Modern turkey has a tradition of women from the elite classes excelling in the professions. So it came as no surprise to me when Tansu Ciller, a graduate of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, became Turkey's first woman prime minister. I, too, attended the American College for Girls in the late 1960s, while my father taught physics at Robert College, the neighbouring American university. Many of my classmates now hold top positions in business and academia. They are angry with Ciller for allowing Necmettin Erbakan, the Islamist leader, to become prime minister earlier this year. Back in 1970, many of them had different views about who the enemy was: it was American imperialism in general and myself in particular.
The girls had been converted to the anti-imperialist cause by their Che Guevara lookalike boyfriends, most of whom came from the sort of families that gave their children factories as 18th birthday presents. I knew this from my boyfriend, Jak, who came from a similar background, but who never apologised for it. He, and most of the Che Guevaras, were students at Robert College.
My revolutionary classmates at the American College for Girls were puzzled and amused by me. Because most of them were two or three years older than I, their attention was flattering. They would ask me about the course I was taking with them on, say, 20th century literature, but then, when I was least expecting it, the ringleader would turn to me with a sweet smile and say: "So, my darling Apple Cheeks, now you will kindly justify your mother country."
The ringleader's name was Seyla. Like Jak, whom she had known all her life, she came from a rich Jewish family that had lived in Istanbul for centuries. She spoke six languages, had beautiful green eyes and a passionate impatience that suggested no room would ever be large enough for her.
Nothing made Seyla smile more brightly than my fumbling attempts to prove that I was not a cultural imperialist. "How can you be anything else?" she would protest. "Your father, after all, is a government agent." If I insisted that he was just a teacher, she would say that this made his influence far more insidious-he was here to subvert the young minds of Turkey with the corrupt ideals of his mother country. In desperate earnestness, I would tell her that the truth was the opposite. He had brought us to Istanbul ten years earlier, I said, because he had lost faith in his country, which, incidentally, he did not think of as his mother. He had stayed in Turkey because he loved it. He was even writing a book about it. "Just because you have an American passport doesn't mean you support its foreign policy," I would say, but Seyla would not buy it. To buy it would have ruined the game. Looking back, I really do think it became a game for her. This was never true of her most loyal lieutenant, Dilek.
Dilek came from a more modest background than her fellow revolutionaries. Poverty was not a theoretical concept. She was an honest girl who said what she meant, and her lack of trickiness meant that she drove the hardest bargain of them all. "How can you be a cultural imperialist without believing in your country?" she would ask me with anger. "Why should your father poison our minds if he doesn't even have a motive?" "He didn't come here to poison your minds," I would say. "He came here to broaden our horizons." This would prompt a torrent of half-mocking, half-affectionate laughter from the others. "That makes you the worst kind of cultural imperialist," Seyla would proclaim. "You are not just a puppet of the west, my darling. You are a blind puppet."
I tried to hide the hurt they caused. But I exposed my weakness by trying too hard to prove that I was not blind, not a puppet, and hardly even American. Never let bullies know they have made you doubt yourself-that is what my father told me when I passed on their accusations. He told me to stand back and try to understand my classmates.
They were picking on me because they felt vulnerable themselves. Most of them were no more Turkish than I was. If they were not 100 per cent Greek or Jewish or Armenian, they probably had an Albanian grandmother or a Russian cousin or a Kurdish mother and a Tartar father. They hid their roots because they had been educated to think it was wrong to be different. "You don't have that excuse," my father told me. "You know who you are. Don't let them drag you into their game," he said. But I didn't know who I was. The place where I felt most alien was America. The only place where I felt at home was Turkey, but now they were telling me that I had no right to be here, and was capable of doing irreparable damage without even meaning to.
By 1969 I was used to anti-American riots, and accustomed to getting taunts in certain neighbourhoods if I made the mistake of speaking English. But now the trouble was getting closer to home. Revolutionary Youth started holding events at Robert College. Protesters would file past our house in the hundreds afterwards, chanting "Americans go home." Once they tried to blow up our car. We found out because they telephoned a paper to announce that they had blown up an imperialist Opel. We went out to our Opel and found a half-burned rope sticking out of the tank. It had not blown up because it contained no petrol. It contained no petrol because we happened to be broke-the end of the month being the same for cultural imperialists as it was for everyone else.
