What exactly did he mean? She did not dare ask. Just to think of asking made her mind go blank. But she began to notice things. They refused to organise themselves into a picture, and for the same reason, they plagued her.
She noticed, for example, that she and her father didn’t really have a relationship. At least, not the sort of relationship that she then thought ought to come naturally to fathers and their daughters. So while he was glad, even proud, to have her living with him, and eager, almost too eager, to sit down with a bourbon and a pile of books to ruminate on what he insisted on calling the burning issues of our time, she could feel no real bond. No – it was worse than that. She felt as if she was more an idea to him than a real person.
‘This hurt me. Possibly because he, too, had always been more of an idea to me than a real person. It could hardly have been any other way, seeing as we had, until now, seen so little of each other. The problem was that I could not bear the cracks now forming in the image of Father I had always carried around with me. With every crack, it was harder for me to avoid seeing the man he really was. Or the father he wasn’t.
For example: Thanksgiving, which we celebrated at Chloe’s. When Sinan turned up two hours late and glowering, I asked if he was okay. But it was my father who took him outside for a chat.
Though Sinan was looking more cheerful when they returned, there was still an edge to his voice as he downed three bourbon sours too quickly. “That’s more like it!” said my father, pouring him a fourth. “Let the good times roll. Let’s party!” I can still hear his reckless laugh. The others laughing with him. I can even see how everyone was sitting, what they were wearing, and whether their glasses were half empty or half full. Which is not so surprising if you think of it. Keep a daughter in the dark, and she has no recourse but to develop a photographic memory.
So here’s the scene: it’s six in the evening, but due to a dip in the gas supply, the turkey won’t be done until nine. Amy is dashing to and fro looking elegant and otherworldly in her mauve velvet bell-sleeved blouse and palazzo trousers. We’re playing the truth game. My father has just told three tales against himself and now he wants us to cross-examine him, to decide which one we believe. One involves a hitman, another a stolen baby. The third concerns a foiled assassination attempt, and when Sinan presses him for details, Chloe’s brother Neil (the family patriot) tells my father not to answer. “You’d be endangering national security!”
Then Amy steps in. “Can’t you find something more edifying to talk about, on this day of all days? I’ve never heard anything so silly.”
My father sighs. “Women! They always spoil the fun.”
He is joking, of course. But at the same time, he means it.
This is a man who is tiring of his mask, who, in spite of his better judgement, wishes someone would just reach out and tear it off. He is tired of keeping secrets, tired of slaving over reports that no one but his hated superiors will ever see, tired of always knowing better than the misinformed masses, tired of the Suits back home misinforming the higher-ups whenever his information does not suit their political agendas.
He’s tired of consulates and diplomatic parties and trips to the Covered Bazaar with this year’s batch of new arrivals who’ve been sent to Turkey even though they are experts on Latin America because that is how the people in Washington make sure their diplomats stay loyal.
He wants out. Forget politics. Make a new life with Amy, put down roots here, really get to grips with the history of the city. Write a book, perhaps. Do a little travelling. Teach a course or two. Have fun. Most of all, he longs to pick up the phone and dial a certain office outside Washington and “tell them to shove it.”
But for now, it’s consolation enough to fret about someone else who is hemmed in on all sides, who deserves a bigger, better life and still has the chance to find it – given the right sort of guidance.
“Come in for a nightcap, why don’t you,” my father says to Sinan as we make our way home. He sends me upstairs. “This won’t be long,” he says.
But when I come downstairs at four in the morning, they are still deep in conversation. The air is stale – smoke flavoured with bourbon. Sinan is sitting, perched forward in his chair, frowning but also nodding as my father gently chides him for “avoiding the issue”, for playing into the problem, for “sneaking around” and “making dubious friends” instead of standing up to his father “like a man”, for letting “fashionable rebels” dictate his thoughts, instead of asking what he has to give to the world, what he has that is special. Sinan’s shoulders sag with every new reproach, and then there is the searing shock of recognition.
This is what it looks like.
This is what a good father can do.
This is how my father might have talked to me, if I’d been a boy.’
As autumn progressed, so, too, did the arguments about safety. Which had everything to do with Jeannie not being a boy. Though her father trusted her, though his confidence in Jeannie’s ‘innate’ common sense was absolute, though he did not want to cramp her style, he couldn’t just leave her ‘to it’ as he might have done the son he’d never had. This was a tricky city for young women at the best of times, and now, with things heating up the way they were, he didn’t want her to think she could just go anywhere: ‘I’d hate to see you walk into something ugly,’ he said. ‘Even if nothing bad happened, you’d lose your nerve.’ As the bombs grew more numerous that autumn, and the little scuffles between students and the police in the downtown universities escalated into gunbattles, he kept adding new names to the list of places Jeannie had to promise to avoid.
