Authors: Maureen Freely
Enlightenment (31 page)
August 27
nd
2000
‘This is the difference between us. She can live with herself and I can’t. She can spill out this story, and just when I’ve taken in the full horror of it, she rolls over with that
harrumph
of hers, turns her back on me and falls asleep. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to roll over like that, to take a deep breath without the baby’s foot pressing against my lungs, to stare at the ceiling without wondering if it’s still alive. I even envy her snore.
I am writing this down because it’s only by writing that I can hope to make sense of it. Is it true what she said – that I have not and never will put down roots here? Is there a line to be drawn between my father’s arrival and my sudden longing to get out on the first plane? Who am I trying to run away from, my father or myself? Or is he my out – my “Get Out of Jail Free” card? It stings me just to write this. That must mean there’s truth in it.
One thing that’s been nagging at me all along: why people like Haluk and Lüset, people who want a quiet life, would allow themselves to be dragged into an intrigue of these proportions. Well, I know now. The fire of Suna’s arguments would leave them with no choice. We can count ourselves lucky she did not go into law.
She played all the parts tonight. She was her own most ardent advocate, and her harshest prosecutor. But for all her magnificent rhetoric: something was wrong at the core. Submissive – is that the word I’m looking for?
She was duped, badly duped, but by the end she credits these evil men for teaching her “the ways of the world”. That’s not right, but if I don’t work out why soon… She’ll drown me out. And then she’ll drown herself.’
This is how they did her over: on the morning of May 25
th
1971, Suna’s mother woke her up to tell her she had a visitor. This man was İsmet, and in her mother’s presence, he was the ‘essence of good manners’. He claimed to be the representative of a scholarship fund, here to interview her for a bursary. After Suna’s mother left to make the tea, he spoke more curtly, saying he had come to discuss her moral character. When she asked why, he said, ‘Because you have cheapened yourself. You are a Turkish girl, from a good family. But now no Turkish boy will touch you.’
He then told her he knew about her PLO training. When she insisted she had never been to the Lebanon, let alone the Bekaa Valley, he silenced her with a wave. What he wanted from her were the names of the army officers with whom she and her fellow student revolutionaries had been conspiring. At which she had laughed in his face. At his advanced age, with his advanced rank, could he not tell the difference between a true threat to state security and a schoolgirl fancy?
Her next meeting with İsmet came three days later, in the police station, when they were all taken in for questioning about the car bomb. His first words to her: ‘So – in addition to having a big mouth and a wide cunt, we know something else about you. Congratulations. You are a true revolutionary. Not only will you whore for your ideas. You will sacrifice innocents to save your skin.’ Slamming his fist down on the table, he demanded that she admit to having planted the bomb that almost killed Jeannie’s father. He passed a document across the table. It was the confession he now wished her to sign. It declared that Dutch Harding had been running a bomb factory. His favourite students had been helping him.
‘Who told you this nonsense?’ That’s what Suna said as she threw the confession on the floor. But she already knew the answer. It was her flirt. It was Jordan. ‘Everything he had told İsmet was the purest
fiction. But it was just the pure fiction that suited İsmet’s purpose. He wanted Dutch Harding to hang, but I was damned if I would help him.’
Suna steeled herself for a cruel interrogation. But then Jeannie’s father had stormed into the room, demanding her prompt release. Relieved though she was to return to her home and her bed, she was nevertheless uneasy. She had to wonder if they had released her for a purpose. But what could that purpose be? She could not fathom it. She was in Alice’s Wonderland, as painted by Salvador Dali.
‘“But at no point did I or anyone else entertain a doubt about our teacher. No, Jeannie. Not even when you barged into the garçonniere to pick that senseless fight with him. What possessed you to do such a thing? Was it guilt? Was it projection? Or was it your father, twisting your thoughts with lies? You must have asked yourself these same questions after you heard of Dutch’s murder. But it was not his students who committed this terrible crime, Jeannie. No. It was İsmet who wished him dead.” A lesser man would have fled then and there. But Dutch Harding could see they were panicking. He stayed to help.
By the time they parted company in the early hours of the morning – Sinan and Haluk to commandeer Kitten II, Suna and Lüset to carry down the trunk, and Dutch Harding to retrieve the money and documents they had gathered together for just such an emergency – the plan was to “carry on as normal once the evidence had been dealt with.” At half past five that evening, they were to meet at the Russian Consulate.
“But by the hour of our rendezvous, I was in the room on the fourth floor, this room with the little table in the middle, the table with the strange metal object, and the window looking out onto the street.”
