Please do not read too much into that word. We’re too odd an assortment to count as a real tribe. Whatever ties we have are tenuous. If we have anything in common, it is shifting sands. It is rootlessness.
Wherever we lived as children, we were guests. Wherever we went, we were ambassadors for a country we knew only by hearsay. We grew up knowing no one whose parents were not teachers, missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, agricultural experts, oil company executives, drug enforcement agents or spies. Then, at eighteen, we flew ‘home’, to colleges that left the same imprint on us as they did on you. But what they taught us about the world was at odds with what we’d seen with our own eyes.
What do you think, Mary Ann? Is that why we keep coming back?
Jeannie did make a life for herself after losing Sinan. Or rather, it slowly and painfully made itself. These were the Reagan years. She was not the only one sifting the recent past for the seeds of her undoing. The stores were full of books for the disillusioned children of Cold Warriors. So she came to know a great deal about the OSS and the early years of the CIA. She read everything of note on the Soviet Union, the McCarthy era, the arms race, the Cuban missile crisis, the endless string of foreign misadventures that her father may or may not have played a part in:
‘I may have done so partly to put my own small tragedy into context but mostly to feed my huge grief. There was no moment when I saw the light and buried my sorrows to move on. I don’t think things happen like that. I was in my thirties by now and could no longer think of happiness as a divine right. Or I knew I couldn’t count on finding it. Even if I did, it was unlikely, at this point, to be in the shape of a man.’
So in 1985 she left the big firm and went to work in the legal department of a newish and still struggling human rights organisation. Because she was the only woman in her office without a young family, she did more than her share of travelling. Most of her journeys took her to what polite people call trouble spots. Over and over, she saw what trouble did to people – how it sucked them under like a wave, turned them upside down and magnified them, propelling some to unimaginable heroism and others to cruelty; how it receded, often as abruptly as it had come, leaving the heroes stranded with the villains; how the past lurked under every stone and no one with a future dared to look. Watching the troubled surfaces of survivors’ lives, she came to see that peace could never be taken for granted and was as thin, as permeable, as breakable as skin.
‘My own grief had not dissipated, but I had, at least, come to see the lie in my own great expectations. Once I stopped asking why the world wasn’t as I wished it to be, once I knew that anyone who tried to change it was doomed, I saw my work in a more modest light. The honour, I thought, was in attempting anything at all.’
In the early 90s, after the Berlin Wall came down and before the wars in Yugoslavia, Jeannie helped organise a group of American lawyers going into Eastern Europe to advise on the new constitutions and penal codes. After a year in Skopje, she went on to Bucharest. By now her pessimism about the world and her place in it was so ingrained that it came as a surprise to her that some things, small things, could change for the better.
‘This revelation stayed with me, even after the wars began. What mattered, if you were to survive, were your principles. If trouble was inevitable, then trouble was an education. It was thanks to the trouble I’d seen at too young an age that I was sometimes able to bridge the gap between my harried, underfunded Rumanian hosts and my startled, coddled American colleagues.’
It was while Jeannie was in Rumania that she became involved in another exchange programme funded by the EU. It was this work that took her to England, to a temporary position at University College London that became permanent in 1995. She was part of a new study centre looking at European integration and although she was drained by the strains of fund-raising and the endless round of committees, she enjoyed the common sense of purpose.
‘There were times when I saw a grand design in their work, even in their composition. No two were the same nationality. Each had roots in at least two countries, and for many it was three or four. Convinced that this congregation of displaced souls must be my new home, I began to look at houses.
The day I made an offer on a garden flat in Stoke Newington, I walked over to Dalston and found myself, without warning, back in Istanbul.
It was not just the kebab restaurants and the Turkish signs. It was the beautiful bounty of the produce spilling out onto the pavements, the smell of soap inside the shops, the gentle, sombre faces behind the counters, the soft ribbons of music, the whispered commands and the cries of conventional anguish: “She wants two kilos of tomatoes. May Allah release me from my sorrows. What’s the time, big sister? I’m bored, my soul is being squeezed. Give her the pistachios that came in yesterday. Allah save me from my son. He should have been back an hour ago. What did we do to bring this trouble on our heads?” No matter how sombre the subject, each word was a gift.’
