventually, they glimpsed the green fields of Polonezkoy, rising like a fair mole on the dark body of Asia.

  Blond, blue-eyed men stood outside each of the big houses in the village, beckoning tourist to stop for food and rest. Taylor stopped at a house on the crest of a hill: it was owned by a sturdy fellow named Thaddeus. He welcomed them enthusiastically and hurried them inside.

  “Upstairs or down?” asked Thaddeus.

  Taylor looked at Anna, as if seeking guidance. But Anna, relaxed and unaffected, paid no attention. She was looking at the Polish airline posters tacked to the wall. “Why don’t you give us the tour,” said Taylor.

  Thaddeus led them up a creaky stairway to a long hallway. He flung open the first door on the left. It was a small room, with a single bed at one end and a little table and two chairs at the other, next to a window that looked out over the mock-Polish countryside.

  Anna entered the room first. She walked to the window, then back to the bed. It was a steel-frame bedstead, low to the floor, with a rough corduroy bedspread, a lumpy pillow and no sheets. What a sad little room, she thought.

  “We can bring food up,” said Thaddeus coyly, “or we can leave you alone.”

  Anna looked at Taylor. What was this all about? Could it be that Taylor—this man she had met several hours ago—was hoping to screw her in that dumpy little bed? Taylor said nothing. He was looking out the window, pretending not to be listening.

  “Let’s try downstairs,” said Anna abruptly. “I think that’s more what I had in mind.” Taylor turned toward her. There was a sheepish, naughty-boy look on his face.

  Thaddeus walked them back down the creaky stairs to the dining room, which had a half dozen tables. It was a low-ceilinged room that seemed too small to hold all the furniture it contained, and it felt cramped and hot.

  “What about outside?” asked Anna, pointing to a garden with several small tables arrayed under a grape arbor. “Can we sit outside?”

  “As you like,” said the Turko-Pole. He escorted them out to the garden and, a few moments later, returned with two enormous bottles of beer.

  “Is this where you bring your women?” asked Anna.

  “Sometimes,” he answered. He still had that sheepish look on his face.

  “Do they like it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Are you trying to screw me?”

  “Not necessarily. I just thought you’d like it here.”

  Anna looked around. The air was cool and crisp and clean, unlike the dirty air of Istanbul. A red rooster was ambling around the garden, looking for crumbs.

  “I do like it here,” she said. “But I’m just passing through.”

  Taylor nodded. “Whatever you like,” he said.

  They smoked cigarettes and drank beer and talked. With the sex question defused for the moment, Taylor throttled back a few degrees. The muscles in his face relaxed; the rhythm of his speech slowed and softened. But on this calm, leeward side of Taylor, there was a whisper of restlessness, like a breeze blowing through an empty courtyard.

  “How do you like the business?” he asked.

  “I liked it fine, until last night.”

  “That’s the good part, hitting people over the head with bottles. Wait until you get to the bad part.”

  “What’s the bad part?”

  “Filling out the paperwork to explain why you broke the bottle.”

  Anna laughed. “Seriously,” she said, “what’s the bad part?”

  Taylor thought for a long moment. “You want the truth?” Anna nodded. “The bad part is feeling like you’re wasting your time.”

  “How often do you get the bad part?”

  “Lately? Most of the time.”

  “You can’t be that disillusioned. You’re not old enough.”

  “Or young enough. Cynicism is a young man’s game.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I dunno. Quit, maybe, if I can’t find anything interesting to do on the inside. I’m becoming convinced there’s a big problem back home, but I can’t figure out what it is. It sometimes seems like they’ve sent everybody off to eunuch school.”

  Anna nodded. There was a pause. “Not that it matters,” she volunteered, “but as a point of historical fact, there was no ‘eunuch school.’ ”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Ottomans. The Palace School was for the janissaries. The eunuchs stayed in the harem. The head eunuch, the kislar aga, simply told everyone what to do. There was no school.”

  “What are you, a eunuchologist?”

  “Ottoman history was my field, before I became a NOC.”

  “No shit,” said Taylor.

  “No shit.”

  “What sort of life crisis pushed you into the CIA? Too many overdue library books?”

  Anna gave her standard answer. “No crisis,” she said. “I was bored. That was the main reason.”

