Enlightenment (37 page)

So ends the last entry in Jeannie Wakefield’s last journal.

In answer to the question that I’m sure you’ll want to ask, it is sitting here next to me, on the balcony of this beautiful Bebek apartment where so many characters in our story once lived, and where I myself first met Sinan. On this very balcony. Halfway between me and my devil. Who could have known?

When I make my next move – if I am in any position to make a next move – I shall leave the aforementioned journal for you in the safe deposit box we discussed earlier.

But now the time has come to take up the story where Jeannie was forced to drop it.

I have already described how I was pulled into this intrigue, sometimes against my will and always against my better judgement. I hope I’ve made it clear that I had doubts all along. The most obvious question being, ‘Why me? Why drag in a journalist best known for her pioneering work on mothers and babies?’ I’ve been over my head from the moment this started, ringed in by taciturn war correspondents, arrogant sociologists and retired spies. From the very beginning, they’ve been playing me off against each other. Feeding me stories, and hoping I’ll believe them. Hoping, perhaps, I’ll go on to convince others?

The first time that question came to me was at the Pasha’s Library. I am talking now about the last hours of my last visit, the day after Jeannie disappeared. As I sat there at Jeannie’s desk. As İsmet sat downstairs guarding the door. You may have marvelled at how easy it was for me: there on the computer, was Jeannie’s letter to me. There, on the shelves, were the journals. There, pressed between the pages, were samples of hair that I was to assume belonged to William Wakefield and Sinan. And just in case I didn’t make the necessary connections, there was İsmet himself, to jab a knowing finger at the poster for
My Cold War
, in which Sinan’s family is joined in one picture by William Wakefield. I was to gasp and shout ‘Eureka!’ Shout ‘incest!’ Jeannie and Sinan should never have been together because they were brother and sister. Jeannie, upon hearing that her child is the fruit of incest, had lost her mind with grief. Jordan being the agent of her destruction. The informer. The agent provocateur. She
had set out from the Pasha’s Library that morning to track him down. Blow him up, if need be. Stop him before he did any more damage. Stop him to save her son. This was the story that İsmet and various others seemed to want me to tell. As I stood at the window, admiring the exalted view, I had to ask myself why.

If they were encouraging me to look where they were pointing, was there something behind me that they were hoping that a journalist best known for her pioneering work on mothers and babies might overlook?

I cannot say that I knew at once what to look for, or where I was most likely to find it. But I will concede that I was keyed up by the adverse responses to the piece I wrote three days later. It is rare to get such attention in ‘motherandbabyland’. I can see that it went to my head. I was also, I am ready to admit this, terrified. But there was vanity there, too. The truth, Mary Ann, is that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt important.

A story had chosen me. Pulled me back thirty-five years, to a place only I could see. To the castle on its wooded hillside; the Bosphorus with its endless parade of tankers, ferries, and fishing boats, the Asian shore with its palaces and villas, the brown and rolling hills that must, I thought, stretch as far as China. The golden destination! The first of many! But now I’ve come full circle. There’s someone behind me, erasing my tracks.

He’s been listening in on us, Mary Ann. He’s been pelting me with his unsigned threats since the day you and I began our correspondence. That he was passing my every communication onto others was clear from the outset. And yes, this caused me to speculate. Or rather, it sent me into that spiral of second guessing that forestalls clear thought.

I should have known what he would do when crude intimidation failed to silence me. And perhaps there were moments when I foresaw this – his last and most insidious refinement. But when you are taking risks with words, when you are out on a swaying limb, you can’t afford to step out of yourself to ask how your words might sound to others. To keep your balance, you must remain in the here and now,
cling to the truth and blind yourself to its possible consequences.

Until last night, when I picked up my messages, and heard his voice. I am not speaking about our tormentor now, but his number one pawn. Though it has been thirty-five years since I last heard from him, he saw no need to name himself. He got straight to the point.

