The Museum of Innocence (29 page)

Zaim had arrived with a lovely girl who was in high spirits because she had scored very high on the university entrance exam. Her name was Ayşe; I made pleasant conversation with her. I drank with a friend of Sibel’s—a shy fellow who worked as a leather exporter and could really hold his
raki
. Long after the sky had turned a velvety black, Sibel said, “You’re being rude. Come inside for a while.” Wrapping our arms around each other, embracing each other with all our strength, we danced that hopeless dance of ours, which to others looked so romantic. We’d turned off a few lights, so that it was dim in the sitting room, giving the apartment, in which I had spent my entire childhood, and indeed most of my life, the aspect and colors of a very different place; with this image came the idea of an entire world snatched away from me, and I embraced Sibel even more desperately as we continued dancing. Because so much of my misery that summer had infected my lovely fiancée—along with my drinking habits—she was as unsteady as I was.

In the parlance favored by the gossip columnists of the day, “as the evening progressed, under the effect of alcohol,” the party got out of hand. Glasses and bottles were broken, 45s and 33s destroyed, some couples who had fallen under the influence of European magazines began to kiss openly, or went into my or my brother’s bedroom, allegedly to make love, but possibly to pass out, and it was as if this group of young rich friends was in a collective panic, afraid that their youth, and their aspirations to be modern, would soon come to an end. Eight or ten years earlier, when I’d begun giving these end-of-summer parties, they’d been anarchic affairs, fueled by anger toward our parents; my friends would fiddle with our pricey kitchen appliances, often breaking them; they would go through my parents’ cupboards, pulling out old hats, perfume spray bottles, electric shoe buffers, bow ties, and dresses, convinced all the while that their destructive energy was political, and so enjoying it all the more.

In the years that followed, only two members of this large crowd took to politics in a serious way; one would be tortured by the police in the aftermath of the 1971 coup, and remain in prison until the 1974 amnesty; and it is likely that both of them dismissed the rest of us as “irresponsible, spoiled, and bourgeois,” but for whatever reason, they cooled to our company and lost touch.

Now, as dawn approached, and Nurcihan went through my mother’s drawers, it was not out of anarchic anger, but a womanly curiosity, expressed with refinement and no small degree of respect. “We’re going to Kilyos for a swim,” she told me solemnly. “I was just checking to see if your mother had a swimsuit.” Suddenly flooded with intense remorse and pain for never having taken Füsun to Kilyos, where she had so longed to go, it was all I could do to collapse onto my parents’ bed. From where I lay, I could see drunken Nurcihan pretend to look for a swimsuit as she covetously fingered my mother’s embroidered stockings from the 1950s, the elegant umber lace-up corsets, and the hats and scarves that she had not exiled to the Merhamet Apartments. Also passing through Nurcihan’s appreciative hands were the titles for all the houses, apartments, and lots that we owned, and that my mother kept in a drawstring pouch in her stockings drawer, because she didn’t trust the bank’s safe deposit box, and piles and piles of keys to locks unknown, apartments that had been sold or rented out. There was also a thirty-six-year-old clipping from a gossip column, featuring my parents’ wedding, and another from the society pages of
Hayat
magazine, dated twelve years later, with my mother looking very chic and attractive at a party. “How lovely your mother was, she was such an interesting woman,” Nurcihan said. “She’s still alive,” I said, still lying like a corpse on the bed, and thinking how wonderful it would be to spend the rest of my life with Füsun in this room. Nurcihan let out a sweet and happy laugh, and it was this, I think, that drew Sibel into the room, followed soon after by Mehmet. Sibel and Nurcihan went through the rest of my mother’s things with drunken ceremony, while Mehmet sat on the bed (in just the place where my father would sit in the morning, staring absently at his toes before putting on his slippers), gazing at Nurcihan with love and admiration. He was so very happy, having, for the first time in years, fallen head over heels in love with a woman he could marry, and it seemed to come as a shock to him, as if he were ashamed of being that happy. But I did not envy him, because I sensed an overwhelming fear of being deceived—the ever-lurking possibility that things would come to a bad and degrading end—and regret.

Here I display a number of the items Sibel and Nurcihan were extracting from my mother’s drawers with such care. From time to time they laughed, reminding each other that they were meant to be searching for swimsuits.

