‘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.
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, but 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:
‘But why am I bothering even to waste one ounce of thought on him? He knows nothing about the human heart, and one day Sinan, his most faithful disciple, will discover that he knows LESS THAN NOTHING about revolution.’
She hid this journal well. Under the floorboards, where it would, after her departure, remain for more than thirty years. But it was too late for small acts of discretion. They’d been heard. They’d been recorded. They’d said the incriminating words, and now the dominoes were falling. Click, click, click.
The day after her visit to Dutch Harding’s office, Jeannie arrived home to find her father sitting on the glass porch, waving a rolled up newspaper. ‘The New York Times has come through for us!’ He passed her a long and exceptionally biased piece justifying the military coup, and the declaration of martial law in eleven provinces: there had, it said, been a real and imminent danger of what a government spokesman had called ‘a strong and active uprising against the motherland and the republic.’ Or maybe more than one – there were the Kurds in the Southeast, and the rightwing extremists, and the Syrians with their jealous eyes on Hatay province, and the leftwing student extremists, many of whom were alleged to have been trained in Palestinian camps. There was, as usual, no effort to explain why.
Jeannie was just remarking on this to her father when they heard footsteps in the library. It was Sinan. A sullen, silent Sinan. Though her father had gone out of his way to insist that Sinan should use their house as his ‘second home’, this was in no way reflected by the tone William took with him now.
‘Who let you in?’
Lowering himself into a chair, Sinan asked if he could speak to Jeannie privately. ‘Be my guest,’ her father said. But he didn’t move. So they went out to the garden, where Sinan told Jeannie the news. That afternoon Dutch had been called to the headmaster’s office and threatened with dismissal for keeping a cobra on school property without permission.
‘My first response was elation. Good riddance! I said to myself. But not to Sinan. No, to Sinan I expressed consternation. But not as convincingly as I should have done, because now he said, “There’s more, you know. You won’t think this is so funny when I’ve told you the rest.” For after castigating Dutch over the cobra, the headmaster had produced a list of books. Was it true that Dutch kept these dangerous volumes in his office? Was it also true that he met secretly with a group of handpicked students to incite them to take up arms against the state? And what was this about drugs? What exactly was this “Operation Judas Tree”? Although he wouldn’t say where he’d got his information, the thing in his hands was clearly a transcript of our conversation in Dutch’s office. Almost certainly courtesy of İsmet.
Now I, too, was outraged. But alas, not thinking clearly. When I think back now on the tumultuous days and weeks that followed, I sometimes wonder if I was able to think at all. Am I wrong to find myself lacking? Is this what it means to be overtaken by events?
That evening, though, it still looked simple. We had been wronged. We would insist on our rights! My father would fix it for us. My father would get İsmet on the phone and read him the riot act. But when we went inside, Sinan asked me to go upstairs, so he could talk to my father alone.’
It was not a happy conversation. It began with shouts and ended with slamming doors. ‘I’m sorry,’ her father told her when Jeannie rushed downstairs, ‘but I’m afraid I had to read him the riot act. For his own good, of course.’
She reached for her coat. Her father stopped her.
‘I’d give him time to cool down if I were you.’ When she kept moving towards the door, he pulled her back. ‘You listen to me when I’m talking,’ he said. He had never taken that tone with her before.
Then came the lecture. A hundred leftists had been arrested in Istanbul during the night. Most were students belonging to associations that had now been outlawed. The most famous was Deniz Gezmiş, the leader of the gang that had kidnapped the four US airmen in early March. Although they had not harmed their hostages, there was a strong chance that he would get the death penalty.
‘But he’s just a student!’ Jeannie protested.
‘He’ll hang anyway,’ her father replied
‘You don’t sound too sorry about it.’
‘I am very sorry. Especially for the poor deluded souls who go down with them. Which brings me to my point. I’m not happy with these new playmates of yours.’
‘Who exactly?’
‘I think you know.’
‘You’d be surprised how many names I don’t know.’
‘Then let’s keep it that way. I’m warning you – this Enlightenment crew in particular – they’re heading for trouble. They’re Maoists, did you know that?’
‘As a matter of fact, no. But even if they were, why would it matter? They’re not doing anything illegal.’
‘Since when did you have to do something illegal to end up in jail?’
‘That’s so cynical,’ I said. ‘No it’s worse. It’s sick.’
‘Be that as it may. There is just no way this government is going to let this insurgency go unchecked. They have to shut this thing down.’
‘What, by throwing people into jail when they haven’t done a thing?’
‘They’ll have no trouble finding a pretext, believe you me.’
‘Are you trying to tell me they’d stoop so low as to set them up?’
William Wakefield sat back.
‘That’s vile,’ Jeannie said.
And he said, ‘That’s life.’
‘You must be joking,’ she said.
‘You wish.’
The martial law command had instated another curfew: no one was to be out in the streets after 9 pm. At 9.15 the phone rang. ‘Speak of the devil,’ her father said. But it was someone calling from the US. Their only phone was on the desk in the library; Jeannie could see him rolling his eyes as he boomed his most affable ‘hello’. The person on the other end had a lot to say. Her father punctuated his ‘yeses’ and ‘certainlys’ with contorted grins. Once he hit his own head with the palm of his hand. ‘If you spoke the language, Bob, you’d see the problem. The long and the short of it is that the Turkish for Judas tree has nothing to do with…’ There followed a tirade. Her father took the phone receiver off his ear so that his daughter could hear the anger.
‘You’re a drooling idiot. Do you hear that?’ This was her father shouting at the phone after he’d hung up. ‘I’m sorry, Jeannie. I hate to leave you here all alone. But someone’s pushed the panic button and I have to step out.’
‘What makes you so lucky that you can step out in the middle of a curfew and no one shoots you?’
‘For some reason I have a special pass.’
‘I was just going to bed anyway,’ she said. But she couldn’t sleep till she’d found Sinan. She tried all the likely numbers, but no one knew where he was. She got her book, made herself a cocoa, and curled up on the sofa next to the phone.
At around eleven the doorbell rang. She spoke into the intercom. No answer. She went upstairs, to look down onto the meydan and caught just a glimpse of a young man heading down the stone path that led down past the house. She bolted downstairs, reaching the porch just in time to see him stepping out of the last pool of lamplight. It was Sinan. What was he doing outside during the curfew? He could be shot on sight – didn’t he know that?
She went to the other side of the porch and got up on her tiptoes, craned her neck, willing her eyes around the corner that blocked her view of Haluk’s apartment. All she could see was the roof. But when she stood on a chair, the two top floors came into view. The windows of Haluk’s apartment were dark at first, but by the time she returned with her father’s binoculars, the light had gone on in the front room, and there was Sinan, pulling chairs around the table. Now he was answering the door. Three men came in, and two women. They looked like students. The door opened again, and in came the man she now hated more than any man in the world.
Dutch. Instead of sitting down, he scratched his head and asked a question. Sinan pointed down the hallway. He disappeared and then Jeannie saw the light go on in the bathroom. She could just see Dutch’s silhouette in the frosted glass.
There was another man in the doorway. He was rubbing the side of his face and smiling, smiling as if it hurt to do so. She knew this man, too, but it took her a few seconds to place him. No sooner had she realised that he was Sergei, the man from the Soviet Consulate, than he vanished into the shadows of the corridor.
She moved the binoculars across to the third window. The back bedroom. The curtains were drawn. But - had they always been? Had she never checked?
She felt like she was going to throw up.