She’d tell him where she wanted to go and he’d shake his head and say, ‘Not on a Saturday afternoon, you’re not,’ or ‘That’s no place for a blonde pony-tail.’ His five categories of danger in descending order were: ‘absolutely not,’ ‘you must be joking,’ ‘only if you have no alternative,’ ‘that should be okay but I still want you to keep your eyes peeled,’ and ‘what a relief.’
‘Of course I resented this. Of course I had no way of understanding that it was not just a question of physical safety. He wanted to protect me from reality. He knew, perhaps from bitter experience, that too great a dose of reality would force the issue. As indeed it did.’
One place she was meant to avoid at all cost was Beyazıt Square, in the Old City. But on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, something went wrong with the school heating system and they were let out early, and Lüset asked the gang to go down with her to the Covered Bazaar to help her buy a leather coat.
Usually you had to fight your way past milling crowds, staggering porters, and darting boys with trays of tea. But today the main thoroughfare was almost empty – for every customer there were ten anxious shopkeepers trying to charm her into buying their finest necklace, carpet, copper tray. They all used the same gestures, and the same eye tricks. Jeannie could almost hear the beat they all danced to. In the beginning, when Chloe and she were walking in front, there was an effort to guess their nationality. French? Dutch? German? English? American? At the sound of Suna’s harsh, admonishing Turkish, their smirks faded into abject murmurs, obsequious nods and bowed heads.
They visited every leather shop in the bazaar: Lüset, for whom shopping was a loathsome chore, couldn’t find a single coat she liked. With each new coat that Suna found, Lüset would puff out her lips, confer with her reflection, shake her head. Suna would snort and light up a cigarette. Chloe would pick out the coat of her dreams, the glacé leather monstrosity she’d have bought in a flash had she been rich like Lüset. Suna would take one look at it and say, ‘But what can you be thinking, my dear girl? This is a disaster. Look at those buttons! Those seams! And the leather! Is it even leather, or plastic for the price of leather?’
When they had worked their fruitless way to the far end of the bazaar, Suna remembered that there was a book she needed for the talk she’d be giving at Current Affairs Club the following afternoon. It was her wish, she said, ‘to draw a line between last weekend’s bombing of the US Officer’s Club in Ankara and the forgotten atrocities of the Korean War.’ Off they went to Sahaflar, the second hand book market, to watch Suna and Lüset browse. The air was chilly and although most stalls had braziers, Jeannie still got the shivers. Was this why they noticed her? From time to time a stallkeeper asked Suna who ‘these foreigners’ were. Without looking up, she would say they were Americans. On hearing this, the other customers – all very serious customers, serious leftwing students with Che Guevara moustaches and army surplus coats – would glare at them.
‘I don’t know about you,’ Chloe said to Jeannie. ‘But I’m beginning to feel…hmm… What’s the word I’m looking for?’
‘American?’ Jeannie said.
As another customer looked up to glare at them, they began to giggle. ‘So what do you say?’ said Chloe. ‘Time for the Americans to go home?’
They’d meant to go straight down to the sea and catch a ferry from Eminönü but they dipped into a side street to shake off two men who seemed to be following them, and soon they were lost. The meandering alleyways of that neighbourhood were always teeming in the daytime, but this afternoon they were more crowded and agitated than ever. Turning into a main street, they were almost knocked down by a ragged cluster of men running in the opposite direction. Hearing a roar in the distance – and a muffled chant, a siren, breaking glass – Beyazıt Square, it had to be – they turned around, too. But they made the mistake of running into a cul-de-sac. When they turned around, there were upwards of twenty men blocking the way. One was holding a club.
The men were swarthy, angry, hungry, bewildered. ‘Let me handle this,’ said Chloe. She addressed the men in Turkish. But no one moved.
They were so close Jeannie could smell them. One man stepped forward and lifted a lock of Jeannie’s hair. There was a murmuring, the same three-syllable word hissing from lip to lip. But just as the man closest to Jeannie pushed closer a second man stepped aside to let the girls pass. Chloe grabbed Jeannie’s hand and pulled her around the corner into the street. They hurled themselves downhill, down to the next corner, where they made the mistake of looking over their shoulders. There they all were. Swarthy, angry, hungry, bewildered, and waiting to be told what to do. The man with the club let out a cry and they all came hurtling down the street.
‘We were saved, in the end, by a man who ran a button shop. He’d gone outside to see what the noise was about. When I tripped on a cobblestone, he picked me up and pulled us inside.