The search for swimsuits and the discussions about going to the beach went on until first light. In fact no one was sober enough to drive. I knew that drink and sleeplessness, together with my anguish about Füsun, would overwhelm me at Kilyos, so I wasn’t about to go. Promising that Sibel and I would follow afterward, I dragged my feet until the others were ready to leave. At sunrise I went out to the balcony where my mother drank coffee and watched funerals, and I waved and shouted down to my friends below. Standing on the street were Zaim and his new girlfriend, Nurcihan and Mehmet, and a few others, all drunkenly carousing, tossing around a shiny red plastic ball, running after it whenever it escaped their grasp, making enough noise to wake up all of Teşvikiye. When the doors of Mehmet’s car finally slammed shut, I saw the old people walking slowly toward Teşvikiye Mosque for morning prayer. Among them was the janitor from the apartment across the street, who dressed up as Father Christmas on New Year’s and sold lottery tickets. Just then, Mehmet’s car took off, its tires squealing, before skidding to an abrupt halt, going into reverse, and stopping again; the door opened, and Nurcihan stepped out of the car, calling up to us on the sixth floor that she had left behind her silk scarf. Sibel ran inside, and in no time brought the scarf out to the balcony, and threw it down to the street. I shall never forget standing there with Sibel on my mother’s balcony, watching the purple scarf’s slow descent, as it swayed like a kite in the light breeze, opening and closing, puffing up and twisting. This is my last happy memory of my fiancée.

39

Confession

WE HAVE now come to the confession scene. It was my express desire that all the frames, backgrounds, everything in this part of my museum be painted a cold yellow. Yet it wasn’t long after our friends had left for Kilyos, and I had returned to my parents’ bed, that a giant sun rose from behind the hills of Üsküdar, casting a deep orange glow over the spacious bedroom. The echo of a ship’s horn rose from the Bosphorus. “Come on,” said Sibel, sensing my lack of enthusiasm, “let’s not stay here forever. Let’s try to catch up with them.” But seeing how I lay there, she knew I was not fit to go to the beach (though it had not crossed her mind that I was too drunk to drive); and that was not all: She sensed that my mysterious illness had brought us to the point of no return. I could tell that she wanted to avoid discussing it, because she kept averting her eyes from mine. But in the way that people will sometimes confront their worst fears without forethought (some call this courage), she was the one to broach the subject.

“Where were you actually, yesterday afternoon?” she asked. But she regretted the question at once, adding sweetly, “If you think this is going to be embarrassing for you later on, if you don’t want to tell me, then don’t.”

She lay down next to me on the bed, pawing me like an affectionate kitten, with such compassion but trepidation, too; sensing that I was about to break her heart, I felt ashamed. But the djinn of love had escaped Aladdin’s lamp and was prodding me, telling me that I could no longer keep this secret to myself.

“Do you remember that evening in early spring, darling, when we went to Fuaye?” I began with these harmless, careful words. “You saw that Jenny Colon bag in a shop window, and as we passed you said you liked it. We both stopped to look at it.”

My darling fiancée knew at once that this was about more than a handbag—that I was about to speak of something real and serious; as her eyes widened, I told her the story that readers will recall and visitors to the museum have known since viewing the very first object on exhibit. Nevertheless, displayed here is a series of small pictures of the most important objects; it will, I hope, serve as an aide-mémoire for visitors making their way through the extensive collection, or for those who are so impetuous as not to start at the beginning.

I told Sibel the story in careful chronological order. As I launched into the painful tale of my first encounter with Füsun, and the relationship that followed, my remorse was palpable, as was the aura of atonement; this endowed my lapse with the gravity of a great sin. But I may well have been the one to add these colors to my story, so as to lighten the tone of my rather ordinary crime, and to suggest I was talking about something from the distant past. Having, of course, omitted the details of sexual bliss at the heart of my tale, I made it sound like a typical Turkish man’s silly indiscretion on the eve of his marriage. I could not, seeing Sibel’s tears, continue with my original aim—to be straight with her—and I was sorry for having brought it up at all.