Before long, human cries began to waft into the room. They seemed to emanate from across the hall. At first Suna could not identify them. Then came the shock of recognition. It was Lüset in this other room. It was Lüset they were torturing.
She ran to the door, but İsmet pulled her back in. She offered to
do whatever he wished, “…anything so long as he would stop the senseless torture of my innocent friend. I said, ‘Please. Fuck me. Rape me. Kill me. Use me. Anything to stop this.’ My pleas had no effect.”
So she decamped to the windowsill. He met her desperate act with a triumphant air – as if she had done as he had planned.
Again, she raised the stakes. If İsmet did not stop them torturing Lüset, she would jump.
His response: “Let Allah’s will be done.” He watched in stony silence as Suna swang her legs outside the window. “You don’t have the courage,” he told her. To prove him wrong, she pushed herself out just that much further.
“Are you afraid of heights, Jeannie? No? Then perhaps I shall not be able to convey how the street below looked to me. So far away. And the perspective so faulty. The cars in the traffic the same height as the buses. No people on the pavements, only heads. Their voices mingling with the rumbling of the cars and the roaring of the buses. But now I saw a very familiar head, threading through the traffic. It was a beautiful head, a glory of curls, and it belonged to our beloved mentor.”
Had he come to save her? Could she let him do this foolish, dangerous thing? Her mind reeled with questions. But she remained steadfast on the windowsill. İsmet behind her, his eyes glued to his files. He could be a father, keeping watch on his child.
She steadied her breathing, even as her grasp of the windowsill loosened. She looked down, and now yes! Her beloved mentor was looking up. He had seen her! She had to warn him.
So she did the only thing she could. She returned his stare.
“Slowly, I added a smile. This, too, he returned. I risked the slightest movement of my head. He nodded, then crossed the street, towards İsmet’s lair. But this was not what I had meant!”
There was only one way to stop him. “The decision was easy, the easiest I have made in my life. I had only to alter my centre of gravity, ease my hands into the motion for which the perspiration had oiled them. I let them slip.”
By the time she was conscious again, Dutch Harding was dead and buried. Lüset was in prison. Haluk was missing. As was Sinan. For
many years to come, she was to know nothing more.
“But this is not enough for you. Is it? You ask me who killed Dutch Harding, who disposed of his body, and how, and where. I think you know the answers to these questions. I think you need no proof. You can simply ask yourself. Where on earth is Kitten II today? I hope you understand now that we all know the truth, while also knowing that our lives depend on our never uttering the words out loud.”
She then repeated a remark İsmet had made during their conversation at the window: “You can break people most easily by exposing their stupidity.” To which Suna could now say, yes, but all young people must face their stupidity, for this is how they learn. But without their friends, they could never find the strength to do so. It was the loving and forgiving hands of friends who helped them through.
“Which brings us back to Sinan,” she informed me. “He is my friend in this deepest sense of the word. He has had a hard life, Jeannie. He has never complained. For reasons that have not always been clear to me, but that I recognise as genuine, he has always loved you. It was to bring joy to his life that I brought you back into it. If you fail him now, I can promise you. I will personally kill you.
But it will not come to that, Jeannie, will it? You are one of us now. You know the truth that binds us. And now, my friend, you must learn how to live with it.”
With that she left me. Rolled over and went to sleep.’
Was it really as neat as that? Did she never once look over her shoulder? Was the silence perhaps an invitation? Was she disappointed when Jeannie found no words to console her?
Every time Jeannie closed her eyes she saw the window-ledge. Every time she saw the street swirling below her, she heard Suna’s voice. Her ten pages of thoughts turned out to be mostly Suna’s thoughts. She’d not been setting down her impressions so much as reeling in the wake of Suna’s: bow your head, see the world for the wicked place it is, say nothing, stop fighting your fate, but never forget your shame.
Why not, Suna? Why not?
No matter how she arranged the pillows and cranked up the mattress, she couldn’t find a position that did not hurt her back. She looked up at the dark ceiling, at Suna’s peaceful slumbering form. She felt her womb contract. After the tautness had ended, she placed her hands on her stomach, and as she waited for the kick that would tell her the baby was still alive, she heard the ghost of Suna’s voice:
such needless worry, why can’t you relax? Let go. What will be will b
e.
She had to get up, out, away – even if she couldn’t walk. Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself to a stand. She lumbered for the door – it was easier than she expected. She headed down the corridor – or did she? No one saw her as she wafted past the nurse’s station. The pallid, groaning woman looked away when she stepped into the lift, and her attendant stared right through her.