If we were broke, was that not proof that we were not being secretly funded by Washington? I thought I was off the hook, but then I went with a group of classmates to a play about the Rosenberg executions. These friends were more interested in the arts than in politics. When I went to Turkish plays with them, they would usually tell me how impressed they were to see an American making the effort. I thought that they would be even more impressed to see me go to a play with an anti-American theme. But it was an emotional production and, as we drove home afterwards, the person sitting next to me-a friend of one of my friends-asked me: "Why are all Americans murderers?"
"Why are all Americans cruel to their friends?" I remember a classmate asking me that same spring. She was one of the silly ones who went to discotheques and bought all her clothes in Paris. She had wanted me to help her cheat in an exam. This was not unusual. This was what Turkish friends were supposed to do for one another. I had refused, because when it came to codes of honour, I could not stop myself from acting like an American. My classmate could not keep from feeling I had let her down. Hence her question. As I turned my back on her, I remember thinking, what if this means Seyla was right? What if I am hurting people, just by being myself? My doubts began to have an effect on the way I defended myself. "So what do you want me to do about my sins?" I remember asking Seyla in exasperation one day when she had argued me into yet another corner. "Apologise and never come back?"
Seyla's reply was, in a way, prophetic. "Now you are touching on the real tragedy. You will go back and forget all about us. Forget even the ideas you planted in our silly little heads. Meanwhile, we will stay and pay the price," she said. As it turned out, she herself did not stay and pay the price. When I went back to the US to start at Harvard university in the autumn of 1970, she started at Brandeis, a university only a few towns away. She ended up settling in Boston, and she has done very well for herself. Seyla is now one of the pillars of feminist critical theory, well known for quelling dissent at conferences with terrifying tantrums about the evils of post-modernism. It always cheers me up to hear that she has been bullying people again; it reassures me that I was not somehow inviting it. But for a long time the bullying did cause me to nurture intense anger and resentment towards her disciples, who all stayed in Istanbul and eventually became my father's students at Robert College. Yet imagine how you would feel if you kicked at a wall because of a minor exasperation, and then saw a whole house collapse.
I continued to hear about Dilek and all the other revolutionaries from Jak, because they soon joined him at Robert College. He was furious about the strikes they and their associates kept calling. When things got too violent and the military stepped in to impose martial law in March 1971, he called it a birthday present. "Now, at last, we have peace." I had no reason not to believe him. Indeed, it was a relief, when I went back to Istanbul that summer, not to have to worry about bombs or riots for a change.
There was just one story that disturbed my peace. We were on our way back from a discotheque when Jak said: "Oh, by the way. Your old friend Dilek. It seems that her friends were a nasty business. She was in a cell." He told me they were not Stalinists, like so many of my other friends, but Maoists. "A group of them were living just up there." He pointed at a wooden house not far from my own. "Apparently, they discovered that one of the boys was an informer. They subjected him to a trial, found him guilty and executed him. Then they chopped up his body and made another of the girls take the pieces across the Bosporus on a ferry in a trunk. The girl was discovered when the suitcase began to bleed." "What happened then?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. "What do you think?" But I did not take the time to think. What was there to think about? They had asked me to keep away from them and so I had.
I split up with Jak so it was another three years before I heard of Dilek again. When she returned to Robert College, which had been nationalised in the interim, and was now University of the Bosporus, she dropped in to see my father and passed on her regards to me. "Apparently, she has been in prison all this time," my father said. He then added, with a frown: "There's something odd about her face. Apparently she was badly tortured."
I did not know what torture meant then. When I found out later that year, it was almost by accident. It was 1976 and I was living in London now, working rather unsuccessfully as a secretary. After getting the sack from a PR agency and an art gallery, I went to work for the death penalty department at Amnesty International. One day, a Turkish constitutional lawyer asked me to translate the book his wife had written about her two years in a political prison. It was a big hearted and humorous account of the ways she and the other women made a community for themselves, against the odds, and despite ever growing efforts on the part of the authorities to break their spirits. I spent the next few months translating it into English. During that time, I felt I was in the prison cell with them, knitting by stealth, drinking orange water with cologne added, putting on plays and making unlikely alliances with belly dancers. One of the most moving sections was about the things they did when new prisoners arrived straight from torture. They knew that these women hated themselves, that anyone who has been tortured has had all information dragged out of them. They would therefore spend the first three or four days talking to them incessantly and brushing their hair. They would keep this up until the new prisoner emerged from catatonia. Every time I read this section, I would think about Dilek. I would wonder how many other of her friends and my classmates had gone through this ordeal, how many girls I did not know, who had gone to the same schools, the same restaurants, the same discotheques. I would wonder, but I was dreading the day I would find out. After I had translated that book, it took me five years to summon up the courage to set foot in Istanbul.