“You’re a disgusting person, and it’s only now I can see it,” said Sibel. Picking up an old bag of my mother’s—rose-printed, and full of her loose change—Sibel hurled it at me, and next came one of my father’s summer spectator shoes. Neither projectile hit its mark. The loose change went flying across the floor like broken glass. Tears were streaming from Sibel’s eyes.

“I broke this off ages ago,” I said. “But I was destroyed by what I did…. This feeling has nothing to do with this girl or anyone else.”

“This is the girl whose table we visited at the engagement party, am I right?” Sibel asked, too afraid to mention her by name.

“Yes.”

“She’s a common shopgirl. She’s disgusting! Are you still seeing her?”

“Of course I’m not…. Once we were engaged, I broke it off. And she has gone missing. I hear she married someone else.” (Even now, I am shocked that I could throw out this lie.) “This was why I was so withdrawn after the engagement, but that’s all over now.”

Sibel would cry a little, and then she would wash her face, pull herself together, and ask me more questions.

“So you can’t get over her, is that it?” This was how my clever fiancée summed up the truth in her own words.

What man with a heart could answer this question in the affirmative? “No,” I said reluctantly. “You don’t understand. To have treated a girl so badly, to have deceived you and broken our trust, to carry all this in my conscience, it wore me down. It took all the joy out of life.”

Neither of us believed what I was saying.

“Where were you after lunch yesterday?”

How I longed to tell someone—someone who would understand, someone other than Sibel—of having taken mementos of her into my mouth, how I had rubbed them against my skin, and how, as I did so, I conjured up images of her and burst into tears. All the same I was sure that if Sibel left me, I would lose my mind. What I needed to say was, Let’s get married right away. There were countless solid marriages—marriages that were the bedrock of our society—that had been made in an effort to forget stormy and unhappy love affairs.

“I wanted to play around with some of my childhood toys before we got married. I had a space gun, for example…. It was still working. I guess you could call it a strange sort of nostalgia. That’s what I was doing there.”

“You are never to go back to that apartment again!” said Sibel. “Did you meet her there often?”

Before I could answer, she started sobbing. When I took her in my arms and caressed her, she cried even harder. As I embraced my fiancée I felt a deep gratitude—and an amity that was deeper than love; I treasured our closeness. After Sibel had cried for a very long while and dropped off to sleep in my arms, I, too, nodded off.

It was almost noon when I awoke; Sibel had been up for a good while, had showered and put on her makeup and even prepared my breakfast in the kitchen.

“If you want you can go buy some bread from the shop across the street,” she said in a cool voice. “But if you don’t have the energy, I can slice the stale bread and toast it.”

“No, I can go,” I said.

We had breakfast in the sitting room, which after the party looked like a war zone, at the table where my parents had sat across from each other for more than thirty years. Here I display an exact replica of the loaf I bought from the grocery store across the street. Its function is sentimental, but also documentary, a reminder that millions of people in Istanbul ate no other bread for half a century (though its weight did vary) and also that life is a series of repeated instances that we later assign—without mercy—to oblivion.

That morning Sibel was strong and decisive in a way that shocks me even today. “This thing you thought was love—it was just a passing obsession,” she said. “I’ll look after you. I’ll rescue you from this nonsense you got mixed up in.”

She’d used a lot of powder to conceal the puffiness under her eyes. To see her choosing her words so carefully, so as not to hurt me, even though she was in terrible pain herself—to feel her compassion—made me trust her all the more, and so certain was I that only Sibel could deliver me from my agony, that I decided then and there to agree to whatever she said. And so it was while we ate our breakfast of fresh bread, white cheese, olives, and strawberry jam that we agreed to leave this house and to stay away from Nişantaşı, these neighborhoods and streets, for a long while. The orange zone and red zone prohibitions were now in full force.

Sibel’s parents had by now returned to their house in Ankara for the winter, and so the winter, and so the
yali
in Anadoluhisarı was empty. They would turn a blind eye on our staying there alone together now that we were engaged, of this she was certain. I was going to move there with her at once, abandoning all the habits that had kept me in thrall to my obsession. As I packed my bags, I felt sad but also hopeful of recovery, like a lovesick girl dispatched to Europe. I remember that when Sibel said, “Take these, too,” throwing a pair of winter socks into my suitcase, I was struck by the painful thought that my cure might take a very long time.