October 17th 1971
‘Today I followed Doctor’s Orders. I made full use of my extreme good fortune. I began the day with a balanced breakfast, and as I sat there with my worthy classmates, perusing the Crimson and the New York Times, sharing thoughts about all the news that’s fit to print, I was mindful of the fact that ten or more girls my age – excuse me, ten or more young women – would have given their eye-teeth to be in the chair I was occupying. For I am under a solemn oath to make the most of my exclusive education.
And what a feast of a morning it was. As Suna might have said. She would have loved the first lecture, and the second, too. She would have talked back to that professor though. I could almost hear her. But when I looked across the hall at the arrogant innocents surrounding me…
Chloe should have been there, too, but she overslept. She was waiting for me outside when I came out. Looking bleary. When I told her, she said good, that was the look she was after. ‘Bleary and belligerently off-hand.’ Off we went through the wind and the falling leaves to Radcliffe Yard, to attend a very nice lunch with the very nice, very old-fashioned ladies who were responsible for our being here, and who wanted to see what we looked like, presumably to find out if they had been right about us or wrong.
We behaved perfectly, I must say. As did the ladies, who asked us sweeping earnest questions and then listened with pained sincerity as we explained why the US was so unpopular in Turkey, and what this entailed. We catalogued the riots, the bombings, the kidnappings, and assassinations. The military coup, the mass arrests, and the allegations of torture. They shook their nice heads and clucked their nice tongues. “I do hope no one close to you was directly affected.”
And I was sorely tempted. I almost said, “Quite a few of them were, actually. You see, my father is a spook. He kept files on everyone I knew. They became suspects simply by virtue of being friends. He set an agent provocateur amongst us – can you believe it? So I fingered him. Then I left – on the next plane, no less. Leaving my friends to do the dirty work. Which they did. Which makes them murderers. What does it make me?”’
November 2nd 1971
‘Today Chloe and I decided what-the-hell, why not throw caution to the wind. We’ve run our Coop cards to the limit but I need a clock radio and she needs new flares so we have no choice but to get ourselves more cards.
So there we were in the Pewter Pot, filling out forms. I looked at Chloe’s and saw she had called herself Mata Hari and given her profession as “world-famous seductress.” So I thought, what-the-hell, and in the slot for profession, I wrote “murderess”.’
November 15th 1971
‘A week ago yesterday, when I was sitting, lying on one of those sofas, actually, at Hilles Library, and thinking about the essay I have to do by tomorrow on ‘an experience that changed me’ for expository writing, it suddenly struck me that I had no choice. So I wrote about the freshman mixer, about what it was like to go to a zoo like that pretending you were interested in meeting boys when you had seen enough of the world, and the way the world worked, to have precipitated a murder. The words just came, and they kept on coming, so I also wrote about the rest of the week, about how it felt to be sitting in that meeting with everyone else who was comping for the Crimson, all these eighteen-year-olds talking big about their high school yearbook and some trip they’d taken that was such an eye-opener, and thinking, you think you’re so tough, do you? Let’s see how tough you are after an hour in a Turkish police station.
Today, after class, this beardless youth who teaches us expository writing took me aside. He tapped my essay about the mixer. “What’s this all about?” were his precise words. I told him the story. He nodded and frowned in all the right places, although it was a bit of a letdown at the end, when all he could think to say was “What a bummer.” He told me that one day I was probably going to write something “very important and very true” about all this, but that right now I was probably “too close”. “All that comes through is the anger,” he said. He then recommended therapy. And oh yes, I forgot to mention. He gave me a “C”, which didn’t feel very much like therapy.
I stopped by Chloe’s room on the way back to my room, thinking she was the only one in this whole place who could possibly appreciate the ironies, but she was smoking dope with those new friends of hers so she just took my essay and threw it on her bed and said she’d read it later.
Sometimes I wonder if she even likes me any more. Sometimes I think our misery is all that binds us together, and our contempt for anyone who doesn’t understand it, but then at the same time there seems to be this unspoken agreement not to put anything of importance into words.’
December 1st 1971
‘Today, when I went to see Chloe in the infirmary, she told me that she’d given her doctor permission to speak to me. “For background,” she said, waving her arm. “You know. All that stuff.” Her arm, her wrist I mean, is still heavily bandaged.
His name was Dr White. We met in his office, which was white white white! We began by discussing what he called Chloe’s “home situation”. It emerged that he had recommended her taking time off and going home, and that she had expressed reluctance. Apparently her precise words were that she had “no desire to waste away in the wilds” with her father and that she could not return to her mother, as she was a persona non grata in Turkey.
Dr White wanted to know about the divorce, which he knew to have been recent and suspected to have been messy. As if divorce was the be all and end all. So I told him. If Chloe was feeling unstable, it was probably not because her parents were living apart, but because some people she knew had murdered someone else she knew and chopped him up into little pieces which they’d stuffed into a trunk.
He asked me to elucidate, so I did.
I explained how hard it was, when the victim of a crime was someone evil, someone your own father had hired to lead your friends astray. But I’d never wanted him dead! When I’d said all that, Dr. White cleared his throat and tapped his pen against the pad in front of him. “You’re sure of all this?”
Yes, you imbecile. I was there.’
December 2nd 1971
‘I don’t see what good therapy is going to do. You’d think, from the way they all talk about it, that it could fix all injuries, erase the marks of torture, raise the dead.’
December 5th
1971 ‘This was the third time in three days I had to tell the story, and every time I tell it, I have a harder time getting people to believe it.’
December 7th 1971
‘All she wants to do is talk about my father.
All I want to do is talk about what he destroyed.
I can’t understand why I can’t get anyone to care.’
December 8th 1971
‘Today I got a letter from him. Apparently he’s spent the last two months in a clinic. But never fear! I no longer have an alcoholic for a father. Now he’s a recovering alcoholic, and, oh yes, a recovering spook, because his days abroad are over, it seems. From here on in, he’s going to do his recovering stateside. He’s slowly coming to terms with “what happened last June,” he claims, and he’d like to see me, to help me recover. Oh, the joy I felt upon seeing those words in a thousand shreds on the floor.
She’s just as bad. She keeps talking about working through my anger, putting “this tragedy” behind me, moving on. And now, to top it all off, he wants to help me “recover.” That’s right – first bury the dead, then bury the truth.
I am not going let you get away with it, Dad.
I will hold you to account.’