  Taylor loo
ked skeptical. “Were you married?” he asked.

  “No,” said Anna. “But close.”

  “Too close?”

  Anna nodded. “His name was Tom. He taught English at Harvard. Very smart, very gentle, very loving. When I met him, I thought I had finally met the man of my dreams.”

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “No, he was, actually. That was the funny thing. He really was the man of my dreams. He liked the same kind of music I did, the same places on Cape Cod, the same novelists, the same flavors of ice cream. And he took women seriously.”

  “A New Age man.”

  “Screw you. You can make fun of it, but those things matter. When I met Tom, I had been with so many half-baked, self-centered men, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have found someone smart who was interested in me.”

  “Sounds like bliss. What happened?”

  “Tom had a fatal flaw,” said Anna. “He was an intellectual, a man who liked abstractions. I began to realize that he liked his abstract version of me better than he liked the real person.”

  “Mistake,” said Taylor.

  “And it turned out he was selfish, too. For all that gentleness, he was as self-absorbed as the others. He would listen to what I had to say, and then say what he wanted to say. I was just a prop. He liked me because I was smart enough to understand him. But that got boring. I wanted something different.”

  “What did you want?”

  “I wanted a man who would connect, a guy who would walk up to me in a bar, look me in the eye and say: ‘Hey, little lady, let’s have some fun.’ ”

  Taylor smiled. “Hey, little lady, let’s have some fun.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” Anna pulled her coat tighter around her body. As the sun fell lower in the sky, it was getting chilly.

  “So who have you found since Tom?”

  “Nobody,” said Anna.

  “Nobody?”

  “I’ve been too busy the past year to think about relationships. And it’s hard to be honest and open with someone if you’re keeping as many secrets as we are.”

  “Who says you have to be honest?” said Taylor. “A lot of our colleagues are liars, and they seem to get laid all the time.”

  “Maybe,” said Anna. “But that doesn’t turn me on.”

  Taylor thought a moment. “I know one thing we have in common,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re both easily bored.”

  They drove back to Istanbul at twilight. The beer and the talk had left them both easy and mellow. Sex was in the air, like moisture before a rainstorm; not talked about, not acted upon, just there. As they drove back through Beykoz, Anna recognized one of the houses and nudged Taylor.

  “I’ve been there,” she said. “To that little house by the water, with the green shutters.”

  “When?”

  “Two years ago. When I was here as a graduate student, doing research for my thesis.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “A funny old woman named Natalia Temo.”

  “How did you happen to meet her?”

  “A Turkish professor introduced me. He thought she might have some old documents that would be interesting. But it turned out she didn’t.”

  “What documents? If you can explain it to a non-Ottomanist.”

  “They sounded pretty sexy, actually. This woman was the granddaughter of an Albanian doctor named Ibrahim Temo, who had been one of the founders of the Union and Progress Committee back in the 1880s.”

  “Known to non-Ottomanists as the Young Turks.”

  “Correct,” said Anna. “I was interested in Temo because he had attended the group’s first meeting in Istanbul in 1889, along with three other medical students: a Circassian from the Caucasus named Mehmed Resid, a Kurd from Arabkir named Abdullah Cevdet and a Kurd from Diyarbakir named Ishak Sukuti. That was the golden age for the Young Turks.”

  “How do you remember all this stuff?”

  “I have a memory for historical trivia. That used to be my job. Anyway, what I wanted was the group’s papers. They were relevant for a chapter in my dissertation about how the Young Turks lost their idealism. I wanted to find out what had gone wrong, how the members of this progressive organization turned into a bunch of killers by 1915. So I went to see Natalia Temo. And she told me an amazing story. A sort of detective story.”

  “Tell me,” said Taylor. “I like detective stories. They’re about my speed.”

  “Okay. But it’s complicated. It began when the original members of the group decided they would send their papers to Sukuti, who would act as their archivist. Temo sent him his papers until he fled to Romania in 1895. Eventually Sukuti was forced into exile, too, and he took the papers with him to San Remo, on the Italian Riviera.”

  Anna looked at Taylor. “Is this boring?”

  “No,” he said. “Quite the contrary. You can’t imagine what a pleasure it is to be talking about something other than tradecraft.”

