Enlightenment (21 page)
Authors: Maureen Freely
Though some of your colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change have been kind enough to sign the queries they have emailed me after each new instalment, others have preferred to remain anonymous. Forgive me, Mary Ann, if I am jumping to conclusions. But I have to wonder what these people have to hide.
In answer to one of their questions: I myself have nothing to hide. Moving on to a second question:
How long was William Wakefield in the dark?
In all honesty, I can only guess. He knew he’d been framed. He read the warning in the Trunk Murder: clear out now, or next time it won’t be some hopped-up underling who’s lying in a shallow grave in the garden of the Pasha’s Library, or inside a trunk at the bottom of the Bosphorus. I am in no doubt it came as a shock to know his life to be in danger, yet not to know where the danger was. He’d grown so accustomed to omniscience. Or rather, the illusion of it.
As for his activities during his last year in Istanbul: it is clear that (between drinks) he was running some sort of agent provocateur. This person would have been expected to involve him or herself in student politics, perhaps to influence the direction it took. It is not clear how much control William Wakefield had over this creature. My guess is that somewhere along the way he lost his grip.
Or someone else took over. Changed the game. Used William Wakefield’s own people against him. For there is no doubt that other intelligence services operated on campus, and also in other universities across the country. They, too, would have had an interest in agents
provocateurs. Sometimes the same agents provocateurs.
There are those who hold that every act of violence perpetrated by the student left in the 60s – and the 70s, and even the 80s – was either planned or pushed forward by agents provocateurs – the aim being to crush and discredit the student left. And certainly, by the end of the Cold War, it wasn’t just the student left that had died a death, but the Turkish left in its entirety. However, I refuse to believe that this was down to a handful of intelligence services running a handful of agents. That lets too many people off the hook.
But back to the question. How long was William Wakefield in the dark? Despite his forced departure from Istanbul and the demotion that followed, he remained a company man, so I am in no doubt that he was using the company’s resources to research his suspicions from the moment he got to Williamsburg. He might have been ‘dead meat’ in Istanbul, as he put it, but the letter from the Turkish Embassy is proof that he could still pull in the odd favour. He would have known all along that the story about the Trunk Murder didn’t add up. When he found himself publicly denounced by his own daughter for having been its mastermind, he would have been doubly keen to track down the true culprit.
Then he discovered (upon reading the famous letter of complaint from the Turkish Embassy in Washington) that Anonymous had added a new twist to the story – No Body! Which would have told William that a certain someone, having rid himself of one agent provocateur, and pinned the blame on four baby revolutionaries, was now seeking to erase all record of it.
Now why would that be? As Suna might say,
cui bono
? The question would have been there, fomenting in the back of his mind. Forever taking new shape. Because of course he knew there
was
a body.
So even when he was out in the middle of nowhere, running fronts, he would have been putting lines out, and stockpiling clues. Just when he saw the light is not for me to say.
But if I had to guess how long it took William Wakefield to figure out who had done him over, and why, and how, I would say it took him a good ten years. If I had to pinpoint the exact moment of enlightenment, I’d say it was the day his daughter returned from her short but colossally ill-advised trip to Istanbul in January 1981.
‘I was against my profession before I even joined it (she told me in her letter). Even as I stood amidst the thunder and lightning of Rehoboth, I knew the demons that would drive me. I looked into the night sky and I saw my future. I would be the kind of lawyer who fought against any law that allowed rich people with lawyers to get away with murder.
I ended up – like so many high-minded classmates – at a large firm in Manhattan. I could not choose my work and most of it was the sort I had scorned during my three years at Columbia Law School. But one of the senior partners had links with Amnesty International. He was on its International Executive Committee, had played a key part in its campaign against torture and was now involved with its new campaign against the death penalty. Humanitarian law was in its infancy then, and I wanted to get in on the ground floor. I helped him out of hours wherever I could, mostly with administrative details and translation. He was pleased by my interest and happy to open doors for me.
In December 1977, he took me along to an Amnesty conference on the abolition of the death penalty in Stockholm. It was here that I met several lawyers my age that worked in or with the US Section, and when we all returned to New York, we kept in touch. It cheered me to be with people who could see beyond “America the Beautiful”. They were, I thought, the best America had to offer: I admired them for their determination to give their best to others. The content of our conversation was gruesome – death and torture,
disappearances and government-condoned murder. You had to cling to your principles to keep from getting swept away. But that’s what I liked about it – having rules that guided you through.
In the autumn of 1980 we were laying the groundwork for a conference on humanitarian law, and I was spending large chunks of my weekend in my old library at Columbia. One Saturday I woke up feeling happy for no reason. It was cold and windy but the bare branches made a beautiful pattern against the sky. I walked into the library and smelled the warm dust and the varnish. The rows of bent heads, the piles of books. I found myself a place, and there, just opposite, was a boy who with his head down looked just like Sinan.
