The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

by Silkworms Ink Anthologies

Why did he want to see me, today of all days? Did he simply wish to gloat, or was he planning to make full use of his upper hand? As I picked my way amongst the potholes of Cihangir, I considered one answer and its opposite. Then came the vertigo, and with it a fast dissolving hope that this might not really be happening, that I might somehow have invented it. So (perhaps for the first time in my life, and against all my bohemian training) I arrived at an assignation an hour early. But I did not open the newspaper I’d brought with me.

  I kept it folded, ordering a coffee and opening my net book to work through my unread messages. Six were from my disgruntled editor in London, asking why I had left so suddenly; he wasn’t the only one who wanted to know. In my hasty, high-handed answers, I resorted to half truths: I was in Istanbul on urgent business. There was someone I needed to see. My father, now in his mid-eighties, still living on the university campus where he’d taught for fifty years, was in some sort of trouble. Only once, in a quick reply to a friend with inside knowledge - she made it clear in her coded way that she had bought the paper, seen the telltale photograph, and read the lies and insinuations in the columns beneath - did I let the fear seep in. I’ve had the summons, I wrote. Now I’m here in a cafe in Cihangir, waiting. But I have no idea what to expect.

  She wrote right back. Then why are you there?

  It’s my only chance, I replied. I need to know what he has for the next instalment.

  I did not need to name names. My friend was well aware of my long history with this man, whom I’d first met on a ship from Istanbul to Alexandria when I was nine years old, and who, during the early sixties, had so loved to boast about having files this thick about every foreigner in Istanbul. In the seventies and eighties, he had gone after every student who had ever entertained a leftist thought, making it his business to incarcerate them, torture them, crush them, succeeding in all but the last.

  And then, in the spring of 2010 - four decades too late - the law had caught up with him. Or rather – this being Turkey – it briefly appeared as if it might consider doing so. It was during this lull - before the first of many sick notes allowing İsmet to use his prison cell as an occasional retreat - that I had written up his story, or rather, everything I knew about his story, for my paper in London. To close the book on him, I told myself. Though even then I must have known deep down that our war had not yet ended.

  And now, at last, İsmet was preparing to slip that last card from his sleeve. It boded ill, I thought, that he was making such a meal of it. For there was only half an expose in the folded scandal sheet beneath my wrist. But it was accompanied by a never-before-seen photograph of my father, aged 36, answering to no one in that black beret of his, standing with his arms folded, halfway up the gangplank of the hulking ship. It must, I thought, have been taken from the deck above: all you could see of my father were his folded arms and his face turned defiantly upwards. In the background I could see my mother, my sister and my brother, huddled and sobbing on the pier. I was standing to their right, my Brownie camera raised to my eyes, and there, at my feet, was my old saddle bag, concealing my sketchbook and my diary and my secret vial. The three waving blurs just behind me were most probably the scandalously late arriving members of our party, for whom my father had decided the ship should wait.

  No year was given, and no place. That was for the next instalment, which promised to disclose the secret of secrets, the disgrace festering at the heart of the Cold War. It would, I feared, work well with this newspaper’s naive and easily manipulated readers. The villains were ‘American expatriates, self-styled bohemians, who had come to Istanbul to teach the flower of Turkish youth, but who knew no shame’. In their selfish abandon they had set off the ‘chain of events that had almost led to the end of life as we knew it’, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962.

  From the corner of my eye I could still read the teaser: TOMORROW: AS TURKEY AND THE WORLD TEETER ON THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR DISASTER, A GROUP OF FECKLESS AMERICANS HAVE FUN AND GAMES ON A SOVIET SHIP. Which did capture something of that midwinter, mid-Mediterranean storm, and my father’s wild dancing in the midst of it, and the songs with which my mother and the ship’s ur-Soviet librarian and the others in our party had mocked the menacing waves, while the ship’s other passengers looked on in perplexity and I took notes. Which picture would the paper choose to accompany the legendary storm party, which my father still described as the high point of our travels? Would it be the one of my mother singing Stormy Weather, with İsmet frowning in the background as the ship librarian dropped to his knees to kiss her feet? Or would it be the one of my father sliding across the dance floor, crashing into tables and upsetting drinks, as the final flourish in his goat dance?

  To blot out that image, and to stop my stomach churning, just as it had throughout that long-ago storm, I put away my net book and closed my eyes, to lose myself in the soft hum of conversation at the cafe’s other tables and the tinny French ballad I could recognise but not identify. There was the whir of an espresso machine, the clink of a cup. A draft blew in through the suddenly opened door. As it swung shut, the hum grew softer, until there was no hum at all.

  I looked up and there he was. Thinner and more drawn than last time, but still exuding the old calm. He was not yet inside; there was still a sheet of glass between us. He was standing on the pavement just next to the entrance to the smokers’ terrace with one of the waiters - or was this tense young man the manager? He was nodding as İsmet told him a thing or two, in easy defiance of the three burly men behind him. All three were wearing the same uniform, which I failed to recognise.