By the time I did in 1982, my parents had left-for good, they thought. Turkish politics had come full circle. There had been another military intervention in the interests of public order. Again, the city looked peaceful. But this time, when I saw the white unmarked military vans, I knew what they hid inside. When I passed the police headquarters, I remembered the stories I had translated. When I passed our old house surrounded by a new concrete wall, and a friend said it was now owned by the secret police and had an underground torture chamber, I did not immediately dismiss it as a rumour.
It now seemed to me that by once hating Dilek for tormenting me, by not bothering to get in touch with her when she was in prison, and not even offering her a helping hand after she got out, I had shown that she had been right about me, right about my father, right about all of us. We were the worst kind of cultural imperialists. We had gone to Turkey and trained a generation of students to appreciate the virtues of free debate and open dissent. And then, when these same students had debated and dissented their way into prison, we had pretended it was not happening.
During the years that followed, I had long arguments with my father about this, but no matter how many torture accounts I read to him, no matter how upset he became to hear about the things his students had had to suffer, he refused to buy my line. Instead, he insisted that Turkey needed people like him, and that there was no other type of thought that could do the things western thought could do. The idea that he had been blindly training his students to become the puppets of the west was preposterous. The very fact that they had used Marxism to question their backgrounds was proof that they themselves were western thinkers. He continued to go back to Turkey for visits. Because he had published more than ten books about Turkey by now, sometimes it was the Turkish Tourism Board that paid for his tickets. I tried to tell him he was being politically callous. There was always some political horror to base my claims on: if it was not the Kurds who needed our support, it was the Alevi Muslims, or some other blighted minority that he should have been protesting about. But he took the tickets anyway, and when he returned he would try to convince me that things were not as dismal in Turkey as I seemed to believe. Yes, the political situation was dire, but the people had so much vitality and resilience and, in the end, that was what mattered, was it not? His reassurances only made me more certain that the country we had ruined was doomed.
My father and mother went back to live in Istanbul in the late 1980s. Over the next few years, the clique my father had helped to educate began to come into its own. A fellow physicist became the leader of the opposition. An environmentally friendly social democrat became mayor of Istanbul. Suddenly my old classmates were influencing policy and getting lucrative contracts. Tansu Ciller, the economist who became prime minister, had graduated from the American College and taught at my father's university, so it was not surprising that she chose her advisers and cabinet from the same pool.
None the less, I was not quite prepared for the confident, almost autocratic behaviour of my old classmates. I would meet up with someone I remembered as a nice, shy, obedient Ottoman daughter; as we would wait for her army of maids to make us tea, she would say, how is life treating you? I would fret about my overdraft and my writer's block, and she would say, yes, it is so difficult, is it not? She would go on to tell me about her unmanageable factory, her absentee workmen, her difficult negotiations with Turkey's most feared tycoon. It was not just the professionals who underwent this metamorphosis. It even happened to my silly classmates, the fashionplates who had never dreamed of working and once only wanted enough arithmetic to go shopping. Now I was hearing through friends that they, too, had restyled themselves into international business women-and were making international fortunes.
Throughout my childhood, Turkey had been a protected market. Now the policy was reversed. It did not do much to improve the ever thickening band of shanty towns that surrounded Istanbul. But everywhere you went in the more prosperous parts of the city, there were men and women smiling into their new mobile phones and telling each other about the new markets opening up to the north. As destitute Ukrainians and eastern Europeans poured into the city off rusting tankers, the word communism lost its dangerous allure. It was no longer a liability to have had a leftwing youth and seldom even a subject worthy of comment. No one except me thought it was odd that the king of the Che Guevara types was now the Turkish head of a multinational tobacco corporation. Then there was the Istanbul waterworks corruption scandal that brought down the social democratic mayor two years ago. It was said to have involved a former member of Turkey's communist government in exile who had been a schoolfriend of the mayor's. This is how the elite looks after itself in Turkey. As a colleague of my father said to me last summer: "We're running the country now, and we're ruining it."
