Free Enlightenment by Maureen Freely

is the moment to present my own hybrid credentials. I am the daughter of an American physicist who came to Istanbul in 1960, to teach at the same university where Sinan was later a student. I am personally acquainted with everyone in this story. As a teenager, I briefly counted myself as one of Sinan’s friends. I also knew William Wakefield, the father of his present wife. Although she and I did not overlap, we moved in the same circles at the girls’ lycée we both attended. We met for the first time late last summer. Until she disappeared, I was helping (or rather, failing to help her) with her husband’s case.
    The facts of this case are as follows: when Sinan Sinanoğlu flew into JFK with his five-year-old-son late last summer, he was expecting a short delay at passport control – but he’d been through this ordeal so many times since 9/11 that he was not unduly worried. It was just a question of answering a few questions honestly, and staying polite…’
    Here followed an account of Sinan’s arrest, and his son’s disappearance into the system, and a heavily doctored version of my efforts over the previous two months to help Jeannie defend Sinan’s innocence and secure Emre’s return. I made sure to mention that she, too, was now missing. Though I did not say why, I did find a way to work the words ‘extraordinary’ and ‘rendered’ into the sentence.
    I made passing references to Turkey’s troubled human rights record, to its curbs on free expression, and of course to the famous author who was to stand trial later that year for insulting the state. But I did not mention Jordan Frick, and neither did I mention my own troubled histories with any of the others. Instead I did what was expected of me, seizing every opportunity to narrow the emotional gap between my subjects and my readers. Inevitably this involved some air-brushing. When the time came for me to explain why it was that Sinan had been arrested, and why his wife had gone missing, I was sorely tempted to name names, to trace this vicious, senseless vendetta back to what I now believed to be its origin. But I knew this would be unwise. And (bearing in mind that I had no proof) unethical. My job today was not to complicate or prevaricate, butto write clearly and urgently from the heart. There would be plenty of time for the contradictions and inconsistencies later, when we’d found Jeannie, when we’d got Sinan out of jail.
    So I chose my words carefully, until I thought my head would burst. My caution made me slow, and I was still a thousand words short when the newspaper made its first call to ask why I hadn’t filed yet. The light had gone out of the sky by then; my mother had settled herself in her armchair with her evening cocktail and was tapping her foot in a way that others might find entirely unremarkable but that I knew was her way of telling me she was running out of patience. The clock struck seven and she asked how much longer I’d be. Just to answer her made my head spin. I could feel great strings of thoughts flying out of it. As I struggled to right myself, an accusing shadow came flying at me through the fog, and I knew then that I had no choice but to say this one thing. If I left all my other furies unvoiced, I would have at least set this one free:
    ‘It is tempting to see this as a story of the here and now, as a sinister footnote in the war against terror, an insight, perhaps, into the dirty wars it has spawned throughout the region. An intrepid film-maker who is travelling around the southeast of Turkey, possibly very close to the border with Northern Iraq, happens to stray into an arena that certain powerful parties do not wish to be photographed. An arena, perhaps, that would make Abu Ghraib look like a nativity play. This could well be so, and if so, could soon be proven. Sinan’s loyal associates have already unearthed incriminating footage, and as their hunt continues, they are sure to find more.
    But to see what I