  Another black Mercedes pulled up to the curb. The men who emerged from it were not in uniform, though they might as well have been. They were wearing dark glasses, and their hair was slicked back, and they had bought these black suits of theirs from the same designer. Casting the most casual of glances in their direction, İsmet moved towards the door. But it wasn’t until he was halfway across the room that the devil deigned to look at me.

  And when he did, he smiled, as if to say: Don’t think for a moment that you can sway me with that plaintive look of yours. This is all your doing. You should have known better than to push me to this point. By now everyone else in the cafe and even on the smoking terrace was looking at us. And in the eyes of the man at the table right next to mine was the glow of new interest. I wondered if he might be a journalist, enjoying a lucky day.

  The first thing İsmet did after he sat down was to light up a cigarette. My eyes were drawn to his hands, and those long, thin fingers.

  ‘I don’t think I need to tell you that you have just broken the law,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘What do I care? Let them fine me. Let them come to my prison cell and tell me how to live.’

  ‘So you’ve run out of doctor’s notes, have you? And they’re taking you back in?’

  Again, he laughed.

  I saw no choice but to go on the offensive. ‘I’ve read your first instalment,’ I said.

  ‘So I see,’ he said, nodding towards the folded paper. Tipping back his chair, he yawned as he stretched his arms. ‘So tell me. How did you find it?’

  ‘Much as I expected,’ I said.

  Tipping his chair back to its rightful position, he stubbed out his cigarette on the saucer of my coffee cup. Then he pressed his hands against the table, splaying them as he smiled.

  The man at the next table bent over his notebook, as if in prayer.

  ‘You know what I am going to ask you now,’ İsmet said.

  I waited in silence as he lit another cigarette.

  Stubbing it out on my plate after only three drags, but so delicately, with those long, smooth fingers, he said, ‘I want the whole story – the story I have in fact already written, that the world will read tomorrow. But when it sees the light of day, I wish it not be in the shape of an accusation, but of a shared reality. Which will, I assure you, be your only hope of mercy. So. To come straight to the point. I wish you t
o confess to me all you know, from the moment your father wilfully delayed the departure of the Felix Dzerzhinsky from Istanbul in January 1962, preventing, for entirely selfish reasons, the raising of its gangplank, right on through to the shameless endpoint that will feature in my next instalment - when, having disrupted delicate negotiations that might have prevented the worst crisis of the Cold War - having even reduced us all to laughing stocks with his shameless conduct on the night of the storm - your father led his party of reprobates and even his own young children down that same sighing gangplank onto the Alexandrian pier.’ Casting me a look of pure fury, he said, ‘You will begin, in fact, by wiping that smirk off your face.’

  ‘It’s not a smirk,’ I said.

  He lunged forward. ‘Are you trying to correct my English?’

  ‘No, of course not. I...’

  He grabbed my wrist. ‘Then perhaps you are trying to have a joke at my expense?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ I said.

  He removed his hand. He sat back in his chair. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So now tell me. Why would a man with a pure and innocent heart take his wife and children to join a gang of shameless reprobates on a Soviet ship at the most sensitive moment of the Cold War?’

  ‘It was winter vacation,’ I said, struggling to keep the squeak out of my voice. ‘We were going to Egypt. It was...I’m pretty sure of this....no, actually, I’m positive. It was the cheapest way to get there. The cheapest by far!’

  ‘Hah! This is poppycock! No one takes his family onto a Soviet ship at the most sensitive moment of the Cold War because it is a cheap way to get to Egypt! This was simply a cover! As you well know! As you even knew at the time! Why else would you have agreed to be his eyes and ears?’

  ‘Come again?’ I asked. My voice came out strangled.

  He waved his hand. ‘Don’t think you can fool me. You, with your camera. Your sketchbook, and your diary. You had your suspicions. You can’t pretend otherwise. So please. Don’t even try to erase your tracks. I have, after all, viewed your telltale documents, and I promise you, I have used a fine-toothed comb.’

  Digesting the horror that his words provoked in me – he had read my diaries! In invisible ink! He’d examined my sketches. Found the secret numbers in the shading! Perhaps I’d not actually lost the Brownie camera. Perhaps he’d stolen it! – I struggled to achieve a blank expression. ‘I am, I must admit, a little flattered that you took me so seriously. But I can assure you...’

  ‘You were your father’s second pair of eyes! His decoy! His mascot!’

  ‘In a way. Perhaps. But not in the way you seem to imagine.’

  ‘What way might that be?’

  ‘I was...I was playing a game.’

  ‘What game?’

  ‘I was looking for the mystery.’

  ‘What mystery?’

  ‘That’s just it. I never found it. That wasn’t the point of the game, though. The point was to play detective.’

  ‘And you were that detective?’

  ‘Yes. I was that detective. I was pretending not to be me.’

  ‘And who had you become, I wonder?’

  ‘Detective O’Brien.’

