Enlightenment

I shall never know what happened at Robert College during its last years as a US-owned university. In this novel I have constructed a parallel world to explore avenues closed to me in real life. Though my characters are as fictitious as the murder in which they are implicated, I have tried to portray the larger events that shape their lives as accurately as possible. Wherever feasible, I have referred to the newspaper accounts that the characters would have been reading at the time. These are named as they appear in the text.

The figures listed in Jeannie’s ‘brutal endnote’ on pp 276–277 are taken from ‘File of Torture: Deaths in Detention Places or Prisons (12th September 1980 – 12th September 1995)’, published by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in Ankara in 1996.

My only other source was a series of unclassified CIA interviews with a disgruntled Soviet citizen. These can be found at www.foia.ucia.gov: Case No EO-1991–00231. They bear no direct relation to the story: my interest was in the language.

I would like to thank Ruth Christie for granting permission to echo and reproduce her translation of Nazim Hikmet’s ‘A Journey’.

I would also like to thank my agent Pat Kavanagh for her magnificence, Catheryn Kilgarriff, Rebecca Gillieron and Amy Christian at Marion Boyars for their inspired professionalism, and my family for their love and understanding.

And I am deeply grateful to my friends Nicci Gerrard, Joseph Olshan, Jennifer Potter, Joan Smith, Richard and Sheila Thornley, and Becky Waters. You know why.

Title Page
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
I: In Answer to Your Question
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II: Everyday Life in the Days of the Cold War
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III: The Coup
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IV: How to Bury a Story
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V: Torture Without Marks
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VI: The Earthquake
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VII: Everyday Life in Times of Terror
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Afterword by Suna Safran
Copyright

I am writing this for you, Mary Ann. The others are faceless, so it helps, when I look into this screen, to imagine you as my first reader.

Let me begin, then, by addressing the points you raised in your last message. You asked if I was certain of this woman’s innocence. My answer is an unqualified yes. She is a committed pacifist and has been all her life. If that bulky jacket did indeed conceal explosives, you can be sure it was someone else who put them there. Either that or the picture you sent me has been digitally enhanced.

You also asked if I could give you some idea of my whereabouts. I regret to say that (for now, at least) I am unable to do so. Nor would it be wise, at this point, to tell you why. But I am happy to tell you about my passports. As my records will show (and please do feel free to check these for yourself) I am a US citizen by birth, though I do also have an Irish passport. I have never been a citizen of Turkey, nor do I plan to become one. But in some sense it will always be my home.

In answer to your final question – and I will go into some detail here, as I cannot expect you or your colleagues to accept me at face value unless I explain who I am, how I came to be that person, and the circuitous route by which I wandered into this murky intrigue – I was eight years old when my family moved to Istanbul. This was in 1960, which means (among other things) that we made the trip across the Atlantic in a prop plane. Crossing Europe, we were low enough to see the cars on the roads. But – and I expect the same was true for Jeannie Wakefield ten years later – I was not at all frightened. My thoughts were on our golden destination, which I knew, and assumed
to know intimately, from an old issue of the
National Geographic
. All summer long, I’d been gazing into its lush and perfectly composed illustrations, imagining myself inside them.

There are no words to describe my first impression of the real thing. It hit me like a hand, ripping the pictures out of my head and tearing them to shreds. I can recall a thousand swirling details of that first drive in from the airport, but I have no sense of the whole. There was the yellow haze rising from the Sea of Marmara but not the sea itself; the flock of tankers and fishing boats but not the horizon on which they sat; the red and crumbling fragments of the old city walls but no history to explain them. I could barely breathe from the stench of burning flesh I could not yet trace to the tanning factories, the injured violins that I could not yet accept as music, the belching chaos of jeeps, trucks, horses, carts and Chevrolets. Tiny gypsies weaved amongst us with flowers no one wanted, and crooked old men with sofas strapped to their backs. Pressed against the sky was a forest of minarets and domes. The Golden Horn, which wasn’t golden. The Bosphorus, so blue it stung my eyes.

The city thinned as we crawled along the European shore, winding our way from bay to promontory, and promontory to bay, through narrow streets that opened without warning into coastal roads, coming so close to Asia at some points that we could see the windows of the houses and at other times veering so far back into Europe that we could see no windows whatsoever, but I had no idea where we were by then, no idea at all. Until that day, I had never seen a landscape that wasn’t planned or protected, or a street that wasn’t zoned.