I remember peeking around his counter, watching our assailants rush past. And the worried crowd of well-wishers that gathered around us afterwards, the tea they brought us, the sting of the iodine our saviour poured over my knee. The murmured question, repeated with every new arrival. “Where are they from?” The answer, rippling through the crowded shop and into the street. “They’re American. American. American.”
A swarthy man was staring through the window. Insolent, contemptuous, disgusted. What did he see in my face that made him hate me so? How could he hate me so, when he didn’t know a thing about me?
The buttonseller insisted that his boy escort us to the ferry station. We must have been in shock, because when the ferry pulled away from the shore, we both burst out laughing.
We did the same when we walked into Chloe’s kitchen. When her mother asked what was so funny, Chloe said, “Absolutely nothing.”
“Are you sure? You look dishevelled.”
“No, honestly, I’m feeling fine,” Chloe said. “I would even go so far as to say I feel…American?”
Chloe’s mother was not amused. She stood in the doorway, her arms akimbo. “Being American is not a joke, you know. You should be proud of who you are.”
That night I dreamt I was Sisyphus, rolling not one rock up a hill, but two.’
But not for much longer. Walking into the little dining room off Marble Hall the following afternoon, Jeannie found Suna laying out papers for the Current Affairs Club. Normally this involved much barking of orders, but today she was so fired up she hardly noticed the others. For at last she had found ‘the perfect illustration of our problem.’
Next to a cursory report on the bombing of the US Officer’s Club in Ankara the previous weekend (clipped from the International Herald Tribune, with the words ‘no casualties’ highlighted in yellow magic marker) she had placed a sheet of paper on which she had listed by nationality the number of dead in the Korean War. At the top of the list was Turkey. Above Exhibits A and B was another sheet of paper on which Suna had written: ‘CONNECT THE DOTS’.
‘Just the sight of those three words made my blood boil. So I asked her. What exactly was she trying to say? Her answer: “It’s my thought for the day.” My retort: it made no sense.’
Oh yes, it did, Suna insisted. But only if her esteemed American friend was brave enough to ‘connect the dots’.
‘I could tell from her smug smile that she knew what those three words did to me. So I asked her: What did a war that happened almost twenty years ago have to do with a bombing that happened last week?’
‘To an American, perhaps nothing,’ said Suna airily. ‘But to a Turk, everything. You used us as cannon fodder in Korea, you know. But did you ever apologise?’
To which Jeannie replied: ‘It wasn’t me who used Turks as cannon fodder in Korea.’
To which Suna said nothing. Instead she began to hum. So Jeannie said it again. This time she shouted:
‘IT WASN’T ME!’
I hate crying (she confessed in her letter). I hate people seeing me cry. I hate it when I have to ask them to pass me a tissue, because I forgot mine at home. I hate blowing my nose in front of them, and running out of tissues again, and seeing the pity in their eyes. I longed to run out of the room, out of the building. I didn’t want anyone to see how red my eyes were, most especially Miss Broome. Who was due any minute now. Who would be so concerned, so attentive, and so keen to discuss my distress. Suna seemed to understand all this. After she had brought me my tissues, and conferred in whispers with Chloe and Lüset, she said, “I think we should go for a walk. But don’t worry. No one will see us. We’ll leave by the back.”
She didn’t even flinch when the alarm went off. “If you walk normally, no one will notice.” So we walked normally to the far end of the plateau. We sat down on the marble bench and watched the passing ships.
“I am truly sorry about yesterday,” she said then. “I had no idea. I should have been more sensitive. But I am a very strange person, with very strange moods, and I am always saying things I shouldn’t say. I know.”
I told her I liked it that she spoke her mind, but then I caved in again.
“No more tears! It’s an order! The general commands you! Here, I brought more tissues. Please. For I have more to say.”
She had a confession to make. So terrible she could hardly bring herself to say it. “I love having arguments with you. What sort of monster does that make me?”
A human being?
“Don’t laugh. I’m serious. I love arguing with you, because you’re my equal. I love arguing with you, because you listen. You never say, ‘Oh Suna,’ or ‘Suna, please!’ like the others. As if I were some sort of Marxist-Leninist circus clown. No, you listen, and then you ask a good question, a question that makes me wish I were an acrobat. Because we’re equals, most of the time we’re equals. Except today. Today you were upset.”
It wasn’t her fault, I said. That, she said, was neither here nor there. “I should have noticed.” A little detail – a change in the way I waved my hand, a catch in my breath, just one of the ten thousand things Lüset noticed.
