Enlightenment (18 page)
Authors: Maureen Freely
‘I saw this for what it was – my only chance. It was only after I had slammed that gate behind me and headed down the path that I looked at my feet and saw I was still wearing my slippers. When I reached the garçonniere, the door was open, and so, too, were the windows. Though nothing seemed to be burned, there was the acrid aftertaste of smoke. There were shouts coming from the bathroom, but Sinan was in the dining room, standing at the window. He, too, had a pair of binoculars. When I called his name, he shuddered, as if he had heard a ghost.
I ran to embrace him, but his arms remained limp. I stepped back and looked into his eyes. They were great black holes brimming with tears. I asked what was wrong, and he told me I knew full well what was wrong. He’d seen it with his own eyes. “He had you in his arms!”
It took me some time to work out that he had seen, and misunderstood, my tussle with No Name on the glass porch. I tried to explain, but he refused to accept what I had said. But I wouldn’t accept his refusal to accept it. I had run away, hadn’t I? I had tricked No Name – tricked him by listening to his pack of lies and pretending to believe them – but we only had half an hour. This was our last chance to escape! Hearing this, Sinan put his arms around me and burst into tears. “Our last chance has come and gone, Jeannie. You
should have realised that last night!”
Again, I had no idea what he meant. He was reluctant to spell it out, and we lost more valuable time. At last he told me he knew I’d spent several hours with İsmet and my father last night, and knew what I’d said to them.
What had I said to them? Correction – what had he been told I’d said? “Jeannie, this is pointless. I know what you did. I know what you said. You turned us all in, and now…”
Now there was the patter of stockinged feet.
I looked up, and there, in the doorway, I spied Suna, and Lüset, and Haluk, and Rıfat of the green, green eyes.
“There’s been a mistake,” I told them. “I didn’t turn you in. I didn’t say anything! In fact…”
“In fact, you did,” said Suna. “And don’t think you can lie to us! We may have soft hearts, but we’re not fools!” She was wearing rubber gloves and a housecoat. Rummaging in its pocket, she retrieved what I first assumed to be a toy gun. “You and this Jordan,’ she hissed. ‘You planned this all along, didn’t you? I should have seen it. I should have understood – why else would he…” But she left her sentence hanging. It would be thirty years before I would hear the second half.
Because now Dutch Harding stepped into the room. The first thing he did was tell Suna to put the gun down. “You have no experience with firearms. You could do something you’d regret.” Reluctantly, she set it down on the dining table. “Good girl,” he said. Was there a touch of irony there? It was hard to tell. Likewise, when he turned to me and smiled.
“So,” he said. For one happy moment, I thought he was going to set them straight. At the very least, tell them we were all on the same side. Instead he said, “So. Let me guess. You’re flying home today. Am I right?”
“That’s what my father thinks. But I have no…”
“No, of course not. But let me guess. He’s sending for you at five? And until then, a certain lackey of his is babysitting?”
“How do you know all this?”
“I make it my business. Call me sentimental, but I like to stay one
step ahead of my enemies.”
“I’m not your enemy.”
“So you say. But anyway. It’s been nice knowing you. And listen,” Dutch said. “Thanks for leading us down the garden path. No, that’s not putting it strongly enough. Thanks for landing us in jail.”
“You’re not in jail.”
“We will be. Any minute now! And that’s not the half of it. If they find me guilty of espionage, I won’t be in jail long, will I? I’ll soon be swinging. And all thanks to you.”
“How can you say that – after all I’ve done?”
“That’s pretty funny, Jeannie. Because you’ve done a lot. At least – you tried. But then you lost your nerve, didn’t you, when that little car bomb went off beneath your father’s car. Couldn’t take the heat, could you? Couldn’t bear to think you might have said something that put your dear old Dad in danger. So you reverted to type. Just like I said you would. You told him. Him and his toadies. İsmet and that No Name. You told them it was me. Didn’t you?”
“You know I didn’t. You know that!”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “What’s more, you can’t prove it.” Leaning back on the wall, he folded his arms. That was that. He wasn’t going to help me. So I turned to Sinan.
“Tell them what I did. Tell them what you know.” But before he could get two words out, Dutch had interrupted him. “There’s one thing I’d like to know. What exactly did your boyfriend No Name send you here for?”
