Enlightenment (33 page)

June 12
^th
2001

‘Today, for the first time in almost a year, I did an honest day’s work. Suna was somewhat prickly. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re so close to the deadline for this EU thing, or because it was hard to concentrate, with Emre devoting so much energy to finding a way to fall off Suna’s balcony, or if she’s afraid, despite my assurances, that I’m going to leave her to do the dogwork. When I told her that I had so many of these things under my belt now that I could do them in my sleep – she gazed at me through narrowed eyes and said, “Perhaps this is just as well, now that you seem determined to spend the rest of your life in a coma.”

I mentioned this in passing to Sinan and he said, “Yes, well, now that you mention it. Have you considered a cold shower?” I did not immediately get the joke. So he said, “Listen. Stop worrying so much about every little thing Suna says. She’s under a lot of pressure right now.” He went on to tell me that she’d done “another of her interviews”. As he said these words, his eyes hooded over too. It was, he said, an exposé of a family with Mafia links. “I think you can guess which family. And which member of this family we know best.” It
took me a moment to realise he meant İsmet. This, too, earned me a hooded look. “Yes. İsmet,” said Sinan. “But this time – thanks to that fiery speech you gave us – don’t tell me your sleepy mind cannot recall this either? Not even vaguely? Such a shame. We were talking about it only the other day, Suna and I, and we both agree it was your finest moment. You were right, of course! You changed our lives in fact! Neither of us will ever dare collude with our oppressors ever again!”

I let it pass for once, asking instead what Suna had said about İsmet. “She mentioned him by name, expressing doubt about his credentials as a politician, and alluding also to his shadier business dealings – but of course, we don’t know for sure that he’s an arms dealer – by presenting rumour as fact, she’s inviting a lawsuit,” said Sinan. “But that is not all. Or rather, it’s more complicated. You see, the family in question – it’s not İsmet’s family per se, but he’s connected to it by marriage – is already in dispute with Haluk’s family. This could exacerbate that dispute,” he said cheerfully. “There’s no knowing where it might end.”

Then Emre woke up, and by the time I’d got him back to sleep, the phone had rung, and it was my father, telling me about the lecture he’s set to give at ARIT in September, and then, when I carelessly asked what the lecture was about, explaining at some length. It’s about the Cold War, needless to say. (As he put it: “I’ve decided to become my own historian.”) By the time I was off the phone I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten to ask Sinan where he thought the new Suna saga was leading, so I still don’t know.’

June 12
^th
2001

‘Something else I forgot to mention. I can’t say I’m happy about it: Suna and my father have made friends. I ran into them the other day on the terrace of the Divan Pub. They were having an argument – about the Cold War, what else?

“It is not that we agree,” Suna told me. “Not even that I hope we ever will. But how often can you find an enemy who will admit openly to his perversity, and who can converse as an equal? How
are we ever to understand our collective past unless we hear from all sides?”

What she fails to ask herself is what my father gets out of the bargain.’

June 12
^th
2001

‘He makes no effort to hide his past. If anything, he advertises it. “Speaking as a retired spook” is his favourite way of beginning a sentence. And if his aim is to make people stop and listen to what he had to say, it works. For all his showmanship, he is careful what he says. His second favourite way of beginning a sentence is, “Although you must understand why I cannot speak about specific operations or allude to any document that has yet to be declassified…”

But he’s happy to talk all night about the bigger picture – what he’d been sent here to do in the mid 50s, how that brief had changed by the time he came back in the late 60s, what the relationship between the US and Turkey was supposed to be, and what it really was, why he was not at all sorry to have been part of the fight against Communism, how and why the CIA failed to do its job, how it did and did not work in harmony with local intelligence networks, and most of all, how and why current US policy in our part of the world was ill-conceived, ill-managed, arrogant and doomed.

And they love it. They just love it. It’s not, Sinan tells me, just the pleasure of discovering that suspicions you had carried through life had some truth in them. It is the freedom, the release that a grain of truth can bring.

Once he stayed up all night with Dad discussing his father. They were not in agreement about the man himself – Sinan called him an “unscrupulous collaborator” who had “used his influence with the Americans to line his pockets”, while my father called him a patriot who “believed his country to be well-served by its strong ties with the US.” But they did agree that this man had had a very strange way of being a father.

“Controlling all I did, but almost never there,” Sinan said. Dad then asked him two questions he couldn’t answer: “What effect did
he have on your politics? Who angered you and your friends most – ‘imperialists’ like me, or people like your father, the Turks who worked with us?”

It seems never to have occurred to Sinan that his almost-
never-present
father might have shaped his politics.

Needless to say – now that it has, he thinks there might be a film in it.

“Why are you rolling your eyes?” he asked me. “Isn’t this always the way you wanted me to be?”

He’s right. I did. I do. It’s just that I feel sidelined. These easy-going free-ranging conversations Dad’s been having with Suna and Sinan have not led on to similar exchanges between dad and me.

Our relationship, set in aspic thirty years ago, must not be touched. He remembers my first year in Istanbul like this: we had a wonderful time together, really got to know each other as human beings. It was one big happy family – not just him and me, but also Amy, Chloe, Chloe’s brother Neil, and Sinan. But then politics marched in to shut the whole thing down.

“You make it sound like an invading army,” I said. “But it wasn’t. It was you.”

“What? I started the Cold War? I pulled the strings of the entire student left? Personally planted the bomb that blew up my car?”

“No, of course not. But as you say yourself, you were here to do a job.”

“Yes, but so were a lot of other people, and some pretty unsavoury people at that. You have no idea. You know why? Because you had your dad here protecting you.”’