After an hour that seemed like a day, our bus turned up a steep and narrow cobblestone lane. We crawled up past a cemetery in which the tombstones wore turbans. Skirting a dark and crenellated tower, we climbed higher still, to pass through a stone gate covered with ivy. Beyond was a cool green hush and a leafy campus that consoled me because it looked so much like the one we’d left behind in Boston. There was a path. I followed it around a corner. I stepped out onto a terrace, and there it was: my golden destination. My picture from the
National Geographic
. The castle on its wooded hillside; the Bosphorus with its endless parade of tankers, ferries and fishing boats. Lining its
Asian shore, the villas and palaces that seemed close enough to touch, and behind them, the brown rolling hills that must, I thought, stretch as far as China.

The terrace on which I was standing belonged to Robert College, where my father was to teach physics. Founded by American Protestants in the 19th century to educate the city’s Westernising elites, it would later be nationalised and renamed. When we arrived in 1960, it was still a private university, run by a board based in New York. Most of its faculty came from the US, and most, like my father, came on three-year contracts.

But by 1963, my parents had fallen in love with the city and couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. Imagine looking out of the window in the morning, they said, and not seeing the Bosphorus. So my father signed another contract, and then another. They managed to hang on until 1970, the year I turned eighteen.

Robert College was no longer a peaceful or secluded place by then – the political turmoil sweeping across Turkey had swept us up, too. The only sensible thing was to move back to Boston. This was where they were, Mary Ann, when your sister and I were classmates. She may remember the beautiful home they made for themselves there. But they never stopped pining for the Bosphorus (and all that it implied). So in the mid-80s, when Turkey seemed to be returning to its former peaceful self, they moved back to Istanbul. They’ve been here ever since. Their house is only a few hundred yards from the one where I grew up.

Had things worked out differently, I might have settled here, too. And this is my connection to the story you’ve asked me to tell you. I am sure I never spoke of it with your sister, because at the time we knew each other, I spoke of it to no one. There was a boy, you see. And it was serious, very serious.

By the time I left Istanbul, in June 1970, we were engaged. But we kept it secret. Because he suspected his parents were reading his mail, we did not even mention it in our letters. As soon as I got to Boston, I found myself a waitressing job, working long hours all summer and neglecting my studies that autumn until I’d saved enough money to buy us two weeks together in a country where no one knew us. In
mid-December, I went to Paris to meet him. But he never turned up. For three days, I sat in our room at the Hotel des Grandes Ecoles, waiting for the message that never came.

His letter was waiting for me when I got back to Boston. He’d met someone else – someone, he said, who was quite like me ‘except that she’s more innocent.’ I wrote him back. A three-word postcard: ‘ROT IN HELL.’ Early the next summer, I opened an envelope with no return address to find a garish clipping from a Turkish newspaper to see that my wish had been granted.

The only way I could fend off the wordless horror that swept over me at that moment – and continued to sweep over me, for years to come, every time I put my head on a pillow – was to sever all connections with the place from which it came. But I was, I now see, only buying myself time. The twists and turns of life have brought me back, and now here I am, strangled by my own principles, forced, through wicked circumstance, to defend my usurper.

I met her for the first time late last summer. Though it would be more accurate to say that it was arranged that we should meet. I was back in Istanbul for one of my flying visits, to keep my mother company while my father was in hospital having a hip replaced. So let me set the scene for you: it was early evening, and we were on the balcony, having drinks. My mother was bringing me up to date on the latest gossip about people I knew only by name, and as she spoke, I gazed out at the branches I felt I knew leaf by leaf, though the trees themselves were twice as tall as they’d been when I was a child. There was something about the light – or something behind it. The sun had already set behind the hills on our side of the Bosphorus, but filtering through the blue-green foliage in my mother’s garden I could almost see the reflected gold from the hills of Asia.

No hint of the sea between us – just the low hum of a passing tanker, the putter of a fishing boat, a car backfiring on the road leading down to the shore. Below us, in the Burç Club, a man was testing a microphone. Filing down the White Walk were the first guests for what my mother told me was the third alumni wedding to be held at the club since Wednesday. As a woman in a filmy dress picked her
way past a family of lazily growling dogs, she faltered on her stilettos but was righted by the man next to her. He glanced sternly into our garden, whereupon, following his gaze, I, too, saw the most curious scene: a thin and anxious woman in a bellydancing outfit, posing on what I assumed to be a log. Crouched next to the wall was a photographer casting furtive looks in our direction.

‘Do you know this man?’ I asked my mother. ‘Does he have permission to be here?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s not for me to say.’

I offered to call someone in Buildings and Grounds. She shook her head. ‘Why bother? Anyway, the joke’s on them.’ She launched into a story that seemed at first to have nothing to do with the photographer and his model: one morning last summer, when my mother had been sitting in this same chair, drinking her coffee and minding her own business, a posse of workmen had ‘just barged’ into the garden with no warning and started digging holes. ‘It turned out they were from the city sewers project. They brought in one more pipe than they had room for, so that’s what the bellydancer down there is sitting on. Not very photogenic if you ask me!’