It hurts too much to recall his exact words. Let alone quote them. Suffice it to say that our correspondence has been made available to him. While I understand why he might question my motives – scorn my sources – label me as Jeannie’s executioner and İsmet’s pawn – I still burn at the injustice.

Open your eyes, Sinan! For once in your life, look the messenger in the face. This is the last time you’ll hear from me. I am too angry for words.

So tomorrow the theatre goes dark again. Tomorrow the bell will ring, and my devil will step inside. He thinks he’s won. Will he take me to her, as promised? Or will I have to find my own way?

So many unknowns. It’s hard to know what to pack. But there is one thing I’d be ill-advised to take with me. Mary Ann, the time has come for me to name names.

I have enjoyed our correspondence. I have enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I dread the prospect of it ending. But if I am to be truthful, Mary Ann, I’ll have to admit that what I have enjoyed most has been holding back this secret. Have you ever wondered why it was arranged that we should write to each other? Have you guessed what I am yet to tell you?

During the past four weeks, I have taken the trouble to acquaint myself with your many accomplishments, most notably at your present place of work. I have done background checks on a number of your illustrious colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change, with a view to seeing who amongst them has an interest in this part of the world. There are several, but the most interesting is a man named Stephen Svabo. Born in Hungary in 1948 to academic parents who managed to relocate to Princeton, New Jersey after the 1956 uprising. Degrees from Columbia and Harvard. Active in human rights since the 70s, and (by his own account) a frequent
visitor to Turkish prisons. Links with several think tanks like yours, but no university affiliation. No public profile, and no photograph on Google, but, in print at least, a vocal critic of recent erosions of civil liberties in the US, including those eroded in the prosecution of Sinan Sinanoğlu. His most recent ‘abbreviated’ list of publications goes on for six pages.

In an earlier, less abbreviated list, he mentions an introduction he wrote for a 1980 anthology of ‘silenced voices’. One such voice is an abstruse East German poet called Manfred Berger. Having heard that name in other unlikely places, I’ve investigated further. I’ve discovered that a Manfred Berger did indeed have a small reputation as a poet in East Berlin during the 70s and 80s, and that he has done rather well for himself since reunification, albeit under his ‘real’ name, Dieter Dammer. After several years in Schroeder’s party, he moved out of politics and now works for a cultural foundation that has funded many sterling ventures in Eastern Europe and Turkey. It is in that capacity that he has accompanied several EU delegations to Turkey in recent years. He has appeared, unsmilingly, in several group photographs. A beaknosed man whose jet black hair is longer than normal for a bureaucrat, he is not to be confused with the Manfred Berger who has been writing so brilliantly for the US press in recent years on the crisis in US intelligence.

Or the Manfred Berger who sits on the board of a new Eastern European telecommunications venture in which İsmet Şen was a major investor.

Or the Manfred Berger whose name has been linked to a weapons manufacturer with whom İsmet Şen’s company also has links.

Or the Manfred Berger whose monograph Sinan showed to Jeannie in Dutch Harding’s office in the spring of 1971.

It was a penname, of course. A private joke. One alias amongst many.

Dutch Harding never existed either. At least, there was no one enrolled at Columbia during the years he was meant to be there. But a Stephen Svabo does appear in the 1968 yearbook. Or rather, his name does. There is no photograph. No proof.

Until today.

What is his particular interest in Turkey? Whose interests does he serve? I’m sure he won’t tell me, but I’m sure I can guess.

What I have to yet to understand is why, when I sat down with Suna last night, and told her what I knew, she had the gall to insist that –

September 2006

It was, perhaps, a cruel trick of fate that prompted my erstwhile friend, the intrepid investigator of mothers and babies, to send her story – which is also my story – out into the ether with its last sentence still dangling. Although we can only guess what prevented an orderly closure, it could have been a simple question of impatience. As her sometime collaborator, I have found to my cost that high emotion has a deleterious effect on her ability to spot small errors. So it is entirely possible that my dear, though fallible, friend sent out the wrong document. The message I received was dated March 16th 2006. With it came seven attachments and a truncated note:

We had spent the previous evening – the Ides of March – together. We can assume this was the disagreement she was hoping to overcome.

So it is possible to conjecture a later document addressing this fracas in greater detail. Perhaps one day we shall find it stored in a discarded computer, or in the inbox of a Washington bureaucrat or floating amongst the soulless routemasters of outer cyberspace.

Of course – we could fashion our clues into more sinister
shapings.

We could imagine, for example, that the lank-haired man padding down the hall in his slippers is not a phantasm, as some are claiming, but the villain in the flesh.

Or we could imagine a more treacherous scenario: he has not yet strutted onto the stage, but as she types her words, she feels as if each one is pulling him closer. How calm she feels! For once in her life, she is making the powerful quake in their boots. She is not running from her fears. She is facing them! She has joined the ranks of the righteous! But then, the ring of the doorbell. It tolls for her. Locked inside her shell of bravado, she cannot breathe. The journey from the chair to the door is the longest and most arduous she has ever taken.

But at the eleventh hour, she finds her voice. There is the short and hypocritical exchange on the intercom. The rush to the desk, the quick dispatching of the document, and perhaps she has misplaced her glasses. As she squints into the little browsing window, her wildly beating heart contrives for her to choose the almost finished document in the place of the one offering us the enlightenment we now crave.

Later that same day – and perhaps we can imagine her now in one of those Anatolian towns that rose from the dust only to serve food to Turkey’s bus-dwellers. Düzce, perhaps, if our friend and her
self-styled
guide have chosen to drive east via Ankara. Though the poet in me would prefer to see this wolf-in-guide’s-clothing en route to Izmir, and so obliged to use Susurluk, that truck-stop of scandal and deep state intrigue, as his point of refreshment. Gentleman that he is – gentleman that he pretends to be – he goes to pay for the food, and this, perhaps, is when my friend M reaches into her hidden pocket for her hidden phone to give the only woman she trusts the pertinent details of her itinerary, moving on to outline for this same faithful friend her proposed modes of future communication.

So, alas, it falls to me, Suna Safran, to finish the story I never chose to tell. By this I do not mean to confirm the truth of the preceding paragraph. It should be taken as offered, as pure conjecture for which there is no shred of truth. My intention is only to finish the story that M had only just begun when she was so rudely interrupted – in short,
to offer a full account of the argument she was describing, at the very moment when she fell into the lion’s maw.

But before I begin, I must ask my readers to understand that – however angry my words, both on that occasion and on some if not all of the pages that follow – we are still and ever will be held together by the golden thread of friendship.

It is a thread of the highest value in this land of ours. Whatever our failings, whatever passions fire our hearts, we honour our friends. And our teachers. Perhaps foolishly, but always with an open heart, we reserve our greatest thanks for those teachers who have shown us kindness, and who, in so doing, have opened our minds.

Billie Broome. She was a paragon of this mould. Without her books and her kind smile, where would I be now?

Dutch Harding – he was her idol, too. To Sinan, to Haluk, to Rıfat and so many others, he was more than that. He was the word of God. The shining light that gave their pain meaning.

So naturally we protected him. From the aspersions of others, and from our own doubts. Of course we were outraged – betrayed! – by the accusations of Jeannie Wakefield at the garçonniere on that fateful afternoon in June 1971. Of course it was easy for our beloved mentor to convince us that the true villain in our midst – the informer – the agent provocateur – was not the man who had opened our eyes to the world, but a green-eyed disciple who had gone over to the enemy.

Were we surprised at our bookish mentor’s skill with firearms? Why should we have been? He was American. Didn’t all Americans have guns? Were we surprised, when we reached the Pasha’s Library, that he had the key, that he knew even where to find the shovel? Perhaps, but we were also impressed at his deep and thorough knowledge of the enemy.
Our
enemy. Did we help him bury poor Rıfat, the informer, the betrayer, the devil in our midst? Yes, of course we did. We feared for our Dutch Harding. We knew – we believed – that his life was in danger. That İsmet was after him, and with him, William Wakefield. So yes. We helped him escape. To cover up his tracks, we jumped from windows.

Did we know where he went next? Of course – we helped arrange it. We were aided by a well-meaning Soviet official who is to remain
nameless. As for the rest – I refuse to edit details that fail to fit the desired mould. For Dutch Harding, or whoever he really is – he did not forget us. He protected us, too. Once he was safe and settled in East Berlin, it was to his home that Sinan and Haluk decamped. It was under Dutch Harding’s care that they returned to a semblance of health. Now that my picture of him has been so cruelly rounded, now that we know he was always the shadow behind İsmet, I am wondering if we can also thank him for the modicum of medical treatment I received after jumping from my window. While my care was not the best our small country has to offer, it was nevertheless better than that accorded to others. The same applies to my other short period of incarceration, in 1981. While we were not spared the rod, we were luckier than most. The angel of darkness was watching over us.

In those days, we were in regular contact. But after the early 80s – after we had honoured our teacher’s wishes yet again and saved his secret by expelling Jeannie and her dangerous questions from our fold – he drifted in other directions. The Berlin Wall was no longer. The Cold War had turned to dust. A great historic shift was underway and he was right in the midst of it. I am sure he did good and helpful work during the early years of reunification. I am even open to the idea that for Dutch Harding – or rather, for the real man behind the false name – the fall of the Iron Curtain was a dream come true. If he was truly Stephen Svabo, and therefore a Hungarian by birth, if he witnessed the 1956 uprising…

This, then, was the gist of my discussion – now six months past – with my wayward but nevertheless beloved and deeply missed friend M on the eve of her disappearance. I regret to report it was a stormy session. She expected to set down her evidence – destroy my life, my dreams, the secret mission of mercy that has lit my way through three decades of trials and tribulations – and then move on to the next question! No time to breathe, to reconsider, to weigh her evidence, to dismember and repopulate my memory. No consideration for my bruised and battered heart. No thoughts even for her parents, whose loving trust she has so cruelly spurned, whose blameless lives she has so blighted. She had thoughts only for herself. She wanted only to
know why we’d lied to her!

There were moments when the years dropped away and I almost could convince myself that we were both seventeen again, hurling the slings and arrows from which our school newspaper was never safe. Such a tragedy! To be born in a place you can’t call home! Such an outrage! To have a passport from a country whose name is blackened! Every word M writes is drenched with this trauma. So of course she must convince us – and herself – that Jeannie feels the same.

But to return to our discussion. The last we were ever to have. We had to cross a veritable ocean of accusation – and tears, there were many tears – before she was willing to relent. But as we reached the end of our Ides of March, she did finally concede that (while we may have acted wrongly) we had done so in good faith. That a group of idealist students with no knowledge of the real world might be putty in the hands of the man we knew as Dutch Harding. Yes, by the end, she was willing to admire the doomed tenacity of our loyalty. She acknowledged the searing pain of disillusionment. Though she refused to understand why it was so shaming, so humiliating, to have been dragged to enlightenment by a journalist whose finest work has been on mothers and babies, my relentless though heartfelt friend did – I will concede this – listen closely to my long and wholly honest account of the lonely road I have travelled in recent years, with Sinan my only confidante. And I, in return, made to M my one concession: it had been a mistake not to bring Jeannie into our deliberations. Had our poor, innocent Jeannie known that Dutch Harding was still alive and inhabiting a thousand aliases – she would have shown us our blind spot. She would have known that our villain was not İsmet, but the man behind him.