June 15
^th
2001

‘Summer school began this week. Today I met my class. There are only six of them, but they all seem keen. One in particular asked very good questions – unfortunately I couldn’t answer several, and one I totally muffed as I had no idea whatsisname had died. It must have happened on a day when I didn’t see the paper. Or saw the paper but didn’t get around to reading it. In other words, it could have
happened any time last year.

I fessed up, and of course we had a laugh about it. But I am going to have to get serious. No need for a cold shower, though. One look at the pile of very important unread monographs on my desk will do the trick.

It was good to be back in the classroom. Good to be wearing grownup clothes. Good to have lunch with Suna at Kennedy Lodge and conduct serious conversations with serious colleagues about matters that matter.

It was better getting home. He shrieked, opened his arms wide, laughed, babbled as he crawled across the floor – no valued colleague has ever given me such a welcome.’

June 27
^th
2001

‘Today we had a man from the Human Rights Foundation come in to talk to us. He said nothing about his own life but had the haunted but strangely peaceful look that I’ve seen so often on people who’ve survived torture. A few of the students had a hard time believing him, but he disarmed them by saying that this made him glad. They’d lost the terror that had gripped their parents – the terror they’d learned in the 70s and again in the 80s, in the country’s political prisons. They assumed they lived in a free country, and although this was not so, their insistence that it should be so would be a force for change. All this without quite looking them in the eye: his voice, though certain, was also weary.

One day soon, Turkey would be an enlightened republic, he said. That day had not yet dawned. He told us how many members of his foundation had been killed over the last two years. He talked about the reports they’d still managed to relay to the European Court of Justice, about the forensic doctors who’d put their lives, their families and their careers at risk to gather evidence. He impressed upon us that torture is still systematic, occurring wherever a person first comes into contact with the authorities. On being asked, he told us what this was likely to entail. Or rather recited this.

After class I took him to Kennedy Lodge for lunch, but we took
the cloud with us. At the very end, he asked if I’d decided about the “mission”. To my shame, I had no idea what he meant. Tonight I dredged through my ever-growing backlog, and there it was: a delegation from the Council of Europe, passing through Istanbul tonight, en route to Van to inspect several prisons. All familiar names, one of them a former colleague. I managed to catch him in his hotel. We’ll meet for breakfast, take it from there.’

June 28
^th
2001

‘I know I should do this, but how? Van is roasting hot this time of year, and I can’t see taking a ten-month-old baby on a prison tour, either. But I can’t see leaving him either. Not if Sinan comes, too.’

June 29
^th
2001

‘Handing him over to Lüset this morning – the hardest thing I have ever done.

All day, I’ve been seeing all the things he would have noticed – cranes, road repair machines, unusual trucks. Knobs, rusty nails, strange looking pieces of bread.’

June 30
^th
2001

‘To think, after what we saw today, that I almost brought Emre with us… I need to get my head checked.’

July 3
^rd
2001

‘I’ve joined the gym at the Burç Club. I’ve been doing a half-hour on the machines after class as I’ve found that clears my head.’

July 15
^th
2001

‘Today I made the mistake of putting him in his sandpit and expecting that he would be so entranced with his new dump truck that I’d be
able to write my lecture. I gave up when a gust of wind took all my papers and blew them over the ledge. Oh the fury and the frustration – until I saw him laughing. We decamped to the Burç Club – after three hours in the pool he’s asleep in his deck chair, and I am free to work. But just the sight of those books next to the suntan oil makes my head hurt.’

August 12
^th
2001

‘Yesterday morning I handed in my grades – reformed character that I am, I stayed up all night. Made the deadline with a half-hour to spare. This left little time for packing, however. Plus I could barely see straight.

This time, Emre looked through the window, not at it. When he saw the earth fall away, he gasped.

We were somewhere over Bulgaria when I remembered that I had left Emre’s suitcase in the upstairs hallway. I felt like shooting myself, but Sinan wasn’t phased. When we got to Heathrow, he phoned Lüset, and by the time we got to her flat in South Ken she had been out to Boots and stocked up on milk, nappies and pyjamas. We went out this morning to buy the rest.

Today we flew up to Edinburgh. Sinan’s event was this evening. We had been planning to leave Emre with a babysitter organised by the festival people, but Emre had hysterics, so we took him with us. Or rather, Sinan went first, and Emre and I went over after the screening. I’ve seen it many times already, so I didn’t mind missing it, but I was curious to hear the questions afterwards – this film is bound to cause controversy just by virtue of its subject matter, and I wanted to gauge the reaction.

There were quite a few Turks in the audience – you could tell from the way they treated Emre. If he whimpered, or rocked a chair, they would turn around and smile, or they’d pinch his cheek and say, “
Ne cici!
Or
Yavrum!
”

Very different response from the Nordics, though the maternal veterans in the audience did make some effort. When Emre was really beginning to work himself up and I realised I was going to have to
let him run around outside for a while unless I wanted a kicking tantrum, one Mat Vet got out of her seat to let me pass, and as I did, she smiled at me wearily, to indicate that she understood exactly how I felt and was with me one hundred percent – though I could also tell (from the smile she gave Emre) that she pitied him for being saddled with an unfit mother who kept him up after his bedtime.

In the corridor was an elegant, agitated woman in her 40s; she was hissing into her mobile phone. Emre, meanwhile, was practising his walk.

When he toppled over in her vicinity, he looked up at her and smiled. But instead of the endearments that he has come to expect in Turkey, all he got was an icy glare. He shot me a puzzled look: what had he done wrong?

He dared to laugh, and the elegant, agitated woman still hissing on her phone cast me a look of pure hatred. That was when I recognised her –
less than a year ago, that woman was me.
’

August 20
^th
2000

‘I’ve decided I’ve spent too much of my life thinking, wondering, asking, looking under stones best left unturned.