She followed them down the corridor – stretcher after stretcher, woman after woman. Door after door. Seeping through the cracks, a shriek of pain. A nurse came rushing past; she was holding a pair of scissors the wrong way. She burst through a set of double doors and as they swung Jeannie could see the pallid woman. She was on her back, tied to a bed that looked like a cross. Standing over her was a doctor. He was pulling something out. His shoes were covered with blood.
She had to save her, she had to. She pushed open the double doors, but the woman was gone. Now it was only the doctor, washing his hands. Where there had once been a wall was now only a ledge. She put her hands on the ledge but her palms were so wet she nearly slipped.
She woke up to find herself lying on the floor.
Suna the Saviour slept through the entire thing – the panic, the dreadful certainty, the poking and the prodding, and finally the kick. Sharp and impatient, as if to say,
what’s eating you, why can’t you let me sleep?
Because I can’t
, she thought.
Because it’s wrong. It’s giving in
.
Yes, that’s what she’d tell Suna when she woke up, that’s how she was going to live with all that truth Suna had thrown at her. She was going to fight her, fight her until she got back her courage. She, of all people, had not been put on this earth to bow to her fate. For whom was she
holding all these secrets? Who benefited from her silence?
Cui bono
, Suna? That’s what she would tell her. And Sinan, too. He said he didn’t trust words any more. The truth was he didn’t trust himself.
But Jeannie would talk him out of it. The time had come to drag this story out of the shadows. There were pieces missing but together they’d find them. They’d assemble the truth in all its glittering horror and take it to the world. Let the world see the oppressors, how they did their business, what they gained from the silence of the tortured. Let the facts speak for themselves. Let the truth prevail! This was what she’d say to Suna when she woke her up. She would go on saying it – she would win this argument – if it was the last thing she ever did.
In November 2005 – only hours before I was due to leave for London – I woke up to find my mother on the balcony with three visitors.
But it was me they wanted to see. ‘I’m sorry to take you by surprise like this,’ Hector said. ‘But Haluk, Lüset and I have been talking. We think there’s something you should know.’
What they wanted me to know, what they made me swear to keep secret, was ‘the rumour’. Rather than tell me the story themselves, they handed me a document. It was a printout of a PDF document downloaded from the Internet. ‘You may recall,’ Haluk said, ‘that we were reading this very file on the day, the hour, we renewed our acquaintance. We are speaking of the day last August, when Jeannie brought you back to the Pasha’s Library. Do you remember our concern? Do you recall how hard we all worked to hide from her this paper?’
There were, in fact, three documents. The first report, dated April 15
th
1979, was an account – by William Wakefield? – of a meeting with a Mr Sergeyev, the then Soviet military attaché. He was trying to defect. He claimed to have in-depth knowledge of the space programme, but the author of the report concluded that this was largely bluff. The Russian went on to give information about a key Soviet agent operating inside MİT, the Turkish national intelligence service.
Mr Sergeyev would not provide the name of this agent, but he did hand over the identity of a Turkish-Yugoslav jeweller who had operated for many years as a drop. He could not remember his name,
only that he was an old man whose shop was in the Bedestan section of the Old Bazaar. His daughter was also involved. She ran their branch in Şişli. Mr Sergeyev could remember nothing about her beyond the fact that she was middle-aged and not particularly attractive.
Seeing that his interviewer was not impressed, Mr Sergeyev then offered information on a US national recently arrived to take up a teaching post at Robert College, who was, he said, working for the Stasi, the East German Intelligence Service. The author of the report did not think much of this tip either. It was not his view that the Stasi had the funding for ‘extravagances’.
The second document was a memorandum marked Confidential, dated March 12
th
1972. The author was a Douglas Hanes of the Canadian Department of Mines and Technical Surveys and concerned two meetings in Paris with Mr Sergeyev, now of the State and Scientific Committee of the Soviet Union.
At the first, Mr Sergeyev had asked Mr Hanes to pass a letter to the Americans. At the second, Mr Hanes had informed him he was not prepared to be a go-between. Mr Sergeyev had responded with the ‘utmost agitation’, claiming that his ‘fate’ was in Mr Hanes’ hands. Although Mr Hanes claimed to have ‘declined everything from this one-sided gushing flow’, he had agreed to pass on a message for him. ‘He claims to have had dealings with a double agent during his previous post at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.’
