Enlightenment Read online

  In November 2005 – the day after Jeannie disappeared, and the day before I wrote my incriminating article for the Observer – Chloe took me round to see the apartment for myself. I’d asked, of course. That said, our main reason for stopping by that day was not to help me with my research, so to speak, but to find out if either of the boys had seen Jeannie. They were horrified to hear of her disappearance, promising to do everything they could to help find her. One went straight online; the other went for his phone and proceeded to go through its entire address book. ‘We’ll track her down,’ they assured us. Meanwhile, we were to sit and drink their tea. So yes, I had a good long look at this apartment, which looked a lot like the student apartments I remember from my own teenage years. As did (uncannily) the boys themselves.

  The sink was filled with unwashed glasses, though a slip of a girl with large, sad, moonlike eyes soon emerged to wash and dry them. There was a pile of shoes and slippers next to the door. Crimson curtains, and hanging from the ceiling, a garish chandelier. The sofa was piled high with books; poking out from underneath was the corner of what may or may not have been a porn mag. The air smelled stale.

  Pointing at the widescreen TV in the corner, Chloe said, ‘In 1971 that was where we had the mimeograph machine.’

  ‘The mimeograph machine?’

  ‘The one we stole from school.’ Though she could not, she now admitted, remember exactly when ‘the heinous crime was perpetrated.’ She was guilty only by association. ‘It was Suna who nabbed it. And Jeannie who carried it over.’

  When I asked why, she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘April 1971? A few weeks after the army stepped in. One of the first things they did was shut down the student associations. Most particularly the ones spewing out dangerous pamphlets on their mimeograph machines. So Haluk invited some of them to spew them out here in secret. Well, at least one of them.’

  I asked if she remembered which one. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘What difference does it make? They changed their names every two days or so. This despite the fact that they were all the same. As far as I could see, anyway. Which wasn’t very far. This being before contact lenses.’

  She let out a short, pained laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but without explaining what for. ‘This wasn’t the happiest chapter in my life, as you may well imagine. I lived in constant terror.’

  ‘Was it really that bad?’

  She gave me a sharp look. ‘Don’t you remember?’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, you lived here once, too! Don’t you remember what it was like? Or did you really erase absolutely everything when you boarded that plane? Come on, now. Take your mind back. It’s the late 60s, and you’re an American girl in Turkey. You’re in bed with a boy but you’re afraid of sleeping with him. You’re so afraid you can feel nothing else. You’re afraid of sleeping with him, because if you do, he’ll stop respecting you and leave you. You’re afraid your reputation precedes you. You’re a foreign girl, after all. Isn’t that what foreign girls do? So if you don’t sleep with him, he’ll be doubly insulted. If you don’t sleep with him, he’ll find someone else who will. You’re afraid he’s already done so, because the sheets underneath you are yellow. Stiff. Stained. Horrible! Nightmare! Ugh! You can’t bear it! You want out! But when, when you rush out to the bathroom dressed only in ugly yellow spunky sheets, you get the “looks” from all their friends. They know everything about you. And they couldn’t care less that none of it is true. Doesn’t any of this sound at all familiar to you, M? Was I really the only one?

  19

  ‘One question my father never asked. I’m sure he assumed the worst, but in those days it would have been unthinkable for a father to ask a daughter if she was taking precautions. In my way I was, though I had no knowledge of contraception and no access to it either. But I had the full complement of folk myths, horror stories and unscientific warnings that schools and mothers and teen magazines were still dishing out to us right through the 60s, and there can’t be many girls who lost their virginity as slowly as I did.

  I was afraid, in spite of Sinan’s ever more exasperated assurances, that he would no longer respect me. I needed to be ‘sure’ – but I was not at all sure I could bear the shame, regret and loneliness. I did not, above all, want to ‘give myself away’.

  I had no way of knowing that if I had come to know his body as well as my own, if he could ask me a question just by stroking the side of my face and I could answer by touching his arm, if I could spend an entire afternoon in the dark with him without once needing to speak, if I could get dressed, tidy up the room, check my hair, leave whatever building we were in by a separate exit but still feel his hands on my back and his breath in my ear, I had already given him everything I owned.

  We’d agreed to wait until I thought the time was right. In the end, the time chose itself. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked me afterwards. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ He sat up, brushed my hair off my face. He still loved me! I still loved him! I felt no shame, no regret. I had lost nothing. We had made love, and there was nothing on earth more beautiful than making love. They’d kept this secret from us. They’d lied!’

  Something must have shown on Jeannie’s face the next day. Or maybe it had nothing to do with her at all. But somehow Suna got wind of Haluk’s garçonniere. She and Lüset went over to ‘pay a friendly visit’ after school and found Haluk with a ‘woman’. Suna was beside herself, and of course she went straight to Chloe to share her grief. In spite of her best efforts, she was just as upset as Suna was. The next day they confronted Haluk together.

  This happened at the Robert College cafeteria, in front of a large and delighted audience. Jeannie was there, too, and euphoria had dulled her tact. When she told all three that she thought they were being less than honest about their feelings, no one thanked her. Suna was so distraught that her legs went and Haluk had to drive her home.