“He sent me down,” I said, “to find out what lie you were spinning.”
He laughed. “Are you for real?”
This was when my own head began to spin.
“That’s an interesting choice of words,” I said.
“Oh really? Pray tell.”
“Someone used those same words with my father.”
“And?”
“Well – maybe I was wrong,” I said. Forgetting to think before I spoke. “Maybe I fingered the wrong person,” I said wildly. “Maybe it was you talking to him in the
meydan
that night!”
“But on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.” His voice was still cool. His eyes sparkled. As if to say, what will she say next? But sizing up the situation all the same.
So I had to ask myself – I had to. Every grievance, every suspicion I’d entertained against this man came flooding back. What if I’d been right to hate him all these long months, and what if there was more to it than jealousy? What if I’d been wrong about the cool young American shadow in the
meydan
? If the man I’d seen was Dutch…
“You’re worried, aren’t you?” I said, nodding at the others, who stood watching, motionless, their eyes blank and dark. “You’re worried what they’ll think. I can tell.”
“They know what to think,” he said. “And they know what to expect from you. You traipse in here, not a bruise on your little American body, and throw us this poison. Which when it comes down to it, is – what? Some cockamamie story about a conversation between two men I sincerely doubt you could even see, on a distant evening that you couldn’t pinpoint if you…”
“It was the 19th of May,” I said. “It was the night after you planted that bomb under Haluk’s Mustang.”
“Got that on film, too, did you?” He folded his arms and laughed. “I don’t know how you guys feel,” he said, turning to the others. “But I’ve had about as much of this as I’m willing to take.”
So now Suna took over. “Get out. Get out before I push you out!” Once again, she was brandishing that gun. This time Dutch made no effort to stop her. I turned to Sinan. First I asked him if he could tell Suna to put the gun down. Then I asked him if he could tell Suna and the others what I’d done. How I’d put myself on the line. How I’d do so again, and forever, if only they’d believe me. But he wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t answer me. Just stood there, staring at the floor. Until I asked him if he could come outside with me. “No!” he shouted. “Never!” When I asked him why he’d let them poison him against me, he fixed his burning eyes on me and told me to leave. “You have no idea what you’ve done to us.” Those were his last words.
I turned to Dutch. “Don’t think it stops here. Don’t think you can do this and get away with it. When I see my father…”
“I wouldn’t bother, if I were you.”
“Why not?” I yelled. “Because he’ll protect you? Because you’ve been working for him all along?”
On my way back up the hill, I like to think I paused to reflect on what I’d done – what I’d unleashed, simply to assuage my jealousy and my raging heart. But I have no recollection of it. I remember only the rush. And the ache, the ache that is with me to this day.
It was only when I heard another cool American voice calling to me that my first doubt struck me. It was No Name, waiting in the car, which had its engine running.
He looked at his watch and smiled. “Said your goodbyes now? Ready to go home?”’
First let me apologise for my long silence, Mary Ann. In answer to your question – I think I just needed a break. A few days in my own shoes. Mary Ann – it took something out of me, writing all that down. I was in danger of forgetting where my life ended and hers began. You might even say I was in danger of
becoming
her. You can see it even in my words. As anyone who knows me from my journalism can tell you – and a few of your colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change do seem to fall into this category – I don’t usually write like this. (Though I do have a tendency to over identify with my subjects.)
I discussed all this with Hector Cabot in November 2005. Let me place it for you – it was just after my visit to the garçonniere. I’d rashly asked Chloe what she remembered of the days leading up to the Trunk Murder. She’d answered sharply: ‘You want me to describe the days leading up to a
rumour
?’ I’d apologised. Relenting, she’d mentioned that her father had visited Jeannie in Northampton in June 1971, ‘
id
est
not long after the murder-that-never-was.’ Perhaps to make up for her burst of irritation, she’d offered to drive me back to her house to see him.
Chloe lives in a multi-million-dollar villa in Emirgân – the glass palace, she calls it. Needless to say, it overlooks the Bosphorus. She and her stepchildren (‘the ingrates’) live upstairs. Her parents (‘the young ones’) live below, and Chloe thinks it is very silly that they insist on paying rent. Though she feels she has to take it (‘you know what a stickler my mother is’) she secretly pays it into an account in their name. ‘They’ll need it soon enough,’ she told me as we headed down
the stairs that connected the two flats, reminding me, not for the first time, that her parents had ‘forgotten’ to take out pensions.
