Enlightenment Page 6
I had no idea where I was going, but it was only a matter of time before I would arrive at this terrible place I see before me. I can no longer remember how I got here: I clicked on search, the screen went dark for a minute, and there it was.
At first I could hardly believe what my eyes were telling me. I could barely breathe. Bed was out of the question. So I went out to the porch, watched the cars and buses rolling across the bridge, the dark tankers sliding under it. And in no particular order I thought of all the clues I’d disregarded, all the signs winking along the track. There was a moment when they almost got the better of me. But now the light is coming back into the sky and my strength is returning and I know at last what I’ve been put here to do. And how, dear friend, you can help me.’
I looked up at the bar at the top of the screen: Microsoft Word: LETTER TO M 31.10.05. I was the dear friend. I glanced at my watch – she’d written those lines on the same day she’d sent me that last email. I looked down at the bottom of the screen to see how many pages there were in the document. Fifty-three. If İsmet Şen had not been sitting downstairs – if my pride had not dictated that he was never to know how much I dreaded the fifty-two pages still awaiting me – I would, I’m sure, have fled right then. Instead I calmed myself. I would find out the truth. And then I would do what I – not he – wanted with it. Having steadied my breathing, I sat down and read on. I do not know how long this took, and neither can I recall what was going through my head as I scrolled down and down the endless page. When I was done, I felt cold, and light-headed. But I still knew where I had to go – to the shelf, to the diaries.
I did not read them in order – could not have borne reading them in order – though if I had, it would not have mattered. Because there were gaps, so many gaps! I skipped from book to book, catching phrases that caught my curiosity and reading until I could no longer catch my breath. It was late afternoon when I came across the passage that confirmed what I must have feared all along, even as I told myself that strictly speaking, this had nothing to do with me. Well it did now.
I walked to the window, and there it was: the landscape that had once cradled us. The castle, the wooded slope, the rooftops of Rumeli Hisar, the Bosphorus, the parade of tankers, ferries, fishing boats. Lining the Asian shore, the villas and palaces that seemed close enough to touch, and behind them, the rolling hills that I once thought must stretch as far as China. A moving postcard, a world unto itself. I’d never seen it – seen it properly – from this exalted angle, and though it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, it froze my heart.
My eyes moved along the Asian shore – Kandilli, Anadolu Hisar, and under the bridge to Kanlıca – until I’d found the yalı I had just been reading about. The sun was setting somewhere in the hills behind me, and the yalı’s windows burned yellow in the fading light.
Was it just another rumour, or was there some truth in it? In no particular order, I thought of all the things it might explain.
Then I thought of a few other things.
As a cloud of dread descended over me – as my heart twisted and turned – I reminded myself that I had been led to this window. That I had spent my afternoon on a meticulously furnished stage.
Why, I wondered?
As I reviewed the possible answers, I felt a ghost passing its cold fingers across the nape of my neck.
I stood still, very still, until I had regained my composure.
Then I turned back to the room, made a quick (and, as it turned out, inadequate) inventory of the things I knew Jeannie would be praying for me to keep safe from prying and destroying eyes.
I headed for the stairs, my handbag clamped under my arm. But there was no sign of İsmet Şen downstairs. On the table next to the chaise longue I found my mobile and, slipped underneath it, İsmet’s business card, and – bizarrely, grotesquely – a special offer from Şenlik, his telecommunications company.
The diggers had left, and the hole they had been digging had been filled back in. There was no van in front of the gate, and no black sedan, either. I walked towards my parents’ house, my heart racing, my knees almost giving way. But there was no point in running. I had escaped the house, but not the truth. When I reached the white walk, I looked up towards the flight of stairs at the far end and saw a dishevelled woman racing towards me with arms outstretched. It was Suna. She was crying, ‘Oh thank God! Thank God you are here!’ Before I knew it, she had locked me into a tearful embrace that almost stopped me breathing. As I stood there, patting her back, I at last saw the shape of the trap closing in on me. And what I believed, in my innocence, to be the only way out.