She swang around in her chair, bronzed, leggy and devil-
may-care
. Pointing at the cheese sticks on the copper tray between us, she said, ‘Eat!’ As I topped up her Martini, she told me about a Dodge Ruthwen, who had taught engineering here between 1960 and 1963, but who also played stride piano. ‘And oh – his voice!’ His son (‘He was a year behind you at the community school, darling, but now he’s at the Smithsonian’) had stopped by last week to say hello. ‘He’s staying with the Winchalls – you do remember
them
, don’t you? She was the head of USIS and he was a historian. They were here in the late 60s, and again in the late 80s. Now they’ve bought a house out on the Princes Islands…’ Name after name I didn’t remember, wave after wave of fun-lovers, swishing in for their three year contracts, and leaving to be replaced by others just like them. Did they ever pause to ask themselves why there were here?

Airily, I repeated something I’d heard the poet Derek Walcott say at a reading a few years back: though the United States was an empire, it was invisible to most of its citizens.

‘So?’ my mother said.

‘So we’re all part of an empire we don’t even know exists.’

My mother flared her nostrils. ‘The problem with you, Miss M –’

‘Can you please stop calling me that?’

‘The problem with you, Miss M, is that you’re so busy designing umbrellas, you lose sight of the people underneath.’

She lifted up her glass, to stare at the ice cubes. ‘Which reminds me. That old flame of yours.’

‘Which one?’ I said.

‘That film-maker. The one who let you down so badly, and then got into all that trouble. His name escapes me. His film name, I mean.’

‘It’s Yankı,’ I said.

‘Yankee?’

‘There’s no “ee” at the end, just “uh.” Yankı. With an undotted “i”.’

‘Yes, dear. But why?’

‘It means “echo” in Turkish. You did know that, didn’t you?’ My mother nodded, somewhat uneasily, I thought. ‘And he’s Turkish,’ I continued, trying to keep my voice light, ‘but not just Turkish. He’s an echo of something else. He was born in the US, remember?’

‘It still sounds too much like Yankee.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a play on words.’

‘Is it? Really? It sounds rather forced to me. But never mind. It’s the films that count. Though I have to say. They’re rather obtuse. The one I saw, anyway.
My Cold War
. It won that big prize.’

‘So I heard,’ I said.

‘Did you see it?’

I shook my head.

‘Someone told me it was about that terrible thing he was involved in, you know, in 1971. So of course, I was curious. But as you probably know…’

I nodded.

‘…it turned out to be about his childhood. He had so much to say about his childhood that he ran out of film by 1970. All we’re left with is a whole screen of dangling questions, which he promises to answer
in a future Part Two. Fat chance of that happening now, though.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s been arrested.’

‘Where?’

‘In America.’

‘What for?’

Tapping her cigarette against the ashtray, she said, ‘The jury’s out on that, I’m afraid. All I know is that he was flying into JFK – this was some time last week. He was on some sort of tour. He’s big with the students there, I hear. Someone we know at NYU went out to meet him. Well, he waited and waited, but there was no sign of anyone remotely resembling an obtuse documentary-maker. So finally he went over to this officious-looking Brownshirt – I just can’t believe they have the nerve to dress these people in brown, can you? Do they have any idea of the historical ironies? Apparently not. Because when our friend went over to this hulking Homeland Security
Übermensch
, and mentioned who he was waiting for, all hell broke loose, and he was arrested, too.’

‘For what?’ I asked.

‘If you can believe it – for terrorism. They didn’t hold him for long, but it looks as if that old flame of yours – they nabbed him at passport control – did I mention that? Well, anyway, it looks as if
he
might be in for the long haul. The rumour is that they’ve sent him to Guadalajara.’

‘
Guadalajara
?’

‘I meant Guantanamo, as you well know. But honestly. If he’s a terrorist, then we’re all terrorists. Which is no joking matter, because that is what it seems to be coming to.’ She lit up a new cigarette. ‘But here’s the worst part. When your old flame was arrested…’

‘Why do you have to keep calling him that?’

‘When this old flame of yours was arrested, he was with his five-year-old son. Really, his wife should have been with them, too, but there was some sort of complication with her passport. She’s a US citizen, too, you know, but have you heard what they’re doing now? Anyone who applies for a new passport from abroad has to wait two weeks, because the consulate has to send the forms back to
Washington to be processed.
And
we have to pay through the nose for the privilege. And believe you me – the diplomatic pouch does not come cheap. Anyway – you must remember this wife of his. Jeannie Wakefield?’