Enlightenment (34 page)

I am coming to see the point of silence.

A few last words, then.

So that I can say I truly understand how I’ve come to this.

Sinan went straight from Edinburgh to Ankara, and the night of his return we’d arranged to meet at the Hisar İskele at eight. It was another sultry August evening. Emre and I had walked down from the house. When we reached the Bosphorus road, traffic was at a standstill. There was a famous singer performing at the castle, and there was nowhere for his thousands of fans to park. We crossed over to the shore, where I took Emre out of his backpack and while he stared at the idling engines on the road, I looked at the water, which was still steel blue to the north beyond the bridge and, to the south, tinged with pink.

Then Emre turned to the sea and began to babble and kick and point. It took me a few moments to see it: the Bosphorus was teeming with boats and ships, but not a single one was moving.

It is not an easy feat to stand in place on the Bosphorus. The current is too strong. The boats and ships had to keep their engines running to stop the drift. It made them sound like planes preparing for take-off.

We were fifteen minutes late. So despite Emre’s pleas, no lingering at the fish tank. We went straight out to the porch, to the corner table Sinan had reserved for us. But it was already taken. When I asked why, the waiter looked perplexed. Wasn’t the gentleman at the table one of our party?

It was İsmet. After he had admired Emre, he invited us to sit down. Beckoning for the waiter, he ordered me an Absolut and mineral water. “That’s your poison, Jeannie, isn’t it?”

He went on to ask me a string of avuncular questions. How old was Emre now? How was his father? How was mine? Was I settling into motherhood? Did I find Istanbul a pleasant place to live?

“I seem to be upsetting you,” he said with a smile.

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“I take your point,” he said. “Because in the grand scheme of things, you’re not important. But I still feel a responsibility for you. Your dad and I go way back, after all. And the same must be said of this little fellow’s father. We’re practically related, as you know.” He looked up: there was Sinan standing over us. His expression was unreadable. Or rather, there was no expression at all.

İsmet stood up. “I am taking your seat, I think,” he said affably.

“Please,” said Sinan in a low voice. “There is no rush.”

“How kind of you to say so. But I won’t stay long. You see, it’s my daughter’s birthday. I’m such a family man these days. It’s my only thought! We’ll be at that long table over there.”

He bared his teeth. “I love children so much, as you know. And this child gives me such a special pleasure. He looks just like his father, Jeannie, don’t you think?” İsmet leaned forward to pinch Emre’s cheek. “And he’s the spitting image of his grandfather, too.”

“Take your hands off him,” Sinan said. “Get away from him or I’ll hit you.”

İsmet’s face went blank. “So you believed him,” he said.

“No,” said Sinan. “For thirty years, I believed you.”

İsmet stood up and the two men glared at each other.

“You should still believe me,” İsmet said. “You should always believe me.”

“You lied to me.” Sinan spat out his words.

“So you may think, but who can ever know…”

“I know!” Sinan bellowed. “I have proof!”

“But why would an old family friend wish to lie to you?”

“You lied because you wanted to ruin my life.”

“I was just trying to protect you,” İsmet said.

“Protect me from what?”

İsmet’s face went very dark.

“Leave us in peace,” Sinan said. “Or I’ll piss in your daughter’s face.”

There was a flurry of activity after İsmet left the table. The ashtray was replaced, the table brushed. New glasses arrived, and then new napkins and knives and forks. There were muttered apologies from the waiter. “The gentleman has bothered you.” It was a question.

Sinan waved it away. “It was nothing,” he said to the waiter in Turkish. “What you did was correct.” He ordered himself an Absolut and soda and asked the waiter to replenish mine. It was only after the drinks had arrived that he spoke.

“I’m sorry. If only I’d been here on time…”

And perhaps he was struggling to find a way to tell me. But then a glowing orange bumblebee of a hovercraft came barrelling past us, and Emre fell out of his chair.

The hovercraft seemed to belong to the maritime police. It was soon joined by two others that pulled up alongside the tugboat sitting underneath the bridge. İsmet (who was not with his family after all, but with three sharply dressed business associates) seemed to be party to whatever was going on. When ships were free to move up and down the Bosphorus again – after a glowing bumblebee had come to pick him up, I turned to Sinan. “So what was that all about?”

“Who knows? It could have been some sort of exercise. Or a bomb scare. Or maybe they were doing some sort of repair.”

“I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I meant that argument with İsmet.”

“You’re surprised I’d want to argue with İsmet?”

“You’ve always said it’s dangerous to talk back.”

“I should have talked back to him years ago. I already feel so much better.”

“What was it about, though?”

“Nothing,” said Sinan. “Really nothing.”

“What did he lie to you about?”

“It’s over. For now, that’s all you need to know.”

But his voice lacked conviction. Late that night, he changed his mind.

We were in bed, and I’d just finished reading a column about the Edinburgh screening of
Van Comes to Europe
. The author, a renowned nationalist, accused Sinan of treason.

“How dare he?” I said. But Sinan was unruffled.

“He can say what he wants. So long as he doesn’t stop me doing what I want, who cares? Things are different now.”

“Are they?”

He laughed. “You’re not trying to warn me, are you? You’re not trying to tell me I should compromise my principles?”

“No, but…”

“Let me guess. You approve, of course, how could you not approve? But you’d still like me to curb my impulses a little, take things slowly, and above all, avoid a confrontation with İsmet.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” I said.

“Very nice indeed,” he said. ‘But also, alas, very European. It’s not the way we do things here. It’s not the way things work.”

“So how do they work?” I asked.

He smiled and for a moment he looked nineteen again. “We’ve been through this before. Don’t you remember? Except…” he wagged his finger. “Except – last time we were wrong.”

“About what?”

“The revolution. Do you remember why?”

“Let’s see. Could it be that the seeds were planted long ago?”

“And?’

“The roots must spread under the ground…the saplings must have time to grow. But when the sap starts running…”

“You can’t stop the course of history.”

“The Judas trees must blossom…until one day…”

He threw his head back in laughter. “Okay then. I’ll tell you. You
might as well know. That day they took us in. You know, in 1971, after they blew up your father’s car, and İsmet took you all in. Well, this is what you don’t know. He took me in first. Yes, I had the first, and the most private, interview! And I suppose you’re going to ask why I’ve waited all this time to tell you.” He was speaking so fast I could barely follow him. “Well the reason is I knew you’d want to know the whole story. But I didn’t want to think about the story long enough to tell it, and now I’ve told you and have no choice to explain, this is what I ask of you. No questions. No nothing. Are we agreed? Here, come into my arms, turn off the light, I’ll tell you as quickly as I can and I’ll be so tired by the end I’ll fall asleep and you’ll stare at the ceiling, trying to imagine every gap in my story, but this can’t be helped, all stories have gaps and this is the only time I will ever say what I am about to say.”

I struggled to find my voice. “If it’s too painful…”

“Too painful? Of course it’s too painful! But please, just listen. I won’t take long. He caught me by surprise, Jeannie. I had no idea what was coming. When he shut the door behind him, I was not even nervous. I assumed he’d brought us in to discuss the bombing of your father’s car, of which I knew nothing.

But first there were to be preliminaries. You would think we were in Sürreya’s, chatting over
piroshki
. First there are the reminiscences – the first time we met, too young for me to remember. Then something odd that still makes no sense to me – about a jeweller in Ankara, a former Yugoslavian who may or may not have been a drop. Then my own first memory of İsmet, on that Russian ship in 1962. I was with my father, he’d just been posted to Cairo. Why İsmet was on the ship I cannot tell you. There was also a group of Egyptian officers on board, and now he wanted to know if I remembered them, what else I had seen. In Caracas, in Washington, in Karachi, how often was my father the guest of the Soviet embassy? Might my father be vulnerable to blackmail because of his ‘varied proclivities’? What was the true reason for my parents’ divorce? Had my mother not confided in me? My answers were vague and without effect.

Then İsmet pulled up a chair to sit next to me. He fixed his eyes onto my lap. Put his hand on my testicles. Squeezed them hard and
said, ‘Do you know what they say about you and Haluk? They say you share your balls. This is what they say. This is what they say you do for each other.’ So he began. He said, ‘Ah! What kind of man are you?’ But then, later. After he removed his hand. I was my father’s son. This is what he told me. His vices were my vices. Our fates were the same. He pushed me into the corner. And made his prophecy come true.

But I did not let him hear my pain. This must have bothered him. He must have known he’d have to do more than this to destroy me. And so he sat me down on the chair again and continued talking. He told me lies.”

“What lies?” I asked.

“Lies about my father – who he really was, what he’d done to my mother.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t! Oh, Jeannie – please! Don’t stay up all night dreaming up wild guesses! You asked why I picked a fight with İsmet. Now I’ve told you. Can we leave it at that?”

Of course – I couldn’t, any more than if I’d been raped myself.

But after he had turned his back on me, after he had extracted himself from my poor attempt at an embrace and asked me to stop asking him if he was okay – I made myself a promise – to close the door on this, to kill every question that tempted me to do otherwise. To see him through this, help him put it behind us and move on.

And it was just as well that I had made this resolution, for when we picked up the paper the next morning, we were to discover what İsmet had been up to with his bumblebee hovercrafts. He was splashed across the front page, standing in front of the speedboat that a crane had just lifted from the depths of the Bosphorus, less than fifty metres from where we’d been eating. Kitten II.

Sinan became ashen-faced when I passed him the paper, but for once I knew better than to press for details. When he asked, “Is that all they found?” I just told him what I knew. According to the paper, at least, all they’d found was the shell of an old boat. But still he seemed unconvinced. “There may be more to this story. There might
be something they’re holding back.”

For once I made a sensible suggestion. Why didn’t he ring Haluk? He was sure to find a way to the inside track. “Good idea,” Sinan said. But he remained tense all day. Every time the phone rang, he jumped. There were long conversations with Suna as well as Haluk. Each left him gloomier than the one before. When the phone rang again that night at half past eleven, I expected the worst. But I was wrong, thank God. For Haluk had indeed found his way to the inside track. They’d found nothing inside Kitten II. We were safe. We were in the clear.’

Mary Ann Widener

CENTER FOR DEMOCRATIC CHANGE

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