“Instead I rolled on. Like a steamroller, to quote Lüset. What I said was not just stupid, but untrue. You did not send those Turkish soldiers to Korea, and you were not the one who used them as cannon fodder. But do you know what, my friend? Even if you had, I’d defend you to the death.”
She took my hand. “So can we be friends again? Will you forgive me my huzursuzluklar, and the senseless storms that threaten our future? Oh please say yes, Jeannie. I long to argue with you forever.”’
How clear the air was when Jeannie set off for home that evening. As she made her way down the steep and winding path to the Bosphorus, pausing from time to time to look up at the gnarled and curving branches of the Judas trees, stopping on the 138th step to catch the first glimpse of the sea, she made her plans. She chose her words, so carefully that she was on and off the bus and halfway up the Aşıyan before she had composed them to her satisfaction. For once it didn’t feel too steep. For once she did not trip on a single cobblestone or cower in the shadow of the castle or turbaned tombs that lined the cemetery wall.
‘I knew what I had to do, as surely as I knew the wind on my back.’
How golden the meydan looked in the late afternoon sun. How dusty their green gate. How sharp and damp the evening air as she walked down the path. How dark the churning waters of the Bosphorus. How easy it was to pull up a chair next to her father’s great desk and ask the question. As the words hung in the air, he showed no surprise. She might as well have asked what they were having for supper. Tipping back his chair, he said, ‘So let me guess. Someone’s been giving you a hard time?’ But how easy it was for her to insist on a proper answer.
This was his answer: ‘Basically, I’m a desk guy. Mostly, I just sit at that desk of mine and analyse information.’
Which was just not good enough. So she kept pressing. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘The short answer is that there is no short answer. It varies. Sometimes we pay for our information, or people owe us a favour. Or they want revenge. Mostly they’re lying. And mindbogglingly boring. That’s our greatest secret, the one no thriller can divulge…’
‘What I still don’t understand is what you do all day.’
‘The truth, Jeannie, is that I spend most of my day in meetings.’
What sort of meetings?
‘Meetings with goons.’
‘And then?’
‘I write reports about these meetings for other goons who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, and care even less.’
‘Then what’s the point?’ she asked. ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’
‘Well, look at it like this…’ he began. She cut him off.
‘What’s the point of being here if they don’t like us, Dad?’
‘The army likes us. The army loves us!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what about the people?’
‘The people might not like us, but they’d like the Soviet alternative a hell of a lot less, believe you me.’ Tipping back his chair, he recited his tired mantra. ‘So that’s why we’re here, Jeannie. To defend freedom, justice and democracy, the principles that made our country great. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – remember? Not that you’ve looked very happy lately.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘There isn’t one!’
‘I’m wondering if it isn’t that Bolshevik classmate of yours who pushed you into this.’ She shook her head, perhaps a little too vigorously. ‘Then is it Sinan?’ She shook her head again. ‘In that case, it must be his parents,’ her father said.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Parents are very interfering here. Though not without cause.’
‘So tell me. What’s this cause?’
He waved his hand, as if to swat a fly. ‘Oh who knows? They could be worried we might spirit Sinan off to the US of A. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea! This is just between you and me, by the way. Same goes for the other matter we were discussing. I don’t say this lightly. Do you hear?’
‘What – you want to turn me into a liar, just like you?’
‘I’m telling you to exercise caution. Listen, rumours in and of themselves can’t hurt you. They’re a dime a dozen, and there’s safety in numbers. But if you go around with a sign on your back…’
‘I don’t have to tell anyone. They know already.’
‘What I mean is, don’t let them know you know.’ He stood up, and as Jeannie did the same, he turned to beam at her.
She didn’t know this look. What was it – concerned? Abashed? Solicitous? No, condescending. Patting her on the head, he said, ‘Poor old Jeannie. All the woes of the world on her back. Is all this getting too much for you? What I meant was…you were so full of life when you got here. So full of curiosity and joy. You’d look into a horizon and dream of what was beyond it. You’d watch people walking along the waterfront and see their stories trailing after them like comets. But now…’ He fixed her with his beadiest and most regretful gaze.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘You’re sure, now.’ It was a question.
‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping.’
‘Well, maybe this will help.’
‘That night it did. But the following morning, as I was walking up the long steep path to Gould Hall, lost in the disordered euphoria that can only come from having demanded the truth and received it (I was right, it wasn’t just my mind tricking me, I stood up to him! I spoke my mind! But it’s not as bad as I feared, it’s just a job and someone has to do it, if it’s only analysing information, what harm can there be in that?) the odd thing my father had said at the very end of our conversation floated back into my mind. And that was when it hit me. I had never talked to my father about horizons or waterfronts or stories trailing after people like comets. He knew all this because he’d read my journal.’