I watched his hands pass through his hair in that bored, insolent way I remembered so well from the days when we had studied together in a library so like this one. He must have seen me, because now he returned my stare. My anguish must have shown on my face, because he leaned forward and in a library whisper, he said, “Look, I know. I’m ugly. But not that ugly.” After he was gone, I spent a long time looking at the empty chair.
My eyes began to wander until they lit, as they so often did, on a couple studying together, almost intertwined. On their faces I saw a happiness that had, I thought, rendered them almost unconscious. The injustice of it hit me, the dumb luck of it: that they were here, together, and we were not.
If only I knew why. If only I knew why, I wrote, I could face the future.
You have to help me
, I pleaded.
I’m losing my bearings
. It was not the first letter I’d written to Sinan since my father had condemned me to the flickering and – in eight years, never once substantiated – hope that one day we might meet. But the letter I began in the library that autumn morning was the longest and most desperate. It took me all day, and all the paper I had with me. I knew it was a futile exercise; I knew when I folded it up and put it into an envelope addressed to Sinan Sinanoğlu, care of his mother, that it was crazy. But every word of it was true.
I wrote about my living death, about how I couldn’t look across the library without seeing him. About the string of boyfriends and the string of therapists, always trying, always failing. About my father,
how I hated him. How I hated myself, too. How at night, when I closed my eyes, I imagined I was sitting next to him in Kitten II, speeding up the Bosphorus, past the palaces, past Pera, past Üsküdar, past the Old City and out along the old Byzantine walls into the Sea of Marmara, and instead of pulling into a discotheque with fairy lights and a dancefloor the size of a mushroom we just kept on going, to Avşa, Bandırma, Çanakkale, Samothraki, Alexandroupolis, Kavala…
Is this what love means at the end of the day? Is this what faith is, pretending there are two of you when really there is only one? Am I telling you the truth only because I know you can’t write back?
That was how my letter ended. I sent it without rereading it. As I let it drop into the post box, something inside me died.’
Jeannie had arranged to meet her Amnesty friends at the West End Café that evening. She was the first to arrive. There was only one other person at the bar and he did not look like a regular. He had a briefcase parked at his feet, but instead of a suit he was wearing jeans and a safari jacket. He was tanned, or perhaps just wind-burned. His hair – curly, brown, but bleached at the tips by the sun – looked like it had been in a windstorm since he’d last brushed it. He moved slowly, and every once in a while he would see something that made him pause.
When Jeannie’s friends walked in, they saw him before they saw her. One by one they shouted ‘Jordan!’ and ran to throw their arms around him. How long he had been back? How glad they were to see him back in one piece! When they brought him to Jeannie’s table, he smiled and held out his hand.
‘Jordan Frick,’ he said.
Of course she knew the name. He was a journalist, the last of the firebrands. He’d just done a big piece in the
New Yorker
on El Salvador.
‘Glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘My name’s Jeannie Wakefield.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘In fact, you know me, too.’
‘I do?’
‘Don’t worry. It will come to you.’ He turned to the man sitting
between them. It now emerged that he and Jordan been classmates at Columbia in the late 60s. But today the talk was of the up-coming presidential election. Jordan was covering it for a British newspaper. When someone asked him about human rights in the event of a Reagan victory, he said, ‘It couldn’t come at a worse time.’ He flicked back his hair in a way Jeannie had once seen a shorn sheep flicking back locks that were no longer. And she knew then who he was.
‘No Name!’
‘No Name,’ he laughed. ‘I’d forgotten you called me that.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Actually, I was about to ask you the same question.’
But before he could, their friends were rushing them off to the seven o’clock show at the Thalia. It wasn’t until they were waiting for the light to change at 96
th
St that Jeannie got a chance to ask.
‘So No Name,’ she began. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t quite bring myself to call you Jordan yet. Last time we met – nine years ago, yes? In the Café Pamplona?’
Jordan ‘No Name’ Frick shot her a sharp look.
‘Anyway,’ she persisted. ‘We were talking about the Trunk Murder. And you said…something about the story not adding up. Am I right?’ He nodded curtly. ‘So anyway. I was wondering. Did you ever get to the bottom of it?’
‘You mean the murder?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Obviously.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What’s Sinan’s take on it all?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know where he is.’
‘How about Chloe then?’
‘I’m afraid we fell out.’
‘Then how about the others? I mean those girls.’
She paused before answering, so that she could control her voice. ‘No, I haven’t been in touch with them either.’
His righteous glare made her want to defend herself, so she added, ‘That’s not quite true. In the beginning, when I knew what prison they were in, yes, I did write to them. A lot. But then, when they didn’t answer…well, it was clear they wanted to have nothing to do with me.’
‘Did you ever ask yourself why?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘There were a lot of things.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jordan said. ‘I think it was one thing in particular. I think it was because of that pack of lies you wrote for my old friend Greg Dickson.’
When they reached the Thalia, Jeannie continued down Broadway. She turned on the TV the moment she walked into her apartment. She kept it on till she went to bed. But the moment she turned off the light, it all came back.