  ‘As I helped her across the playing field, I apologised for causing her more pain, but how thin my voice sounded. By the time we got to Haluk’s Mustang, it was Suna consoling me: she still adored me, even though I was a repressed, joyless, blinkered, puritan triumphalist.

  That evening, over supper, I apologised to Chloe. That was stupid, too, because it made her mother dangerously curious. Chloe left the table in a huff and although Amy insisted I was not to blame (“These things will happen, and that’s all there is to it!”) I could see she was perturbed.

  A week or so later, when we were again at the Robert College cafeteria, and again a tense sixsome, the green-eyed boy from that afternoon at Nazmi’s sat down next to Chloe and began to flirt with her. When they left the cafeteria together, Haluk made as if he didn’t even notice. But from then on, and no matter how much the rest of us pleaded with him, he refused to speak to her, look at her, or sit at the same table.

  I sided with Chloe – of course. Why should there be one rule for Haluk and another for her? But I didn’t think she was handling it right. Every afternoon, she’d come into the Robert College cafeteria with one boy and leave with another. Then the stories would circulate. Suna would translate them for me, and I can say at least that I was never fooled by them.

  But still I worried about her. I felt she was undervaluing herself. It would have been sometime in mid-April that I said so to her face. The circumstances were unfortunate: it was just after a champagne dinner to celebrate her getting into Radcliffe. Her mother was intensely relieved – it had been a ‘high-wire winter’. Chloe having refused to apply to anywhere else. But now we were both in, and how nice it would be, to know that just down the hallway, there would be someone who was almost a sister.

  Our last conversation as almost-sisters began like this: I was saying there’d be four boys in our class for every girl. “But I want you to promise something. I want you to value yourself, stop all this sleeping around.”

  She looked at me as if I’d said she should stop wearing grass skirts. “But I’ve never slept with any of them,” she said.
r />   Not any of them? Why not?

  “Because I’m a virgin.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, of course I am.” She drew up her knees. “Aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.

  I didn’t get any sleep at all that night. My head was swirling. I kept thinking about all those afternoons she and Haluk had spent together, in Sinan’s mother’s apartment, and then in Haluk’s secret apartment in Rumeli Hisar. If they hadn’t been sleeping together, what had they been doing? Why had Chloe held back? What was she afraid of? How had it been for Haluk? Poor Haluk, I remember thinking. No wonder he’d felt so hemmed in. Everyone envying him, everyone calling him a pasha, but once the door was closed – nothing. I was hardly on speaking terms with Haluk by now, and the next day I made things even worse by telling him how sad I was for him, now I knew the truth.’

  He’d found her struggling around Akıntıburnu one evening, pursued by the usual kerb crawlers. After she was safe in his Mustang, he went off to reprimand them. Jeannie couldn’t follow everything but the gist of it was that they were a shame to the motherland. Haluk was still seething when they pulled back onto the road. When she tried to thank him, he growled, ‘You should know better.’

  ‘You sound angry.’

  ‘Of course I’m angry!’

  Jeannie took this as an allusion to their earlier disagreement. So she said, ‘I’m sorry about that, too. I mean – I had no idea Chloe was holding herself back like that. She only told me yesterday. I must admit, it was quite a shock.’

  It was quite a shock also when Haluk pulled off the road again. They came this close to going over the edge into the Bosphorus. Clutching his steering wheel, Haluk turned around. ‘Tell me what Chloe said.’

  ‘She said she’s never slept with anyone. Not even you.’

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. ‘She is lying.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘She is lying!’ he slammed his fist down on the horn.

  He reversed back onto the road and roared up the hill to the meydan. Jeannie thanked him for the lift.

  ‘I could not have done otherwise,’ he said. ‘But now you must listen.’

  It was dark by now; she could only just see his eyes glinting in the shadows. ‘What I wish to say is this. We have never met today. I did not see you put yourself in needless danger, and you did not see me. Sinan will never hear of this. Do you understand?’

  As Jeannie opened the door, he said, ‘There’s one more thing. Tell your garbage friend that she’s a garbage liar.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. But in the end Haluk must have said something about it to Sinan, and Sinan must have said something to Suna, and Suna being Suna couldn’t keep it to herself. The next day, when we were sitting in Miss Broome’s front room waiting for her to retrieve my next piece of essential reading, Suna turned to Chloe and said, “So is it true you never slept with our poor friend Haluk? Is it true you never slept with any of them?” I’ll never forget the look Chloe gave me right then. She was right to hate me.

  Had she given me the dressing down I deserved, might I have learned my lesson in time – kept my unresearched opinions to myself – and perhaps, in so doing, saved us all?

  Chloe being Chloe, there were no improving lectures. Her dignity depended on not caring, on being seen not to care. So the day after I had torn her social life to shreds, we went to school together in my father’s chauffeur-driven car. We sat next to each other in class and doodled on each other’s notebooks, ate lunch at the same table, giggling, gossiping and helping each other with our homework the same way we always did. On our way home, we stopped off at Robert College cafeteria. She went off to join her friends of the moment, and I went off to join the others. The moment I sat down, Haluk found a reason to leave. Suna heaved a great sigh and gathered up her things, signalling for Lüset to do the same.