6
As some of you will already know, they gave me the front of the Review Section that Sunday, plus the better part of page two. This was at least four times the space to which I was accustomed, but it still felt as if I had been asked to fit this story on a postage stamp. I wrote it on the third day of my stay in Istanbul, which meant that I had no time to check facts or pursue the strong suspicion that had kept me awake most of the night. There was also the matter of Jordan Frick, for as he himself had warned me, Jeannie’s view of him was radically different from my own, and (to me) deeply troubling. But I remembered, too, what Jordan had said to me. Jeannie was in trouble, and my first job was to help her through it.
‘The best way to make a lie come true,’ (I wrote) ‘is to repeat it ad infinitum; if we have come in recent years to believe in a “war between the civilisations”, it is because we are ruled by liars who tell us it is so. In fact, there is no neat dividing line between East and West: in Europe alone, there are fifteen million Muslims. In Turkey, so often described as the “gateway to the Islamic world”, there has been a secular, westward-looking state since 1923. But so great is our desire to divide the world into warring halves that we refuse to consider any fact, or indeed any historical reality, that threatens to blur the picture.
At the same time, we are fascinated by the lonely few whose very existence defies our reductive impulses. The Turkish filmmaker Yankı is one such enigma. This is an alias – his real name is Sinan Sinanoğlu. But his pseudonym reflects his hybrid roots and mixed allegiances. For in Turkish, “Yankı” means “echo”, while also echoing another word more familiar to us. Born in 1950 in Washington DC to Turkish diplomat parents, Sinan Sinanoğlu is a dual national. He was educated in both his countries, and while in Turkey, he attended an American-owned lycée that has been educating Istanbul’s elites since 1863. The very existence of this school ought to be enough to demonstrate that the links between Turkey and the US are long and old and very tangled. But to accept such a claim you must have a map on which to place it. You must have some sense, at least, of how the US has conducted its many and varied adventures outside its borders across two centuries. The sad fact is that even those of us who were brought up and caught up in this saga have only the sketchiest acquaintance with it. We know about the World Wars and the Cold War, Vietnam and Iraq. We know of the millions of Americans who served in these wars, but we know next to nothing of the peace-time armies of teachers, missionaries, entrepreneurs, engineers, diplomats, community organisers and agricultural consultants whose contributions, be they laudable or suspect, had a far deeper effect on the countries that invited them in.
But as Sinan himself might say, art feeds on the shadows. If there is a single wish behind the thirteen films he has made over the past decade, it is his determination to bring this hidden world into the light. It is, perhaps, a testament to the power of his art that he now finds himself wasting away in a US prison, falsely accused of terrorist links.
This, then, is the story of a witch hunt – a witch hunt so peculiarly “now”, and so tied up with the paranoias of our times, that one is tempted to see it as emblematic. If the Committee on UnAmerican Activities continues to cast its long shadow over our memories of the 1950s, we can be certain that Homeland Security will do the same in the dark chapter we are living through today. Once again, we’re obsessed with t
he enemy within. Once again, we mistrust anyone and anything that fails to conform to pure types. Once again, it is the hybrid who arouses our most sinister suspicions.
So perhaps this is the moment to present my own hybrid credentials. I am the daughter of an American physicist who came to Istanbul in 1960, to teach at the same university where Sinan was later a student. I am personally acquainted with everyone in this story. As a teenager, I briefly counted myself as one of Sinan’s friends. I also knew William Wakefield, the father of his present wife. Although she and I did not overlap, we moved in the same circles at the girls’ lycée we both attended. We met for the first time late last summer. Until she disappeared, I was helping (or rather, failing to help her) with her husband’s case.
The facts of this case are as follows: when Sinan Sinanoğlu flew into JFK with his five-year-old-son late last summer, he was expecting a short delay at passport control – but he’d been through this ordeal so many times since 9/11 that he was not unduly worried. It was just a question of answering a few questions honestly, and staying polite…’
Here followed an account of Sinan’s arrest, and his son’s disappearance into the system, and a heavily doctored version of my efforts over the previous two months to help Jeannie defend Sinan’s innocence and secure Emre’s return. I made sure to mention that she, too, was now missing. Though I did not say why, I did find a way to work the words ‘extraordinary’ and ‘rendered’ into the sentence.
I made passing references to Turkey’s troubled human rights record, to its curbs on free expression, and of course to the famous author who was to stand trial later that year for insulting the state. But I did not mention Jordan Frick, and neither did I mention my own troubled histories with any of the others. Instead I did what was expected of me, seizing every opportunity to narrow the emotional gap between my subjects and my readers. Inevitably this involved some air-brushing. When the time came for me to explain why it was that Sinan had been arrested, and why his wife had gone missing, I was sorely tempted to name names, to trace this vicious, senseless vendetta back to what I now believed to be its origin. But I knew this would be unwise. And (bearing in mind that I had no proof) unethical. My job today was not to complicate or prevaricate, but to write clearly and urgently from the heart. There would be plenty of time for the contradictions and inconsistencies later, when we’d found Jeannie, when we’d got Sinan out of jail.
So I chose my words carefully, until I thought my head would burst. My caution made me slow, and I was still a thousand words short when the newspaper made its first call to ask why I hadn’t filed yet. The light had gone out of the sky by then; my mother had settled herself in her armchair with her evening cocktail and was tapping her foot in a way that others might find entirely unremarkable but that I knew was her way of telling me she was running out of patience. The clock struck seven and she asked how much longer I’d be. Just to answer her made my head spin. I could feel great strings of thoughts flying out of it. As I struggled to right myself, an accusing shadow came flying at me through the fog, and I knew then that I had no choice but to say this one thing. If I left all my other furies unvoiced, I would have at least set this one free:
‘It is tempting to see this as a story of the here and now, as a sinister footnote in the war against terror, an insight, perhaps, into the dirty wars it has spawned throughout the region. An intrepid film-maker who is travelling around the southeast of Turkey, possibly very close to the border with Northern Iraq, happens to stray into an arena that certain powerful parties do not wish to be photographed. An arena, perhaps, that would make Abu Ghraib look like a nativity play. This could well be so, and if so, could soon be proven. Sinan’s loyal associates have already unearthed incriminating footage, and as their hunt continues, they are sure to find more.
But to see what I have related here as the first chapter in a yet to unfold story – to ignore the history – is to miss the point. Above all, it is to misunderstand what it means to live in a country ruled by never-named outside interests, where thought is still a crime, where truth-telling has long been a prisonable – and life-threatening – offence. Where the most dangerous thing that any journalist can ever do is to suggest out loud what all Turks acknowledge in whispers – that this is a democracy in name only. That it is ruled by a network of faceless entities known as the “deep state”.
The thing to know about Sinan Sinanoğlu – and the same holds for most of his friends, and indeed, his entire generation – is that he has never controlled his own destiny. All his life, he has been fought over, manipulated, lied about, jealously guarded, framed. All his life, he has been feared – for the very thing that has landed him in prison. He is feared because of the very power he’s never been allowed to exercise – the power that comes from being conversant with more than one system of thought, from being able to travel between and draw from cultures that pretend to be in opposition to each other. To those who have seen fit to incarcerate him, Sinan Sinanoğlu bears all the tell-tale signs of a double agent. Such a pity, then, that no one’s thought to look more closely at the three or four men most likely to have had a hand in his entrapment.