Forgetting is a fine art for Hector and Amy, and the bright, airy garden flat is their greatest work. To look at the pictures on the walls – children and grandchildren and stepgrandchildren, weddings and christenings and circumcisions, Amy and Hector in front of the Sphinx, the Parthenon, and the windy walls of Troy – you’d never know there’d been a twenty-five year blip in their marriage. They do not deny it – what unites them is their refusal to dwell on it. The past is a vast, disordered attic. They extract only what might look nice on a shelf.
It was teatime when we arrived, and (as was so often the case with my own parents at this hour) the room was full of visitors. One (a former student) was a physicist, now working in Denmark. Another (also a former student) had just purchased a budget airline in the American Southwest. With him was an English travel writer, in Istanbul to research a book about the travel writers who had come before her. After she’d left, we were joined by a Greek politician and a Turkish playwright. They’d come to discuss a cultural exchange that Hector’s foundation was helping to sponsor. When they discovered my line of work, they of course had things to say about the sins of the media, and most especially, the way their own countries were reported in the US and European press. ‘It is as if they have set out to kill all hope of peace!’
I tried to explain the problem from the other side: though there were some very good journalists out there, they weren’t always heard. Their readers had only the sketchiest knowledge of the Ottoman Empire and its troubled legacy. As a rule, they disregarded anything that did not confirm their prejudices. Then there were the gatekeepers – the editors, the advertisers and the long line of little people in between them – who decided what was news and what was not, who rarely thought something was important unless someone important had pronounced it to be so, and who between them had a thousand ways of burying a story.
Hector did more listening than talking, though he interrupted with a jabbing finger from time to time to say, ‘But this must stop!
Europe or no Europe, Turkey needs to be back on the world stage!’ Or: ‘You have
got
to make them come to grips with history. They have
got
to see that the dividing line isn’t Islam!’ It took me back to my teens, when this man was close to being my second father. There were only about a dozen faculty families on the hill in those days. We’d all been in and out of each other’s houses, and there were no separate tables. Whatever the adults happened to be arguing about – the Balfour Agreement, the road to Damascus, or the music teacher who had rolled under the sofa at a recent party, never to be seen again – they were as interested in our views as they were in their own.
In those days, Hector was the life of every party. But late one drunken night, he went out into his garden to shoot a rabid dog and shot his own mother by mistake. There were no more parties after that. He gave up drink, found God in some form, and moved back to the US. I’d never quite forgiven him for his defection. But now, as he drew me back into a conversation we’d left off thirty-odd years earlier, I thought how lucky I’d been, to grow up surrounded by adults who’d taken us and our thoughts so seriously.
As the physicist and the budget airline owner rose to leave, they asked Hector if he’d had any news ‘on the Sinan front’. It emerged they were old classmates. They listened sadly to Hector’s update, and there was news in it for me, too. Hector told us that William Wakefield had been on the point of returning to the US to rescue little Emre. ‘He was so happy the last time I saw him. He’d finally found the right string to pull. He thought the problem was solved!’ Now that he was ‘no longer with us,’ they were ‘Back to Square One’, as no judge was going to release the child to a party, ‘however responsible,’ who did not maintain a residence in the US. But Hector did. So he and Amy would be flying back to the US that weekend to see if the authorities might agree to move Sinan’s young son out of fostercare and into their custody. ‘But of Jeannie, poor soul, we’ve heard nothing.’ Then Hector turned to me. ‘Unless you have something new to tell me?’
I shook my head. ‘Right now, I’m just trying to establish what happened. I’m hoping that might tell us where she went.’ I added that it was not just the recent past that concerned me, as every avenue of enquiry took me back to June 1971.
Chloe’s mother didn’t seem to like that.