  Then it was just the two of us – just me and Sinan – what an unexpected boon! Our lives stretched out before us, and it was only four o’clock.’

  A great black hulk of a tanker was just coming out from behind the southernmost tower of Rumeli Hisar as they sat down in front of Nafi Baba’s tomb. For a few moments the whole hill trembled. They watched it threading its way up the Bosphorus, turning from black to grey. As it crossed paths with another tanker coming down from the Black Sea, a horn sounded. As the sharp, violent blast faded into its mournful echo, they heard the backfiring of a car. Then this, too, faded away. A bird that might have been a nightingale began to sing in the tree above. Could it be a nightingale, if it wasn’t night yet? Could anything be more beautiful than the Bosphorus when the Judas trees were in bloom?

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand yet,’ Jeannie said. Afternoon had melted into evening and they were in Dutch’s office at Robert Academy. Dutch was away again, and Sinan was again looking after the cobra. The terrarium was sitting just below the window. They were sitting on the desk drinking from the bottle of Russian vodka that Sinan had fished out of the filing cabinet, and smoking the last of the hash Dutch had left Sinan in payment for his snakesitting services, and Jeannie had never been quite this stoned, this stupidly happy.

  ‘Bookshelves lining every wall and books piled up across the floor. There were, I calculated, upwards of three thousand in residence, and only about a hundred were about mathematics. The rest, Sinan said, were about “the revolution.”

  So that’s how we got into this silly, reckless, pointless conversation that changed our lives – I was looking at the rows of sombre titles, and there was one thing I couldn’t understand. How did Dutch expect this revolution of his to get started, if all he did was read books?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to do a thing,’ Sinan said. ‘Revolutions start themselves.’

  ‘How convenient,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I’m serious.’ But then he smiled, too.

  ‘So let me get this straight. He just sits here, thinking revolutionary thoughts, and checking his watch from time to time, waiting for the call…’

  ‘An intellectual must be patient in the face of history. He must choose his moment carefully!’

  ‘You’re laughing,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘Of course I’m laughing. If I didn’t laugh, I’d go mad.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘I’m quoting Dutch. He says beautiful things, you know. He says revolutions are like springtime. They seem to come from nowhere, but…’

  ‘The seeds were planted long ago?’

  He nodded. ‘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 any more than you could stop spring.’

  ‘The Judas trees must blossom…’

  ‘Until one day, every hill in Istanbul turns pink! No – red!’

  ‘And then what?’ Jeannie asked, still giggling.

  ‘The city will rise up!’ he said. ‘The enemy will melt away!’

  ‘And if they don’t melt?’

  ‘We’ll round them up!’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘What do you think? I’ll start with İsmet. İsmet Bey, excuse me.’ He cocked his finger and pretended to shoot at the wall. ‘Or maybe I’ll just wring his neck. Or break it, like this. Like a chicken.’

  ‘So that’s the plan, is it?’

  ‘There is no plan.’

  ‘How can there be no plan?’

  ‘There doesn’t need to be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He leaned across me and pulled out a random book. It had a soft binding, and it was typed, not printed. I cannot for the life of me remember the title. Only that the author was Manfred Berger. “Read Manfred Berger,” he proclaimed, “and all your questions will be answered. But make sure no one sees you. Remember – thought is a crime!”

  “So how about this thought?” I said, bu
t without any forethought – that is one thing I would stake my life on – that this thought came from nowhere. “What if your beloved Dutch Harding does have a plan, and simply hasn’t told you about it?”

  “Such twisted thoughts!” said Sinan.

  “No, honestly,” I persisted. “What if he’s not really who he says he is? What if he’s just playing a part?” Waving the bottle of Russian vodka before his eyes, I said, “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you to ask if perhaps, just perhaps…?”

  He snatched the bottle from my hand. I had never seen his face so dark. “Who put this thought in your head?” he hissed. “What has your father been saying to you? Why have you let him poison your mind?”

  I felt as if he had slapped me. But for what? I could not say. I had not meant it seriously. I was just fooling around.

  “Of course,” Sinan said coldly. “For you it’s all a joke. Let’s go,” he said, pulling my hand off his arm and putting the vodka back into its drawer. At the door, he turned around and said, “He warned me, you know.”

  “About what?”

  “He said that sooner or later, you would, in his words, revert to type.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You want his exact words? Fine, then. I’ll give them to you.”

  He waited until we were halfway along the dark path around the Bowl. He was walking behind me, and his voice was loud and cold.

  “There is no such thing as pure love, Sinan. The struggle taints all it touches. This thing you have going with her – it’s putting us all at risk. Don’t you see? Sooner or later, this girl will revert to type. By the time she’s through with us, we’ll all be behind bars, my boy. Or worse. You mark my words.”

  Mark them she did. The moment she got home. She opened up the blank notebook that would become the journal of her last weeks in Turkey and she began her first entry with Dutch’s damning words. Then she wrote what she thought of them. And then what she thought of their ‘sleazy, scheming, self-aggrandising’ author: