Enlightenment Read online

  ‘In the meantime, should my parents call the authorities?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah!’ she cried in horrified disdain. ‘Which authorities did you happen to have in mind?’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘The police. Hah. That is very precious.’

  ‘Or perhaps the US Consulate. They must keep track of such things. They might have some good advice.’

  ‘Yes, and they might also have something to say to you about your article last Sunday. Do you think they were pleased? No,’ she said. ‘Leave it to me. Leave it to us. We love your parents, probably more than you do. We’ll take good care of them.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘We’re grateful to you, too, you know! In spite of certain slurs…but we discussed all this during our long and delicious argument yesterday, so there is no need to fret further. So all I need to add is something by way of a warning. It is clear, from these responses, that you have managed a direct hit. You may just have been guessing, but you were closer to the truth than we could have known. This is good! But be careful. You are sure to be approached. If not on the journey home, then soon afterwards. Watch what you say. Watch your back too. Keep in touch, but be careful, too, about how you say it. Assume there are others listening to our phone calls, and others reading our emails. Anything you say to me, you are saying to everyone. This is my first golden rule for you. And the second is: carry on as normal. Don’t let them scare you, and above all, don’t let them see you scared.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I said.

  ‘One more thing, then. The most important. Don’t forget who your friends are.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘A final request, then. Don’t rewrite the past.’

  7

  On my flight home I was seated next to a Turk in his thirties who had once played for Arsenal but had to give up football due to injury and now ran a dry cleaning business in North London. He had been in Istanbul for his mother’s funeral, and he had no special message for me. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else. As I went about London during the week that followed, there were people here and there who mentioned they’d ‘seen the great piece’, but they had nothing else to say about it. By the end of the week, we had already moved to the next stage: ‘I saw your byline the other day, but I can’t for the life of me remember what paper it was, or what you were on about.’ Which was fine by me.

  Because by now I’d worked out why it was that I’d been spirited into the Pasha’s Library, and what I’d been meant to make of it.

  Or to put it differently, instead of looking where they wanted me to look, I’d glanced over my shoulder.

  I’m still not sure how the news of my enlightenment got out.

  I’d been home for a week when I got the first email message. The name of the sender was not familiar to me, but the domain was a university in New York State, so I opened it, expecting that it would be a friend of a friend as per usual, or a student needing a favour.

  It was only one sentence.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  I paid it no attention. But the next day, I received another.

  ‘You fucking bitch. If you’re going to ruin my life, and destroy my family, too, you can at least do me the courtesy of saying what you want from me.’

  This I tried to ignore, too, though the words stayed with me. I was worried enough to ring my old friend Jordan Frick, who was back from Uzbekistan, and who was worried enough to come over to see the emails for himself. When we checked my messages, there was a third email. This was a very long one, and I shall not quote it here. Suffice it to say that it contained information that only two people in the world know, myself being one of them. Impossible as that may seem. And yes, I am aware that, technically speaking, it is impossible for a man charged with terrorism to gain access to the Internet. But I am assuming that even the Patriot Act makes some space for legal counsel. So perhaps this was the conduit. During the week we were communicating, the gaps between my answers and his replies would indicate that we were being aided and abetted by a messenger.

  I am assuming there is no need to reproduce the full correspondence here, Mary Ann, as you’ve already seen it. Again, let me thank you for seeing the threats as serious. This is a very nasty business, especially now, and I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is when your life is in danger and no one in officialdom will take you seriously. You were the first person to do so, and for that I can never thank you enough. The same goes for everyone else at the Center for Democratic Change.

  I know we are still of two minds about Jeannie Wakefield – and I can understand why anyone seeing her likeness in that doctored photograph might jump to conclusions.

  But you, at least, are prepared to see her as innocent unless proven guilty. It heartens me to know that even today, even in Washington, there are still organisations like the CDC that insist on due process. If we all band together, we can and will see justice done. In the meantime, I would ask for your patience. To say what I have to say, I need time. And a few other luxuries as well.

  Which brings me to the email I received a few moments ago from the correspondent who might or might not be Sinan:

  ‘How much do you know?’

  My answer: not as much as I’d like. But rest assured: what I don’t know, I can imagine.

  II

  Everyday Life in the Days of the Cold War

  8

  She was born in Havana, of all places. I’m not sure what her father was up to in Cuba, or what the sign on his door pretended. Whatever it was, Jeannie’s mother didn’t like it. Within months of the birth, she and the baby were back in Northampton, Massachusetts. Before much longer, Jeannie’s father had moved on, too. His next posting was in Caracas. Then he jumped continents and landed in Ankara. After that it was Delhi, Manila and Colombo. Somewhere along the line, he married a second wife and divorced her. The wife he brought with him to Istanbul in 1966 was his third. By 1970, she, too, had moved on – to Washington, DC, to pursue a law degree. The story on the grapevine (and I remember people being quite shocked by this at the time) was that William Wakefield was paying her tuition.

  So he wasn’t your standard chauvinist. He had his own ideas about what a man should do, and what a father should aim for. I know he regretted not knowing his daughter because once, at a party at my parents’, after he’d had far too much to drink, he’d told me so, in what seemed to me then to be excruciating detail. Though he was sure Jeannie’s mother was giving her ‘the finest of American upbringings’ – there was ‘a world out there’ and it pained him to think that his daughter had never had a chance to see it.

  But one day… This was the message, implied or explicit, in every postcard he wrote to her. Would he have been surprised to know she’d pinned 971 of them to her bedroom walls? Hyderabad, Luxor and Petra. Montevideo, Anchorage, and Hong Kong. Harbours, mountains and skylines. Statues, mausoleums and ships. Each of them a testament to the bigger, better world her father was waiting to show her. The idea to spend a year with him in Istanbul had been hers, not his.

  Her mother had of course baulked at the idea. Istanbul was too far away, and far too dangerous – though a bachelor pad anywhere else in the world would have been just as bad. Her main fear (well-founded, as it turned out) was that Jeannie would be left to fend for herself. This was a man who let ‘nothing and no one come between him and his job.’ However, she seems not to have known what his job really was. Had she so much as guessed the truth, she most certainly would have used it as her trump card.

  Instead it was Radcliffe that had the final say. They’d offered her a place, and instead of doing what most people did, and grabbing the chance before it disappeared, Jeannie had written to them to remind them that she was only sixteen, and would she not derive greater riches from her college career if she deferred for a year? She told him about her father, and her longing to see the world that had been kept from her for so long. She wrote about reading Gibbon, and the real Richard Burton. Ger
trude Bell, Rose Macaulay and Freya Stark. There was not a waking hour, she said, when she did not ask herself how long it would be before she saw the enigmas of Near Eastern Culture at first hand. In so saying, she established herself as just the sort of student Radcliffe dreamed of serving. They wrote straight back to Jeannie saying that they were more than happy to back her plan. Their only stipulation was that (while she was in Istanbul, at least, and in addition to the journal she had already promised) she committed herself to some sort of formal study.

  Six weeks later, she said goodbye to her distraught mother at JFK Airport and boarded the PamAm flight for Istanbul. She began her journal in what only an adolescent could call a spirit of forgiveness (‘it is easy to be charitable to one’s mother when one is looking down on her from a distance of 30,000 feet.’).

  Her next entry, dated June 16th, begins in the same lofty tones:

  ‘I am glad now I had to wait so long. Glad I had a chance to read the history, and absorb it – make it real, at least in my head. For when we turned up that narrow, cobblestone lane that would take us along the great walls of Rumeli Hisar, and I set eyes on that first crenallated tower, I felt myself inside Gibbon’s prose. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I could see the Ottoman armies pouring over those walls, I could hear their battlecries as they thundered off to take the flower of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Greeks, its previous owners. I was so in the thick of it that I was literally beginning to hyperventilate. And then, when Father took me into the garden of his house to show me his view – when I stood here on this great glass porch, gazing with wild surmise at the distant and inscrutable twists and turns of the Bosphorus, I felt History itself rolling over me. I understood, for the first time, the meaning of the word “awe”…’

  Here she stopped, knowing every gushing word to be a lie.

  9

  Who am I writing for? This is what she later recalled asking herself. Though she knew the answer: she was writing for the seasoned and urbane woman she hoped to become. In truth it was even worse than that. Even more twisted and duplicitous. She was putting down the story of her first fortnight in Istanbul as she wanted to remember it. As she wished she had lived it. As she would pretend she had, forever more.

  Looking up from her narrow desk to gaze at her lying reflection in the window, set against the iron grilles, she examined The Nose, and then The Left Nostril: it had grown. She shut her notebook, which stared back at her importantly. As if to say, a notebook of my calibre – or have you forgotten I am made of the finest leather? – should be treated with respect. She was ready to surrender to its superior wisdom – give up, go downstairs, call a friend, perhaps, or watch television – but of course, she couldn’t; she was not in Northampton but half a world away, locked away in a tower, with only her faltering imagination to keep her company – or that’s how it felt in the dark of night, when all she could hear was the trembling of a passing ship and the howls of the dogs in the hills.

  A noise downstairs. A cross between a screech and a crash. A chair. He must have knocked it over. Her chest tightened, as she listened to her father swear. And now a hard, sharp knock, which took her longer to decipher – her father hitting the ice tray against the counter? Then silence, and footsteps, stopping at the foot of the stairs. She held her breath, but then there was the creak of the door into the library. She let herself exhale.

  She opened to the first page: ‘The Journal of Jeannie Wakefield On Her First Venture into the Near East, June 1970 –.’ Such poppycock! Such pretension! You’d think, from her verbiage, that she’d already come and gone. But she’d only been here for a fortnight, and already she wanted to leave. If she were to write the truth, it would go like this:

  ‘It was my idea to come here – my idea, even if it’s true what Mother said, even if it was Father who planted it and fed it with every postcard he ever sent me. It was my idea, and I had to fight long and hard to make it happen. But now here I am, standing at the end of the longest limb in the world, in a house that smells like oatmeal. And last night…’

  But she couldn’t bear to think of last night. Her heart churned at the very prospect. She opened the notebook, returned to her task, and as she described the great monuments she’d visited since her arrival, and the splendid vistas on which her eyes had feasted, she was again grateful for the calm and the courage this pretence brought her.

  Soon she had mentioned every mosque, cistern and bridge. Rereading her account so far, she saw it for what it was – a droning catalogue of inanimate objects. She rushed to correct the oversight:

  ‘But enough about us. My next task is to give some sense of the city as a living, breathing entity. You’d think I hadn’t met a soul, when actually, I’ve been doing a fair amount of mixing! We had a lovely evening on the Hiawatha (the consular yacht) on Wednesday, with a group of Dad’s colleagues, and the night after that we went up the road to meet Dad’s girlfriend, which is a strange word to use for a woman in her forties. But she is, in fact, a lovely person. She did everything in her power to make me feel at home.

  Chloe, her daughter, was somewhat less forthcoming, though we seemed to have forged an alliance of sorts. Because yesterday…’

  Ye Gods! Just to write that word sapped the last of her courage. But she could not give up now. She had started; she’d persevere to the end, and perhaps, when she got there, she would have succeeded in making some sense of this.

  ‘…yesterday, Chloe introduced me to two boys she’s friendly with. We ended up spending the whole day together – and a pretty big chunk of the night, too. It was, for me at least, an emotional rollercoaster. We didn’t just have a car at our disposal, but a speedboat! Most of the time, I literally had no idea where I was, and I think I must be the sort of person who needs to know this. But all in all, I am glad to have had the chance to explore the strange world these boys inhabit; if nothing else, it offered a fascinating insight into the lives and mores of Turkish youth. Though I have to admit say that the process of getting to know an alien culture is a lot less straightforward than I originally assumed. I am loath to add to my already burgeoning list of questions…’

  And she mustn’t. Mustn’t! The burgeoning list at the back of her notebook was for important questions. Questions about History and Monuments. Things she’d need to know for college. While the questions she was loath to add to her burgeoning list were petty, and personal, and sometimes even unkind. Like: why did Turkish teenagers think it was so amazing to own a six-year-old Mustang? And why, once they owned them, did they drive them like maniacs? Why, when they’d just almost killed you, did they turn around and wink? Why did they laugh when it really wasn’t funny, and why, when they’d said something that she had to hope was a joke, did they not even crack a smile? And why, when they’d given you every indication that…

  ‘…enough of this nonsense. There can be no substitute for the simple facts, which are as follows. Yesterday morning…’

  Yesterday morning, she had gone downstairs to find her father sitting in the library with two strangers. One was a sharp dresser with bland, attentive eyes, whom her father introduced as ‘İsmet, my opposite number’. The other was a lank American who, she guessed, was not long out of college. He had a chiselled face punctuated by eyes set too deep for her to see their colour. His close-cropped hair ended a good inch before his tan began, and gave him the air of a shorn sheep. He was hunched over her father’s radio, fiddling with the knobs, but when he saw her, his eyebrows shot up, almost of their own accord. ‘What’s with the protocol?’ he asked. ‘Don’t I get introduced, too?’

  ‘Now that I think of it, no,’ my father said.

  ‘Have it your way,’ said the young American. He stuck out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Call me No Name. And your name is?’

  ‘Don’t give him an inch,’ said her father.

  ‘Thanks,’ said No Name.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said her father, and Jeannie could tell that he meant it. Annoyed (because she did not need
such protection), but also ashamed of feeling annoyed, she went off to the kitchen. Her father followed her in to apologise for ‘springing those goons on you.’ Something urgent had come up, he explained. ‘And as usual, yours truly has to deal with it. Typical! You’d think they had something better to do. Don’t they ever go to the beach?’ By ‘they’ she now knew he did not mean his colleagues at the consulate but Communist insurgents.

  ‘I’m sorry I have to leave you in the lurch like this,’ he said as he ruffled her hair. Which was, she was sure, a perfectly reasonable thing for a father to do, though there was something not right about it, something cold. It left her wondering if a father was only really a father if you grew up in the same house.

  Knowing this to be something he wondered about, too, she gave him her best attempt at a smile, though if she were to be honest, the real thing she was smiling about was the prospect of a morning to herself. ‘You won’t be alone all day, I’ve made sure of that,’ her father said, responding with his usual (but still alarming) alacrity to the thought she had not voiced. ‘My friend Amy is sending that wonderful daughter of hers over to take you out for the afternoon. If she can’t show you a good time, then no one can.’

  ‘I didn’t have high hopes, though. We’d already met and failed to click. She took about five minutes to file me away as “tedious” and to me, she was a moody, ill-mannered girl with sultry eyes and a fondness for words that should never be allowed out of a dictionary. Which was why, when she turned up after lunch wearing a tiny tie-dye dress and huge round sunglasses and a killer pout, I just said, “Listen, we don’t have to do this.”