  “Okay,” she said warily, resuming her narrative. “Sukuti stayed in San Remo until 1905, when he became very sick. He knew that he was probably dying, so he arranged to send all the important documents to Temo, in Romania. He put them in a trunk and wrote Temo that they were coming. But before he could send them, he died.”

  “Delicious,” said Taylor. “This is sounding like The Maltese Falcon.”

  “Just wait. It gets better. The Ottoman consulate in San Remo had been watching Sukuti for years. When they learned of his death, they bribed the police, stole the trunk and sent it to Sultan Abdul-Hamid in Yildiz Palace in Istanbul. The trunk stayed there until 1909, when the Young Turks finally got rid of Abdul-Hamid. Whereupon Ibrahim Temo went to Yildiz, found the trunk, and took it back with him to Romania.”

  “Where it remains.”

  “No. That’s the problem. When Ibrahim Temo died in 1945, he left the trunk to his son. And when the son died, the papers should have gone to his daughter, Natalia. In which case they would have gone to me, for my thesis, because she liked me.”

  “But she didn’t have the papers?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Albania,” said Anna with a sigh.

  “Albania?”

  “Somehow the Albanian government found out about the papers in the 1950s, after Natalia began trying to emigrate to Turkey. They wanted them for the Albanian national archives, presumably because Temo was Albanian. Natalia told me that two Albanians came one day to pick up the trunk and she never saw it again. It’s probably in Tirana now, gathering dust.”

  “So you never found out what turned the idealists into the murderers?”

  “No. That was part of why I gave up my dissertation. I decided I would never really know.”

  “What happened to Natalia?”

  “The Romanians eventually let her out. She came to Turkey in the late 1960s and settled down in the little house with the green shutters in Beykoz. She’s an old woman now. Tough, and sad.”

  “What was in the papers? Did you ever find out?”

  “All I know is what Natalia told me. She had looked through the papers as a girl and talked to her grandfather about them. From what she said, they sounded fabulous. They included correspondence among the various branches of the Union and Progress Committee, written in code to confuse the sultan’s spies.”

  “What kind of code?”

  “I don’t know. The only thing Natalia remembered was that each member and branch had a number. Let’s say Paris was six, so if you were the ninety-first member of the Paris branch, your number was six/ninety-one.”

  “No wonder the Albanians were so interested. They’re spy-crazy.”

  “There may have been another reason. From what Natalia said, the papers showed something that might have interested certain people in Moscow.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that in 1905, when Sukuti died, the Young Turks were part of a network that stretched thro
ughout the Caucasus and Central Asia. There were Young Georgians in Tbilisi, Young Bukharans in Bukhara, Young Turkestanis in Tashkent, Young Azeris in Baku, Young Armenians in Yerevan. All working together to topple the old empires.”

  “So what.”

  “So history didn’t begin in that part of the world in 1917, the way the Soviets like to pretend. There used to be something else. There used to be another vision of Central Asia.”

  “Interesting,” said Taylor. “But it’s ancient history. Back home, they can’t remember what happened last week. Who’s going to care about what happened seventy-five years ago?”

  “Nobody, sad to say. That’s why I decided to stop being an Ottomanist. It was time to get out of the archives.”

  “Welcome to the real world, such as it is,” said Taylor. His arm was on the back of the seat, and he let it drop casually over Anna’s shoulder. He pulled her toward him and gave her a kiss on the cheek. As he held her, his hand touched her breast. Anna let it stay there a few moments, wondering what it would be like to sleep with Taylor, what his hands would feel like on her body. By now, Taylor was feeling the curve of her breast in his hand. He was evidently the sort of man who didn’t stop until someone said: “Stop.”

  “Stop,” said Anna.

  Taylor smiled. No problem. He was easy.

  Silence surrounded the car. In the winter chill, small clouds of fog were forming on the black waters of the Bosporus. As Taylor drove, he thought about Anna’s tale of Young Azeris and Young Turkestanis and a network of Central Asians that had existed nearly a century ago. And as he thought, an odd notion fell into his head. He recalled an unlikely encounter a few weeks earlier with a Canadian who claimed to be a filmmaker but showed unusual interest in Central Asian émigrés.

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Taylor. “Have you ever met a NOC named Jack Rawls?”