‘Please do try and understand,’ Hector said, after she had left, somewhat huffily, to see to supper. ‘She doesn’t like to discuss that summer you mentioned, and with good reason. She was recently divorced, poor woman. She was dating a man who, however inadvertently, pulled her daughter,
our
daughter, into the middle of a murky political intrigue. Amy herself spent several weeks under house arrest, did you know that? But she’s a woman of courage – don’t you forget that. Police guards notwithstanding, she still found the courage to give shelter to your old flame when he was on the run.’
‘She hid Sinan?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t know that? Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Could you possibly pretend I didn’t? Listen. I’m going to be frank with you. I have some serious qualms about this digging you’re doing. I know your intentions are excellent – you want to find Jeannie. You want to help
us
get little Emre back and secure his father’s release. But I’m afraid that the very things that qualify you for this task – your intimate knowledge of the history, the place and the people involved – are what will rob you of the very thing without which you
cannot
succeed
. Namely detachment. My dear, you just don’t have it.’
‘I think I do,’ I said.
‘You might
think
so, but for God’s sake, M, this woman nabbed your boyfriend!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. I damned her to hell. Sinan too. But then they actually went there… Don’t you see? No one wants to have that much power.’
‘But my dear girl, you never had that much power.’ He reminded me that the Trunk Murder (‘the
so-called
Trunk Murder’) had nothing to do with me. Nodding in agreement, I explained that – nevertheless – Jeannie Wakefield and I shared a history. The fact that it was an invisible and unacknowledged history didn’t make it any less important. Because it wasn’t a one-off, I said. Just as she had stepped into my shoes in 1970, so too had I stepped into someone else’s shoes ten years earlier, ‘and to this day I have never known,
never even asked
, whose shoes they might have been.’ You could, I said, take this story back and back – back to the middle of the 19
th
century, if you were
so minded. ‘Only when you line up all these shoes in a row do you begin to get a sense of who we are, and what we signify.’
‘By which you mean to say what exactly?’
‘By which I mean to say that Jeannie’s story is my story. Or mine to tell.’
He gave this proposition intensive thought.
‘Or think of it this way,’ I said. ‘Unless I come to some understanding of Jeannie – what she did with the life I left, and what it did to her – I cannot begin to understand the life I chose.’
Grimacing, his hands cupped around his chin and his eyes still closed, he asked ‘What do you think
she
would say, if she heard you say that?’
‘We’d disagree on certain points,’ I conceded. ‘But listen, Hector. I’m doing this because she asked me. She wrote me a fifty-three page letter, for God’s sake…’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But why?’ He paused again to think. ‘After steeping yourself in Jeannie’s words, what puzzles you the most?’
There were three things in particular. I began with the easiest: William Wakefield. What sort of man would treat his daughter the way he did that year? ‘He let her run wild and then he spied on her.’
‘I don’t find that puzzling at all,’ Hector said. ‘It was professional arrogance.’
‘You’d think he was God,’ I said.
And Hector said, ‘A
little
God. Drink had a lot to do with it, you know.’
I did. So I moved on to my second question. Sinan. ‘I hope you won’t discount this as sour grapes, but there’s so much he doesn’t tell Jeannie. And – barring the odd crisis – she seems to accept that. Crave it, even. Why?’
‘Marriage is a strange thing,’ Hector said. ‘Especially when it’s viewed from the outside.’
‘Especially,’ I added, ‘when your father is a spy.’
‘So they were both spies, were they?’ Seeing my confusion, he added, ‘I mean Sinan’s father, too.’ In fact, I hadn’t meant that at all. Though (as I now heard) there had always been rumours. ‘I suppose you know that Sinan’s father was an old army buddy of the formidable İsmet?’
I told him I did. Hector shook his head again.
‘İsmet. Now there’s a tough customer. Did I ever tell you about the time he dropped by at the office and told me chapter and verse about every party I’d wrecked and then forgotten between 1955 and 1969?’
Though it was a meandering tale with a several subplots, each featuring its own little god, he got to the end without forgetting that I had promised three questions and delivered only two. ‘So what is it?’ When I hesitated, he clenched his fists and said, ‘You’ve got to understand that I am asking you for your own good. If you don’t put your doubts into words, they eat you up, you know!’
So I phrased it as tactfully as I could. As much as I trusted her sincerity, as certain as I was that Jeannie knew no more about the so-called Trunk Murder than she had recorded in her journals and letters, I was still left feeling that there was something very odd about her story.