‘It came back as it always did, in snatches. First my own words, the grandiose theories I’d spun with hearsay. Then it was that pack of lies, the retraction. Then my father, telling me the moral of the story. Then it was Suna. Suna with her feet dangling from that fourth floor window, Suna lying bruised and broken on her prison bed, reading what I’d said about her, Suna stuffing each and every bad translation of my thoughtless words into an envelope and drafting the only letter she’d ever sent: I thought you were my friend. With each new voice, an old sorrow engulfed her. As the walls came down, my grand resolution came back to mock me. How dare I say I cared about human rights? How could I draft a letter on behalf of people I’d never met who were in prisons in South Africa or Central America, but never once enquire after people I had personally harmed?
These were the questions that compelled me to accompany my friends to a seminar on torture at which Jordan Frick was to be one of the featured speakers. It was three or four weeks after our encounter at the West End Café. The election had come and gone. Jordan was there as an expert on Central America, but he also spoke briefly about Turkey.
Nothing he said was news to me. I had read the reports. After five years of ‘democratic’ rule under a new constitution, five years of turmoil and escalating violence – drive-by shootings, hijackings, pitched battles between right and leftwing militias – Turkey was once again governed by the military. Once again, its political prisons were filling up. I knew the facts and figures but not what I felt about them. Listening to Jordan, looking at someone who was not afraid to
condemn the regime in print and in public, the walls came down.
It was not just that he was fearless. When he spoke, he lost all sense of self. He became his subject. He pulled you in. There was no possibility of distance. You were there in the torture chamber. You could feel the
falaka
on your feet. You could smell your tormentor, and hear the electric cattle prod buzzing as he lifted it over his head. You tasted the fear. You knew you had to devote your life to fighting it. You knew you were a failure because you had done no such thing.
“You’ve never been back, I take it?” This is what he said to me later, when we’d decamped to The White Horse. I told him I wouldn’t dare. “How can you justify that? I mean, if you care about the people.” I told him the truth – that I never considered it from that angle.
His response was strange: “I know you like to pity yourself, but have you ever considered the possibility that I might feel even more compromised than you do?” It was right after this that he mentioned the trial.
Hadn’t I heard? It was set for January “The old Enlightenment crew, under a new name. Technically, it’s the editorial board of a political magazine. Your friend Suna is one of the defendants.” What he wanted to do was drum up some international interest. “Embarrass the government, so they dismiss the case. To do that, I need better access. To be blunt, I need someone they can trust.”
Stupidly, I asked why they didn’t trust him.
It was my article, of course!
There was only one way to make up for it.
As he considered my proposal, his eyebrows went up and down, up and down. He made a fist and then he opened it like a flower.’
But later that same evening, she told her friend Fran that she’d never been so sure of anything. She wasn’t going to Istanbul to find out what happened ten years ago. She was going back to help people who needed help now.
‘The trial is just the peg,’ she said. ‘What he’s really doing is mapping out a generation – showing how people like my father destroyed an entire generation in the name of the Domino Theory. Which as theories go couldn’t be more insane, could it? Since when
have countries been dominos? And why exactly does one country “falling to Communism” mean its neighbour will fall, too? Jordan has a brilliant way of…’
‘Oh, so Jordan’s brilliant now, is he?’ Fran looked at her with some amusement.
‘I’m not attracted to him.’
‘Of course not. You’re never attracted to anyone. But he
is
pretty cute.’
‘That has nothing to do with it, Fran!’
‘Who am I to begrudge you an adventure? But Mike can’t be too happy about it, can he?’
Mike had been Jeannie’s boyfriend throughout law school. He still was her boyfriend, though he was working in Washington. ‘It’s none of Mike’s business,’ she told Fran. ‘If he cares about me at all, he’ll know it’s something I have to do.’
In fact, Mike was not at all happy to hear that Jeannie was going off to Turkey on an ill-defined mission with a journalist so famous even he knew his name. When she wouldn’t back down, he said fine, if that was the way she wanted to play it, then so be it. He slammed down the phone, and they didn’t speak again until the day she was due to leave. This was another short call. ‘I’ve called to say goodbye,’ she said. And Mike said, ‘Well, okay then. Goodbye.’
The moment she put the phone down, it rang again. She said, ‘Listen, Mike,’ but it wasn’t Mike. It was her father. His first words were, ‘That’s the spirit, Jeannie! Give the bastard hell.’
Her father was living in Columbia, Missouri now, running what purported to be an air cargo business. Whatever his real work was, it bored him to tears. But there was always the sloppy biography he had just finished, the joke of a course he’d just signed up for at the university, the former colleague who’d just disgraced himself in a way that ‘makes you think there might be a God after all.’
The big news this time was his Vietnamese housekeeper. She was ‘putting the moves’ on him. ‘And I can’t say I blame her. The husband’s no good. He’s gambled all their savings away. And she has two kids heading for med school.’
‘Sounds like a lot to take on, Dad,’ Jeannie said.
‘But that’s not what I called you for.’