  ‘O’Brien. Who is O’Brien?’

  ‘It was me. It was my codename!’

  ‘So at last, you choose to confess.’

  ‘İsmet. It was the codename I invented, for the game.’

  Lunging forward again, he said, ‘So you think you can make a fool of me? Then let me assure you. You cannot! So please. Let us waste no more time. You will confirm the facts of that journey to me, and also to this honest and hardworking man to your right! He is, as you should have noticed, hanging on our every word. You will not waste any more of his time! You will state what we both know to be the truth.’

  ‘About what?’ I asked.

  ‘About your father’s true mission.’

  ‘Oh, I can certainly do that,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ As he sat back, I thought I caught a glint of hunger in his eyes, but when he spoke again, his voice was smooth. ‘So. I’m all ears. Do proceed.’

  Speaking slowly, struggling to keep my voice as smooth as his, I said, ‘I’m not sure how you are going to take this. But my father’s true mission, as you put it, was to travel to as many countries as we could afford.’

  ‘And?’

  Drink. Be merry. Make new friends. Climb the pyramids under moonlight.’

  ‘Of course. We know all this. But this was, as you know – as you wrote in your own detective’s diary – this was only the cover.’

  ‘What I wrote in my detective’s diary was pure invention! I was just trying to give a meaning to things!’

  ‘As indeed you did.’

  ‘But it was all nonsense! I was making it up as I went along.’

  ‘As you have done ever since.’

  ‘Whereas you tell the truth?’

  This time he laughed as he tipped back his chair. ‘You live for this don’t you? It was you who started it.’

  ‘I was only 9, for God’s sake!’

  ‘While I am only 75,’ he said. ‘With just a few months left. So please. You will follow my instructions. You will identify your father’s true identity and purpose, and then you will trace his treachery. You will, in short, explain the secret mission that brought him to this country. You will confess how, while masquerading as a dancing fool on the Felix Dzerzhinsky, he conspired with others to sever the ties of trust between your land and ours, while forging new and dangerous links between the dissidents of the two world powers!’

  In a last attempt at sarcasm, I asked, ‘Will that be all?’

  He leaned forward, stubbing out one last cigarette on my plate. ‘It will be almost all. But – as you will have anticipated – there will be one more thing. As it happens, the most important thing.’

  Reaching into his briefcase, he brought out a plastic folder. Pulling out a sheaf of paper, he passed it across the table. ‘These are your words,’ he said. ‘You shall read them, and then you shall sign.’

  My fingers were trembling. The top page was blank.

  ‘Are all the other pages blank, too?’ I asked.

  A smile flitted across his face, as he considered how he might have responded to my question, had he been so inclined. Slowly he lit up. Slowly he exhaled. Together we watched a third black Mercedes pull up to the kerb. He waved a hand in its direction. ‘Soon I must go,’ he said languidly. ‘Soon I shall no longer be in a position to grant you mercy. So think about it, Mimi. Think of what this life of concealment has done to you.’

  But for the first few moments I could not think. I could only lower my gaze, to feel the chill of his eyes as I kept my own fixed on his gold watch - on its second hand slowly circling. Even this I could not sustain. Even my eyelids were trembling. I let my gaze travel upwards. His hands were cupped around his chin. His long, thin fingers stretched up as far as his eyebrows, just as I had seen them do when I was 9, as we’d sat together on that Soviet ship, swaying in the midwinter storm, surrounded by the debris of that party in the harsh light of the morning after.

  How much of that conversation had survived the test of time? How much had I invented? I recalled him telling me how sad he was, to hear I’d lost my Brownie camera. But how glad he was, too, to have recovered my sketchbook and detective’s diary, which I’d lost during the storm. I remembered now how, heart beating ever faster, I’d flicked the pages of my diary under his enquiring gaze – how, seeing my notes were still invisible to the naked eye, I’d relaxed.

  Perhaps I’d pressed down on the pages too hard when writing them. Perhaps he’d read my words from their indentations. I closed my eyes, remembering now some of the other questions ›smet had asked me on the morning after the storm party, as our chairs slipped back and forth across the swaying ship lounge– Was there something that was worrying me? Was there something he could do to help? Wasn’t it unfair, the way that parents sometimes acted, having so much fun, but also
, somehow, keeping us in the dark? I recalled answering politely: No, not really. No, but thanks for asking.

  Staring now at the blank page still obscuring the confession İsmet had prepared for me to sign, I struggled to remember the plot I’d invented almost fifty years ago.

  I pushed away the thought – the preposterous possibility - that I had no need to remember it, that when I opened the paper in the morning, to the second installment of İsmet’s expose, I’d be reading the words I had written at the age of 9, during a storm on a Soviet ship in the midwinter Mediterranean, as my parents and their friends sang and drank and danced the night away, and I slid back and forth with every wave, awash in mystery, and kept afloat by the most beautiful suspicions, which I recorded in invisible ink.

  Pilgrimage

  Elsa Halling