At least two of them were, by their own admission, working for intelligence networks in Turkey in 1971, when parties unknown had Sinan and several others framed for a murder that was later established never to have happened. By the time the truth came out, two of those falsely accused young innocents had spent a decade each in hiding and three had served time in prison. One nearly died after jumping out of a fourth floor window during what has been euphemistically described as an ‘interrogation.’ Though all were fortunate enough to return to fruitful and reasonably peaceful lives, all have done so more quietly than they might have done had they not endured those years of torture and terror.
All, that is, except for Sinan Sinanoğlu, who with each new film has asked bolder questions. And never has he been so bold as in My Cold War, when he turned his camera on his own childhood.
As his case continues, we should, of course, devote our first efforts to his prompt release. But we should also be looking at the would-be fathers who have always hovered over him. Why is his silence so important to them? As Cicero might have put it, cui bono?’
I filed these words on a Friday evening. They came out in England that Sunday, at which point anyone who might have wanted to read them in Turkey (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) could have done so on the net. That Monday, my piece appeared in translation in three Turkish newspapers. It appeared in three more on Tuesday, and on the same day there was quite rabid coverage of the case and my take on it in various columns. Some went so far as to denounce Sinan as a traitor and Jeannie as a missionary who had come to Turkey to ‘complete the dream first hatched in the Treaty of Sevres, namely to destroy the Turkish nation and parcel it out to the powers of the West.’ I was denounced as a fifth columnist, a meddling human rights campaigner, and an agent provocateur. And how dare I suggest there was such a thing as a deep state? None of this particularly concerned me, nor did it seem to concern Suna when we met to discuss them (though she told me I’d been an idiot to mention the deep state), and any colleague familiar with the Turkish press will back me up on this, I’m sure. It’s routine for Turkish papers to cover stories about Turkey in the Western press, and when they do, the lesser papers routinely twist the original words to suit whatever the editor’s agenda happens to be that day. The misleading headlines are not, however, always as ominous as they look. It is understood, even by relatively unsophisticated readers, that the newspapers tell lies: the only way to see through those lies is to divine their authors’ ‘true intentions’.
One or two columnists mentioned my father’s name, and his place of residence, and this, I think, is what paved the way for the death threats. My father took the first two calls, but because the voices were unfamiliar and the Turkish garbled, he assumed them to be wrong numbers. I took the third call, and I understood every word. But the first time somethin
g of this order happens to you, it’s hard to know what to do.
How do you hide from someone you can’t see? Who can protect you? As we sat around the supper table, these questions were as abstract as they were unanswerable. As my mother said, it was all too preposterous to believe. But in the same breath she said, ‘You know, I was expecting something like this.’ She did not accuse me directly but she didn’t need to. I knew I had been reckless. But it had never occurred to me that I’d be putting anyone at risk but myself. I was sick with horror at my stupidity.
I was due to leave for London the following morning, and now I felt I couldn’t do so unless I took my parents with me. This they refused to do. ‘Our lives are here.’ When I offered to put off my departure, they gave each other furtive looks that I had no trouble reading. It was my presence that was putting them in danger. ‘I’m sure it will blow over,’ my mother said. ‘So long as you keep quiet. And why shouldn’t you? You can rest with an easy conscience. You’ve done your bit, after all.’ It was late in the evening by then, but I knew I could not leave it like this, so I rang Suna, who came right over. She made light of the death threats – ‘Welcome to the club!’ she told my father, smiling broadly. ‘I don’t mind telling you, the company is excellent! I myself received no less than four such phone calls, only yesterday! As for a certain colleague of yours…’ She mentioned a name, and then another. They all laughed, as if it were all a harmless sport. But as she headed for the balcony to smoke a cigarette, she pulled me out with her. ‘I didn’t fool you, I hope,’ she said. I shook my head. As she watched her smoke rise into the chilly night, she said, ‘I take it your parents are refusing to go with you to London?’ I told her she had guessed correctly and she said, ‘This is a shame. But leave it with me, darling. I shall keep them safe. In Turkey, as you know, we never forget our teachers.’