Had we known this – had we so much as
suspected
his heinous and treacherous realities – we would never have gone on protecting this man, until the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour. More to the point, we would not have gone on following his instructions. Because yes, it was Dutch Harding who advised Sinan to flee the country before İsmet’s diggers found the body in his garden in August 2005. It was Dutch Harding who later told me, Suna Safran, that Jordan was on his scent, that Jordan had paid a visit to Jeannie. That though
Jordan had not managed to persuade Jeannie that Dutch Harding was still amongst us, our mentor’s life was nevertheless at risk. That Dutch Harding’s safety now depended on my giving Jeannie other things to think about. And so, to my shame, I did his bidding. I guided my dear and trusting Jeannie to the ancient though wholly unfounded incest rumours that drove her to the edge of madness.

But please God, no further.

A question remains. If our aim was always to protect our beloved mentor, why did we drag out this old secret that had lain safely buried, for so many years? Here, at least, my doomed and fearless friend M guessed correctly. It was İsmet we were seeking to expose. It was William Wakefield who had started the ball rolling. He had started within minutes of his return to our city. He was angry, of course! Those incest rumours that first reached his ears on the eve of his grandson’s birth – this was not the first straw, but the last! He wished revenge! Not for the first time, we were the vehicles. He fed us first this little clue and then that question. The result was
My Cold War
. I am sure that Jordan, if he returns to us, will have a similar tale to tell.

As for the story contained within these pages – its travels through the public domain have been well documented and perhaps excessively analysed – I would like to take this opportunity to highlight a few key points:

1) I, Suna Safran, was not this story’s original disseminator. I have penned only the afterword you are now reading. The story you have read is the story M transmitted in seven electronic segments to Mary Ann Widener at the Center for Democratic Change. It was only on the night of her disappearance that M saw fit to send me a copy for my perusal. As we have already seen, this copy may be incomplete.

2) Though Mary Ann Widener has been established to be a real person (those seeking further information are advised to consult the website of the above-named think tank, where her accomplishments are documented in their entirety on the page bearing her name) the identity of the person who chose to post all seven segments of M’s story on a rival website has still to be defined.

3) There is, however, no difference between the seven documents
published on that website and the story M transmitted to me directly.

4) Although I was immediately aware of her story’s importance (and in touch with the lawyers representing Sinan Sinanoğlu in the US) I had hoped (as did the above-mentioned counsel) to use it in a measured and judicious manner. This is not to say (although it has been said) that our purpose was to censor it. Rather, our hope was to stagger its release in such a way that it did not prejudice the trial, or subject Jeannie, wherever she might be, to unnecessary danger.

5) We shall never be sure if the trial of Sinan Sinanoğlu was indeed overshadowed by the presence in the public domain of a hot-blooded and intemperate ‘True Confession’ with all the ingredients of a
potboiler
– a swarthy, swashbuckling hero with a secret, a fair-haired, ivory-skinned maiden in peril, a love affair doomed by a cast of scheming Cold Warriors, ruthless terrorists and colourful locals much feted for their strange ways and linguistic foibles. And last but not least – a mole! Of course, this charming orientalist confection was not admissible as evidence.

6) But there is no doubt that, due to its high profile and its easy availability on the internet, public interest in the case was magnified a hundredfold. I have been assured by analysts of the strange beast that is US public opinion that in the end, the lamentable guilty verdict may do much to foster moral outrage and therefore further the cause of all those who in this age of terror and unreason still dare to fly while brown.

7) That Sinan himself remains steadfast in the face of adversity we know from both the court records of his trial and the accounts in the responsible press. He may have been convicted, but the cries of outrage grow. As for the cries that must have pierced his own heart upon hearing the truth about our faithless mentor, we can only guess. From his proud posture in the photograph that they flash on the screen with every mention of his name, and his clear-eyed gaze, we can entertain the soothing thought that he has accepted the poisoned arrow of truth lodged inside the heart of M’s confession – perhaps even accepted the possibility that her intentions were, if not perfect, at least sincere.