When her father came to visit, she took him to her favourite kebab restaurant. They’d given up on the sparring matches, because what was the point? The Cold War was over. They were back with the older conflicts it had only temporarily suppressed, and because of the work Jeannie did, she knew more about these than her father. But he was eager to catch up.
Now he was retired, William Wakefield spent his time reading, and his favourite reading was anything that suggested America had, at any point in its history, taken a wrong turning. This made for some overlap of interests, though William seemed happiest if he could find a book Jeannie had not yet heard of.
The night she took him to her favourite kebab restaurant, it was The Peace to End All Peace. He was only too pleased to tell his erudite daughter how the Allies had stitched up the Eastern Mediterranean after the First World War. He’d pause from time to time to speak to the waiters in his clipped, affectless Turkish. They obeyed without question.
Suddenly Jeannie asked him, ‘Do you ever regret doing the work you did?’
His answer was immediate. ‘Every living day.’
‘In what way?’ Jeannie asked. She was hoping for a mea culpa: the regrets he had about the way ‘our side’ had conducted itself during the Cold War; the arrogant pursuit of American strategic interests everywhere, the fanning of mass paranoia; the propping up of any fat cat or dictator willing to tow the line; the covert subversion of any group that questioned it; the sustained effort to keep the American people from knowing what their government did in their name; the need to find a new way of comporting ourselves now that there was no longer a Soviet ‘threat’; the understanding that, though democracy was something you could foster and encourage, it was not something you could impose from above.
But what her father said was, ‘I regret it because the people I did it for were drooling idiots. Boxes for brains. They couldn’t see further than their own one-horse town. Damn it, we were a resource. We knew the ground. They refused to listen to us. They punished us for speaking. For this they expected us to put our lives on the line? They didn’t let us have a life. As you saw for yourself.’
He sat back and eyed his daughter beadily. ‘Not once, not twice, but four times unlucky. First your mother, then your stepmothers. Then Amy. They couldn’t stand for it. Not just the danger, but the subterfuge. You can’t build a life on that. You can’t even be a father. Though God knows I tried.’
Another beady stare. Jeannie knew what she wanted to say but stopped herself. He was a lonely, broken seventy-three year-old man. Instead she pointed to the kilim on the wall and asked him which part of Turkey he thought the family running the restaurant came from. The next time the waiter came to the table, her father addressed him in a language Jeannie couldn’t understand. ‘Mardin,’ he announced, when the smiling waiter had retreated. The language they’d been speaking was Kurdish.
‘And that’s another problem that’s not going away any time soon,’ he said. ‘But you can count on our old friends the Washington Box-Heads to pay no attention until it’s too late.’ There followed a lecture. He went to bed with his dignity restored. His daughter went to bed with a headache, and for the first time in many years, had a dream about Sinan.
She’d heard from Chloe – this would have been the last conversation they’d had before one or the other had moved again and forgotten to forward their new address – that Sinan had returned to Denmark following his release from prison.
In Jeannie’s dream he was thinking about having a haircut and wanted her opinion. Before she could tell him, he disappeared.
A week or two later she was having a coffee just off Dalston High Street, in the café of the Arcola Theatre. She looked across the room and thought she saw Lüset. The cold terror she felt at that moment took her by surprise, and by the time her heart had slowed enough for her to dare to look again, she was gone.
A month or so later – in April 1996 – an opportunity arose for Jeannie to spend a year in The Hague working alongside the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. One year turned into two, and then her mother’s health failed. She spent the next year commuting between the Netherlands and Northampton, a decision she would never regret, because she was with her mother when she passed away. Though still she would ask herself. Was her mother at peace when she died? By the end, had Jeannie become a good daughter?
It was while she was packing up her mother’s house that Jeannie found her old postcards, and then her old journals (though the most important one remained under the floorboards at the Pasha’s Library: even as she went through her mother’s papers, Istanbul interrupted her thoughts).
She had only just returned to her flat in Stoke Newington when she turned on the television one evening to see a picture of the Istanbul skyline.
Another date to remember: August 17th 1999.