That colleague was a former classmate of mine and one of Seyla's revolutionaries named Yasemin. Now she counts my parents as two of her best friends. In fact, she is so crazy about my parents that she has introduced them to quite a few of our old revolutionary classmates. When I was back last summer, we all went out for a meal together at one of the city's few remaining Greek restaurants. It was supposed to have been a fun evening, but I could not help asking how they could all go through so much hell and then go right back to the same place they had started, and live in peace with the people who turned their backs on them, who may even have turned them in. My question made them roar with laughter. Where else were they supposed to have gone? What use was crying? Anyway, they had all changed. Why was it inconceivable that a person might change? They told me that even Dilek had changed. She lived in a beautiful little wooden house only two minutes walk away from my parents. They gave me her number and suggested I go talk to her.
And so I did. Even though I had not seen her for 20 years, I recognised her the moment I saw her. As my father had warned me, there was something odd about her face, something that made it look as if it had been broken and then pieced back together. But the smile was the same, and so was her manner of speaking. She was as untricky as ever. The first thing she said after we had sat down over our drinks was that she forgave me for being a cultural imperialist. "But I should tell you that the main reason I trust you now is that I admire your father, because he hasn't forgotten us. He is a true friend of Turkey." The unspoken reproach was, unlike you.
And then, to my stupefaction, she told me what my father had told me so many times, in almost the same words-that Turkey needed people like him, and that she was thankful now for her western education, because there was no other type of thought that could do the things western thought could do. She had grown more understanding of intellectual differences, she told me. At the new university where she taught, she had many colleagues she loved dearly even though they did not share her background. The only problem with them was that they were boring. She told me about her new enthusiasm, a campaign to change the way history is taught in schools. Now history in schools was propaganda, designed to make Turkey look omnipotent and cast its every action in a virtuous light. Although she was happy with the idea of there being an official history, she and her fellow campaigners wanted it told in such a way that it was clear that countries came into conflict not because they were good or evil, but because they had opposing ideologies and conflicting interests.
Everyone had his own story, she told me. But the more she talked, the more I lost hold of mine. What would she have said if I had told her how much time I had spent thinking about her? Why had I spent so many years blaming myself for something even she did not think I had done? What had I done? And why had I thought that the best way to make amends was to cut myself off? That is what I asked Yasemin when she asked me how my meeting with Dilek had gone. "You haven't changed, have you?" she said. "Has it not occurred to you," Yasemin continued, "that we all feel that way? We were there at the centre of things, but at the centre of things, there was nothing... there never was a revolution, it was only in our heads."
She pointed out of the window at a group of fundamentalist students who were passing by. They wore head scarves and full length coats (despite high summer), the new uniform for young, idealistic, women disaffected with the west. "I feel so sorry for them," Yasemin said, "they are going to face such difficulty." Then-was it to keep me from drawing the obvious parallel between their generation and hers?-she launched into her own story. It began the year I left, with the wars between the different factions at Robert College, and the campaign to have the university nationalised. Then came the imposition of martial law, which led to mass arrests at Robert College after the trunk murder. She told me how she had panicked, tried to burn all her subversive literature in her bathroom-but it was plastic and so all she did was burn a hole in the tub. Dilek and another friend tried to get rid of their Maoist literature by taking it out into the middle of the Bosporus in a row boat and off-loading it in string bags. But instead of sinking, they spread out across the water in all directions. Then a friend of Yasemin denounced her for belonging to an organisation she had never even heard of, and they came to get her for the first time. She had been blindfolded and questioned for three days, first at the police station, and then at the Selimiye barracks. But she had managed to escape. "How?" I asked impatiently. "In order to find out, you're going to have to prove yourself." As she said this, there was that familiar half-affectionate, half-mocking edge to her voice that took me right back to the days when I was Apple Cheeks and she was a Stalinist and the only subjects we agreed about were Nixon and Mao. So how was I to prove myself? "You'll have to come back next year."