Although Mr Hanes advised caution – Sergeyev was a ‘disgruntled citizen in a minor post that must be a great comedown from his military career’ and ‘worst of all, dangerously talkative’ – the Americans had taken Mr Sergeyev’s advances seriously. The third document was titled ‘Meeting No 40.’ It, too, took place in or near Paris. It was couched in routine language; ‘Subject was picked up at RV No 1 by L and G at 2000 hours while Roger provided surveillance cover.’
There followed a transcript of a meandering conversation between L, G and Mr Sergeyev. At one point Sergeyev described a ‘very interesting’ party at the Soviet Consulate that was attended by a number of young American Communist sympathisers from Robert College. He could not remember all their names, only that one of them had the strange first name of Dutch. In the past, said
Mr Sergeyev, Istanbul had been a ‘hard nut to crack’. But during his own stay there, he had made great headway into both the American community and the Turkish left through contacts made at Robert College. He had been helped in this by an old associate from his days in Cairo, whom Mr Sergeyev declined to name. ‘Suffice it to say that he was a Turkish diplomat in his mid-forties with a number of peccadilloes.’ It was through this old contact that he had been able to forge a link with the Turkish diplomat’s son, then a student at said institution. This had proven most useful, as this same boy had already forged personal links with ‘your man in Istanbul’. That this was an extraordinary achievement Mr Sergeyev could confirm personally. ‘But as luck would have it, he had an Achilles Heel. Our friend from the CIA had formed an affection for the boy I have mentioned, as I understand was the case for your man’s teenage daughter. So interesting, don’t you agree?’
His interviewers thought differently. ‘Let’s get back to the illegals,’ they said. It was in the last moments of the meeting that Mr Sergeyev, now aware that the US had no use for him, found the sting in his tail.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘I’ve remembered the name of that Turkish diplomat. Would you like it?’
No, they wouldn’t.
‘Then perhaps you’d like this. A story, a very sweet story, about your man in Istanbul. As I’ve said before, he took a very keen interest in this diplomat’s son, whose name was Sinan. So too did Mr Wakefield’s lovely daughter. We all found this rather strange you know – for you see, in the late 1940s, your man Wakefield, then posted in Washington, had had a heated affair with this boy’s mother, whose cuckolded husband also happened to be posted in the same city at that time. You may have heard of her – she gained some notoriety later, in the 60s, when she enjoyed a brief singing career in this very city of song. This woman – her name was Sibel but she was at least half-Greek, you know, and it was neither her first scandal nor her last.
‘Get to the point,’ said his exasperated interviewer.
‘Well, the long and the short of it, is that your man Wakefield got
this Sibel pregnant during this affair he had with her. And Sinan is his son.’
I had read these documents before, but as I did not wish to explain how and when, I tried to look surprised.
When he spoke again, Haluk’s voice was very soft.
‘It isn’t true. I hope you know that.’
I nodded. Though of course I did not yet know for sure.
‘Who would want to spread such an ugly rumour? That’s what I still can’t understand.’ I said that, though of course I had my suspicions. I noticed, too, that Haluk’s shoulders relaxed.
‘The only person who would want to spread such a rumour would be someone who did not wish Jeannie and Sinan to remain together.’
‘Someone like İsmet?’
Another faint smile.
My next question made his eyes bulge. ‘You may not know this,’ I said, ‘but if you had to guess. How many years did Sinan walk around believing this?’
A shrug of the shoulders. ‘Twenty? Thirty? Thirty-five?’
‘We cannot say for sure,’ said Lüset. ‘All we know is the day he discovered it to have no basis in truth.’
The harbinger of truth, they now informed me, was William Wakefield. Or rather, it was he who had ferreted out the lie. He had done this the night of his arrival in Istanbul, in August 2000. ‘The night before little Emre was born.’
‘Of course William Wakefield could only give him his word on that occasion. But later, there were the tests.’
‘In between there were many weeks of anger. It was this anger that marked the beginning of the change.’
‘We are talking about a change of heart not just in Sinan but in William Wakefield.’
‘What had been to him a game until this moment, was no longer a game.’
‘He saw his enemies for who they were, and they saw what they had done to him.’
‘And to Sinan. And his daughter.’
‘He made a vow that night. A vow he kept.’
‘But he also made us promise something.’
‘This was to keep the entire matter safe from his daughter’s eyes.’
‘He did not wish any shadow to pass across her happiness.’
‘However, we are almost certain that it was this document that Jeannie discovered just a few nights ago.’
‘We fear that this was what sent her into despair, and disappearance.’
‘Do you really now?’ I said.
They looked up, surprised.